Masquerade in Blue, page 10
Ed’s Express was a tiny place with four small formica tables crammed into it. The smell of grease almost knocked me over as I stepped in. As I purchased the three beefs, one with cheese, a couple orders of fries, one Coke, and one chocolate shake, I tried not to think about my arteries or how I was going to get Elaine to open up. As I pushed the door open, I wondered if she might have used the opportunity to escape again.
But she was still there, scratching Peanuts where he liked it most – right behind the ears. She took the bag from me and set it on the open glove compartment. “The one with the cheese is for Peanuts,” I said. “He loves cheese.”
Elaine quickly located Peanuts’s meal, which was pretty easy seeing as cheese was seeping out of the wrapper. “How does he eat it?” Peanuts was whining and pacing in the back seat. He was probably drooling too, but I didn’t look. Dogs just don’t know how to be cool.
Settling into the seat, I said, “I have to tear it up for him. Otherwise he’ll eat it whole. It’s not a pretty sight.” She peeled back the white paper wrapping the sandwich and proceeded to tear it into dog-sized bites. As she bent to her task, her hair fell forward. With her hands full of grease, she tried to shake it out of her face and had no success. I reached out and secured it behind her ear. Her hair is thick and usually somewhat unruly, and I’m always surprised at how soft it is. She smiled as I moved my hand away. I watched her finish shredding the sandwich and said, “I warn you, he’ll gobble that down in two seconds and come begging for yours. You’ve got to be strong. As a last resort, he’ll hit on me.”
I keep newspaper on the floor for these occasions, and I spread one out on the seat and took the sandwich-laden paper from Elaine. Before it hit the newspaper, Peanuts’s nose was buried in it. When I turned back, Elaine was wiping the grease from her fingers with a white paper napkin. Now we could get on with it.
I was working on my beef and searching for a way to start when Elaine said, “I’ve been a real bitch. I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay.”
“No, it’s not. Don’t go absolving me. I don’t deserve it.”
I swallowed a bite and washed it down with a swig of Coke. “I guess I figured you wouldn’t be acting like that without good reason.”
“Jack thinks I’m pregnant.” Then she stabbed me with a look that said my response here was real important.
“I guess I thought of that too, but I rejected it.” Her gaze softened, but she waited. After a minute, I said, “Whether you believe it or not, you are pretty decisive. You’d decide whether to abort or go through with it, and you’d live with your decision.” I shook my head. “No. Whatever’s bothering you, you haven’t come anywhere near resolving. Maybe it’s too big.” She looked away. “But I don’t know what it is.” She sucked on the straw, making it go dark with chocolate.
“How’s the shake?”
“Delicious. Sinful, but delicious. I can feel it going right to my hips.” It was time to take the gloves off. “Elaine, why did you go to Santa Fe?”
I felt her turn toward me, but kept my eyes on the reflection of the lights from Ed’s Express in the windows of the Pizza Hut next door. After a moment, she said, “I told you. Ginny had set up a catering business. She wanted me to go in with her.”
“That’s it?” I looked at her now, waiting.
With a little shrug she said, “Though sometimes I wonder what I would have done if you’d asked me to stay.”
“We’ll never know.” And then, because that seemed cold, I added, “That’s not me, Elaine. I don’t ever make people’s decisions for them. Not ever. Not anymore.” I hadn’t intended for those last two words to slip out, inviting clarification.
“What do you mean ‘not anymore’?”
I rolled the window down and lit a cigarette, searching for a way to change the subject. Then I figured communication was supposed to go both ways. I blew a cloud of smoke out the window and said, “My wife, Joan. When I asked her to marry me she’d just been offered some kind of music scholarship in New York. I guess that’s why I asked her there and then. I figured I’d lose her if she went.” I glanced at Elaine and couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Only that she was interested. I tapped an ash off the cigarette. “She stayed. We got married. She never forgave me. Said she’d be first oboe in the Chicago Symphony if she’d gone to New York.” I shrugged. “Maybe she was right. So, I asked her to stay because I thought I’d lose her if she went. She stayed and I lost her anyway.”
The silence grew and I tried to fill it by listening to the traffic on Golf. Finally Elaine said, “Did she go back to the oboe?”
“Last I heard she’d married some stockbroker. They already had two kids and a pool and were living in Winnetka.”
“Sounds like she never really believed she could do it.” She spoke as though that was the only logical conclusion. I’d tried to convince myself of the same, but without as much success.
“Or maybe the time was never right again,” I said.
She sighed and settled back, an ankle crossed over her knee. After a long drag on the straw, she said, “Do you ever wish you’d stayed with the minor leagues? Like maybe you were just about to peak, but now you’ll never know?”
That caught me off guard, but I gave it a minute and said, “I had a lot of peaking to do to get out of the minors.” The fact was I used to think about it, especially in the spring, but had come to terms with it. “Besides, even if I had gotten to the majors, I’d be out by now. I’m a little old, even for a pitcher. I figure I’d be worth, what? Maybe me and two utility infielders would get you one Ron Santo in a baseball card trade.”
“Yes, but at least you’d be on a baseball card. You know what I mean?” Then, in a familiar gesture, she pulled her hair back and released it with a shake of her head. “I’m sorry. That came out all wrong. I don’t want to make you feel lousy. It’s just that I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. You know, when you’re young you have all these dreams, these possibilities. There’s no way you’re going to be like everyone else. But then one day you wake up and you’re thirty-three and you realize that not only are you not exceptional, you’re not even above average.”
She didn’t want to hear that I thought she was exceptional and had from the moment I first saw her. She wasn’t measuring herself by my ruler. Hers had a lot more inches on it. “What would it take to make you exceptional?”
She sniffed and chuckled, her half-eaten sandwich abandoned, holding a French fry. “That’s the hell of it. I don’t have the slightest idea.” I heard her take in a deep breath and release it. “I guess I thought that by working for myself I could prove something to myself. You know? I don’t need the backing of a major corporation to be a success. I mean, I realize that running a catering business isn’t like running IBM, but it would be something I could, you know, be proud of.” She ate the fry.
“What happened?”
“Everything.”
“You go under?”
“Worse.”
I waited.
Finally she said, “I’ve known Ginny forever. Since kindergarten. Best friends through high school. Even when she went to college, we were still in touch. I’d go down to see her in Macomb at least once a month. This catering idea of hers was a good one. She was keeping the books – she’d been an accountant – and we were doing fine. I put money into the business, but so did she. More even. We’d invested in supplies, equipment, lots of things. Once a month we went over the books together. She wanted me to know what was going on. I trusted her completely. And we were doing fine. Building up regular clients. Getting some good jobs.” She paused, folding her legs under her on the car seat. “Then this guy starts showing up. Richard. They met at one of the dinner parties we catered. She started seeing a lot of him. I used to wonder what he did for a living. You know, he’d show up at the store at odd times during the day. Not like he was on lunch or anything. Ginny said he was in investments.” She looked heavenward and shook her head. “I should have known then.”
Peanuts was trying to worm his way into the front seat. I pushed him back.
“Anyway,” she continued, “I show up at work one day and there’s no Ginny. She hadn’t come home the night before, but it was getting so that wasn’t at all unusual. But we had a big luncheon that day, and I was really worried. I tried calling Richard. No answer. God knows how, but I managed to pull the luncheon off myself. When I got back to the store, the cops were waiting for me.” Shaking her head slowly, she said, “How dumb can one person be? It seems that Richard, Mr. Investor, was busted trying to sell an ounce of cocaine to an undercover cop. Ginny had split.” She looked at me, blinking back tears. “You’ll never guess what they used to finance this investment.”
“Your money?”
“All of it.”
“Did the cops think you were involved?”
That sent her groping for her purse, which she hadn’t brought. “There’s Kleenex in the glove box,” I said.
She nodded her thanks and took the box out, holding it in her lap. After she’d wiped her eyes and blown her nose, she said, “Yeah, they did. At first. They’d been staking out the store for a couple months. They thought we were all in on it together. I got printed, mug shot, the works.” She pulled out more tissue. “Fortunately, the next day they found Ginny. She told them I wasn’t involved and they couldn’t prove otherwise, so they let me go. I’ve got to go back to testify.” She turned to me. “Do you know what she said to me? Do you know what her excuse was for turning our little catering business into a money-laundering operation?” I shook my head. “She said she was afraid Richard would leave her if she didn’t go along. Shit. What an idiot! She was my friend and she did this to me. Just to keep this louse for a boyfriend. I mean, he was using her and our money and she never saw it. The hell of it is, if he hadn’t been caught, this could have gone on for years. And then I found out that some of our best clients were referred to us not because of our great culinary skills, but because we could supply them with drugs. There I was, happily stuffing manicotti shells while everyone’s waiting for me to turn my back so they can get down to business.” She pounded a fist against her knee. “What a sap!”
“Elaine, if you had no reason to suspect something was going on, why would you even look for it? And it’s not like they were doing this for a long time. Just a few months, right?”
She nodded. “Still, I shouldn’t have been so trusting.” After a minute, she said in a soft voice, “I’m broke, Quint.”
“You mean broke as in no disposable money or broke as in not a penny to my name?”
“The second one.”
“The condo?”
I barely heard her say, “That’s gone too.”
“You sold it?”
She sniffed and cleared her throat. “So I’d have something to invest in the business. It turned out that we had a lot of debts we had to pay off too. Debts I never knew about.” Sighing, she shook her head. “I just don’t know what to do.” Each word was an effort. “I feel frozen. I can’t do anything. I just want to curl up under a blanket somewhere and never come out.” Her shoulders began to rise and fall with her sobs. I tried to move over next to her. Damn the gear shift anyway. I managed as best I could and held her for a while as she released some of her grief. Losing your money was one thing; losing your ability to trust someone was another. After a few minutes, her tears abated and she wiped her eyes and face with a couple tissues. She forced a little laugh and said, “Thanks. I needed that.”
I moved slightly so the gear shift pierced another part of my rib cage. “You want a little advice?”
I felt her head nod against my chest.
“You’re broke, you start over. You learn. You don’t make the same mistake twice. And, you let your friends and family help you through it.”
Abruptly, she pulled away from me, shaking her head. “No. I can’t do that.”
“Your family doesn’t know about any of this, do they?”
“No. And I’d like it to stay that way.”
“Elaine, your brother’s a lawyer.”
“Yeah, and he’s married to a bitch who blames women who work outside the home for everything from child abuse to the high cost of designer clothes.”
“Screw her. Who cares what she thinks? He might be able to help you. You may have legal options. You’ve got to let him.” Before she could argue, I went on. “How do you think he’ll feel when he finds out about all this and you never asked for help. And he will find out. You know that.”
She sighed. “I suppose that’s true. It’s just …”
“I know.” I pulled her closer. Neither of us spoke for a minute. Then I took her hand and gave it a small squeeze. It was still damp with her tears. “Hey, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you come back to Foxport with me?” I gestured toward Ed’s Express. “We don’t have quite the selection of fast food, but it’s not a bad place. Give yourself a couple weeks. Talk to your family. Give yourself time to decide what you want to do.”
Pulling her hand away, she said, “I don’t …” Interrupting, I said, “You can stay at my place. You take the bedroom, I’ll be fine on the couch.”
“I couldn’t.”
“Yes, you could. Half the time I fall asleep on the couch anyway.” Pausing, I added, “Your next decision is going to be an important one. Give yourself some time. Don’t rush into it.” With that, the defense rested.
Sighing, she wiped her face with a Kleenex. She seemed calmer, more self-contained, and after a few minutes she said, “Maybe we could try it for a day or two.”
We stopped at Jack’s so Elaine could get her things. She gave him a cursory explanation, one which would probably drive him crazy guessing. But she promised to call him in a day or so and explain everything. By the time we got back to my apartment, it was almost eleven. I took Peanuts down by the river while Elaine got settled in. I felt both relieved and a little ashamed. Now that I understood what was eating at Elaine, I could deal with it. I almost wished that her only problem was that she’d come back to find that I wasn’t what she wanted at all and just didn’t know how to tell me.
When we got back, Elaine was standing at the sink, drinking a glass of water. I was surprised to find that I’d missed seeing her in that ratty blue robe. “I’m pretty tired,” she said. She looked as though caught between two thoughts. Then she asked, “You’ve got blankets and everything for that couch?”
“Yeah. Don’t worry.”
Setting the glass down, she walked around the counter to where I was standing. “Well, I’ll see you in the morning.” Tilting her chin up, she gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. “Thanks.” Then she turned, and walked down the short hallway into the bedroom, closing the door behind her.
I looked at Peanuts. “Well, I guess it’s you and me, kid. Roughing it.”
Peanuts sat in the middle of the living room, watching as I made the couch up into a reasonable excuse for a bed. After I settled under the blanket, he gave me one last look, turned, and trotted down the hall. Then I heard him scratching at the bedroom door. The door opened. I heard Elaine coo something at Peanuts. The door shut and there was silence. Just wait until seven in the morning when the furry little turncoat wanted to go out. I turned off the light.
Chapter 9
WHEN PEANUTS AND I returned from our morning run at nine, Elaine wasn’t up yet. He trotted down the hall, on his way to letting her know we were back, and I stopped him just short of the closed door, ordering him into the living room. This must have posed quite a dilemma for him, because he stood in the hall, tail slowly wagging, possibly considering the consequences of outright disobedience. He finally went with my suggestion, curling up in a mistreated ball under the coffee table. I told him to stay put and, miraculously, he was still there after I’d showered and shaved and put on a pair of old jeans and a red NIU T-shirt. I started the coffee and called my office. There were no messages so I gathered up Jeff’s notes and settled on the couch, with my feet up on the low table. Even though the light wasn’t real good, I chose the end nearest the kitchen, which gave me a view of the hall and the bedroom door so I could keep Peanuts from sneaking past me.
Jeff’s handwriting was bad. Not that it mattered. Most of his notes appeared to be in some sort of code. At nine fifteen I had deciphered two of his symbols and I celebrated with a second cup of coffee. Leaning against the formica counter, I sipped from the mug and tried again. No good. I was too far away from it and the coffee was making me hungry.
I eat out a lot and, as a rule, I skip breakfast, but if I get an urge to cook, it’s usually bacon and eggs. I guess it runs in the family. Dad always made Sunday breakfast with a flourish and a lot of commotion. Poor Mom cooked the other twenty meals and we barely noticed. I put on three strips of bacon, hesitated, then added three more. Maybe I’d give them to Peanuts.
They were three quarters of the way to being well done when Elaine padded into the kitchen wearing her robe and argyle socks, her hair a mass of red curls and tangles. Finishing a yawn, she said, “God, that smells good.”
“Want some?”
“I’d love some.”
“Eggs too?”
“Yeah, one. Over easy.” She opened the refrigerator. “Do you have bread?”
“It’s out.” I pointed with the fork toward the counter and watched as she removed a small stack and dropped two slices into the toaster. “How’d you sleep?”
Yawning again, she drew up the collar of her robe and tightened its tie. Then she looked at me, a smile pulling at the corners of her mouth. “Your dog snores.”
I glanced at Peanuts who was in the middle of the small kitchen having trouble standing still what with all the good smells. “You hear that?” He licked his chops.
Once breakfast was ready, we moved into the living room, setting the food on the coffee table. Elaine sat on the floor, her legs crossed beneath her.
