Looking for Laura, page 3
“Winfield isn’t a city,” Eddie pointed out.
“Which is why we’ve only got a few.” Through the panes of glass he could see his mother hunched over her computer, her lips moving and her hand convulsively squeezing the mouse. If forgetting the name of a doorknob was a symptom of Alzheimer’s, then surely talking to yourself because the three-click process of calling up a file, which had been explained to you a hundred times, was too challenging was also a sign of Alzheimer’s. Both his parents were loony. Maybe he could get a two-for-one discount when it came time to lodge them at the local nursing home.
“I really think I can tug some heartstrings with this story,” Eddie persisted.
“Don’t get carried away,” Todd warned him. “We’re not exactly venturing into Pulitzer territory here. You have until tomorrow. Make it count.”
Eddie lingered in the doorway, giving Todd a hopeful gaze. Big mistake. Todd could stare down anyone, especially when he was pissed off. And through no fault of Eddie’s, Todd was seriously pissed off.
After a moment, Eddie conceded, turning and slinking out the door. His trousers were too big. On a high-school kid they might look stylish, but on a cub reporter they looked like poorly sized hand-me-downs.
At least he was gone. But that meant Todd once again had an unobstructed view of his mother. Her lips were still moving as she squinted at her computer monitor, her brow furrowed, her shoulders bunched. She seemed to be trying to twirl a strand of her hair, but it was lacquered into place and her fingers kept slipping behind her ear.
She was a good woman, he reminded himself again. His parents were good people. He came from a good family.
And right now, he felt like shit. Before Paul died, he used to find his parents tolerable, even amusing. But since the accident, everything rubbed him wrong. A guy needed a best friend to vent to. Paul had always been so calm, so steady. He used to listen to Todd, commiserate, offer good advice. He never made mistakes.
Correction: he’d made one mistake. It was a whopper, and in rectifying that mistake and doing the right thing, he’d put his future on a leash. Had he known that his future would last only six more years?
Of course not. He’d just been the most decent man in the universe, that was all. A scrupulous attorney, a solid husband, a stylish dresser, a stalwart friend. Someone who could talk Todd down when the trivial irritations of daily living threatened to beat him to a bloody pulp.
And now Paul was dead, leaving Todd to cope with his parents, his newspaper, his staff and the sewers of Winfield all by himself.
“Todd?” his mother howled. “This computer doesn’t work! Everything I tell it to do, it ignores me!”
Smart computer. He swiveled his chair so he wouldn’t have to see her. Gazing out at the newsroom, he saw a few reporters tapping away at their computers, which apparently worked well enough. Several desks were empty; those reporters were out chasing exciting stories about the mayor’s weakness for bad puns, the zoning board’s weakness for kickbacks, the police chief’s weakness for driving way above the speed limit and insisting he was doing so only to keep his reflexes sharp in case he ever had to engage in a high-speed chase. Winfield was a city with enough weak souls to fill eighty pages a day, augmented by national and international news lifted off the wires and lots of advertising. God bless those weaknesses for keeping the Valley News in the black.
The door at the opposite end of the newsroom swung open, and the irritation quotient of Todd’s day doubled. In walked Sally Driver. The dizzy waitress. The queen of flake. The grieving widow.
He would have considered Sally in more kindly terms if he’d believed for a minute that she and Paul had been made for each other. They hadn’t been. She’d trapped the guy using the oldest trick known to womankind, and being the moral man that he was, Paul had done what he’d had to do. But she hadn’t trapped Todd, and he was under no obligation to be nice to her.
Everything about her annoyed him, from her long frizzy hair to her innocent smile to her too-big body. She wasn’t fat, but she was bulky, broad shouldered and round hipped, and she emphasized her fleshiness by wearing swirling, gauzy dresses that looked like castoffs from a third-rate summer-stock production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Whatever the opposite of delicate was, that was Sally.
She’d been utterly wrong for Paul. He’d been neat and contained, as organized in his demeanor as he was in every other aspect of his life. He’d never had a hair out of place; she never had a hair in place. He’d been logical; she was manic. He’d never gone anywhere without condoms, yet she had somehow managed to get herself knocked up. The immaculate conception, Todd used to call their daughter, who looked enough like Paul that Todd suggested he consider suing the condom company.
He wasn’t in the mood to talk to Sally today. He wasn’t in the mood to talk to her any day, but especially not today, after having endured his mother’s ineptitude with a computer and her insinuations about his father’s mental health, and the discouraging prospect of Eddie Lesher in search of a socially relevant story.
Ignoring Margaret, the office manager, who tried to stop her, Sally stalked through the newsroom, her stride ominously resolute. A large tote bag woven out of pastel-dyed straw hung on a strap over her shoulder, and her hair flailed around her face in ripples of reddish-brown.
Todd braced himself. He hadn’t seen her since the meeting in the office of one of Paul’s law partners for the reading of Paul’s will, three months ago. Todd had been both honored and dismayed that Paul had named him the executor. The job would be tedious and time-consuming, and it would mean continuing contact with Sally, but he respected Paul’s desire not to give her the opportunity to mismanage his estate.
He hoped she hadn’t come to argue with him over the will. Paul had left her comfortable, and the rest was going to Rosie. If Sally had any intention of messing with that, Todd would set her straight.
She swung into his office and he realized, somewhat belatedly, that she was furious. Her eyes were usually a gentle blue, but now they seemed diamond-hard and cold. Her hands were clenched into fists and her bosom rose and fell with each determined breath. Something strange was dangling from her ears. Gold dice, maybe.
Paul’s cuff links. She’d looped them through gold wires, and now they hung from her ears, looking ridiculous.
“What do you want?” he asked none too graciously. He knew Sally didn’t expect courtesy from him. They’d never bothered to pretend a fondness for each other when Paul was alive. They certainly weren’t going to pretend now.
“I want the truth,” she retorted.
He was distracted by the rhythm of her breathing. Her breasts were plump beneath the bodice of her floral-print dress. Paul had always claimed to prefer petite women—yet one glance at Sally’s voluptuous figure and he’d succumbed like a drooling adolescent.
Fortunately, Todd was immune to her endowments. “What truth?” he asked, refusing to smile or offer her a seat. If he did either, she might mistakenly believe she was welcome.
She set her tote bag down on one of the visitor’s chairs with a clunk and glowered at him. “Who was Laura?”
“Laura?” He frowned. “Laura who?”
“You tell me.”
He sighed with forced tolerance. “Look, Sally—some of us have important jobs to do. If you want to play Twenty Questions, we’ll have to do it some other time. I’ve got a newspaper to publish.”
“I’m not playing Twenty Questions. I want to know who Laura was. Some woman Paul was having an affair with, right?”
Todd was shocked into silence. Paul having an affair? He didn’t believe it. He couldn’t. Todd had known Paul for fifteen years, and he just wasn’t the sort to do that. Affairs were too messy.
He tried to imagine it. Tried to visualize Paul sneaking around, making coded telephone calls, contorting himself for a little fun and games in the Alfa Romeo’s bucket seats. No, Paul wasn’t that limber.
And beyond that, no, he wouldn’t have an affair. He was too decent. Decent to a fault, in Todd’s opinion.
“He was fooling around with a woman named Laura. You were his best friend. You must have known.”
“You’re crazy,” he told her. If she was suffering from delusions, he wished she would take her delusions and suffer somewhere else.
“She wrote him letters. He saved them.” She started rummaging through her tote bag. Hearing things clink and rattle in there, he tried to guess what she’d packed in it. A key chain, for sure. A tire chain. A pair of cymbals. Some plumbing hardware. Enough spare change to keep a Las Vegas slot machine fed for a year. Something scratchy—a currying brush, perhaps. Chopsticks. A great deal of crinkly paper.
Her hand emerged from the hidden depths of the tote, clutching some of that paper—a bulging manila envelope. “Letters,” she said, hurling the packet onto his desk. “Icky love letters.”
He glanced warily at the envelope. “Icky?”
“Purple-prose letters. Nauseatingly poetic. Who is this woman? I think she’s got my knife.”
“Your knife?”
“Well, technically, Paul’s knife—but only because I gave it to him. It was a family heirloom, and she’s got it. Who is she?”
“I have no idea,” he insisted.
Sally scrutinized him through fierce eyes. “You don’t have to cover for your buddy anymore, Todd. He’s dead.”
That was it. He was done indulging the lunatics in his life. “I’m not covering for him,” he snapped. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. He wasn’t having an affair. Why would he, when he had such a wonderful wife?”
Ignoring his sarcasm, she poked a finger at the envelope on his desk. “Those letters were written to Paul by a woman named Laura. She dated them by month and day but not year. But they must have been written within the past five years because they acknowledge that he’s married, and that he lied about it to her for a while. And he gave her the knife I gave him. She must have mailed these letters to his office, because if she’d mailed them to our house I would have seen them. But I’ve got no envelopes, no return address.”
“You read his mail?” Todd wished he could sound more indignant than he felt. Paul was dead, as she’d pointed out. If he’d found a stash of mysterious letters after the death of a loved one, he’d probably have a peek at them, too.
“I found them in a drawer of his dresser. Which means they were mailed to his office and he brought them home and hid them inside his brown crew-neck sweater.”
“Inside his sweater?” That was weird. Not very Paul-like at all.
“Why would he bring them into our house?” Sally started pacing around the small glassed-in cubicle, not waiting for an answer. “Maybe he liked to take them out and reread them when I was out. Maybe that was how he started his day. I usually left for work by six-fifteen. He’d get up, get Rosie ready for school, eat breakfast…and maybe he’d grab one of his letters from Laura and reread it to fire himself up. Or after I went to bed—maybe he’d pull out one of the letters, sneak into the bathroom and jerk off.”
“That’s uncalled for.”
“Is it?” She halted in her minicircuit around the room and glared at him. “The man was having an affair, and I’m supposed to talk about him like he was a saint?”
“He wasn’t having an affair,” Todd said with certainty.
“How do you know that?”
“If he had been, he would have told me.”
“He would have told you, and he would have sworn you to secrecy. He would have said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t let Sally know.’”
True enough. But the fact was, Paul hadn’t told Todd, so Todd didn’t believe any of it. Sally was a wildly imaginative woman. In the throes of her grief, she’d concocted this sordid myth based on a packet of letters that Todd couldn’t imagine Paul stashing inside a brown crew-neck sweater.
Still, the packet sat before him, daring him to examine its contents.
She must have sensed his curiosity. She stormed back to his desk, jabbed her finger at the envelope and said, “Read those letters, Todd. Read them and tell me why your very best friend would have given my knife to a woman who writes such icky stuff.”
“Reading them would be a betrayal,” he said, cringing inwardly at how pompous he sounded.
“Bringing them into my house was a betrayal,” she argued. “Knowing her was a betrayal. Telling her there was no love in our home…” Sally’s voice cracked, and Todd noticed a flash of tears in her eyes. “That was a betrayal.” She drew in a deep, steadying breath and squared her shoulders. “And pretending you don’t know anything about her, Todd—that’s a betrayal, too.”
It would have been, if he’d been pretending. But he wasn’t. He honestly had no idea what Sally was talking about.
The conviction in her voice unnerved him. He stared at the envelope, suddenly uneasy. If it contained what she claimed, if someone named Laura had sent love letters to Paul, if he’d had an affair…Damn it! To have an affair and not tell Todd was the worst betrayal of all.
“I’ll read them,” he promised, unable to look at Sally. He was embarrassed to think he viewed keeping one’s adultery a secret from one’s best friend a worse betrayal than committing the adultery itself. Of course it wasn’t, but still…Paul had known Todd longer and better than he’d known Sally. They’d met as freshmen at Columbia. Todd’s closeknit family and small-town pragmatism had appealed to Paul, and Paul’s coolheadedness and class had helped Todd keep things in perspective. They hadn’t been quite opposites, but they’d complemented each other in pleasant ways. Paul had weaned Todd from cheap beer to microbrewery beverages, and Todd had introduced Paul to cross-country skiing and burned lasagna—which tasted better when washed down with microbrewery beverages. Todd had suggested that Paul move to Winfield after law school, to practice in Todd’s hometown, and Paul had enjoyed the town’s slower pace, its backdrop of rolling hills and the fact that it enabled him to be a very big fish in a small pond.
He and Todd had double-dated. They’d compared notes. Paul had told Todd that Denise was too self-centered, and after the divorce Paul had exercised great restraint by saying “I told you so” less than a hundred times. Paul had known about the women Todd dated, he’d known about the women he slept with—not because Todd talked a lot but because they’d been best friends.
So wouldn’t Paul have told Todd about Laura if she was at all significant?
“I’ll read them,” he repeated, lifting his gaze to Sally and praying with all his heart that she would go away.
“Call me when you’re ready to tell me the truth,” she said, an undeniable threat underlining her words. Then she hoisted her cacophonous tote bag off the chair, slung the straps over her shoulder and left his office.
He stared after her as she marched through the newsroom and out the door. Then he swiveled back to his desk. The envelope sat on his blotter, beckoning, taunting. There was something foul about the entire situation, something sleazy about the act of reading a dead man’s private correspondence, something dishonorable about letting a suspicious widow tarnish the memory of a good man.
But the only way Todd could prove Paul had been a good man was to refute the contents of the envelope. If he read the letters, he might discover that Sally was as nutty as he’d always assumed. Or he might recognize the letter writer as an old acquaintance of his and Paul’s from their college days, or perhaps a client of Paul’s who had expressed herself ambiguously in her correspondence. Perhaps Paul had saved the letters because he thought they were funny or absurd.
Reading the letters might be tantamount to dancing on Paul’s grave—but it might also be tantamount to planting flowers on his grave, salvaging his reputation. Todd owed it to his best friend to redeem him.
He opened the flap of the envelope and shook out the letters, all of them neatly folded in thirds, handwritten on unlined parchment, fancier paper than he was used to handling. The creamy weight of it seemed overindulgent, almost fetishistic.
“Shit,” he muttered, wondering if Sally had screwed with his head. Since when did he pass judgment on paper quality?
He unfolded the letter on the top of the pile and started to read. His gaze inched along the florid handwriting, the even more florid phrasing, and he found himself swallowing hard, several times. Partly because the writing was sweet and thick enough to choke on, and partly because…
Shit. This was a love letter. No question about it. It was a love letter to Paul, and it was signed, “Love, Laura.”
Who the hell was Laura?
And how could Paul have kept this a secret from his best friend?
Three
At eight-fifteen, Sally stomped into the New Day Café, still fuming. Todd had had nearly an entire day to get back to her. He’d had plenty of time to read the revolting letters, recognize that there was nothing he could tell Sally that she hadn’t already figured out and telephone her to say, “All right, so you caught him. He was screwing around with a bimbo with literary pretensions. But he didn’t mean to. He couldn’t help himself. He really, really loved you.”
Did she actually want to hear that? If she did, would she believe it? Could Todd say anything that would make her feel better?
Probably not. But she wanted to hear from him anyway. As Paul’s best friend and confidant, he had to have known about Laura. And since Paul wasn’t around to apologize, Todd could apologize for him.
She didn’t like arriving at the café after eight. Before the accident, she used to be at the café in time for its six-thirty opening. Greta would have been there for two hours by then, baking the first round of pastries and preparing the trays for later rounds that Sally and the others could slide into the industrial ovens and cook fresh as inventory demanded. Greta would receive a daily delivery from a bakery that specialized in bagels, and a delivery of coffee beans, which she would grind on the premises so they’d be optimally fresh for brewing. Then Sally would come in, unlock the cash register and set up the tables, and Greta would leave.
