And When She Was Good, page 19
Her forays into the virtual matchmaking world have paralleled her correspondence with Terrence—Terry, as it turns out—which has proceeded at the perfect pace as far as Heloise is concerned. His e-mails have been flirtatious, but not overly so, and he has shown just the right amount of interest in her—lots of questions about her likes and dislikes, what she was like as a little girl, not so much about her family. Her instinct was not to tell him about Scott, but she realizes that this is important information she shouldn’t hold back. She will tell him over lunch tomorrow, make a clean breast of things.
The phrase strikes her, as phrases sometimes do, and she can’t help herself: She goes to her laptop, which is never far away these days, as it might chime at any moment with another message from Terry. She quickly types “clean breast of things origin” into Google, conjecturing that it will go back to poultry, the literal cleaning of. But no, it derives from a reference to the chest cavity, which holds the heart. To make a clean breast is to bare one’s heart.
What if she began to feel something for Terry? Would she tell him everything? Make a clean breast of it all? She can’t imagine that. Terry is a private treat she is allowing herself during a time when it’s better not to be too active at work. With Shelley’s homicide pulling her into the sight line of that homicide cop, it’s downright convenient having a real man around, going out like a normal person. A little fake normalcy is just the ticket right now. Solve the Sophie problem. Wait out the Shelley investigation. Ignore her mother’s requests, both of which seem equally impossible to Heloise. She’ll figure everything out. She always does.
She likes the fact that Terry has set a lunch for their first date. It means sex is unlikely, although not impossible, obviously. She’s pretty sure she won’t have sex with him; she doesn’t plan on doing that until their third date. (She has been researching the so-called Rules, too, and is amazed by how some of them mesh with her own advice: Be honest but mysterious. Be a creature like no other.)
First, however, she has to get through her visit with Val. She has waited until their regular Tuesday to ask the questions that have been nagging at her since Jolson brought her in: Why was Shelley on your visiting list? Do you know anything about her death? Did you even know she was dead? Instinct—no, not instinct or intuition, but her hard-earned knowledge of Val—tells her that she can’t come at the topic too directly, reveal how desperately she wants the answers. She’s not even sure she should tell Val that a Howard County homicide cop has questioned her, much less mention the photograph of Shelley and Bettina. And she’s definitely not going to let Jolson see how interested she is in this topic. Only Val can tell her why he was in touch with Shelley—and why he never mentioned it.
I made a connection the other day that I can’t believe I didn’t notice before,” she says about fifteen minutes into her conversation with Val, after providing a detailed account of the trip she and Scott had made to Antietam, which she found unexpectedly moving. Now she and Scott are watching the Ken Burns series together. Of course, there is no Scott in her account, which is a shame, as that’s what made the trip particularly effective. Scott was entranced by the vista, had no problem imagining the thousands of men crossing the open fields, whereas warfare is always a little hazy to Heloise.
“Hmmmm.” Val has never been very good at following up on conversational cues. He never had to be.
“That woman, the so-called Suburban Madam? The one they found dead and now say was a homicide?”
“Yeah?”
“It was Shelley. Shelley Smith, but going by a different name now.” He stares impassively through the glass. “She worked for you. Briefly. Back around”—no, better not to reference Martin’s murder—“mid- to late nineties.”
“Christ, I barely remember her. Brown hair? West Virginia?”
There it is, the lie. She can call him on it or pretend that she doesn’t know what she knows. Why would he lie? But clearly, if he wanted her to know about Shelley, he would have shared the information earlier. Val was always squirrelly that way, controlling people by not letting anyone know the whole story.
“Dirty blond when we knew her, and I think it was Virginia. The thing is—police questioned me about her death.”
“Really?”
Val’s not quite as good a liar as she is, having had to do it less often. That’s the ultimate perk of power, not having to lie, because there are no consequences for telling the truth.
Or maybe he just doesn’t care that she can see through him.
“Yes. We were connected in a way I didn’t realize.”
A quizzical look.
“She’s on your visitors list.”
“Oh.” As if this had slipped his mind. “You know, I don’t think she ever did, though. Visit me. Not regular, like you. I think that goes way back to when I was first locked up. No reason to take her off, though.”
Why is Heloise scared to confront a man on the other side of a glass, a man who is locked up for life? “But she was gone by then. She disappeared a few months after”—she’s going to say it this time—“after Martin was killed. I always thought she was a little freaked out.”
“Yeah, we stayed in touch for a while. Back then.”
“Val, did you set her up? Did you give her the idea for her business?”
He grins. “You jealous, Hel? Did you think you were my one and only?”
Yes.
“It just would have been nice to have a heads-up. Can you imagine what ran through my mind when a cop said he wanted to talk to me about her death?”
“But I bet you were convincing. I mean, you didn’t know that you had any connection with her, and you hadn’t seen her for years, so you were probably really persuasive when you told him you don’t know anything about her being murdered.”
“Yes, but it means a suburban cop could figure out I was in the life, once upon a time, although I denied it. I don’t want to be on any cop’s radar.”
“A homicide cop in Howard County doesn’t care about a prostitute who works out of Arundel County. Cops are funny that way. Hierarchical. And homicide cops are always full of themselves, think what they do is so much more important than all the other squads. You’ve got nothing for him, legitimately. He’ll leave you alone.”
“Jesus, Val, aren’t you the least bit upset? Or curious? This is someone you knew. Someone you must have liked on some level, if you did business with her. And she was murdered, possibly because of what she did.”
“You know, Shelley always was a scaredy-cat,” he says. “You’re right about the timing. Martin got killed”—even now, after all these years, he never spoke of this event except in the passive voice—“and she couldn’t hack it. She asked me if she could leave, which I don’t usually let people do, as you know. She had a lot of earning left in her. We worked out an arrangement, sort of the beta plan for what you ended up doing. So you’re really riding her coattails, benefiting from what I learned being in business with her, although you’re more suited to it. She never got the high-end trade that you have, didn’t have the discipline to run it like a real business.”
He’s trying to compliment her, but what Heloise is hearing is something very different. She’s been a dupe, a sap. She is, in short, as unwitting as her own mother, the second Mrs. Hector Lewis. No, even more so. Her mother never suffered from the delusion that she was Hector’s one and only. Stupid to feel cheated on, when it was a business deal, but Heloise always believed Val when he said she was the only person like him, the only one who understood him.
“Anyway, I truly thought Shelley offed herself, though. I mean, you could see why she might have. No income coming in. Jail looming. But now they say homicide? Maybe she began to look around her life, see what she had to bargain with.”
“What are you telling me, Val?”
“Just making an observation. I think she pissed someone off, threatened to name names, and it came back to haunt her. Nobody likes a snitch, Helen.”
Val never calls her Heloise, but he almost never calls her Helen either. He usually falls back on the shared first syllable, Hel. Hell.
She thinks about the photograph discovered with Shelley’s body, the Polaroid of Shelley kissing Bettina. Does Val know about the photograph? If he knew that the cop would talk to her, did he also know that the cop would share this photo, ask her about the other woman in the photo? She thought Val had put the Bettina thing behind him a long time ago, assumed she was dead. Did he have Shelley killed? Is he trying to find Bettina, have her killed?
“Did I tell you,” Heloise says, “that I’m finally watching the Ken Burns documentary on the Civil War? You really inspired me.”
“I wish they would rerun that,” he says, his eyes lighting up. Those familiar eyes, the ones she looks into every day. “I get PBS on that rinky-dink TV they let me have, but I swear it’s just one big Lawrence Welk pledge drive.”
They talk about Little Round Top for the rest of the visit.
2005
Val was proud of Helen. There it was, she had said it, and—she was going to admit this to herself, too—she felt something warm and powerful in his pride. She knew enough about the rudiments of psychology, as almost everyone does in our modern age, to realize that this was bound up with her feelings about her father, who had seldom complimented her on anything, and then it was never meaningful, a grunt of thanks for bringing him a beer or finding the remote control when he had left it somewhere unfathomable. (The glove compartment of his car, for example.)
Val at least admired the things for which she wanted to be admired: her mind and her appearance. She tried not to put too much stock in her looks, realizing that placing all her self-esteem behind that asset was like putting all one’s money into a beautiful boat with a small but unfixable hole. One day that asset would be lost to her. All the more reason to make it pay now.
In prison Val cared even more about her beauty. Where once it had generated income for him, perhaps inspired envy in other men—poor Jules—now, when she visited him at Supermax, her beauty redounded to Val in a way she had not anticipated. The pretty redhead was the subject of much speculation, a legend. No other inmates saw her, but many described her, based on the guards’ gossip. Val never said anything about her at all, fueling the interest.
“The latest rumor,” he said when she settled in for her bimonthly visit, “is that you’re a former model. One guard swears you were Playmate of the Year fifteen years ago.”
“Fifteen years ago? Fifteen years ago I was sixteen. I like to think I look good for my age.”
“Oh, don’t be sensitive. He’s black.”
Helen looked at Val, even more confused.
“Black people, they’re not fooled by white people’s ages. It’s the damnedest thing. It’s like they’ve been looking at our skin in a way we don’t. They see the most subtle signs, even in a very well-kept woman such as yourself.”
Helen filed this away, as she filed away every interesting insight about human nature, even when unsure if it was true. Could this be? She knew that the obverse was true, that African Americans aged better. “Black don’t crack.” Of course, that wasn’t the obverse exactly, but a corollary, she supposed—
“You seem like you’re somewhere else,” Val said, annoyed. Her visits were supposed to be focused on him.
“I ran into—” At the last minute, she declined to say Bettina’s name. She knew that Val wanted Bettina dead. And heading here today, Helen had every intention to set things in motion, to see if Val would take care of Bettina for her. Besides, it would be helpful for her to know if Val could do such a thing. If he couldn’t . . . well, then she would be safe, too. A win-win.
So why did she say, “Mollie. I ran into Mollie”?
“That cunt.”
“She’s fat now.”
“I saw that coming.”
“Really? How?”
“She was greedy. Nothing could fill her up. She was big as a bucket, inside and out. She still working?”
“No. She hooked some poor sap who met her while she was working as a florist. Older man. She thought he was rich. He’s not.”
Val laughed, pleased by Mollie’s fate. “More than she deserves. You know, I sometimes wondered if she ratted me out.”
This was territory they had covered before. Helen decided to push past it.
“I ran into her at the grocery store. She says if I don’t pay her ten thousand dollars, she’ll tell all my neighbors what I used to do.”
“She used to do it, too.”
“But she doesn’t anymore.”
“Does her husband—the jerk she lassoed, does he know?”
“Probably not.”
“Well, there you go. That’s dynamic tension, baby. You’ve got as much on her as she’s got on you.”
“But if she poked around, she might figure out I’m still in the business. I have more to lose.” She could not mention Scott, her primary concern, so Val didn’t have any idea just how much she had to lose. If he did—maybe she should have introduced the idea of a child earlier, claimed to have gotten knocked up a year later than she did? No, Val had seen her almost every month since Scott was seven weeks old. Even if she had tried to fake a pregnancy, he would have figured it out immediately, put together her absence during his trial, known that the child was his.
“Look, she could make things hot for you, but you could ruin her life. You can move, mix things up. All she has is the meal ticket. You know what? You should fuck him. The husband.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I just think that would be funny.”
“It would only make Mollie angrier.”
“Yeah, you’ve got a point. Maybe have one of your girls do him?”
“I don’t want to do that. I think he’s a genuinely nice guy who’s in love with Mollie.”
“Those two things can’t be true. If he’s a genuinely nice guy, he’s in love with an idea of Mollie, a fake person that she created to land him.”
Helen had to marvel at Val’s intuition about people. Even with some key details fudged—Mollie instead of Bettina—he was on top of the situation. “She was a horrible person, out for herself,” Val continued. “I bet she gave you some great bullshit line about why she needs money.”
Helen felt naïve, a feeling no one enjoys, ever, despite the fact that we often pretend it’s a virtue. Naïveté is just a euphemism for ignorance. “She says she needs money for fertility treatments.”
“Like she would ever be a mom, wipe someone else’s ass. She probably does want a kid, though, to anchor the guy. She’s feeling insecure about him, take my word. Make it clear that you’ll take the husband away, and she’ll get lost. Scare her, Hel. You don’t have to do anything if a person is genuinely scared of you. TCB, like Elvis and his gang used to say.”
“TCB?”
“Taking care of business, that’s all it is. Taking care of business.”
A silence fell. Helen thought about Martin and wondered if Val was thinking about him, too. Of all the people in his life, Val had failed to make this most unlikely young man scared of him, or at least scared enough so it would last through the buzz of cognac and a winning streak. Helen doubted that Martin was the only person Val had killed in his life, but part of his success was that he used violence sparingly. He was a bad daddy, and a bad daddy kept everyone in line by erupting only now and then.
She pressed her fingertips against the glass and thanked him for his insight.
Supermax was near downtown Baltimore, right off the Jones Falls Expressway. As she headed out that afternoon, she checked her watch, calculated if she had the time to take a literal trip down memory lane. She drove east, to the house on the water that had been her world with Val. It had been sold. She was unclear if the state had seized it as one of Val’s assets or if it was owned by someone who’d sold it for him and funneled the proceeds to him, to the offshore accounts maintained by Val’s lawyer, the same accounts to which she made deposits every month. Legitimate people lived there now. It was a beautiful house—why shouldn’t a more traditional family want it?
Did they know? she wondered. Did they know about the weird family that had lived here, the murder, the way it had ended? Had they found all the hidden places—the safe in the wall, the tunnel to the dock? Val had believed that if the police came for him, he would have enough notice to walk out through the tunnel, get on his boat, and head for the bay, take it all the way down the eastern seaboard to Jamaica or the Bahamas. The boat was kept ready, shipshape. The only flaw in the plan was that Val never learned how to pilot it himself.
That was one of Martin’s jobs. Besides, the day the police came, Val didn’t take it seriously, didn’t think he had anything for them to find.
She was home in time for Scott’s supper, bath, and bedtime, as usual. She tried to take no more than two evening gigs a week. They paid the best, being longer, but there were plenty of lunchtime engagements, and besides—she got a cut of everything. Because she hired smart girls, there was inevitably a moment when they asked themselves what she was really providing. Couldn’t they leave and take their clients with them? She didn’t argue with them. She let them go, and yes, some of them managed to take her clients.
They promptly got busted, too, after she tipped off Tom. Word spread. It happened less and less.
Maybe she knew more about TCB than she realized. She called Tom, asked if he wanted to come by. Poor guy, he always did. She wished he didn’t love her. She told him that all the time, was very up-front about the fact that she didn’t love him and never would.
“I want you to pay a visit to someone for me.”
“A competitor?”
