The Ultimate Exit Strategy, page 13
Down the hall there might or might not have been the click of a door and the muffled sound of footsteps on the plush, tight carpet, but within the muddled confines of my brain I thought I could hear my mother calling me as she had when I was a little girl and the days stayed light very late in the summers. The kids were playing kickball in the lot down by the IGA and she was calling, “Ginny, Ginny, time to come home.”
I tried to go home, but a wave of nausea bent me over Wes’s marble countered sinks. Pushing my hands under the luke-warm water, I rubbed them first together, then with the dainty little lavender soap from a small stone dish. I splashed the water up at my cheeks and neck rubbing my face with my soapy hands and after a while the contents of my stomach settled down.
It seemed that everything might well be all right after all, as I grabbed around for Wes’s guest towel to dry my face, but then there was Cassandra Hope glaring at me as reflected in the vanity mirror.
“Well, hi.” I waggled my fingers at her in a dopey way I’d hope that she would think was cute. But it was hard to tell exactly what Cassandra was thinking as she was opening and closing her mouth as if the unbelievability of my presence in Winslow’s bathroom was defying her every attempt at speech.
“What exactly are you doing here?” After the wait, I found the plainspoken outrage of the sentence kind of anti-climactic.
“Surprise.” The vagueness in my answer was not purely intentional. To tell the truth, I was still feeling pretty thoroughly out of sorts.
“You stole my keys,” she said and I was hurt by the not completely fair characterization of my actions, since I had agonized at least a little bit about how I was going to return them to her. It was almost a relief that I could just hand the envelope back now: no harm, no foul. “Let’s say I borrowed them. Look,” I began to explain, “I had that idea about Wes’s mistress –”
I would have finished my thought, but I was confused – more than just about the mushrooms or Winslow’s absent lover – and just as I was formulating my crushing summation of fact, the room seemed to bend oddly inward like the corners of a piece of paper folding simultaneously towards the center. The marble floor reached up and tried to slap my face. I pushed it away just in the nick of time – only temporarily though. The floor had proved an insistent suitor. The next thing I knew, I went down.
“Virginia?” Cassandra was kneeling beside me. “Virginia?” The marble and I were cheek to cheek like Hollywood lovers in a 1930s musical. I had gone down almost peacefully; the way they say it feels to drown.
* * *
Cassandra’s face held me with a reserved concern as if she suspected my collapse was just a clever ploy to garner sympathy. “Are you all right?”
The edges of the room had uncurled just a little. “I’m better than ever.” I managed to say, “I’m the new improved model with scrubbing bubbles.”
I don’t remember getting up or walking, but I must have walked down the champagne carpeted hall, out of Winslow’s apartment, down the elevators past good, old Joe from security and out to her car. Whatever questions were asked by security, Cassandra must have answered. She’d driven me home, but all I can reliably recall until the warm lapping water of the bathtub is the pain in my head, which was sharp and the complaints of my gut, which were, unfortunately many.
After my bath, Cassandra had put me gently to bed in a dark quiet room. She was still there with me when I woke up.
“Am I under arrest?” It seemed a reasonable question.
“I don’t think so,” she said rather kindly. Then, she kissed me and it started up again – Cassandra and me, revisiting the one great over-reaching dilemma of my adult life: Which would you rather have, Order or Craziness? I kept shooting for Order, but it never ever seemed to take.
“What a funny book,” she was saying, her face turned away and her brown back stretched out prone, laid sideways. We were kitty corner on my bed and her long, seemingly flawless arm having reached awkwardly behind her head to take the book from a low shelf in the wooden headboard.
“Would you like it if I read to you? You used to like it.” She read aloud, “My face hasn’t collapsed as some with fine features have done. It’s kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste.”
* * *
I was almost myself again the next morning, wakened by the sound of the shower running and the smell of coffee somewhere in my apartment. It was nice, if disorienting, as I hadn’t remembered buying any coffee since Em left. Shortly after the water stopped, Cassie appeared in the bedroom, damp-skinned, holding in one hand a ceramic mug and a jumbo Styrofoam cup, the apparent source of the coffee smell, in the other.
She settled down beside me on the bed, at home in the tacky geisha-style bathrobe Spike had brought me from San Francisco’s Chinatown and which,until now, Spike herself always seemed to get to wear. Somehow the gaudy robe looked better on Cassandra than it ever had on Spike – or me. On Cassandra it looked like it was real.
Sweet Potato had positioned himself in the hammock my legs and bedclothes had made of my lap, and it seemed to me overnight my life had been perfected. When Cassie told me, “See, I remembered you like chamomile in the mornings,” I found myself unaccountably pleased, filled up with that dopey coupled satisfaction I was always inclined to ridicule in others.
“Were you worried about me, Sweet Potato?” I was rubbing the space between his black, saucer eyes, asking Cassandra, “Where’d you get the coffee?”
“White Hen Pantry around the corner.” She raised her still-steamy cup. “Hazel nut roast.” Apparently even the corner store had moved into the world of designer beans.
“So do you think Winslow had a mistress?”
“It depends,” Cassandra had a better question. “Can you tell me why Winslow would have left Elana Gutierrez a quarter of a million dollars in trust?”
“A trust?” I was almost as surprised as when I’d first spotted Elana in the Whytebread library, a job jealously reserved for the walleyed albino children of Whytebread big men. Elana didn’t look the part, a brown pretty girl with long shiny black hair and a frightened sort of smile that suggested she might rather jump off the bridge into the cold Chicago River than raise her voice.
That day she was talking though, gushing to Winslow, “I got an A on my Calculus test, and my history teacher says she will recommend me to Wellesley College. Massachusetts is really far away from Joaquin and Momma, but he says I should go.”
“Well, that’s fine.” Wes touched her cheek lightly, listening with uncharacteristic patience to her discussion of Joaquin, a boy in her neighborhood who would go to Loop College in the fall and who was escorting her to the movies that Friday night.
Crouched behind the library shelves, where I had been looking for bond yield data, I was now uncomfortably privy to the tiny touching details of Elana’s life that I was certainly never meant to hear, but it seemed far worse to announce myself. So, I’d stayed hidden there, reading the Moody’s Reports and developing a terrible crease in my calf muscles until Winslow left, and I could slip away while Elana reshelved something or another.
A couple of months later when Elana had left Whytebread rather suddenly before the end of the school year, the buzz on her pregnancy was strong. I told Cassandra from Elana’s gravid appearance at Winslow’s funeral, it seemed like the rumors were true. Cassandra said the trust was independent of Winslow’s will and my only conclusion was that he was providing for his baby.
“You don’t think Camille or Elana had anything to do with his death?” As I asked, Cassandra bent down to kiss me.
“Do you know how much I’ve missed this?” She was licking my ear, I thought conveniently changing the subject.
“What subject was that?” She had pushed me onto my back, then kissed me again harder with an open mouth.
Cassandra never did answer my question about Winslow’s mistress, but later we spooned through at least three cycles of the snooze on my alarm. By the fourth one, I was vaguely aware of her sitting on the edge of the bed again, talking quietly into her cellular phone.
“I had a meeting,” she was whispering. “It ran late and I stayed at Lonnie’s,” and then her voice got short. “Well you won’t have to wait up tonight.”
I didn’t move, just watched her because I didn’t want to actually catch her at it. I didn’t want to know who it was on the phone. So, I closed my eyes and began to stretch my arms, groaning softly as if I had just woken up.
“Look, I have to go.” She folded and palmed the small phone almost noiselessly. I wondered if it was possible that Cassandra was talking to her mother, which I thought would make sense of her address at 62nd Street. That made me feel all right again.
When I opened my eyes, her arms were around my waist as if she had been lying that way all the time.
“Do you have a suspect yet?” and Cassie’s grip on my waist loosened noticeably. I was saying, “How can I help you if you won’t tell me everything?”
“I’ll tell you when there’s something to tell.” Cassandra had begun to untangle herself from my body now with a minimum of unnecessary intimacy.
Sitting up and retrieving her gold bracelet watch from my nightstand, I watched her pause to admire her wrist. It was a beautiful watch, the kind of gift a lover would give, I told myself – perhaps as an anniversary gift. Then I told myself I was being crazy, looking for the complication in a tryst that could remain pleasantly simple if I could only stop myself from ruining it. Cassandra kissed me again lightly and left the room.
She was wearing a pale blue, woolen pants suit I hadn’t seen the night before, when she returned, and she ran a hand along my cheek anticipating my question about her change of clothes. “Sometimes I can’t get home so I keep some extra things in my car.”
Sweet Potato arched and stretched and strutted across the bed purring and swinging his big orange tail.
She kissed me again, calling me, “sleepy head – you and your cat.” She was petting my face with one cool fingered hand and reaching out to scratch between Sweet Potato’s ears with the other. “Nice kitty, kitty, kitty.”
He’d let her pat his head for quite a while before he wrapped himself around her wrist, digging into her arm with his sharp back claws. Cassandra shook him off swearing and he landed against the bedroom wall with a dull, ugly thud, although he seemed no worse for wear.
“I’m sorry.” I said, “I guess he’s jealous.” Sweet Potato shook himself lazily and walked over to the middle of the rug to calmly lick his private areas.
Cassandra winced. “Jealous? I guess so.” I traced with my fingers the bloody welts that ran from the bend of her elbow along the inside of her arm to the wrist, and dabbed at them with a little Kleenex. The scratches looked worse than they were. Sweet Potato hadn’t much liked Spike either, and then I asked her as the thought came suddenly into my mind. “How did you know Justin Collier was gay?”
“August Madsen mentioned it.” Cassandra said this offhandedly as I was bending down to kiss her arm, I hoped, all better. “Despite what Mr. Collier believes it’s hardly a very big secret.” She kissed me back, summarily though, removing my hand from her shoulder, standing, and apparently ready to leave, Cassie’s exit scene had an unpleasant déjà vu from years past.
She squinted critically into the mirror, brushing down her manicured hair. The perfect bob had been somewhat disheveled by the night and I could see this put her out. Cassandra gave her whole attention to righting her appearance as she talked to me. “Thanks so much to you and your cat for a lovely evening. If you don’t hit it, Virginia, you’re going to be late to work.” Purring once again, Sweet Potato blinked his narrow cat eyes slowly in my direction.
XVI
I made a resolution that morning to drive to work more often because even with Cassandra dropping me by the Park Shore, I’d ended up at Whytebread a good half an hour earlier than I would have arrived on the bus. Not that I got much face-time credit for it. That morning, like most of them lately, the office was quiet. Most doors were closed, most people shut behind them and only The Irishman had the self-confidence to be loitering in the hall – lounging was more the picture, like he owned the place – not just the hall, the whole universe.
“How are Wes’s chosen people this morning?” He fairly shouted at me in a voice of good nature I was not inclined to trust. “Hey. Hey.” The Irishman was calling. “Don’t get used to it, Virginia.” His body seemed to have swollen so that it stoppered the hallway and I couldn’t get around him. “Do you hear me? Nothing around here is going to change for you.” The Irishman had pushed up very close to me, breath hot and jubilant. “Too bad there isn’t going to be any Gold Rush deal.”
“Is that what Winslow told you the night he died?” I managed to ask at a prudent number of paces. “Or did you just beg him to let you stay, Tom?”
“Oh, I’m going to stay all right, young lady. Things around here are going to stay just the same as they always were.” The Irishman hissed, any pretense of goodwill completely eroded, “You just remember that.” Then he stepped aside politely as if he’d been wishing me a good day.
* * *
I’d had the strange idea that with Winslow’s death life would slow down, but somehow my world kept turning, at least the phone kept ringing. A frantically blinking phone message light greeted me in my office: Two calls from Naomi, a message from my old friend, Sandra Rutherford, for whom I had promised to baby-sit on Friday night, and three messages from Emily Karnowski, my ex-girlfriend and tax accountant, who I realized, just at that second, I’d forgotten to meet the previous night.
Em had called at 6:35, 7:00 and 7:30 the evening before, the night I’d spent reacquainting myself with Cassandra, regarding our appointment to discuss my tax situation. With each message Em sounded progressively more piqued, so the return call required a really good story. In the meantime, I checked my e-mail.
There were twelve electronic messages since yesterday afternoon. Nine of these were client-related. There was one from my dad whose subject line read, My new cooking class. There was a message from Starr who’d apparently, had a change of heart, wanted to meet me back at the office at 8:30 tonight, and a long, rambling, indiscreet epistle from Spike. While I was cringing over how I would answer her, Naomi called again.
“I left two messages on your home machine last night.” Naomi began to berate me almost immediately, and I thought Cassandra must have turned the ringer off.
“Wesley Winslow, the president of Whytebread was murdered, last weekend,” I started to say but Naomi cut me off.
“Yeah, I know, your dead financier and his ultimate exit strategy.” She was never one to miss a scandal. Part of the reason Naomi’d been trying to reach me was to dish. “By the way,” she asked, “were you in my house yesterday?”
I admitted I’d been doing some investigation. “Winslow lived in your building.”
“Uh-huh.” I could feel her roll her eyes. “Right. You know, you parked in my spot, which meant I had to park outside in the visitor’s lot. You left all the lights on including the one in the microwave. FYI, Virginia, when you don’t use up all the time you can just press stop. And there was some weird note in my trash.” It seemed Naomi had been doing some investigation of her own. Besides, “what am I, only good for my convenient location?” She was complaining fluently, “you know, I’m having a life change here and you’ve practically abandoned me.”
It sounded like Naomi was talking about menopause.
“That’s next.” Through the phone, I could hear her lighting a cigarette and I said I thought the plan was to quit smoking.
“Of course. I did quit.” She snapped at me. “At least four distinct times since Tuesday. I tried to quit. That was just my point. Where were you when I needed support?”
I’d begun recalling for Naomi’s benefit the nasty and potentially deadly side effects detailed in the Nicoderm information packet. “So, I took the patch off for a little while.” She said. “Okay? All right? Keep your shirt on. There’s still stick-um on it; it’ll go right back on – well, maybe with a little bit of tape.” She was exhaling irritably into the phone at the prospect of such a project. “I called you six times so you could talk me down for Godssakes.”
“I’ve been tied up,” I said. “I’ve met someone.” It seemed the simplest explanation.
“Young love. Why am I not surprised?” Naomi made her voice a singsong imitation of my own. “Now you’ve met someone. How could you possibly have met someone, Virginia? There isn’t a single new dyke in the world.”
“I’ve recycled an old one,” I told her. There was a hopeless smile in my voice. “Someone I used to see before Em, before I knew you, even.”
Naomi breathed out in mute annoyance. I could hear the wheels in her head, grinding along, as she hated any of my relationships to predate our own. “Fabulous, who doesn’t like leftovers? You know that’s the beginning of the end, running out of fresh women. Mark my words,” Naomi pronounced with finality, “it’s a sign that Chicago is ruined for you.”
“She’s the cop working Wesley Winslow’s murder,” I went on.
“Uh-huh.” Naomi was apparently interested enough in Winslow’s murder to have stopped smoking into the receiver. “Well, whatever. My condolences on bedding the cop. They are the worst.” Already relishing my love affair ending badly, she promised, “It’ll never last. Look I’m telling you these things because I care about you. Don’t you remember that meter maid – the one with the cute little scooter? Haven’t you learned anything from my mistakes?” Naomi sighed, my pain was her pain, even if I wasn’t feeling it yet.
