Bad People (37 page)

“Shut that, if you’re not ready to get out.”

“Sorry, sorry,” said Barry. He pulled the door partially shut again. Looking ahead, and then down, and then at her, he finally said: “I’m not a horrible person. I don’t think I am. I don’t think so.”

“You’re not,” she said.

There was another silent moment.

“Well,” said Barry. “Okay, then. Goodnight.”

He got out of the car and shuffled up his driveway. The house was dark, like no on lived there, and Connie wondered if Barry had made a mistake keeping it. True, it was the only
real
home he had ever known, but it was empty. She watched him go inside, turn the living room lights on and shut the door. He didn’t look back. She drove away, using her hands-free set to return Luke’s latest call.

He picked up on the second ring. “Hey!” he said, pleasantly. “Your meetings ran late!” He sounded like he had plenty of energy, and it was not that late really, though after the day she had had it felt to her like three in the morning.

“Sorry I didn’t get back to you….”

“That’s all right. Look we can still get dinner. Like I said, my treat. You home yet? S/D around?”

Dinner? Treat? Stephen David? She had looked at the messages but she hadn’t played them. Luke, despite his youth was strictly a voicemail man. She’d never managed to get him fully on board with texting.

“You didn’t play my messages, did you,” he said, his voice teasing, not testy.

“You got me,” she said.

“I want to take you guys out…I figured…”

“I’m not home yet, and I haven’t talked to S/D this evening yet, but really Luke, I’m pretty tired. I think we should—”

She was going to say “call it a night,” but he cut her off first. “All right, all right. I’ll get take-out from that Pan-Asian place. I’m home now and it’s right on my way.”

“I don’t know….”

“Scallion cakes…” he said.

“Hm. And sake?”

“Hot sake on a night like this. Well naturally.”

“Oh, all right. But make sure you get more than one vegetarian thing, in case S/D is hungry. He likes the garlic eggplant.”

“So do you. I’ll get two orders.”

“Okay. Sure. So I’ll see you in a little bit?”

“You will.”

He’d probably be at least forty-five minutes getting the food. That would give her time for a good long shower. Then she’d be okay. Luke sounded so chipper over the phone; he must have had a good day. Had his ex’s funeral been today? Frankly she had forgotten when he told her it would be, but yes, now that she remembered, it was today—the same day as her meeting with Erika—which itself now seemed days ago. That accounted for his chipperness on the phone—she felt sure of it.

That, she knew, was the common enough sense of relief after a funeral, a temporary—but real—sense of euphoria after releasing all those emotions. Not understood by those who hadn’t been through it. And she, thoughtless girlfriend that she was, had not only ignored Luke’s calls all day she hadn’t even asked him about the funeral just now when they talked.

She glanced in the rear view mirror, just to try and figure out how she still managed to look at herself. She was really a bad person.

41: Luke

Luke fidgeted waiting for the food. He had ordered a lot, and they were crowded.

Friday night, but it still shouldn’t have taken that long. If he were in charge he would have had more people working. He would have been better prepared. The staff were unfailingly polite, and, it seemed, more than a little afraid of him. He refused to sit, but instead stood, hovering over the fish tank that separated the small waiting area: a small waiting area combined for both those waiting for seating and those waiting for their takeout order, and the cashier. But he wanted to stand, not take one of the two proffered seats crammed between the fish tank and the front door, which would have left him placid and small against the steady line of incoming patrons who would have then towered over him while standing lined-up waiting for their table.

Once or twice the waitress came over to him, politely repeating, “five minute, five minute” before shuffling away again. He could see the kitchen, which lay open behind a wide gunmetal-gray counter. Even the counter was full tonight: couples squeezed in together, shoulder-to-shoulder and eating off each other’s plates. The clientele was young, but successful looking.

They had to be, because the food was so expensive. The scallion pancake appetizer alone was fifteen dollars. He had paid in cash, and the order before tip came to seventy dollars, which was a good chunk of what he had taken from Barry. Good things were expensive. Of course this only made sense, as if a thing was no good, it shouldn’t cost much.

Paying in cash annoyed him. The man in front of him had a black card. He’d heard of those and he wanted one. The man wore a coat of soft tender felt and a silk scarf. Even his glasses looked rich: square black frames, thick and imposing. Luke didn’t need glasses of course, but he wanted a pair of those frames. They probably cost hundreds of dollars.

He was not getting what he wanted. Like his timing had gone incredibly wrong. He should have met Connie a year ago. He should have seduced her away from Robb, and never gotten into the cut-rate bargain with Barry. Short-term thinking. Now Connie was a wreck. She wasn’t making things happen, but maybe that had started to change. He had a feeling that it must have. Connie had been working all day today, getting home late. She may have put some things back together with her business meeting. This had to be the case, he decided, because otherwise nothing much was going his way, and that was intolerable. The Mind didn’t work that way. The Mind worked on the Law of Attraction, and Luke fixed on attracting wealth and prosperity. The Mind had given out to the universe; the Mind would be fed back. And would feed him.

With the help of a smiling busboy, the waitress, smiling herself, finally brought over Luke’s two shopping bags of food. Both repeatedly bowed their apologies for the delay, and why not? He had tipped thirty percent. He made them follow him to the car and put the bags on the floor of the back seat. Of course Ardiss’s car was a junker, but the Asians didn’t dare look down on him for that. If a man of his caliber was driving a car like that then he must have a reason, was their thought. He gave them each an additional ten-dollar bill. So what? When he had money; he spent money. He created wealth.

Really, he had not realized how far off his path he had roamed.

But everything had changed after he fucked Heather at the coffee house that afternoon. He wanted to do it and he did it.

Getting inside her had been as easy as pushing his fingers into a cake, much easier than trying to extract money out of Barry. Men were such a pain in the ass sometimes. They didn’t flow with the universe, like women did. Robb had been hard to kill; he was a male pain in the ass. By contrast, Heather would have been easy to kill, so easy he could have just told her to lay down and cease to breath. He could have ordered her heart to stop and it would have. Jay Porter had been easier to kill than Robb, but then he was more female than Robb, at least by the end.

Barry was a weak-willed weepy thing too, and yet he proved difficult to deal with. The Mind hadn’t resolved that contradiction for Luke. Yet.

Connie was difficult to deal with at times too, but the masculine role of parent and provider forced her into that behavior.

That would change. He was anxious to see S/D again tonight, to read the changes in the boy. Soon S/D would transfer his need to be mothered into an unrequited love for Ardiss, and then he would be out of Connie’s way. Out of Luke’s way.

They could start investing together, Luke and Connie.

He pictured them on the cover of
Seattle
magazine together. He had found the magazine with the article about her, in one of her desk drawers.

The article had been marked with a yellow post-it otherwise he would have never thought to look through it. There was a picture of her in the article, as one of Seattle’s most prominent entrepreneurs. The magazine was four years old. She had kept it but had done nothing with it. Hadn’t framed it or anything. Just left it in the bottom drawer, on top of her handgun. The gun, in a plastic bag, sealed, interested him for a minute. A Seattle PD evidence bag, so it may have been something the police took away from her for her own safety after Robb. The bag was sealed and he had left it that way, but he assumed the gun was probably unloaded. She also had a box of bullets. They were in another drawer, in the bottom of her stand-alone file cabinet. The box was complete, not a bullet missing. Perhaps she didn’t even know the bullets were still there. She should have kept them with the gun for her own safety, but he couldn’t tell her that until she brought up the gun on her own.

He wanted the gun; he wanted to take it, to have it, but he would have to find a way to learn whether she would miss it or not.

When
Seattle
magazine came calling for Luke, he would insist on the cover.

He would frame it and put it on his office wall. There would be many framed photos on the walls of his office. Photos of him on the cover of
Entrepreneur
, and
Business 2.0
, and
Forbes
. And photos of him with important people: Senators, Donald Trump, Tiger Woods.

The smell of the bags of food filled the cab of the Datsun as Luke drove through the Seattle rain to Connie’s. He didn’t like the smell of food in a car, it tended to linger, but the car would be going soon too. It had served its purpose, and he would soon give it back to Ardiss for services rendered. He could think of nothing more to do with her now. She was to handle S/D and draw him away and that was it. She didn’t fit in the new world, but she had served her transitional purpose just as the Datsun had. Soon the crucial turn with Connie would come. He started to salivate. He could taste it.

By the time he got to Connie’s he was starving. He carried all the bags to the door and dropped one in order to press the buzzer, then pull the door open. As soon as he had, an strange man wearing a beret and pulling a black and white cat on a leash stepped out of the elevator. Luke stepped into the lobby and he and the man passed wordlessly. The elevator door shut quickly which did not matter because Luke intended to take the stairs. He looked back as he did so, noticing that, now on the other side of the lobby glass door, the man was having to wait for the cat, which was sniffing the ground where Luke had sat one of the food bags down for a second. He noticed now that one bottom corner of the bag was wet, and leaking.

Upstairs, he knocked. He had expect Connie would have cracked the door open after buzzing him in downstairs, but she hadn’t. She came to the door a little while after his knock. He heard the locks being undone. She opened the door and let him in.

“That’s a lot of food,” she said when she saw the bags. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, gray. From her hair he could tell that she had taken a shower in the last half hour.

“S/D here?” asked Luke.

“No,” said Connie. She had an expression of confusion on her face about the question.

“I got extra. Thought he would be. We talked about that.”

“It’ll reheat.”

Luke didn’t like that. He didn’t like the casual way she dismissed what he had done here. On the phone she had been suggesting that he get specific items just to accommodate S/D’s supposed vegetarianism. He had done that and yet it was as if that counted for nothing. He kept his thoughts about that to himself. Disguised them.

“Are you all right?” Connie asked.

“Certainly. You want to eat. Do we have plates.”

“Yeah we better. I can’t believe how late it got. Don’t want to eat too late.”

She took 2 plates out of a cabinet and put them on the counter. Then she started unpacking the food.

“How about we sit at the table,” said Luke.

“The table? I don’t want to move all that stuff.”

The only stuff was a single stack of accordion files, probably from her meetings today, and a decorative centerpiece. Hardly “stuff.”

She continued to open the take-out containers and line them up on the counter. “This way we can reach everything. We’ll never eat all this…”

“Well again, I thought S/D was going to be here too. That why there’s ‘so much’ as you keep saying.”

She tilted her head off to the side, slightly. “I’m being bitchy, I’m sorry. Long day. Let’s fill our plates here and take them to the table. Buffet style.”

“Because the containers are leaking.” The counter was made of Formica and wouldn’t stain like the tabletop might have. If that was her reason it made sense.

“What? No. I hadn’t thought about that. Come on. We’ll sit at the table. You had a rough day.”

“How so,” he asked. What did she mean, he had a rough day. How could she know what he was doing today.
What
did she know.

“The funeral. Was there a reception? How did it go?”

Oh. That. “Well, it went. Of course it was something.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t go. I don’t think it would have made sense for me to, I still don’t, but I appreciate that you wanted me there. Maybe I should have gone.”