About the Author (18 page)

I got up and leaned over the case. Brenda meanwhile busied herself with processing my withdrawal forms (banging them, one after the other, with a series of rubber stamps). The bills were held together in packets of fifty banded with strips of paper. I had told Brenda that fifty-dollar bills would be fine. There were fifty bundles. It was all there.

At the door to Brenda’s office, I shook her hand and explained that I would be redepositing the money within the week. She gave me what can be described only as a searching glance and said she certainly hoped so. And it was then that she paused, while standing in rather close quarters with me, and I saw her nostrils lift as she caught a whiff of the firewater on my breath.

“Everything okay at home, Cal?” Brenda suddenly asked, a look of concern on her face.

“Everything’s fine. Writing’s been a little, you know, blocked up,” I added, hoping that this might explain my morning snort. “But otherwise, great.

“Oh, and Brenda,” I said, before opening the door to her office, “I guess I don’t need to tell you to keep
this
”—I lifted the attaché case—“under your hat. I want it to be a complete surprise.”

I had had the foresight, that morning, to fill a small hip flask with bourbon. Hardly had the bank’s miniature pillars disappeared around a corner in my rearview mirror when I fumbled the flask from the glove compartment, took a long, throat-scouring guzzle, then steered onto route 3. Before pulling into the Pleasant View parking lot, I first checked for any flaring busybodies who might later report my movements to my wife. The coast was clear. I veered in and parked behind the nibbled hedge, which shielded my car from the road.

Inside the hotel’s dank purlieu, I relaxed a little, thinking that it was unlikely I would run into anyone who knew me—and that if I did, whoever it was would have as much explaining to do as I. At the front desk, I told the florid-faced, pug-nosed crone that I was there to see Sally Monroe. I hoped that my educated-sounding voice, and my briefcase, might make the woman believe I was Sally’s lawyer, or perhaps her parole officer. She consulted the worn-looking register on the counter between us. “Room Twenty-eight,” she said, without meeting my eye. My old room. I thanked her and moved on past the bar’s beaded-curtained doorway (no sign of the Buddha Brothers—it was too early), then dodged up the stairs.

I knocked on the door to room 28. A sleep-muffled female voice said, “Who is it?”

“It’s
me
,” I hissed.

“Jus’ a sec.” I heard the complaint of bedsprings. Footsteps padded toward the door. It opened.

She was standing there in nothing but a small sleeveless undershirt and panties. Screwing one fist into her eye, “C’mon,” she began, a yawn distending her mouth. “C’mon in.”

I ducked into the room after her and closed the door behind me.

She waddled back to the bed, scrambled onto the mattress, then dropped onto her back. She gazed at me, puffy-eyed. “Did you get my money?”

She asked it like a spoiled and blasé kid asking her rich daddy if he’d remembered to bring her a present upon his return from a foreign city. So offhand was she, in fact, that she actually half closed her eyes, as if about to drop back to sleep. I also noted that she no longer seemed to fear that I might physically assault her. The knife was nowhere to be seen. But then she must have reasoned that even if I was the type to attack her, I would not try anything funny in this hotel.

“Yes, I brought the money,” I said.

I sat down in an armchair at the end of the bed and, leaning forward, placed the briefcase on the covers, not far from one of her extended bare feet. Unbidden, and unwelcome, an old memory of her pedal manipulation of my organ assailed me. I snatched my eyes away from her naked foot and flipped the latches on the case. I opened it, then swiveled it around toward her so she could see the bricks of bills inside. This got her attention.

“Wow,” she said.

She slithered forward on the bed, moving toward the booty on elbows and knees, as if intent on climbing headfirst into the case. “Shit,” she whispered, lowering her face toward the money, perhaps to sniff it. Her raised bottom, in its tight, grayish underwear, presented itself to my gaze, calling up still more disturbing memories of our earliest associations. I kept my eyes on her face as she began to finger a few bills. She brushed away a strand of hair that fell over her eyes, then grinned at me. “Awesome, dude,” she said.

“Count it. It’s in fifties.”

She took her time over the task, sitting in a modified lotus position in front of the case, piling the bill-bricks into the space between her legs.

“It’s all here,” she said, eventually.

“Good. Now it’s time for you to get dressed. I’m driving you to the airport.”

She wrinkled her brow. “What’re you talking about?”

I explained that I had booked her a three-thirty flight out of Burlington International Airport, to La Guardia. “You’re going to be on it.”

“Oh yeah?” She flipped her hair. “What makes you think I’m leaving so soon?” She began to heap the money any which way back into the case.

“You’ve got what you came for. Why would you stay?”

She slid the case toward the end of the bed, then lay back against the pillows. She extended her legs, crossing them at the ankles and resting her feet in the money. “Well, for one thing,” she said, “I met some really cool people last night.”

“Yes. The Trench brothers and the Morrissey sisters. And little Chopper. I trust you didn’t mention our arrangement to them.”

“What, I’m stupid?”

“Because if you did mention anything,” I said, “it will be all over town by now. And that’s it for both of us.”

“Ahhh,” she said, “I wouldn’t tell them shit. They’re strictly rubes. And anyway, you’re right. I gotta get home. Tommy’s waiting for me. Tommy’s my boyfriend. Well, my fiancé, I guess.”

I said that she could tell me all about Tommy when we were in the car—she was going to miss her flight. “Come on,” I said. “Get dressed.”

With that same weird obedience which the day before had prompted her to hunker down in the backseat of my car, she groaned and climbed from the bed, saying she had to “grab a quick shower first.” Before I could twitch my gaze away, she had yanked her panties to her ankles, revealing a flash of sparse, ginger-colored pubic hair. She stepped, on tiptoe, out of the underwear, which remained curled on the beige carpet like an infinity symbol. She sauntered past me to the adjoining bathroom.

I heard the water come on. The bathroom door, ajar, revealed only the edge of the yellowed shower curtain. I jumped to my feet and began to rifle through the dresser drawers, searching for the laptop. Not there. I crouched down and looked under the bed. Nothing. I stepped over to the girl’s shabby bag and unzipped it. Inside was a
People
magazine, the copy of
Suicide
that I had autographed for her, the pages she had printed from Stewart’s computer, some soiled-looking jeans and bras—and the knife she had threatened me with yesterday, now sheathed in a tooled-leather carrying case. A grisly, Hitchcock-inspired fantasy assailed me. But I pushed it down. Pushed it away. If I was going to extricate myself from this nightmare, it wasn’t going to be like that. Or so I hoped.

She emerged some ten minutes later, her hair wrapped in a towel-turban. A second towel encased her body from her armpits to the top of her thighs. I looked away as she sent these towels sailing into a corner. After I heard her zip up her shorts, I turned back to her. She was sitting now on the edge of the bed, yanking on her military boots.

“You’ll have to transfer the money into your bag,” I said. “I need that briefcase.”

“Be my guest.”

It was a tight fit, but by removing the copy of
Suicide
, I managed to stuff all the bills into the satchel. When I closed the zipper, the bag looked awfully bulky and misshapen. But it was her problem now.

A half hour later, we were on the road, barreling along the highway, bound for Burlington Airport.

“I suppose this
Tommy
knows all about the situation?” I said.

She began to pick at her thumbnail. She was slouched in the seat beside me, her feet propped on the dash.

“Hell, no,” she said. “He thinks I’ve gone home to see my folks in Wisconsin. Fuck him. It’s
my
gig. Besides, my mom always told me that it’s a good idea to have a few secrets from your man.
And
a running-away account.”

“Sounds like true love.”

She snorted. “You’re one to talk! You got so many fucking secrets from Janet, you make me look like an angel.”

It was horrific to hear her utter my wife’s name. I figured she must have learned it from that crowd the night before.

“That reminds me,” she said, pulling down her feet and bouncing around on her seat so that she was facing me. “Chopper told me that Jan’s maiden name was Greene. Dude, I nearly shit, because I’ve read about her in Stewart’s diary! He goes on and on about her in there. The whole fucking diary is ‘Janet this, Janet that, oh-how-I-love-Janet.’ I gotta ask you, how’d you do it? How’d you steal his book
and
his girl?”

I stomped on the brake. The car, fishtailing, executed a quarter spin, straightened, wobbled, then shuddered onto the shoulder, coming to rest in a cloud of brown dirt. A couple of trucks shot past, horns blaring. I looked over at her. Not a seat-belt wearer, she had banged her head against the dashboard and was lying back now against the seat, dazed and groaning, pale throat exposed. I could have grasped her neck right then and there and crushed the life out of it. But my hands remained clutching the steering wheel.

She came to and scrambled against the door of the car, one arm up protectively. “You fuckin’ maniac! What the fuck’s your problem?”

“I don’t care what you say about
me
, or
Stewart
, or my
novel
. But I don’t want to hear you mention my wife’s name again. This is between you and me. If you get
her
involved in this, I swear to God, I’ll kill you.”

She was rubbing the side of her head now. Her blue eyes regarded me like those of a wounded child. Then she smiled. There was no telling just how smart—or perhaps the right word here is
calculating—
she was, exactly. Looking at her, I thought I detected in her grin a certain sly condescension, as if she knew that we both knew that she had, for a moment, been entirely at my mercy, and that I had lacked the stomach to do anything about it.

“I was just tryna make conver
sa
tion,” she said, dropping back against the seat.

“Well,
don’t
.”

We drove the rest of the way, another thirty minutes, in silence. But as I guided my car onto the departures ramp at the airport, she spoke up.

“So about the rest of the money . . .”

“You counted it yourself,” I said, jockeying my car among the taxis that bottlenecked the area in front of the US Air terminal. “You saw that it was all there.”

“The first installment,” she said. “But I’m talking about the monthly payments.”

I looked at her. “I didn’t think you could be serious. I’ve just given you more money than you’ve ever seen in your life.” (And to be honest, it really was my naive hope that the payoff would be enough for her; that she would consider herself lucky, give me the laptop, take the money, and run, disappear from my life for good.)

The shift in her mood was frighteningly abrupt—crazily so—as her scratchy, metallic voice suddenly filled the car’s cabin with panic-inducing volume. “I’ll tell
Janet
,” she screeched. “That’s right, Janet! I’ll talk about your wife all I want.
Janet! Janet! Janet! Janet
! You don’t scare me. You’re a fucking
pussy
. I’ll bring Stewart’s laptop right to her, asshole. I’ll fucking demolish you!”

I tried to calm her. To no avail.

“We got nothing to
discuss
,” she screamed. “
I’m
calling the shots here!”

By now I had wedged my car into a space beside the terminal entrance. A line of taxis and airport limos had already formed behind us, the drivers working their horns.

“All right, all right!” I said, desperate to shut her up, to get her out of my car. “Where do I send the money?”

“You mail me checks, dummy. I’ll write you a letter and tell you where to send them. I gotta get a mailbox. So Tommy won’t know.”

I told her to send any correspondence in care of my publisher, Phoenix Books. “They forward my mail,” I said. “Use the name Sally Monroe. And don’t say
anything
about money. Just say that you want me to send you an autograph. Have you got that?”

She nodded. She shouldered her bag. The horns blared behind us. A skycap, a black gentleman in a blue shirt the color of airmail paper, stepped up to Les’s passenger door. He opened it and peered in.

“You can’t park here!” he said.

“Getouta the way,” Les snarled. The man stepped back quickly from the car. She started to get out, then looked over her shoulder at me, tossing a curtain of hair from her pale, plump face. “I’ll be writing.”

“I’m sure you will,” I said.

She got out and slammed the door. I jerked the car into gear and got out of there.

Storm clouds lowered over the mountains to the east. I was reminded of my first visit to New Halcyon. Once again, I was in danger of exposure; once again, I was pitted against Stewart in a struggle for survival. For a time, I had allowed myself to believe that I had
become
him. No longer. I was myself again, Cal Cunningham: the wily, desperate character living by his wits, covering up his slime trail even as he inched forward into his uncertain, fogged future.

Like so many of the lies I tell, the one that I had produced for my bank manager, Brenda Rasmussen, contained a grain of truth. I had, some two days before Les’s reentry into my life, received a partial advance on my embryonic new novel—a check in the amount of two hundred thousand dollars, which Blackie had managed to extort from Phoenix Books not only on the strength of the one-page synopsis he had written up for me, but also through the tacit threat that if Phoenix did not care to ante up for my next opus, another publisher surely would. I had not yet had the chance to bank the money. Under normal circumstances, I would have stuck the check into my New Halcyon account. But these were far from normal circumstances.