Best Friends Forever (17 page)

“Physical evidence,” said Jordan. “Blood.”

Christie wrapped her arms around herself and led him inside, into her vast kitchen, al gleamy stainless steel and shiny black granite, immaculate as an operating theater.

“Would you like some green tea?”

“You guys vegans?” Jordan asked.

She looked at him strangely. “We do eat meat, but only organic.” Christie took a seat on a rattan barstool and waited for Jordan to do the same.

“Did you see anything unusual last night?”

Jordan asked her. “Arguments? Fights?”

“Unusual.” She cupped her elbows in her hands. “It was a high school reunion. There were a bunch of people who hadn’t seen each other in years, plus an open bar, so yeah, I’d say I saw some unusual stuff. Lots of it in the ladies’ room.”

Jordan raised his eyebrows, waiting. Christie tightened her grip on her elbows. “I saw Larry Kel eher and Lynne Boudreaux, being intimate. And they’re married.” She leaned in close enough for Jordan to smel her toothpaste. “Not to each other. Oh, and Merry Armbruster was trying to convert people in the parking lot. She’s born again

—she got saved the summer between junior and senior year—and I guess she wants everyone else to be.”

“Any fights?”

She thought. “I heard Glenn Farber talking with his wife about which one of them was supposed to pay the sitter, but that wasn’t a fight. Just kind of an intense conversation.”

“If you had to guess…” He let his voice trail off. Christie looked at him, blinking expect-antly, her eyes wide underneath the pale, unlined expanse of her forehead. Stupid, or Botox?

Jordan wondered.

“As far as I could tel , everything was fine.”

“We’re going to go through the list and contact everyone. Make sure that nobody’s missing a belt.” Or bleeding to death, he thought.

Christie chewed on her bottom lip. “My God. I just can’t believe it. It was a real y great party.”

He asked for the guest list, and she handed over five stapled sheets. “That’s everyone who RSPV’d ahead of time. We had thirteen walk-ins. Judy should have their names—that’s Judy Nadeau.” She pointed out Judy’s name and address on the sheet.

“She lives about a mile away. Elm Lane, do you know where that is?”

Jordan did. “Think she’s awake?” he asked.

Christie wrinkled her nose. “She had a lot of Cuervo. I’d maybe cal ahead.”

“Wil do. You around today?” Jordan asked.

“I’l be in and out, but I always have my cel phone with me. My trainer should be here any minute. We’re going joggling,” she said.

Jordan figured he’d misheard her.

“Jogging?”

“Nope. Joggling. You run while you juggle these little bean bags. It’s an amazing upper-body workout. I’m signed up for a 10K

next month.”

“Amazing,” Jordan repeated. He instructed Christie to keep her cel phone on, in case he had fol ow-up questions, and folded the list into his pocket. She walked him to the entryway and stood in front of a gold-framed mirror, tugging at the hem of her top. “I just can’t believe this. I seriously cannot. I was driving home not six hours ago, thinking how wel everything went.”

He gave her his card. “We’l be in touch. Try not to worry,” he said as she rubbed her upper arms, frowning. “This could be nothing.”

Christie offered one final “I can’t believe it,” fol owed by a plaintive, murmured

“There’s no way they’l let me be in charge of the twentieth after this.”

EIGHTEEN

Jordan had figured that Judy Nadeau would be hungover. He hadn’t planned on her being actively inebriated. But when a tiny, bedraggled brunette with a crushed updo and a sheer black dress slipping off one shoulder answered the door and offered her hand through a cloud of high-proof fumes, it took him about ten seconds to realize that she was stil smashed.

“A private dick!” she slurred, batting her prickly lashes and stumbling backward, giggling, as he let go of her hand. She steadied herself on the wal , blinked, and led him through a kitchen just as big as Christie’s had been, but considerably less neat. “That is so noir!” Instead of granite countertops, Judy had gone for white marble and a backsplash of food-splattered tiles behind the sink. Lined up next to the jumbo food processor and an espresso machine that looked like a rocket’s insides was a col ection of painted ceramic roosters. Jordan tapped one, making it wobble on its yel ow metal legs.

“Nice cock,” said Judy, then pressed one ringed hand against her lipsticked mouth and giggled. Oh boy, Jordan thought as Judy pul ed a container of orange juice and a bottle of champagne from the refrigerator.

“Hair of the dog,” she announced, dumping juice and booze into a coffee mug that read NUMBER ONE MOM. For the second time that morning, Jordan had to force himself not to stare.

He sat down at the cluttered kitchen table, stacking newspapers and twisting the lid onto an open jar of baby food to clear some space. “Ms. Nadeau, I need you to fil in a few details about the reunion last night.”

“Sure thing,” she said, and hiccuped, sliding into the seat across from him. She propped her chin in her hands and stared at him with disconcerting intensity. “Hey. You’re cute.”

“Thank you. Now, about last night…”

“My ex-husband was cute, too,” said Judy.

“I don’t trust cute men. They’re al so entitled. ”

“Last night,” Jordan repeated.

“What about it?” She frowned and patted at her hair. “Oh, shit,” she said. “Listen. Pete told me he was divorced.”

“Ma’am, we found a belt in the parking lot.

”

“Almost

divorced,”

Judy

Nadeau

continued. “That’s what he said.” She took a swal ow of her drink. “And we used a condom. Let the record reflect.”

“Ma’am, there was a belt and some blood in the country club parking lot. Someone might have been hurt.”

“Not Pete,” she said instantly. “I didn’t do anything to him.” She smiled slyly. “At least nothing he didn’t want me to do.”

“Listen,” Jordan said through the thunderclouds of an incipient headache, “do you have a list of the walk-ins from last night?”

She shook her head. “But I think I remember them. I could write them down.”

She produced a pen and a piece of monogrammed stationery from a drawer, and after several lengthy pauses, a refil on her beverage, and a lot of tuneless humming of what Jordan eventual y recognized as Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal,” she wrote down thirteen names.

“Were there any classmates you can think of who might cause trouble?” Jordan asked as she sat back down at the table and picked up her mug.

Judy thought for a minute before lifting her drink and sloshing mimosa onto her sleeve.

“There was this one guy who graduated with us. Jonathan Downs. He had…” She paused, searching for the political y correct term. “He was in a bad accident, and he was always a little bit off after that. I’m not exactly sure what was wrong with him. But he was strange for sure.

And he used to take things from other kids’

lockers.”

“Things?”

“Oh, just any little thing. Jackets. Notebooks.

Somebody’s

lunch.”

She

hiccuped against the back of her hand. “I remember once he took al the badminton shuttlecocks from the gym. It was more annoying than anything else.”

Jordan wrote down Jonathan Downs.

“Was he there last night?”

“I don’t think so. If he was, I didn’t see him. I kind of doubt that he’d want to come.”

Jordan pul ed out the class directory Christie had given him and found an entry that read Jonathan Downs/Adelaide Downs/

14 Crescent Drive. “This him?”

“That’s the last address we had for him. It’s where he lived in high school. I’m not sure if it’s current. He didn’t RSVP one way or another.”

Jordan tapped the name Adelaide. “His wife?”

Judy shook her head, her smal face crinkling as she frowned. “Sister.”

“Are they twins?”

“No, Jon was older, but he got left back after his accident.”

“Was Adelaide there last night?”

Judy shook her head again.

“You’re sure?”

“Believe me, I’d have remembered if Addie Downs had been there. You couldn’t miss her.” She gestured with her mug. This time, mimosa spil ed on the tiled floor. “She was huge.”

Two kids in the same class, in the same house; one fat, one brain-damaged. Interesting.

“Did Addie take things out of people’s lockers?”

Judy stared at the floor. “Nah. She just

…you know…moped around.” She looked down into her NUMBER ONE mug and seemed surprised to find it empty, then looked up, blinking at him. “Hey, you want a drink?”

“No thank you,” said Jordan.

“Wanna fool around?”

He cleared his throat. “Ma’am, I’m on duty.

”

“ I’m kidding. ” Red lipstick had come off her upper lip and stained the skin beneath her nose crimson. “Unless you want to. I mean, if this were a porno, we’d have to, right?”

“We’l be in touch,” Jordan managed, getting to his feet.

“It’d be my tax dol ars at work!” Judy said.

“Take

care,”

he

said

stiffly,

seeing

her

face

crumple before he turned toward the door.

“Cute guys,” she said. “Screw ’em.” And she slammed the door hard enough to make it rattle in its frame.

NINETEEN

Jordan Novick could read people—at least that’s what they told him at work, where he’d become, at thirty-five, the youngest chief of police that his hometown had ever employed. But he’d failed to read his own wife, failed to notice the array of textbook signs: the new hairstyle, the gym membership that she was actual y using instead of just paying for, the new underwear (scraps of black and nylon embel ished with lace and embroidered rosebuds, items so intricate and tiny that when they’d shown up in the laundry basket, he hadn’t even known at first that they were underwear). He hadn’t registered any of it until Patti sat him down one Sunday night two years ago and told him that she thought they were drifting apart.

Yes, he’d said, pathetical y eager. He had noticed the same thing. It wasn’t surprising, after what they’d been through. Maybe they could give counseling another try or plan a trip. He had four weeks of vacation coming. They’d always talked about Paris…

Patti had cut him off. No Paris, she’d told him. He’d noticed how tired she looked, how, underneath the layers of her chemical y brightened hair, the skin of her cheeks was stretched and papery and her lips were pale. I am sorry, she’d said. Jordan, I’m so, so sorry. But I can’t stay here anymore.

“In the house?” he’d asked stupidly.

“In this marriage,” she’d said.

Patti’s mom and sister had come up the next night, and the three of them had moved Patti’s things—which, per Patti and her mother, included most of the furniture and al of the wedding gifts—to Patti’s sister’s house. Jordan had been left with the bookcases and most of the books, the futon he’d had since col ege, a few IKEA chairs that wobbled if you looked at them too hard. He’d been abandoned in a house where every doorknob had a plastic baby-guard around it, where every outlet was plugged with a safety lock, where there were gates in front of the staircase, top and bottom, and a lock on the toilet tank. Patti had told him she just wanted to “be by herself” to “sort things out” until she could “see things clearly,” but the truth was, not three weeks after she’d left their house and their eleven-year marriage, she’d moved out of the sham condo that she’d rented and in with Rob Fine, their dentist. Their dentist.

“We just got to talking,” Patti told Jordan three months later in the mediator’s office when, sitting across from his wife at a shiny conference table, in a voice that was too loud for the room, Jordan had recited the demand of cuckolded husbands the world over and asked his wife how al of this had started.

“Just got to talking?” he’d repeated. “With your mouth ful of cotton, and that tube for the spit?”

“He listens to me,” Patti had said.

“I listen to you!” said Jordan, jumping to his feet, leaning across the table, speaking right into her face. “I do your temperature charts on PowerPoint! I measure your cervical mucus!

I…”

“Let’s maintain a respectful tone,” said the mediator, a smoothy in a red-and-gold silk tie that he stroked like a pet, a man who had the nerve to charge two hundred bucks an hour for his services. Jordan circled the table, heading toward Patti. The big muscles in his thighs were twitching; he had to move.

“I measure her cervical mucus,” he said to the mediator, who’d pursed his lips in a prissy little line.

“I’m not sure this is a productive line of discussion,” he’d said, and put his hand between Jordan’s shoulders, trying to ease him back into his seat.

Jordan ignored the man. “How long?” he asked Patti.

She twisted in her chair. “Maybe six months,” she muttered.

“Six MONTHS?” He leaned across the table, unable to believe what he was hearing.

“Please,” said the mediator, pushing on Jordan’s shoulder harder. Patti crossed her legs and stared at a spot on the wal just above Jordan’s head, refusing to meet his eyes.

“Six months?” Jordan repeated. His hands clenched into fists. I’m a detective, he thought.

How could I not have seen this?

“We can discuss this reasonably,” said the mediator.

“She told me she had bad gums!” He turned on the mediator, who stared back at him, the gold frames of his glasses shining in the lamplight. “Advanced gingivitis!”

“Please,” the man said, and pointed to the chair. Reluctantly, Jordan sat down. He knew when he was beaten. He scrawled his signature on the forms they slid in front of him without looking at his wife and without reading a word.

“Good luck,” he told Patti once it was over. She’d put one soft hand on his arm and said,

“Be happy, Jordan. That’s al I want. For both of us.” He’d kissed her cheek numbly. He couldn’t stop looking at her teeth, which glittered like a mouthful of pearls. Il -gotten gains. Dr.

Fine was probably giving her freebies.

He and Patti had hooked up junior year at a party, when Patti, tipsy on foamy beer pumped from a keg, had tried to climb a tree during a game of Truth or Dare. She’d been doing a pretty fair job of it, too, until someone had howled, “I can see your bush, ”