Deadly Beloved (5 page)

“Thank you,” Patsy said again.

The black-and-white-striped electric arm popped up in front of her car. Patsy got into gear and stepped on the gas and went forward. She bumped over a metal plate on the floor and felt the whole car shudder.

She had to go up to the third level before she found a parking place. People were always talking about how Philadelphia was dying, but you couldn’t prove it by the number of parking spaces available on a typical weekday afternoon. Patsy pulled in between a white Toyota Celica and a greenish-blue Saturn and got out. She locked up very carefully and went around to the back of the Volvo. The packages looked like nothing but brown wrapping paper. The clothes were hidden completely. Patsy tried the back door, found it locked too, and left it.

To get out, she had to go down an elevator in a well that let her off right next to the booth with the dirty old man in it. He didn’t notice her come through. Patsy went out onto the street and looked around. It was still hot and the people still looked tired. She walked half a block north and turned the corner. On this street there were stores and banks and newsstands. It looked a little more alive than the street with the parking garage on it had. It was still terminal, Patsy thought. Sometimes Philadelphia looked to her as if it were slowly being drained of people.

Patsy walked two more blocks and then stopped at a kiosk for a copy of the paper. It was a copy of today’s
Philadelphia Inquirer
, which she had already seen, but she didn’t care. She paid with a ten-dollar bill and waited patiently while the woman in the booth made change. She tucked the paper under her arm and walked away. There were more and more people on the street. She was getting closer and closer to the university.

The bank was just a block away from the administration building at Penn. Patsy could raise her head and see the start of the attenuated quads the university called a campus. She had met Stephen on one of those quads. He had been hunched up on a stone bench, studying an accounting textbook.

Patsy went into the bank and stopped at the long counter set aside for making out forms and writing checks. She took out her checkbook and wrote a check for $15,000. Then she turned around and looked at the tellers standing at their windows. The bank was relatively busy at this hour, mostly with young people who looked like students. There was a line at two of the three windows. At the third, a heavyset man in a tan linen suit, rumpled and sweaty, was trying to deposit what looked like thousands of penny rolls. Patsy got into line behind a young man with a backpack.

“Deposit,” the young man said when he got to the window, after the girl in front of him, willowy and nervous, had finished her business and wandered off.

Patsy waited patiently. The teller did official-looking things with a computer and a print-out machine. The young man took his deposit slip and wandered off himself. Down at the third booth, the heavyset man was still counting out penny rolls. He had what looked like two more large brown paper grocery bags of them sitting at his feet.

“What can I do for you?” the teller asked Patsy. She was cute and perky and barely eighteen years old. She made Patsy feel faintly nauseated.

Even at eighteen I wasn’t that young, Patsy thought. She pushed the check across the counter along with her driver’s license and passport. The teller picked it up and went white.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh. Well. I don’t think I can cash this.”

“Of course you can cash it,” Patsy said patiently. “There’s more than enough money in the account.”

“Oh,” the teller said again. She was looking very frightened now, as if Patsy had done something crazy and might do something crazier at any moment, as if she expected to see a gun pulled out of Patsy’s black Coach bag. She tapped at her computer and stared at the screen. She said “oh” one more time and then, “well, yes, I see.”

“I would like as much of it as possible in one-hundred-dollar bills, please,” Patsy said. “I have only this bag to carry it in.”

“Just a minute,” the teller said.

The lines at the other windows had begun to get longer. The heavyset man was taking up all of one of the tellers’ time, and now Patsy was taking up time too. Only the teller in the middle was doing business as usual. People had begun to shift and cough and mutter. Patsy’s teller had gone around to the back of the bank to talk to a middle-aged woman at a desk. That must be the bank manager, Patsy thought, and went on waiting patiently. After all, she had all the time in the world.

Patsy’s teller left the bank manager at her desk and came back to her window. “I can’t cash a check this large on my own,” she said primly. “You’ll have to talk to Mrs. Havoric.”

“I have to talk to Mrs. Havoric just to get my own money out of my own checking account?”

“It’s for your own protection,” the teller said sourly. She pushed Patsy’s check and driver’s license and passport across the counter. “It’s to protect you against possible fraud.”

“I do have two pieces of identification,” Patsy said gently.

The teller looked past Patsy’s right shoulder. “Could I help somebody, please?” she asked in a larger voice.

Patsy stepped out of line. Mrs. Havoric was standing at the side of her desk, doing her best to look concerned but mostly looking nervous. She was a stout woman with thick legs and gray hair and a suit jacket buttoned all the way up the front, like a blouse. It was a cheap suit that wrinkled easily and didn’t fit right. Patsy walked over to the desk and handed over her check and her identification.

“I believe I’m supposed to get these authorized by you,” she said. Then she took the chair in front of Mrs. Havoric’s desk, pulled it back a little, and sat down. Mrs. Havoric did not look happy.

“Well,” she said. “Well. You must understand. This is very unusual.”

“People taking money out of their checking accounts is unusual?”

“People taking this much money out of their checking accounts is unusual, yes. Fifteen thousand dollars is a lot of money.”

“It’s mine.”

“Yes. Yes. Well. Your identification does seem to be in order.”

“Then I would like this money in hundred-dollar bills, if I could have it,” Patsy said. “I really don’t want too bulky a package to carry around in the city.”

“It’s very dangerous to carry cash like that in the city in any kind of package.”

“I understand that.”

“Do you mind if I ask what it is you want so much money for?”

“Yes,” Patsy said. “As a matter of fact, I do mind.”

Mrs. Havoric looked nonplussed. “Miss MacLaren. You must realize—”

“Ms.,” Patsy said.

“Excuse me?” Mrs. Havoric said.

“Ms.,” Patsy repeated. “I’m married now. To a man named Stephen Willis. So I’m not Miss MacLaren. I’m Ms.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Havoric said.

“I suppose I could get my attorneys to force you to give me my money,” Patsy said, “but I don’t really see why I should have to do that, since legally you’re required to give it to me whenever I want it. This is a demand account.”

“I know this is a demand account,” Mrs. Havoric said sharply. “I just want to make sure you’re not taking this money out to buy an oil well, and then next week you come back here and try to sue us for not trying to stop you.”

“I won’t come back here next week and try to sue you. Word of honor. There is no oil well.”

“What if you walk out the door and get mugged?”

“I don’t think I’d have to worry about that if this was done discreetly,” Patsy said, “which, quite frankly, up to now it hasn’t been. Could I have my money in hundred-dollar bills?”

Mrs. Havoric tapped the top of her desk. She looked more than put out now. She looked angry. She was studying Patsy’s face with such concentration, Patsy thought she was trying to memorize it.

“All right,” she said finally. “Just a minute please. I’ll take care of it myself.”

Patsy pushed the Coach bag across the desk. “Put it in here,” she said. “That way, nobody has to see me with it.”

“Don’t you want to count it?”

“I’ll count it in a stall in the ladies’ room. If you have a ladies’ room.”

Mrs. Havoric squared her shoulders. “I can make a ladies’ room available to you,” she said. Then she walked away, strutting a little, like the high school English teacher nobody wanted to have for study hall monitor. Patsy watched her pull the teller away from her window and hold up a whole line of people waiting to do simple transactions.

This, Patsy thought, was what women’s lib had gotten them all. These days, the Mrs. Havorics of the world were bank managers instead of high school English teachers and it didn’t matter anyway. They still weren’t making much money and they still weren’t happy. That was what marriage did to you, no matter what anybody said about it. It split you and gutted you and stuffed you full of lemongrass. It made you all bitter.

Mrs. Havoric was coming back across the bank with Patsy’s Coach bag in her hands, and Patsy suddenly remembered.

She wasn’t married anymore.

She wasn’t married anymore.

She had given herself a summary divorce this morning, and now she was free.

K
ARLA PARRISH ALMOST NEVER
thought of herself as a successful woman. “Success,” in her mind, meant having a big apartment on a high floor in New York City or a BMW and a Porsche in the driveway of a house in Syosset or a lot of jewelry to wear to parties that had to be locked up in a safe afterward, for insurance reasons. Success, in other words, meant having a lot of things, and Karla had never had much in the way of things. Enough underwear to get through two weeks straight without doing laundry, as much in the way of other clothes as could be stuffed into a double strap pack without making her feel like she was lifting stones when she picked it up—Karla never seemed to need that much from day to day, and she honestly couldn’t think of what else she would buy for herself if she got the chance. She wore her long straight hair pulled back these days, instead of falling free to her shoulders, because she thought she had to make some concession to being forty-eight. She didn’t want to spend the time or the money to get it fixed up in beauty parlors. Her hips were beginning to spread a little now that she was racing through middle age. She was content to buy her jeans a couple of sizes larger and let it happen. Spending hundreds of dollars on a dress that would disguise the weight gain seemed so stupid, she had no idea why anyone ever did it. The one thing she did spend money on was her equipment—the cameras and the lenses and the tripods and the lights—but that was different. That was work. Karla Parrish understood absolutely why it was important to spend time and money on her work.

What she didn’t understand was the attitude of this man behind the registration desk at the George-V. She didn’t even understand what she was doing at the George-V. “Book us a hotel room in Paris,” she had told Evan when they were about to leave Nairobi—and then she had forgotten all about it, because she was tired and dirty and depressed, and the way things were going she wasn’t going to feel any better for weeks. She had just spent four weeks taking pictures in Rwanda, and her head hurt. Her film cases were full of images she didn’t want to see again. Every time she came to rest in a hotel room or a restaurant, she got phone calls from New York. She wanted to go someplace where she didn’t have to listen to anybody talking at her, but she didn’t know where that would be. Home, something in her head kept pounding at her, and that was when it had hit her. Karla Parrish was almost fifty years old and she didn’t have a home. She had a pied-à-terre in Manhattan with a lot of secondhand furniture in it. She had her camera equipment and the clothes in her pack and some books she’d picked up in the airport in London on her way out to Africa. She had this succession of hotel rooms that looked as if it was never going to end: Nairobi to Cairo to Lhasa to Athens to Tokyo to God-knows-where. Some of the hotels had electricity twenty-four hours a day. Some of them had electricity only some of the time. All of them had dust and bugs and heat in spite of their air-conditioning systems and their cheaper-than-cheap maid service.

The George-V had a lobby that looked like a stage set for a movie about France during the time of Marie Antoinette. The carpet was so plush, Karla felt as if she were swimming in it. The chandeliers were so large and densely packed with crystals, they sounded like factories full of glassware breaking every time there was a slight breeze. Karla saw a woman in a chinchilla coat down to her ankles and another woman walking five overgroomed dogs on silver lamé leashes. Karla could feel the dust in her pores, caked and hardening. Her hair felt so dirty, she wanted to cut it off instead of get it washed.

The man behind the registration desk was beaming and bouncing in her direction. He came around the counter to where she was standing and took her hand, talking all the time in a rapid-fire French Karla hadn’t a hope in hell of understanding. Karla wouldn’t have understood if he’d spoken in slow French. She had never paid much attention to her language classes.

Karla let the man take her hand and bow while she smiled back. Then she turned to Evan at her side and raised her eyebrows. Evan was her new assistant, hired less than ten months ago in a fit of craving for organization. This time, Karla had told herself, she was not going to go off for a year in the hinterlands and let her life unravel in the process. She was going to have somebody who would keep track of the bills and the receipts and the travel arrangements and let her keep her mind on her photography. She had put an ad in the Vassar College alumnae magazine, expecting to get a young woman with an itch for travel—and ended up with Evan instead. Vassar was coed these days. It kept slipping Karla’s mind.

Evan was tall and thin and wore wire-rimmed glasses, the way all the preppie boys did these days. He was also very smart and very eager and close to fluent in French.

“Evan,” Karla whispered, leaning back so that he could hear her. “What is going on here?”

Evan rubbed his soft hands together and blinked. “Monsieur Gaudet is welcoming the famous Karla Parrish to Paris.”