Into the Dark (18 page)

“I was scared of the answer,” he had said, “I even went so far as to talk to private
detectives. I had a phone I was using . . . I threw it out. I’m so sorry.”

And Jill had gone to him and put her arms around him, her heart crumbling . . .
You were suspicious of me.

But that was gone now, the bad times were behind them. After they’d made love and
Gary was sound asleep to the point of snoring, Jill had snuck out of bed. She’d taken
the piece of paper with the three phone numbers out of her purse and she’d put it
through the trash compactor. “Never again,” she had whispered.

Gary clutched at her in his sleep now. She kissed the top of his head and shut her
eyes tight. Tears seeped out the corners. She loved him. After all these years, now
more than ever. She loved him so much it hurt.

Gary murmured something in his sleep. It sounded like “Sorry.”

It’s okay. Everything is going to be okay, my love, my great love . . .

Jill closed her eyes. She took a deep breath—a cleansing breath. She and Gary had
taken a
pranayana
class together just a few weeks ago, and that’s where she’d learned it. She’d liked
the
pranayana
teacher, Lily. Not quite as much as Yasmine, with all her wonderful medical terminology,
but definitely more than that Bikram girl, who was forever missing class to audition
for commercials and soap operas . . .

Jill heard a noise. At first she thought it was in her imagination, part of her sleep
drifting. But when she opened her eyes, she heard it again. And then again.

A vibrating phone.

The sound was coming from Gary’s side of the bed—but strangely, not from his cell
phone, lying dormant on his nightstand. No—it was coming from the chair behind the
nightstand, piled with Gary’s clothes. Jill moved toward it.

Strange, the things you think of when your life is about to change forever . . . Here
Jill was, moving toward a vibrating cell phone at 6
A.M.
on a Sunday morning—a phone her own husband had kept hidden from her—yet she wasn’t
thinking about that at all. She was thinking about the January 7 Wise Up fund-raiser,
how she was going to hire back that publicist and buy herself a new dress for it,
too. She was going to buy that five-thousand-dollar St. John sheath she’d seen in
Barneys last week; while she was at it, she’d buy the girls new dresses, too, because
they deserved new dresses and even if it was just someone calling the wrong number
at six in the morning on a Sunday, the fact remained that Gary still owned a secret
phone, different from the one she’d found in his desk, a different brand—a Nokia,
she saw now, as she plucked it out of his shirt pocket. Everyone in their family had
Motorolas. They shared a Sprint plan, but she supposed this Nokia’s plan was different.

A different plan, indeed
.

She checked the blinking screen and saw not a number, but a name.
DeeDee
.

Jill hit talk. She didn’t say hello. She said nothing, just breathed into the mouthpiece.

The voice on the other end of the phone was a girl’s voice, small and fragile, full
of breath.

“It’s done,” the girl said.
DeeDee
said. Then she hung up.

“H
e will never bother you again.” Diandra said this to the walls of her apartment, but
in her head she was saying it to Mr. Freeman. She often had long conversations with
Mr. Freeman, Diandra did, as if he were in the room with her. She’d tell him stories
from her life, and in her mind he’d give her advice. He’d talk to her about everything,
but mostly, about her craft . . . “You have it all inside of you, DeeDee. You have
the capacity to be a heroine or a villain, a goddess or a tramp. It’s all there—every
quality of every single character ever written, buried beneath that beautiful skin.
All you need to do is bring it up, DeeDee. Show the world. There’s no part you can’t
play. There is nothing you can’t do.”

This was something he’d told her for real. Or at least she thought he had. The real
and imagined conversations overlapped in her mind—especially the ones from long ago.
One thing she did know was that he needed her. He needed her like water, for his very
survival, and she knew that because he’d told her, over the phone yesterday when he’d
asked for her help with Errol Ludlow.
I need you DeeDee. I hope you know that.

“I do know it,” she whispered, now. “I do.”

This was what she loved most about Mr. Freeman—his need for her. And so she’d done
what he had asked her to do, which was to stop Errol Ludlow. Put him out of his own
misery and Mr. Freeman’s, too.
He will throw me and my family out on the streets, DeeDee. He doesn’t care about us.
Stop him. Now
.

He hadn’t said
how
he wanted Errol stopped, but Diandra knew. She knew Mr. Freeman, better than he knew
himself. The proof: By the time he had called her, she was already prepared.

Ecstasy and Viagra was known on the streets as “trail mix,” and it was awfully dangerous—“Russian
roulette,” Saffron had told Diandra two nights ago. Saffron was a large black man
with a shaved head and diamond studs in his ears. He wore a tight white T-shirt and
had very white teeth. To Diandra, he had looked otherworldly, glowing. “Want to go
to heaven, sugar?” he had said to her upon approach, and it had felt as though she
were talking to an angel.

Saffron hadn’t been the first man to speak to her at the Rose Room that night but
he had been the right one, and so she’d gone back with him to the VIP lounge, which
was not quite heaven but as close as one could get on a cold Friday night in Dumbo.
Afterward, she glowed, as if she’d absorbed some of his shine. He’d shown her the
bag of pills in his pocket, and that’s when the idea had come to her—she wasn’t quite
sure how or why. “Can I have three or four for a friend of mine?” she had said, testing
out the idea, watching for emotion in the gleaming black eyes. “He likes to take them
with his Viagra.”

Saffron had looked alarmed—something Diandra hadn’t quite thought possible. “Tell
your friend he could have a heart attack,” he had said, such a beautiful, helpful
man.

And here, she had no idea that the next day, Mr. Freeman would call and beg for her
help—no conscious idea, anyway. But when he did,
of course he did
, scared and shaky-voiced and needing her like water, Diandra was able to help him,
without hesitation.

If that wasn’t a soul-connection, she didn’t know what was.

D
iandra had convinced Errol Ludlow to take three of them, even though he’d wanted nothing
to do with pills at first. “You’ll be amazed at your performance,” she’d whispered
in his ear, easing her fingertips down the length of his chest, slipping them under
the black silk robe he’d put on, exploring . . . “
Oooh, you wore the ring.
”

“I’ll take the pills,” he had said, his voice thick from desire. And then she’d given
him the pills with a glass of champagne and followed the same trail with her tongue.
The entire time, Mr. Freeman’s voice was in her head, urging her on.

And he had moaned, Errol Ludlow. He had run his hands through her hair and called
her incredible and he had told her . . .

Had he said, “I love you”?

I love you, my sweet . . .

He couldn’t have said that. Not Errol Ludlow, who loved no one. Hadn’t he told Diandra
as much during her job interview? Hadn’t he bragged,
Here at Ludlow Investigations, we make good money proving time and time again that
true love is a lie?

“You never loved me,” she said now. “You loved who you made me into.”

That was the way most men were.
They look at a pretty face, they fill in the blanks
,
and that’s who they love—the girl their minds make you into.
Diandra’s stepmonster had said that once while putting on her lipstick—and she did
have a point. Why, Diandra’s own adult life had been a succession of men, each one
filling in her blanks so reverently, ascribing to her such goodness—or for that matter,
bad
ness—she barely had to lift a finger to win their love.
The ancient Greeks called Beauty a virtue
.
They put it right up there with Truth
. The Monster had said that, too. And if she was right, it was easy to see how the
Romans had kicked their asses.

I love you, my sweet . . .

Diandra shut her eyes tight. She didn’t like this feeling, this niggling guilt. What
would have helped was if Mr. Freeman had said something, anything to her over the
phone this morning. He was a busy man and never alone and probably half asleep when
she’d called. But still, she’d hoped, at the very least, for a “Thank you.”

Diandra wouldn’t stay mad at him for long, though, she knew. She could never stay
mad at Mr. Freeman—who had listened to her when she was DeeDee Walsh, a mousy brown
butterball with zits and food-clogged metal braces and just thirteen years old.

When her stepmonster had first brought her into his office for her audition, DeeDee
had been so embarrassed she couldn’t even say hello. She’d expected The Monster to
carry the conversation the way she always did—with her peekaboo hairdo and her keyhole
blouse and her perfect Marilyn smile . . . But Mr. Freeman had barely looked at her.
He’d been so kind, asking DeeDee questions, such as “Where do you see yourself in
ten years?” and “What are your career goals?” And when she answered, he’d looked her
in the eye—as though it mattered what she said. DeeDee had caught sight of one of
the pictures on his desk—his two tiny blonde daughters—and thought,
I’d do anything to trade places with one of them
.

Mr. Freeman had believed in DeeDee the way no one else ever had. He couldn’t get her
many parts, but she knew he was trying. She knew that there were times of the day
when he thought of her, and her alone.
You have every character inside of you, DeeDee, beneath that beautiful skin
, he would tell her.
There is no part you can’t play. There is nothing you can’t do.
And even when she grew too old to be a client and dropped out of his life for years,
he kept her in his thoughts—the same way she’d kept him in hers.

Diandra’s phone chimed once. Her heart leaped, but just a little bit. One chime meant
a text, and Mr. Freeman never texted her, but she looked at it fast anyway, allowing
herself that taste of hope.

The text was from Trent LaSalle. It read:
Sup?

She sighed. Articulate as ever. Timely, too. She’d texted him five hours ago, and
coming from a geek like Trent LaSalle who announced his every move on Twitter and
Foursquare, a five-hour text delay was unacceptable.

She typed:
Where U been?

Long story. Later!

Diandra’s eyes narrowed. She stared at the words on her screen. The smiley face.
Are you kidding me?
“He’s blowing me off.”

What would Mr. Freeman say? Diandra had been told to keep an eye on Trent LaSalle—and
on his boss, Brenna Spector.
They need to get close to the truth
, he had said,
but we can’t let them get too close. Do you know what I’m saying, DeeDee? We need
to watch them more carefully than they’re watching Lula Belle
.

Of course she knew what he was saying. She always knew what he was saying.

And now Trent was blowing her off. He was wrecking her plans, just like her last L.A.
boyfriend had done with his
You were pretending with me,
and his
I’ll get you back for hurting me. I’ll get you good, you and him.
Just like Shane.

This can’t happen
.

Diandra took a deep breath.
Calm, calm . . .
She needed a face-to-face, that was all. He’d never be able to blow her off in person.
He wasn’t strong enough for that. How long had their first encounter lasted? Thirty,
forty seconds? He’d done better the second time, but still. Trent was not one for
self-restraint.

And besides, she needed to see him, for Mr. Freeman’s sake. She needed to see Trent
one more time.

Diandra flipped open her computer, checked Trent’s Twitter feed. Thank God for Foursquare,
and the idiots who used it. Right now, it was telling her—along with his thirty-five
hundred other followers—that he was at a Starbucks, just a few blocks from where he
lived. Along with a tweet:
The chairs here hurt my ass.
Seriously—was this guy allergic to privacy, or what?

In twenty seconds, another tweet popped up:
Headin’ home
.

If there’s one thing life had taught Diandra Marie about men, it was that there was
much to be gained—
much
—from their stupidity.

Diandra checked herself in the mirror. The jeans worked, but she definitely needed
to change her top. She stripped off the tired old “I heart NY” sweatshirt she was
wearing, and chose something shinier—a low-cut, hot pink angora sweater that always
got her line-cuts at the movies. It worked with the white lace push-up, so she changed
into that, too. She applied matching hot pink lipstick, brushed through her pale blonde
hair, slipped into matching Steve Madden heels and checked herself again . . .