Partners in Crime (13 page)

The eerie blue-yellow light from the parking lot outside cast gloomy shadows in the shabby room. He could hear the distant roar of trailers barreling down Route One, but Jane slept on, oblivious, lost in her own nightmare world of misery.

He should leave her alone, he knew that. He should go back to his own room, slam the door loud enough to wake her out of her tear-laden sleep, and let her work out her problems by herself. What the hell did he have to offer her but more lies?

The bed sank beneath his weight as he sat down beside her. He touched her shoulder, gently, hoping just to jar her out of the nightmare but let the sleep continue.

Her eyes flew open, staring up at him, dazed, myopic, filled with unshed tears. “What are you doing here?” she demanded in a husky voice.

“You were having a nightmare,” he said softly, reluctantly pulling his hand back.

“I was dreaming about Richard and the car crash. I was in the car with him, falling down the embankment, rolling over and over and over.” Her voice shuddered to a halt.

“You’re safe,” he said, knowing how lame it sounded. He wondered how he was going to be able to touch her again. He’d probably end up on the floor.

“I suppose I am.” Her eyes narrowed as she looked up at him. “What are you wearing?”

“A bathrobe,” he replied, startled.

“A F C.” She reached out and traced the telltale monogram. “Don’t tell me you stole your lawyer’s bathrobe?” There was more weary amusement than indignation in her voice.

“Of course not,” Sandy said, glad the darkness hid his expression. “I just borrowed it.”

“You’re an unregenerate scoundrel, Sandy or Jimmy or whoever you are.”

“I’m afraid so,” he agreed, feeling suddenly very guilty. Maybe now was the time to tell her, now in the timeless hours between midnight and dawn. The longer he waited the worse it would be. “Jane,” he began earnestly, steeling himself.

“Good night, partner,” she said, interrupting him gently but firmly.

“But I wanted to...”

“Good night.”

He had no choice. At least he could comfort himself with the knowledge that he tried. Not hard enough, but he did try. He sat on the bed, looking down at her.

“Good night,” he said. And without another word he went back to his room, closing the door silently behind him.

“I
wouldn’t trust Elinor Peabody further than I could throw her,” Jane said, huddling deeper into the leather car seat as they sped toward New York.

“Neither would I,” Sandy said reasonably enough. “That doesn’t mean she can’t be useful.”

Jane gave her clothing a look of disgust. The artfully streaked and tattered jeans had clearly seen better days, the top resembled something Geronimo might have worn. At least it covered her. Beneath it was a metal studded leather bra that Sandy had presented with a flourish. She wouldn’t have worn it at all if the feathered shirt hadn’t provided a few desperate gaps, and she would have given anything to be able to wrap her underdressed body in a nice, enveloping raincoat.

Her hair was even more absurd, but by the time she’d attacked it she’d become reckless, getting into the spirit of the thing. It stuck out every which way, aided by mousse, styling gel, and the kind of teasing she hadn’t seen since her brother went to the senior high school prom with Rita Di Angelo in a fit of teenage lust never repeated in his noble manhood.

But the hour-long, cramped ride into the city in Sandy’s MGB was giving her more than enough time for second thoughts, and every time she glanced at her reflection in the mirror she cringed. The blue, purple and pink streaks radiating above her eyes were visible even without her purloined glasses, and the black lipstick made her look like the bride of Frankenstein. She shivered delicately, looking out over the New Jersey Turnpike, and hoped her left earring wouldn’t catch in the feathers. She’d closed her eyes when Sandy had inserted the diaper pin in her right ear, and she still couldn’t bring herself to look closely at it.

It was long past dusk, an early autumn chill was in the air, and the smell of New Jersey exhaust penetrated the closed windows of the little car. Jane had drawn the line when Sandy had tried to douse her with some sort of musk that smelled more like pesticide, but maybe that would have been better than the sulphurous fumes rising from the sprawled-out megalopolis surrounding Newark.

“You could have stayed home,” Sandy said gently.

“I wouldn’t exactly call the Princeton motel home,” Jane said, allowing herself another, surreptitious glimpse of Sandy’s spiked blond hair and torn T-shirt and swallowing the sigh of part disgust, part lust. While she looked like a cross between Cyndi Lauper and Vampira, Sandy managed to look like a punk Don Johnson. Certain things in life weren’t fair.

“What would you call home?”

“The second floor of a run-down Victorian house in Baraboo, Wisconsin. I used to live in a boxy apartment but it drove me crazy.”

“Somehow I don’t see you as a Victorian.”

“Don’t you? I’ve been called prudish in my time.” She knew her voice sounded raw, but she hoped he wouldn’t notice.

Sandy noticed everything. “Who called you prudish? Your ex-husband?”

“Yes.”

“Does he have anything to do with your Victorian lifestyle?”

Jane sighed. “I wish you wouldn’t be so damned nosy. Why don’t we change the subject?”

“Lovely weather,” he said obediently enough.

There was a long silence. “You really want to know about my marriage?”

“Only if you want to tell me.”

“If I wanted to tell you I would have brought up the subject myself.”

“Yes, I want to know about your marriage,” Sandy said, dropping all pretense.

“All right. It doesn’t take long to tell. I met Frank at the University of Wisconsin. I was taking a night course in Japanese Socialism and he was rebounding from a messy divorce.”

“Japanese Socialism?” he echoed in a voice of horror. “Why in the world would you willingly choose to study something that dry?”

“I thought it was time to try something new. I’d already had enough arts and sciences to keep me going. Do you want to hear about my academic career or my marriage?”

“We’re getting near the turnpike exit. Which takes the shorter amount of time?”

“Definitely the marriage. Frank was teaching the course, which was unspeakably boring. He’d just been divorced by his wife of five years—apparently she needed to find herself and he’d been holding her back. So he cried in my arms for a while, then figured there probably wasn’t much of me left to find, so he proposed, and I was fool enough to accept.”

“Why?”

It was a good question, one she hadn’t considered in a long time. She gave the unrepentant Sandy her most severe look. “Because I was in love with him,” she said firmly.

Sandy, of course, wasn’t cowed. “Really?”

She didn’t hesitate. “At this point I don’t know anymore. Maybe I married him because he looked like Dustin Hoffman and he was man enough to cry. I should have realized one should never marry a man who’s crying over another woman.”

“What happened?”

“His ex-wife found herself, Frank got over his rebound and went back to her. It was all very civilized and decent, everybody was terribly sorry about the whole bloody mess.”

“Did you put up any kind of fight?”

“Are you kidding?” Jane tossed her frizzy mane over her feathered shoulder. “I’m much too reasonable a person. I’m cursed with seeing everybody else’s point of view. They both made a mistake and they’d suffered too long for it. I bowed out gracefully and flew to Mexico for a fast divorce so they could get remarried on their old wedding anniversary.”

“Nice. What did you give them as a wedding present?”

Jane glared at him. “What makes you think I gave them a wedding present?”

“You’d already been such an incredible sucker I’m sure you didn’t stop there. I bet you refused alimony.”

“Of course.”

“What about community property?”

“Stop sounding like a lawyer. We’d only been married seventeen months. We hadn’t had time to accumulate much more than a car and a time-share in Bermuda where we spent our honeymoon.”

“What happened to them?”

“I gave them up. I don’t like Saabs and I never want to go to Bermuda again.”

“Did he give you any compensation?”

“Sandy...”

“Didn’t you have a lawyer?” He was sounding positively incensed.

“Of course I did. A friend of Frank’s took care of the details.”

“A friend of Frank’s shafted you.”

“I didn’t want anything,” she said, anger and desperation making her voice tight and hard. “I just wanted my freedom.”

“You didn’t get anything else.” Sandy didn’t look at her, concentrating instead on the heavy evening traffic as he headed for the Lincoln Tunnel. “Not even your self-respect.”

If she hit him they’d probably swerve into another car and die. Still, the thought was tempting. With great difficulty she swallowed her rage. “My self-respect doesn’t depend on material possessions.”

“That’s good. Let’s just hope it isn’t influenced by being screwed by people who once cared for you.” His voice was tight with anger, and that emotion finally stirred Jane out of her own fury.

“What does it matter to you how I’m treated? If
I
don’t mind why in the world do
you?
”

“Are you trying to tell me you don’t mind?” he countered.

She thought about it, carefully, prodding at the remembered pain like a tongue prodding a sore tooth. “I mind about me,” she said finally. “I mind that I made a fool of myself. Apart from that, it’s all ancient history.”

He didn’t have to say anything, his skeptical expression was reaction enough. She tried to shove a deliberately careless hand through her teased and tangled mane, but her fingers stuck in the rough mass. “All I know,” she added sweetly, “is that I’ll never let a man make a fool out of me again.”

His derision vanished. “Good idea,” he muttered, turning his attention back to the narrowing road.

You
’
re getting more and more foolhardy as time goes on,
Sandy berated himself as he maneuvered the car down the crowded, narrow streets of the Lower East Side. He’d had plenty of chances to tell her the truth, plenty of times when he could have set things straight and then sat back and let others take over this incredible mess. Instead here he was, wandering around places he shouldn’t be seen, looking for people he shouldn’t even know existed.

He wouldn’t have done it if Elinor Peabody hadn’t called up with a name. A name he knew. Anyone else and he would have left it alone, but the coincidence made it unavoidable.

Years ago, when he was first practicing, his partners had handed him a case too dirty for them to soil their patrician hands with. When Gregory Matteo had shown up in his office all Sandy had known was that he was squeezed into a thousand dollar suit too small for his fat, sweating body. After talking with him Sandy had watched the contradictions mount. The man had an income and a title ill-suited to his meager intellect, combined with a bullying attitude that irritated Sandy enough to look further into the man’s background. He’d been accused of assaulting a police officer. He’d actually been beating his girlfriend, but she’d refused to press charges, so only the policeman who’d tried to stop him ended up going to court.

He’d gotten him off on a technicality, a maneuver that required no great brilliance on his part, but Matteo had been almost pathetically grateful. And he’d made a firm promise: if Sandy had ever needed anything, he had only to send word to his notorious father, Jabba Matteo himself, and that wish was granted. And as Sandy had watched the man waddle away he’d wiped away an icy sense of relief that it was over so quickly.

Jabba Matteo was so powerful, so dangerous and so rich that his very existence was almost a secret. The media that didn’t hesitate to stake out presidential campaigners and malign anything that moved seldom mentioned his name, and then only in the most circumspect manner. Even Sandy didn’t know the extent of the senior Matteo’s activities, and he didn’t care to. All he knew was that one of his quasi legitimate forms of employment was arms dealing, and that Matteo owed him one. Once Elinor Peabody mentioned his name, the die was cast.

Getting in touch with him had proven the major challenge, one that Sandy had chosen to meet in typically brazen style. Three blocks away, their guide to the underworld was waiting in Ratner’s delicatessen, probably stuffing his ratty little face with strawberry cheesecake. The real Jimmy the Stoolie was waiting for them, and it was going to take all of Sandy’s quick thinking and mental juggling to keep Jane and Jimmy at arm’s length.

“So how come your lawyer hangs out with godfathers?” Jane queried as he pulled up beside a boarded-up building and switched off the car. “I didn’t think Alexander Caldicott was a hireling of organized crime.”

“He isn’t. He knows a friend of a friend. I should have thought of him myself. If anyone in New York knows anything about arms dealing, Jabba’s the man. He’d also be likely to know if anything...unpleasant...happened to your brother.”

“Something unpleasant happened to him, Sandy. He died.”

“I know,” he said hastily, trying to keep from staring in total fascination at her streaked and painted face. He could barely see the normal, so-called plain Jane beneath the gold and purple stripes, the spiky, tangled hair and garish mouth. He still wanted to kiss that mouth, black lipstick and all, and he was still far too partial to what lay beneath the metal-studded leather bra, but for the present he struggled to keep his mind on business. He’d explained the situation to Jimmy, and the little weasel had promised his full cooperation in exchange for a break on his legal fees, but Sandy wasn’t fool enough to trust him. If Jimmy thought he could get some sort of advantage out of his information he’d try to, and the next few hours would prove harrowing indeed if Sandy wasn’t extremely careful.

“Isn’t that your lawyer?” Jane murmured, reaching for the door handle.

Jimmy the Stoolie was sauntering toward them, a smarmy smile on his rodent-like face. Sandy just watched in growing dismay. He’d told Jimmy to borrow a suit from his wardrobe—they were close in size and the doorman would let him in. Needless to say Jimmy had chosen the best one he owned—a Giorgio Armani he kept for special occasions. Jimmy had already dripped a faint trail of strawberry on one lapel, and that was probably the trace of whipped cream just beside the pocket. Sandy bit his tongue in outrage.