Puppet (32 page)

The buzzer sounds.

They break apart.

Forever is over.

“Shit,” he says, looking toward the floor.

“Shit,” she agrees, looking at him.

They stand this way until the buzzer sounds a second time.

“You don’t have to answer it,” she says.

“If I don’t answer it, she goes away.”

“That’s the general idea.”

“And you?” he asks, looking up from the floor, staring directly into her eyes. “When do you go away?”

Amanda takes a deep breath. What she wants to say is
never.
What she says is, “Friday. Saturday at the latest.”

Ben reaches over to scoop her sweater off the floor. “That’s what I thought,” he says as the buzzer sounds a third time.

“Saved by the proverbial bell.” Amanda takes the sweater from his hands and pulls it down over her head as he stretches his hand toward the intercom.

“Jennifer?” she hears him say as she buries her head inside the thick mohair, like a turtle inside its shell. The soft hairs fill her nostrils, make the tip of her nose itch.

Jennifer’s voice fills the foyer. “There you are. You had me worried.”

“Sorry. I was in the bathroom. Come on up. Apartment 1012.”

“I’m on my way.”

“She’s on her way,” Amanda mimics, poking her head out of the sweater and spitting a few stray woolen hairs out of her mouth. Grabbing her boot from the floor and her coat from the closet, she opens the door to the apartment and steps into the hall. “Don’t worry. I’ll make sure she doesn’t see me.”

“Where will you go?”

“Oh, I’m sure I can find somebody who wants to sleep with me.”

“Amanda …”

“I’m fine, Ben. It was a whim. It didn’t work out. No big deal. Honestly.”

He nods understanding. “See you tomorrow?”

“Two o’clock sharp.” Amanda walks away without saying good-bye. She stands in the corridor on the other side of the elevators until she hears an elevator pull up and its doors open. Soft footsteps quickly disappear down the carpeted hall. A door opens in the distance.

“Hey, you,” a female voice says lovingly.

“Hey, you,” Ben’s voice echoes back.

The voices disappear inside Ben’s apartment as Amanda presses the button for the elevator. Doors open almost immediately, and Amanda steps into an elevator redolent of lemons.

A
MANDA
wakes up with a jolt at nine thirty the next morning, wondering (a) what day it is, (b) where she is, and (c) who she is. The first two questions are by far the easiest of the three to answer. It’s Wednesday, and she’s in her mother’s living room, where she’s spent the hours since midnight lying on the uncomfortable sofa, staring at the plastic plant on the mantel over the fireplace and thinking about last night’s fiasco with Ben. “That was definitely not me last night,” she states emphatically, pushing herself to her feet and stumbling toward the window, pulling back the dusty white sheers and shielding her eyes from the surprisingly bright sun.

What she sees: a deserted street that seems frozen in time, like a picture on a Christmas card. The white snow covering the front lawns of the houses on either side of the road glistens like hard metal. Huge clumps of frozen slush have been shoveled haphazardly from the middle of the road to the curbside and now stand, leaning like drunken sentries, at irregularly spaced intervals, making parking almost impossible. Several cars have been abandoned almost in the middle of the street, their tail ends
sticking away from the sidewalk precariously. “It looks cold,” Amanda mutters, wrapping her arms around her body, feeling the soft tickle of mohair against her hands, trying not to feel Ben’s fingers digging at her flesh through the delicate wool.

Whatever had possessed her?

“I need a shower,” Amanda announces to the empty house, heading for the stairs she was both too tired and too frightened to climb last night, although what exactly she was so frightened of is a mystery to her now. Did she think the puppets might attack her in her bed, payback for her having so thoughtlessly gutted their own resting place? Or was she afraid she might find something else hidden in unlikely places? “Like my heart?” she scoffs, avoiding the bedrooms and proceeding directly to the bathroom. “Not bloody likely.” She turns on the shower, extending her hand beneath the old-fashioned nozzle. It used to take forever for the water in this shower to heat up, she remembers, smiling as a torrent of cold water splashes down on her waiting hand, strangely comforted by the fact that some things, at least, haven’t changed. She makes a face at her reflection in the mirror over the sink, noting how the purple of the sweater brings out the blue in her eyes. Then she pulls her sweater up over head and tosses it toward the hall, the move mimicking her action of the night before.

“Oh, God,” she groans, lifting her face to the ceiling, reliving the touch of Ben’s lips on hers, his hands at her breasts and buttocks, his fingers fumbling with the zipper of her pants. “Damn it,” she says, roughly pulling off her slacks, and standing naked in the middle of her mother’s bathroom. It was a blessing that Jennifer had showed up
when she did. There was enough confusion in her life at the moment. The last thing she needed was to compound that confusion by sleeping with her ex-husband.

Still, she couldn’t remember the last time a man had turned her down.

So why hadn’t she simply taken a cab to the Metro Convention Center hotel and surprised Jerrod Sugar with another late-night treat? “Been there, done that,” she says with a shrug, as the small bathroom fills with steam. Besides, any more late-night surprises and Jerrod Sugar might go into cardiac arrest. She smiles as she steps inside the tub and pulls the shower curtain closed, recalling the stunned look on the poor man’s face when Ben showed up unexpectedly at her door in the middle of the night. “Which makes us even,” she decides, pushing her head underneath the water’s spray, the now hot water running into her open mouth. “One unexpected late-night visit from you, one unexpected late-night visit from me.”

All square. Finished. Over. Done.

Except they aren’t. And she knows it.

She grabs the shampoo from the side of the tub and washes her hair, letting the soap stream into her eyes, giving them the excuse they need to tear. “This is just stupid. You are being so stupid,” she repeats, angry fingers massaging her scalp. “I can’t believe you are obsessing over a man you dumped years ago.” The shampoo slides off her hair and over her shoulders, like a silk scarf, then clings to the tips of her breasts. She feels Ben’s fingers at her nipples and grabs the bar of soap from its dish, impatiently rubs his hands away. “Been there, done that. Remember?”

Amanda finishes her shower and dries herself with a thin white towel, then searches for a hair-dryer in the
cabinet underneath the sink. It’s just her competitive juices that have been aroused, she tells herself, not any latent feelings of love. She simply doesn’t like letting another woman win. That’s all there is to it.

She locates an ancient dryer buried underneath an unopened bag of cotton balls, at least half a dozen shower caps, and several rolls of white toilet paper. Nothing else of significance. “Thank you, God,” she whispers, aiming the blow-dryer at her head, pushing the
ON
button as if it were a trigger, and feeling a blast of hot air at the side of her temple. Wet hair immediately whips up and around her face. Just like last night outside Ben’s building, she thinks. “Oh, no. I am not going back there.”

Instead, she finishes drying her hair, purposefully blocking out everything but the whir of the motor, then gets dressed in her new navy pants and blue sweater. She knows she should finish cleaning up the guest bedroom, that there are still pieces of the shattered puppet stage scattered across the floor, not to mention the puppets themselves, who have been lying facedown on the bed all night and need to be returned to the safety of their closet hiding place, assured that everything is all right. “Later,” she says, heading for the kitchen, making herself a three-egg omelet, and chewing on a Granny Smith apple as she ferrets around inside her purse for the business cards she discovered last night. She spreads them across the kitchen table, examining each one in turn. Walter Turofsky, Milton Turlington, Rodney Tureck, George Turgov. Bogus business cards obviously, the useful props of a man who called himself Turk. So, which one was he really? Or was he none of the above, someone else entirely? And was there any way of finding out? “Think,”
she tells herself forcefully. “You’re a smart girl. You can figure this one out.”

A woman, her round face framed by a soft mop of auburn curls, winks at her playfully from across the room.

“Rachel Mallins,” Amanda says, leaving the table to flip through the phone book. “Malcolm, Malia, Mallinos … Mallins, A.… Mallins, L.… Mallins, R.”

The phone is answered on the first ring, almost as if Rachel has been expecting her call. “Hello?”

“Rachel, this is Amanda Travis.”

“I was right, wasn’t I?” Rachel asks immediately.

“I checked the death notices for the past month. There was no listing for John Mallins’s mother.”

“And the man himself? Were you able to find out when he was born?”

“His passport lists his date of birth as July fourteenth. You were right about that too.” Silence. “Rachel? Are you still there?”

“I’m here,” she says, her voice heavy with the threat of tears. “Anything else?”

“Apparently the autopsy revealed that the victim was ten to fifteen years older than his passport claimed, and that he’d had a face-lift, maybe a nose job.”

“So that bastard really did murder my brother.”

“Rachel, did your brother ever mention anybody named Walter Turofsky?”

“Walter Turofsky? No, I don’t think so.”

“How about Milton Turlington?”

“No.”

“Rodney Tureck … George Turgov?”

“No. Who are these men?”

“Think,” Amanda says. “Turofsky, Turlington, Tureck, Turgov …”

“Turk,” Rachel says, her voice a whisper. “You think they’re aliases?”

“Criminals are generally lazy, as well as unimaginative. They tend to stick with what they know.”

“Where did you find those names?”

“I found a bunch of bogus business cards hidden in my mother’s house.”

“Your mother?” Shock resonates through Rachel’s voice. “What’s your mother got to do with this?”

The shock transfers to Amanda. “My mother?” What is Rachel talking about? “What are you talking about?”

“You said you found a bunch of bogus business cards in your mother’s house.”

“My mother? No. I said my client.”

Silence. “Oh, sorry. My mistake. So what now? Back to the death notices?”

“What?” Amanda hears the quiver in her voice. Is it really possible she’d said
mother?
“Why would I recheck the death notices?”

“Think,” Rachel instructs, as Amanda had instructed earlier. “Last time you were checking for a woman named Mallins. But if anybody’s mother really died, her name would be Turlington or Turgov or whatever those other names were.”

“Tureck or Turofsky.”

“Tur-something, anyway.”

Amanda sighs, not particularly anxious to return to the Reference Library.

“Want some help?” Rachel asks, understanding the sigh.

“No,” Amanda tells her quickly. This is something she needs to do alone. Besides, she’s already said too much. Could she really have misspoken, said
mother
instead of
client?
It was a good thing that Rachel, like most people, was so willing to ignore the evidence of her own ears.

“You’ll keep me informed?”

“Of course.”

“Thanks. Oh, and Amanda?” she adds as Amanda is about to disconnect.

“Yes?”

“Next time you see your mother, give her a big hug from me, will you?”

And then she is gone.

“Shit.” Amanda hangs up the phone. “Shit.” She sits for a few seconds without moving. “Give my mother a big hug,” she repeats wondrously. “That’ll be the day.” In the stillness, she feels her mother’s arms reach out to encircle her.

I don’t think I’ve ever told you how beautiful you are.

“Whoa! Enough of this crap.” Once again she grabs the phone book, turning to the blue-bordered government section in the middle, locating the listing for City Hall. There has to be an easier way than plowing through all the death notices again, she thinks, blocking out all unwanted thoughts and images. Surely there must be some central listing. Amanda dials the number and waits, bracing herself for a recorded message advising her of the many choices available to her.

“City Hall. Davia speaking.”

“Davia? You mean you’re real?”

“In the flesh,” the woman responds, as another unwanted image, this one of Ben, instantly materializes
before Amanda’s eyes. Amanda promptly replaces this image with one she conjures up of Davia, who she decides is a tall, willowy brunette with a high forehead and large, pendulum-shaped breasts. “How can I direct your call?” Davia asks.

Amanda hesitates, her mind so full of uninvited guests, it’s almost impossible to remember why she phoned in the first place.

“Hello? Are you still there?”

“Do you have some sort of death registrar?” The question pops from Amanda’s mouth, like a pellet from a gun.

“No, I’m afraid we don’t,” Davia answers, as if this is a question she hears every day.

“So how would I find out if someone has died in this city in the last month?”

“Probably the best thing to do is check the death notices in the papers,” Davia says, as Amanda knew she would. “The Reference Library has a wonderful newspaper morgue.”

Amanda almost laughs at the term. “What if no one put a notice in the papers?”

“Well, in that case, I guess you could forward a request for the information to the province, although they require a period of seventy years since the person died.”

“Seventy years? No, this person died very recently. Look, I don’t understand why this is so difficult. Isn’t death a public record?”

“No, actually. It isn’t.”

“It’s a secret?”

“No. It’s just not public.”