Puppet (7 page)

“You think I’ll go to jail?”

“It’s a first offense; you’re Tiffany’s primary caregiver. It’s more likely you’ll get probation.”

“I swear I’ll kill that bitch if I end up in jail.”

“Fine. Just remember to get yourself another lawyer.” Amanda slings her purse over her right shoulder and heads toward the back of the courtroom, Derek Clemens at her heels.

“Hey, wait up. I thought we could maybe grab a drink. To celebrate.”

Amanda doesn’t even bother slowing down.

The full moon follows her as she drives north along Congress. Beside her on the front seat of her three-year-old black Thunderbird convertible is a freshly purchased bottle of expensive red wine. The Thunderbird was a gift from Sean on their fourth, and as it turned out, last anniversary. The wine was a present to herself. After all, hadn’t she helped make the world a safer place for nasty cannibals everywhere? “I did my job,” she reminds herself, turning left on Forty-fifth and heading toward I-95.

It’s not her fault Derek Clemens is such a convincing liar. It’s not her fault Caroline Fletcher is her own worst enemy. The justice system is a crapshoot at the best of times, which is why a good lawyer is always preferable to
a good cause. The innocent often suffer; the guilty regularly go free. And luckily, one face pretty much blurs into another over time, Amanda knows. By tomorrow morning she won’t even remember what Caroline Fletcher looked like, crying in the back of the courtroom. With a little luck, that is, and enough celebratory glasses of wine. Amanda pats the bottle on the black leather seat beside her. The new day will bring a fresh batch of lowlife to her desk to be processed and prepped. Pay your money; take your chance. Head ’em out, move ’em on.

Amanda checks her rearview mirror as she switches into the right-hand lane, sees her mother’s eyes lurking behind her own. Some faces don’t blur as easily as others, the eyes warn.

She takes the ramp a touch too quickly onto I-95, then cuts in front of a white Lexus SUV. The driver swerves and shakes his fist in fruitless indignation. Just where do you think you’re going in such a damn hurry? the fist demands, as Amanda stares slack-jawed at the stagnant lines of traffic heading north.

The highway, as usual, is a clogged artery of cars. Weary commuters heading home from work, clueless tourists looking for the newest hot spot, barefoot teenagers with fake IDs heading for the hippest bar, seniors who should have had their driver’s licenses revoked years ago, not sure where they are, let alone where they’re headed. A typical Friday night in February. Probably an accident somewhere up ahead, judging by the volume of traffic and how slowly it’s moving. Her own fault, she thinks, checking the clock on her car’s dashboard. Almost seven. She shouldn’t have stayed so long at the office after court. She shouldn’t have spent
so long in the liquor store choosing wine. She shouldn’t have picked I-95 at seven o’clock on a Friday night in February. What was normally a twenty-minute drive from here to Jupiter, and she’d be lucky to be home by eight. Amanda leans her head back against her headrest. No point in getting all bent out of shape over something she can’t control.

This philosophy works for about ten minutes before she’s ready to explode. “Okay, enough of this. Let’s get a move on, people.” She glares at the creamy yellow moon overhead, as if the smiling face she sees carved into its side is somehow responsible for her predicament. Full moons are a dangerous time, she knows, glancing at the car beside her, seeing a woman in a matching pink sweater set talking on her phone.

I could call someone, she decides, reaching for her purse. Although she’s not sure exactly whom to call. Ellie would think it strange to hear from her twice in one day, and she vaguely recalls Kelly having mentioned she’d be at her parents’ house for dinner. “Ellie and Kelly,” Amanda says out loud, the names rolling off her tongue. “Ellie and Kelly. Kelly and Ellie. Everything’s swelly with Ellie and Kelly.” Oh, great. Now I’m a total lunatic, she thinks, deciding to call her friend Vanessa. “Oh, sure. Call Vanessa. She hasn’t heard from you in what? Two years?” Or how about Judy Knelman? You used to see her and her husband every few weeks when you were married to Sean. And that other woman, the one who married Sean’s friend Bryce Hall? What was her name? Edna, Emma, Emily? “Oh, yeah, all Sean’s friends are just dying to hear from you.”

Why is she still thinking about Sean? Just because she ran into him at lunch? He’s turned up unexpectedly
before. Once, at the Kravits Center, a couple of years ago. He was still pretty bitter then, even though she’d asked for nothing in their divorce, but still he’d pretended not to see her, ducking into the men’s room as she was walking over to say hello. She’d pushed the incident out of her mind, scarcely giving him another thought. When something was over, it was over and done. Out of sight, out of mind. Hadn’t that always been her motto?

Of course Jennifer had yet to enter the picture. Jennifer with her peaches-and-cream complexion and long, shiny black hair. And swelling belly.

Swelling belly, swelling belly, swelling belly.

Is that what has her feeling so out of sorts?

That could have been me, she reminds herself. I’m the one who insisted I didn’t want children. I’m the one who said I wasn’t cut out to be a mother.
You’d be a great mother
, Ellie had told her at lunch. Sure thing. Just like my mother—a woman whose maternal instincts manifested themselves in two ways: indifference and rage. Strangely enough, she’d always preferred the rage.

Amanda glances back toward the woman in the pink sweater set, who smiles at her as she continues talking on the phone.

The last time Amanda saw her mother, her mother was wearing a blouse in almost that exact shade of pink. Her short, honey-blond hair was freshly washed and neatly coiffed, as always. Indeed, Amanda can’t remember a time when her mother didn’t look as if she’d just come from the beauty salon. Even if she was drunker than the proverbial skunk, and falling all over everything, her hair was always picture-perfect.

What’s she done now?

Really, this doesn’t concern me.

Who’d she kill?

This is not my problem.

She’s your mother.

Not anymore.

Amanda pushes her mother’s image aside with a swat of her hand, as if shooing away a pesky fly. “Can we please get this show on the road?” she begs the other drivers, and mercifully the cars in front of her begin to pick up their pace. “Thank you,” she says to the smiling face in the moon.

Forty minutes later, she is home.

“Hi, Joe.” She waves to the doorman.

“You get stuck in that mess on I-95?”

“I sure did.”

“Radio said there was an accident at the exit to Riviera Beach.”

“There were still police cars at the side of the road,” Amanda tells him.

“Expecting company?” He nods toward the bottle of wine in her hand.

Amanda feels her spine stiffen. Is it curiosity she hears in his voice or judgment? “Not tonight.”

He smiles. “Well, have a good one.”

“You too.”

He was just making idle conversation, she reassures herself in the elevator, grateful that the ride to the fifteenth floor is mercifully uneventful. No unnecessary stops. No former lovers. No suspicious wives. “Just me and my bottle,” Amanda says to the empty hallway as the elevator doors open. She walks briskly to her unit on the southeast corner, almost tripping over a piece of
ivory-trimmed red carpet that has come loose from the ivory-colored wall. She’ll have to call the building manager in the morning, tell him to send someone up to repair it before anyone gets hurt. Wouldn’t want some ambitious young litigator, such as herself, to sue.

Not that personal injury lawsuits are her area of expertise, Amanda thinks. No, her specialty is defending creeps who try to swallow their girlfriends. Not to mention those who beat up strangers in a bar or rob a 7-Eleven and shoot a few innocent bystanders. Of course if the creep who does the shooting is the son of a prominent local politician, or if one of the bystanders happens to be young and beautiful, and therefore likely to make the front page of the
Palm Beach Post
, then it becomes a case for Jackson Beatty or Stanley Rowe, who keep all the really good stuff for themselves.

“The good stuff,” Amanda says out loud, wondering when she became so jaded. And what has her more upset—the fact Derek Clemens was acquitted on four charges or found guilty of one?

She stands for several seconds outside her apartment door, almost reluctant to go inside. How many messages from her former husband will she find waiting on her voice mail? Although, surprisingly, there were no further messages from him at work.

Nor are there any now. “Good,” Amanda says, standing in the middle of her all-white kitchen and uncorking the bottle of red wine. “Good,” she repeats, feeling curiously slighted. She fills a large wineglass almost to the top and takes a long sip, deciding she should probably eat something. She opens her fridge, finds nothing but a bottle of orange juice and a dozen containers of assorted
fruit-flavored yogurt. She checks the best-before date of a strawberry-kiwi yogurt and sees that it expired five days ago. Which means all the other yogurts are likewise past their prime, since she bought them all at the same time. How long ago? When was the last time she went shopping for groceries? There isn’t even any milk, for Pete’s sake.

What kind of mother is she, she doesn’t make sure there’s any milk for the baby?

“Luckily, I don’t have a baby,” Amanda states, as if pleading her case. Carrying her wineglass in one hand and the bottle in the other, she walks into the living room. “See? No baby.” She takes another sip of wine, kicks off her shoes, and flops down on her white canvas sofa, downing half the glass in one prolonged gulp, the way her mother used to do.

It’s not really surprising that Ben hasn’t called, she decides. He was never one of those men who couldn’t take a hint. He always knew when to stop, when to give up, when to cut his losses and run.

What is surprising is that he called her at all.

Amanda giggles. Of course the circumstances are rather unusual. It’s not every day your mother commits murder.

Then again, who knows how many people her mother has killed over the years. John Mallins may be the first man she’s dispatched so publicly, but Amanda is convinced there are bodies everywhere.

She downs the rest of her drink, then pours herself another, spilling a few drops on the white tile at her feet, and just missing the corner of her black-bordered white rug. She should really get a few more pieces of furniture for this room. Another chair to fill the empty space by
the left wall, perhaps a coffee table, another lamp. Her apartment has always looked vaguely unfinished, as if someone were just preparing to move in. Or out.

Just the way I like it, she thinks, taking another swallow of her wine as she examines the bare white walls, feeling her shoulders finally starting to relax. “To the man in the moon,” she says, nodding toward it, and taking a sip. “And to Ben, my first ex-husband.” Another sip, longer this time. “And to Sean, my second.” Another sip, and then another. “Hell, to all my ex-husbands, past and future.” She tops up her glass, raises it in the air. “And to all my mother’s unsuspecting victims: Old Mr. Walsh. John Mallins. My father,” she whispers, struggling to her feet. “Oh, no. We are not going there. We are definitely not going anywhere near there.”

The doorbell rings. Amanda stares at the door without moving. After several seconds, it rings again.

“Come on, open up,” a woman’s voice commands.

Amanda goes to the door and opens it without asking who it is. “Janet,” she says to the woman whose light brown bangs all but swamp her forehead. What’s the point of having your brow lifted, she wonders, if you’re going to cover the whole thing up? She thinks of asking, To what do I owe the honor?—but decides she already knows. Instead she settles on, “Would you like a drink?”

“No, thank you.”

Amanda smiles and pours what’s left in the bottle into her glass.

“Can I come in?”

Amanda steps back to allow Janet entry, follows her into the living room, motions toward the sofa. “Please sit down.”

“No, thank you. I won’t be staying long.”

Then why did you ask to come in? Amanda wonders, but decides not to ask. She is too busy staring at Janet’s unnaturally swollen lips. What possesses attractive women like Janet to do such horrible things to themselves? she wonders, then stops herself because she knows the answer. The answer is women like herself. Amanda takes another sip of her drink.

“I’m sure you know why I’m here.”

“I’m sorry. I’ve been meaning to return your call. It’s just that I’ve been so busy—”

“You’re not fooling anyone, you know.”

“I think I better sit down.” Amanda sinks down into her sofa, feels the room spinning around her.

“I know about you and my husband.”

Amanda says nothing. She remembers something about the best defense being a good offense, but has neither the energy nor the willpower to engage in a debate.

“Victor told me all about your little affair.”

Amanda shakes her head in bewilderment. What is it with men and their horrible need to confess? Again she knows the answer. Confession may be good for the soul, but it’s even better for passing off the guilt.

Janet mistakes Amanda’s bewilderment for denial. “You’re trying to tell me you didn’t have an affair with my husband?”

“I’d hardly call it an affair.”

“Really? What would you call sleeping with somebody else’s husband?”

Amanda is much too tired to mount a good rebuttal. “Thoughtless,” she hears herself say. “And stupid. Very stupid.”

“Well, at least you’ve got that right,” Janet agrees, looking distinctly uneasy, as if she’d come prepared for a good fight and wasn’t ready to accept victory so easily. She glares at the wineglass in Amanda’s hand.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like something to drink?” Amanda asks.

“What’s the matter, Mandy? No married men left to drink with?”