The Boyfriend (12 page)

By the beginning of August, he was so thoroughly enthralled that she was the central and only essential part of his life. He woke up from dreams about her to think about her. In silences he heard her voice. While his parents and Mindy’s were at work, they had the run of both houses. They had sex in every room.

There was never a slipped word, a revealing look. He never told any friends or acted as though he had been doing something they didn’t know about. He never made a mistake. When she walked from her house to her car, he didn’t even seem to notice her.

Their affair didn’t end when she’d said it would. It continued through the fall, winter, and spring until the following summer.

One day Joey saw a new man arrive at her house in a black Audi. He got out, walked to her door, and rang the bell. On later reflection, Joey Moreland realized that what he had seen was Eric Coates’s homecoming from the army. When the doorbell rang, Mindy flung open the door, threw herself on him, and kissed him.

The next afternoon as soon as Joey came home from school, Mindy arrived, came in through the kitchen door, and met him inside his room. He looked at her beautiful green eyes and the tentative posture and knew there was trouble. Most days as she came in the door of his room she was already unbuttoning or unzipping. Today she was standing looking at him with her hands knitted as though she suddenly didn’t know what to do with them.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Eric came home.”

“Who’s Eric?”

“My boyfriend.”

“Oh. Where’d he come home from?”

“A lot of places. He was a soldier,” she said.

“So you and me—you know—is this going to be a problem?”

She nodded. “You knew it wasn’t going to be forever. The first time I came over I’m sure I told you it was just for then, just for last summer. I’m, like, eight or nine years older than you.”

“I love you.”

She put her arms around him and kissed his forehead, his cheek, his eyelids. “I love you. You know that. But if word of what we did got out, I’d be in jail, and your life would be ruined. It’s not normal. At first this was just going to be me having some fun while Eric was deployed, trying to keep myself from dying of loneliness by playing with the cute boy next door. It would keep me from cheating on Eric. But by the end of the summer it was, like, the best sex ever. And I feel closer to you than I’ve ever been to anyone. But it’s got to end now so we can fit in with other people and have okay lives. Do you understand?”

He was devastated. He just felt deprived, rejected, and sad. He didn’t know what to say to change her mind. “You can’t just do this. I don’t want any other life.”

The time he had devoted to Mindy he now devoted to Eric. He began to learn about Eric. He got the license number of the Audi and used it to get the name and address of the owner. He rode his bicycle to Eric’s apartment, hid it in a carport behind the building, and walked past, recording the hour and the people who came to the apartment building. He wrote everything he observed in a pocket notepad. On weekends he sat at his bedroom window and watched for Eric’s car to arrive and pick up Mindy. His preparation took sixty-two days. Summer had already become fall before he was ready.

He visited his uncle Dave’s apartment across town while his uncle was at work. He got in using the key his uncle kept with his parents in case of an emergency, and he didn’t spend long inside. He examined his uncle’s guns and settled on a compact .38 revolver, partly because it was way in the back of the drawer, where Uncle Dave probably seldom checked on it or took it out to fire, and partly because it was simpler than the semiautomatics, and he had no idea how to clear a jam.

The next night he rode his bike to Eric’s apartment. He wore black jeans, a navy blue hooded sweatshirt, and black sneakers. He hid the bike in the back of a different carport, it seem that had been vacant during the whole time since he had been coming to study Eric.

The rest of the job was not as difficult as he had expected. He waited in the bushes near the lot in the back of the apartment building where Eric parked his car. At a little after two a.m., when the bars closed, Eric drove up the street, turned into the driveway of the apartment building, and parked his car in his assigned carport. Before he could get the door all the way open to get out, Joey was beside him, firing over the driver’s-side door into his head.

Joey put away the gun, walked two carports down the row, got on his bike, and left. He rode fast along the route he had planned. It went down a pedestrian path across a large city park, along the side of the high school athletic field, and along the route of some old railroad tracks that had been torn out. His ride crossed a quiet street and then led right up to his house. He was never on a street that the police patrolled, and never passed a house with a light burning. He was upstairs in his bedroom by two-forty-five, hid the gun inside the box of a Monopoly game, and was asleep by three.

The next day he unloaded the revolver, did his best to clean the surfaces with a soft cloth made of a worn T-shirt, and then pushed some strips of the cloth through the barrel with a new, unsharpened pencil. Finally he rode his bike to his uncle’s apartment and returned the gun to its box in the back of the drawer. There was now one more round missing from the already-opened box of ammunition, but he was sure his uncle wouldn’t notice.

A few days later, he overheard his parents talking about Mindy She had always been such a lovely girl. Nobody could blame her for moving away from Jamestown after what had happened, but losing her struck them as a tragedy for the neighborhood.

Joey Moreland opened the laptop again that night, signed onto the hotel’s network as a guest with one of the accounts he sometimes used, and began to move down the titles of the escort ads. He moved quickly past “Busty Latina, 21” and “Sexy MILF, 35” and “Platinum Blond Hottie, 23” and the others. He was still searching for the right girl. It was like holding a mask in his hand, and trying to find the face that would fit it perfectly.

When the boast was vague, like “Stunning Beauty, 22” or “You will never forget me, 27” he would often click to see the ad. He didn’t like to do it, because about half the pictures reminded him of what an unappetizing business this could be. The ads were often misspelled and ungrammatical. There were girls claiming to be eighteen who looked is if they belonged on a playground, and others claiming to be thirty who looked a hard-worn sixty.

Most of the pictures were shots taken by the girls themselves by holding a smart phone up to a mirror while they assumed a pose that they hoped would be titillating, but was often just a grotesque contortion that reminded him of cubist paintings in which the front and back of a model were shown simultaneously. The reflected backdrop would be a bathroom in a cheap hotel or an apartment bedroom so cramped and cluttered that a client would have to move clothes and shoes just to get to the narrow bed.

He saw another ambiguous title: “I promise to look my best and be on my worst behavior, 24.” He clicked on that title, and there she was again, just as she had been in other cities. It really was only a matter of searching for her. The same strawberry blond hair; the smile; the skin that looked like porcelain on her breasts and buttocks but was so heavily freckled on the shoulders that the freckles nearly melted into a tan.

He enlarged the picture and looked more closely. The eyes were bright blue, and the eyelashes that he knew were blond had been covered with black mascara. Her expression was just the right combination of amusement at the human condition—the absurd set of common needs that were about to bring them together—and a hint of the longing she was feeling for a man like him. He was sure. He copied the number and called it on his cell phone.

When the recording prompted him, Moreland said, “Hi. My name is John Carter. I saw your ad on Backpage, and I wondered if you had time to see me tonight. I’m at the Four Seasons and my room is five ninety-two. You can call the hotel and get connected to me. I’ll be here for a while.” He hung up and turned on the television.

It took her two or three minutes to call back. He lifted the phone. “Yes?”

“Hi. This is Kelly. You called me?”

“Yes, I did. How are you?”

“I’m fine. You said you’d like to see me tonight.”

“I would.”

“Do you want to come to my place?”

“I’d like you to come to the Four Seasons.”

“It’s a little more expensive if I come to you. An extra hundred.”

“That’s okay.”

“What time?”

“Can you come at ten?”

“Yes. Please have my gift ready. All right?”

“All right. I’ll be looking forward to seeing you at ten.”

In the fourteen years since Mindy had disappeared from his life, he had continued to learn what he could about women. He was a good listener because he was listening for vulnerabilities, for ways he could exert power over them. He had to charm them into wanting him to win, even though winning was getting them to abandon self-protection and common sense. He had become highly skilled at satisfying women sexually. His face was unlined and boyish even though he was twenty-eight, and that helped. Many escorts liked his unthreatening face.

He showered, shaved especially close, and met her coming in the doors to the lobby. “Kelly?” he said.

She looked at him, and he could see her eyes focus on him as her mind worked rapidly to see if she recognized him or if he was a cop. He was smiling, so after that instant she smiled too. It was a simple trick. Smiling released endorphins. She would begin feeling good in a few seconds. “I’m very pleased to meet you.” He said it into her right ear because that was the shortcut to the left brain, which was the side that needed to be alerted that he was the one. He took her arm in the first couple of seconds and walked her into the bar, because a touch gave a woman the subconscious impression he was a strong, confident man taking charge of her. They sat at a table in the bar, and he said, “I’m going to have a martini. Would you like one?”

Kelly might or might not have ordered a martini if she had been left alone, but once he had said it she seemed to find herself wanting one without thinking about alternatives. She said, “Yes, please.”

“You’re very beautiful,” he said. “And you have perfect taste in clothes.” His smile broadened and he leaned close to her right ear again to whisper, “I’m very pleased.”

She could hardly not have known she had beauty, because her livelihood depended on it, and she probably heard it every day. But perfect taste was a form of intelligence, and the compliment made her feel even more desirable, and that made her more likely to desire.

He said, “Are you Irish? I can’t help wondering.”

She said, “I’m part Irish, with a little German thrown in.”

He kept her talking so he could mirror her expressions. “Did you grow up right in Boston?”

“No. My family is still in the South,” she said. “I still have the accent when I let myself have it.” She said that part with the accent. “You can’t be from here, or we wouldn’t be in a hotel.”

He appeared delighted by everything she said, and never took his eyes away from hers. “I was born in California,” he said. “I travel around a lot on business. I just got here a few hours ago.”

He noticed that she was already beginning to mirror his expressions and his posture. Everything was working already, without much effort on his part.

The waitress arrived with the martinis, and she gave him a chance to take out his soft leather wallet and open it to flash a thick layer of hundred-dollar bills while he found a fifty for the drinks. He noticed that Kelly was not the only woman whose eyes focused for a millisecond on the wallet and then flicked back to his eyes. The waitress gave him a smile to rival Kelly’s, and as she thanked him her head gave a little bow. It was aphrodisiac to a woman to notice that other women acknowledged the value of the man she was with.

He carefully lifted his glass and clinked it against Kelly’s, then leaned back in his chair and sipped it while he studied her over the rim. “That’s good, isn’t it?”

“I like it,” she said. “I don’t drink very often, though.”

“Why not?”

“It’s bad for my figure and my complexion.”

“No wonder you’re so beautiful.” Alcohol also made women less likely to be critical of men’s failings, and less inhibited. He estimated that she weighed about a hundred twenty, so one drink would be enough to make her feel good, but two would make her sleepy. He asked her to have dinner with him.

At dinner he made an effort to learn more about her. She was smart, and seemed to have some education. She knew what artists had exhibitions in Boston museums at the moment. “You might go and see the Newman show at the Hibble Gallery tomorrow,” she said. “If you can keep yourself from hiring another girl for one afternoon. And if you haven’t been to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on one of your trips here, you should go. The concierge will arrange it for you, and the doorman will tuck you right in the taxicab.”

She was intrigued by and grateful for the delicious and expensive dishes he ordered for her, but as he’d expected, only tasted them and left them unfinished.

He asked her about the books she liked, and she was vague about that. He told her honestly about his own preferences. “I travel most of the time, so I read a lot. Lately I’ve been driving, so I listen to audiobooks on the road.”

He expected her to ask which books, but instead she said, “Why do you travel?”

“I’m a consultant. I go to businesses and I tell people what to do, then go away and let them take all the credit.”

“I’m sure you’re good at it. You eat at very expensive places.” She leaned forward and said quietly, “I’ve been wondering. What are you expecting tonight?”

“Pardon me?”

“It’s okay. We’re not talking loudly, and nobody’s close enough to hear.”

“You mean, do I have a fetish or something unusual in mind?”

“Well, you might. And that would be just fine. I’m not at all judgmental. But you’ve been very nice to me, and I don’t want to disappoint you.”