“You said you loved me,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, trying to catch my breath.
“If it was ever true, then that should be enough.”
“Okay,” I said.
“So no more questions about the drugs and who they were for. No more questions about where I was when my husband was killed.”
“No more questions.”
She stepped forward and put her hands on either side of my neck. “And we’ll trust each other again.”
“Yes.”
“Good,” she said, and then she pulled my head toward her and kissed me.
And this is what she tasted of. She tasted of alcohol, sweet and swollen. She tasted of tobacco, dark and loamy. She tasted of yearning and desperation and a fatal sadness. And oh, yes, she tasted of deceit.
“So what do we do now?” she said after she stopped kissing me, and grabbed my wrists and pulled my hands out from beneath her dead husband’s shirt.
“Breathe?” I said.
“About the police.”
“Oh,” I said. “Them.” I bit my lip to try to bring the feeling back. “We can do nothing and see what happens.”
“Or,” she said.
“Or we can find out who the hell really killed your husband.”
“What if I don’t care who it really was?”
“The police care.”
“Do they? Or do they just want to find someone to pin it on?”
I thought of Sims and his political smile. “I don’t know.”
“Why don’t we find out?” she said.
“You want us to find someone to blame.”
“If you think it will help.”
“An innocent dupe.”
“Maybe not so innocent. But someone to draw attention away from us. At least for the time being.”
“A fall guy.”
“Yes.”
“That’s what I thought you were making of me.”
“Oh, Victor,” she said as she grabbed my tie. She pulled me close, kissed me quick, then let me go and turned away. “Don’t be silly.”
“So who do you have in mind?”
“I don’t know. I’m just thinking.”
That’s what I did for a bit. Remember I said her kiss tasted of deceit. That’s what I was thinking of. She was keeping something from me, something crucial, I could tell. But just then I didn’t want to dig for it. So I searched where the light was better.
“Tell me about Gregor Trocek,” I said.
She spun around. “How do you know about Gregor?”
“I had an early dinner with him just tonight.”
“With Gregor?”
“We shared tapas and beer. And he told me a peculiar story. That your husband tried to hire him to kill me.”
“Gregor and his stories.”
“But I believed him. And I’m afraid the cops will, too.”
“What if it’s true? Is that bad?”
“For both of us. The cops will know that your husband found out we were seeing each other again.”
“But it was almost innocent.”
“Almost,” I said. “That’s a hole big enough to drive a prison van through. It gives us both a motive.”
“So what do we do?”
“Gregor said he’s looking for Miles Cave. The police asked me about the very same name. Do you know this Cave person?”
“No,” she said.
“Ever hear of him before?”
“An old friend who had something to do with Wren’s business.”
“What was he, a patient?”
“No, not a patient. Wren had retired from medicine.”
“A little young for the old-age home, wasn’t he?”
“The retirement was not wholly by choice. Wren was sued. By a bitter transsexual whose sex-change operation went bad.”
“There was a lawsuit?”
“It didn’t go well. After the loss, the hospital suspended his privileges. So Wren, who had been losing interest in penises anyway, found a new profession in money management.”
“What did he know of money management?”
“Not enough, I suppose. The company, called Inner Circle Investments, was having trouble. And one of the names I heard Wren mention in his business conversations was Miles Cave.”
“Was he a partner?” I said.
“I don’t know.”
“An investor?”
“I never met him.”
“And you told that to Gregor?”
“He was a bit skeptical, but he didn’t know Miles Cave either.”
“So,” I said, rounding out the vowel as I thought it through, “no one knows who this Miles Cave is.”
“I suppose.”
“A mystery man who might be the key to everything.”
Julia looked at me for a moment, her face a cipher as she worked it out, and then she smiled. “So he might be the one,” she said.
“He might.”
She stepped up to me and grabbed my belt. “How do we find out?”
“We do the most obvious thing.”
She leaned forward, rose on tiptoe, kissed me again. I reached inside the shirt, grabbed her waist, pulled her close, kissed her back. Even as the figure sprawled on the floor stared gape-mouthed at us both, I kissed her back.
You want to know what deceit tastes like? It’s sweet. Like honey. Charged with electricity. Laced with amnesia. It is why adultery will never go out of fashion, why sincerity fails, why sex with strangers is more fun than ever it ought to be. It is the very taste of old love reclaimed, which might be the sweetest deceit of all. The taste of her made me stupid, and the more I tasted it, the stupider I wanted to become.
She pulled away slightly, moved her chin to the side, her lips to my neck. “What do you mean, ‘the most obvious thing’?”
“You want to find the dirt in this world, there’s only one route to take.”
“What’s that?”
“Follow the money.”
I bent her back like a bow and snapped at her ear.
“Maybe it’s time,” I said, “for the grieving widow to claim her marital assets.”
16
I had a moment of clarity the next morning, when I spied Julia Denniston walking up Locust Street to meet me in front of the offices of Inner Circle Investments.
She was well dressed, in widow black, of course, her figure thin, her legs long and well shaped. Her stride was her usual careless glide, but now with the edge of some intriguing sense of purpose. Her head, covered by a black, wide-brimmed straw hat, swiveled easily on her proud neck, her inky black hair was silky and well coiffed, the flow of her arms was loose. She was a lovely woman, absolutely, as lovely as hundreds who walk back and forth on Locust Street each day. But she wasn’t as young as the woman who first caught my eye in that coffee bar, and there was now a brittle disappointment that showed in her tense eyes. Objectively, she was nothing to get all shivery about, nothing to get stupid over. You put her in a lineup and you’d pass her by and pick that one, the other one, with the green eyes and the breasts of a Big Ten cheerleader.
What the hell was I doing?
Then she spotted me and smiled, and I remembered. I remembered the fever I had felt the night before, the fusion of desire and remembrance. She wasn’t just another appealing woman on the street, she was my heartbreak and my history and my hope.
She came up to me, put her hand on my forearm. “Hi,” she said with a lover’s intonation, which meant she had a long memory, because we still hadn’t as of yet consummated our reunion. The night before, she had pushed me away even as her earlobe was pinched between my teeth. It was late. Gwen was still awake. It was too soon after her husband’s death. It was like he was still in the room. “All the better,” I had said, with the tact of a brontosaurus in heat, but still she had pushed me away and still I had let her.
“You ready?” I said now, as we stood outside the building.
“I suppose.” She glanced up at my hair, squinted a bit, looked back into my eyes. “So you think this Miles Cave gambit will work?”