Up close, Gavin is a little scarier than I remembered. I’d seen him on Christian’s balcony a couple of times, but I didn’t get a look at him up close. He’s thick in the neck, shoulders, and chest, and his eyes are set like a predator’s. He reminds me, more than anyone, of that wrestler, Mitchell Kitchens.
“Do you know a man named Christian Newsome, Mr. Dobias?”
I look up, like I’m pondering. “No, never heard the name.”
“What about Nick Caracci?”
I open my hands. “No.”
“Lauren Betancourt? You know her, don’t you, Mr. Dobias?”
That’s not very good procedure. A real FBI agent, not someone posing as one, would have asked that open-ended, innocently. Give me a chance to give the wrong answer, so they could slap me with a 1001 charge for lying to a federal agent.
“I would say I did know Lauren,” I answer.
“Why the past tense? Because she was recently murdered?”
Again, Gavin, bad form—don’t feed me that answer; give me some rope with which to hang myself. (Pardon the pun.)
“Past tense,” I say, “because I have not spoken to Lauren for nineteen years.”
Gavin, trying for the stone-faced, by-the-book special agent, jerks in his position, which is funny to see from someone sitting down. “You haven’t spoken to Lauren for nineteen years?”
“That’s right. Since 2003. She finally left town in 2004, but last time I spoke to her was 2003,” I say. “I heard she was back in town. And I heard about her recent death, obviously.”
He poises a finger in the air. It looks like he’s losing some color to his face. “Mr. Dobias, you know it’s a crime to lie to a federal agent.”
I do know that. And I’m not lying. Okay, maybe I spoke to Lauren after she was dead at her house, but I don’t consider that “speaking to” her. Otherwise, I’m telling the truth.
I have not said one word to Lauren in nineteen years, not since the day I confronted her at the law firm, the morning after I found her fucking my father.
“Mr. Dobias, we know you were having an affair with Lauren,” he says.
“A what? You think I had a relationship with Lauren, of all people? She’s the last person in the world I’d get near.”
That is all true.
“Agent Crane,” I say, “is there some reason you think I was sleeping with Lauren?”
Of course there is. What Gavin knows, he knows via Christian.
“We’ve read your diary, Mr. Dobias.”
Well, technically, Christian read the diary. I prefer the word journal, but this is not a time to quibble over terminology.
“What diary?” I say. “I don’t have a diary.”
That was some of my best work. Full of highs and lows and melodrama, like most passionate romances. And sure, I sprinkled in some truth—the best lies always have some truth, right? But by and large, yeah, the whole thing was a work of fiction. The whirlwind affair, my hemming and hawing, Lauren being pregnant—fake, fake, fake. Necessary for Christian, though, full of details to give the whole thing a real narrative form.
Gavin leans forward. “You’re denying that you kept a diary all about your affair with Lauren?”
“I’m denying every part of that sentence. I don’t have a diary, Agent Crane. And if you know anything about me at all, you’d know that I would sooner drink cyanide than have an affair with Lauren Lemoyne. Or Betancourt, whatever.”
“That’s . . .” Gavin shakes his head. “That’s impossible.”
“If I have a diary,” I say, “show it to me.”
“That’s not how this works, Mr. Dobias.”
“Okay, well, someone must have written a bunch of words on a page. I suppose anybody could say anything, right? It doesn’t have to be true.”
Gavin sits back. He’s playing catch-up. He only knows what Christian told him, and Christian bought the whole routine hook, line, and sinker.
It’s almost humorous. This guy’s a con artist himself, in cahoots with a fellow swindler. And yet the possibility that someone swindled them seems beyond his capacity at the moment.
Here’s the problem. It’s a lot easier to fool someone than to convince someone they’ve been fooled.
“You were about to divorce your wife and leave her for Lauren,” says Gavin, though with a bit less conviction. He’s starting to realize the ice under his feet is a little thinner than he thought.
I let out a harsh chuckle and stare at him. “Are you kidding me?”
“You weren’t about to leave your wife?”
“This is ridiculous.”
“You’re not estranged from your wife right now?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know where you get your infor—”
“Then where has she been?” he snaps. “Where has your wife, Vicky, been since Halloween? Because we’ve been watching your house, Mr. Dobias. And since Halloween night, when both Lauren Betancourt and Christian Newsome were murdered, your wife, Vicky, hasn’t come home.”
“There’s a good reason for that,” I say.
“Yeah? And what’s the reason?”
I cup my hands around my mouth, as if to shout: “I don’t have a wife! I’m not married, and I never have been!”
This meeting is not going as well as Gavin had hoped. He puts a hand on the arm of the couch, as if for support. “Vicky Lanier,” he says, grasping, flailing.
“Vicky who?”
“Vicky . . . Lanier,” he says, almost as a plea.
“Never heard the name.”
“The woman who’s been living with you,” he says.
“Nobody has been living with me. Not someone named Vicky or anyone else. I’m a bachelor. I’ve never been married. Hell, I don’t even have a girlfriend.”
I used to. I love Vicky Townsend. I asked her to marry me once. She said no. I asked her a second time. She said no again. She broke things off because she could see I wanted the whole thing—marriage, kids—and she couldn’t do it. Or at least not with me.
These last few months, stressful as they were plotting out all of this, were at least enjoyable in the sense that Vicky was staying with me. Always coming and going under darkness, using the rear alley garage and coming in under the shield of my privacy fence. But I loved having her here again. I wish she would stay forever. But what I was offering—commitment, love, devotion—was not enough for her.
“You’ve been married for ten years, Mr. Dobias. As of today, ten years.”
Poor Gavin. He’s still trying to keep his chin above water.
Ten years ago, I didn’t even know Vicky. I met her three years ago at Survivors of Suicide, not long after Vicky’s sister, Monica, overdosed on OxyContin. But yeah, Vicky told Christian about the ten-year anniversary. And I milked the hell out of it in the diary.
“We’ve seen a divorce petition,” he adds.
“Sounds like another fake, like the diary,” I say.
“We’ve seen a marriage certificate.”
“Probably another fake, Agent Crane. I mean, how hard would it be to fake a marriage certificate? Look me up, if you like. See if I’m registered with Cook County as married.”
“You don’t have to be registered with the county to be married,” he says. “Not if it’s a foreign marriage.” His eyes are beginning to water. Anger, probably.
“A foreign marriage certificate? Shit, that’d probably be even easier to fake.”
It was, actually. I just downloaded a blank form and edited it on PDF. Took me about half an hour. Vicky helped. She helped a lot with the diary, too, for that matter. Gave me some details from a woman’s perspective.