“Just put her on,” Vince said.
Cynthia was standing in the bathroom doorway, mouthing, “Who is it?”
I held out the receiver. “Vince,” I told her.
Her eyes went wide. She reached out, put the receiver to her ear. “Vince,” she said.
She let me put my head up next to hers so I could hear both sides of the conversation.
“Cynthia,” he said. “I need to know whether you’ve brought in the police. Are they there now?”
“Why would I have called the police, Vince?”
“Because there was an incident. At your home. Not your apartment. About an hour ago.”
“That’s right,” she said. “There was. How would you know about that?” She gave me a quick look.
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“No,” Cynthia said. “The police are not involved.” She paused. “Yet.”
Another pause, at Vince’s end. Was that a sigh of relief?
“That’s good,” he said. “I owe you an apology.”
Cynthia’s face started to flush. “An apology? That was you? That was one of your goons?”
“Like I said, I owe you an—”
“No!” she said. “You owe me a fuck of a lot more than an apology! You owe me — us! — some answers, that’s what you owe us, you son of a bitch!”
“Cynthia, I—”
“No more bullshit! Why the hell was someone, working for you, trying to get into our house? How did you get a key? What’s going on? And what about Stuart? Was it you? Did you send those texts?”
“What texts would those be?” he said.
“To Grace. She received text messages from Stuart, just a few minutes ago.”
“I didn’t send Grace any texts,” he said.
Those sounded like weasel words to me. He didn’t say he didn’t know about it. But Cynthia was going in another direction.
“Our house, Vince. You sent someone to break into our house. What was the plan? Was it to get Grace? To keep her from talking? My God, is that what the plan was?”
“No,” he said. “He thought the house was empty.”
“He?”
“Bert. It was Bert.”
I took the phone. “Why, Vince? Why would Bert be trying to break into our house?”
Another moment of silence at the other end of the line.
Finally, Vince spoke.
“Because that’s where the money is.”
Forty-three
It was nearly ten thirty when Jane Scavullo arrived at the offices of the Anders and Phelps advertising agency with her purse over one shoulder, the strap of an oversized gym bag, the handle of a tennis racket sticking out one end, over the other.
“Hey, Jane,” Hector, the young guy on the front desk, said as she walked through the lobby. “Lookin’ a little wasted there.”
“Fuck off, Hector,” she said.
“Late, too,” he said with pleasure.
She had to admit she’d looked better. Not nearly enough sleep last night. All that drama with the Cummings house and Grace and Vince. Then, this morning, finding out that Bryce had lied to her. Finally, making a stop on the way to work to deal with another matter.
She dumped the gym bag in the well under her desk and kicked it forward, then saw the light on her phone was flashing. She wasn’t ready yet to face her messages, so she got up and went around the corner to the lunchroom to see whether anyone had put on a pot of coffee yet.
Yes.
She grabbed a mug and filled it. Jane drank her coffee black, the way Vince drank his. If you’re going to have coffee, he’d told her, have coffee. Don’t pussy it up with milk or cream and sugar.
She blew on it, then had a sip, caught her reflection in the glass of a framed newspaper ad: “Riverside Honda! We’ve Rebuilt and NOW We’re Having a Fire Sale!”
Not one of her ads. That was before her stint here began, although she remembered when the car dealership burned down a few years ago. She hadn’t worked at Anders and Phelps — A&P, everyone around here called it — long enough to earn a framed piece of work on the wall, not even here in the lunchroom. And these days, an effective ad was unlikely to be something you could frame. Who advertised in newspapers anymore? Who looked at newspapers anymore? Jane couldn’t remember the last time she’d picked one up, not even the New York Times. When Jane wanted to know what was going on in the world — which was not that often, if you wanted to know the truth — she went online. That’s where she liked to see her clients’ ads placed. You just had to find the right Web site so you were going after the right demographic. Or figured out peoples’ surfing habits and made the ad pop up wherever they went. There was radio, too, which seemed like the oldest medium on the planet next to newspapers. But it was still a good choice. People driving around in their cars all day, radio turned on for background noise. That could work.
Like she gave a shit about any of this.
Was this what she really wanted to do? Mr. Archer, he’d figured her out. She wanted to write, and not stupid jingles for gas stations and furnace repair companies. She wanted to write novels. She wanted to write about what it was like to be a young woman growing up today. Wondering what the hell you were going to do with your life. Having to fight for everything you got. Nobody wanting to give you a permanent job. All short-term contracts. No benefits. The whole 22-22-22 thing. If you were twenty-two, companies worked you twenty-two hours a day for twenty-two thousand dollars a year. And if you didn’t like that, well, tough shit.
Kind of like Anders and Phelps.
She went back to her desk, set the coffee down, and retrieved her messages. She’d made cold calls the day before to a couple of dozen random Milford-area businesses. She got three callbacks, all saying thanks but no thanks, they didn’t have the budget to advertise at this time.
Dumbasses. If things were slow, you had to get your name out there. If there wasn’t a lot of business, you had to make sure what business there was went to you. Jane tried to tell them, but some people were dumb as turnips.
Fucking Bryce.
Talking about his gig, how the evening had gone, but he hadn’t even been there. Jane hadn’t let on that she’d seen his text. She’d left his phone facedown on his bedside table. When he’d come out of the bathroom, she’d said his phone had buzzed. Bryce checked it, turned his back to her.
“What is it?” she’d asked.
“Nothing,” he’d said. “Just Hartley, saying he thinks we should work on some new things.”
She’d seen him fiddling about with his thumb, no doubt deleting the exchange in case she got curious.
If Jane was guessing, it was Melanie. Her supposed friend Melanie. She’d seen something going on between the two of them. Nothing overt. It wasn’t as if Melanie had leaned across the table the last time they were all out for drinks together and shoved her tongue down Bryce’s throat. It was more the way she laughed at everything he said, and let’s face it, Bryce was not exactly Jerry Seinfeld. And Jane was pretty sure she’d caught him looking at her out of the corner of his eye more than once.
Jane got out her phone, brought up her contacts, and tapped on Melanie. Considered how to go about this. What message could she send her friend that might trip her up?
She typed: Hey maybe a drink after work? Did you catch band last night? I couldn’t make it.
Sent the message.
Jane set the phone down, took a file folder out of her desk. She had to write some copy for a law firm’s radio spot and think up some way to make a protective mattress pad sound like something you just had to buy, without using the word “stain.”
Her phone buzzed.