Looking for Laura, page 5
“Then you agree that those letters prove he was cheating on me?”
Todd considered his answer, his face softening again, becoming less angry, more reflective. “I don’t know.”
“What else would they be? A correspondence with his grandma? Come on, Todd—don’t defend the indefensible. Your very best friend in the whole wide world was an adulterer. Maybe you covered for him when he was alive—”
“I didn’t!”
“—but it’s a little late to be covering for him now.”
Todd drummed his fingers on the counter. They were broad and blunt tipped and clean. She lifted her gaze to his face. Cute? Tina was obviously a woman of weird taste—anyone who could fall so deeply in love with a man named Howard that she’d tattoo his name above her heart was by definition weird—but Sally would never call Todd cute. He was gruff. Seething. Haunted. His hair was mussed and wavy, his apparel expensive yet somehow dowdy, the blazer a dull gray tweed, the trousers not quite baggy enough to be fashionable but not tight enough to look tailored, the charcoal-gray shirt wrinkled. Cute was for puppies and candy canes, blue jeans and dimples. Todd didn’t have dimples.
“You want a cup of coffee?” she asked again, because he seemed tense. Nothing like a shot of high-octane caffeine to soothe the nerves, she thought sarcastically. But he seemed as if he needed something, and coffee was the strongest drug she could offer him.
“No. I’ve got to go to work. I just wanted to tell you I don’t know anything about Laura.”
If he was lying, he was good at it. He looked earnest and bewildered, even upset. He wasn’t entitled to be upset—it wasn’t as if Paul had done him wrong—but he certainly seemed bothered by the whole thing.
“Where are the letters?” she asked.
“They’re at my house.”
“I want them back.”
“Why?”
She had to think about that. Why did she want to possess the miserable evidence that her marriage had been a fraud? She wouldn’t be using the fireplace until next winter, so she wasn’t going to have occasion to burn them in the next eight or nine months. What did she need them for?
An excuse to hate Paul. An excuse not to miss him, not to mourn him, not to want to wrap herself up in his sweaters and think about what a wonderful husband he’d been.
“I was thinking,” Todd said, “that I’d like to investigate this further.”
“Investigate what?”
“Laura.”
Oh, great. Todd was probably figuring that Laura had to be someone special. A hot prospect, gorgeous and sexy, someone Paul could love and Todd could approve of. She’d likely be the antithesis of Sally—rich, well bred, endowed with a Hahvahd accent. Maybe she’d gone to finishing school and was a member of the Junior League. Maybe she was thin and blond and wore miniskirts and laughed at Paul’s jokes. Maybe she was kinky in bed.
Todd probably wanted to track Laura down so he could console the poor woman. She’d lost her lover, hadn’t she? Todd could find her and ease her loneliness. He could try his luck with her and learn whether she’d been worth Paul’s breaking his wedding vows over.
Of course she’d been worth it. Paul wouldn’t have broken his vows otherwise. He hadn’t been the kind of man who did things just for fun. He’d always been intent, focused, organized. Laura must have fit into his life in just the right way. She’d thought the knife Paul had given her was vulgar, just as Paul had thought it was vulgar when Sally had given it to him. They’d probably laughed about it behind Sally’s back, never acknowledging that Sally had given it to Paul because it had been the most precious object she owned.
If Todd had seen the knife, he probably would have laughed at it, too. He’d never done anything to hide his loathing of her. His best friend had married her under pressure, out of obligation. Todd obviously believed this was her fault.
“The letters belong to me,” she said, mostly to spite him.
“I wasn’t thinking of keeping them. I just wanted to hang on to them for a while, to see if I could figure out just who the hell she was.”
“Why should you care?”
He ruminated for a moment. “I can’t believe he’d do something like this behind my back,” he finally admitted. “I was his best friend. I can’t believe he kept Laura a secret from me.”
“He kept her a secret from me,” Sally pointed out.
“Of course he did. You were his wife.”
She nearly reached over the counter and slapped him. But she sensed that he hadn’t meant to wound her with his words. He looked too confused. He’d just fired into the air, and the bullet had wound up hitting her.
“You can keep the letters on one condition,” she stipulated, grabbing the sponge and wiping the counter. She felt a surge of nervous energy. Offering to cooperate with Todd was an alien idea; it made her edgy.
“What’s that?”
“Anything you find, you’ve got to tell me.”
“No,” he said quickly.
She did reach across the counter this time, not to slap him but to grab him. Unfortunately, she still had the sponge in her hand, and she wound up squeezing water from it onto his sleeve. Dropping the sponge, she clung to the soggy wool to prevent him from backing away. “You’re not going to keep me in the dark, Todd. That’s the deal. I’ve been lied to enough. Bad enough your buddy lied to me. I won’t have you lying to me, too.”
He stared at the wet spot on his sleeve, at her hand arched around it. Her fingers were stubby, her nails short and unpolished because she never had time to take care of them. Sally bet Laura had gorgeous hands, the sort of hands that could model in commercials for moisturizers and Swiss watches.
Todd didn’t try to shake free of her, though. He simply stared at her hand on his forearm. After a moment, he sighed. “The thing is, anything I find out is probably going to hurt you. There’s no need for you to go through that kind of hurt.”
Did Todd want to spare her? Did he actually care enough to want to protect her from pain? He’d never expressed any concern for her before. Why did he suddenly want to be nice to her?
He didn’t want to. He was only pretending to be nice so he wouldn’t have to share with her whatever he might learn about Laura. “I’ve already been hurt by this,” Sally argued. “Nothing you find out is going to hurt worse.”
“I’m not so sure of that.”
She released his arm, picked up the sponge and surprised herself by smiling. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m pretty tough. Go ahead and find out what you can, but if you don’t tell me, you’re dead.”
“You’re going to kill me?”
She shrugged. “It’s too late to kill Paul, so I guess you’ll have to do.”
He pulled a face. “Okay, then. Open yourself up for more heartache. That’s what it’s going to be.”
“I can hardly wait,” she muttered, then turned from him. There was nothing more to say. Todd would find things out, he would tell her, and he would probably be annoyed when she wasn’t as crushed as he’d expected her to be. Or else she would be devastated, and he’d be annoyed because she’d forced him to tell her this devastating information. Either way he’d be annoyed, which was fine with her.
He hesitated for a few seconds, then headed for the doors. She turned around. He looked rumpled from behind, like a basketball player who’d crammed his street clothes into his gym bag and now was forced to wear them wrinkled. She’d never noticed how long his legs were. On those unfortunate occasions when she’d been unable to avoid him, she’d generally had Paul to focus on, and she’d paid Todd as little attention as possible.
Cute? Not by any stretch.
Damn. She didn’t want to have to depend on him for information. But she refused to remain in ignorance. Anything he found out, she wanted to know. She wasn’t going to allow him to smirk behind her back. She was going to stay on top of this, get to the bottom of this, pull it inside out and expose it to the light, and if she got hurt along the way, big deal.
Four
The scent of coffee lingered in Todd’s nostrils as he strolled east down Main Street, away from the retail enterprises that catered to the college kids—the boutiques, the convenience stores, the shops that sold perfumed candles and chunky pottery and T-shirts that said Perfect GPA: Gross Party Animal—and toward what he’d always considered the real Winfield. He passed Town Hall, an oppressive gothic edifice of dark granite and leaded glass. It was the sort of building inside which you could imagine people arguing endlessly about the capacity of Winfield’s sewers. He passed the bank, the post office and the stubbornly untrendy Gould’s Department Store, where his parents purchased all their clothes, just as their parents had before them. He passed squat two-story brick and brownstone buildings containing the offices of dentists, accountants, surveyors, chiropractors, insurance brokers and Madame Constanza, tarot card reader.
Downtown ended at the railroad tracks, an overpass above Main Street that descended to street level at the station a few blocks south. The building that housed the Valley News was just steps from the station; the newspaper used to receive its rolls of blank newsprint via the rails, so proximity to the station had been necessary. Now trucks brought in the newsprint, which was stored in a warehouse on the outskirts of town, and buses were the primary mode of public transportation. The train stopped only once a day in each direction. Every few months, Todd would write a staunch editorial urging Amtrak to increase passenger service to Winfield for the sake of the environment.
He wasn’t in the mood to write any staunch editorials today. He’d already stopped in at his office, heard his mother fulminating about her modem through her open door and ducked out before she could catch up with him. With time on his hands and an office to avoid, he’d strolled up Main Street to the New Day Café to tell Sally he’d read the letters.
He’d never been inside the New Day Café before, partly because the coffeemaker in the lounge at the Valley News produced perfectly adequate coffee, partly because he was reluctant to patronize any establishment that had a rhyme in its name, but mostly because he didn’t feel like having to be pleasant with the woman who’d hoodwinked his best friend into a marriage five and a half years ago. In fact, if he hadn’t been looking to waste a few minutes that morning, he wouldn’t have entered the place today. He could as easily have telephoned Sally that evening to tell her he’d read the letters and he had no idea who Laura was. But he was restless, disturbed enough by the letters not to care if the New Day Cafe’s name rhymed or if discussing the letters with Sally in person might not be the smartest thing to do.
He’d exerted himself to resist the café’s charming decor, the lush java fragrance permeating the air, the spiky young waitress with the glut of earrings and Sally herself, big and flouncy in a denim jumper and hoop earrings so large they could double as tire rims. He’d ignored his sudden thirst for a tall, steaming cup of black coffee and the pang of nostalgia for his carefree youth, when spending hours arguing with friends over coffee about whether Shakespeare actually wrote Shakespeare’s plays had seemed like a worthwhile way to kill an afternoon. He’d refused to acknowledge that Sally’s hair looked almost fiery in the sunlight streaming through the window, brown with licks of hot red whipped through it. He’d shut his mind to the possibility that maybe the reason Paul had slept with Sally in the first place was that her hair was remarkable when the sun struck it.
Sally’s hair didn’t matter. What mattered was that her life and Todd’s now intersected in two places: they’d both been close to Paul, and they’d both been duped by Paul.
Todd didn’t want to give the letters back to her—not because he wished to spare her more pain, as he’d said in the café, but because he didn’t want to have to deal with her as he continued his investigation into Laura’s identity. Todd wasn’t through with the letters yet. He wouldn’t be through with them until he’d found Laura and compelled her to explain what the hell Paul had been up to, having an affair and not telling his best friend about it.
Paul had betrayed Sally, but even worse, he’d betrayed Todd. They’d known each other so long, so well. Todd had shared with Paul his mortification about having been cut from his high school’s basketball team because he hadn’t run fast enough, and Paul had confessed his resentment over the way his superrich parents used to jet-set around the world, leaving him to the care of nannies and boarding schools. Paul and Todd had talked about everything that mattered: football, sex, cars and work…yet Paul hadn’t talked to Todd about Laura. If Sally was hurt, Todd was even more hurt. Sally had been just some woman Paul had knocked up and married. Todd had been Paul’s best friend, damn it.
He veered north, deciding to pay a call on Wittig, Mott, Driver and Associates, Attorneys-at-Law. The firm where Paul used to be a partner was located in an angular fieldstone-and-glass building planted on the corner of Main and Clancy streets like a souvenir the Jetsons might have left behind. Back in the sixties it had probably looked daring, streamlined and modern. Now it looked like an architect’s worst mistake.
“Driver” had not yet been expunged from the glass front door. Then again, neither had “and Associates,” although from the day Paul had been named a partner, the firm had had no associates. It had two secretaries and in the summers a clerk, usually a law student on his school break, some poor sucker who’d been unable to land an internship at one of the prestigious firms in Boston or New York. But it sounded grander to call the firm Wittig, Mott, Driver and Associates than Wittig, Mott, Driver and Some Poor Sucker.
They did decent legal work at Wittig, Mott. When Paul had been there, they’d done superb work. But the firm was doomed to be a small-town, small-time operation: real estate, wills, minor torts and misdemeanor defenses. Court TV was never going to find anything worth filming in Winfield. Case law was not made in this town nestled into a valley surrounded by farms, vacation meccas and mediocre ski slopes. The Constitution had never been challenged in Winfield—and if it ever was, someone would be sure to hire counsel from Boston or New York to handle the matter.
Patty Pleckart was stationed at the receptionist’s desk when Todd entered. He’d gone to school with her, and during his junior year had had biblical knowledge of her on the sofa bed in the guest room of Dan Kajema’s house during a party when a lot of bad wine had been circulating. Todd and Patty had had trouble looking at each other for the rest of that year, but then they’d both gotten over it. Now Patty was married and fat, and whenever they ran into each other, Todd chivalrously acted as if he’d never seen her without her panties on.
“What brings you here?” she asked. No need for professional formality between them.
“I was wondering if I could have a peek inside Paul’s office,” he said.
She eyed him suspiciously. She always eyed him suspiciously, as if the mere sight of him forced her to relive that embarrassing night at Dan’s in her mind.
“What do you want in Paul’s office?”
“He was my best friend,” Todd said, managing not to choke on the words. Best friend? The schmuck hadn’t even told him he was having an affair with some lady named Laura! Best friends didn’t hide that kind of information from each other. But he kept a straight face and said, “I just…miss him.”
Patty didn’t look moved.
“I miss him a lot,” Todd emphasized, trying to put a tremor in his voice.
“What does that have to do with his office?”
“If I could stand in it for a few minutes, maybe I’d feel closer to him.”
Patty’s expression changed from merely suspicious to affronted, as if she viewed his request as perverted. Who cared what she thought, though? She hadn’t considered him perverted twenty years ago.
She still didn’t seem prepared to admit him into Paul’s office. “I really, really miss him,” Paul lamented.
Pursing her lips, she pulled a key from the center drawer of her desk, unwedged her broad hips from her chair and waddled over to Paul’s office. The lock gave with a quiet click, and the door swung inward.
“Thanks,” Todd said, slipping inside and closing the door behind him.
Paul had always been tidy, and even in death his anal neatness hovered like a ghost in the room. Three months he’d been gone, and everything was just as he’d left it: the blotter clear, the computer protected by a dustcover, the chair positioned squarely against the desk. The file cabinets shut, the slats of the blinds all adjusted to the same angle, the framed photo of Rosie in a peculiar felt hat—one of Sally’s whimsies, no doubt—positioned on the credenza so Paul would be able to see it from his desk.
Todd didn’t have time to lapse into awe over Paul’s fastidiousness. He was supposed to be grieving in here. He had to work fast.
He moved behind the desk and tugged on the drawers. All of them were locked. Damn. If there was a clue in his desk to Laura’s identity, Todd wouldn’t be able to unearth it.
He crossed the thick carpet to the credenza and opened the cabinets below the shelves. He found stacks of folders, legal pads and other office supplies, including a box of computer diskettes. The disks looked unused. He doubted he’d find anything on them.
If Laura had been a client of his, Paul would have her records not just on file but on disk. Where would he keep his active disks? Besides locked in his desk.
Todd searched the room frantically. Any minute now, Patty could return, and she’d expect to find him in deep grief over the tragic loss of his dear friend. He couldn’t let her catch him scouring the room like a two-bit detective.
Visible from the credenza side of the room, a wall of shelves stood behind Paul’s desk. The shelves held books, a humidor from Paul’s cigar period, a polished brass clock and a carved wooden box.
Todd hurried across the room, lifted the hinged lid of the box and found—yes!—a few computer diskettes. He grabbed them, shoved them into the pocket of his jacket and spun around as George Wittig swept into the office. The firm’s senior partner, George was a doughy-faced man of indeterminate age, although Todd guessed him to be at least sixty. He’d been Todd’s parents’ lawyer since before Todd had been born. Dressed in a brown suit from Gould’s—Todd recognized the cut; his father had at least three identically tailored suits—George shook his head until his jowls trembled. “You shouldn’t be in here, Toddy,” he said.
