Nine Lives, page 2
She wasn’t surprised to see Aaron Berlin at the Club Room after work, but she was surprised that he wasn’t alone. He was sitting at a booth with Roger Johnson, the outgoing special agent in charge. Roger spotted her entering the bar and asked her to join them.
“I’m going to have dinner with Anthony at the bar, but thanks, anyway.”
Anthony, the bartender, had a glass of Pinot Noir already poured and waiting for her when she slid onto the padded leather stool. She wondered briefly if it looked bad that she’d shunned her colleagues in favor of eating alone at the bar, then shrugged it off. Johnson was moving to the Schenectady office, and Berlin, well, fuck him.
She drank her wine slowly, doing the Times crossword, Anthony helping her out when he wasn’t busy. She asked for a second glass plus a half order of penne with puttanesca sauce and a garden salad on the side. When she’d finished the crossword, only unsure about one of the answers, she slid the folded newspaper back into her purse, paid the bill, and prepared to leave.
“Two Belvederes please, Anthony. On the rocks.” Aaron deposited himself onto the stool next to her.
“Uh, no thanks, Aaron. I was about to go home.” Jessica looked over Aaron’s shoulder and saw Roger making his way to the exit.
“One drink, Jess. Please.”
She agreed, and, surprisingly, he asked her several questions about her recent life before starting in on his favorite topic: their affair and why it had ended.
“You’re married,” she said.
“Sort of. Not really. My wife has affairs. I know she does.”
“That’s not really the point.”
“Then what’s the point?”
“Honestly, I don’t even know if I want to be in a relationship, but if I did want to be in one, it would be with someone closer to my age, someone unattached, someone without kids, someone I don’t work with, someone who isn’t a narcissist …”
“I already don’t trust this guy.”
Jessica smiled, even though his attempt at humor was the type of thing she had grown to dislike about him. When they’d first gotten involved, there had been a real intensity between them. Aaron was a little bit of a jerk—she’d always known that—but he took his job seriously, he had empathy, and there had been a week early on when she thought they might be falling in love. She sipped at her vodka with slightly numb lips and knew she’d made a mistake by agreeing to one more drink. She decided to change the subject. “You really didn’t think there was anything strange about that list I got in the mail?”
Aaron was signaling Anthony with just his eyes, trying to get two more drinks. “What? That list of names? That bothered you?”
“It didn’t bother me. I was just interested. It was unusual.”
“I guess so. If you want, I’ll get Rick to cross-reference them in the database. Maybe there is a connection. Maybe you all won three free days at a timeshare in Fort Myers.”
“Maybe you’re right. Just some glitch in some mass mailing system.”
Two more vodkas arrived, and Jessica eyed the glass, knowing that the difference between drinking it and not drinking it was the difference between a full night’s sleep and Aaron winding up in her bed tonight.
She slid off the stool and began to put on her coat. “Sorry, Aaron. I need an early night.”
He pursed his lips, but said, “Okay. Lunch soon?”
“Sure.”
Anthony glanced over at Jessica, and she thought she saw a little bit of approval in his eyes. Although he’d never said it out loud, Anthony was not a huge fan of Aaron. “You leaving so soon?” the bartender asked, a crooked smile on his face.
“I am, Anthony. Thanks again, and tell Maria that I loved the penne.”
Anthony was reaching for the extra vodka on the bar when Aaron stopped him. “That’s okay, T, we’ll keep it.” He poured her drink into his as Jessica knotted her scarf around her neck. She turned and left before she changed her mind. She really did need an early night.
5
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 2:00 P.M.
Thursdays were Caroline Geddes’s office hours, two hours that she had begun to rely on as quiet writing time, due to the low number of students who stopped by to see her. That Thursday there was only one, Elaine Cheong, who dropped by unannounced, while two students who had previously arranged meetings didn’t show up. Caroline had taught long enough—a dozen years now—to see how email had transformed the student-teacher relationship. Today’s students went out of their way to do everything via email, or via the wiki she’d set up for some of her larger courses. They sent their late papers, their excuses, and even their grade-grubbing compliments, all via email. One of her male students from last year might even have sent a sexual proposition to her, although, despite twenty years spent parsing text, she still wasn’t sure what he’d meant by “Wish you were my teacher aide, know what I mean? jk.” It took her half a day to realize that jk stood for “just kidding.”
Elaine, with tears in her eyes, explained to Caroline that she was late for the second class of the semester because of a problem with a faulty alarm clock and that was why she’d missed the pop quiz. “It’s not fair that I can’t make it up,” she said, for the second time.
“It was a pop quiz. It’ll be a very small part of your final grade.”
“I need to get an A in this class.”
“Tell you what, Elaine, I’ll give you a new pop quiz right now.”
Caroline pulled a piece of paper out of one of her notebooks and quickly jotted down three new questions on one of the Wordsworth poems that they hadn’t gone over in class that morning but which had been assigned. Caroline pushed the sheet of paper across to her student and told her she had ten minutes.
“This isn’t the same quiz,” Elaine said, two distinct lines appearing on her otherwise flawless forehead.
“No, it’s a new pop quiz.”
Caroline pulled out a book and pretended to read it while watching the girl bite at her lower lip so hard that she left little teeth impressions in it. “I didn’t know we were supposed to memorize dates.”
“Just do your best, and at least you’ll get better than a zero.”
Elaine hunched herself over the paper and scrawled some answers, and just before Caroline was going to announce that time was up, she pushed the paper across the desk. “I still don’t think it’s fair,” she said, but almost so low that Caroline couldn’t hear it.
“I’ll see you in class next week,” Caroline said, and Elaine left in a huff, her phone already in her hand. Caroline imagined she was texting someone about what a bitch her English professor was. It didn’t matter; there were twenty minutes left in her office hours. She glanced at her emails and there was nothing pressing to respond to, so she opened the email she’d received two weeks earlier from David Latour, the professor from McGill University whom Caroline had met when she’d delivered her lecture on Joanna Baillie at the Scholarly Theories Conference in Toronto over the summer.
He’d written to say how much he’d enjoyed her talk, but also to share a poem he thought she might enjoy by Louis MacNeice, called “Wolves.” Its opening line was “I do not want to be reflective anymore,” and Caroline had had that particular line trapped in her head ever since she’d read it. She reread the poem now, nearly wrote David to tell him again how much she loved it but stopped herself. It was enough that she’d written him once, and enough to think she might see him again at some further date and be able to tell him in person.
Her office hours over, she crossed the campus to where her Prius was parked, then drove to her two-bedroom cottage in the Water Hill section of Ann Arbor. She’d left Fable, her adventurous cat, out all day, and was relieved to see him waiting on the front porch for her, relieved also that he hadn’t caught and killed a bird and left it on her doormat. He followed her in, pinned his gray ears back, and bolted toward the food bowl in the kitchen. Estrella, her shy orange tabby, leaped up onto the dining room table to greet her. Caroline flipped through the mail she’d received, pulling out a white envelope, her address printed out on a mailing label in Courier font. A single Forever stamp with the American flag was in the right-hand corner. There was no return address.
Something about it seemed personal somehow, even though there wasn’t anything remotely personal about it. She set aside the excise tax bill, the solicitation letters from any one of the animal welfare nonprofits she got—Pet Smart had clearly sold her address to some sort of mailing list—and slit open the envelope with an unvarnished thumbnail.
Inside was a single piece of paper, computer printed, the font Courier, like the mailing label.
Matthew Beaumont
Jay Coates
Ethan Dart
Caroline Geddes
Frank Hopkins
Alison Horne
Arthur Kruse
Jack Radebaugh
Jessica Winslow
Caroline looked into the envelope to see if there was anything else, but there wasn’t. Just the single sheet of paper with the list of names, none of which was familiar to her, except for her own, of course.
Estrella tried to rub her cheek against the edge of the paper, and Fable loudly mewled from the kitchen, waiting for food. A horrible thought went through Caroline’s mind: It is a list of death. Someone has marked us for death. She thought this automatically, in the same way that she automatically thought that every time her phone rang it was news of some unspeakable tragedy. She read the list again, then laughed internally at how morbid she’d been. Of course, if it was a list of living people, they were all marked for death, sooner or later. It was eerie, no matter what, and reminded her of that Muriel Spark book, Memento Mori. Of course, she was reading too much into what was probably a list of no consequence. But that was what she did with her life, that was her profession—she read into things.
“‘I do not want to be reflective anymore,’” she recited to herself, “‘envying and despising unreflective things.’” MacNeice was onto something there, even though he’d probably been talking about the political situation in Germany right before World War II and not about a tendency to overanalyze. But in her own life, though not necessarily in her class, she allowed for personal interpretations of literary works. What was the next line in the poem? Was it “I do not want to be a tragic or a philosophic chorus,” then something, something, then “And after that let the sea flow over us”? Maybe tonight she’d memorize the whole poem. It was the one good thing that her mother had taught her to do. Memorize and recite poetry.
Caroline rubbed Estrella beneath the chin, feeling the vibrations of her purr against her fingers. Then she went into the kitchen to feed Fable.
6
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 12:33 P.M.
He glanced through the list, didn’t think much of it, and threw it into the kitchen wastebasket. Jay Coates had a callback for a commercial that day and was feeling halfway bullish about his prospects. It was an ad for instant rice, and he would be playing the elitist chef won over by the crappy processed rice in a box. His meeting was at three that afternoon in Burbank, so that gave him two hours before he’d need to be in the Beemer and on his way.
Even though he’d gone for a short run right after he’d gotten up, he pulled out the rowing machine and did a solid hour on it, finally watching the NCIS episode that his friend Madison was in. It had been on his DVR for weeks, and she’d been asking if he’d watched it yet, hoping for notes. Notes. Jesus. It was NCIS. She had two scenes, and a total of three lines of dialogue. She played a personal trainer at a gym, and the director made sure her tits—he probably thought they were real—were prominently framed in both of her scenes. After watching the whole episode, Jay was relieved that a) it was a crappy role, and b) Madison was crappy in it. The real reason he’d delayed watching her big break was the fear she might have nailed it, and that it might lead to more work for her, and that was something he couldn’t handle right now.
After parking in one of the guest spots outside of the single-story office park where Buchman Creative was housed, Jay did two quick lines of the coke he’d been saving up for just this occasion, then walked across the gluey asphalt in the near ninety-degree heat, hoping he wouldn’t start sweating before the meeting. He was ushered straight in by the doughy receptionist, who had some sort of Midwestern accent, turned down the offer of a bottled water, and asked for tap. Madison had suggested the tap-water move—made you seem down to earth, she’d said. He ran his lines again in front of the two ad writers, creeps who might be younger than he was, although he was not a hundred percent sure, plus Amy Buchman, head of the agency, who swung by because she’d just found five free minutes in the day. When he left, Jay spotted Dan Sweden in the waiting room. They both pretended not to see each other.
His manager called an hour later to tell him that they’d passed, but that Amy was impressed, and if anything else came up, etcetera. The call came while he’d been walking through the Brentwood Country Mart, considering buying some new sneakers at James Perse. Instead, he went and got onion rings at Barney’s Burgers, sat at a table, and, seething, began to look for a good prospect. It took twenty-five minutes but just as he was finishing his rings, he saw her. She was perfect: late twenties, yoga pants, not quite as pretty as she’d been told she was, and all alone. He followed her, knowing exactly how to blend in, not be noticed, but always keeping her in his peripheral vision. He followed her into Christian Louboutin, where she was pretending she could afford a pair of shoes, and asked the woman behind the desk if Tracy still worked there. She looked confused, then finally asked, “Do you mean Theresa?”
“Right,” Jay said.
“She works on the weekends.”
“Thanks,” Jay said and left the store just as the blonde did.
He trailed her to the parking lot, where she got into a silvery blue Honda Civic, probably purchased by her father when she turned twenty-five. “It’s a very reliable car, sweetie,” he’d undoubtedly said, then she’d kissed him on the cheek and told him in her little girl’s voice how much she loved her daddy.
After she got into her car and pulled straight out of her parking spot, Jay trotted to his Beemer, managing to find her again on San Vicente heading east. He followed her all the way to Koreatown, memorizing her license plate number. She parked in front of a two-story stucco apartment building and entered through the plate-glass doors using a key on the same chain as her car key. This was where she lived. Jay pulled into the strip mall across the street, parked so that he could keep an eye on the building, and lit one of the two Parliament cigarettes he allowed himself per day. He got on his phone, and went to Instagram, punching in #brentwoodcountrymart, not really expecting to get a hit, but not entirely surprised when the most recent image, a close-up of some latte foam swirled into a heart, was posted by an abbybritell. Her pictures, mostly selfies, confirmed it was the blonde he’d been following. She called herself an actress, writer, and tai chi instructor.
And like that, he owned her. Her name. Her personal photos. He knew where she lived, what she drove. And Jay knew, without a doubt, that he could murder her in the next twenty-four hours. And no one would ever catch him. There was zero connection between Jay Coates from West Hollywood and Abby Britell from Koreatown. He could imagine the headlines already. A pretty white girl murdered in Hollywood. It would be everywhere. He started to fantasize about how it would play out but stopped himself. There’d be time for that later, and, right now, just the fact that he’d learned her name and where she lived was giving him a hot buzz of adrenaline. He felt better as he pulled the car out of the lot and drove toward home. He thought he’d feel good the entire drive, but he didn’t, not really. It had been way too easy tracking that woman, and maybe what he really needed to do was to up the game, actually hurt one of those smug bitches, and then see how he felt.
That night, after doing a hundred push-ups, then his facial routine, he called Madison to let her know he’d watched her NCIS.
“Oh, finally. So?”
“It was so, so good. Your tits …”
“I know. They looked great. And can you believe I got three lines?”
“Technically two.”
“I guess so. You’re right.”
“But it was all great. It’s a solid credit, Mads, you should be pleased.”
“Yay. Thank you, Jay.”
He didn’t tell her about the callback, but before they hung up, he did say, “And, Jesus, good makeup there at NCIS, huh?”
“What do you mean?”
“You were worried, remember? You had that outbreak. You could barely tell. I mean, I could tell, but that was because I was looking for it. The makeup really covered it all up.”
“It did,” she said. “They did a good job.”
Jay could hear the insecurity creeping into her voice, and he quickly ended the call, got under the covers. He fell asleep wondering what it would be like if he had the courage to go visit Abby Britell, or some other wannabe just like her, and actually do the things to her that he dreamed of doing. Really show her who was boss. He reached down and allowed himself to wrap his hand around his dick, hard as a piece of rebar now, but didn’t allow himself to do anything more than touch it. He thought some more about Abby Britell but then he was thinking about Amy Buchman (“Amy passed, Jay, but she was really impressed”), and how he’d like to tie her up and take an actual piece of rebar and make her choke on it. It was this thought that finally calmed him down enough to allow him to sleep.
7
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 5:15 P.M.
On his ride home from work—forty minutes of solitude that went way too fast—Matthew Beaumont recited the facts of his life. It was a daily routine, a way of remembering what was good, and reminding himself about the things that needed work.
