A Time of Torment (6 page)

His parents had left him some money, for which he was grateful as he’d been wiped out by the divorce, despite anything his ex-wife might have claimed to the contrary, although she managed to get her hands on some of his inheritance too. The bequest might have been enough to enable him to resettle in another state, were it not for his status as a registered sex offender and the requirement to engage with probation and counseling services in Maine on that basis. He’d been given a list of his conditions of probation, which included, on top of the standard requirements – refrain from using drugs and avoid excessive alcohol intake, find a job, pay the court-determined probation and Department of Corrections supervision fees – an injunction against contact with anyone under the age of eighteen, and any use of a computer with an Internet connection. The latter stipulation meant that he had to get the private detective’s number the old-fashioned way, through directory assistance. He’d bought a TracFone, and his lawyer had registered it for him online.

He was barely out of prison, but already he recognized the difficulty of adjusting to the outside world: it was either too loud or too quiet, too cognizant of his presence or too unaware, too random or too regimented. There were aspects of it that he no longer understood, and others that appeared to have vanished entirely while he was incarcerated. He had eaten dinner in a bar earlier that evening, but at first he had been unable to pick up the silverware. It was the first time in five years that he had been presented with utensils that were not plastic, and he was afraid to use them. He wondered if the reason why so many former inmates reoffended was simply because they wanted to be back in a world they understood.

He dialed the number and waited. It went straight to voice mail.

For a moment, he struggled to find his voice. He thought about hanging up and remaining silent, but he believed that he did not have long left. If he was right, they would come for him soon, because all that was left to take was his life.

But they had not broken him completely. Despite everything, he had endured, and now he would tell his story.

‘Mr Parker,’ he said. ‘My name is Jerome Burnel …’

S
o how did it come to pass? How did Jerome Burnel, the Disgraced Hero, lose everything? It began when Jerome Burnel was no kind of hero at all, when this tale was not even his.

Almost six years earlier, this was the stumble that led to the fall.

Corrie had been sizing up the guy for the last hour. She was good at what she did, or thought she was: after all, she’d had enough practice by now.

He was neatly dressed: shirt, jacket, and trousers, not jeans. His shoes were clean and well shined. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, which was a problem. She’d found that the ones who wore a ring were more likely to be amenable to the kind of pressure under which they would ultimately be placed, simply because they had more to lose. He was on his third drink, though, which was a plus, and she’d seen the way he looked at some of the girls who were passing. He was in the market, even if he didn’t know it yet.

She didn’t care much for the bar itself. To begin with, the music was terrible – the kind of faux-country seemingly beloved of city boys slumming it in Portland – and even though the bar was new, it already smelled of stale, spilled beer that hadn’t been properly cleaned up, and of half-eaten peanuts crushed into the floor. On the other hand, because it was a recent arrival to the strip of noisy bars down at the Old Port, and the bouncers weren’t familiar to her, or she to them, it represented virgin territory. She and the others had almost worn out their welcome in Portland. To stay much longer would be to risk inviting attention.

She drifted over, swaying in time to the music because it made her appear drunker than she was. She was drinking bourbon, but heavy on the ice and soda. Good bartenders tended to assume that girls who drank like her were trying to be careful, and responded accordingly, but the dunce in this place had already offered her one on the house, which she’d declined. He’d pretended to act all hurt in response, but then the pretense had become reality, and when she’d tried to order a second drink he’d ignored her. She didn’t make a fuss. She didn’t want to give him more cause than necessary to remember her.

Corrie slipped onto the stool to the right of the mark.

‘Hi,’ she said.

He turned to look at her. His eyes were slightly different colors: one bright blue, the other closer to green. It could have made him appear odd, but instead she found it hugely attractive, helped by the fact that he was slim but not too thin, and dark-haired without any gray that she could see. Up close, she could tell that he was older than she’d first assumed: early thirties.

‘I saw you looking at me,’ he replied.

‘I didn’t think you’d noticed.’

‘Hard not to, when a pretty girl is giving you the eye.’

‘You didn’t let on.’

‘I figured you’d come over, in your own time.’

He said all this without smiling. The words sounded flirty, but his manner was neutral. He wasn’t arrogant, she thought. He was simply commenting, as he might have done on a change in the weather.

‘Well, I’m here now.’

‘Yes, you are.’

‘Buy you a drink?’

‘Aren’t I supposed to ask
you
that?’

‘I don’t know. It’s the twenty-first century.’

‘So it is. Still, I figure that’s how this thing is supposed to go.’

Corrie tried not to bristle. Did he figure her for a hooker?

‘What kind of thing?’ she asked, trying to keep the edge from her voice.

He moved his gaze away from her for the first time. ‘Just a conversation between a man and a girl in a bar: man buys the girl a drink, they get to talking. I’ve seen it done before.’

Again, she experienced a peculiar sense of disconnection, of this individual as a kind of observer of his own life. Perhaps she’d made a mistake in choosing him. For this thing of theirs to work, she needed lust, and a loss of inhibition. This one seemed too much in control of himself.

But then he let his right hand drop to his thigh, brushing her leg as he did so, and she gently rubbed herself against it. After a moment, she felt his hand slide onto her jeans. No, she hadn’t made an error after all.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

‘Henry.’ Which it wasn’t.

‘Like the king.’

‘Which one?’

‘Any of them.’

‘Yes, just like one of the kings.’

‘I’m Lise,’ she said, although he hadn’t asked, and it wasn’t her name either.

‘Hello, Lise.’

‘Hello, Henry.’

‘What can I get you?’

‘Bourbon and Coke,’ she said. ‘Easy on the ice.’

‘And the soda?’

She sipped through her straw, draining the watery residue at the end of the glass she had so carefully nursed until now.

‘Easy on that, too.’

The volume of the music rose. Dancing wasn’t permitted, but somehow they found themselves standing close to each other, and she thought she could feel the hardness of him against her. He wasn’t from around here, he told her, but she could have guessed that by the way he held himself apart from his surroundings. When she pressed him, he gave her only ‘south of here’, which wasn’t much. Given that they were just below Canada, most places were south. She was used to evasiveness, though, particularly from the married ones. Henry said that he wasn’t married, but a lot of them told her that. The ones who were honest often qualified their status with unflattering descriptions of their wives, or admitted just to being unhappy. A handful were genuinely sad and lonely, trapped in relationships because of kids, jobs, mortgages, or simply because they didn’t believe that anyone else would have them. She was always sorry for those ones, afterward.

As for Henry, she couldn’t detect a mark on his ring finger, the little telltale band of white that spoke of a symbol set aside. She’d have spotted it easily in his case, because he had outdoor hands. He was here on business, he said. What kind? Stock acquisition. Corrie didn’t know what that meant, and Henry wasn’t interested in telling her. Corrie was smart enough to suppose that everyone, on some level, was engaged in stock acquisition. Only the job titles varied.

‘I like you, Henry’ she said. ‘I prefer slightly older men.’

‘And why is that?’

‘They know what they want. And they’re kinder than young men.’

And she meant it.

‘Kinder, how? Like with money?’

‘Sometimes,’ she said, then added the lie: ‘But this isn’t about money.’

‘No?’

His tone caused her to frown. Although this was all a game, and one that he was destined to lose, it annoyed her that after the couple of hours they had spent talking, he was still capable of making such an implication.

‘I’m not a hooker,’ she said.

‘I never said you were.’ He didn’t sound defensive, or even amused. There was only that weird neutrality again. ‘But money always comes into it, in one form or another, even if it’s only for dinner and a movie. Kindness takes many forms. I know that you didn’t mean it just as dollars and cents, but it’s part of it. Folks who are tight with money tend to be tight in other ways too, or that’s been my experience. But the opposite isn’t always true either, now that I think of it. I’ve known plenty of men who threw money around and were still motherfuckers.’

It was the first time he’d uttered a cuss word since they’d met. It didn’t bother her. She kind of liked it. What he said also made sense to her. She started to realize that, under other circumstances, she might almost have enjoyed making the fantasy a reality, and being with a man like this, if only for a little while. She shrugged the thought away, and found that the action was as much physical as mental, for her body actually moved in a kind of shiver. Henry’s mouth twisted.

‘What was that?’ he asked.

‘Someone walking over my grave,’ she replied.

‘That’ll come, someday,’ he said. ‘No point in rushing it. You want another drink?’

‘No, I’ve drunk enough, or enough here. But I’m having a good time with you. Do you have somewhere we can go?’

‘Don’t you?’

‘I have a roommate.’

‘Male or female?’

She decided not to lie about it, although the way Henry was staring at her so intently, she felt like she had little choice.

‘Male.’

‘Boyfriend?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘But not serious.’

Oh, you have no idea, she thought, but settled for repeating herself.

‘Sometimes.’

‘Just not tonight.’

‘No.’

He called for the check, and paid in cash from a fold of bills. He kept it concealed from Corrie so that she couldn’t catch the denominations, but it looked thick.

‘Which hotel are you staying at?’ she asked, as they walked from the bar. She tried to take his arm, but he kept his distance from her: not much, just enough.

‘I’m not at a hotel,’ he said. ‘I’m in a private house.’

That was unusual, but not sufficiently to cause her to reconsider. Apartments were one thing – the buildings could be hard to gain access to, and access was a major factor in this business – but a house wasn’t such a concern. Houses were more vulnerable than apartments, and definitely easier than hotels, as long as the alarm system was turned off. With hotels there was always the issue of cameras and, in the better ones, hotel security. Motels were ideal, especially the big chain ones: they were so used to pizza deliveries and prostitutes that their staff barely batted an eye at passing strangers because everyone was a stranger to them, didn’t matter how many cupcakes or cookies they offered you at check-in.

‘Did your company find it for you?’

‘I suppose it did, in a way.’

His car was parked on Middle Street. It was a Toyota compact, and not at all what she was expecting. It was kind of a chick car, in her opinion, if the gods of feminism could forgive her the generalization.

‘Rental?’ she asked, as she got in. It was pretty clean, but didn’t smell like a rental.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Some small outfit the company uses. It was all they had.’

‘Huh.’

She tried to remember how much he’d had to drink. At first it had seemed like a lot, but now that she was in the car she recalled plenty of ice melting, and fresh shots of Jack being ordered before the last was finished, after which he’d pour the new into the old. He’d sipped throughout the evening, and she suspected that she might have imbibed a lot more than he had. But she’d been careful, even if she had been forced to dump almost an entire measure on the one occasion that he’d gone to the bathroom.

‘Where’s the house?’ she asked, as he pulled out.

‘York,’ he replied.

‘That’s a ways from Portland. They couldn’t have found you somewhere closer to the city?’

‘I have to drive a lot,’ said Henry, ‘so one place is as far away as another. And I like some quiet. I’ve never been much for towns and cities.’

Corrie pulled down the visor, revealing one of those illuminated mirrors with a little pullback plastic shield. She checked her makeup and her teeth, then adjusted her angle so she could see the road behind her. A couple of cars were following Henry’s. One of them would be theirs.

She was about to flip the visor back in place when she spotted a stain on the mirror. She leaned in closer to check, although she already knew what it was: a small smear of lipstick. She didn’t comment on it, but it confirmed her growing suspicion that Henry was lying to her about the car, and maybe about the house and the company as well. She was used to lies – the whole success of the venture depended on them, because lies made men vulnerable – but she was disappointed in him. Not afraid, just disappointed.

Still, it made her feel better about what was to come.

T
he house looked like a family home: two floors, an attic window, and a two-car garage. It even had a pool, although it was currently protected by a plastic cover that had come loose at one corner and now flapped in the night breeze. The property was private, set back from a tributary road with a row of maturing trees in place of a fence. A light burned in one of the upstairs rooms, and another in the room that faced out onto the pool, leaking through the drapes to cut a fiery line across the grass.