Lies You Wanted to Hear (2 page)

Matt

It was the hottest day of the year, temperatures up over a hundred. A crushed Pepsi can kept the front door of the Sweet Spot propped open for ventilation. The place used to have live strippers when I began patrolling the Combat Zone, but now it was just private video booths, couple of minutes of porn for a quarter. I went in the open doorway and said hi to Lenny.

“Officer Drobyshev.” He saluted from his perch behind the counter with an electric fan blowing on the back of his neck. He was reading a battered hardback copy of
The
Mayor
of
Casterbridge
, elbows resting on a display case filled with sex toys.

“Scorcher today,” I said.

“You’re telling me. I got four, five more weeks of this shit, and the boss won’t spring for a fucking air conditioner.”

“How’s business?”

“Couldn’t be better. Summer, winter, guys never stop jacking off.”

“You been checking IDs?”

“Please.” Lenny frowned. “There are
real
crimes happening out there, my friend. Don’t tell me Boston’s finest give a flying fuck about a couple of guys giving each other blowjobs in a private video booth.”

“The brass wants us to crack down. Undercover picked up a young hustler at the Pussy Cat last night. Third or fourth juvie this month.”

“Enterprising youth. I’m sure he makes a helluva lot more money than I do.”

I smiled. “How’s the book?”

There were underlinings on the page, the margins filled with notes in minuscule handwriting in different color inks.

“Michael Henchard.” He shook his head. “The trouble with the past is, it’s never really
over
. Just keeps coming back and biting you in the ass.”

Lenny had been working on his dissertation for years. He told me
Jude
the
Obscure
was one of the three greatest novels in the English language. I had a copy of the book on my nightstand but couldn’t get into it. I preferred history—Sacco and Vanzetti, the Nuremberg trials, General Sherman burning his way across Georgia. Stuff that really happened.

I stepped through the black curtain to the peep-show booths in back. The room was divided into two narrow corridors with video booths on either side. The piney smell of disinfectant couldn’t hide the human stench underneath. Several men lurked in the corridors. I turned my head and caught one of them staring at me. In the half-second our eyes met, the man’s face seemed to change from desire to fear to shame before he turned away. What a life! Poor schmuck probably had a wife and three kids at home. I heard a guy whisper in the booth behind me and another man let out a moan. I pounded on the door with the heel of my hand.

“One person to a booth,” I said and went back out front.

“Thomas Hardy, my friend." Lenny held up the book like a gospel preacher. “He understood how weak the human race is. Every fucking one of us.”

Back on the street I checked my watch. Twenty minutes till knock off. That left me an hour after work to go home and shower and get ready for my blind date. I was supposed to meet her for a drink at the piano bar at the Copley Plaza. Not the sort of thing I did often, but Terry O’Shea’s wife, Jill, cornered me at our last softball game and asked me to do it as a favor. The girl she set me up with was her best friend.

“Lucy’s gorgeous,” Jill had said. “Smart, funny. Body to die for.”

“And…?”

“Terrible taste in men.”

“Ah, no wonder you asked me.”

Jill laughed. “No, no, that came out wrong. The last one was a total shit, that’s all. She’s been sitting at home, moping for months now. I figured if she went out with a really terrific guy…” She batted her eyes like Betty Boop. Jill knew how cute she was, even with all the weight she’d put on with her pregnancy.

I said okay to the blind date. She wasn’t going to stop bugging me till I did.

“Anything else you want to tell me?” I said.

“Well, she’s not…” She crinkled her eyebrows. “Let’s just say she has an edge.”

An edge was fine with me. The last girl I dated was as edgeless as fog. I met her as I was passing through Filene’s cosmetics department. I was on my way to the basement to look for some shirts and she caught me ogling her cleavage.

“Would you care to sample the new fragrance from Chanel, officer?” She blocked my path. “For that special lady in your life.”

“Sorry, I don’t have one at the moment.”

“Maybe I could offer some assistance?”

Some women have a thing about men in uniform. It’s one of those unwritten perks that comes with the job, like never having to worry about getting a traffic ticket. Something to help make up for the scornful looks cops get sometimes from strangers on the street.

The Chanel girl and I met for coffee after work and ended up in bed that same evening. At first I was taken by her sunny disposition. She had been a cheerleader in high school and still had that chirpy, never-say-die spirit that keeps those girls leaping and chanting when it’s cold and rainy and the home team is down forty-two zip. But after a while it got irritating. She didn’t want to hear about the unsavory things I had to deal with on the job. I started calling her less and making excuses not to get together. One night over dinner, I told her I thought we should take a break.

“But why?” she said. “I thought we were doing so well.”

I sank low in my chair and tried the it’s-not-you-it’s-me maneuver, but she kept probing.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess it’s just…you’re too damned
happy
.”

“Not anymore,” she said.

Out on the sidewalk, heat rose from the cement through my crepe rubber soles.

“Mr. Pleeze-man. Mr. Pleeze-man.” A woman was yelling and waving her arms on the opposite side of the street. “You come quick.”

I couldn’t place her accent. She was short and round with dyed black hair. She didn’t appear to be hurt, but the front of her yellow waitress’s uniform was splattered with blood. I ran across the street, and she led me down an alley to a brick building with an apartment on the second floor. We hurried through her living room, and she pointed toward an open doorway.

“In there,” she said. “My husband.”

A hairy man was lying face down on the bed, naked except for the boxer shorts pulled down around his knees. Blood oozed from a lump the size of a tennis ball on the back of his bald head. For a moment I thought the man was dead, then he let out a loud snore. I felt so relieved I almost laughed. In five-plus years on the job, I’d found the dead body of a homeless man in an alley and another of a junkie who OD’d in the backseat of a car. But never a homicide victim. I wasn’t anxious for my first.

“You did this?” I said.

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

There was a shrill cry behind me. “No! Don’t you dare!”

A girl ran into the room and tried to put her hand over the woman’s mouth. The woman started yelling in another language, her arms flailing to fend the girl off. I got between them and told the girl to calm down. She was about fourteen, short and chubby, in tight cut-offs and a Sex Pistols T-shirt. Streaks of mascara ran down her cheeks.

I looked at the woman. “Tell me what happened.”

The girl said, “I’ll kill you if you say anything.”

“I come home from work and find him and this little whore—”

The girl lunged, but I grabbed her around the waist and held her back.

“Shut up, Mummy. I mean it. Don’t say another word or I’ll come in your room some night and slit your fucking throat.”

I said to the woman, “Is this your daughter?”

She nodded. I was still holding my arm around the girl’s soft belly, which almost made me feel like a pervert myself. The man on the bed groaned and tried to roll over.

“We need to call an ambulance,” I said.

***

By the time I talked to the detectives and got back to the station and filled out all the paperwork, I had less than fifteen minutes to get to the Copley Plaza for my date. No time to go home and shower and change. I had a pair of jeans and golf shirt in my locker. I asked Sergeant Barker what he thought I should wear.

“Go with the fuckin’ uniform,” he said.

“You think?”

“Listen to Sergeant Barker, boyo. This is who you are. She don’t like it, fuck her and the appaloosa she rode in on.” In Barker’s thick Boston accent, there was an “r” at the end of appaloosa, none in his own last name.

“The uniform it is.”

“What time you supposed to be there?”

I glanced at my watch. “Eight minutes. No way I’m going to make it on time.”

Barker laughed. “Hop in the cruiser. We’ll hit the fuckin’ siren.”

We pulled up to the Copley Plaza with our blue lights flashing.

“Check this out,” Barker said, lifting his chin. A girl was crossing the intersection. “Maybe that’s her.”

“Maybe. Fits the general description.”

She was wearing mules and a sleeveless mini-dress—small breasts with no bra, nipples and panties outlined against the pink cotton. Summer tan and Jackie O sunglasses, light brown hair hanging halfway down her back. Two guys stopped to watch her pass. Her walk was slow and casual, like a lioness sauntering down to the waterhole.

“No way you’re that fuckin’ lucky, boyo. That girl could melt the pennies on a dead man’s eyes.”

I grinned and started to get out of the car. “Well, here goes.”

“You really think that’s her?”

“I can only hope.”

The doorman made a little bow as he held the door open for the girl. I followed her into the hotel. The piano bar was on the right. She stopped in the entranceway and looked around.

“Lucy?” I said behind her.

She turned, took off her sunglasses, and smiled. “Hello. You must be…?”

“Matt.”

“I’m sorry. I’m terrible with names.”

“Not my strong suit either,” I said. A lie. I had a knack for remembering names and faces, which served me well on the street.

“I didn’t expect you to be in uniform.”

“Sorry.” I looked down at myself. “I got tied up with a case and didn’t have time to change.” She had bright, mischievous eyes, gray-green with a dark ring around the iris.

“No, it’s fine. A little
arresting
, but that’s okay.”

I cackled like a madman. Stay cool, I told myself. It felt like a pinball was ricocheting around in my chest. The Copley was one of the best hotels in the city. Plush chairs and low polished tables in the piano bar, half the patrons dressed to the nines. I wanted to walk into the bar with her and see all those heads turn our way, guys wondering how I got so lucky. But it probably wasn’t a good idea.

I said, “I don’t think the manager’s going to appreciate me sitting there in my uniform. Might make some customers nervous.”

“What do you suggest?”

Let’s skip the small talk and go back to my place. Make love till we set ourselves on fire.

“I have a friend who’s the owner of the Café Budapest. It’s just a short walk from here. Have you ever been?”

“No, I’ve heard it’s wonderful.” We went back outside. “Look, mimes,” Lucy said.

In the middle of Copley Square, a boy and a girl in white face and black leotards were sitting at an imaginary table eating an imaginary meal.

“Amazing,” I said. It was hard to believe they could sit in those nonexistent chairs without falling down. The boy crossed his leg, balancing on one foot. The girl mime was trying to uncork a bottle of wine. She kept twisting and yanking the corkscrew and did a back somersault. Her partner hurried over to help, but he was more worried about the wine than the girl. They struggled over the bottle till it crashed on the sidewalk. The two of them tiptoed sad-faced through the broken glass. Then the girl cut herself and started hopping around, holding her foot against her chest.

I glanced at Lucy, wanting to share the moment, but she seemed far away.

Lucy

The first time I saw Griffin he was smoking a joint and talking on a pay phone in Harvard Square. He appeared to be about thirty—thin face with a patrician nose, strawberry-blond hair parted in the middle, charcoal gray slacks, beige turtleneck, and a navy blue blazer—one of those men who would look perfect in a rainstorm. I slid a dime in the phone beside him but couldn’t get a dial tone.

“Sorry, Russell, but I can’t do that,” he said. “Have you taken economics yet? Supply and demand, my friend. Supply and demand.”

He turned and smiled at me, eyes as blue as arctic snow, and handed me the joint. The first toke made my scalp tingle; the second one made me feel like I’d just stepped off a Tilt-A-Whirl.

“I don’t have time for this, Russell.” His eyes never left mine. “Six-fifty for the whole stash. Take it or leave it. There’s a young lady standing here with a Mona Lisa smile who requires my attention.”

He introduced himself simply as Griffin. It was Saturday, a cool afternoon in early May, my second year out of college. My mother, Amanda, had driven to Boston from Connecticut for the weekend and was staying at the Ritz. We were planning to go see the Renoir exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts and have dinner after. I’d gone out to do some errands and lost track of time, so I stopped to call her and say I was running late.

“Plans change,” Griffin said, flicking the roach into the street. He asked if I wanted to go get something to eat.

It didn’t take much convincing. I called my mother and told her I’d come down with a bug, was feverish, and could barely get out of bed. Amanda went on about how sorry she was, how she’d been looking forward to spending the day together, even mused about coming to Cambridge to make me tea and soup, but we both knew she didn’t mean it, no more than she believed my story about being ill. I had no qualms about standing her up; given the chance, she would have done the same.

I was eleven or twelve when I realized my mother was a drunk. My younger brother Mark and I learned to watch her and adapt to her shifting moods. My father basically ignored her tirades and dark silences until she went completely off the rails, at which point he blamed it on “exhaustion” and carted her off to a sanatorium to dry out. In my junior year of high school, Amanda decamped on a three-day bender with the twenty-six-year-old assistant tennis pro from the country club—one of her more public transgressions, right up there with the time she drove
into
the beauty parlor. The scandal probably would have ended most marriages, but my dad had his own counterweight of peccadilloes: speeding tickets, bimbo secretaries, a pied-à-terre in Manhattan. The tennis pro, whom I had a crush on and would gladly have run off with myself, lost his job; Amanda spent a few weeks at a spa. Like all family disasters, we never discussed the incident at home, not openly anyway.

Mark and I, who relied on each other for regular reality checks, learned early on that our parents’ foibles were an invaluable legacy, a bottomless trust fund of bad behavior. Amanda and Roger Thornhill—everyone, including my mother, called him “Thorny”—had no illusions about their children being perfect; they assumed Mark and I would screw up from time to time, just as they did. No matter what the misadventure—wrecking the car (a Thornhill family tradition), stealing pills from Amanda’s cache, getting caught in the TV room
in
flagrante
delicto
—the best defense was to pretend it hadn’t happened. Or lie about it.

***

Griffin got a red Lord & Taylor shopping bag from the trunk of his BMW, which was parked on Mt. Auburn Street, and we walked up to the Hong Kong across from Lamont Library. The restaurant was empty except for an elderly couple near the window. We sat in a booth next to the tropical fish tank. The waiter brought us menus and we ordered drinks—Glenlivet for Griffin, a mai tai for me. When the drinks came, Griffin took the pink paper umbrella from my glass and spun it back and forth between his fingers; then he reached up and slipped the stem under my hair comb as if it were a flower, drew his head back, and gave me the once-over. He smiled his approval. I was half thrilled, half mortified, as if he’d put his hand up under my skirt.

He asked what I did when I wasn’t picking up strangers in the Square. I told him I worked for the Harvard Class Report Office, editing the entries alumni sent in for their reunion books.

“About half the stuff we get is nothing but bragging,” I said. “Guys crowing about themselves, their kids, grandkids. The Cliffies are almost as bad as the men. Not that some of these people don’t have reason to brag. We get responses from congressmen, Nobel Prize winners, businessmen with more money than God. Leonard Bernstein, Norman Mailer. That big tall actor…what’s his name? The one who plays Herman on
The
Munsters
. Can you believe he went to Harvard?” Griffin had one elbow on the table, his chin in his hand and his eyes fixed on mine. “Some guys write in and they can be really thoughtful or funny or sad. I mean, sometimes we’ll get a submission from some guy who graduated thirty years ago, probably thinking he had it made; now he’s been divorced three times and is working in a shoe store in Schenectady. We get stuff from Hare Krishnas, Black Panthers, you name it. Harvard has this thing about trying to keep up with all their alumni no matter what.”

I couldn’t stop babbling. The waiter brought mountains of food I didn’t remember us ordering. Griffin wielded his chopsticks like a grasshopper; I wished I had a fork but was embarrassed to ask. A boy in a ratty Army jacket approached the table.

“Hey, Russell,” Griffin said, “have a seat. This is Lucy. Will you join us?”

“Can’t, man. I got to run.”

Griffin sighed and looked at me. “The death of manners. He used to beg me to play catch with him when he was a kid.” He slid the shopping bag out from under the table with his foot. The boy took the bag and handed him a wad of bills, which Griffin slipped into his pocket without bothering to count. It didn’t occur to me that I was witnessing a felony, that a narc might walk in the door and arrest us. I suppose I could attribute my lack of concern to the times—dealing drugs in Harvard Square was as common as selling used textbooks—or to the fact that I was stoned, but it was more than that. Nothing mattered but Griffin. Maybe it was those blue eyes, the way he seemed to hang on every word when I talked. I couldn’t explain the feeling; I just wanted it to last.

The waiter brought the check and a brown bag with the leftovers. Outside it was clear and chilly. I put on the sweater I’d brought in a canvas shoulder bag. Griffin and I both lit cigarettes, and we walked down to the river and sat on the grassy bank. A man in a filthy hooded sweatshirt was throwing a Frisbee to a brindled mutt with a blue bandana tied around its neck. The dog was swift and agile with an uncanny sense of timing, his body arching and twisting as he leaped to make the catch. Sometimes the Frisbee would sail into the river and the dog would swim out and get it. Griffin went over and spoke to the guy, then came back for the leftovers. He took the bag to the water’s edge where the dog and the man shared the food. I stretched out on the grass and rested on one elbow. Griffin slipped off his blazer, and he and the man started taking turns throwing the Frisbee to the dog, the disc hovering at the top of its arc like a prop in a low-budget sci-fi movie, interplanetary orange with a purple outer ring. I lay back with my shoulder bag under my head. There was a drowsy hum of car wheels on Memorial Drive as I closed my eyes and thanked my lucky stars I wasn’t slogging through the museum with Amanda.

When I awoke, the sun was sinking behind the stadium on the other side of the river. The man and his dog were gone, and so was Griffin. I stood up and brushed myself off, scouring the ground and my shoulder bag, hoping to find a note. A gust of wind made me shiver. As I reached up to refasten my hair comb, I felt the paper umbrella and removed it gingerly, careful not to tear the paper or break the fragile spokes. The umbrella was pink with a pattern of pale green bamboo shoots. I held the stem between my fingers, spinning it clockwise and counterclockwise as Griffin had done, trying to convince myself he’d gone off for a few minutes to make a phone call or buy a pack of cigarettes, but I knew he wasn’t coming back.