The Confidence Woman (16 page)

The complex where John lived fell into the undistinguished category. It was a row of attached townhouses stuccoed in a forgettable color and had no landscaping or views. Claire knew why John had chosen to live here—he could afford it, it was convenient to work, he didn't have to think about it. John didn't care where he lived as long as he had his books. When he opened the door, Claire saw that his townhouse had the same careless clutter as his office. The walls were lined with bookcases. Papers were piled everywhere. The sofa was upholstered in gray, as was the armchair. His artwork consisted of black-and-white drawings, carelessly framed, haphazardly hung. The lighting came from overhead fixtures that made Claire feel as if she was being examined. Someone needed to tell John about plush furniture, pink bulbs, the welcoming puddle of light that seeped out from under a table lamp. Claire had to ask herself why she should expect plush furniture and pink bulbs from John when she didn't have them in her own house.

He had a warm glow when he met her at the door, and so did the amber liquid in the glass in his hand.

“What are you drinking?” Claire asked after they had exchanged their hellos.

“Jack Daniel's. Would you like a shot?”

“A small one, on ice.”

She followed him into the kitchen, separated from the living room by a counter and a dining room table. Like many other surfaces in the house, the table was piled high with reading material. John had
cleared
space enough for two and put down place mats with knives and forks. He dropped some ice in a glass and poured the Jack Daniel's over it. Claire leaned against the counter and took a sip, enjoying the warm, mellow taste. The only time she had gotten drunk in recent memory was on Jack Daniel's.

“Well, now that you know your boss is a plagiarist, what are you going to do about it?” John asked.

“I haven't decided.”

“You never liked the guy, did you?”

“Not much. You know him. You know how difficult he can be. How parsimonious he is with money and praise.”

“You could get him fired, couldn't you? It would make your life easier.”

“It's not that easy to get someone fired. Harrison has tenure.”

“They could move him sideways, let him keep his salary but give him an office in the basement with nothing to do. It would get him out of your hair.”

“True.”

“Dinner's almost ready, why don't we eat now, talk later?”

“All right,” Claire said.

John concentrated on putting the chicken breasts in the microwave and the broccoli in the steamer. In a few minutes dinner was ready. He placed it on two plates with white rice he had already cooked and they carried it to the table. Like many men who found themselves single after having been married for a long time, John had a limited knowledge of cooking. The meal was edible but uninspired. Claire sipped at her Jack Daniel's through dinner and imagined that she was eating chicken the way she prepared it, the way John didn't like it, roasted slowly in a clay pot with curry powder and onions and yams.

When the meal was over, John cleared the table and suggested they move to the living room, where they sat down at opposite ends of the sofa. John put his feet on the coffee table, stretched his arm across the back of the sofa and studied Claire, who kept wishing that he would turn the overhead lights off but feared he would misunderstand if she made the suggestion.

“Now tell me why you're so reluctant to nail your boss's ass to the wall,” he said.

“Kindness?”

“Why don't I believe that's all there is to it? Not to say you're not a kind person, but you're not a simple person either.”

“There are a number of things. I wouldn't want to be remembered as the vindictive librarian who destroyed Harrison Hough's career.”

“Could you do it anonymously?”

“I
could, but it seems like a cheap shot.”

“Won't it be awkward to be working with the guy, seeing him every day, knowing what he did and not saying anything about it?”

“Yes,” Claire replied. “Which is one reason I don't know what to do.” She took a deep sip of her Jack Daniel's, leaving a thimbleful of amber in the glass.

“Care for another?” John asked.

“No, thanks. I'm learning what it's like to be a rabbit with a hawk circling overhead myself, to have someone out to destroy my reputation and my life. Someone I know is trying to frame me for Evelyn Martin's murder.”

“She's the woman who stole your
Confidence-Man?”

“Right. Somebody hid another one in my office disguised under the jacket of
The Scarlet Letter,
then told the detective who is investigating me exactly where it was. It was a first edition and a signed copy, but it wasn't my book.”

“How do you know?”

“The signature looked bogus.”

“Couldn't the detective have it authenticated?”

“He could and he might, but he says that wouldn't prove anything. According to him my edition could have had a fraudulent signature. Apparently he believes I hit Evelyn Martin over the head, killed her, took my book back and hid it in my office.”

“If you'd done that, you wouldn't be dumb enough to tell someone like me who could rat on you.”

“Amaral doesn't have such a high opinion of my intelligence. I told him I wouldn't be dumb enough to own a book with a fraudulent signature either. On the night Evelyn Martin was presumed murdered, a runner saw a woman who fits my description arguing with her. I don't have an alibi for that night, so I've hired a lawyer. If this goes to court maybe I'll use you as a character witness.”

John sipped at his drink. “Use me as your alibi. We're two people who are often home alone at night. Who's to say we weren't together?”

“Thanks, John. If s kind of you to offer, but neither one of us are practiced liars and we're liable to get ourselves into more trouble.”

“I doubt it will ever go to court, but if it does, what jury in its right mind will believe you're capable of murder?”

“Isn't everyone capable of murder under the right circumstances?” Claire asked. “Suppose one of my former friends found out Evelyn had ripped her off and went to her house. There was an argument. Evelyn attacked the woman, who found a blunt object near her hand and hit Evelyn over the head with it.
She
didn't intend to kill anyone, just to protect herself.”

“If someone did that she ought to come forward and say so.”

John put his glass down on the end table and inched closer on the sofa, leading Claire to think that not only were most people capable of murder under the right circumstances, they were also capable of sex.

“Would you say so if you were guilty?” she asked him.

“I'd like to think I would. Self-defense isn't a crime.”

“There would only be the perpetrator's word for it. Some of my former friends are not as civilized as you are. One of them is finding it easier to fake an alibi and implicate the person who doesn't have one—me.”

He extended his arm along the back of the couch. Claire thought this might be the signal for her to move closer, too, and snuggle into his extended arm, but she remained committed to her end of the sofa. Dating had been awkward as a teenager. Dating in middle age was even worse. She had the same anxiety about how she would perform, but it wasn't fueled by the same wild animal desire. Desire at this age was more like a house pet that got to run wild only when permitted.

She glanced at her watch and said, “It's getting late,” which was roughly the equivalent of declaring she had AIDS or wore a chastity belt.

She expected John to protest, but he surprised her by agreeing. He stood up. So did she. He walked her to the door, gave her a peck on the cheek and said good-bye.

“Thanks for the dinner,” she said, pecking him back.

“My pleasure,” he replied.

******

Later that night she woke up, well aware that she still had desire, although the man who'd been in her dreams was not John Harlan, as he appeared now, but Pietro Antonelli, as he was thirty years ago.

Chapter
Fourteen

I
N THE MORNING SHE TOOK OUT A BLANK PIECE OF PAPER
, sat down at the table in her dining area, imagined herself to be a police artist and attempted to reconstruct Pietro's face as it might appear now. There was likely to be less hair on top of his head. When she knew him he had thick, reddish brown hair worn long. It was one of many things she admired about him. Pietro had been so skinny then that she felt his bones when they hugged. Reminding herself that Pietro would be in his fifties now, she added pounds to her mental image and began mentally manipulating the hair, moving the hairline back, changing the color from dark red to pale red to gray to white. Often as a man lost the hair from his head, he added it to his face. If the middle-aged Pietro had a beard, would it be short? Long? Gray? Red? White? His eyes at least were likely to remain the same: shrewd, warm, sparkling. After she rearranged the features, it was no longer the Pietro who inhabited her dreams. But she wouldn't be the Claire who inhabited his dreams either—if she even entered his dreams.

Feeling discouraged, she crumpled up that piece of paper and threw it away. She got up, made herself a cup of coffee, sat down at the table again and tried to imagine the last face Evelyn Martin ever saw. Elizabeth Best's came out red and twisted in anger. Ginny's was also red, swollen and befuddled by alcohol. Claire didn't want to imagine Lynn's face here at all, but she made herself do it and came up with a sad, perplexed expression. As for Miranda, she saw her as the young woman, the old woman, the businesswoman, but no matter how hard she tried she couldn't get rid of the vague hippie expression she remembered from the
U
of
A.

Considering what Sid Hyland had said, she moved on to the men in these women's lives. Brian and Jess were not so different from each other in their eagerness to please Elizabeth. She saw Steve Granger as thin, pale and hungry, and Erwin Bush as a card player with an amused glint in his eye.

Mentally she erased all of them, then took a blank piece of paper and drew the outline of another face, one with no hair, no eyes, no expression, merely a line around a blank, white space.

She set that piece of paper aside and thought about Harrison. Knowing all too well how he looked today, she tried to imagine how he looked in his late twenties or so, the age when he would have written his dissertation. Harrison remained Harrison, sour, mean-spirited, but suddenly vulnerable.

She thought about the phrase “the existential enigma of the self” and wrote it down. Technically the phrase wasn't Harrison's, but he had expropriated it.

Since words were the tools of her trade, Claire thought that she might learn more about the people
she
knew if she considered their words rather than their appearances. She began making a list of their more revealing phrases beginning with Evelyn's envious “look at
you,
aren't
you
doing well.” She added Elizabeth's “one of the things I hate about this country,” which expressed her out-of-touch selfcenteredness. There was the naïve devotion expressed in Jess's “of course you were,” the equally naive admiration in Brian's “one of the foremost environmentalists in the Southwest.” There were all the nicknames Ginny used in speech—Clairier, Lizzie, Evie—and the artbabble in her writing. Words were a smokescreen for Ginny, but she could wield them like a sword when she chose to. When she came to Lynn, Claire wrote down “I know you wouldn't do anything wrong,” which expressed the concern she had for others. She remembered Steve saying Evelyn should move to Santa Fe, which expressed the acuteness of his observation. There hadn't actually been any dialogue with Miranda, only the written words in the e-mail. She remembered two phrases in that e-mail—“time wounds all heels” and “living well is the best revenge.” She compared the latter phrase to Erwin's “revenge is a dish best served cold.” Was this a case of two people who knew each other well falling into the same phraseology? Would the Miranda she knew have thought about revenge? But, of course, she had to consider that the Miranda who wrote this e-mail was no longer the person she had known, just as she was no longer the person Miranda had known.

Next she considered Amaral's precision with words, and Sid Hyland's “concentrate on your job and leave my job to me.” Today was Saturday and she didn't have to consider her job. She had all day to do whatever she wanted to do, but before she made plans for the rest of the weekend, she added one more phrase to her list, Pietro's
“cara mia, te amo.”
It was a beautiful phrase in sound and in spirit, far more lyrical than the occasional stilted “I love you” she had coaxed out of Evan. She put all the papers in a manila folder and filed it in her desk. The file contained more questions than answers, but she was willing to put the questions aside and give the answers time to develop.

Turning her attention to what to do with the rest of the weekend, Claire checked her calendar and found two blank pages for Saturday and Sunday. She began poking through the pile of mail and newspapers on her desk to see if she could find something interesting to do. In the mail she found an invitation to the Rocky Mountain Booksellers annual dinner in Santa Fe that night. The booksellers who would be there were people she felt comfortable with. The hour drive to Santa Fe was a good chance to think.

******

The Rocky Mountain Booksellers dinner was held in a motel on Cerrillos Road, the fast-food strip outside Santa Fe where the City Different became the City Clone. Except for the green chile on the burgers, Cerrillos Road could have been anywhere in America and the same could be said for the motel.
The
cocktail party before the dinner was held in a large and anonymous room filled mostly with casually dressed booksellers. Awards were presented at this dinner for numerous categories of Western writing. The award for fiction was going to a well-known male writer whose macho cowboy heroes were more popular with women than they ought to be. Claire recognized him standing at the center of a group of women holding a glass of whiskey in his hand. From the waist down he was a cowboy in worn Levi's, scuffed boots and a leather belt with a silver buckle. From the waist up he was a city slicker in an expensive blazer, a white shirt and a red ascot looped under his chin. His upper body said “I'm a powerful dude.” His lower body said “I'm a cowboy who doesn't care about this upper-body bullshit.” Both were roles women found appealing, but a role women found truly irresistible was the drunken bad boy in need of a good woman to straighten him out. The writer played that one to the hilt, smoking, laughing, sipping the whiskey in his glass.