The Good Kind of Bad (8 page)

‘Okay, at
first
it was great. Who wouldn’t want to be on every Gold Coast guest list?’ she murmured, her jewel-encrusted heel holding the majority of her attention. ‘Plus, Mickey had this thing for vacations, like, every month vacations. Mexico, the Dominican, Vegas . . . he’s even taking me to the American Club in Wisconsin tonight. But back then, when it was all shiny and new? I was on a permanent high. I’m telling you, it was better than any drug, and I’d know.’

‘Vegas?’

‘The Presidential suite at the Bellagio.’

‘What did you say he did again?’ I quipped.

‘It sounds amazing, right? Well, it didn’t last. Come the holidays, it was like he’d had an asshole personality transplant. First came the plate smashing, then the phone calls . . . believe me when I say it got way out of hand, and fast.’

I pulled my jacquard blazer tight over my chest. ‘Did you ask him about it?’

‘You mean, before he ran out of things to smash? One night after my Villeroy & Boch dinner service ended up in a thousand pieces, he confessed. He confessed to taking bribes to ignore the Alderman’s less-than-legit friends, to getting tied up in some kickback over missing money and to skimming drugs off the top of those PCP hauls. Remember? A few months back in Englewood, on the news? That was Mickey. He pulled the guys in, then took a little product for himself to piss them off. Talk about balls.’

Kickback? What was a kickback? And skimming
drugs
? Where was
Hero Cop of the Year
? Surely Nina wouldn’t be seen dead with an actual drug-stealing dirty cop.

‘Do you know
why
he was in the lousy bar the night I met him? To collect money from some scumbag he knew. Then I asked why, why he’d become such an asshole. He mentioned another cop arriving at his district. He carried more weight and lifted his contacts, but I don’t know. Maybe Mickey had always been an asshole. Maybe he just got tired of hiding it.’

Why hadn’t I seen it sooner? Nina was living in a cop show, not that it wasn’t the most enthralling thing ever. Pulled from Nina’s imagination or not, I always loved a good story. My friend had the starring role in her own personal movie, laced with all the excitement and suspense of any Hollywood thriller. The story panned out in front of us: the dark world of greed and corruption shaken by the arrival of this mysterious stranger. The recent dramas with Joe were beginning to resemble a not-so-glamorous B-movie, and not a particularly good one at that.

‘Mickey takes direction from the new guy now. He calls him
Victor
, no last name. He has this henchman too, some old Mexican guy. Rafael. Like the turtle.’

‘So, why?’ I asked.

‘Why
what
?’

‘Why do it? He’s a cop, right? He’s supposed to be accountable. One wrong move, internal investigation, hidden camera, bug, and then what?’

Nina shot me a penetrating stare. ‘You swallow a morality textbook for breakfast or something?’

‘I’m only saying . . .’

‘Girl, there’s a reason I don’t have anything to do with Mickey’s world. Although I hate it, what he does, he must do
some
good to make up for the heads he cracks, and it’s not like I’m marrying into the goddamn Mafia. He’s a
cop
.’

‘I guess,’ I murmured.

‘Just don’t tell anyone, all right?’

Not that Nina was great at keeping her voice down, but above the hubbub of the office our conversation had gone unheard and unnoticed, apart from Quentin’s clock watching.

After examining a razor sharp talon, this time in muted mauve, Nina flicked her eyes up at me. ‘I’ve been waiting for the new Prada peep-toe boots all season. I don’t want to jeopardise my chances.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, don’t run to the cops about Mickey. You’re my friend. I trust you. Don’t make me doubt that.’

If it was such a big deal, I didn’t know why she’d told me in the first place. ‘I won’t go to the cops,’ I mumbled uneasily.

‘Good, because Mickey’s the one bankrolling me. We can’t all be as lucky as you.’

‘Who says I’m lucky?’

‘I do. My mom’s a cashier and my dad worked in the lumberyard ’til his vertebrae snapped, and most of my modelling money went up my ex-boyfriend Cash’s nose. Yeah, I put up with some crap from Mickey, but it beats living in poverty.’

Maybe Nina did love Mickey, but apart from the perks ‒ namely, expensive shoes ‒ she didn’t seem happy to be embroiled in it all. Hell, if Nina wanted those ankle boots,
I’d
buy them for her.

In moving to South Evergreen I’d learnt to do without, and when Joe and I
were
surrounded by lavishes my purse could afford, namely K2, he’d given me a new perspective. I’d seen through the pretence of champagne and candelabras, not to mention how uptight that world was. I knew Joe would’ve been happier at Wendy’s, but was there anything wrong with that? Good or bad, at least the people there were real.

Back to Nina and her impromptu confession. I knew she liked to talk, but it was getting ridiculous. Either it was a great story or there was now a sinister edge to my Imaginary Mickey, the doughnuts disappearing along with that tubby belly. Imaginary Mickey now worked out.

‘Nina, I won’t say a word. Promise. Besides, who would I tell? You’re the only friend in Chicago I have.’

‘What about Joe?’

‘What about Joe? Trust me, the only thing he listens to are the sports channels. Everything else is white noise.’

Memorial Day, aka perfect day for a picnic, equalled being dismissed after a couple of hours’ work and I was more than glad. I rushed home, changed into my sun-yellow bikini and denim shorts, plaited my hair and prepared a picnic basket full of treats in readiness for an afternoon park visit.

Rustling up a smoked salmon potato quiche and tuna pasta salad in the barely equipped kitchen, I cheated on the batch of lemon drizzle muffins and bought them from Delicia’s next to LaSalle station on the way home. I secured the treats within my new woven basket, cloth-lined with a double flip lid. It was a guilt-ridden gift from Joe after I failed to see the funny side of last week’s Dorothy joke.

On a date at Brooklyn’s, a place only described as dive-bar chic, I’d worn a D&G checked dress that had borne an uncanny resemblance to Judy Garland’s in
The Wizard of Oz
. Joe, knowing zero about fashion, decided to ridicule me all night with endless yellow brick road jokes. While ‘hilarious’ was not the word, he didn’t appreciate my Friend of Dorothy quips either. Still, the basket came in handy. The thought was there, somewhere.

Joe came home as I was finishing up the basket and was positively excited about a picnic in the park date. As I waited down on the baking street with Sybil panting by my feet like there wasn’t enough air to go around, Joe emerged shirtless and dog tagged onto the street with a pair of jeans low on his hips.

Standing there with his arms outstretched, I folded mine in confusion. I knew he was gorgeous, he knew he was gorgeous, but what was he waiting for, a round of applause? For being handed good genes by Mother Nature?

Turned out he was after Sybil’s lead, and after planting a quick kiss on my cheek, we set off for the park.

The bright May sun baked my shoulders, turning them a bubble-gum pink. I always believed my skin would muster its own form of defence in time; either that or skin cancer, but placing a hand on my hot skin, I found it peeling nicely.

Joe’s arms folded behind his head, like he was sunbathing on the deck of a private yacht in the Caribbean. ‘You’re turning a beautiful shade of red there, baby. That’s what happens if you wear a bikini when it’s one hundred outside. Not that I’m complaining.’

I sat up, mainly in protest. ‘If you had any cream I wouldn’t be frying in the sun.’

‘I don’t burn. I don’t need it.’

Joe stretched out his tanned olive arms, exquisite in hue. Like a lame synchronised swimming routine, I re-enacted his movements, only to find ancestral Irish skin inherited from my father morphing from shocking white to scarlet red.

Done preening, Joe lowered his shades, surely to disguise that wandering gaze. Window-shopping was fine so long as you weren’t caught, and I’d watched Mr Blond enough on the pooper-scooper park visits. Though I couldn’t say I enjoyed sitting next to Joe as his head blatantly followed the waif-like models. They were dressed in less than me, and even my bikini was lacking in the material department.

His Frankie confession might’ve still been troubling me, though it didn’t give him a free pass to do what the hell he liked. I moaned again, hoping for a little sympathy.

‘If your sunburn hurts that bad I better rush you to the ER. Looks like third-degree burns to me.’

‘Like you’d ever catch
me
in a hospital,’ I shot back. I’d made it my mission to avoid anything and anywhere remotely clinic-like. I was going back to one this side of
never
. ‘Doctors, white coats, death . . . no thanks.’

He turned to me, staring from behind his sunglasses. ‘Why?’

Sybil was darting breathlessly over the grass before deciding digging it up might be fun too. ‘Shouldn’t you keep her on a lead?’ I was eager to divert the dangerous subject of conversation. In Chicago nobody knew about my chequered medical history, and no one was
going
to know. ‘Hey, Sybil, cut that out!’ I shouted for effect, like I was in a play or melodrama or somewhere not quite here.

When Joe rose to his feet, he shot me a dirty look. ‘Nag, nag, nag.’

He’d
so
climbed out of bed on the wrong side.

After finding a suitably sized stick, Joe set about playing with the Shih Tzu in a puerile manner, Sybil clinging to the stick by her teeth for dear life, though I was soon distracted by the sight of a familiar face and his Labrador. It was Mr Blond, on this occasion clad in a tight navy T-shirt and indigo jeans.

I made a point of blatantly gazing from behind my sunglasses due to Joe’s lack of restraint, but hubby dearest hadn’t registered my disinterest in the Joe and Sybil Show. Back on the other side of the fountain, a pair of sparkling blue eyes was looking back at me, obviously interested. I was only staring to piss Joe off, and he hadn’t bothered to notice. To make matters worse, I was given a slow knowing nod before Blondie strode away and joined the queue for Earl’s hot dog stand.

Snapping out of my trance, I looked back at Joe and Sybil to find they’d quit the stick game, ignored my picnic basket and hotfooted it to Earl’s too.

I lay back and expelled a well-deserved sigh, closing my eyes in the verdant urban greenery where the sirens of the city didn’t come so close.

‘How long do I put this stuff on for?’

Back at the apartment, I was spread-eagled on the sofa as I squeezed another gloopy dollop of after-sun into my palm.

Joe had been fiddling with the back of the television for the past half an hour, entirely oblivious to my damsel-in-distress routine. It looked like I’d crawled out of a burning building in a bikini.

‘That’s what happens when you fall asleep in the sun, babe,’ he warned knowingly, waving a screwdriver at me before smoke poured from the back of the TV ‒ cue Joe coughing like he was about to vomit his lungs up.

‘I didn’t fall asleep! And you could’ve told me I’d turned into a lobster.’ Just in case he didn’t get how pissed off I was, I pointed to my panda eyes.

‘You looked so peaceful. Besides, I was busy.’

‘What, scoffing hot dogs at Earl’s?’

‘I was hungry.’

‘For hot dogs but not my quiche?’

‘Your quiche was cold,’ he moaned.

‘It was supposed to be cold! What’s with the attitude?’ I pulled myself up to tentatively balance on my elbows.

‘How was Labrador Guy? Thought I aught to give you some privacy, you know, in case your husband was cramping your style?’

He
had
been paying attention.

‘And like you weren’t wondering what those bikini girls would’ve looked like
without
their bikinis,’ I reminded him.

Joe slowly rose to his feet, all six-foot-one of him. I wasn’t sure whether he was about to vent his anger on the TV or fall at my feet in forgiveness. In fact, it was neither.

He ambled over, taking the seat beside me and patting his knees for me to prop my legs upon them. ‘Would you listen to us? We sound like some old married couple already. It should be you and me, that’s it. Screw everyone else.’

‘You don’t have to get jealous every time I look at a guy.’

‘I can’t help it, okay? I just don’t get it.’

‘Get what?’

‘How I scored you. How a guy like me got hitched to a
nice
girl, a respectable girl; hell, a girl I love.’

He’d said it. Again.
Those
words had come out of
that
mouth, but they weren’t accompanied by a blissfully happy Joe; quite the opposite.