The Most Wanted (17 page)

“It’s making me sick to my stomach,” I said. “I don’t want to think about it.”

“Do you think you can feel?” Elena asked me. “After you’re dead? With your soul? Do you think he’ll be there at his funeral, watching us all cry?”

I told her I didn’t know. But I knew we were past the point of horror and guilt over the death and near the point of beginning to enjoy it—to relish our firsthand involvement with a notorious story, the kind of story kids would be telling at school for months or even years. People would ask us about it; we were there, after all. It makes me ashamed to think how we were.

The bus was late, and after a while we took off our waitress shoes and white stockings to let our legs tan. We were sitting on the edge of the big Republic fountain, the one with the golden lady hoisting up the eagle, when Elena suddenly hissed at me, “Arley, behind you! It’s old nutso. Look what he’s doing!”

It was Mr. Justice. In one hand he had that beat-up Spurs cap he always wore, and he was pretending to trail his other hand in the water; but what he was really doing was scooping up coins, coins people came and dropped in there. People on dates. Kids with their parents. You’d see them all the time. They’d stand with their backs to the fountain and flip a dime or a quarter up over their heads.

“Pretend you don’t see him,” Elena said, without moving her mouth, like a ventriloquist. But I couldn’t pretend. Everything in me was so keyed up that day, so close to the surface, like a boil starting to roll.

I stood up and I said, “Mister Justice. It’s Arley Mowbray. Don’t do that, okay? It’s not right.” He looked at me, and his mouth opened and his eyes closed tight, like the sun hurt them.

Of course, I instantly regretted it—the way his face looked. He went so pale under his tan, the color of his cheeks looked like bad makeup. Just the way, in some photographs, you can see how a little kid will look when it’s all grown up, you could see in that minute the way Mr. Justice must have looked once, when he was young, and drinking was something his body could just throw off—how he must have been handsome and slender and dark, with eyes the shade of blue jeans.

“I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “I’m sorry. Here.” I dug in my uniform pocket, grabbing a wad of dollars, quarters—my tip money. “Here. Take it.”

“Are you crazy?” Elena yelled.

“I’m sorry.” I started piling the money on the white marble lip of the fountain. “I’m sorry it embarrassed you and I’m sorry I saw it.”

“Arley,” said Mr. Justice, “I shouldn’t have been doing it. I’m sick is all. I hate to have you see it.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“You know,” he said, not nuts at all but just slow and careful, “that it is.”

“Please take the money,” I begged him. He got up, the silver coins he’d dug out slurrying droplets as they slid back into the fountain pool.

“No, Arley,” he said, drying off his hands. “I can’t.”

“Then you’ll just ruin everything more!” I yelled at him. “First you tried to steal all those people’s wishes—”

“Arley, are you crazy?” Elena screeched again, mystified.

“And now you want to make me ashamed because you don’t have any money. It’s not fair. So take it! Do me a favor!” I swept my tip money off the edge of the fountain onto the ground; and Elena grabbed me by the arm and we ran for the bus just pulling up, our white shoes thumping against our collarbones where we’d hung them by the laces. With his hands limp by his sides, Mr. Justice watched me go.

But when I was in the bus, safe behind the tinted windows, I saw him pick up those bills and the change and put them carefully into his jacket pocket. As the bus pulled away, he lifted his hat like he was sort of saluting me, and he smiled.

“That was practically your whole day you just gave him,” Elena said.

“He’s poor and he’s sick and there’s just . . . there’s just too
much wrong
in the world,” I told her, sobbing.

“You should have let him just take the money out of that fountain. The city gives it to them, anyhow.”

“To who?”

“Poor people.”

“But I couldn’t. It would be a curse! I would never hear one word from Dillon again! Something terrible would happen—I mean, something else terrible! Like, death comes in threes, you know?”

Of course, I didn’t believe any such thing. I was exhausted was all, on an ignition burn.

I was only fourteen. I have to remember that. I had never really thought about death in relation to a person young like me, until Corty. And to tell you the truth, not even then. What happened to Corty quickly became like a movie death, dramatic but distant. That afternoon in the park, as Elena and I ran for the two o’clock bus, ran from Mr. Justice and the tragedy of the previous night, we folded death into our pockets with our tights and hair nets. We put it out of sight within twelve hours, the way we put those singles and change in our uniform pockets and forgot, until closing, how heavy those pockets had become.

Of course, death
would
come in threes. I could not have known how soon, and how urgently, I would have to think about death, be asked about death. I would have no choice but to fold my warm hand over its cold one and accept it as real.

“I
T’S TRULY HIDEOUS
,” said Jeanine.

“It’s structurally quite sound,” I replied.

“It’s almost monumentally hideous, like a ruin or something,” Jeanine went on. “This is big, Annie. This is really big, mistakewise.”

It was a December morning, and we were standing on the sidewalk in front of 4040 Azalea Road. My closing on the house had been dated and slated with unseemly haste, as if the broker could hardly restrain himself from snagging this ever-so-fresh fish. A lawyer can’t abide anyone else feeling that he’s putting one over on her. Clue up, mister, I wanted to tell him whenever we met. I actually know how bad this house is, and I’m buying it anyway. This thing is personal, I wanted to explain. I just couldn’t explain why.

In the weeks since the night of the broken glass (Stuart’s term for our moonlit stroll into mortgageland), I’d had several garden-variety final-exam dreams and one episode of high-noon heart banging I could describe only as an anxiety attack. Eleventh-hour jitters. Pro forma. But I hadn’t backed out, in part because I knew that Stuart, with an irritating air of superiority, kept expecting me to do just that. Four times with Jeanine, once with Patty, and even once with Arley, I’d driven past the house, trying to see it from an angle that would deliver me a sharp kick in the pants and send me back to my senses. It didn’t happen. I’d see something else that bewitched me: a turreted tower fit to house a tiny princess (which in fact one day it would), a handmade, overgrown shrine in the backyard, a pebbled arch with “Santa Cecilia” shakily spelled out in bright bits of glass mosaic. Authority on all things Catholic, Jeanine told me Saint Cecilia invented the pipe organ. Surely the patron saint of piano teachers—one of whose number, I’d learned, the former owner had been. Had Santa Cecilia kept safe the surge of music through this house, even as the owner grew frail and bats snuggled in the attic? What I needed was the patron saint of plaster and landscaping, I complained. One night, on one of the rare occasions when he spoke of the house at all, Stuart warned me that this was a bad area for Jews. “The list of great Jewish carpenters is very short, Anne,” he intoned. “Look what happened with the last one.”

Stuart confined his involvement with the house to accompanying me on a single debris-removal expedition with a borrowed pickup, the day after I signed the loan papers. Standing in the foyer while I ran up and down the great solid spiral of staircase, he pointed out that the risers were so scarred, it looked as though the previous residents had used the hall to train racehorses. He hadn’t even deigned to inspect “our” bedroom, and I was too proud to insist. He continued to maintain what I described to Jeanine as his “letting-Anne-learn-her-lesson stance.”

Not once had he tried to dissuade me from buying the house, and not once had he offered to put up half the down payment. He never said he would not move into the house with me, but neither would he discuss moving plans. Whenever he caught sight of my sheaf of plat documents, inspection reports, and real estate offer forms, he did a reasonable imitation of a southern schoolmarm, pursing his lips and wagging his head in a display of silent disapproval. One day, he’d found an old book of Faulkner short stories at a rummage sale and left it on my bedside, with “A Rose for Emily” prominently marked by a piece of ribbon.

I threw that book at him. Enough was enough.

Just because buying a house had been an impulse that took Stuart by surprise—especially from straight-arrow Anne, his own predictable partner, the same woman who once thought having an aquarium would tie her down too much—I was on a path toward some future as a demented recluse, drifting from gable to gable in a nightgown of tattered lace, no matter what Stuart thought.

I figured Stuart would settle down about the house, and I didn’t give a lot of thought to what would happen if he didn’t. We lived around the subject, playing football in Garner Park against the district attorneys, shopping for birthday gifts for my nephews, buoyed up and blown along by the impatient current of our ordinary work lives. Kim McGrory had awakened from his coma, angry and aphasic, not at all happy to be alive. If it had been a sin to execute him before, it was now an obscenity—after all, Kim, once an ordinary downtrodden punk with lousy luck in lawyers, had become a brain-damaged man who couldn’t speak on his own behalf. Stuart was busy gathering testimony on the evils that would emerge from further efforts to set Kim’s big date. He was also preparing a brief in a new case, an appeal on behalf of Tyler Talley, the “Ready Get Set” killer, a nineteen-year-old football star and B student, poor as chalk, sentenced to death for the execution-style murder of two convenience-store clerks. Given those kinds of clients, he wouldn’t have been around very much at even the best of times.

Between us, it wasn’t, however, the best of times. On two lonely nights, Stuart had turned away, angry and soft, unable to make love to me, a circumstance unknown in his history. He’d blamed the heat and his chronic lack of sleep, but I could feel the stalemate between us nibbling at his confidence. Stuart had never come on like a stud; he was simply a man who really did prefer the company of women over men and really did think that sex was one of the things—along with basketball, steak tacos, and Marx Brothers movies—that human life offered as a compensation for the knowledge of death. Late one of those nights, as we lay in the dark, I with a whole batch of “never mind”s and “no big deal”s cooling on my lips, disclaimers I knew wouldn’t lay one finger on his humiliation, he’d told me, “Every time, now, I think of this being procreation.”

“Stuart, it isn’t. I wouldn’t do that to you.”

“I know you wouldn’t. What I mean is, I think of it as being linked with procreation, and the zest . . . the passion of it . . .”

I suddenly wanted to slap him. “Stuart, honey, you know that
was
the original intention of intercourse—”

“Stop it,” he said, and I thought he was about to cry.

But I was wound too tight to stop. “Stop what?” I asked him. “Stop what? Stop myself from even thinking about anything I might want in my life? Stuart, this . . . phenomenon of yours isn’t my fault.”

“It’s not your fault, but it’s both our problem, Anne. I mean, are you happy here? For ten generally pretty terrific years, we’ve done this one thing really well. Plenty of three-pointers, you know? Plenty of memorable overtimes. Why does everything good have to change?”

“I guess because not everybody thinks that it’s always good for everything to stay the same. Life is progressive.”

“This is really progress, Anne.”

From my point of view, the house, with all its entanglement and expense, meant a moratorium on the baby decision. The house would keep us plenty busy all by itself. Stuart, however, saw it as exactly the opposite—a goad, a challenge, an ultimatum. So the fears I had about the house, about affording it, about even wanting it at all, were things I couldn’t share with my nearest. Instead, I’d sit sleepless in bed through light gusts of December hail, until the sharp, freshened smell of asphalt began to rise from the pavement below our apartment windows, the day already heating up before the sun even rose. Maybe Stuart was right. Maybe I wasn’t exactly declaring my right to procreate. But a five-bedroom house was a much bigger deal than a twenty-gallon tank, some neon tetra, and a few black mollies. It meant putting down roots, big time.

But even all that didn’t ruin the house for me. Every time I passed it, or parked my car and strolled from Amor Ausente through the dapple of overreaching branches up the street and around the corner, past vast hacienda-style stucco ranches and stout colonials to what would soon be my own front door, I felt like an explorer. Like the Meriwether Lewis of soon-to-be-forty single white females. I felt connected with something so large it might become unmanageable, and that was somehow heady. When I drove Arley past the house, and told her to squint her eyes and use her imagination a little to see how it might look someday, she breathed, “I don’t have to pretend. It’s just like a castle, Annie. It’s the most beautiful house in the world.”

I sort of felt like that too.

In broad daylight, however, that morning with Jeanine, it had an almost sinister aspect, like some shopping-cart derelict intent on making a vile suggestion. I leaned against one rust-furred spoke of the iron fence, and the whole fence wobbled. Jeanine caught my arm.

“You seem to have your choice of mailboxes,” she pointed out. And indeed, though we’d eliminated many of them, there were still a dozen or so, one in the shape of an old carriage. I hoped I might be able to fix that one up, and I had designs on a few of the others as flowerpots. Toeing one of the mailboxes aside, I struggled to get the palm-sized front-door key to tumble the sticky lock. The real estate agent had offered to meet me at the house for my first formal tour as owner; but I’d told him I’d do just fine on my own. Now I wondered whether I’d have to slink back to the office and ask for help even to get the door open. Jeanine asked me again whether Stuart was coming around. I was tempted to ignore her. Jeanine had a nose for trouble, and the fact that Stuart and I never fought, and never nicked one another in public, filled her with awe and vexation. “Isn’t there a risk that this is going to ruin everything between you, Annie?” she asked with what sounded like some pretty ill-concealed pleasure.

“He’ll be fine,” I told her, still fumbling with the lock. “People change, Jeanine. You have to have some flexibility. You don’t always want exactly the same things.” I didn’t doubt that Stuart would share the monthly bills for the house, though even my income from Women and Children First was more than adequate for the financing I needed, even given the thousands I had to build in for major remodeling. The price of the house itself was ridiculous—on the telephone, my father left messages: “Now, Anne, I don’t mean to be offensive, but sixty thousand dollars for a five-bedroom house strains the imagination . . . are you sure this isn’t a very dangerous neighborhood?” This from a man living in Manhattan, one of the murder capitals of the free world.

“You wouldn’t do it if it would really put a big strain on you and Stuart, would you?” Jeanine pressed. Jeanine herself was so paranoid about any man she adored eventually dropping her that she used a backup system: she backed up the pediatrician with the state cop, Jack Becker, whom she’d met when she knocked down a few dozen construction cones on Highway 10 while rushing to one of her birth mothers in Kendall County.

“If I thought it would be such a big strain, I’d be more worried about me and Stuart than about the house,” I told her, just as the door abruptly popped open and I stumbled into the foyer, banging my knee against the jamb.

“Think of your dignity, Annie. You’re a woman of property now,” Jeanine said, grabbing my elbow. We stared into the gloom of the huge lower hallway. Jeanine fumbled for a light switch; there was none either of us could see. My knee felt like a cap pistol had exploded inside it, and when I reached down to rub it, my hand came away bloody.

“Look,” I said. “I’m bleeding.”

Jeanine went back out onto the porch to look for help. As I plopped down on the bottom stair, cradling my knee, I heard her talking, her voice taking on certain telltale characteristics—the ones that always came out when a man was around. When she came back over the threshold with the blond giant who’d been planting the sign the night we first saw the house, I was only annoyed, not surprised. Jeanine had forgotten about my knee, forgotten about sharing my proud inspection of my crummy new mansion. She’d seen big shoulders and blond hair, high up, and it had immediately transformed her into Heather Locklear. Simple as that.