Two for the Show (12 page)

Whether she was being held in case I needed more “persuasion” as a partner, or she was just hiding till I had extricated myself from the chaos of my life, it put anxious shadows into my thoughts and dreams, and fresh urgency into my plans.

For now, the anchor was cut away from me; my boat was unmoored in unknown seas, and I was on my own.

I began to reconstruct my own life—my own movements, my own residences—over the past twenty years (forgotten motels, featureless short-term rentals, temporary domiciles and living situations that ran together so unmemorably, so fluidly one into the next, that it required receipts, calendar datebooks, the Internet’s infinite memory to revivify it). Once I had done all this grunt detective work of dates and geography, once I had it charted in front of me, the rest of the task turned out to be still substantial, but at least methodical.

It was a matter of finding, and then eliminating, all those other fellow travelers (right now only addresses, ID numbers, car registrations, tax filings) who had moved from city to city with me. With every new city that I charted from my past, some of the names got crossed off, of course, while some were added, and as I continued—traveling digitally over my route through the fuzzy, foggy years—fewer and fewer names were constant. And once the attrition of geography and facts had narrowed it down to a small handful (by which time, by which small handful, I was fairly trembling), I put names to the numbers and the movements, and sluiced it down finally to one.

Dom Carter.

The one person who has moved along with me, week to week, city to city, close by, likely within a few blocks, for literally the past twenty years. Eerie to think it.

My Internet searches revealed no further information about Dom Carter than the name. Which in and of itself strongly indicated, nearly confirmed outright, that Dom Carter was exactly who I thought.

Dom Carter.

I stared at the name, scribbled on the pad, the silent tournament of elimination finally reduced to this opaque “winner.” How does he play? What will his game be like?

How will Dom look, what will Dom say, how will he react if I confront him? It was preoccupying to say the least. And of course, part of the prize of Dom Carter, the nearly painful pleasure, was that he was likely living within a short drive of me. Which turned out to be exactly the case. A firm, final confirmation.

I pull in across the street from Dom’s condominium. A blue Camaro in the driveway. A little bit of personality, in a job that allows none. This little bit acceptable, still invisible enough, in the milieu of Vegas. Wonder how Dom likes Vegas?

I get out of the car, lock the door.

I look at my hands. They are trembling. I rest them on the roof of my car for a moment, try to steady them. It’s no wonder. This will be pivotal. This will be a confirmation of a world different from what I have so clearly imagined and inhabited for twenty years. This will rewrite it. This will coat it over in a new color, hide the previous color forever. And this, answering the detective in me, will be evidence of a different Wallace from the one I always thought I knew. Evidence indelible. Irrefutable. Safely out of reach of whim or imagination.

I still don’t know if I’m going to go through with it.

I know I’m going to go through with it.

Dom may or may not have imagined the idea of someone else doing what he does, the idea of redundancy, which had only occurred to me after twenty years, and only through an inadvertent revelation. Dom might not even believe me. I’m not sure
I’d
believe me.

A trim nondescript walkway. Hardy plants in the sand that require no care. Utterly self-sufficient. Hardly draws a second glance. Like Dom. Like me.

I ring the bell.

Dom opens the door. And I know it is Dom, instantly, by the sterility that frames Dom. By the condo’s unlived-in, unoccupied feeling, by the rented couches. By the side-by-side computers—an easy giveaway.

The obviousness of it centers me. Keeps me upright in my dizziness. Because standing there before me is the first complication. One I somehow should have predicted, but could and would never have, I guess.

Dom is Dominique.

And Dominique is beautiful.

And the smile that I diligently, professionally suppress—the smile that earns me second glances and approving appraisals—escapes from me now, unbidden, authentic, surprised.

“Yes?”

I’m able to process the name thing quickly: Dom from Dominique, not a lie exactly, but not the truth exactly either. Easier for her to move through paperwork, through life, dodge uncomfortable situations and entanglements, with purposeful ambiguity. Going by Dom—maybe a helpful reminder to herself of her own imposture. Helping her to never forget.

“Hi, I’m . . . Jim Isaacson, and, uh . . .” There are about a thousand places to begin, and I can’t pick from among them.

“And what?”

I’m too dumbfounded, too off-balance, to find a gentle, polite, oblique way in. I have only utter directness available to me. “We need to talk, Dominique.”

She is suspicious but can’t help the edge of her own smile. “We do, huh?”

“Yes.”

“About what . . .
Jim
?” Her eyes narrow. She has picked up somehow from me already—from my expression, my stance, my unsteadiness?—that it’s not my name. Which only confirms for me, this is a detective.

I look at her with import. “We need to talk about Wallace the Amazing.”

She furrows her brow mechanically, gives the practiced response. “Wallace the Amazing? What about him?”

I smile. “That’s exactly how I’ve handled it for the past twenty years.”

Now her placid beauty goes visibly off-center—unmoored, challenged. She has caught the whiff of something significant.

“Dom—Dominique—I do what you do for a living. You do what I do. We’re each other’s backup system. Tennessee, Baton Rouge, Phoenix, Chicago. We’ve shared the same existence for twenty years, a few miles apart. I never would have guessed there was another one, which is why you may be having trouble with the idea . . .”

I find myself spilling it all at once like that. And maybe it makes it seem more credible. I have no idea whether she can handle it, or accept it. Or whether she has long suspected such a thing, or even known for sure, or like me, had not the slightest inkling.

But I have my answer in an instant. Something darkens in her eyes; a light goes out—a light of innocence, clearing room for dark truth.

Silently, perhaps shell-shocked, she opens the door wider, and motions me inside.

Two cups of coffee. I watch the broken understanding cross her face. I watch what happened to me, happening to her. My sympathy goes out to her.

But throughout it, she’s breathtaking.

“And why are you telling me this?” Knee-jerk defensiveness. Resentment at having her morning, her life, disrupted, her world rocked. But it’s also a good question: Why am I? What’s to be gained or derived, exactly? Am I looking for an ally? Do I want to be known at last? At least by someone? And more than that, understood? Appreciated at last? The full answer, I know, is deep and subtle and multifaceted. For now, I cobble together a response.

“We’re detectives. We’re after the truth. We live for the truth. I thought you deserved this truth.”

She looks at me, cocks her head. “Detectives?” She shrugs. “Well, I guess.”

How embarrassing. How revealing. How perfectly belittling. Seeing what we do as “detective” work—that was only my eccentric, lonely glorification of it. My grand definition of it, my grand delusion, for twenty years. She’s never even thought of the term.

And then, setting down her coffee cup, as if the first step in ushering me out: “Look, you really don’t know me . . .”

Oh, but I do know you. You have moved around from city to city, venue to venue, and have therefore not been able to establish a relationship, have therefore remained isolated, cut off, alone. You have filled your time with reading, with daydreaming, with empty projects, with false cheer. You have filled the emotional emptiness with fantasy, with perverse imaginings that drive you crazy, that you have to switch off like a television screen. Your existence has stayed lean, everything about it—from the disposable objects in your rental home (things you don’t care about, nothing that lays down roots) to your perennially unsatisfying takeout meals, quick, second-thought calories and nothing more. You look lean, hungry, your arms and abs ripped from constant, empty exercise to fill the void. Even your eyes are hungry-looking, and though this is a fashionable and sexual look, a turn-on to others, it comes out of need, and desperation, and hunger in oneself, which holds little promise for a relationship, if one should stumble into one. And oh, one does—here and there. Briefly. Interrupted, before it can even begin, by secrecy, by insularity, by professional privacy that can’t be risked or punctured. Yes, I know you. And you, by the way, know me. You just don’t know yet, how well you already know me.

And why be silent? Why not say it aloud? Why pretend, be formal, when the intimacy is automatic? This is me I am looking at. I am looking at a mirror. We talk to our mirrors, after all. “Oh, come on, Dominique. I do know you. And you know me. We’ve lived the same life for almost a quarter century. Thinking, obsessing, about the same person, about each night’s performance.”

She smiles gently, resigned. “The same life, with one big exception.”

And I hear my own words—
“thinking, obsessing, about the same person”
—and I know it, sense it, moments before she says it, so her saying it merely confirms my stomach-sinking awareness.

“I sleep with him.” Looking expressionlessly at me. Adding nothing more for the moment. No further commentary or punctuation needed.

And the moment I saw her, when I saw the sudden and disarming beauty, I should have realized it. I should not have plunged headlong into my own fantasy of the two of us, of my double, my other half, this romantic notion . . . I should have taken a breath, taken a step back.

And the instant question, of course: Where do her loyalties lie? Will I be reported? Has she been leading me on, gathering her own data?

I look at her. She looks at me. And now I see how completely wrong I was. I thought I knew her completely. But I don’t know her at all.

“Well, I don’t know if I’m glad I learned this, or not,” she says quietly, just above a whisper, really. “I’m going to have to think about that. You and I, we deal in the power of information and knowledge every day, but I’m not sure that information and knowledge are always such a good thing.” She sips her coffee, and without looking up, says, “Strange, how well we know each other, and how much we don’t.” And then looks at me, smiling ruefully, mimicking her boss lightly, faintly, profoundly, and in a way she knows I’ll recognize. “Connection. Connection. We’re all connected.”

And it is only in leaving Dominique’s kitchen, passing through her sparsely furnished living room, as devoid of artifact and the past as my own, that I see the one exception, a silver-framed faded photograph of an attractive, smiling couple at an amusement park. And something about its place of honor on the shelf, the empty space around it projecting a kind of unspoken holiness to it, inevitably unleashes the detective in me. It is obviously her parents. A single, old photograph, surrounded by no photos more recent. I lift my index finger to point to it, to ask her about it, but she anticipates my question, answering flatly, factually, as if to head off any further discussion.

“My parents. Deceased. Both killed in a train crash, when I was nine.”

Any sympathy I might have felt is overwhelmed by my mind’s sudden whirring.

Connection. Connection. We’re all connected.

NINE

Obviously, the fake detectives,
Armondy and Hammer, had not caught up with Archer Wallace, because he delivered his next blackmail message, and it was quite a variation on the oblique, nearly invisible, easily deleted e-mail he had sent earlier. Its cousin. Its opposite. Because this message ran on the news zipper that girdled the New York, New York hotel, sandwiched between national events and sports scores, and was crafted in a way to create mystery and startlement but give away nothing. Cheerful sounding. Revealing nothing, and everything—in that, the message was its own bit of stagecraft.

A.W.—I’m in town with Dave and Sandi, but working independently. You know I know. Let’s get together on it.

An intimate koan, sent out across the zipper. Sitting mysteriously between marriage declarations and buckeye ads for auto dealerships. Now of course, anyone was free to look into the message. To do their own bit of detective work—though “A. W.” and “Dave” and “Sandi” probably wouldn’t get them very far. Archer sent me a private e-mail—subject line: “NY NY zipper, 2:50 p.m.”—just to make sure I didn’t miss it.

Jesus. The news zipper, used for blackmail. The world moves forward in unpredictable ways.

Was it a volley intended to drive the Amazing Wallace crazy? After the fake detectives, to show commensurate recklessness?
Anything you can do I can do crazier
. On getting over my initial shock—seeing the note there on the zipper, watching it circle, and then disappear after its allotted few repetitions for the next set of electronic messages—I calmed down and realized that the odds were likely that no one would think twice about it. They would go on uninterrupted with their Vegas lives, assume it was merely the message of an old friend reaching out Vegas style to another old friend, and quickly forget it. But wasn’t there the risk that someone would be curious, look into it, begin to insert themselves into the story?

Its second audience, and further intention, was clearly the Stewartsons. To say to them in flashing neon,
Look how far I will go, I’m in charge here, this is mine, back off, don’t mess with me . . .

It also may have been meant to inspire, to formulate in fear, what might be the next step. If Archer leaped like this from message one to message two, what would he do for message three?

It is a game of chicken, I realize, a tightening circle of move and countermove, poised to spiral upward. Neither side wants to
actually
go to the police—if Archer Wallace does, it exposes and brings down Wallace the Amazing, yes, but then Archer will never get his blackmail money, so both sides lose. And if Wallace the Amazing goes to the police, the blackmail ceases, and yes, Archer is prosecuted, but in the process, there is a closer look, an investigation, of the Amazing Wallace, and when the truth of Archer’s claim becomes clear, the Amazing empire eventually crumbles, and—again—both sides lose.

And speaking of money: Why hasn’t Archer Wallace made the ask? The zipper indicates that he hasn’t. He hasn’t assigned an amount, proposed a figure. Hasn’t gotten to that. Why? Something in me already knows the answer to that. Because it’s actually not
about
money. Because Archer wants something besides, beyond, the money. And if it’s something other than money, it may not be payable. There may not be any transaction that will satisfy. No earthly exchange that will suffice.

In light of those fluently fake detectives, and Dominique’s very existence (parallel to mine yet unknown to me), and the shifting identities of the Stewartsons, and ghostly Dave/Archer, and Wallace the Amazing himself—in light of all these inversions of expectation in my previously narrow, orderly, comprehensible life, and, most of all, of that framed photograph of her deceased parents in Dom’s condominium, I began to think again about my father’s highway accident and my mother’s cancer. How Wallace had approached me at my moment of greatest vulnerability. A master of psychology, of human frailty, right from the start. I had left for college just a few weeks before, in the wake of a fierce argument between us. My mother had a locked trunk full of my dad’s belongings in the attic, and I had always wanted to see what was in it, and she had always insisted that I was not old enough. I argued that now that I was going off to school, I should be allowed to look through it, and she still refused. Said it was still not the appropriate time. So I left with the angry notion—ironically prescient—of returning only for absolutely necessary appearances: holidays, weddings, deaths.

I came back from college straight to my mother’s funeral. She had obviously kept her illness to herself, because it was a complete surprise to her small handful of friends and acquaintances who were there and who, like me, had only just learned of her illness too. They were friends I didn’t know—women from her bridge game, clerks from local stores, apparently, people from the church services I had never attended with her (feeling remorseful about that now)—but I was relieved to discover she had all of them in her life, close enough and meaningful enough to be there for her. We had no living relatives. (As you know, that was part of the reason Wallace picked me. Few if any familial obligations or commitments. Relatively free to make
him
my family.) And my mother had largely kept to herself. Had always been an extremely private person, which I attributed to my father’s early, sudden death. In its wake, she had drawn inward, enveloping herself in grief, and then, self-sufficiency. Although I was too young to remember, I had probably done so myself in some unconscious way—probably a natural human reaction, a hard-wired defense, to the disruption of my father’s sudden death. When I left for college, she must have taken the opportunity of the sudden silence and time on her hands to put some household affairs in order, to be even more organized than she already was. Because there in a desk drawer when I opened it—alongside bank and financial statements organized neatly in a folder—were her instructions and arrangements for a funeral and cremation and disposal of ashes, should anything happen to her. And whether she had done all this before or after the discovery of the aggressive cancer—highly organized, or simply bored and alone, with an eerie sense of approaching fate?—I’d never be able to say.

I did my part, though in a fog, understandably, and without much grace or experience; I was a college kid after all, and only by a few weeks. I hastily organized and administered the funeral, according to her explicit instructions. Followed her sheet of directions precisely. Dialed the numbers of people I didn’t know and delivered the news. I contacted the bank officer on the card in her folder, as her folder said to.

Which allowed me to leave the funeral, pack my few remaining possessions into a couple of duffel bags, return to school, and never look back. I didn’t even bother opening the locked trunk. At that point in my life, I decided, I didn’t want to know. I didn’t care. I wanted to turn my back on all the sorrow of my past. I swore I’d never return to such sadness.

And then, there was Wallace with his offer. He was very frank. He had read about the funeral, and about me. He was looking for someone like me. Here were the advantages. Here were the disadvantages. Take it or leave it. But please—for you
and
me, Chas—take it.

And over the years, of course, the question would nag at me. Should I go back? Should I go back? It was always a question fraught with pain, and morality, and contemplation, and a wash of emotion.

But never with suspicion.