Talk Talk (13 page)
There were two bona fide bedrooms in the condo, one for Madison and one for Natalia and him, as well as an extra half-bedroom, what the real estate lady wanted to call a sewing room. Or a nursery. “Or”--with a look to him, coy and calculating--“a home office, an office away from the office. For when you get tired of all those patients.” It wasn't much, not a whole lot bigger than the cell he'd shared with Sandman at Greenhaven Prison, but it had a view of the bay and the big stippled pyramid of Mount Tam, and Natalia had found him an oak desk, a pair of matching file cabinets and a Tiffany desk lamp on one of her far-flung antiquing forays. So it was an office. He hooked up his computer and his printer and did business here, reserving the computers at the public library for highly sensitive transactions, the things he didn't want to risk having traced. Madison wasn't allowed in this room, for obvious reasons, and he frowned on Natalia coming in to appropriate a pen or a pair of scissors, though once, when he'd forgotten to lock the door, she'd slipped in naked and put her hands over his eyes. She didn't have to whisper, “Guess who?”
He was in the office now, at his computer, Natalia treating herself to a morning at the spa and Madison off at day camp, and he was doing a little research. It was the kind of thing he was good at, better than good--he'd made a nice quiet living at it for the past three years now, and if there was the occasional glitch, like that time in Stateline when he'd been up all night at the blackjack tables and he was wired and burned-out and maybe a little drunker than he thought, he had it covered. Post bail and walk and let them come after somebody else, Dana Halter or Frank Calabrese or whoever. It was nothing to him, not anymore, and if he hadn't fallen for Natalia he could have lived in Marin for the duration, a doctor in a tailored suit and the calfskin duster he'd picked up last winter, “money for nothing and the chicks for free,” wasn't that how it went?
The first time, though, when he was Peck Wilson and in love with his four-year-old daughter--Sukie, Silky Sukie, he used to call her--the law was a clamp, a harness, a choke hold that cut off all the air to his lungs and the blood to his heart. Gina moved out on him and took his daughter with her, right back to the big Bullhead's house, and why? Because he was a son of a bitch, a rat, a scumbag, because he was cheating on her and no fit father and she never wanted to see him again, never. And if he ever dared to lay a hand on her again, if he ever even thought about it-- What she didn't mention, what the lawyer didn't mention, was the way she'd come to treat him, as if he'd been hired for stud purposes only, to broaden the gene pool so the Marchetti dynasty could wind up with a granddaughter and heiress prettier than a queen and smarter by half than anything they could ever have hoped to produce. That, and to go on fattening the bank account by pushing himself day and night till his brain began to bleed out his ears. Without her, and with the unflagging bullheaded enmity of her father, Lugano went down the tubes within six months--the state came and closed the place up for non-payment of sales tax, which he had to hold out just to cover the suppliers--and the pizza place was reeling. But the divorce order, which he hadn't agreed with but was too tired to fight, specified the amount he had to pay for alimony and child support and laid out the hours--minutes, seconds--he could spend with his daughter. Okay, fine. He moved to a smaller apartment, ran the wheels off the car. There was Caroline, there was Melanie, and what was her name, that girl from the bookstore in the mall? On Sundays, he took Sukie to feed the ducks at Depew Park or to the zoo at Bear Mountain or they hopped the train into the city to catch the opening of the newest kids' flick or to see the Christmas display at FAO Schwarz.
Even now, sitting at his desk, watching the information come to him like a gift from the gods, he could remember the way it felt when he found out Gina was seeing somebody. He'd let himself slip--if he was working out more than every second or third day, that was a lot--and he was drinking too much, spending more than he wanted to on women who did nothing for him, letting work eat him up. He was at a club one night after locking up, a local place that featured a live band on weekends, standing at the bar waiting for Caroline to come back from the ladies', thinking nothing, when somebody threw an arm round his shoulder--Dudley, one of the busboys from Lugano, the one who was always in the cooler, smoking out. “Hey,” Peck said.
“Hey. 'Sup?”
Dudley must have been around nineteen, twenty, hair corded in blond dreads, pincer eyes, big stoned grin, tattoos to the waist, which was as far down as he'd ever been exposed on the premises of the restaurant, but Peck could speculate about the rest. This was the kind of guy--“dude”--who probably had the head of a dragon staring out of his crotch.
In answer, Peck told him “Not much,” and then went on to regale him with a laundry list of woes, not the least of which was his bitch of a wife, and then Caroline came back and they all three had a shot of Jäger and the band pounded away at a Nirvana tune and they just listened, nodding their heads to the beat. When the band took a break, Caroline went outside to have a smoke and Dudley leaned in, his elbows tented on the bar, and opined, “It sucks about the restaurant.”
It did. Peck agreed. There was movement at the door, ingress and egress; somebody stuck some money in the jukebox and the noise came roaring back.
“Yeah,” Dudley said, raising his voice to be heard above it, “and it sucks about Gina too.”
A little fist began to beat inside Peck's right temple. “What do you mean?”
Dudley's face receded, flying away down the length of the bar like a toy balloon with human features painted on it, and then it floated back again. “You mean you don't know?”
The next day, he didn't go in to work. He felt the faintest sting of conscience--they'd be shorthanded, short on produce too, and the dishwasher would just sit around and listen to right-wing talk on the radio and Skip would be so drunk he'd burn the crust off the pies and squeeze the calzone till it looked like road kill on a plate--but the tatters of his work ethic were nothing in the face of the rage he felt. What was he working for, anyway? “Who” was he working for? At first he refused to believe what Dudley was telling him. That she was seeing anybody was enough to light all his fuses, but that she was going out with--sleeping with, “fucking”--Stuart Yan was beyond comprehension. That he was Asian, or half-Asian, had nothing to do with it, nothing at all (and yet he couldn't help wondering just exactly how the Bullhead must have felt about that). The problem, the immediate problem that settled inside him with the weight of a stone, was how he was going to face people, anybody--Dudley, his friends, former customers, people at the bar--when his wife was fucking some slope and he was paying for it, paying for her to just lie around like a slut and get laid all day.
By ten in the morning he was parked at a turnout just off the road to her parents' house. The season was spring, late spring, and already the vegetation was twisted up like a knot, weeds crowding the front bumper, the branches of the trees in full leaf, but still he was afraid she'd notice the car--metal-flake silver wasn't exactly an earth tone. Cars went by, three and four at a time, as if they were attached on a cable, then nothing, then three and four more. There were birds crowding the canopy of the tree that hung out over the car--tiny black-and-yellow things he'd never noticed before, popping in and out of the leaves like puppets--and he worried briefly that they'd spot the top of the car with the drooling white beads of their excrement, but eventually they faded out of his line of vision and he forgot all about them. He didn't really know what he was doing there parked under a tree on a back road to nowhere, didn't have a plan, and yet every time he heard the hiss of tires on the road his heart started slamming at his ribs. He watched pickups rattle by, cars of all makes and descriptions, a kid on a green Yamaha. There was the smell of the sun on the pavement. After a while he buzzed the window down all the way, let the radio whisper to him, the soft thump of a song he'd heard so many times he might have written it himself. An hour cranked by, two hours, three.
Finally, and he might have dozed for a while, he couldn't be sure, he came up fully alert, just as if someone had slapped him or doused him with a bucket of ice water: there she was. Her car. The metallic blue Honda her father had bought for her, and she was behind the wheel with her ugly black-framed glasses on, two little white fists like claws jerking back and forth though the road ran straight as a plumb line in front of her, and there was the kid's seat in back--Sukie, strapped in and clutching a neon-orange teddy bear, her face a blur--and another face there too, on the passenger's side in front. The car was coming toward him--he'd chosen this straightaway for its sight lines--and the whole thing was over in the space of ten seconds, come and gone, and yet still he recognized that face, round as a beachball, the sleepy eyes, the clamped dwindling afterthought of the mouth, and before he could think he'd turned the key in the ignition and slammed the car into gear.
If she hadn't seen him there at the side of the road, she saw him now. He watched her eyes go to the rearview and then her head bobbed toward Yan's and Yan looked over his shoulder and that was all it took to put him over the line, that unconscious gesture of complicity, of intimacy--“putting their heads together”--and he came up on the bumper of the Honda so fast he had to hit the brakes to keep from tearing right through them. And he might have--might have run them off the road, because he was acting on impulse only, inimical to everything that walked or drew breath on the planet--if it wasn't for Sukie. His daughter. His daughter was there, strapped in with her bear, and he was the one out of line here, he was the one endangering her. He dropped back half a car length--safety, safety first, because Gina was as uncoordinated and ungifted a driver as he'd ever seen--but he stayed there, raw and hurt and put-upon, stayed there, right on their tail, till a gas station rolled up on the right and Gina hit the blinker and pulled in.
As if that could help her.
He was out of the car in a heartbeat, screaming something, he didn't know what--curses, just curses, maybe accusations too--and he had his hand on the driver's side door of the Honda even as Stuart Yan was puffing himself out the other side and some bald suit at pump number 3 shouted, “Hey, what's going on here?” If he recalled anything with clarity from those diced and scrambled moments excised from his life, it was the look on Gina's face behind the rolled-up window and the locked door--pale, distant, afraid, terrified of what was about to unfold--and the look of his daughter. Her face was like a big open wound, hurt and puzzled and caught dead-center in a tornado of emotions. That look--Sukie's look--almost stopped him. Almost. But he was running on fumes at this point, the high-octane stuff, fully combustible, and he lit into Stuart Yan with a kick to the windpipe and then he took hold of the suit--some real estate drone with an inflated opinion of himself--and flung him across the hood of the car. What did it take? The trash can, the first thing that came to hand, metal anyway. He raised it above his head, shit flying everywhere, cups and paper wipes and soda cans, and brought it down against that window, again and again and again.
He lifted his eyes from the computer screen and looked out over the bay to where a string of pelicans blew like leaves across the belly of the water. In the foreground was a gently curving row of palms, just like in Florida or Hawaii, better even; sun glinted off the hoods of the Jags, Mercedeses and BMWs in the reserved parking; sailboats crept by like moving statues. If Gina could only see him now. He was sitting on a condo worth three-quarters of a million dollars, he had a new BMW, money in the bank, a girlfriend any man would kill for, and he was leaning over his antique desk under the light of his antique lamp, doing research, manipulating things, the kind of work that always had a calming influence on him, but then he wasn't calm. And he wasn't happy. Not today. In fact, the more he thought about it, the angrier he got, filled right up to the neck with the bitter concentrate of the very same rage that had come over him the day he'd put Stuart Yan in the hospital. And why? Because he'd been careless, because he'd let himself get sucked in, because Natalia was the one thing he couldn't let go of. And Dana Halter wasn't the problem, he saw that now. Bridger was. Bridger Martin.
Once he had the cell number, the rest had been easy. He went online to a reverse phone directory to get the carrier, then called customer service, claiming to be Sergeant Calabrese of the Fraud Division of the SFPD. The woman on the other end of the line, whether she was in India or Indiana, never asked for verification, though he had a legitimate police code he could have used, and she matched the cell to the account number and brought up the name and address on the account. For twenty-five dollars an online information broker gave him the header information on the credit reports--full name, address, social security number, d.o.b.--and he faxed all three credit reporting agencies on the stationery of one of his ersatz businesses, Marin Realty, asserting that Bridger Thomas Martin, of #37, 196 Manzanita, San Roque, was applying for rental property and ordering up a copy of the credit reports. A little research, that was all. Just watching his back.
He'd been busy since he'd got that phone call at the Smart-Mart, very busy, but it wasn't as if he hadn't known it was coming. The same Realtor who'd sold him the condo would be handling the resale, and though he'd probably get screwed out of a couple thousand here or there, it didn't really matter--he'd already set up an account in New York to handle the transfer of the funds once it sold. And it would sell fast, prime property right on the water, people lining up to get in. The hard part was Natalia. She didn't know a thing about it, not yet. The real estate woman wouldn't be showing the place till they were gone, and he was ready to just walk and leave everything behind, the desk and the lamp and the bedroom suite and all the rest of it, but Natalia was going to put up a fight, he knew it. And that was what made him angry. The thought of it. The thought of losing her. And for what? For Bridger Martin?