And When She Was Good (14 page)

F
RIDAY,
O
CTOBER 14

H
eloise is taking a morning for herself, staying in Starbucks with her Venti latte and
Wall Street Journal
before heading out for a morning of treatments at a favorite spa—just the kind of expense, per Leo, that she should be able to deduct but never has.
Because she's so careful.
Her nerves ajangle all morning, she had hoped some extra caffeine would help, but it's only making her shakier.

A strange man dropping into the chair opposite her doesn't do anything to thwart that feeling. Especially when she can tell with a glance that he's a cop.

“Vice,” he says. There are other words, too, but all she can hear is
vice.
Vice, vice, vice.

How would an average woman, a legitimate woman, feel about such a statement? She would think the man was crazy, dangerous. Or assume that she couldn't possibly have heard what she thought she'd heard. Heloise manufactures the horrified, frosty look that she believes one of the stay-at-home moms would give such a man.

“Excuse me?” she says, even as she pushes away from the table, prepares to leave. Why did she sit at a table anyway, which makes it easier for someone to join her like this? She should have taken one of the armchairs. But she was afraid that if she sank into an armchair, she would never get up again, not after the sleepless night she'd had.

“I said we share a vice.” He points to the Venti in his hands, the markings in the little boxes, their coffee identities. They are the same, although the order is not a common one—Venti, half-caf/half-decaf,
minus
a shot, heavy on the milk, one Splenda.

Still, he's clearly a cop. A cop in a suit, a detective. It couldn't be more obvious to her that he's a cop if he were wearing a uniform and driving a marked car with the siren blaring. His suit's not quite sharp enough for a Baltimore city detective. He seems suburban to her. Damn. She has always assumed that the county police are stretched too thin to be worried about vice cases, especially as she's not stupid enough to do anything in her own home. But she can't stay out of Annapolis. It's 40 percent of her business. She takes a long draw of her coffee.

“You're Heloise Lewis, right? Your housekeeper said I might find you here. I was hoping we could talk.”

“Why? What could you possibly want from me?” She's not about to relinquish her befuddled-citizen role, the woman keen to help authorities, but incredulous that she could.

“I'd like to talk to you about a homicide in Howard County, where I'm a detective.”

On this particular score, she couldn't possibly feel less guilty. She is 100 percent sure that she has not killed anyone in Howard County. But now she trusts him even less.

“As a suspect?” A little too blunt for the persona she's channeling, but she's impatient.

He's not as surprised by her directness as she would like. “No, not at all. Just a talk. No big deal. We could probably do it here, right now, but the acoustics are god-awful.”

He glances meaningfully around the coffeehouse. This time of day, it's mothers, the laptop crew, and that increasing army of people who seem to use Starbucks as their home office. Everyone eavesdrops here. Heloise knows because she eavesdrops here. She has picked up information about marriages going bad, problems at the local school, even stock tips, although she has never been tempted to take those because she is dubious about the business acumen of men who yell into their cell phones at Starbucks.

“I'd like to bring my lawyer, so let's schedule an appointment and I'll call him.”

“No reason to do that,” he says, his manner a little less friendly than it's been. “It's only a conversation.”

“I have appointments all morning. Spa things. They charge you if you cancel with less than twenty-four hours' notice.” She is thrilled to have this wonderfully legitimate excuse, almost hopes he'll challenge it. “Can we meet at your office at two?”

He nods, slides his card to her. Alan Jolson. Al Jolson!

She can't stop herself. “Why did your parents do that to you?”

“I think it's because they didn't want people to call me Al. And that was before the Paul Simon song. Everybody does, though. Calls me Al. Why did your folks stick you with Heloise?”

“Old family name.” She lies for the sheer practice of it, to test herself—and him. If he's been checking into her for any reason, the name change will kick up in the most basic LexisNexis search.

He sighs, brings his bulky frame up from the chair with some effort. “See you at two. Really, I wouldn't bring a lawyer.”

“Do you have a son or a daughter?” she asks.

“I've got kids,” he allows.

“If a police detective asked them to come in for a friendly conversation, would you allow them to go alone, without representation?”

“Yes I would. My kids know that we're on the right side.”

She doubts it, but she lets it go. Heloise has always told Scott not to talk to the
principal
without her or Audrey in the room.

S
everal hours later, spa-pampered but not at all refreshed, Heloise arrives at police headquarters with her lawyer, Tyner Gray. An older man who has spent most of his adult life in a wheelchair, he has an electric energy that can feel like rudeness to those who don't know him. She likes it. He has never known the ins and outs of her business. She hopes he never will. But he has overseen all the confidentiality agreements she has used, and he is the one who put her in touch with the private detective who does her client background checks. He's probably figured it out, but they have been happy with their don't ask/don't tell relationship.

Perhaps to punish her for bringing a lawyer, Alan Jolson makes Heloise wait for forty-five minutes. That's okay. Audrey's already on tap to pick up Scott from school. Still, the principle bugs Heloise. The point of an appointment is not to be left waiting. Civil servants.

“I'm thinking about adding a no-compete clause for my employees,” she says to Tyner, making conversation. “I want to keep them from taking clients when they leave.”

“Those are tricky in a business such as yours,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“It's all about relationships, right?” He could be speaking of her real business or a legitimate lobbying firm. “I can look into it. My hunch is that it will be a lot of billable hours and in the end I won't be able to craft a foolproof provision. I'd hate to do that to you.”

The conversation peters out. He has no talent for small talk, and Heloise prefers to be paid for it. She notices the wedding ring on his hand, tries to imagine his wife. Was she with him before he was paralyzed? She envisions a patient, loving woman who has stood by him for forty years, someone as soft and yielding as he is hard and prickly. She bets he's a sweetheart with her—and no one else.

The silence between them is becoming more and more strained when Detective Jolson—Al Jolson, it still makes her smile—finally summons them in. He's angry, no mistake. He didn't want her to bring a lawyer. Yet he didn't make the usual threats, so she's clearly not a suspect. Cops just hate people who know their rights.

He pushes a photograph toward her—a woman appears to be sleeping on the steering wheel of her car, her face discolored.

“Recognize her?” he asks. Then, before she can answer: “Michelle Smith. Died earlier this month. They called her the Suburban Madam.”

She cannot gauge if he's baiting her, if he knows what she does. It doesn't matter. She's not going to tell him anything about herself.

“I thought she committed suicide,” Heloise says, even as Tyner shoots her a look. Right, they had agreed: Follow his lead, volunteer nothing, speak only with Tyner's nod of approval, direct and to the point.

“Yeah, funny about that. Everyone assumed that because it was asphyxiation, and we let it go. But it's a homicide. Official ruling's going to be released Monday.”

She can't help herself. “Why Monday?”

“Because it's going to be a fucking big deal, and we'd all like to have a nice weekend free of media and Internet conspiracy theories.”

Heloise sees a setting sun, feels the cool autumnal air, hears Tom's voice:
Be careful. Be careful.
This is what he was warning her about. Not his replacement in vice. A killer, someone who had murdered a woman not unlike her.

But she waits. No question has been asked of her.

“What do you think about that?” Jolson presses, not much better than the television reporters he hopes to evade for a weekend.
How does this make you feel?

Tyner nods permission for her to speak, not caring that Jolson sees what he's doing, that he will understand the dynamic at work.

“It's horrible, of course. It's not what one expects, not in that neighborhood.”

“Not for the everyday resident, but maybe not so surprising for a whore.”

She flinches at the term. Still, no question has been asked. There is nothing for her to say.

“A whore,” he repeats. “That's a nasty business. Nasty things happen.”

“Was she killed by a client?” Tyner is allowed to speak as he wishes.

“You'd think so, right? I mean, that's how it works in the movies. Some guy's got a fetish, he goes around killing prostitutes. But let me tell you, those guys, they are not going to the high-end ladies.” Heloise feels a bizarre flash of validation to hear her own theory supported. “And this lady wasn't supposed to be seeing customers, being under indictment and all.”

“Right,” Tyner says. “But she had a black book.”

“You need to stop thinking that newspapers get stuff right,” Jolson says, not unkindly. “There was no black book, not really. She had a coded list of customers. We broke it pretty easy. The most ordinary guys you could imagine. No senators, no bigwigs.”

Bigwigs?
Heloise has never heard someone use that term in earnest.

“I'm not saying these guys didn't care about being found out. They were shitting bricks, but it was all about their wives and bosses and neighbors, you know? The ones we talked to—they have alibis or it's just not plausible. I mean, you cannot imagine these guys carrying off something like this. Trust me, they would have confessed. They confessed to everything. I felt more like a priest than a detective.”

Silence. What is there to say? Heloise feels as if she can pinpoint the exact location of her heart. It is like a pigeon caught in a chimney, flapping its wings, desperate to get out, blind in the darkness.

“What do you want from my client, Detective?”

“A show of emotion, at the very least. You know her, right?”

Tyner has to poke Heloise. She hasn't registered Jolson's comment as a question. “I don't think so.”

Jolson pushes a photo across the desk. Now it's the living version of the woman as she appeared in her last court appearance. Thin, dark eyes—Heloise shakes her head, happily sincere. She has no idea what he's talking about.

“Does she look familiar to you in this photo?” The next one is a Polaroid of two women—the wraithlike, coked-up Bettina, eyes enormous, her arm around a juicier version of the dead woman, making out in a halfhearted way. But that's Shelley, not Michelle Smith. A brief favorite of Val's long ago. Lord, Heloise hasn't thought about her in, well, forever.

Heloise has been so sure of her absolute innocence in whatever matter was at hand that she hasn't asked Tyner what to do if asked about something she doesn't wish to discuss. She has to make a split-second decision. She goes to her default. She lies.

“No,” she says.

“You sure?”

“Pretty sure.” Michelle Smith. A different name, and she looks so different. She hasn't aged well at all. Funny, she got so thin and Bettina got so plump—

“You have something in common.”

Heloise wonders if she is going to throw up, and if she can plead food poisoning if she does. “Really?”

“She's on the visitors list for a convicted killer named Valentine Day Deluca.”

Don't say his full name,
she wants to warn automatically. Instead she allows herself to furrow her brow as if she's trying to be a good Girl Scout, put together these connections.

“You are, too.”

She is so well trained she won't even affirm this until Tyner makes eye contact and nods.

“Yes, I am.”

“Why?”

“Because I visit him.”

“I mean, why do you visit him?”

“I knew him.”

“Were you one of his whores?”

“I was his girlfriend.” It's hard not to say this without laughing. Still, they can't prove she was a prostitute. She was never arrested, not even once. The closest she came was the time she shoplifted the home pregnancy kit. And she knows Tom won't give her up, to anyone, not even to another cop. “His work life—I admit I turned a blind eye, tried to ignore what was right in front of me.”

“He's a pretty bad guy. How did a nice lady like you ever become involved with him?”

“I was very young when I came to Baltimore. Also very broke and very desperate. I didn't have the best taste in companions. Val's arrest set me straight, made me see that I needed to get out and start over.”

“Why do you still visit him?”

“I was under the impression he didn't have anyone. Now I know different.”
Why was Shelley visiting him?

“But you didn't know her?”

“I might have met her, but it was a very long time ago and I don't remember much about her.”

“And the other woman in the photo?”

She shrugs as if she doesn't even understand the question.

“Did you know her?”

“I don't think so, no.” She's still trying to process the fact that Shelley is
the
Suburban Madam. Shelley is on Val's visiting list. That's the only reason Heloise is here. This so-called detective doesn't have an inkling what she does. Yet.