And When She Was Good (17 page)

“I'm sorry. A pickup in the grocery store, it just seemed, oh, tacky.”

“A bar is so much better.”

“Are you trying to pick me up now?” Teasing, challenging.

“No, you're much too classy. I think a man has to have better game than that if he wants to get to know you.”

There's something about his open admiration that soothes her nerves. He's so fresh-looking. Wholesome.
Why not a man?
she thinks. Why not marriage to someone, someone who could care for her and Scott? Close the business, disappear, run away from all this. Not necessarily this man, although he might make for good practice. She'll probably have to settle for someone older, a widower or a divorcé, one of those men who can't live alone. Men have always been the root of her problems, but perhaps they—one, the right one—could be the solution, too? Not in a happily-ever-after fairy-tale way, but in the spirit of pragmatism that has governed her relations with men for the last decade.

“I am, at heart, an old-fashioned girl,” she says.

“Too old-fashioned to use e-mail? That's simple enough, right? A little back-and-forth in the safety of our laptops. And maybe a drink, right now, just to get us started.”

She is more tempted than she thought she would be. “I really have to get home, but . . .” She takes out a business card, writes down her private e-mail, the one that the PTA gets. “We can correspond.”

“I'll be proper.” He hands her a card. Terrence Acheson, security consultant.

“You'd better be. I have an aggressive spam filter. Don't shock my computer. Or me.”

He kisses her hand. He's the kind of man who can carry that off, kissing a hand. He's the kind of man who takes care of women, she can tell. Could she really allow a man—not just this man but
any
man—to take care of her at this point in her life?

“You'll hear from me,” he says.

She knows she will. More than knows. Hopes.

2005

B
y the time Scott started preschool, Helen felt that she was in control of her life. Business was good. She had a reliable baby-sitter, an older woman with absolutely no imagination. None. Lonnie—a nickname derived from Lenore—was the most literal-minded person that Helen had ever met. If Scott banged a spoon on an upended piece of Tupperware and declared, “I play drums!” Lonnie seemed to feel obligated to say, “That's actually a piece of Tupperware.”

Perhaps this made Lonnie less than an ideal baby-sitter, but Helen rationalized that Scott's Montessori school nurtured his imagination. And Lonnie was ideal in every other aspect. Prompt, never sick, never thrown into tizzies as college girls could be. She also loved Scott, but who wouldn't? The dream baby was now a dream boy, unusually sweet and kind, with real empathy for people, animals, even objects. He was into everything, as boys often are, transforming the most unlikely things into vehicles and weapons, although Helen had shielded him from guns and violent cartoons. The other mothers at his nursery school spoke of the same dilemma, how boys seemed to have this innate interest in weapons. (These lamentations were overheard, of course. Helen didn't feel she could risk anything more than the most superficial greetings, coming and going.)

Still, she worried about what his father's genes might have contributed to the mix. Not to mention her own. She tried to encourage Scott's sensitive side, giving him soft, silky things to pat and stroke. At night she took him into her lap and made a ritual out of brushing his hair, which was coppery red. She dyed her hair to match, but she could never forget that Scott had Val's hair and Val's eyes, too. She remembered a saying she'd heard around West Baltimore: “There's no denying that child.” If she ever crossed paths with anyone from her old life, that person would recognize Scott as Val's son.

But she never did. How could she? Val was in prison, George I was in prison. George II had disappeared, along with the other girls. She was grateful now for the small, tightly circumscribed world that Val had created, claustrophobic as it felt at the time. She never had to worry about bumping into her old life. Tom was the only remnant, and as far as she was concerned, their relationship was a pragmatic one. He was a captain in vice now. He heard things, he knew things. He told her if there was any threat to her, or if a certain hotel was under scrutiny. Not for money or even sex. They were friends. She had risked a lot helping him hand Val over to county homicide. She deserved Tom's eternal protection.

Yes, Helen had everything figured out. Perhaps she was daring to think that exact self-congratulatory thought as she waited in line at the Giant on Route 40 one night.
I have everything figured out.
She might even have allowed herself a smug, happy sigh. She made some kind of sound, because why else would the woman two people ahead of her in line glance her way, turn around, then swivel her head back, frankly studying her.

“Helen.”

She widened her eyes, pretending confusion.

“Helen.”

She couldn't decide whether to deny her name or merely the acquaintance. “I'm so sorry, I have a horrible memory,” she lied.

“It's Bettina. From . . . back in the day.”

Bettina. Not dead and no longer a fiend, judging by her plump, rosy features. She had gotten healthy, only to let herself go. Was she a mom? At the very least, a wife, someone not actively looking for a man.

“Hi, Bettina.”

“Do you live around here? How funny. I mean, life is just funny. I always say that, and it's true.”

Helen apologized to the women standing between them. “Sorry to talk over you this way.”

Bettina turned to complete her transaction and left the store. Helen thought she had escaped, but Bettina was outside the hissing doors, lying in wait.

“Life is funny,” she repeated. “I always wondered what happened to you.”

Helen couldn't muster the dishonesty to say that she ever thought about Bettina. She should, she knew she should, but some lies came hard to her.

“That was the best thing that ever happened to me, Val throwing me out.” When Helen didn't follow up, Bettina prompted her. “Aren't you going to ask?”

“Bettina, I have a lot of frozen food—”

“And it's barely forty degrees out here. I think you're okay for now. Especially in that coat.”

The coat was cashmere, nothing showy. Showy didn't pay. Showy was for what was worn under the coat, the dress, but never on the outside. The coat was expensive, though, and if one had any eye for clothes, that was apparent. Who knew that Bettina, in her enormous rainbow-striped down coat, had such an eye?

“Anyway, I kept working after I left, but I got busted and I couldn't make bail. Stayed in city lockup so long I detoxed by the time I got to trial, and then the case was thrown out. The public defender took an interest in me. Got me to go back to school. I got a degree—A.A., over to Dundalk, worked in a flower shop, ended up being manager. Did a lot of weddings. I was working with this young girl, only twenty, and one day her daddy walked in, and he turned out to be no more than forty-five, cute as a bug. And widowed. Well, you can believe I closed that deal.”

“That's great, Bettina.”

“So you're not the only one.”

“The only one?”

“Who got out. You did get out, didn't you?” She swept her eyes up and down Helen, taking in the coat, the boots, the earrings. Helen remembered how Val once said a dope fiend could find loose change anywhere. Bettina still had that quality, an ability to assess the value of objects, people. She had been a good whore before she fell in love with drugs, excellent at cadging extras from the men she serviced. Not as good as Helen, but few were.

“I've done okay.”

“Married?”

If you have to stop to consider the lie, the opportunity has passed. Some instinct told Helen it would be better to say that she was, that she could then create a phantom husband who was responsible for the fine things she wore. Would that make Bettina more or less jealous? But now it was too late to tell anything except the truth.

“No.”

“Never?”

“Briefly. Widowed.”

“Kids?”

She hesitates, then nods. A kid bolsters her story.

“I'm trying. Lord knows I'm trying.”

Helen couldn't help being shocked that Bettina's weight gain wasn't a postpregnancy phenomenon. She must feel very secure in her relationship with the forty-five-year-old.

“I can
get
pregnant, but I can't seem to hold on to a pregnancy. Breaks my heart. I got a grandkid. Well, stepgrandkid. But I want my own kids. And Nestor is a man—Mexican, too—he's not going to be open to adoption. So the only thing available to us is IVF, but health insurance doesn't cover it. Life's unfair. Isn't life unfair?”

“It is.” Helen had no problem being sincere in her agreement on this point.

“And it's not like I have family or that Nestor can afford it. I mean, I thought he was pretty well fixed, the way he was throwing money around on that wedding, but it turned out that the maternal grandmother had put money aside for the little princess.”

A saga, an entire miniseries opened up with that sentence. Bettina, setting her cap for a man she believed to be rich, winning him, only to find out that the deep pockets belonged to his former mother-in-law. Oh, and she clearly hated her stepdaughter, who probably wasn't too thrilled with Bettina.

“I'm sorry,” Helen said, unsure of what Bettina wanted to hear.

Bettina leaned over her cart. She looked like a jealous dog, someone who would slap you if you so much as dared to touch one of the frozen pizzas or cans of Pringles.

“I need a loan, Hel.” How Helen hated that abbreviation of her name. Only Val used it, and that was because she couldn't tell Val what to do.

“Have you tried the banks? Or a second line of credit on your home? Equity loans are pretty easy to get now, and the terms—”

“What's it worth to you for me not to let people in your life know what you used to be?”

“I have no people in my life,” she said, quite truthfully.

“C'mon, I know you're married. I'm not buying the widow crap. Look at you. You didn't put those clothes on your own back.”

She wanted to argue that she had, but it didn't seem the best idea.

“I really am widowed, Bettina.”

“So he left you a good life-insurance policy?”

Helen said nothing.

“He left you
something.
What did you do, pick out some geezer and ride him in bed until he had a heart attack?”

“No, Bettina, I think that was your plan.”

Oh, whatever pleasure she took in that little barb was quickly taken from her when she realized that she had harmed her own cause.

“I want money, Hel. When you leave here tonight, I'm going to follow you. And maybe you'll give me the slip, but not before I get your license plate. You know how easy it is to get someone's address if you have the license plate? I'll come to your neighborhood, I'll go door-to-door saying Helen Lewis—that was your name, right, Lewis?—used to be a whore.”

Used to be. If only you knew.

“How much?” she asked.

Again that calculating look. “Twenty—no, twenty-five thousand. Sell the earrings if you have to.”

“This really isn't about IVF, is it?”

Bettina was already rolling her cart away. “You let me worry about how I spend my money.”

She put her groceries into a Subaru Outback, then waited, emergency lights blinking even as people circled, eager for her parking spot. Helen was parked only one aisle over, and she couldn't wait Bettina out. For one thing, she was already fifteen minutes late relieving Lonnie. She drove off. Bettina did in fact follow her home, flashing her brights from time to time, reminding Helen that she was there. As if she could forget.

It was hard getting through the next few hours without letting Scott see that something was weighing on her. She put the groceries away with shaking hands, fixed his dinner, read him a bedtime story, acquiesced to his requests for one more, one more, one more. It was almost 9:00
P.M.
before she could take the time to think about her situation.

She knew, instinctively, that Bettina was like a stray cat: Feed her once and she would never go away. Helen could afford twenty-five thousand dollars, if it came to that. What she couldn't afford was for Bettina to keep coming back to her. She already had to pay Val a monthly fee. She couldn't afford someone else on her payroll.

Val would know what to do, she realized. If only to protect his own share, Val would tell her how to get rid of Bettina.

Val would get rid of Bettina.

T
UESDAY,
O
CTOBER
25

A
s Heloise
dresses for her usual visit with Val, she finds herself thinking about the
questions on the eHarmony compatibility match. These questions are not easily
found if one doesn't wish to register for the service, which Heloise has no
intent of doing. But she figured someone, somewhere, had to have posted the
questions to an open forum, and she has finally located those on a blog.

How important is chemistry to
you?

Now, if she were to actually take this test—and she
might end up doing that, if she really begins to panic about the Sophie
situation, but she is holding on to the hope that she will find another
solution, just as she did with Bettina all those years ago—how would she answer
that? Clearly chemistry is not important to someone who has slept with—let's not
put a number to it—a large sampling of men not actually of her choosing. But she
hasn't decided to live with any of these men. Besides, would she want to be with
someone who said chemistry wasn't important? Everyone wants chemistry. Someone
who doesn't care would be suspect.

Describe your parents'
relationship.

Pass.

Which of the following quirks
would bother you most in a partner? Uses poor grammar, tends to cling to you
in social situations, superstitious, is not familiar with current
events.

How about all of the above and the fact that he has
to rely on a matchmaking site to find me?

Heloise has always paid close attention to the
marketing of matchmaking services. She has even allowed herself a few minutes
with the horrible reality show about a matchmaker, a woman who seems to think
she knows what men want. (She's right about the long hair, though. Men do want
that.) But it's the heavily advertised services that fascinate her—eHarmony,
Match.com, Great Expectations, JDate, the one with the ad in which the woman
imagines getting thrown around the room by a gorgeous man and decides she'd
rather just go to a movie. The fact that Heloise can't remember the name of that
one would indicate that its marketing is a fail. WFEN is
supposed
to be forgettable, but a good matchmaking service should
have a name that's instantly memorable.

Yet they're in the same business, in a way. She
knows that few would agree with her, but the way Heloise sees it, she and the
matchmakers both traffic in lonely people. Same market, different solutions. She
bets a lot of guys who end up searching matchmaking sites would just like to get
laid.

And the men who hire Heloise and her employees are
lonely, achingly so. Some of the regulars swear it's not so, that it's “just”
sex, which is like a man dying from thirst, finding an oasis, and trying to
claim, manfully, it's “just” water. They have been denied a basic human need.
They should feel entitled to go to any lengths to satisfy it, as long as
everyone involved—the men, the workers, the wives and the girlfriends—are
granted basic dignity. Heloise believes there's more dignity in her business
than in the matchmaking sites, where people can be rejected. Once someone has
passed her screening, he is assured that no one's going to say no.

Her forays into the virtual matchmaking world have
paralleled her correspondence with Terrence—Terry, as it turns out—which has
proceeded at the perfect pace as far as Heloise is concerned. His e-mails have
been flirtatious, but not overly so, and he has shown just the right amount of
interest in her—lots of questions about her likes and dislikes, what she was
like as a little girl, not so much about her family. Her instinct was not to
tell him about Scott, but she realizes that this is important information she
shouldn't hold back. She will tell him over lunch tomorrow, make a clean breast
of things.

The phrase strikes her, as phrases sometimes do,
and she can't help herself: She goes to her laptop, which is never far away
these days, as it might chime at any moment with another message from Terry. She
quickly types “clean breast of things origin” into Google, conjecturing that it
will go back to poultry, the literal cleaning of. But no, it derives from a
reference to the chest cavity, which holds the heart. To make a clean breast is
to bare one's heart.

What if she began to feel something for Terry?
Would she tell him everything? Make a clean breast of it all? She can't imagine
that. Terry is a private treat she is allowing herself during a time when it's
better not to be too active at work. With Shelley's homicide pulling her into
the sight line of that homicide cop, it's downright convenient having a real man
around, going out like a normal person. A little fake normalcy is just the
ticket right now. Solve the Sophie problem. Wait out the Shelley investigation.
Ignore her mother's requests, both of which seem equally impossible to Heloise.
She'll figure everything out. She always does.

She likes the fact that Terry has set a lunch for
their first date. It means sex is unlikely, although not impossible, obviously.
She's pretty sure she won't have sex with him; she doesn't plan on doing that
until their third date. (She has been researching the so-called Rules, too, and
is amazed by how some of them mesh with her own advice:
Be
honest but mysterious. Be a creature like no other.
)

First, however, she has to get through her visit
with Val. She has waited until their regular Tuesday to ask the questions that
have been nagging at her since Jolson brought her in:
Why
was Shelley on your visiting list? Do you know anything about her death? Did
you even know she was dead?
Instinct—no, not instinct or intuition,
but her hard-earned knowledge of Val—tells her that she can't come at the topic
too directly, reveal how desperately she wants the answers. She's not even sure
she should tell Val that a Howard County homicide cop has questioned her, much
less mention the photograph of Shelley and Bettina. And she's definitely not
going to let Jolson see how interested she is in this topic. Only Val can tell
her why he was in touch with Shelley—and why he never mentioned it.

I
made a connection the other day that I can't believe I didn't notice before,”
she says about fifteen minutes into her conversation with Val, after providing a
detailed account of the trip she and Scott had made to Antietam, which she found
unexpectedly moving. Now she and Scott are watching the Ken Burns series
together. Of course, there is no Scott in her account, which is a shame, as
that's what made the trip particularly effective. Scott was entranced by the
vista, had no problem imagining the thousands of men crossing the open fields,
whereas warfare is always a little hazy to Heloise.

“Hmmmm.” Val has never been very good at following
up on conversational cues. He never had to be.

“That woman, the so-called Suburban Madam? The one
they found dead and now say was a homicide?”

“Yeah?”

“It was Shelley. Shelley Smith, but going by a
different name now.” He stares impassively through the glass. “She worked for
you. Briefly. Back around”—no, better not to reference Martin's murder—“mid- to
late nineties.”

“Christ, I barely remember her. Brown hair? West
Virginia?”

There it is, the lie. She can call him on it or
pretend that she doesn't know what she knows. Why would he lie? But clearly, if
he wanted her to know about Shelley, he would have shared the information
earlier. Val was always squirrelly that way, controlling people by not letting
anyone know the whole story.

“Dirty blond when we knew her, and I think it was
Virginia. The thing is—police questioned me about her death.”

“Really?”

Val's not quite as good a liar as she is, having
had to do it less often. That's the ultimate perk of power, not having to lie,
because there are no consequences for telling the truth.

Or maybe he just doesn't care that she can see
through him.

“Yes. We were connected in a way I didn't
realize.”

A quizzical look.

“She's on your visitors list.”

“Oh.” As if this had slipped his mind. “You know, I
don't think she ever did, though. Visit me. Not regular, like you. I think that
goes way back to when I was first locked up. No reason to take her off,
though.”

Why is Heloise scared to confront a man on the
other side of a glass, a man who is locked up for life? “But she was gone by
then. She disappeared a few months after”—she's going to say it this time—“after
Martin was killed. I always thought she was a little freaked out.”

“Yeah, we stayed in touch for a while. Back
then.”

“Val, did you set her up? Did you give her the idea
for
her
business?”

He grins. “You jealous, Hel? Did you think you were
my one and only?”

Yes.

“It just would have been nice to have a heads-up.
Can you imagine what ran through my mind when a cop said he wanted to talk to me
about her death?”

“But I bet you were convincing. I mean, you didn't
know that you had any connection with her, and you hadn't seen her for years, so
you were probably really persuasive when you told him you don't know anything
about her being murdered.”

“Yes, but it means a suburban cop could figure out
I was in the life, once upon a time, although I denied it. I don't want to be on
any cop's radar.”

“A homicide cop in Howard County doesn't care about
a prostitute who works out of Arundel County. Cops are funny that way.
Hierarchical. And homicide cops are always full of themselves, think what they
do is so much more important than all the other squads. You've got nothing for
him, legitimately. He'll leave you alone.”

“Jesus, Val, aren't you the least bit upset? Or
curious? This is someone you knew. Someone you must have liked on some level, if
you did business with her. And she was murdered, possibly because of what she
did.”

“You know, Shelley always was a scaredy-cat,” he
says. “You're right about the timing. Martin got killed”—even now, after all
these years, he never spoke of this event except in the passive voice—“and she
couldn't hack it. She asked me if she could leave, which I don't usually let
people do, as you know. She had a lot of earning left in her. We worked out an
arrangement, sort of the beta plan for what you ended up doing. So you're really
riding her coattails, benefiting from what I learned being in business with her,
although you're more suited to it. She never got the high-end trade that you
have, didn't have the discipline to run it like a real business.”

He's trying to compliment her, but what Heloise is
hearing is something very different. She's been a dupe, a sap. She is, in short,
as unwitting as her own mother, the second Mrs. Hector Lewis. No, even more so.
Her mother never suffered from the delusion that she was Hector's one and only.
Stupid to feel cheated on, when it was a business deal, but Heloise always
believed Val when he said she was the only person like him, the only one who
understood him.

“Anyway, I truly thought Shelley offed herself,
though. I mean, you could see why she might have. No income coming in. Jail
looming. But now they say homicide? Maybe she began to look around her life, see
what she had to bargain with.”

“What are you telling me, Val?”

“Just making an observation. I think she pissed
someone off, threatened to name names, and it came back to haunt her. Nobody
likes a snitch, Helen.”

Val never calls her Heloise, but he almost never
calls her Helen either. He usually falls back on the shared first syllable, Hel.
Hell.

She thinks about the photograph discovered with
Shelley's body, the Polaroid of Shelley kissing Bettina. Does Val know about the
photograph? If he knew that the cop would talk to her, did he also know that the
cop would share this photo, ask her about the other woman in the photo? She
thought Val had put the Bettina thing behind him a long time ago, assumed she
was dead. Did he have Shelley killed? Is he trying to find Bettina, have her
killed?

“Did I tell you,” Heloise says, “that I'm finally
watching the Ken Burns documentary on the Civil War? You really inspired
me.”

“I wish they would rerun that,” he says, his eyes
lighting up. Those familiar eyes, the ones she looks into every day. “I get PBS
on that rinky-dink TV they let me have, but I swear it's just one big Lawrence
Welk pledge drive.”

They talk about Little Round Top for the rest of
the visit.