Anonymous Rex (24 page)

“You hit it off right away?”

“I wouldn’t say right away, but it was obvious something was there. The wife and I got along well that day, actually. By the next morning, we hated each other.”

File that. “Did you sleep with Raymond that night?”

I can almost hear the SLAP! and see the welts forming as my offhand question smacks into Sarah’s stunned face. I didn’t mean it that way. I wasn’t thinking. It was stupid, it was dumb, but I’m too aghast at my own words to voice any regret. This is not the first time my runaway mouth has shattered fragile circumstances—once the PI part of me gets turned in a certain direction, the gas gets floored and the power steering goes out, which is great if I’m on a straightaway—but if there’s a cliff in front of me, so long Vincent.

Sarah’s response is low, pained, the voice of a young girl huddling
in a corner who doesn’t understand why she’s being punished. “Is that how you see me?” she asks.

“No, no, I—”

“Talk to a man once and then sleep with him?”

“That’s not what I—”

“Because if you do see me that way, I don’t want to disappoint you. You wanna leave the restaurant, go home and lay me, okay, let’s go.” Anger flooding her eyes now, spilling over onto the table, washing out the restaurant. She leaps to her feet unsteadily and pulls at my arm. “Get on up, boy, and let’s go home and see how you can put it to me.” Patrons turning, listening, eager to get an earful and enrich their workaday lives. I can almost smell the rancor on her.

I place my hand over hers, trying to restore tranquillity to our once-idyllic table for two. “Please,” I say, “I didn’t mean it like that.” Slow subsidence of the anger waves now, flowing away, back out to sea, look out for the undertow. “Please. I get ahead of myself sometimes. It comes with the job.”

Two glasses of wine and a few more dips of
tzatziki
later, Sarah accepts my apologies. “No,” she says pointedly, returning to the conversation. “I did not sleep with him that night.”

“I gathered that.”

“I won’t say I didn’t find him attractive, though. That strong, weathered face, creased with those deep lines—wrinkles that let you know he’d
been
somewhere. Long, tight muscles, broad shoulders … On the outside, Raymond was a very durable man. Not physically, mind you, but mentally. Emotionally.”

“And on the inside?”

“You wouldn’t see the inside unless you knew him well, and then you learned what made Raymond … Raymond. He had some interesting peculiarities, some more endearing than others. I doubt anyone other than myself and maybe his wife knew Raymond as he really, truly was.”

Should I tell her that her beloved Raymond was widely known as a philanderer? That he’d seen more mattresses than Inspector Number 7? That while she might have been the last of his lovers, she was surely not his only one? But what would be the point in that, other than to hurt the girl—I’ve already gotten in my quota of stinging remarks
today. Perhaps I am jealous of McBride, of his willingness to flaunt societal constraints, of his desires for the forbidden, which were obviously so much stronger than mine. But this kind of thinking is both destructive and completely moronic, and so I snip it off at the source.

“… but even if he had been interested at the time,” Sarah is saying, “I was in a relationship.”

“With whom?”

“With my agent.”

“Your agent? Is that wise, mixing business and pleasure?”

“Sometimes it’s best,” says Sarah, and I’m both glad and troubled to see she’s moved away from anger, back toward seduction. Anger wasn’t fun, but easier to handle. “In this case, no, it wasn’t wise. We broke up soon after the party, in fact. Which left me out of a relationship and Raymond still in one.”

“Judith.”

Sarah waves off the name with an annoyed flick of her hand, as if swatting away a bothersome fly. “We didn’t call her that. We called her missus, plain and simple. Missus. It was better for me, it was better for Raymond.”

“Was he still in love with her?”

In the time it takes Sarah to begin her answer, the waiter arrives with our entrées. My Lemon Chicken is well prepared, but Sarah’s Greek Platter looks positively scrumptious. Fortunately, I’m sure she won’t finish it all, and then I can peck away.

The waiter trots off, and we hunker down, tearing into our dinners like Compys come upon a fresh kill. I am not surprised at my appetite—it’s been over twelve hours since I’ve had anything substantial, and although my breakfast this morning was a feast fit for the roundest of royals, I’m famished.

What I am surprised at is Sarah’s ability to make food disappear off her plate in what has got to be Guinness time. Moussaka, Chicken Olympia, Pastisio, some eggplant dish I’ve never heard of before—I watch in growing amazement as each forkful enters that darling mouth, only to emerge empty a moment later and return to the plate for more. My word, where does it all go? Under the table? Into a roving dog? But I can see the long lines of her throat swallowing, so I
know she’s ingesting every bite. How does that platter of food, which probably weighs more than the model herself, vanish into that body? There is some twisted perversion of the laws of nature going down in this Greek tavern, a clash of food and antifood, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out how it’s working. If I hadn’t had the disappearance of Jaycee Holden solved for me today, I’d think that maybe Sarah had eaten her.

I am unable to talk. I can only watch. Wow. Wow.

Ten minutes later, Sarah is finished with dinner and my jaw is agape.

“Hungry?” I ask.

“Not anymore.”

I should hope not. Sarah pushes her plate away, and despite the prodigious amounts she’s recently ingested, I can’t make out a bulge anywhere on that tummy. People like Sarah evoke a lot of hatred from the body-conscious all around the world, but I’m too astounded to feel jealous over metabolic rates. “Where were we?” I ask, honestly forgetting. That display of concentrated consumption put me off my track.

“You asked if Raymond was still in love with the missus,” says Sarah, using the title to refer to Judith McBride, “and I hadn’t yet answered.”

“Well then … was he?”

Again, she pauses, though I would think that she’d had enough time to ponder her answer while digesting the whole of Greece. Of course, it probably takes a good portion of one’s brain power to shovel it down like that. “Have you ever had an affair, Vincent?”

“With a married woman?”

“Yes, with a married woman.”

“I have not.” I came close, though. I’d been tailing a Bronto’s wife, trying to get the usual incriminating photos, and found that although she was not currently engaged in an extramarital affair, she was most interested to get one started. She’d caught me snapping pictures outside her bedroom window, and the next thing I knew, I was sipping champagne in the Jacuzzi to the strains of vintage Tom Jones. I had to wait until she’d gone back in the house to slip out of her guise and “into some skin more comfortable” before I could make my getaway.

“Married people are just that,” Sarah tells me. “Married. You can’t ask if a married man who is having an affair is still in love with his wife, because it’s a question without a point. It is immaterial whether or not he loves her, because she is his wife, plain and simple.”

I pick at my dinner, mulling over her viewpoint and my next question. “How often did you see him?”

“Often.”

“Two, three times a week?”

“By the end? More like five or six. He’d try to spend Sundays with the missus, but by that point she wasn’t very interested.”

“So she knew?”

Sarah snickers derisively as she leans over and plucks a lemon potato off my plate. “Oh, she knew. She’s not a dumb lady, I’ll give her that much. You’d have to be a real piece of granite not to notice something like that. Working late, every weeknight? Sure, Raymond was a driven man, but no one puts in eighteen-hour days at the office for nine months straight.

“I think the missus got the picture after the first month or so, because Raymond started to loosen up on the telephone. Calling me by my name, not screwing around with code words. Before that it was all cloak-and-dagger, and I could tell when she walked into the room because he’d start calling me Bernie and talking about the great round of golf we’d played the other day. And I hate golf. All my life I’ve been surrounded by golfers. Please tell me you’ve never played golf.”

“Twice.”

“You poor soul.”

“Raymond loved that damn game. We’d be in Paris, taking in the spring air, walking through the Arab Quarter, stopping in the shops, talking to the people, and he’d be practicing his swing, wondering what kind of club he’d use if he had to hit a ball over that storefront and into the window of that church. Fourth-tier Eiffel Tower was a nine wood, by the way.”

“He took you to Paris, then?”

“Paris, Milan, Tokyo, all the hot spots around the globe. Oh, we were quite the jet-setting couple. Surprised you didn’t see us in some social column.”

“I don’t read much.
TV Guide
sometimes.”

“Pictures in all the international magazines, Raymond McBride and his traveling companion. They never mentioned his wife, and they never made a deal over it. That’s the one good thing about Europeans—to them, adultery is like cheese. Options are plentiful and varied, only occasionally accompanied by a stench.”

The rumors, then, were true: McBride had lost his mind. This well-known Carnotaur had obviously flipped out, flaunting his human girlfriend to the world, even going so far as to let magazines link them romantically. And while the International Councils are not quite as stringent about sexual mores as are the American Councils, cross-mating is still verboten across the globe. All it takes is one slipup from any of us, from the smallest Compy in the smallest district of Liechtenstein, and the last hundred and thirty million years of a persecution-free environment could all be over. Not including the Middle Ages, of course. Dragons, my ass …

“Did he offer to marry you?”

“Like I said, he was married to the missus and that’s that. I assume they had some sort of arrangement.”

“Arrangement?”

“He slept with me, she slept with whomever she slept with.” Sarah is glancing about the other tables, looking for more alcohol.

“So you think Jud—Mrs. McBride—was having an affair as well?”

“Think?” Sarah tosses her head, clears some cobwebs, and I have to stop her from motioning toward our waiter-turned-sommelier. “Course she was having an affair. She was having an affair before I ever came along, that’s for sure.”

I should be shocked, I know, but I can’t dredge up the proper emotion. “Did you know the guy she was sleeping with?”

A head shake, a nod, and I can’t tell if Sarah’s answering me or about to drop off into sleep. “Yeah …” she murmurs. “That damn … nightclub manager.”

Score one up for Vincent Rubio. My initial queries into the nature of Donovan and Judith’s relationship, questions that clearly had put Judith on edge, will have to be brought up again the next time I see Mrs. McBride. Obliquely, of course, and with all tact, and if that doesn’t work, directly and rudely.

“Sarah,” I ask, “did you know Donovan Burke?”

“Hm …?”

“Donovan Burke—did you know him? Did you know Jaycee Holden, his girlfriend?”

But Sarah’s head is drooping now, tottering in all the cardinal directions, balancing precariously atop that long neck, and no recognizable answer is forthcoming. The wine is finally wielding its power, taking its toll despite the six tons of Greek food mopping it up in her stomach. “He wanted to see his children so badly,” Sarah whimpers, on the verge of tears.

“Who wanted to see his children?”

“Raymond. He wanted children more than any other man I’ve known.”

She’s rambling now, muttering words I can’t make out, but I have to pursue this a little longer. I lift Sarah’s head, force her to watch my lips. “Why didn’t he have children?” I ask her, making sure to enunciate clearly. “Was it Mrs. McBride? She didn’t want kids?”

Sarah flails her arms, tossing my hand from her face. “Not her!” she yells, drawing attention from the general public for the third time this evening. “He wanted to have them with
me
. With me …” She trails off, sobs wracking her body.

No wonder she’s such a wreck—this poor girl lived the last few years of her life under the delusion that she would eventually carry Raymond McBride’s child, never knowing that such a thing was a physical impossibility. Who knows what other lies he told her? And the fact that McBride was so involved in it as well leads me to believe that perhaps he did indeed have Dressler’s Syndrome, as many have surmised, that he had truly begun to think of himself as human, unable to distinguish his daily deception from the reality within.

The combination of wine and painful memories has made an emotional invalid out of Sarah Archer, and I feel honor-bound to make sure she returns back home safely. “Let’s go,” I say, tossing a hundred dollars on the table to cover the cost of dinner, wine, and a sizable tip. With the exception of two twenties tucked into my sock, it’s the last bit of cash I have in the world—I should pay with the TruTel credit card, but at this point it’s better that we exit, stage left, as soon as possible.

Dragging Sarah up and away from the table isn’t as easy as I’d expected;
she’s not as heavy as the dino-mix I towed behind the Dumpster, but her drunken body machinations give her a lot more heft than her small form should allow. We stumble backward, Sarah slumped atop my lap like an oversized ventriloquist’s dummy, and I grunt with exertion.

“Are we having fun yet?” Sarah asks, throwing her arms around my neck and hugging me close. This is easier, at the very least, though her proximity is causing some involuntary reactions that are inappropriate for both the location and the species. The other restaurant patrons are wholly involved in our struggle, having as they do box seats for the main event. I can see their faces grimace along with mine as I half-drag, half-support Sarah as we make our way toward the door. Ten feet away, no more, but it might as well be a mile.