Anonymous Rex (27 page)

“She’ll be right back,” I explain to a startled Marilyn, who, I can see up close, is actually more like a Marvin, and pull Judith into one of
the more nonpopulated areas of the ballroom, letting her have it all the way.

“What the hell are you doing, going out like that? Have you lost your mind?”

Judith, nonplussed, says, “This time, Mr. Rubio, I believe I will have you thrown out.” She raises her hand—her forepaw—toward some unseen protector in the distance, but I grab it before the ascent is complete, holding the fingers in my kung fu grip.

“You can’t do this—this is—this is violation number one, the big one—going out unguised—”

“It’s Halloween.”

“Screw the holiday, you can’t risk security because some mammals want to make fools of themselves.”

“I’m risking nothing, I assure you.”

“You know what I’m talking about—”

“And you’re not listening. It’s Halloween. This—is—a—costume. A dinosaur costume. Nothing less.”

My fingers unclench; the clawed forepaw drops back to her side. “That’s not possible,” I say. “The mouth—it moves when you talk. It’s just like—the teeth—the tongue—”

Judith laughs, and the Carnotaur costume jiggles up and down. “I spent more on this costume than you probably did on your house, Mr. Rubio. I should hope it is realistic. As for its possibility … well, you should know better.”

“This is … a guise?”

“I can promise you—I swear to you—that what I am wearing is the guise of a dinosaur.”

Keeping my voice low, though on this night and in this place, no one would think twice if they overheard: “So you’re a dino dressed as a human dressed as a dino.”

“Something like that,” she says, and to prove it to me, she carefully peels back a bit of skin just below her midsection, retracting from a seam I hadn’t seen before. Beneath is a wash of pale human flesh, Mrs. McBride’s “natural” guised-up skin tone.

“Good costume,” I say lamely.

But I’ve got her laughing, and laughing is better than screaming at her bodyguards to throw me into the punch bowl. “Dance?” she asks, already stepping out toward the floor.

The song’s a fox-trot, and I believe I remember the steps. “If you can forgive me,” I say, “I would be honored.” Casual dance-floor chatter might prove to be the perfect lead-in to my follow-up questions.

It does indeed begin that way, Judith and I talking about the weather, the city, the madness of the holiday as we slow-slow-quick-quick around the dance floor, my lead becoming stronger with every turn and promenade. She’s an excellent dancer in her own right, following my moves with the slightest pull, the most delicate of touches. Soon I’m able to talk without counting the beats out in my head, and we fall into an easy patter.

“Are you done with whatever you came to find?” she asks.

“Yes and no.”

“I assume you came tonight as you found something that couldn’t wait. Isn’t that what you people say? It couldn’t wait?”

“Us people do say that sometimes, yes.”

“And you’d like to ask me now.”

“At some point in the evening.”

“As we seem to have exhausted our stores of small talk,” she suggests, “why don’t we dispense with the rest of it and get down to business. I assume you’ve spoken with the Archer woman by now.”

“I have.”

“And the rest of Raymond’s harem?”

“His harem?”

“Shocked? Don’t be.”

I was aware that Judith had known about her husband’s affair with Sarah—I’d learned that tonight at dinner—but how many more of Raymond’s dalliances was she privy to? “You knew about the affairs, then?” We spin around a slower couple, leaving them in our dust.

“Not at first, no. It took me a little bit to catch on, but not long. Raymond was a brilliant man, but in matters of the heart, my husband had long ago outlived his warranty.

“He started out low-key enough,” Judith continues, “a girl from the office, I think, and for a while I thought it was cute. You know, he was taking this young thing under his wing, guiding her through the labyrinth of corporate existence.”

“And then?” There’s always a then.

“And then he started fucking her.” The number picks up, the band climbing into a faster rhythm, and we escalate our steps to match.

“What did you do?” I ask.

“The only thing I could do: Deal with it. It happens all the time.”

“What does?”

“Infidelity. There’s not a friend of mine whose husband hasn’t screwed around on her.” Now
there’s
a sewing circle to stay away from. “But it’s not like us to get angry. Not openly, that is.”

“Hit ’em when they’re not looking?” I ask.

“Hit ’em
where
they’re not looking. When you stake your life in the upper crust, the best revenge is always financial. So, in retaliation, we buy things. Furs, jewels, brownstones …

“I had one friend whose husband was such a recidivist that she was forced to purchase a small charter airline company and run it into the ground—often literally, mind you—just to get his attention.”

“Did it work?”

“For a year. Then he was back at it, and she moved on to passenger trains.”

I say, “But you didn’t do anything like that, right? You were the good little girl of the group.”

“Believe it or not, I was. For a while, at least. I took it all on the chin, accepted Raymond for what he was. Of course, those first few flings of his were … normal. Natural. He hadn’t yet … switched species.”

“And when did he jump ship?” I ask.

“Three years ago, maybe four, I don’t remember.”

“Was Sarah Archer the first one?”

Judith’s laugh is humorless, a short bark of derision. “If you mean was she his first cross-species fling, no. Five, ten, twenty girls before her, all the same, all of them leggy and shaggy-haired and beautiful and dumb. Would you believe that some of them would call the house—
my
house—and leave messages for him?

“But if you mean to ask if Sarah Archer was the first one to possess my husband, to claim him as property, to latch on to him as if he were the dock and she were a boat in heavy chop, then yes, I would say she was.”

“And that was when it started to grate on you.”

“No,” says Judith, “it troubled me long before that. There was a period of time when he spent perhaps two nights out of the entire
month in my bed. And whereas Raymond and I hadn’t … had relations in a while”—choice of words definitely less intense now—“there was still a void at night. When you are used to sleeping next to someone all your life, it becomes difficult to adjust to the empty space on the mattress. I believe it was then that I’d finally had enough.

“Money was out—he didn’t care. And I couldn’t reach him in the bedroom, not directly. So I got back at him the only way I could think of: I had an affair.”

“With Donovan Burke,” I say.

This does not discompose Judith as much as I would like, but it’s a start. At the very least, her assured feet falter a bit, and I have to swing around to her side, shifting the move into an underarm turn, to accommodate the false step. “You know about it.”

“I had my hunches from the start.” Sarah’s comments during dinner tonight only served to corroborate my earlier guess, but I choose not to let Judith in on this. “An affair to punish an affair. Very eye-for-an-eye of you.”

“Are you judging me, Mr. Rubio?”

“I don’t judge what I don’t understand.”

Judith accepts this with a wry smile and says, “It wasn’t how it sounds.”

“It never is.”

“My affair with Donovan was not begun solely for revenge, you understand. If anything, it was for companionship. Raymond couldn’t be there for me, and I was getting tired of shopping. Donovan was what I needed.”

“In your bed?”

“In my bed, in my house, at the park, at the theater, wherever and whenever he could go. Companionship is more than sex, Mr. Rubio.”

“And this affair with Donovan Burke—this was after Jaycee’s disappearance, I take it?”

Silence from my dance partner, a telling pause. “You were having an affair with Donovan while he was still engaged to Jaycee Holden?”

The reply is meek, a mouse twitter, the first soft-spoken word I have heard out of Judith McBride’s mouth: “Yes.”

I don’t want to be part of the Great Spiritual Oneness when the
McBride family karma is finally added up; it’s going to take a good portion of eternity to get all of their shit sorted out. “Back in your office the other day you claimed to like Jaycee Holden.”

“I did.”

“You called her a lovely girl, if I recall.”

“I did.”

“Then why would you choose to stab her in the back like that?” I hate to sound uppity, but all of this marital malfeasance is making me ill. Can’t these people keep it in their guises? Of course, two hours ago I was ready to play amateur magician, rip the tablecloth out from under our Greek food, and throw Sarah onto the bare wood in a fit of passion, but that was two hours ago, and I have since found the control I almost lost.

“Jaycee was no saint,” says Judith. “She had her faults.”

Aside from a penchant for well-orchestrated disappearances and poorly orchestrated kidnappings, she’d seemed pleasant enough to me. “They had problems before you started seeing him, then?”

“Not that I know of,” says Judith.

“Who started the affair?”

“It was mutual.”

“Who started the affair?” I repeat. I feel like a father trying to discover which of his children broke the vase in the living room.

“I did,” Judith finally admits.

“Did you seduce him?”

“If you want to call it that.”

“Why Donovan? Why not someone who wasn’t already involved in a relationship?”

Judith is unable to meet my gaze now. She stares off toward the bandleader, elongated Carnotaur snout propped against my shoulder. “Donovan and Raymond … they were very close.”

“That’s why you chose him—his friendship with your husband?”

“Yes. My intention was not to hurt Raymond, let me make that clear. But if he were to ever find out about the affair … a little pain might be in order. I chose a confidante of his so that he might feel betrayed as I had felt betrayed. It was a business decision, in many ways.”

“I was under the impression that Donovan worked under you at the Pangea. That he had little contact with your husband.”

“Professionally, he didn’t. Donovan was an entertainment manager,
nothing Raymond would have troubled himself with. But they’d been personal friends for a while. Golfing buddies. This was way back when we initially moved to New York.”

“About fifteen years ago?”

“That’s right.”

“Where were you before that?”

“Kansas. Oh please, it was dreary, I don’t want to talk about it.”

Fair enough. I don’t want to talk about Kansas, either. “Did Jaycee find out?”

“You know,” Judith muses, “at the time I thought we’d done a pretty good job of keeping her in the dark.”

“But you didn’t.”

She shakes her head. “No. We didn’t. I know that now.”

“Oh, yeah? And how’s that?”

“I simply do. She disappeared two weeks later.”

“And a few months after that …”

“I fired Donovan,” she admits.

“Kind of you. Donovan must have been ecstatic. No woman, no job, no reason to go on.”

“You don’t understand,” says Judith. “Without Jaycee, he was morose. The club was neglected, the books were a shambles. He—he was—”

“Useless?”

I don’t get a response. The fox-trot ends, but the band gives us no respite. A sharp tango begins, and my body snaps to attention—the back going ramrod straight, knees flexing, arm curling around Judith’s Carnotaur waist. “Can you tango?” I ask, and she answers by spinning into my arms for a perfectly timed dip. A number of other couples join the dance floor, and though it’s getting crowded up here, Mrs. McBride and I are Fred and Ginger, swirling and stomping in all the right spots at all the right times.

“You move well,” Judith says.

“Why did you tell me your husband was killed by gunshots?”

“Because he was.” Two three dip!

“I’ll ask you again—”

Her hands disengage from mine, pushing against my chest as she struggles to move away. But I’ve got her tight around the waist; she’s not going anywhere. I force her to continue the dance. “You think you
understand everything,” she sneers, “but you don’t. You don’t have clue one.”

“Maybe you can help me. You can start by telling me why you lied.”

“I didn’t. I will show you the crime scene photos, Mr. Rubio, and you will see the bullet holes, you will see—”

“I’ve seen the crime scene photos,” I say, and this shuts her up. “I’ve seen the real ones.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“The undoctored ones. The originals.” I’m right next to her ear hole now, whispering harshly into the costume upon costume. “The ones with your husband almost torn in half by the claw marks, the bites running down his side—”

She stops dancing. Her arms drop away, begin to tremble. “Can we talk about this outside?”

“It’d be my pleasure.”

I lead Mrs. McBride off the dance floor, and we receive polite applause for our efforts. It takes me a minute to locate a door to the outside, but we soon enter a small courtyard sporting a fountain, a few trees, and a bench. The sounds of the tango disappear behind another soundproof door. With a huff of air, Judith begins to remove the Carnotaur costume, exposing her head and torso to the cool autumn air. Now she’s a human with fat green legs and a tail, looking like a drunken dino who’s started to pull her guise on from the wrong end.

“Do you have any of those cigarettes?” she asks me. I toss her the entire pack, and she lights up. The smoke coalesces about her head, and she sucks it in deeply.

“Why did you doctor the photos? Why did you get Nadel to lie?”

“I didn’t,” she says. “I asked someone to do it.”

“Who?”

She mumbles a name—“Who?” I say, standing over her. “Speak up.”

“Vallardo. I asked Dr. Vallardo to take care of it.”

Filling in all the blank spaces now—that’s what the money was for, the deposits into Nadel’s account. I can’t believe it’s come together this quickly. “Now, I can’t arrest you,” I say. “Not officially. But I can hear your confession, and I can make sure the cops treat you okay.”