Practice to Deceive (12 page)

“Sure.”

“Bailey’s on the rocks,” she told the bartender when he came around. Then she asked me, “Are you married?”

“No.”

“Divorced?”

“No.”

“Gay?”

“Nope.”

“A good-looking guy like you, who’s your age, who’s not married or divorced, you might think he was gay. No offense.”

“None taken.” The gay reference didn’t bother me at all. But I was curious. “How old do you think I am?”

She shrugged, drained her glass and ordered another Bailey’s. “I like older men,” she said.

I took no comfort in that. “Older than what?” I asked.

“Older than me.”

“How old are you?”

“Old enough.”

“I bet.”

“Let’s go someplace,” she suggested, downing her second Bailey’s.

“With or without my VISA card?”

She turned on me like I had just called her a whore, which, I suppose, I had. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I didn’t answer, and she ordered a third Bailey’s. She was drinking them like they were chocolate milk.

“I’m not a pro,” she told me and I believed her. But she was definitely something. I’ve always thought of myself as a Harrison Ford-Mel Gibson kind of guy, only good looking. But in my entire life, not once has a beautiful woman tried to pick me up in a bar. Or anywhere else for that matter. So why was I lucky tonight? The ring on her right hand gave me part of an answer. It carried the emblem of Macalester College.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

“Why?”

I offered my hand. “I’m Holland Taylor.”

She hesitated, took my hand, hesitated some more, then said, “Melanie.”

I nodded. “That’s a pretty ring you’re wearing. May I see it?”

“This?” she asked, holding her class ring out for me to get a good look at it.

“Could you take it off?”

Again she hesitated, then slipped it off her finger. I held it up to the light. Her name was engraved inside—and it wasn’t Melanie.

“Pretty,” I repeated, returning the ring.

“Let’s go someplace where we can … talk,” she said.

“We’re talking now.”

“You know what I mean?”

“Yes, I do.”

“What do you think?” she asked.

“I think I’d like to know you better first. Tell me what you do for a living.”

The woman was clearly frustrated. She wanted me to leave the restaurant with her, and the reason had nothing to do with the laces of her corset. But she went along with my request, feeding me a cockamamy story about answering phones and taking appointments for a doctor. She couldn’t answer telephones for five minutes—her personality began and ended with her cleavage. At first her voice was clear, controlled, but after her fourth Bailey’s it began to slur and words like “fuck” and “shit” began creeping into her sentences. A lot of people, the more they drink in public, the lewder, cheaper, and dumber they become.

Finally, she wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me hard. “Let’s go,” she whispered.

“Let’s,” I agreed, anxious to meet whoever was outside, holding her coat. Cotton dress and pumps in Minnesota! In March! Who was she kidding?

I paid the tab, including her drinks, and ushered her to the door. We stood just inside while I zipped my jacket to my throat. Snow was blowing hard and I wished I had brought my gloves.

“Where to, Piper?” I asked.

“My car is in the alley across the street. Hey, wait a minute. I didn’t say my name was Piper.”

“Sure you did. Piper Lindquist.”

“I did?”

I pushed her out the door. We stopped to let a snowplow pass before crossing the street. There was a car parked deep in the alley. It was running. Two men were in it. When we dashed across the street they got out, crossed their arms, and waited next to the car. They were big.

“It’s him,” Piper said as we entered the alley.

Both men were young. College-age kids. They looked like they played the defensive line, but that didn’t bother me. Macalester hadn’t won a football game since Reagan was president—assuming, of course, that they were smart enough to get into Macalester, a fairly prestigious school, after all.

I walked up to the man standing next to the driver’s door. He dropped his arms as I approached.

“Hi,” I said brightly. “Are you a friend of Piper’s?”

Before he could reply, before he could move, I kicked him in the groin real hard. He went down, his mouth twisted with agony, a soundless scream deep in his throat, like a child crying without oxygen. He caught his breath and the pain spilled out, then he lost it and was quiet again until his lungs filled with air. All in all, I found his performance quite satisfying, his hands between his knees, his knees drawn up tightly against his stomach, rolling side to side in the snow.

His partner hesitated for about five seconds, then came around the car in a hurry. He threw a punch at my face, but he started too soon. I ducked under it and his momentum carried him toward me. He collided with a ridge hand I threw at his solar plexus. He was already falling, his feet slipping badly on the snow, when I stepped behind him, locked a claw hand over his throat, and flipped him on his back.

I could have finished him, could have finished them both, probably should have, but what the hell. They weren’t pros. They were just a couple of kids looking to score a few quick bucks.

“Motherfucker!” shouted the youngster I had tossed to the ground.

“Hey, watch your language,” I told him. He tried to get up. I advised him not to do that.

“Fuck you,” he said.

I hit him with your basic forefist—but I slipped, and it went high. A sharp, piercing pain raced through my fingers, wrist, elbow and shoulder blade before dissipating through my upper right quadrant. You’d think someone with my experience would be more careful than to hit the hardest part of someone—the braincase—with his hand. That’s what hammers are for.

“Dammit!” I cried, shaking the pain from my fingers. Now I was mad. “Go on, get up you dumb sonuvabitch! G’ahead. Christ!”

The football player didn’t move.

I turned on Piper. She was weeping quietly, clouds of breath coming from her mouth with each sob as she shivered in her cotton dress, snow melting on her bare shoulders.

“So, does Levering hold paper on you, too?” I asked.

She didn’t answer.

“Who hired you?”

“
Nobodyyyyyyy!
” she wailed, her voice bouncing off the alley’s stone walls.

“Crystalin?” I shouted at her.

She shook her head.

“Yeah, right.”

I turned back to the kids laying in the snow. They looked like they would recover.

“Fellas,” I said. “You don’t want to do this for a living. The money is lousy, there’s no health plan, no retirement fund, you have to work nights—and besides, you’re not very good at it. Think about it.”

“Fuck you, asshole,” said the youngster who had hurt my hand with his head.

I went into a guard position, careful of my footing, and snapped a front kick to his forehead. I tried hard to maintain my balance on my back foot but slipped and fell on my ass anyway. No one laughed, but I was embarrassed just the same. I got up, brushed the snow off and said, “Let that be a lesson to you.”

O
GILVY, MY GRAY-AND-WHITE
mini lop-eared rabbit, nibbled popcorn from the bowl on my left. I soaked my throbbing hand in another bowl filled with water and ice on my right, occasionally flexing the fingers. The knuckles were swollen but not broken. I sat on the floor between the bowls, my back against the sofa, watching the second game of the TNT NBA doubleheader. The Celtics were playing the Lakers. It was a good game, the Lakers leading by a field goal at the half. But it was a far cry from the days when Larry Bird, Kevin McHale and Robert Parrish were matched against Magic Johnson, James Worthy, and Kareem Abdul-Jabaar. I dozed off. The ringing telephone brought me back. It was nine-thirty, and I wanted it to be Cynthia. I answered in the kitchen.

“Hello,” I said hopefully.

The threat wasn’t particularly imaginative, just your basic I’m-going-to-kill-you-you’re-dead-there’s-nowhere-you-can-hide crap; nothing I haven’t heard before. I listened closely, trying to place the voice, but couldn’t. Definitely not Cynthia. I hung up without comment. My caller ID flashed:
PAY PHONE
and
UNAVAILABLE
where the number should have been—to cut down on the drug trade, Ma Bell has fixed it so that you can call out but not in to most pay telephones.

LA jumped on Boston early in the third quarter, taking an eighteen-point lead. The fourth quarter was merely a formality, a matter of final statistics. I emptied the ice water in the sink and tossed what was left of the popcorn. I lay on the sofa; Ogilvy lay on my chest. I fell asleep.

Again I woke to the sound of the telephone. TNT was broadcasting an old John Wayne movie. The Duke was inexplicably dressed like some kind of Mongol warrior with bad facial hair.
Who the hell are you supposed to be?
I wondered.
Genghis Khan?
Well, yes, as it turned out, he was. Go figure.

I answered the phone.

“Hello?”

“I’m gonna kill you, motherfucker.”

EIGHT

M
INNESOTANS LOVE SNOW.
We love to work in it and play in it; we build two week festivals around its coming and going. We particularly delight in blizzards. Not the little stuff, snowfalls of three inches or less. Nuisance snow, we call that, useful only to groom ski trails and conceal exhaust-stained drifts along the freeways. But the big stuff, six inches or more, always brings a smile. And heavy, wet snow—heart attack snow—man, we love it. We love the threat of it, the excess of it, the endless work of it. It feeds our collective ego the way doing penance nurtures Catholics, reaffirming our long-held sense of superiority over souls who live in more temperate climes. It amuses us that two inches of snow in Washington, D.C., can shut down the government. Five inches can put New York, the city that never sleeps, into deep hibernation. But ten inches in the Twin Cities isn’t even a decent excuse for coming late to work.

The weather guy said nine inches of snow had fallen overnight at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. In my driveway it measured closer to a foot. Schools didn’t close. The government didn’t take a holiday. The mail still got through. Which is why we tend to smile knowingly whenever critics ridicule our state for its climate. Unlike them, we can take it.

I cleared my driveway with an ancient snowblower my father-in-law bought for me at an estate sale. My driveway is long, two hundred feet from the street to my garage set well behind my house, with another one hundred fifty feet curving like a horseshoe around a towering willow in front of the house. The job took over an hour, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

My house is a two-story colonial built three hundred yards from a large boulder fixed with a metal plate denoting the forty-fifth parallel. That means I live midway between the equator and the North Pole.

It was constructed in 1926 by a well-to-do businessman who had wanted to escape the rat race that was St. Paul. In those days, Roseville was all farm country. Now it’s one of the Twin Cities’s oldest suburbs, with scores of look-alike split levels and ranch houses, all with attached garages.

Laura and I had found the house while looking for something else. It had hardwood floors, beamed ceilings, arched doorways, stucco walls inside and out, a fireplace in the living room, two corner china cabinets in the dining room, French doors leading to a three-season porch, a wood-paneled family room, three bedrooms, two-and-a-half baths, a completely modern kitchen, detached two-car garage, a huge dual-level yard with a wooden swing hanging from an apple tree, and an owner who was desperate to move to Southern California where a house like this can fetch a half million dollars easy, maybe more. We couldn’t afford it, even at Minnesota prices, even with two incomes, even with the interest rates being low. To our astonishment the owner cut twenty percent off his asking price.

“Are you going to have kids?” he’d asked. We told him one was already on the way, and we were hoping for at least two more. He smiled. “I was raised in this house,” he said. “Kids belong in this house.”

Mortgage insurance paid off the house after Laura and Jennifer were killed, and now I stand to make a bundle if I sell it. Don’t think I hadn’t thought about it, either. But where would I go? To some balsa-wood apartment? To a condo or a town house with a yard the size of a postage stamp?

Still, the man had been right. Kids do belong in this house.

T
HE CELL PHONE
rang just as I stepped out of the shower. I followed Sara’s instructions, waited, and answered when it rang again. Steve’s voice sounded excited.

“I hacked Levering’s bank,” he told me gleefully. “No kidding, I did it! God Almighty!”

Steve was having some fun.

“Man’s got a ton of dough just sittin’ there,” Steve added. “Over seven hundred grand. And it’s all liquid. He has it in a brokerage account—stocks, bonds, mutual funds. Gives him unlimited check-writing capability. He could come up with the two eighty-seven in cash in like a minute. Only here’s the thing. It’s all in his daughter’s name. What is it? Emily, yeah. Emily Elizabeth Field, age sixteen.”