The Devil's Interval (42 page)

T
ravis seemed distracted and distant when Isabella and I arrived at the Q the next day. Though Isabella chattered away, with an edge of urgency and excitement, about some new areas to follow up, Travis remained disengaged. At one point, as we were talking, he suddenly stood up, shook his head briefly, and started pacing. Isabella looked nervously around. “Travis,” she said, catching his arm, “you're not paying much attention to us.”

He put his hands down on the table, resting them flat, almost pressing them against the surface, as if he were willing the table to help him levitate right out of the place.

“How's my mother doing?” he asked. “She sounded dead to me on the phone.”

“She was exhausted when I saw her,” I began. “But that was understandable.”

Travis shook his head. “I don't mean dead tired; I mean she sounded dead. Lifeless. That place meant so much to her, and I think she was motivated to hold onto it so I'd have a place to come back to.”

I thought back to the “rent party” just a few nights ago. Those had been almost exactly the words Ivory had used.

“She has insurance,” I said.

Travis put his hand up to stop me.

“What she has,” he said carefully, “is the very frayed end of a rope. And she and I are both hanging on for dear life.”

He leaned back in his chair, and gave a short, bitter bark of a laugh. “Hey, too bad they don't hang people in California these days, isn't it? That would have been a damn fine little joke.”

Isabella clapped her hands. Both Travis and I looked at her, startled at the sharp crack the sound made in the room.

“Okay, Travis,” she said. “Enough with the pity party. Your mom's in a terrible place, and you're in a worse one. So, let's see what we can do to get back on track. Because at the end of the day, and believe me, mister, that end will come, that's all your mother really cares about.”

He shrugged. “What choice do I have?”

“Exactly,” said Isabella. Impatiently, she flipped through pages in her notebook and stopped at a sheet covered with yellow highlighter.

“I know we covered this already, but think out loud with us about who knew where you lived.”

“A few friends, my mom, of course, Grace.”

“How about Grace's friends—Ginger?”

“Not unless Grace told her, and I don't know why she would have.”

“How about her husband?” I said.

“Bill Brand?” asked Travis. “The world-class stick-up-his-ass?”

“That's the one,” I said.

“Again, I don't know how he'd know where I lived unless Grace told him.” He paused. “That is one weird guy.”

“Talk to us,” I said. “What makes you say that?”

“I don't know all that much,” said Travis. “It's not like I was his regular squash partner at the club. Like I told you before, he and Ginger and Grace and Frederick used to hang out together.”

“At the Crimson Club sometimes, right?”

“Right. Or sometimes just Ginger and Grace, or just Frederick and Grace.”

“When you'd drive them home,” I pressed him, “how'd they act?”

“A little drunk, a little silly.” He paused. “Well, not Frederick,
he never seemed like he had too much to drink—or if he did, he didn't show it.”

“So,
how
would the rest of them act silly?” I persisted.

He thought a minute. “Well, Frederick would usually get in the front seat with me, and Bill and the ladies would get in the back. They'd giggle and kind of cuddle together back there.”

“And did you get jealous?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if Bill was snuggling with the wives, didn't it bother you to watch him with his hands on Grace?”

Travis shook his head. “That's not how it was. It was a little, you know, fun to watch.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, Grace and Ginger would be…well, fooling around with each other.”

“Really?”

Isabella sat up a little straighter. “You never told me that.”

He shrugged. “Didn't seem important. I mean, sometimes Bill would sit in the middle, but often the girls would be just—well, it wasn't full out anything, you know. But they'd be all over each other. Like teenagers, necking.”

“Okay, I get it.” I thought for a moment. “And that didn't make Bill or Frederick uncomfortable?”

Travis gave me a small smile, and I saw a glimpse of the sexy, compelling presence he must have projected outside the walls of the Q. “Men love to watch women together. They like a little show, and that's what it seemed like the girls were doing. Men get off on that, or haven't you heard?”

“Yes, I've heard,” I said. “But still,” I persisted, “you didn't have the impression that it might have bothered one of them, Bill or Frederick?”

“Not really,” he said. “Frederick didn't even seem very bothered when it was Bill who was getting handsy in the back,” he observed.

“Why'd Frederick always sit in the front, anyway?”

Travis shrugged. “He'd get on his phone and read e-mail or
text back and forth. He pretty much ignored what went on back there. It was like, he got back in the car, turned off the fun, and went right back to work.”

“But this was very late at night, right?”

“Mostly, yeah. But his business is 24/7, as he always said. There's some money market open somewhere in the world, every hour of every day.”

“Compulsive.”

“You got that right,” he said.

I looked at him. He stared back at me. “You're thinking that's what started the whole thing between Grace and me?”

“Gives a girl pause,” I said. “And Bill?”

“Hard to tell with that guy,” he said. “He's one closed-off, uptight, intense drink of water. I know people joke about how much he looks like a whippet, and he does. But he always reminded me of a rattler, cold-blooded and all coiled up, waiting to strike.”

“But he'd get frolicsome in the backseat?”

“Sure, but it wasn't very personal. More like, I don't know, somebody had challenged him to a handball game—there was a partner and a court and a ball, and he already had on a glove, so what the hell?”

Isabella and I sat silent. Did this mean anything?

“Plus…” Travis began. We waited. “Plus, it was like Brand knew that Frederick was the alpha dog in the pack, and it was fun to handle the alpha dog's property.” He shrugged. “Probably didn't matter, though, since the alpha dog hardly looked up from his BlackBerry or iPhone or whatever he was glued to.”

“That would have driven me crazy if I were Grace,” I said.

“But it's like it wasn't Grace,” said Travis.

“Meaning what?”

“Well, here's something I've never thought of. The nights that Bill would get frisky with the girls in the backseat were usually nights one of them would be doing some alter ego thing.”

“I don't get it.”

“They'd dress up like other people once in a while. Ginger
used to wear wigs on occasion—you know, one of those electric blue or white, white blond ones. Sometimes they'd both do it, sometimes just one—but they were good. You had to get pretty up close and personal to recognize them.”

“What did that have to do with Bill in the backseat?”

“I don't know exactly,” said Travis. “But I think he got off on pretending to fool around with these two ‘other women.' Or maybe being in disguise made them feel more free about flirting with him—as a stranger.”

“Curiouser and curiouser,” I said.

“
Alice in Wonderland
,” said Travis.

“
Through the Looking-Glass
, actually,” I said. “But you've got the idea.”

W
hen I stopped at the intersection, I heard a faint, insistent beep-beep-beep coming out of my purse. My cell phone had been announcing messages, and between traffic and my distracted state, I hadn't heard anything. I pulled over, put on my flashers, and rummaged for my makeup bag. This was my new solution to being able to retrieve my phone quickly from my purse, since I'd always know exactly where it was, zipped into my oversize makeup bag, bright pink, visible even in a black-bottomed purse. I unzipped the bag—which held two ancient lipsticks, some sugarless chewing gum for the boys, parking receipts, and a pair of folding opera glasses. What were they doing here? And then I remembered, Josh had borrowed them for birding—or so he said. I suspected he'd used them to spy on the nymphet across the street, which was probably why I'd found them discarded on the front-porch bench, and tossed them in my bag on my way out the door, so they didn't sit outside. I plucked the beeping cell out of the bottom of the bag. “You have eight messages.”

I felt that little clutch of fear. Eight! Too many, someone's trying very hard, very continually to get hold of me. Hospital! Accident! Disaster! I'm sure someone else might think eight calls could mean they'd won the lottery and someone was trying to reach them with the good news—but those “some people” were neither Jewish nor married to a Catholic. I punched in my retrieval code, so nervous I hit a wrong number in the sequence. Calm
down, Maggie. Deep breath, tried the number again. I clicked through the messages, one routine call from Michael about pickup duty, then five hang-ups in a row. Then a message from Ivory, “Maggie, call me please. As soon as you can. I feel like, well, like the fog is lifting.” She sounded breathless. I hit the last message. It was Ivory again. “Hi, Maggie. You can ignore my last call. Everything's…fine. I just wanted to say thank you for everything you've been trying to do for Travis.” She paused. “That's it. Just, thanks so much.”

The sun beating through the windshield had made the car uncomfortably warm. Now it felt chilly, all of a sudden. I hit redial and got Ivory's cell message. “Ivory, it's Maggie. What's up? I got both your messages and I'd really like to talk to you. Please call me as soon as you get this message.”

I sat in the car, watching downtown lunch foot traffic hurry back and forth across the busy Union Square intersection. Two horn blasts from behind made me jump. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a giant SUV in back of me. I needed to move the car if I was going to stay here. I looked across Union Square to the St. Francis. Maybe Ivory was still there. She hadn't said she'd moved yet. I turned the corner and whipped into the Union Square garage, took the elevator up to the ground level, and trotted up the street to the hotel.

At the front desk, I asked for Ivory Gifford. No one registered by that name, said the clerk, shaking his head. “How about Augustus Reeves?”

The clerk looked at the computer. “Yes, we do have a Mr. Reeves registered.”

I hesitated. “Can you ring the room?” I asked.

The clerk glanced at the screen. “Sorry, there's a ‘do not disturb' request from the guest.”

“Really?” I said. “Because I just got a call that sounded somewhat urgent.”

Two other people were waiting next to me. They didn't look happy and were clearly impatient to talk with the clerk. I saw him
glance over at them and raise his finger, signaling “just a minute while I get rid of the pushy lady.”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “Perhaps you'd like to leave a note for your friends. We'll deliver it to the room.” He pushed notepaper and an envelope to me.

“I will,” I said, “but is there a manager I can speak with?”

The desk clerk narrowed his eyes. “I assure you our manager has to honor the guest's request as well,” he said. “And he's at lunch right now, but if you care to wait…”

“Oh, I understand,” I said. “I'll leave a note, and check back in half an hour or so? He'll be back from lunch then?” The clerk nodded, distracted, and turned to the couple behind me. I stepped aside, wrote a note to Ivory, letting her know I was in the hotel, and left it on the counter. Okay, I knew how these things were done, or at least how they were done in the movies. I reached out my hand to the desk clerk, reading his name tag at the same moment, “Sorry to interrupt, Brian,” I said. “But I wanted to thank you for your help, and for making sure this gets to my friends as soon as possible.” He shook my hand, which enabled a twenty-dollar bill to change hands. His face didn't change expression. “I'll make sure,” he said. “And check back in a while, our manager should return from lunch shortly.” Brian the desk clerk picked up the envelope, wrote something underneath Ivory's name, and held it in his hand, tapping it absently against his pocket while he listened to the couple explain the problem housekeeping had been unable to fix in their shower.

I walked briskly away, heading toward the door, and then doubled back behind the square, green-veined, mirrored pillars, and disappeared into a wingback chair in the lobby bar. Brian was not having a good day—though I couldn't hear the conversation well from this distance, I could sense the escalating complaint level from the plumbing-challenged couple.