There Must Be Some Mistake (8 page)

CHANTAL AND
I were up in the apartment over the restaurant. It was nearly two in the afternoon, and she'd been working on whatever she worked on for the restaurant while I slept. She looked fresh and clean, bright eyed. I didn't. We were at the table, sitting on opposite sides of the table, which was Knoll—Saarinen, maybe. Or maybe that sculptor whose name I never could remember—Bertoia. Harry Bertoia. No, it was the tulip table. I was right the first time.

Two police cars turned into the drive and pulled to a stop. Four cops emerged, two in suits, two in uniforms. We could see them from the kitchen windows. The cars were marked. We watched the four men rearrange themselves. They were leaning back into their cars to get things, one fellow twisting into his jacket, the uniformed guys spitting and adjusting their gun belts, straightening out their too-tight policemen's trousers.

“What do you figure they're here for?” I said.

“Never can tell,” Chantal said. She went down the hall to the little space she used as an upstairs office, then came back. “I don't want you to be surprised,” she said. “You should know that my name isn't really Chantal.”

I was surprised. Plenty. But I said, “Your name is not Chantal.”

“It is now, but it wasn't always,” she said. “I changed it. I've lived here awhile, in Texas, but before that I was in Mississippi. Biloxi, there along the coast.”

“You're from Mississippi,” I repeated.

“Not from there, but I lived there.”

“So what do the police want?” I said. “Is there something I should know?”

“Always,” she said. She seemed a little rattled. I hadn't seen her like that before. “I used to live louder, I guess you'd say, but now it's slow and easy, and being quiet, stick to the shadows. Suits me best these days. I gotta change these clothes.”

She left the kitchen and went to her bedroom and I buttoned my shirt and thought about getting my shoes but decided to do without and went into the front hall where I could get a better look outside. A minute later she came out of the bedroom straightening her hair. She looked thin, coming toward me, real thin, even gaunt. She reached my side and looked out the window at the four men below. One of the suits was finishing a smoke and shot the butt into the air toward the coast road. The four of them exchanged a look and some remarks, and three headed for the door. The fourth, one of the uniforms, went under the house.

“This looks like no fun,” I said, which was the truth. Unvarnished. I was not a fan of the police, or, more accurately, I was a fan of them out doing their duty but not visiting me and mine.

“They look businesslike,” Chantal said. “Don't they look businesslike?”

“Maybe they're just here to go over the attack again,” I said.

“I don't think so,” she said. “I had some trouble in Mississippi years ago. Whenever they show up like this it takes me back.”

“So, what was the trouble?” I was rebuttoning my shirt because I'd gotten it wrong the first time. It was a striped shirt from Ralph Lauren, blue. Heavily wrinkled at that moment.

She put her arm around my shoulder, pulled me to her. “Tell you later,” she said. “It's a long story.” She had that Chantal smell in her hair, her skin, that scent I'd become attached to. We stood together at the edge of the window until the knock hit the door.

We welcomed the police inside, and they were very polite. They wanted to talk to Chantal about the “gangland style” murder of her late husband, Bo Del Mar. Chantal made coffee, and we sat with them in the living room of the apartment over the Velodrome. We were forthcoming, at least Chantal was. I was quiet and scattered, sat there fiddling with my hands.

She'd married an army guy named Bo Del Mar, who, it turned out, accused her of endless infidelities, which, according to her, were imagined, but that, apparently, made no difference to him when he was beating her. She would flee the house in the middle of the night and he would follow, catch her, bring her home, and beat her more. One night he pressed a steam iron into her back, leaving a scar still visible all these years later. I'd seen it. She'd said it was an accident. She went over all this with the officers. What they knew was that her second husband had been killed in his sleep in their bedroom. Chantal, who was then Greta Del Mar, was a suspect, as spouses are when the mate is killed, and after an investigation she was arrested and charged. Then, once the trial started, the DA suddenly withdrew the charges and asked that the case be dismissed with prejudice, meaning she could not be charged again. So much time had passed by now that she hoped she'd heard the last of it, but here they were again.

What she told me later, but did not discuss with the cops, was that she had eventually decided she needed to defend herself. It made sense that she would do that, but for me it was frightening. She told me she got a twenty-two-caliber pistol from a guy who worked odd jobs for her, a Gulf War vet named Dave Roberts, and she shot her husband in the temple while he slept, drunk and passed out, in their bed. With good reason, she thought. Self-defense. After years of beatings, drunken rages, hiding from him in and under neighbors' houses, of trying to divorce him and being threatened with everything from strangulation to being washed in gas and set on fire—a method Bo Del Mar said was a common punishment for bad women in the Middle East—she had done the unthinkable. “I shot him,” she said. “I put him to sleep for good.”

Her lawyer, she told me, was an ex-prosecutor who was so successful in that job that the street in front of the courthouse was named for him, and he was every bit as good as his reputation. He was later implicated in a Dixie Mafia multiple-murder case but was eventually absolved of any connection to the scandal that ensued.

As Chantal told the story, after her charges were dropped she changed her name and worked as a low-level executive for one of the Biloxi casinos when the casinos there were still relatively new, dodging the hangers-on and fourth-tier TV personalities who seemed to drift through the neon-lit gambling palaces and weather-vulnerable condos that dotted the beach. It was after one of the big storms that hit Biloxi every few years, so it was a whole new coast, empty by day, fog ridden by night, splashed with blistered light, silly white limos endlessly trailing up and down the beach highway, a place overgrown with and much in love with any new Gulf Coast celebrity, among which Chantal was often counted most notorious because of the publicity of her case. After the arrest there had been support parties in penthouse condominiums, gambling binges in which Chantal and her friends hit the blackjack tables with more money than seemed reasonable; there had been boating parties and too many mornings seen from dark to light. TV people called, networks wanting interviews for the likes of
20/20
and
Dateline.
And the case became stupidly famous, so that some nights Chantal remained hidden in her place and watched herself on program after program. The discussions of the case on television were wildly off, but that didn't seem to bother anyone, and all skated on, the case on television looking nothing like the case in the court, the crime nothing like the crime that occurred, the horror more inane and less complicated than a woman pushed to extremes taking a pistol and standing over her husband in their barely lit bedroom late one night, squeezing the trigger.

That was the story she told me later, after the police had come and gone that afternoon. Their project was routine, they said, and they asked a few questions, jotted a note or two in their various notebooks, thanked her for her time, and moved on.

She spent the remainder of that day and night telling and retelling the story, adding bits of detail, trying to get what she called the most accurate rendering of events, so that I would understand. I did understand. Chantal was not Chantal, she was this other woman who, in another lifetime, had shot and killed her husband, a serial abuser. And she had gotten away with it. I was with a woman who had murdered her husband. With reason to be sure, if she was to be believed, and I had reason to believe her, but the act itself was so large, so real and present, that it redefined her for me. My feeling for her changed in an instant. I tried not to show it, not to reveal myself, but I was sure she could see it plain as day. She frightened me.

JILLY WAS
down for the weekend and I was glad to have her back. She was all energy, thinking of things to do, places to go, goofy projects that were easy and pleasant to dispatch. This time she wanted new T-shirts, but she had to have women's T-shirts, which were different from men's T-shirts. I suggested that she'd look great in regular T-shirts, but that involved defining regular T-shirts as men's T-shirts, plus it intimated that the women's T-shirts she was interested in were somehow inferior, which didn't seem like a great idea, so I backed away from my position quite readily. She also wanted some boy clothes, like dress shirts, but was horrified at the price, so we thought the best deal would be to drive to the outlet mall in Texas City. It was a nice drive, coastal part of the way and lots of those huge high power lines strung on the tall T-shaped steel towers that look like giant Japanese war poems, warriors marching across the landscape. She did some voices for the warriors, fake Japanese movie talk, which was funny. I told her I was working through all this stuff that had happened to me over the years, it was all coming back to me. It seemed like since I crossed fifty I spent about half my time remembering the crap that happened way back. I was wandering around in memory.

“Oh?” she said. “Like what?”

“People and places, stuff I did or didn't do, the way the world was then.”

“Dark ages,” she said. “Pre–Johnny Depp.”

“Not at all. Anyway, he's about my age.”

“I thought he was about twenty,” she said. “And prettier, no disrespect. Has more hair. How did you lose this much hair?”

“Sold it,” I said.

We were driving on Camber Road, which was a recently refinished four-lane running into town. She was driving; I was manning the map. She couldn't read anything when the car was moving without getting seasick, so whenever we hit the road I was navigator.

“So what things are you thinking about? Are you thinking about God again?” She said this like I was hitting the booze. “Remember,” she said, “we're scheduled to go to church.”

“I'm thinking the world has passed me by,” I said.

“Duh,” she said. “Is news?”

“Wasn't always the way,” I said.

“It's passed me by, and I'm still in my teens,” Jilly said. “So, what else?”

“My mother, I'm thinking about. She was funny and wry, mysterious to us kids, at least until the late going, when she got a little addled. We have these people around, parents, and then they go south on us. And they vanish. I hate that.”

“I know. I went to a funeral last week, this kid at the office. I stood there at the casket and looked at him, and all I could think was here was this body, and it was not working anymore. I mean, I was this close to him,” she said, waving a hand between us. “And the week before I'd talked to him, and we planned a thing for a deal we were working on. And he was all there. And then, suddenly, he wasn't.”

“How'd he die?”

“Some weird medical thing. His heart started racing and sort of exploded. That's how they explained it to us. What bothered me was the casket. The thing inside there, the body, seemed utilitarian, like something you'd order from Amazon. A rug-shampoo device. I guess that sounds stupid, but that's what it was. Another busted machine and the guy, Ricky Lipper, was gone. The body had nothing to do with him, it was a thing, there, on display.” She shook her head. “I'm not explaining this well.”

“I get it,” I said.

She turned down toward the bay, a little street that went past where a lot of shrimp boats tied up, and she ran the windows down so we could get the full effect, the smell of the place. It was overcast and reasonably cool for late spring, and the rain clouds looked as if they could do some damage. Breezes whipped through the car.

“I haven't thought much about church,” I said.

“Morgan said you hit her up about it,” she said. “Thing is, I'm tired of all these Tea Party church people, and as tired of the other end of the deal. Like that British wiseguy who died and his hard-boiled atheist bullshit. Like who really knows what is going on? How we got here? What other ‘people' are out there? How it started—all that shit. It's fucking unknowable. Why is that not good enough? Let's say
Who the fuck knows?
and let it go.”

“Religions are built on that stuff, so they gotta know.”

“That's crap,” Jilly said. “Hokum. Made-up mumbo jumbo. I'm sure, these apostles really did that Jack Webb thing and reported just the facts. Or the other guy, or—” She pulled up in front of a two-story restaurant that had a deck overlooking a harbor. “You want to eat something?”

We went inside, through the room, got a table on the deck. “I like going around with you,” I said. “You improve my life.”

She eyed me.

Her energy turned the lights back on for me. I wanted to say something about that, but I didn't want her getting the wrong idea. I didn't know what the right idea was, but I didn't want to look like I was going overboard.

“You haven't been around much recently,” she said. “I've called a few times.”

“I've been hanging out with Chantal,” I said.

“You going vintage?”

“Meow,” I said.

“Didn't mean it that way,” she said. “On the other hand—”

“You're chilly today,” I said.

“What're we having here?” she said. “Looks like it might be good for oysters.”

The waitress arrived and looked familiar, but I couldn't place her at all. She did the waitress thing, standing there with pad and pencil, looking off in the distance to give us a little extra time. It was clear she wasn't leaving the table without an order, so we gave her one, and she strode away.

Next to the restaurant there were a couple wood-plank piers running out into the bay. They were chockablock with pelicans, maybe fifty pelicans in various states of disarray, some with tucked beaks, others with twisted necks in service of underwing cleaning, others stretching and waddling, throwing their heads all the way back until their necks showed up in the cavernous bottom halves of their open beaks, some so buttoned down they looked as if they had no heads at all.

“I saw this special on TV,” Jilly said. “They were doing religions, a two-hour special on world religions, contrasting them and that sort of thing. People in church—Catholics, Jews, Protestants, Muslims, Holy Rollers, all the way to snake handlers.”

“TV loves it some snake handlers,” I said.

“God, the author of famine, plague, blindness, and decapitation,” she said.

“And flambé,” I said.

The waitress brought our salads, and I cherry-picked Jilly's for the croutons. She didn't like croutons. “Religion always gets to me,” she said. “I don't hate it, but I kind of hate it, you know? I'm a little negative when it comes to religion.”

“We're better at plumbing,” I said.

She shook her head and straightened up in her chair. “I guess I shouldn't be going on. What's with you and Chantal? You guys hooking up?”

“We're not altar-bound,” I said. “But, on the other hand, when you're not around—”

“Reflect,” she said. “Meditate. Stroll quietly through the great apses, footsteps echoing, flying buttresses flying overhead.”

“The buttresses would be outside,” I said. “But I will start tomorrow if it pleases you.”

“Picky, picky,” Jilly said. “Should I conclude there is still a chance?”

“You are unnaturally direct this weekend,” I said.

“I missed you,” she said. “You know. When you didn't call back immediately, when I got nothing in my e-mail, no clever text messages, nothing on my Facebook page, nary a tweet. I felt, like, abandoned. In a minor key, of course.”

“What other key is there?”

I worked on my salad, ate some lettuce and chopped bacon, more croutons, some honey mustard dressing. I felt lucky to have her to spend time with, drive the coast roads, eat at local dives, someone who hadn't killed anybody. I kind of gazed at her. I smiled at her. In the harbor the boats rocked and splashed in the water, their moorings and riggings and ropes stretching and clanking in that lovely way they do.

When Jilly visited she was always cleaning some part of the house, and she seemed to enjoy being there, making it up as she went along. I spent a lot of time thinking back on things, remembering bits and pieces, but Jilly didn't do much of that. She'd mention something, hint at it, but rarely elaborate.

One night I tried pressing her, and she started telling me about a time when she was working at an antique shop in New Orleans. “I was living there,” she said. “I went to work for an older guy in his forties named Simon Color, keeping books, selling some things when he was out of the store, being a personal assistant. He had a son, a good-looking kid, sharp dresser, sort of a mix between a jock and a geek. Like that idiot actor, what's his face? Anyway, this kid was finishing at NOCCA in New Orleans. This is years ago. I was twentyish, still in school, and between boyfriends. Pre-Cal.”

We were in the kitchen at the condo. I was putting butter on premium saltines, lightly, for a premium saltine indulgence, one of my favorite late-night indulgences. Jilly wanted nothing to do with the saltine thing but got herself a beer from the refrigerator. She said she was planning on staying up all night with me.

“You couldn't be more welcome,” I said.

“So this kid was pretty, direct, and since my duties involved being at the house sometimes, ferrying stuff from the shop, like that, we got to be friendly, probably more friendly than I'd anticipated. After a while it was clear we wanted to have sex.”

“You're scorching my ears,” I said. “I thought you'd never had sex, to this day.”

“We'd go out and park, and talk, and get along great, and after a bit, we started making out some.”

“Heaven forfend.”

“Simon didn't know about this. I figured I was going to end up selling something for a living, so I was glad to have the antiques job, even though I didn't know fuck-all about antiques. I worked as a gofer, really, I was the head gofer.”

“I want to hear it,” I said, chewing my premium saltines.

“I'd get Matthew at his house and we'd drive out somewhere, a parking lot, someplace out by the lake, anywhere, really. Matthew was sexy and a tease. I was questionable then, a rat girl. I had pink and blue swans on my Pontiac, behind the front wheel wells. This was before Pontiac went belly-up, but my Pontiac was old even then.”

“Enough with the Pontiac,” I said. “And then—”

“Matthew was, uh, Mediterranean, maybe, medium thin with big shoulders. I was only a few years older than he was anyway. We were both kids, sort of, was what I thought.”

“So did you
consummate
with him or not?”

“I want a premium saltine after all,” Jilly said, so I gave her one. “Mmm. One more,” she said, holding out her hand. I gave her two more and waited for her to chew through them.

“In the Clinton sense, I did not have sexual relations with that young man,” she said.

I squinted at her, suggesting, I thought, disbelief.

“Not intercourse,” she said. “Everything but, every way to avoid it, every option, the whole show. We had our moments in the house, in motels, in the car, but I dodged that one single bullet. He didn't seem to mind. I didn't, either. He was a good boy, fast learner. Eventually Simon sort of caught on, though I don't think he ever discovered the length and breadth of the thing, I think he thought we were just a little too friendly. So I was gently out of a job. And the other thing is I never really regretted it.”

“A scalding memoir,” I said. I was cleaning up the crumbs on the kitchen counter, sweeping them into the sink where the water was running strong.

“That's one I never told anybody before. You're the first.”

“You did what you did. You're a regular what's her face.”

“Who?” Jilly said.

“You know. That Oregon woman. The teacher.”

So then we had to look up female teachers who had sexual relations with their students, and we found a list of the top-fifty female-teacher sex scandals on a site that included pictures and links to news stories. The list began with Mary Kay Letourneau—“A love story,” Jilly said—and included Abbie Jane Swogger, Traci Tapp, Autumn Leathers, Cameo Patch, and Deanna Bobo among others.

We stared at the pictures on the MacBook's screen for what seemed like a very long time. Finally, I said, “You want to click the links?”

“These women are all pretty good looking,” Jilly said.

“This modern world,” I said.