Aphrodite

24

“Will you tell me what you dream about?” she said.
It took Justin a few seconds to orient himself. He knew his hair was wet, that his sweat had soaked through the sheets and pillowcase. Deena was holding his head to her breast and he could feel her heart pounding against his ear. He was breathing fast and hard. His shoulder pulsed with a dull ache. Slowly she released him, her hand stroking the back of his head until the last possible moment, until he fell back wearily against the headboard. She got up, went into the bathroom, and brought him back a plastic glass full of water, which he downed gratefully. Then he realized she’d asked him something.
“What did you say?” His mouth still felt dry, his tongue thickly coated with crust.
“I asked if you’d tell me what you dream about.”
“Could I have more water, please?”
She nodded, got up again, and returned with another full glass. When she handed it to him, she sat on the bed, not at all self-conscious about their physical proximity. Her hand rested on his hip and he couldn’t help but be aware of the fact that he was naked under the covers. She was wearing her souvenir T-shirt and a pair of socks. That was all. When she twisted to tuck one foot under her leg, he could see the muscles on her thigh and calf go taut. Her hair was a mess of unruly curls, which she realized just at the moment he found himself staring at her, so she shook her head and ran her hands through the tangle. It didn’t do much good. She swung her head one more time and shrugged.
“I don’t talk about this,” he said quietly.
“Yes, I know.”
“I’ve never talked about this. Not all of it.”
“Maybe it’s time,” she said, matching the softness of his voice.
He shifted his weight on the bed, watched as she brushed a last, feisty curl off her forehead.
“Maybe it is,” he said.
And he began to talk.
“It’s not what you think,” he began. “It’s never what people think. Even after all the publicity and the stories, no one ever really knew what happened. You didn’t see the Times the other day—Jesus, was it just the other day? They got some of the details right, but they didn’t know what was underneath. They didn’t remotely get to the truth.
“When we were in East End, on our way to the library, when that guy pulled up in the car, said he was my college roommate, you thought I was embarrassed ’cause I went to a junior college or something, but that’s not what it was. This is really hard for me. …You want to know where we roomed together? It was at Princeton. I went to Princeton and then Harvard. Harvard was medical school.”
“Excuse me,” Deena said, swallowing hard. “Can I have some of your water?”
He nodded, handed her the glass, watched her gulp what was left. She went back to the bathroom and he heard the tap run. Then she returned with two glasses, both full.
“Okay,” she said. And then she muttered, “Harvard. Jesus Christ. I thought …Princeton and Harvard.”
“I lived in Rhode Island, in Providence. My father’s very successful. He’s … oh, hell—he’s one of those really rich guys. Big house in Providence, mansion in Newport, right on the water, on the Cliffwalk, the whole deal. It’s old money. My great-grandfather. He started a bank and my grandfather inherited it and then my father—”
“Your father owns a bank?”
“No. He owns several banks.”
“A Harvard rich guy,” Deena said. “Did that bottle of scotch get blown up?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“So when you bought the car …” she began.
“I gave the guy a check for ten thousand dollars. Five grand more than the car cost. Once the bank told him it was okay, he promised to forget we were ever there.”
She shook her head in disbelief. Then she said, “Go on. I won’t interrupt anymore.”
“The whole family is pretty conservative. Stiff upper lip and all that. Very concerned with class and image. They’re not very interested in your Buddhist ideal of the whole. And they’re not big on denying self. So it was a major deal to them when I—I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me go back. …
“When it was time for college, I went to Princeton. It’s where my dad went. And his dad. I studied business and everyone thought I’d go back home and … and run a bunch of banks. But I didn’t want to.” Justin took a long swig of water. “I wanted to spend my life dealing with something other than money. So I decided to become a doctor and I switched to premed. Caused kind of a ruckus back home, but they calmed down after a while. A doctor was a little up close and personal, too much like work, but at least a doctor was respectable. And when I got into Harvard I think they actually got excited about the whole idea. They saw me running a hospital or becoming dean of a med school. Something prestigious and—clean. I lasted two years and then I quit. Dropped out.”
“You weren’t cut out to be a doctor?”
“I was pretty good at it. The problem was that I found something else I wanted to do.” He managed a smile, rubbed his dry lips with his hand. “You know, I wish I had a joint right now. I’d very much like to get stoned out of my gourd.”
“Finish the story, please. What is it you wanted to do?”
He shook his head as if he still couldn’t believe it. “I don’t know how to explain this. When I was at Princeton, what I was good at was figuring things out. Business puzzles. I could look at a company and see where it was going. Look at the debt and inventory and the earnings potential and it was like a connect-the-dots picture. I could see the whole thing in my mind—exactly what was going to happen to this company. I absolutely could tell if it was a good investment or if it was going to tank. And I could do it in reverse, too. We’d study a business that failed and I could put the pieces together, figure out what went wrong and why. When I got to Harvard, I thought I’d find the same kind of satisfaction. You know, find someone who was sick, trace the problem, fix the problem. And I could. I did. But I woke up one day and suddenly I saw the big picture. That’s not what I was going to be doing. That fixing thing. At least not fixing anything I cared about. And none of my classmates were going to be doing that either. We weren’t going to be family doctors, patching people up and sending them on their way. We were going to be curing rich people’s tennis elbows and staring up billion-aires’ rectums. I could feel myself falling into the trap.
“Then one day I was sitting in a class and I looked around and I thought, I hate all these people. I mean, my classmates, my professors, the residents. And I really did. I couldn’t stand to be around them—they were everything I didn’t want to be. Smug and privileged, isolated from the real world. So I quit. I went back to Providence. My parents couldn’t believe it. My father is not someone who understands the words ‘I don’t know what I want to do.’ He also doesn’t understand the idea of not doing anything. But that’s what I did for a while. Nothing. I hung out with my buddies and messed around. And that’s when I realized what I wanted to be. One of my best friends, this guy named Albie Flett, he was walking down the street in Providence, downtown, right near the Biltmore Hotel in downcity. It wasn’t even late at night, and some guy came up to him, robbed him at gunpoint. Albie gave him his cash and his watch, his credit cards. He wasn’t rich but he gave the guy whatever he had. The guy took it, told Albie to turn around, and when Albie did, the guy shot him. For no reason. Just for the hell of it.”
“Oh my God. Killed him?”
“No. Worse, in a way. Paralyzed him. Turned him into a quadriplegic.”
“Did they ever find the guy who did it?”
“That’s the thing. It seemed kind of impossible. It was random, you know? And that’s the hardest kind of crime to solve because there’s no rhyme or reason. Most cops would give it a shot for a while, then forget about it. But there’s this cop in Providence, Billy DiPezio—he’s the chief of police. A strange, funny guy. All squinty and leathery, drinks like a fish and smokes a ton. Very controversial up there—a lot of people want him out but he’s got too much dirt on everyone; he’s untouchable. Anyway, he took a personal interest in what happened to Albie. I’m not sure why. I think it just made him sad. So he decided to solve it. He wanted the prick who did it behind bars. Billy came and talked to a bunch of Albie’s friends, to get any background information that might be useful. Fairly standard stuff. I told him a few of Albie’s hangouts, his habits, stuff like that. He thanked me and got ready to leave and I asked him where he was going. He said he was going to Waggoner’s—that was one of Albie’s hangouts—and for some strange reason I asked if I could go with him. Even stranger was that he said yes. We went to the club and I listened while Billy asked a bunch of questions—was Albie flashing any money lately, had he gotten into any heated conversations, had anybody been paying any special attention to him, that kind of thing. He just beat it into the ground, wouldn’t give up. He let me tag along, figured I couldn’t really get in the way, and he liked talking to me. Billy likes an audience and the fact that my parents were who they are didn’t hurt—Billy likes rich people, too. I spent two weeks with him and the son of a bitch solved the case. He found the guy. Did it with shoe leather, just kept pounding and pounding until one thing led to another and he got what he needed. It was amazing to me. I loved Billy’s bravado, but most of all I loved the fact that he brought someone to justice who otherwise would have been free to f*ck up a lot of other lives. So a week after Billy arrested the guy, I went and took a test and passed and I joined the police force. Went to work for Billy and became a cop. That’s what I wanted to be.”
“Your parents?”
“General hysteria. Which died down eventually, but my father never got past his anger over my decision. I no longer had the right image for the family. I wasn’t someone he could parade around and talk about how successful I was.”
“Families are complicated.”
“Yeah. Well, there were other complications, too. I got married when I was a senior at Princeton. Her name was Alicia. And …um … she liked the idea of being married to a Harvard doctor too. It took a lot of adjustment to go from that to being the wife of a Providence cop.”
“She left you?”
“No, no. God, no. We were incredibly in love and that was what counted. At least that’s what we thought.”
He fell silent, stared away from Deena, off to the side, into the darkness of the motel room.
“What happened after that, Jay?”
“Alicia and I had a kid, that’s what happened. And I turned out to be a hell of a cop. I liked being a tough guy. Took the meanest calls, got a reputation on the streets. It took me three years to work my way up to Homicide. I got there because I solved a murder no one else could figure out. An academic, guy in his mid-fifties, history professor at Brown, disappeared. His wife reported him missing, said he just didn’t show up one night. Everyone thought she did it; I didn’t think she was the type. I spent some time with her. She was his second wife, she told me; they’d only been married a few years. Her husband had a son from his first marriage; she said he was a nice boy but had problems. She didn’t tell me what the problems were. The kid was in his twenties now; he was staying with her to help her out during this difficult period. I talked to him, something didn’t seem right. So I did some checking. There was no first wife. There was no son. The kid was a street kid, an orphan. This very respectable professor, he’d been molesting the boy since the kid was ten, twelve years old. The boy lived with the professor, didn’t know anything else, so he let our guy support him as an adult, too. He had an apartment that the professor paid for. They were lovers right up until the night the kid killed him.”
“Oh my God. Why did the guy get married if he was—”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t my job to psychoanalyze him. People are sick. They hurt in all sorts of ways. People do things that, until you actually see them firsthand, you think are inconceivable. I used to tell Alicia about some of it, but she didn’t want to know. She didn’t like that I knew it either. Didn’t like that I saw the things I saw. I didn’t blame her. She thought she was marrying a doctor and that she’d spend her nights going to charity dinners and dances at the country club. She didn’t want to know about men f*cking little boys and people getting chopped up and the garbage that I had decided to cover our lives with.” He was trembling again and he knew it was time to finish the story. “So, anyway, I became a hotshot. The star of the force, if you will. And when I wasn’t being a cop I was a dad. We had a little girl. Lili, we called her. That was Alicia’s favorite movie, the one with that French actress and all those puppets. She was a great kid. A lot like Kendall. Smart and funny—and sweet. God, so sweet. Even my dad, who’s not the warmest guy in the world, couldn’t resist her. Spoiled her like crazy. He loved her so much he could almost forget what a disappointment I was. Then, right before Lili’s eighth birthday, I made a big arrest. Providence has a decent-size organized-crime population. There was a guy there, been there for years, basically the number-two guy in the New England Mafia. Involved in a lot of union stuff and local politics. Louie Denbo was his name. He was a bad guy but everybody pretty much left him alone. Cops, politicians, no one wanted to deal with it and it was just about money—there wasn’t much killing—so no one really cared. It’s a separate world, the Mafia up there. He was a character, he talked funny, and he was quoted a lot in the papers, so people thought he was—I don’t know—a cute Mafia guy or something. But then he crossed the line. He hit a banker, someone my dad knew pretty well. There was a financial scandal going on and the guy owed a lot of money and some of it he owed to Louie. So Louie took him out. Only he overdid it. He had his guys do the hit in a restaurant and they took out three others, innocent bystanders. Well, I got him. It was three months of serious police work—Louie was incredibly well protected—but I got him. And he knew I had him.
“The day before the trial started, I was home with Alicia and Lili. It was after dinner. I didn’t hear anything—I don’t know how, but I didn’t. In my dream, I do. I hear them every single time. It’s like a premonition. But that night I didn’t hear a thing. I was watching TV and I looked up and there were three guys in my house. They worked for Louie Denbo. I knew them, and as soon as I saw them I knew why they were there. But the crazy thing is, what they wanted to do, it didn’t matter. I mean, I was going to testify against Louie, but the prosecution didn’t need me. I was the icing on the cake. So they couldn’t even help him. It was just spite. I’d taken Louie down, so he was going to take me down. I was sitting in a lounge chair, with my feet up. Lili was helping Alicia do the dishes. They were going over the multiplication tables while they were cleaning up. One of the guys—his name was Jerry—he pointed the gun at Lili and he pulled the trigger and he killed her. He didn’t even say anything. He just shot her. She was standing next to Alicia and—” Justin closed his eyes now, he could see it all, picture it perfectly with his eyes closed—“and my daughter’s brains splattered all over my wife’s pants and shirt. I tried to get out of the chair, but they shot me. Once above the knee, once in the chest, once in the back. I went down. Stayed on the floor. They thought I was dead.”
“Oh my God, Jay … they killed Alicia?”
“They were going to, but they decided to rape her first. Jerry, he was such a sick son of a bitch, he told her they wanted her to see my face while they were raping her. They wanted her to see who’d really done this to her. So he walked over to me and kicked me, to turn me over on my back. He didn’t know I had my gun with me. I’d gotten home late and hadn’t put it away. I mean, I always put it away—I never wanted Lili to even touch it. But that night—I don’t know why—I just didn’t. I’d fallen on it when I went down on the floor. And I managed to put it in my hand while I was there. So when he kicked me I turned over and I shot him. In the chin, while he was staring down at me. He died instantly. One of the other bastards shot me again, but I kept firing, and I killed them, too. Then I passed out. When I came to, a couple of days later, my little girl was dead and Alicia … Alicia, she …”
He turned away from Deena, put one hand on his throat as if to lock the words in. Deena reached over, put her hand on his. “What happened to your wife?”
“I was in the hospital for a couple of weeks. When I got out I had a few months of rehab; I was on paid leave. Temporary disability. Alicia couldn’t bear to look at me. She just got more and more depressed. She’d cry a lot and spend most of her time in Lili’s room. If I tried to say anything or, worse, to touch her, she’d just look at me—it was like she was saying, ‘You did this.’ She never said anything. Not out loud. Ever. But that’s what she was thinking. And, of course, she was right. I did do it.”
“Your parents …”
“Not much help, I’m afraid. My mother came to see me in the hospital. My father never did. When I got out, he wouldn’t take my calls. So I went to see him at his office, at the bank. His secretary let me in and my dad was sitting at his desk, working. He looked up at me and he said, ‘You took the thing I loved the most away from me.’ He meant his granddaughter. And that was it. He put his head down, went back to work. I haven’t seen or spoken to either one of them since.”
“And Alicia?”
“One year to the day after the break-in and the shooting, she killed herself. I was home and she went to the kitchen, right to the spot where she was standing when Lili was killed, and she shot herself. I had put the gun away that day, but she took it out of the closet, put it in her mouth, and pulled the trigger.
“I think I’m finished,” he said. “That’s the end of the story.”
Deena slid over next to him, put her head on his chest, and wrapped one arm around him. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Bad stuff happens all the time,” Justin said. “It just seems a lot worse when it’s happening to us.”
“That’s not what I meant. I am sorry for all that happened. But I meant …you shouldn’t have gotten pulled back into the bad stuff. You’re here because of me. And you shouldn’t be.”
“No one really gets pulled into something they don’t want to get pulled into. Not exactly the words of the Buddha, I’ll grant you, but there’s my philosophy of life. When push comes to shove, people are where they want to be.”
He slid down on the bed so his eyes were even with hers and his mouth was an inch away from her lips.
“Do you want to be here?” she asked.
“Right now I do, yes.”
He could feel her warm breath on his face, feel the hardness of her body up against his.
“I know you’re out of shape,” she whispered, “and you haven’t been a real cop in a while. And I know my daughter can outtalk you on the telephone.” She put her hand on Justin’s cheek and stroked him gently. “But exactly how rusty are you?”
Justin leaned in to her and they kissed. Their lips were cracked and dry, and he winced when her shoulder bumped up against his. But he kissed her again, harder, and when she lifted her T-shirt over her head and tossed it on the floor, he pulled the sheet back and motioned for her to get under it.
“I think we’d better find out,” he said.
In the morning, Deena opened her eyes a few minutes after six o’clock. She thought an alarm had gone off, but then she heard someone talking, thought maybe it was a dream. She turned over, saw that he was gone. She realized it was his voice she was hearing. She looked across the room. Justin was on the telephone, speaking quietly.
“All right,” he was saying. “You be careful. If you can get what I asked for, that’s great. But don’t do anything if it’s too risky. Do you understand?” He listened for a moment, then said, “Okay. Thanks for calling back. If I’m wrong, I’ll let you call me paranoid. I’m sorry I woke you up.”
He hung up, saw that she was awake, smiled, and slid back into bed. “That was Gary. The kid I work with in East End.”
“Do you trust him?”
“I don’t really have a choice right now. People aren’t exactly lining up to help.”
She kissed the corner of his lips. “Has anything else happened?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” he told her. “There’s a warrant out for my arrest. And yours, too.”
“For what?”
“Murder. They’re saying I killed Ed Marion. And that we both killed Susanna Morgan.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“Somebody doesn’t want us to get any closer to whatever the hell is going on. And it’ll be a lot harder to get close while there’s a manhunt going on.”
He could feel her tremble as he held her. And he saw goose bumps raise on her arms.
“I’d better go back to my room,” she said. “So I’m there when Kenny wakes up.”
He nodded. Ran his hand through her hair. “I’m not going to let them hurt you,” he told her. “Not you or Kendall. I swear.” “I believe you.” She did her best to smile, and then she said, “Do you really have a plan?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to tell me what it is?”
“We’re going to Providence,” he said.
She looked surprised. “What’s in Providence?”
“Almost everything we need,” he told her. “At least for now.”