As “Aileen,” Leenie had thought physically, like Rodin’s Thinker, all furrowed brow and bent body. Leenie stands stock-still, her chin on her hand.
“I can’t make rent,” she says.
“You could find another roommate, couldn’t you?”
“No, Victoria’s the only one on the lease. I had some credit problems a few years ago and we thought it better that way. Legally, I don’t have standing. I could get in trouble if I brought another tenant in.”
So she’s comfortable carving up bodies and disposing of them, but worries about being hauled into rent court.
“That is a tough situation,” he says, trying to sound sympathetic, “but I’m not sure how this is my problem.”
“If you hadn’t killed Margot, I wouldn’t have had to kill Victoria.”
Gerry is pretty sure there’s a fallacy lurking in that reasoning, but he can’t be bothered to find it. Instead he asks what he has asked before, hoping for a different answer.
“Did I kill Margot, Leenie? Did I? What really happened that night?”
She stomps downstairs, offended. She has bashed in the head of her friend, but she apparently takes great exception to the suggestion that she might have plunged a letter opener into Margot’s eye.
Not that even Gerry can persuade himself she did it. Why would she have killed Margot? Did Margot, of all people, figure out what was going on and return to the apartment to confront Aileen? No, that makes no sense whatsoever.
The landline rings. Thiru.
“I’ve received your royalties and gone over the accounting. Any chance you’ll ever surrender your love for paper checks and let me use ACH to deposit these things?”
“No—” he begins. Then he remembers that Victoria was the one who deposited his checks. He does not want to entrust this task to Aileen, does not want her to see what Dream Girl puts back into his coffers every six months. “Yes. Yes, I think I will change. How does one go about that?”
“I just need some basic information. Routing number, account number. Your assistant can—”
“No.”
“Excuse me?”
“Victoria is gone. Stopped coming to work, with zero notice. But I can give you that information now. I keep a checkbook in the drawer of my nightstand.”
Gerry realizes that lying, once it has begun, never stops. He has lied to the detective about Margot and now he has lied to Thiru about Victoria. In their long partnership, he has never before lied to Thiru, although he was sometimes obscure about the infidelity that ended his first marriage. Thiru would have been scandalized, not by Gerry’s adultery, but by his ability to screw up what most men would have considered a dream scenario.
Thiru assumed men were unfaithful, he called it the nature of the beast. But all Gerry had ever wanted was to be good, not his father. For much of his life, he had been able to achieve this not inconsiderable goal. He considered the two episodes of adultery—the stupid fling with Shannon Little, the one-night stand when he was married to Sarah—to be forced errors. The enormous guilt he still felt about both was proof that he was not a sociopath.
“Gerry Andersen, giving up paper checks. It’s almost like that Internet meme that goes around from time to time.”
“What?”
“Do I need to define ‘meme’ for you, or this one in particular?”
“I know what a meme is, Thiru, I just don’t get this one.”
“I’m thinking of the one where people try to craft a message that would alert others they are in danger, while seeming neutral to their captors. You giving up paper checks—that’s darn close. If you said something rhapsodic about Wuthering Heights, I would know for sure that someone had a gun to your head. Or if I ever saw the word ‘limn’ in your work.”
Gerry laughs as best he can. The primary thing is, there will be no checks arriving, no record of his money for Aileen/Leenie to see. It has become all too clear to him that Leenie is very, very interested in money, especially his money.
She’s going to do something stupid with the purse and the phone cover, he is convinced of it.
1972
THE SHOEBOX WAS from Hess at Belvedere Square. Gerry believed he knew exactly what pair of shoes it once held. Two-toned spectator oxfords with a slight heel. His mother was vain about her feet, which were small and delicate, a size six. Whenever they went shopping for his back-to-school shoes, she usually ended up buying a pair for herself, too. How the Hess salesmen loved to wait on her. Gerry knew his mother was pretty, although he tried not to think about it. But whenever he saw her calf in the hands of a shoe salesman, he was reminded not only how pretty she was, but how she must have had her pick of men, and yet she still chose his father.
He was not looking for the shoebox, of course. Who would look for a shoebox in the pantry, behind boxes of generic pasta from the Giant? He had been looking for his mother’s secret stash of chocolate, a game of sorts. She hid her chocolate; he found it, ate a few pieces; she pretended to be outraged. Then she hid it again. He wasn’t snooping, not really. It had never occurred to him to spy on his mother. The only thing she had ever tried to keep from him was his father’s awfulness. But his father was gone, had been gone for almost two years now.
The shoebox was light, too light to hold even a dainty pair of size sixes. Curious, Gerry pulled it down from the shelf and opened it.
Envelopes with cellophane windows. Bills. Six months of bills. He didn’t know much about bills—what fourteen-year-old boy did?—but he quickly realized these were unpaid.
They don’t make money off of us. They make money off people who don’t pay their bills.
His mother had said that to him once when he was trying to understand why a simple piece of plastic could be substituted for cash, why stores would accept it. In the 1960s, there was a single Baltimore charge card, accepted by all the local department stores. He had hovered at his mother’s elbow, watched the clerk press down on it with the metal machine that looked like a stapler. It made no sense to him. All he understood was his mother’s pride at not being one of the people that the store made money from.
He was fourteen. He wanted to shove the box back on the shelf, continue to look for her chocolate. Instead, he sat at the kitchen table and made neat stacks of bills. She had been using a charge account at Graul’s from time to time; strange, because she seldom shopped at that grocery store despite it being in view of their house. She always claimed it was too expensive. But it was the kind of store that would allow customers to have charge accounts. Bills for clothes, but all for him, and not many because he wore a uniform to Gilman. The car payment. Utilities. C&P Telephone.
It was a school day, late afternoon, the sky gray, a boisterous wind whipping around the house. When his mother came through the kitchen door and saw what he was doing, she didn’t seem particularly surprised. If anything, her reaction seemed to be one of relief.
“Gerry,” she said.
“Get your checkbook, Mother. And your paystubs. I can get us out of this—and make sure it never happens again.”
He did, eventually. He worked out payment plans with those who were owed money, then created a household budget. He also got a job—at Graul’s, as a stock boy, which meant not only did he contribute money to the household, he sometimes was allowed to take home unsellable goods—badly dented cans, cans with missing labels. His mother made a game of concocting dinners from these rejects. They were not particularly good dinners, but he admired what they jokingly called her “can-do” attitude.
And every month, he sat at the kitchen table, filling out the checks and then passing them to his mother to sign. He couldn’t help noticing that his father’s name was still on the account, which worried him to no end.
April
“I GAVE UP MY APARTMENT,” Leenie says.
“What?”