He nodded with satisfaction. “That’s good. Because crazy people can say all kinds of shit that’s just not true, you know what I mean? He thinks a former president is his friend, for Christ’s sake.”
I kept my voice level, and firm. “Len, I suspect you meant well, and I know you were my father’s friend for a very long time, and I mean no disrespect, but I won’t have you calling Thomas crazy. He’s a good, gentle, decent person. I’m not going to try to argue that he’s not a bit unusual. I get that. But you’ve no right to call him names. And if he doesn’t want to take you up on your offer to go to lunch, you need to respect that the way you would if you were asking anyone else.” I took a breath.
As I turned for the stairs, Len said, “He’s not so gentle, you know.”
“What?”
“Your dad told me. Thomas could get real angry. Tried to push your dad down the stairs one time. Oh, he made all kinds of excuses for your brother’s behavior, but if you want my honest opinion, he ought to be locked up in a loony bin.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
“I don’t know why you had to wear that red dress to the party last night,” Kyle Billings said to his wife, Rochelle. “I told you, even before we left, that you should put on something else.”
“You know I like that dress,” she said. “I like how it makes me feel.”
“What? Like a slut? Is that how you want to feel?”
“Fuck you,” she said, and stormed out of their en suite bathroom—Jacuzzi, shower built for two, double sinks, bidet, the whole nine yards—into the bedroom with the curved windows that looked out onto the tree-lined street, and straight into her walk-in closet.
There was one for her, and a walk-in for him, and there was more square feet for either one of them than in the basement apartment in Chicago’s South Side where Kyle had lived ten years ago. Mice and mold, and almost every night, the tenants on the floor above screaming at each other about everything from too little butter on the toast to his staying out late drinking with his friends.
Now Kyle didn’t have to listen to the neighbors fighting, nor did the neighbors have to listen to him and Rochelle. They had a refurbished multimillion-dollar place on Forest Avenue in Oak Park, right next door to an honest-to-God Frank Lloyd Wright house, one of several on the street. Kyle Billings believed it was only a matter of time before one of the Wright-designed houses went on the market and he’d be able to snatch it up. That, finally, might impress the hell out of his father, who didn’t seem to give a shit that Kyle had become a multimillionaire before he was thirty through his Whirl360 wizardry, but worshipped at the altar of Frank Lloyd Wright, America’s greatest architect, living or dead. “Why’d you buy this house, and not that one?” Kyle’s father had said, pointing to the closest Wright house. “I thought you were doing well.”
Asshole.
Kyle Billings followed his wife into her closet. “You know when you dress that way you’re just going to draw attention to yourself. You were getting everybody’s motor running. All the guys there—their tongues were practically on the floor. Every one of them was fucking you with his eyes.”
She spun around, stood there barefoot in her jean shorts and red tee, and placed her hands defiantly on her hips. “I could start wearing a burka if you’d like. That the look you want me to go for?”
“Jesus,” Kyle said. He knew, deep down, he was an idiot to be bitching about this. Face it, what the hell attracted him to Rochelle Billings—Kesterman before she married him—in the first place, when he saw her at the software trade show in San Francisco five years ago, prancing about onstage in her stilettos, drawing more eyes to herself than to the finer points of some just-had-to-have-it phone app?
She was as stunning now as she was then, with her black ass-length hair, long legs, and small but perky breasts that looked you right in the eyes. Her skin, the color of coffee with cream, gave her an exotic touch. He’d had to meet her right away. Found her behind the curtain after her performance, invited her for a drink, worked into the conversation his success, the 911 Turbo, the Chicago condo he had, at that time, overlooking Lake Michigan. How this new thing he was in on, that would let people explore cities all over the world from the comfort of their computer chair, was going to make him richer than God.
Rochelle liked that part.
Five months later, they were married.
Kyle knew if she could turn his head, she was going to give other guys whiplash, too. He was okay with it for a while. Seeing men give her the eye, then they’d exchange glances with him and he’d give them the smile, the one that said, Yeah, you can look all you want, dickwad, but I’m the one who gets to ride this at night.
And what a ride.