“They’re wearing dresses,” Jamie said, and ran out again, to the front of the store.
She passed the security guards and Geri, and now a small crowd of people looking and talking, to the front doors where she exited, ran into the parking lot, back to her car, which was still empty. She hit the hood with her hand and ran back to the store, where more people stood, watching her.
The face of a man with a mustache blurred in front of her, next to the guard with the double chin.
“Ma’am, I put out a Code Adam alert for the entire mall and called the police. Do you want to sit down?”
Jamie didn’t understand the words he said. He held out his hand, to guide her inside to a cushioned folding chair, where someone would bring her a glass of water.
Jamie didn’t take it. She dug her fingernails into her scalp and whispered, “My girls…my girls.”
—
They always think they won’t get caught, thought Cap. They want to get caught, Nell said to him once. Otherwise why do it? And Cap said, No one wants to get caught, not even the ones who feel guilty, and that is actually most of them. Not even Catholics. And you need a little bit of ego to think you’re the one who’s not going to get caught. That you’re the one guy who’ll fool his wife forever; you’re the one woman whose husband never asks too many questions. Maybe you are. Maybe you get to have it all—a sweet home life and something breathless and dramatic on the side. Maybe you deserve it, too. Maybe she’s a bitch and you never wanted to marry her in the first place. Maybe you never wanted to work this job in this trashy old town and drive this piece-of-shit car and have these screaming kids with cheese curl dust on their fingers. Maybe the only way it gets better is to have an hour with the waitress from the diner or the fresh young babysitter in a motel room or your car with the backseat folded into the trunk.
Maybe you’re just an asshole.
Cap had stopped flipping through the possibilities a long time ago. The truth was he didn’t care why they did it; it was just his job to catch them. A pocket-sized DVR tucked into a cigarette box, one full water bottle, and one empty, black coffee in a thermos. Beaded seat cushion like the cabbies used to have back in Brooklyn when he grew up. Sometimes reading material but not for this kind of active surveillance, which usually took place over lunchtime or a coffee break. Passion doesn’t take long.
His phone buzzed. It was a text from Nell: “Do u have anything 4 din in the house???”
Cap wrote back: “Let’s order Justino’s.”
Nell wrote: “Sick of pizza. Chinese. I’ll get mu shu.”
Cap wrote: “Great.”
Nell wrote: “:)”
Sideways happy face. People are going to start putting sideways happy faces on their headstones, he thought. Here lies Max Caplan: Father, Ex-husband, Private Investigator, Disgraced Cop, :). Sideways happy face.
Definitely “Father” first on the headstone. Leave it to his daughter, Nell, he thought, to think of dinner at 5 p.m., not because she was hungry but because she knew he would have a bowl of cereal unless she took care of it. He told her not to worry because he was basically okay. He never went into how much he drank on nights when he wasn’t working or when she was at her mother’s, how he woke up in the middle of the night after passing out on the couch with the TV blaring.
The door to room 7 opened, and Cap propped the cigarette box up on the side mirror and tapped Record on the DVR. A man and a woman came out. The man had a belly that seemed to go all the way around his waist, like a life preserver, over his belt. The woman was, unfortunately, blond and trashy-looking, tight jeans and a spray tan. You couldn’t fight the stereotype a little, lady? Cap thought as he watched it all through the screen. He zoomed in as much as he could on the couple, getting their entire bodies in the frame. You wanted to see the body language as much as the face, he’d found. Hands and hips and feet. If they didn’t kiss you wanted to see how they touched, and if they didn’t touch, if you could see every part of them, it was easier to see if they wanted to.
These two touched. The man had his hand on her elbow, her arm was around the life preserver, both of them talking with their mouths downward, whispering, thought Cap. The man said something, and the woman laughed and then put her fingers to his lips, like she was shushing him. Playful, intimate. Then the woman got in her car and drove away, and the man watched her go. He walked across the lot to his car, and then sat in the driver’s seat for a couple of minutes. He sat, and Cap sat. Cap watched him rub his face with the heels of the hands and then the fingers. Guilty, big guy? Then the man drove away. Cap tapped Pause.
“Oh, Mr. Svetich,” he said.
Watching another man cheat on his wife was exhausting. Cheating was one thing Jules could never accuse him of when they were married. He worked too much, drank too much, smoked too much (which was really hardly at all, but too much for her); he was emotionally unavailable and never wanted to talk about things. He was vaguely resentful and angry at Jules for bringing him not even to Philly but to a part of Pennsylvania where he was the only Jew in the room at any given function. Then he lost his job, and there was nothing vague at all about how resentful and angry he was.
Once he threw a beer bottle at the bathroom door when Jules was in there and wouldn’t come out. He was always too tired. He didn’t spend enough time with Nell. He snored and twitched when he slept. His pee aim was poor in the middle of the night. He had dandruff sometimes and rarely clipped his toenails. But he never cheated on her.
Cap put the camera in his pocket and drove away, heading home, to Denville. He stopped at the beer distributors close to his house, picked up a case of Yuengling for him and club soda for Nell. In the parking lot he walked past a guy who looked familiar, but in a town of fifteen thousand everyone looked familiar. At the grocery store you ran into the guy who cut your hair and the woman who’d served you an Irish Car Bomb on the house last weekend. At your kid’s soccer game you saw the postman and the city councilman and the gal who handed out free samples in front of StoneField Ice Cream. The longer he was a cop, the more Cap thought this was not such a nice thing. He hated knowing people. The Iraq War vet who he used to shake hands with at bars eventually holed up in his house with a jug of vodka and a gun. The flirty waitress at Applebee’s who left her newborn in the garbage in the restaurant bathroom. The former high school football star who OD’d on oxy and Heineken. Keep your small towns, thought Cap. Give me a city where I don’t recognize the corpse.
“Hey, Cap, right?” the guy in the beer distributors parking lot said.
Place him, place him, thought Cap. You’ve known him for a while because he looks older and fatter and redder now than he used to.
“It’s me, Chris. Chris Morris.”