That cool, that quick thinking.
Tonight, she’s unusually lively. Funny, he never noticed her longing for female company or museum trips, but the Winterthur visit seems to have jazzed her up. She doesn’t want to be with a book tonight, that’s for sure. And she laughs while they’re making love—not in a mean way, simply flushed and happy. After, she starts to talk again about opening a bed-and-breakfast, maybe in one of the old Victorian houses near downtown. He flashes on her in the window of the bus, how she looked like a kid on the first day of school, tight with nerves, trying to conceal them. It is touching how little she wants.
But does he love her enough to stay here, restless as he’s feeling? How can anyone want to stay in Belleville, where the best scenic view is the sun setting over the cornfields? It’s small enough to be boring, big enough to be charmless. No, my Handsome Polly-O, I do not want to run a B and B here.
That night, as she sleeps, he goes through her purse. He finds nothing. How do you go to a place like Winterthur and not have a brochure, a ticket, a receipt for a cup of coffee? Her purse has an old-fashioned wallet—another thrift store find—a lipstick, a hairbrush, two pens, and a tiny notebook. He opens this, sees a list of numbers. Dates? Accounts? Dates, he thinks, from the 1980s. She has jotted down a series of dates that, best he can tell, correspond to the final months of her marriage.
Where did you go, my Handsome Polly-O?
32
Pauline Ditmars walks through Irving Lowenstein’s front door the Tuesday after Yom Kippur, bold as brass. She’s wearing a dress the color of marigolds and a lightweight, nubby wool coat, her hair piled on top of her head, like she thinks she’s Audrey Hepburn. She even has gloves.
“So,” he says, “the mountain came to Mohammed.”
“I think we both know you’re the mountain here. And I’m no Mohammed. I’m not even sure I know who Mohammed was.”
Noting Susie’s interest in the visitor, Irving takes Pauline into the back. By any objective standard, she is more attractive than she was when Ditmars was alive. Thinner, less defeated looking. But he preferred her as she used to be, and it’s not just because of what he knows now about her proclivities. Still, he has to admit that yellow, the color used for warnings and caution, suits her.
“Why are you here?” No reason not to be blunt. He has nothing to hide. Adam Bosk, on the other hand, has probably concealed his connection to Irving. That’s why he was so happy to be fired as of Labor Day. He tried to make it like he was quitting, but all he did was save Irving the trouble of saying those words.
“I’m here to make amends. I’m in a twelve-step program now and that’s one of the steps.”
Irving assumes most Gentile women drink, but he doesn’t remember that being Pauline’s problem. Lord knows her husband was the worst—drink, cocaine, pills, whatever. Whereas Irving drinks only a little sliwowitz, maybe three times a year.
“You going to give me some money? Because you owe me. Even your husband, horrible as he was, knew to kick back something when he used someone.”
He sees a flash of anger, something the old Pauline never allowed herself to show. Interesting reaction, for a woman trying to make amends.
“I didn’t take that money from you. I took it from an insurance company. And it was to care for my daughter. But if I asked Ditmars to sit for a medical exam—you know he wouldn’t have done it. Not because he suspected anything, but because anything I asked for, he said no. It was only a matter of time before he killed me and then what would have happened to Joy? He would have put her in some horrible, cheap institution.”
“She ended up in an institution, anyway.”
“In a good one. Paid for with that money. That’s how I justified it. As I said, I didn’t see how I was hurting another person.”
“I was investigated by the state insurance board, which wasn’t exactly good for my business. And your husband got hurt, didn’t he? I mean, I think it must hurt to have someone drive a knife through your heart. It’s not exactly a mercy killing.”
There it is again, a flash of anger, at odds with her penitence. “You know better than anyone what he was capable of. How many people do you figure he killed while he was on your payroll?”
Irving holds up his hands as if to stop a car coming toward him in a crosswalk. “Hey, hey. I don’t know any such thing. I don’t know where you get your ideas. For one, he wasn’t on my payroll. He worked for someone else.”
Glancing down, he notices a stain on his shirt, coffee from his breakfast. Birdy never would have allowed him to go out of the house like this. It bothers Irving that he’s been walking around with a stain, even if the only people he’s seen all morning are Susie and Pauline. She looks good, Pauline. Healthy, rested. All buffed up with love. Adam Bosk is a schmuck, but it’s hard to blame him.
“He told me everything, Irving. To scare me, to keep me in line. You arranged the policies. As a broker, you could spread them among several companies, disguising the pattern. And it wasn’t always property, right? Sometimes the guy—what was his name, Ford? He took out life insurance policies. On his own people. Then bought them back at a fraction of face value. He got the idea from you, right?”
“Maybe Ditmars did beat you. I think you got brain damage.”
“No, I’m smarter than ever. Wised up. Now I see I should have made a deal with you, offered to give you a percentage instead of rewarding you with that sad little screw in my kitchen.”
It’s strange, how much that hurts. He’s known for a long time that she used him, but he still thought it might have been pleasant for her. Ditmars was no prize. Irving, in his youth—well, not his youth, but he was ten years younger then, well preserved, meticulous in his hygiene—he had prided himself on being a very thoughtful lover. Birdy never had any complaints. She was an animal, this one. The kind that devours her male partner immediately after rutting.
“Again, you have a strange way of making amends.”
She lowers her gaze, seemingly contrite. “I’m sorry. It’s harder than it might sound, saying you were wrong, taking responsibility. Putting—other things aside, I should have offered you a cut. That’s how it worked. I knew that.” A pause. “I almost feel as if I need to make amends for Ditmars. He cut you out, sometimes.”
“How so?” he asks, adding quickly, “Not that there was anything to be cut out of. But—he talked behind my back?”
“It was one of the last fires he set. He said that you and the other guy—what was his name?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“He bragged how they cut you out. They cut you out a lot, went to other insurance brokers. That guy, the drug dealer, he saw that he could buy properties cheap, take out policies, then let Ditmars burn them down. Did you know that? Anyway, the last fire, the one that Ditmars modeled after a real fire he had investigated—open the gas jets, light a candle—was just meant to damage the house as I understand it. He didn’t know about the girl sleeping upstairs, with her baby. He was haunted by that. He tried to tell himself that they died from smoke inhalation, but the autopsy couldn’t rule out that they had been killed by all that flying debris. That was on Eutaw, I think?”
“Paca,” Irving says. Hard to forget Paca. He wished they had cut him out of that one. Pauline killed Ditmars two months later. If only she had done it sooner, Paca never would have happened.
“Right, Paca. Winter 1986. A fifteen-year-old girl and her baby blown sky-high. They weren’t supposed to be there. It was supposed to be a quick-and-dirty job, a complete loss on the house so—what was his name?”
Irving doesn’t provide it.
“Whatever happened to him, that guy?”