Killer Move

The thought of the guy brought a twist to my stomach, but I was glad he’d done it. I didn’t know what I was going to do about that situation. Right now it wasn’t my highest priority, but at some point it probably would become so. Real life comes due in the end. You can’t just focus on work. You can keep scribbling on separate Post-it notes and shoving them in drawers, but sooner or later every real thing comes to its moment on the great To Do List of Life. Probably it came down to what this “friendship” amounted to. I hoped it wasn’t much and took solace from the fact that the guy had only been at the company for five or six weeks. It couldn’t be that serious, surely. I didn’t know whether to be sad or worried or angry. I didn’t know how much of the situation could be laid at my door, either, for failing to provide some thing or things Steph felt she was lacking. It is a bitter shame we’re so much better at imagining perfection than life is at providing it. The perfect evening, perfect weekend, perfect house . . . Our minds effortlessly serve these images up, and so we write fairy tales in our heads, and they’re always so damned bright. The world meanwhile digs in its heels and prevaricates and stalls—yet we believe the universe is so much bigger than we are, bursting full of potential wonders, and so we’ll denigrate and underuse the good things we have on the basis that there’s better out there. There probably isn’t. The best life you can have may be the one you’ve already got. This fecund imagination of ours is just The Dark One’s voice, cajoling, promising. Some gods might fight back by giving us lives that run closer to what we’d like, but ours doesn’t operate on the letter-to-Santa model. He wants our respect because he’s God—not for being nice or merciful or any pansy-ass crap like that.

And as I sat there, I did kind of pray, something I hadn’t done in a long time—since back when I thought of myself as William rather than Bill. My mother was a lapsed Catholic, and prayed once in a while. I know the tune, that’s about all. I tried to hum it. I felt sick and light-headed, and Cass’s face was still appearing in front of my inner eye on a regular basis. I was trying not to think about where her body might be and had given up attempting to imagine why anyone would have done it.

I kept remembering, too, that my thumb drive was still in her apartment, and each time this made my stomach flip as if someone was turning it with a red-hot fork. I shoved all this to the side as best I could, however, and sent up a prayer for Stephanie.

I have no idea where it went.

Finally the guy behind the desk nodded at me. I went over to the elevator and took it to the fourth floor.

I knocked on the door to the Thompson apartment, and it was opened by Tony immediately, as if he’d been standing behind it. It could be that I was judging everyone else by how I felt, but it seemed to me he looked a lot older today. Older and tense and deep-lined around the eyes. The eyes themselves were flat, and despite the speed with which he’d opened the door, he didn’t seem in any hurry to invite me in. Behind him I saw Marie on the big white couch, arms folded.

Eventually Tony stood aside. The bottle of wine I’d presented him with was on the coffee table. It was unopened. Tony didn’t sit, and didn’t invite me to, either.

“So what’s up, Bill?” Marie asked.

I’d only been directly addressed by Marie on a couple of occasions. I had always found the experience unnerving. She’d gone full-bore on the figure-over-face school, and the planes on the latter were harsh and unforgiving. Even in her youth it would have been a countenance to be admired rather than enjoyed: the bones were big and asymmetric, arranged as if to withstand impact rather than inspire attraction. On the other hand, I’d seen this woman in her sixties beat Karren soundly on the tennis courts in front of a small crowd, and I was pretty sure Karren hadn’t been playing politics.

“I bought that bottle along with one more,” I said. “Someone took the other from my house. They drank half of it. They’re in the hospital and very sick. I don’t know if there’s a link. But it’s possible.”

“Tony said you bought the wine on the Internet.”

“Yes. I heard him mention it, thought it might be nice to see if I could track it down for him.”

“To curry favor with us.”

You could have held the sneer in her voice in your hand. You could have fed it. You could have kept it as a pet. “Yes.”

“How precisely did you get hold of it?”

“I already told Tony. I found a wine forum on the Web. Put up a post.”

“Did you use your normal e-mail address?”

“Of course. Why?”

Marie and Tony looked at each other. “So that’s how,” she said.

Tony nodded, with something that looked like relief. “Which means it wasn’t necessarily aimed at us. Just a throw-out. A random spike in his life.”