Killer Move

screen featuring an intriguing new TV show. Shocked and nonplussed though I was, I still found a second to worry about whether the incident had been witnessed by others. That was part of it. But I realized I was also wondering if someone might be watching us.

Or watching me.

Steph turned back to face me the moment I’d shut the front door. I’d had time to wonder whether she’d received the joke e-mail—I couldn’t recall whether she’d been on the list or not—and if this was a weirdly extreme reaction. Steph’s not a prude or too obsessed with being politically correct, but that was the only thing I could think of. Her face destroyed whatever minimal credibility the theory/hope had. She was furious, but there was something else in her eyes. They weren’t hard enough for it to be anger alone. There was the softness of hurt in there, too.

“Honey,” I said, reaching for the voice I used with clients when a deal had gone belly-up and the world needed making right. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“The sad thing is,” she said, her voice still at the reined-back snarl that I found more worrying than shouting, “I’m actually slightly relieved. In a bizarre way. I’d thought there might actually be something going on between you two. Okay, I didn’t think it, but the possibility had entered my mind.”

“Between who?”

“Oh shut up. You really think that’s going to play now? Don’t insult me.”

“Steph,” I said, disconcerted at how hard my heart was beating, “I have not the slightest clue what you’re talking about. Really.”

She started to say something, and this would have been a shout, but the words collided in her mouth and canceled each other out. Instead, she shook her head and marched off in the direction of the den. I followed.

The den, or family room (if you’ve got a family), is on the other side of the kitchen, a continuation from its open-plan cooking/eating area and sharing its view out onto the pool area. As I entered I saw that both of our laptops were lying open on the L-shaped sofa.

I stopped in my tracks. “What are you doing with my computer?”

“What you said you’d do two weeks ago,” Steph snapped. “And again a couple of nights ago. Pulling off the pictures from Helen’s birthday party. Remember?”

I started to protest, but I had nowhere to go with denial or self-righteousness. I had said I’d do those things, and it was also long-established practice for us to access each other’s computers as and when required. Why not? Neither of us had anything to hide. But it felt like an intrusion nonetheless, especially today.

I watched as Steph stormed over to my machine and banged a key. This caused the blank screen to blink back into life. Steph tried to say something, but once more it died in her mouth. She gestured at the screen instead.

I bent over the back of the sofa and looked. At first I couldn’t make out what I was seeing. A picture of some kind, but oddly framed: a skewed, multicolored oblong surrounded by near black, a short series of numbers in orange down at the bottom right.

Then it snapped into sense, and I realized I was looking at a photograph taken at night, through a window. The colored area showed the inside of someone’s house. A small, blurry blue-gray section was presumably a television screen. A portion of a blood-red sofa—which is what broke my first half-assumption, which was that the picture had been taken through one of our windows, of our den. Our sofa is pale blue.

The other thing that had broken it was the figure visible a third of the way along from the right side of the window. Also blurry, but flesh-toned, apart from a black bra. The hair that hung down almost as far as its horizontal line was a very dark brown.

“What the hell is this?”

“Bill, please. Spare me.”

I reached out and hit the cursor key. This brought up another picture, which was similar but in better focus. The edges of the objects within it were still fuzzy, suggesting that the photograph had been taken twenty or thirty yards from the window, using some kind of zoom. It was, however, sharp enough to tell both that the woman had removed her bra, and that she was Karren White.

There were twelve photographs. In all but four, the identity of the woman was clear. The others caught her from behind or at a nonrevealing angle, before and after she had removed her clothes and put on a terrycloth robe. They began and ended what was evidently a sequence taken from some vantage point near Karren’s apartment. I knew the building, near the bay at the north end of Sarasota, having sold an apartment there several years before.

“I have no idea how these got on my laptop,” I said.

“Yeah, right. I mean, for god’s sake. How lame do you have to be to do this? Never mind the lying.”

“Lying?” I said, confused.

“Good lord. You don’t even realize how clearly you’ve screwed up, do you?”

She jabbed her finger at the screen, where the last of the sequence of pictures—a relatively innocuous one, showing Karren in the process of leaving the room via a door—was still in view. I saw that Steph was indicating the sequence of numbers in the corner.

09•14•2011

A date, of course. The fourteenth of September. Yesterday. So the lie had been . . .

“Steph, I’ve got to see a client,” Steph snarled, seeing the penny had dropped. “Steph, it’s so cool, I’ll get the commission. Oh no, honey—Karren won’t be there. And of course, she actually wasn’t—except via what you could see through your putrid lens.”

“Steph,” I said. I was mirroring how she’d just spoken, but couldn’t help it. I was starting to get angry, but defensively assuming the offensive. “I don’t even have a zoom lens. I’ve got a three- hundred-dollar compact. You know that. You bought it for me.”

“Sure, I bought that one,” she sneered. “But who knows what other gadgets you’ve picked up in the meantime? From Amazon, maybe? Your favorite online retailer, from what I gather.”

Having done the head work over the book earlier in the day, I knew the corner I was now in. I could suggest she search the house, and she could choose to believe I’d stowed the camera elsewhere. I could demand she look through the last year’s credit card statements: she could laugh in my face and ask me how hard it was to get a couple hundred bucks out of an ATM and take a quick drive to the Bradenton Outlet Mall. Every time I set up one of these barriers for her to knock down, it would just make me look more and more as if I was not only lying, but doing it with malice and forethought. The harder I tried and the better I argued, the more it would look like I had my story straight, and that would just make it worse.

And anyway, the camera wasn’t the point.

I said all this. Steph agreed. She agreed all too readily. She agreed that the real point was that I had snuck around to Karren White’s apartment—on the pretense of being out at a meeting that (surprise, surprise) hadn’t materialized and thus couldn’t be checked. The real point, she was happy to see that I’d grasped, was not only was I obsessed with my coworker, but that I was enough of a loser to take stealth pictures of her naked, instead of having an affair like any normal person.

“Hold on,” I said. “Whoa. I’m not obsessed with Karren. What are you talking about?”

“No? So how come you’re always mentioning her?”

“What?” I couldn’t help being distracted by each untruth as it arrived. “Of course she crops up—we work in the same office. I know the names of everybody you work with at the magazine. I know the names of their children. Karren’s an operator, you know that. I only bring her up to say how I’m trying to get around her, to get my thing going, to build my rep.”

I took a step toward her. She stepped back, making a sound like a can of soda being opened.

“Don’t even try it,” she said.