Killer Move

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.”

“Yes. Though . . .” She had a thought, and turned back to me, frowning. “What did you actually say in your post? Did you say you were looking for the wine as a gift?”

“Said I wanted to do someone a favor, which is why I was keen to track it down and willing to pay well.”

She took a long drag off her cigarette, looking at me through the smoke. Her eyes were the same color. “That’s . . . less good. Come on, Tony—who else could Bill have wanted to suck up to?”

“What’s going on?” I asked. “Can you just tell me?”

Neither seemed to hear. Both appeared deep in thought, gazing out of different windows. After a moment, a question of apparently trivial importance struck Marie.

“Who drank the wine?”

“Stephanie,” I said. “My—”

“Wife,” Marie said. “I know. Pretty girl.”

Something inexplicable happened to her face, and she pursed her lips together.

“What the hell was that?” I asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Seriously,” I said. “I tell you my wife is in the hospital, and you have to bite down on a smile?”

“Rather her than me, don’t you think?”

I stared at her, and I remembered something Hazel Wilkins had said when we’d met for coffee a hundred years ago: Self-centered. Dangerously so.

Tony picked up on how angry I actually was. “Bill—I’m sorry to hear about your wife. Do they have any idea what was in it?”

“Not for sure,” I said. “But they were talking about E. coli. The bottle’s at the lab now.”

“How on earth would he get hold of E. coli?” Tony asked, but he wasn’t talking to me.

Marie shook her head. She wasn’t looking so pleased with herself anymore. I was brutally glad. “Probably wasn’t him,” she said. “He will have tasked one of his little helpers.”

“Wouldn’t one of them have said?”

“No. They’re his helpers, not ours. Always have been. Which is why I said—”

“Who?” I said, infuriated at being treated as though I wasn’t there. “Who the hell are you talking about?”

The phone on the coffee table rang—the sound sudden and jangling and harsh. The Thompsons looked at it. It kept on ringing. Finally, after about six rings, Marie leaned forward and picked it up. Listened.

“Okay,” she said. “Thank you.”

The change in her face was remarkable. She stared up at her husband, suddenly looking about eighty years old.

“Get rid of him.”

Tony took my arm and led me to the door. His grip was hard and strong. “Look,” I said, but by then I was outside in the corridor. The door closed behind me.

I didn’t walk away. A beat later I heard Marie’s muffled voice.

“Hazel’s disappeared.”

As I stepped out into the sun I saw Big Walter the maintenance guy standing in the middle of the lot. He had his cap in his hand. He didn’t look right.

“You okay?”

He looked at me. “Don’t know,” he said. “You know Mrs. Wilkins is missing?”

“I just heard. But she could just be out somewhere, right?”

He shook his head. “I was just up there. Melda took me. I been in that apartment many times, fixing things. Tidiest damned condo I ever saw. Now it looks like someone was looking for something, got mad when they didn’t