“Why don’t you come downstairs and I’ll show you what I’ve been working on,” he said, giving me a look that told me he knew why I was there, and that he didn’t want to talk about it in front of his wife.
“Sure,” I said.
“You positive you won’t have something?” Marie asked, following us to the basement door.
“We’re good, Marie,” Len said, holding out his arm for me to precede him down the steps. He closed the door behind him as he followed me.
“Nice workshop,” I said. It looked as though Len had, in this well-illuminated room, every tool a master craftsman might need: jigsaw, drill press, lathe, a large worktable, a Shop-Vac, and a wall adorned with hand tools of every description. On the far side of the room, a broad set of stairs led up to a pair of angled, swinging doors. So that was how he’d get the furniture out. There wasn’t a speck of sawdust on the floor, which made sense, since I didn’t see any project under way. No chair legs or dresser drawers or cabinet doors lying about, waiting to be made into something whole.
“I try to keep it nice,” Len said.
“So what are you working on?” I asked. “This place looks too pristine to actually build anything.”
“I don’t have any projects on the go,” Len said. “I figured you’d want to talk privately.”
“Thomas told me there was an incident yesterday,” I said. “I came over to find out more. I understand Thomas struck you.”
Len reached up and touched his cheek. “Yeah, well.”
“I’m sorry. Thomas shouldn’t have done that.”
“I guess he can’t help it,” Len said. “Being crazy and all.”
“He’s not crazy,” I said. “He has a mental illness. You know that.”
“Come on, Ray. That’s just a nice way to say he’s nuttier than a fruitcake.”
I felt something tingle at the back of my neck. “What happened, exactly? When you came out to the house.”
“I dropped by, just to see how you boys were doing, that’s the kind of thing your dad would have wanted me to do, and you weren’t there, just Thomas. He said you were in New York?”
“And what happened?”
“I tried to do something nice, that’s what happened.”
“I don’t understand why Thomas would get angry if that’s what you were trying to do.”
“I just wanted to get him-”
“Everything okay down there?” Marie called. She had opened the door.
“We’re fine, damn it!” Len barked.
The door closed.
Len cleared his throat and continued. “I offered to take him out for lunch.”
“You know Thomas doesn’t like to leave the house much.” I didn’t add that he especially wouldn’t have liked leaving it to go out with Len.
“Yeah, yeah, I know that, but I thought it would do him some good. He can’t stay cooped up in there all the time. It’s just not healthy. Used to drive your dad batty.”
“So when did Thomas hit you?”
Len shrugged tiredly. “I guess I was kind of pressing the point. Trying to talk him into coming out. I took hold of his arm, thought I could nudge him along, you know? He yanked his arm back and he caught me on the side of the face. If Thomas said it was anything more than that, if he said I hurt him or anything, that’s totally not true. That’s one of his flights of imagination, that’s what that is.”
“He never said anything like that,” I said.
He nodded with satisfaction. “That’s good. Because crazy people can say all kinds of shit that’s just not true, you know what I mean? He thinks a former president is his friend, for Christ’s sake.”
I kept my voice level, and firm. “Len, I suspect you meant well, and I know you were my father’s friend for a very long time, and I mean no disrespect, but I won’t have you calling Thomas crazy. He’s a good, gentle, decent person. I’m not going to try to argue that he’s not a bit unusual. I get that. But you’ve no right to call him names. And if he doesn’t want to take you up on your offer to go to lunch, you need to respect that the way you would if you were asking anyone else.” I took a breath.
As I turned for the stairs, Len said, “He’s not so gentle, you know.”
“What?”
“Your dad told me. Thomas could get real angry. Tried to push your dad down the stairs one time. Oh, he made all kinds of excuses for your brother’s behavior, but if you want my honest opinion, he ought to be locked up in a loony bin.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
“I don’t know why you had to wear that red dress to the party last night,” Kyle Billings said to his wife, Rochelle. “I told you, even before we left, that you should put on something else.”
“You know I like that dress,” she said. “I like how it makes me feel.”
“What? Like a slut? Is that how you want to feel?”
“Fuck you,” she said, and stormed out of their en suite bathroom-Jacuzzi, shower built for two, double sinks, bidet, the whole nine yards-into the bedroom with the curved windows that looked out onto the tree-lined street, and straight into her walk-in closet.
There was one for her, and a walk-in for him, and there was more square feet for either one of them than in the basement apartment in Chicago’s South Side where Kyle had lived ten years ago. Mice and mold, and almost every night, the tenants on the floor above screaming at each other about everything from too little butter on the toast to his staying out late drinking with his friends.
Now Kyle didn’t have to listen to the neighbors fighting, nor did the neighbors have to listen to him and Rochelle. They had a refurbished multimillion-dollar place on Forest Avenue in Oak Park, right next door to an honest-to-God Frank Lloyd Wright house, one of several on the street. Kyle Billings believed it was only a matter of time before one of the Wright-designed houses went on the market and he’d be able to snatch it up. That, finally, might impress the hell out of his father, who didn’t seem to give a shit that Kyle had become a multimillionaire before he was thirty through his Whirl360 wizardry, but worshipped at the altar of Frank Lloyd Wright, America’s greatest architect, living or dead. “Why’d you buy this house, and not that one?” Kyle’s father had said, pointing to the closest Wright house. “I thought you were doing well.”
Asshole.
Kyle Billings followed his wife into her closet. “You know when you dress that way you’re just going to draw attention to yourself. You were getting everybody’s motor running. All the guys there-their tongues were practically on the floor. Every one of them was fucking you with his eyes.”
She spun around, stood there barefoot in her jean shorts and red tee, and placed her hands defiantly on her hips. “I could start wearing a burka if you’d like. That the look you want me to go for?”
“Jesus,” Kyle said. He knew, deep down, he was an idiot to be bitching about this. Face it, what the hell attracted him to Rochelle Billings-Kesterman before she married him-in the first place, when he saw her at the software trade show in San Francisco five years ago, prancing about onstage in her stilettos, drawing more eyes to herself than to the finer points of some just-had-to-have-it phone app?
She was as stunning now as she was then, with her black ass-length hair, long legs, and small but perky breasts that looked you right in the eyes. Her skin, the color of coffee with cream, gave her an exotic touch. He’d had to meet her right away. Found her behind the curtain after her performance, invited her for a drink, worked into the conversation his success, the 911 Turbo, the Chicago condo he had, at that time, overlooking Lake Michigan. How this new thing he was in on, that would let people explore cities all over the world from the comfort of their computer chair, was going to make him richer than God.
Rochelle liked that part.
Five months later, they were married.
Kyle knew if she could turn his head, she was going to give other guys whiplash, too. He was okay with it for
