Slow Burner (Hush collection) Read online

  Oh

  Dinner?

  I don’t know

  We’re friends. Friends have dinner, right?

  No one has dinner anymore except Insta influencers

  Funny

  [curtsy]

  No, seriously, can we have dinner?

  Where are you staying?

  Fairmont

  Nice. Old school, but nice

  I’m old school. But nice.

 

  So dinner?

  Date?

  NOT a date! DINNER.

  Haha You know what I mean

  Oct 30.

  That works J will be in Shanghai

  If he were here, would you tell him you were meeting me?

  Does Liz know you’re still talking to me?

  We’re separated as of last week.

  Oh

  Not that it’s relevant to you.

  I don’t know what to say.

  I’m going to be happy. This has nothing to do with you. I deserve to be happy.

  You do. Everyone does.

  They are not separated. He floated the idea of a trial separation at their last counseling session. Liz refused to discuss it. The only way to save a marriage, she believes, is to stay and fight. Once Phil is out the door, he will never be back.

  But he also will never stop straying. And she is no Hera. She cannot send stinging flies after the poor girl trapped inside the white cow. It’s not this girl’s fault, and it won’t be the next girl’s fault.

  Oh god, there’s going to be a next girl—and that’s the best-case scenario.

  He whistles as he packs for San Francisco. Liz realized long ago, the first time, that he is kindest to her when he believes his relationship with HW is going well. He must think that she is going to leave her husband for him, despite the denials. Phil has always gotten what he wants. A short man, boyish and charming, he has a big personality. He’s irresistible. It’s only a matter of time before he gets what he wants. What he thinks he wants.

  He whistles and packs, packs and whistles. The blue Thomas Pink shirt Liz gave him for his last birthday, the handmade Italian shoes from Christmas. Of course, his money really paid for those gifts. He owns everything.

  It seems to Liz that he’s packing a lot for a two-day trip to San Francisco.

  “Do you want me to go with you,” she blurts.

  “You’re working.”

  “I could use my sick days. They’d never suspect a thing.”

  “Not worth it for this kind of trip. Wall-to-wall meetings. Maybe next time.”

  Let’s have dinner in your room.

  Really?

  For discretion’s sake. It’s a small town in its way. I live here, remember. People know me.

  Whereas I’m nothing but a face in the crowd.

  It’s my hometown. Text me your room #

  I’ll behave.

  What if I don’t want you to?

  2110

  Leave the door unlocked so I can slip in. I don’t want anyone to see me knocking on someone’s hotel room door.

  The Dark End of the Hotel Corridor.

  What

  A reference to an old song. I’ll play it for you.

  Winter comes early to Chicago that year, with measurable snowfall the second week of November, then an unending string of icy rains, which are worse than the snow. Still, Liz likes to walk after dark, no matter the weather, and Pugsley is happy for the extra exercise. She walks and walks and walks, and the neighbors who recognize her give her space, respect her need for solitude.

  Besides, no one knows what to say to a widow, especially a widow in these circumstances.

  Once upon a time, the story of Phil Kelsey’s death might have been kept to the circumspect old-school media coverage. Prominent Chicago investor killed in hotel robbery. Those were the facts. He was a prominent man, a rich man. Someone had entered his hotel room—no sign of forced entry—and shot him as he came out of the shower, then left with his wallet and his watch.

  The internet, however, was happy to indulge in speculation and gossip. The flirtation between PK and HW was well known in the incestuous world of tech; she had confided in her friends, after #MeToo, how confused she was by his attentions. Yet she had chosen to go back to work for him less than two years later. Friends said he promised her he would be professional, and for the most part, he was. That’s what friends had been told.

  Phil’s phone, the second phone, yielded a different story. Although he had been diligent about deleting all the texts from HW within a day or two, nothing ever really disappears. There it was, the history of their communication—a man pushing, a woman pulling away—their plan to meet. She denied it all, professed amazement, and her husband stood by her.

  The texts didn’t matter to the police, however. HW’s husband was not in Shanghai; he had never been in Shanghai. He had returned earlier that day from Seattle. The happy couple had been at dinner together when Phil Kelsey was shot.

  A door was left unlocked. A man with a gun walked through it. Or maybe a woman with a gun. A watch and a wallet were taken; two phones were left behind with tantalizing clues, but—Occam’s razor. It was a robbery. Phil had surprised a burglar and been killed, his body left on the bathroom floor, the shower still running. It was a random crime, not a crime of passion. HW and J were miles away, having dinner in San Mateo.

  As for Liz Kelsey, the sad cuckquean—the term for a female cuckold, seldom used, perhaps because betrayal is presumed to be part of the female condition—she was at a school event two thousand miles away, a showcase for students’ artwork. One of her students from last year had, at Liz’s suggestion, done a series of pastel profiles of the collateral damage of Zeus’s infidelity. Io and Argus and Echo and Callisto and Leto—it was quite a gallery.

  Liz walks and walks and walks. Every night she walks until Pugsley begins whimpering to be carried.

  Deep in her down coat’s right-hand pocket, a phone vibrates.

  “It is time to discuss your invoice.”

  “Of course. And you will invoice me for—”

  “Item #2728. It’s an oil painting from the mid-century. Unsigned, but in the style of a mid-Atlantic artist whose bigger canvases have gone for as much as $250,000. He’s back in vogue because he was featured on some movie star’s Instagram account. All you have to do is hit the ‘Buy Now’ button. You won’t be able to use a charge card, but we’re set up to take bank transfers. In a few weeks, you will receive the painting. It’s a very pleasant landscape. We do recommend hanging the work. Don’t try to resell it or insure it.”

  “May I ask—where did you get the painting?”

  “We have a young woman who scouts flea markets and garage sales for items that could credibly be works of value. She assumes it’s a simple art scam.”

  He is assuring her, Liz realizes, how few people know just what, exactly, Vintage Works LLC sells to its customers, those canny art lovers who are enterprising enough to enter the dark web to find what they really need.

  She is on the bridge over the northern branch of the Chicago River. “It runs backward, you know,” Phil had told her on one of their early dates, and she hadn’t known and had been so impressed. As students at Northwestern, she and Phil had loved coming downtown. They felt so grown-up, with their fake IDs and true love. And when they actually could afford to buy their dream house, that had been more amazing still. It was their forever house in their forever town, where the river ran backward, but they were going forward. A city so old-fashioned that you might, as the song had it, see a man dance with his wife.

  “Well, goodbye,” she says.

  “Pleasure doing business with you.”

  She has been speaking to her “art dealer” on a flip phone that is the exact same model as Phil’s burner. She powers it down and throws it in the river. There will be no record, no proof that she is anything but the grieving widow she appears to be. And she is grieving; that part is true. That will always be true. Next week, $125
,000 will go out of her bank account, but an oil painting believed to be by a somewhat fashionable mid-century painter will arrive at her home. She will hang it in Phil’s office. She will tell people that Phil admired the painter and had asked her to try to find one of his works.

  She pulls a second flip phone from her left-hand coat pocket.

  This was her first burner, the one she obtained a few weeks after she found Phil’s secret one. She had, after all, promised not to spy on him. So she bought a burner phone and texted her husband, pretending to be the woman with whom he was infatuated. Then she watched her husband woo the other woman.

  Eavesdroppers hear no good of themselves, fair enough. But Liz also had to bear witness to her husband’s excitement and concern and affection for another woman, a flame that couldn’t be extinguished as long as it burned inside his phone. Then the fire leaped, as fires do, threatening everything.

  Liz gets to be almost everyone in this story. She is Hera; she is the cow chased by stinging flies until she regains human form. She is Leda, swooped up, then dropped, terrified. This story cannot be told without her, but what does that matter when a story can never be told?

  Zeus and Hera, Hera and Zeus. How much damage they caused to everyone around them. Why, her student asked, did Hera hurt the women and not Zeus? Because Zeus is immortal, Liz said. Why does Hera take him back? Because gods must marry gods.

  Phil was not a god. Neither is she. But for a few months, she seized the gods’ prerogatives in order to survive. To spy, to fool. To kill.

  Liz throws the second phone in the river, picks up the exhausted Pugsley, and heads back home in the stinging rain.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © 2016 Leslie Unruh

  Laura Lippman is the New York Times bestselling author of Lady in the Lake and the Tess Monaghan novels. Lippman has won more than twenty awards for her crime fiction, including the Edgar, the Anthony, and the Strand Critics Awards.