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Alice (Tommy & Alice) Sunday, 2:00 p.m.
Passing the open doorway to the laundry room, I saw Karen taking a load of blue jeans out of a washer. “Hey.”
“Hi, Alice.” She raised her thumbs in mock celebration. “Laundry. The height of my week.” After checking to make sure I was alone, she asked, “Are you helping Julie input the information for the display?”
“Yes. We should finish our interviews quickly now that we have a plausible reason for asking. We should have thought of it before.”
Her brows met briefly. “Still, it doesn’t mean our guy will tell the truth. If I were a double murderer, I’d lie like a rug.”
“All we can do is turn what we find out over to O’Connor. What he does with it will be up to him.”
“Speaking of the detective, Marlene told me the other day that their relationship is getting serious. Julie says O’Connor spoke as if they’re only dating casually.”
“Hmm. Sounds like he and our secretary are traveling on different wavelengths.” I waited while Karen opened a dryer and leaned in to load the wet clothes. “What do you think of the man?”
She checked the lint tray and made a disgusted face at the half-inch coat of fuzz clinging to its surface. “I only met him once, but I got an impression.” Cleaning the filter into the trash can, she banged it on the edge and then put it back in place. “Back in the day, we called guys like him uptight.” Fishing quarters from her pocket, she started the dryer, adding, “Marlene likes him a lot though. You should see her face light up when she talks about him.”
“Then I hope it works out for them.”
Karen moved her basket to another dryer. “Me too.”
I went on, but my thoughts remained on Marlene, who was too nice to ever give a man an ultimatum. My reading of her personality was that she’d smile and blush and put up indefinitely with a man’s commitment avoidance. Was O’Connor playing around? Was he too shy to make a move? Had he been burned too many times? Whatever the holdup was, I had a feeling the relationship needed an intervention.
Admittedly, I’m the last person in the world who should play matchmaker. My track record with men is abysmal, at least it was for most of my life. Somehow, at sixty-eight, I stumbled onto Tommy, who is everything I’d convinced myself no man would ever be: kind, gentle, thoughtful, and—it took me a while to admit this—faithful. Once you find a mate like that, and once you admit you got really, really lucky, you wish other women could find Mr. Right too.
My friends don’t fully understand how wonderful their marriages are. Living with a normal guy for forty, even fifty years, they have no idea how wrong things can go between couples. I’m sure Ron has never hit Julie. Wilma’s probably never even heard Earl swear, much less had him shout curses directly into her ears. And the way Al looks at Karen, you’d think she was a goddess. None of them has to struggle against old fears of abuse, fight feelings of panic they can’t control, or suppress anger they can’t reason away.
They gripe about empty dishes left in the fridge and muddy shoes worn into the house. Sometimes I join in, since those things are part of living with another person. But I know the difference between little squabbles with your mate and deadly fear of him. I appreciate the love I get from my husband in a different way than my friends do. Slowly, I’m learning to let go of my fears and let my feelings show, to Tommy and to everyone else.
That’s why Marlene’s situation troubled me. When a man doesn’t move forward in a relationship, all too often the reason is an existing marriage. With that on my mind, I headed for Julie’s house. She knew the detective better than the rest of us. Besides, Ms. Retired Librarian can track information through cyberspace like a hound on a scent.
“You want to spy on a police detective?” she asked a few minutes later. “Alice, we’ve got tons of other things to work on, and besides that, it’s not right.”
“You need a break from the Miles thing. O’Connor is romancing Marlene but avoiding the question of where the relationship is headed. Shouldn’t she know if he has a half-dozen kids somewhere?”
She kept refusing. I kept insisting. Finally, she agreed to look at O’Connor’s social media profile. “Things he puts there are public,” she said in a self-righteous tone, “so we aren’t really snooping.”
“That should work,” I leaned over Julie’s shoulder as she started typing. “These days, people under fifty who don’t post pics are few and far between.”
We found him on two sites, one designed for sharing photos and the other for business contacts. There were pics of O’Connor with a dark-haired woman, but they were over a year old. I learned that he liked playing basketball (no league, just pickup) and watching football (the Tampa Bay Buccaneers). A photo revealed he’d tried deep-sea fishing, but his grim expression and greenish-pale complexion hinted he hadn’t had a great time.
On the business contacts site, he listed himself as single (not a guarantee) with no children. His profile sounded a little stiff, like O’Connor himself, but it was accurate as far as we could determine. He’d been a detective for a little over two years, and before that held a variety of law enforcement jobs from patrol officer to public relations representative.
I directed Julie back to the social site, where she scrolled farther into O’Connor’s past. Three different women showed up in his pictures, all of them smiling happily as they clung to him. For one, a name came up when Julie hovered the cursor over her face. “Jennifer Bonafista,” I urged. “How many women with that name can there be in Florida?”
Jennifer had a much more active social site than O’Connor did, and we found several pictures of them together. We found no evidence of an acrimonious break-up, but Jennifer started showing up with a new guy, one as handsome as O’Connor but maybe a touch warmer, pulling her close for the shots. Best of all we learned, since Jenni told all on social media, that she currently worked at a shop less than ten miles from B-Bird Park.
“You want to what?” Julie asked when I proposed my plan.
“Talk to this Jenni. We’re shoppers. We’re old ladies. We chat with salesclerks.”
“I can’t believe you want to intrude on Detective O’Connor’s personal life like that.”
“Didn’t you pretend to be shopping for real estate last month in order to find out what kind of person someone was?”
“Well yes, but we were looking for a criminal.”
“It’s criminal to string some poor woman along. Do you want poor Marlene hanging out with some pretty-faced man who might be lying about who he is?”
Julie knows more than most about my abusive ex-husband, so she realized I was looking out for Marlene’s best interests. “Okay. We’ll go tomorrow, if you promise to be discreet. And careful.”
“Sure thing. Shall I drive, or will you?”
