“In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m fucking furious.” She wasn’t being coy about it, lips pursed so tight she looked like she was trying to keep a canary from escaping her mouth, eyes squinting as though staring straight into a dust storm.
“I did notice.”
“I don’t understand checking into a four-star hotel and then checking out before we even get to go to bed.”
“Baby, I told you, it’s a client thing, I have to get back to Ventura. I’m doing it for the firm. For us.” He stretched his hand across to her knee, but she brushed it away.
“Don’t you fucking touch me. That was a three-hundred-fifty-dollar room. Which, I’ll remind you, I paid for myself.”
Jesus God, could her temperament ever turn shitty at the slightest provocation. When they’d hit the slowdown into LA that afternoon, she’d instantly switched on the bitching, addressing it straight at him, as though Rigby himself had arranged for a big rig to plow right into a bunch of passenger vehicles on purpose with the express purpose of fucking up her ride back to Ventura. It was about four o’clock when he suggested—despite the fact that traffic was starting to get moving again—that they just say fuck it and check into a nice hotel in Santa Monica, and as soon as he’d said it she sweetened right up.
Rigby tried to imagine what marriage to Beth would be like. Constant demands, incessant suspicions, no end to the carping. He didn’t want to leave that fucking hotel room either. But all morning his assistant had been trying to get him on his cell, and frankly, he hadn’t wanted to talk to Lena about anything, important or not. The only important news he could imagine was Glenn Haskill’s death, and if that was it, the old bastard would still be dead tomorrow. And since the phone was close to dead, he let the battery run down to nothing. And then he checked into the hotel and recharged the fucking thing and found out that Haskill’s grasping imbecile nephew was not only coming into town practically unannounced, but staying at his own house. Shit. He should have told Lena to text him if it was anything important. Now he had no option but to decamp and head straight for home.
That was what Beth couldn’t understand, the urgency of his return. He couldn’t tell her anything about wanting to keep Jerry away from the painting, of course, but there was a more important consideration, and one that he absolutely couldn’t let Beth know was something that concerned him in the slightest. Jerry Haskill wanted to fuck Paula, and though he didn’t think she would take him up on it, he knew he was on shaky ground of late, and it was always possible she might decide to take vengeance on him by sleeping with the schmuck, who, after all, was going to be a reasonably rich man before long.
He cursed himself for the last thought. It couldn’t be said that Paula didn’t care about money, but he knew she wouldn’t fuck for it, either. He’d have to confess that uncharitable thought, he told himself, and then he considered that he had several things he wasn’t quite ready to confess yet.
Cresting over the hill just past Thousand Oaks, he realized Beth was still talking to him. He’d shut her out completely without even realizing he was doing it. With Paula that never happened, even when she was going at him at full-gale force, cutting him to pieces. He wondered why that was, and it came to him that when Paula yelled, she was still saying something worth listening to, as opposed to just giving him shit for the sake of giving him shit. A woman worthy of respect and love, he thought, and for a split second he felt something akin to guilt for the Vegas jaunt, for the whole sordid business with Beth. Then his attention was diverted by the sound of Beth’s voice, a steady, sharp, piercing thing when she was animated and angry, not unlike a parrot’s. She didn’t sound like that most of the time, or did she? He wasn’t around her most of the time. And evidently they’d arrived at the point where she felt free to speak to him this way, with no fear of rejection. Jesus, what had he been thinking back in Vegas, telling her he’d marry her? Even if it were possible, it was plain to him now that such a marriage would be the ninth circle of hell. Was that the lake of fire or the fecal pool? Either way. Didn’t matter. He had to find a way to cool this thing down. She was just getting down to her own most important piece of leverage against him now, and he found himself feeling the first stirrings of panic.
“And I will shut that firm down if I need to, Rigby. To be honest, my CPA is giving me a lot of shit about it anyway. A law firm with one client? Come on.”
“It’s not my fault you married a guy who thought he was an extra-special adventure athlete or whatever the fuck he called it.”
“Extreme sportsman. And how dare you bring up Britt’s death at a time like this?”
“Hey, if he hadn’t taken a stupid risk, the firm would be in fine shape.”
“And I suppose you’d prefer that.”
“Have my best friend and law partner alive? Of course I would,” he said, even as he sensed it wasn’t exactly the right answer.
“You’re telling me you’re not even a little glad we can be together?”
Paula was always telling him he was a glib son of a bitch, and he took no small amount of pride in his ability to bullshit on the fly, but by God here he lacked a satisfactory response, and he just took a deep breath, let it settle in his lungs, then slowly blew it out to give himself a few seconds to think of something.
Nothing. There was no response that wasn’t going to get him in deeper.
“You spineless creep. All I am to you is a piece of ass.”
Now there was a straight line worthy of Bud Abbott, real low-hanging fruit, and instead of voicing any of the various callous ripostes that sprang immediately to his tongue, he let out a big, loud laugh, at which she took an umbrella off of the floor and brought it down on his head, a left-handed blow that landed with surprising force. He lost momentary control of the vehicle and drifted into the left-hand lane, provoking angry honking from a tiny, ancient, once-white Datsun. When he managed to swerve back into position, he waved apologetically and insincerely at the white-haired lady behind the wheel, who flipped him off anyway, then turned to Beth.
“You really are one crazy bitch, you know that? You just about killed us both.”
“The amount of disrespect—”
“You know what? Shut the fuck up.”
“How fucking dare you?”
“You heard me. I don’t want to hear another goddamned word until we get back to Ventura.”
Apparently, the barely contained rage he felt had manifested itself in his voice, because to his great surprise, for the rest of the drive she stared out the window and said nothing. That got him worried about a possible explosion back at her house, but when he dropped her off there and picked up his own SUV, which they’d hidden in her garage, she kept quiet. She walked into the house without a word, without any hints about whether she was hurt or just pissed off or some particular combination of both, and that in itself was a relief. He’d been afraid she wouldn’t let him return home to Paula without oaths of fealty being sworn, among other insincere promises that certainly would have qualified as exaggerations if not outright lies.
He walked into the house quietly, disarmed the alarm system and crept toward the media room, where he heard the TV playing. There, he found Jerry Haskill sound asleep, snoring quietly on the couch while next to him Paula watched the movie that had knocked him out.
“How was your trip?” Paula asked without looking up or pausing.
“Fine,” he said. On-screen, a pair of young and improbably pretty actors in 1940s clothing wept in one another’s arms, the girl pleading as the boy prepared to enter an Army recruiting station. “What are you watching this for? You hate this kind of shit.”
“Shhh,” she said, a finger to her freshly glossed lips, indicating Jerry.
He took a good look at his wife. She was wearing a lightweight, clingy lavender dress and heels; not unusual attire for working hours or a party, but unheard of in the evening at home. He found the jealousy rising in his throat and was about to say something stupid and accusatory when she spoke again.
“You two have a good time?”
For the second time that night, he was at a loss for a response.
“You going straight to bed, or you want to watch the rest of this with Jerry and me?” She was looking at the screen as she said it.
There was no malice in her voice. Maybe that was the result of having the upper hand for once, he thought. Or maybe he’d heard wrong? “Bed,” he said. “Long drive.”
She glanced at him briefly, not deigning to offer even the slightest of insincerely polite smiles. “Night.”
In the morning, he made an excuse to Jerry about his uncle’s condition and headed up the 101 to determine whether or not Glenn was going to be lucid when they finally connected. Nina took him upstairs and gestured toward the bed, where the old man took in shallow breaths and looked through red, rheumy, half-closed eyes at him with no sign of recognition. A pale redheaded nurse sat in the corner of the room reading a thick paperback, looking half pickled herself and breathing loudly through her mouth.
“Look, Mr. Haskill, it’s Mr. Rigby,” Nina said, loud and slow.
Haskill didn’t respond. His skin looked papery, veins blue beneath the scalp, and Rigby almost felt bad for having wished he’d get on with it and die so he could get busy selling the painting. He did harbor a certain fondness for his client, after all, and a degree of gratitude for the fact that he alone hadn’t bailed on what was left of the firm.
He followed Nina down the stairs, and when they reached the kitchen he asked her about the nurse. “Is she hammered?”
“Her? Twenty-four hours a day. You want her fired?”
“No, let’s keep her on. Don’t want any bad feelings around here, do we?”
“I guess not. You want the nephew to see him?”
“No reason he shouldn’t, I guess. Glenn’s not going to understand anything, is he?”
“Not a chance. Make sure he comes before four o’clock, the GP’s sending over a nephrologist.”
“A what?”
“A kidney specialist.”
“No fucking way. A specialist who makes house calls?”
“Dr. Pulliver pulls some weight in the medical community up here. And this kidney guy was a big fan of High Cimarron when he was a kid. So he’s coming in person, see if he can’t do something to make him more comfortable and avoid an ambulance trip.”
Rigby nodded, wished once again that the old bastard would hurry up and croak, then a moment later felt bad again and made a note to add that to his ever-lengthening confession.
Lena gave him the stink eye when he walked into the office at three, and as was his habit he pretended not to notice. “If you don’t start picking up your phone when I call, I’m going to quit.”
“Sorry, phone died while I was driving back, and I didn’t have my car charger.”
“I’m not talking about yesterday, I’m talking about today.”
“Right. I was at the old man’s house in conference.” He passed by her as she stood. She really looked pissed off this time.
“Wait.”
He pushed his door open and found Stony sitting right there at his desk, arms folded across his big chest.
“I was trying to tell you,” Lena said.
“And what’s wrong with the waiting area?” he asked her.
“That’s my reception area, and I didn’t like the way he was looking at me.” She gave Stony a transitory sidelong glance before looking away, flustered.
“All right, get back to your desk.” She returned to her post and he shut the door. He was about to tell Stony to get the fuck out of his chair, but seeing the expression on the man’s face, or lack thereof, he thought better of it. No need to escalate yet. He turned on the white noise machine sitting on the floor lest Lena catch wind of whatever damning accusations were about to fly.
“I told you not to mess with this kind of business,” Stony said.
“What are you talking about, Stony?”
“I’m not fucking around here. I need to know what you did with that gun afterwards.”
Jesus, but Stony was a big man. A fair amount of flab around the muscle but Rigby knew from his days in competition that the core underneath was solid, and he imagined that Stony had been in more than his share of fights. “The gun you sold me?”
“I told you once I’m not fucking around. Magda Schuller was a friend of my wife’s, she worked at the clinic.”
“Doesn’t mean anything to me. You saying you want the gun back?”
“Are you trying to be funny?”
“Not at all.”
“Radio says they found a gun on the so-called killer’s person. That wouldn’t be the same one, would it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Stony.”
Stony got up out of Rigby’s chair. “This better not get back to me. Meaning you best not get caught.” He walked out of the office, scowling at Lena as he passed her desk, and she blanched visibly, which almost made the whole exchange worth it for Rigby.