Peter Spiegelman - Thick as Thieves

“Doesn’t sound particularly appealing,” Valerie says. “Or easy to live with.”

“He wasn’t.”

“So why did you?”

“I found Howard kind of cute, at first-like a blond, blue-eyed teddy bear. He was funny and self-deprecating-more the class cutup than the quarterback types I usually went with, and I liked that. He was sweet, and easy to be with, and if I’m being honest, there was the economic factor too. Fading trust fund or not, Howard seemed to be at the start of a good career when I met him. And where was I then-a pre-K teacher at a private school, and filling in part-time at Sotheby’s. That’s what a fine arts degree got me-that, and my house painting skills.”

Valerie nods. “So cute and funny didn’t do it in the long haul?”

“They never had a chance: the longer he worked at the bank-the more time he spent with those people-the more drinking and whining there was, and the less there was of cute and funny. And having a baby just made it worse. He was useless as a father-well-meaning, I guess, but useless.” Holland pauses and laughs bitterly. “Of course, the gambling, the drugs, and the hookers didn’t help much.”

“Are you serious?” Valerie asks, and Tracy Holland nods.

“Who do you mean by those people?” Carr asks. “Who was he spending time with?”

Another frown from Holland. “His clients, his colleagues-all those people.”

“Was Curtis Prager in that group?”

The frown deepens, and an icy silence settles on the porch. When Holland speaks again, her voice is tight and low. “I’m the wrong person to talk to about him. Maybe I’m the wrong person to talk to altogether.”

The silence expands until Valerie clears her throat and points at Holland’s beer bottle. “You have another of those around?”

Holland is surprised, but after a moment she stands. Valerie raises a hand. “Brian can get it, if you tell him where.”

Holland pauses and nods uncertainly. “In the kitchen, in the fridge.”

Carr takes his time, going back through the dining room and down a hall. The kitchen, when he finds it, is another work-in-progress: new cabinets and countertops, raw wallboard where tiles will go, the smells of sawdust and paint still strong in the air. The old refrigerator is forlorn in a slot that’s sized for a larger model. There are layers of paper stuck to it with magnets, and Carr flicks through them. Bills from a dentist, an electrician, a plumber, an invoice from a fuel oil company. There’s a calendar too, with drawings of lobster traps and fishing buoys on it, and a dense scrawl of appointments in red ink. Beneath all these there are photographs of a boy.

They are badly rippled by the salt air, but still his resemblance to Howard Bessemer is plain. The same blond hair, though considerably more of it, the same round face and benign, guileless smile. The photos cover a range of ages: at six or seven he is dressed as a colonial soldier, trick-or-treating with a tricorn hat and plastic musket; at eight he’s at the helm of a sky-blue sunfish; and at nine and ten and eleven, he’s playing soccer-blond hair flying amid clouds of dust and turf. His face is a mask of concentration and resolve. And then a door slams, and there are knobby footsteps behind Carr, and the boy himself is there.

He’s twelve now, small and solid and still a soccer player. His cleats and knees are muddy, and his jersey is stained with grass and sweat. His cheeks are red and his thick blond hair is matted. His head is canted as he stares at Carr, and his face and eyes are without expression.

The eyes are dark and wide-spaced, like his mother’s, and Carr thinks the camera missed what’s important in them: the wells of suspicion, the watchfulness, the deliberation, and the stillness-the sense that the boy is always preparing for the ground to shift beneath him, or to fall away altogether, always waiting for another shoe to drop.

Carr smiles. “You must be Simon,” he says. “I’m Brian.”

The boy nods slowly, weighing Carr’s words and his own reply. “Where’s my mom?” Simon Bessemer asks eventually.

“On the porch, with my boss. I’m supposed to bring beer. What position do you play?”

The boy pauses again, considering. “Defense.”

“Fullback?”

“Defensive mid.”

“You must be fast,” Carr says. The boy nods, and Carr points at his soccer jersey. It’s blue, with a broad gold band across the chest. “Boca Juniors?”

Simon Bessemer raises an eyebrow and nearly smiles. “The home jersey.”

Carr nods. “I’ve been to some of their matches.”

The near smile turns skeptical, and the boy looks suddenly like his mother. “In Argentina?” Carr nods again, but the disbelief doesn’t fade. “I watch them on satellite,” the boy says, “on the soccer channel. You’re a friend of my mom?”

“We’re doing research, my boss and I, for a documentary about Wall Street. About banking.”

The boy’s forehead clouds with questions, but he doesn’t ask any. “My dad worked in banking,” he says finally, “when we lived in New York.”

Carr nods again. “You must’ve been pretty young then. You remember much about it?”

Simon Bessemer studies Carr for another moment and shakes his head. “I don’t really know him,” he says. “I haven’t seen him in a while.” And he turns and leaves the kitchen.

His footsteps recede down the hall and up a flight of stairs. Carr looks again at the pictures on the fridge. Something in the boy’s eyes is familiar, though he cannot say what at first. Something about the watchfulness, and the suspicion. Something about the deliberation. Later, after he has delivered a beer to Valerie and brought another one for Tracy Holland and excused himself again, it comes to him. He is in a hallway powder room, sluicing water on his face, and he looks up, into the mirror, and there it is.

“Portland to JFK at eight,” Carr says as he comes down the wharf. “Then we pick up a rental and drive to East Hampton.”

Valerie grimaces. “Eight a.m.? Do we have to be such fucking early birds?”

Carr smiles at her. She takes his hand, and they walk farther out. “There’s a worm waiting for us,” he says. “At least, I hope there is.”

Valerie nods. “Tracy was pretty clear about it,” she says. “The date it went from merely intolerable with Bessemer to call-in-the-lawyers bad. She knew when it was, and where he’d been, and she knew that whatever he was doing, he’d been doing it with Prager. Of course, the fact that it was the weekend of their fifth anniversary, and Howard was supposed to have been at home with her, probably helped it stick in her mind.

“Before that weekend-according to her-he was just a middling-to-bad husband and dad, out drinking with clients too often, paying no attention to her or the kid when he was at home, whining all the time. After that weekend was when it went south in a big way: the gambling and drugs and whores-usually with Prager as his wingman. Or vice versa.”

“Sounds like a worm to me,” Carr says.

What’s left of daylight is sputtering out in the low brick skyline of Portland. The sodium lights along the wharf cast an amber glow on Valerie’s face. Her hand is warm in his. She leads Carr to the railing, and they look out at the swaying boats.

“She didn’t like you,” Valerie says after a while.

“Yeah, I got that.”

“You shouldn’t take it personally-she doesn’t like men. She’s permanently angry.”

“I got that, too. Is it all thanks to Howard?”

“He just finished the job. Her dad started it, and there were others in between.”

“You got all that from a beer?”

“It was six beers, each, and it helped that you made yourself scarce.” Valerie unwinds her hand and slips it around his waist. “Besides,” she says, “I’m a good listener. People open up to me.”