Michael Koryta - Tonight I Said Goodbye

She retreated to the opposite edge of the whirlpool and sat on the concrete as I had done. She was still hugging herself tightly, but I didn’t think it was because of the cool wind. She looked like a woman who felt very vulnerable. A woman who had felt very vulnerable for a while, maybe. She rubbed her hands over her upper arms and stared at me.

“You said John hired you?”

“That’s right.”

“Tell me about him.”

I frowned, but then I realized this was her way of testing me, of seeing if I was who I claimed to be. “He’s a loud, opinionated old soldier,” I said. “And many people probably find him intimidating. He’s a lonely man, and he’s lonelier now than ever.” She winced when I said that.

“He loves his son, he loves his granddaughter, and he loves you,” I continued. “He’s opened his savings account to me and my partner, just in hopes of finding you, or at least finding out what happened to you. That is his reason for living right now. The last time I saw him, he was sitting on the deck behind your house staring at a snowman your daughter built as if it held everything that was left of his soul.”

I hadn’t meant to make her feel guilty or sad. I’d simply described John Weston with the first images that came to my mind. By the time I mentioned the snowman, though, Julie Weston was crying softly. She kept her hands clutched against her arms, and the tears slid along her nose and down her cheeks before falling in fat drops to her thighs. I sat across from her, motionless. I wanted to cross the whirlpool, put my arms around her, and tell her everything would be all right. But I knew she wouldn’t want me to, and I didn’t know if everything would be all right.

She cried for a few minutes, and I kept my mouth shut. If she was going to trust me, she’d have to do it on her own. If she didn’t, I was going to have to call Cody and have him send a group of agents out to scoop her up and take her back to Cleveland. That was what I should do. My job had been to find her, and now I’d done that. It was time to turn it over to the feds now and let them have their fun with the rest of it. I didn’t move, though. I wanted to hear what she had to say. Eventually, she stopped crying and took a long, shaky breath. Then she lifted her head and looked at me again, the shadows and her damp hair hiding most of her face. Her eyes were visible, though, and they caught me and held me, seeming to look right through me, as if she were searching my soul before determining how to deal with me. When she spoke, her voice was as soft as the rustle of the palm fronds in the breeze above us.

“I need help,” she said.

I waited for more, but nothing else came. I nodded. “Then I guess it’s a good thing I showed up.”

She asked me to show her identification and my investigator’s license. It was a pointless routine-IDs can easily be faked, and she’d already decided she had to trust me-but maybe the trivial precaution made her feel better. We went up to her hotel room, and she dried off and pulled a sweatshirt over her swimsuit while I stood in the living room and waited. It was a three-room suite, and the door to the second bedroom was closed. When she came out of the bathroom, she saw me looking at it.

“She’s in there,” she said, knowing who I was wondering about. She watched me hesitantly, then stepped past me and opened the door. I stayed where I was, but enough light from the bathroom filtered into the bedroom to display the little girl asleep under the covers, her dark hair spilling across the pillow. Betsy Weston. I stared at her for a few seconds.

“I’m glad she’s safe,” I said, and my voice sounded slightly hoarse.

Julie Weston stood in the doorway, out of the light enough so that I could see into the room, but in my way enough to block me if I tried to move past her. Protective. I turned away, and she closed the door quietly and led me onto the balcony.

“We should talk out here,” she said. “I don’t want to wake her.” She leaned over the rail and looked down at the pool below us. “I should never have gone down,” she said. “I was so scared to leave her here alone. But I needed to get out. I had to get away from this damned room. It’s been like a prison.”

I sat on one of the plastic deck chairs and watched her as she stood with her back to me, looking at the pool. The sweatshirt extended just beyond the bottom of her swimsuit, but the slim, graceful lines of her legs were visible in the shadows. She turned back to me but stayed on her feet, pressing her back against the railing. Then she told the story.

They’d been the perfect family, she said. Happy, healthy, and wealthy. She’d met Wayne while he was working for the Pinkertons. It had been a blind date arranged by one of her friends. They’d gone out once, and at first she thought he’d been a little too arrogant, a little too slick, a little too confident. But he was good-looking, and smart, and charming. So when he called again, asking for a second date, she’d found it hard to refuse. There’d been a second date, and a third, and eventually they’d spent a week in Switzerland, and he’d proposed to her in a beautiful chalet in the mountains. They’d married six months later, and Wayne had taken a risk, leaving behind the benefits of the Pinkertons to set out on his own.

And it had worked. Worked very well, as far as Julie Weston knew. Wayne originally had a partner named Aaron Kinkaid, she told me, but they’d decided to go their separate ways, and her husband had worked alone from then on. I watched her face carefully when she mentioned Kinkaid, but if there was any emotion or passion there, she hid it well.

So the happy marriage lasted, and the career thrived, and the family grew with the addition of their daughter. Wayne was making good money-great money, in fact-and he told her business was good, couldn’t be better, there were new clients coming in every day. On their tenth anniversary, he surprised her with a brand-new Lexus. Good-looking, charming, and prone to extravagant gifts, Wayne Weston seemed like the perfect husband. He was the perfect husband, Julie Weston told me. Until one day in February. She smiled at the recollection, but it wasn’t the product of emotions one typically associates with a smile. It was hard, cold, and bitter-a smile not at the memory but at her own foolishness, a mocking smile at her own faith that had turned out to be so undeserved.

“He came home early,” she said, “and I knew right away something was wrong. Betsy always met him at the door, jumped on him, and hugged him, and he always responded playfully. That night, though, she just seemed to bounce right off him. He gave her an automatic hug and told her to go play in her room before dinner because he had a headache. She went to her room, but I looked at his face and knew right away it wasn’t a headache that was bothering him.” Her hands tightened on the rail, the knuckles pushing against the skin. “He told me he had a confession to make. And I was standing there in the kitchen, still holding the stupid meat tenderizer in my hand, just staring at him and thinking, ‘Whatever it is, we can beat it. If he’s having an affair, if he’s got cancer, we can get past it.’ And then he told me his confession. And it wasn’t an affair, and it wasn’t cancer. It was worse. He told me he’d been working for a businessman, helping him settle deals and get the best prices. And I said I didn’t see what was wrong with that. So he explained it to me.”

The cold smile came back again. “He’d been helping him by digging deep in people’s private lives and then handing the information over. He shot videotapes of married men having sex with their mistresses, he dug up information on addictions and past psychological problems, on family secrets-anything and everything people were afraid of. And then he handed it over to his boss, and they went to work turning other people’s fears into money. My husband,” she said flatly, “was nothing more than a blackmailer. That was his profession. To ruin lives, or threaten to ruin lives, so another man could make more money on his business deals or have more pull with the city government.”