Laura Lippman: The Last Place

“Well, Flower Tie Number One looks like he’s leaving, and Flower Tie Number Two appears to be with that other guy. Ladies, meet our lucky bachelor, Flower Tie Number Three! He likes music, sailing, watching sunsets, and picking up underage girls on the Internet.” Tess began to sing the Herb Alpertesque theme to the old Dating Game, pounding out her own accompaniment on the dashboard.

“Will he be a dream,” Whitney trilled, “or a dud?”

“This guy aspires to dud status. Look at him.”

He was sitting sideways at the bar, watching the basketball game on the set mounted in the corner. His pink shirt ballooned a little on his narrow shoulders, while his disproportionately large ass ballooned over the stool.

“He drinks frozen margaritas,” Whitney said. “Never trust a man who drinks frozen margaritas. He’s probably already bribed the bartender to give you doubles of whatever you order. I’ll bet you twenty dollars he recommends a piña colada or a daiquiri.”

“Can I pass for seventeen?” Tess asked, leaning forward to study her face in the rearview mirror.

“You’ll squeak by in that light, if only because he wants to believe you’re seventeen,” Whitney said, not unkindly, for her. “Besides when was the last time a man ever looked at your face upon first meeting?”

Tess glanced down. She was wearing a pale pink T-shirt and a flowery skirt, both borrowed from Whitney. It wasn’t easy, being a thirty-one-year-old woman who was trying to pass for a seventeen-year-old girl who was trying to pass for twenty-one. She had unbraided her hair and let it fly loose around her face, a feeling she hated. But she hoped the hair would create a soft frame, offsetting the faint lines by her mouth and eyes. She also had on more makeup than she had ever worn in her life. Here, she hadn’t had to fake a seventeen-year-old’s ineptness.

GoToGuy-he had provided a first name, Steve, during that last exchange, although with seeming reluctance-stood up when she entered the bar.

“Are you-?”

“I guess I am.” She was nervous, which was good. Nervous was right. Nervous would work.

“What are you having to drink?”

“I don’t know. A beer?”

He sized her up. “A strawberry margarita would go well with your outfit.”

A strawberry margarita-that was even worse than a daiquiri. Plus, she had an instinctive dislike for men who ordered for their dates. Still, she nodded. The bartender swept his eyes over her and didn’t ask for an ID. Damn him. But Whitney was right. Steve, primed to see a seventeen-year-old, saw a seventeen-year-old, even if no one else did.

“After all that trouble for a fake ID,” he whispered wetly in her ear. His nonchalant supposed-to-be-suave chuckle sounded hollow and rehearsed, as if he were a little lost without his keyboard. “Want to go sit in a booth?”

“Sure, I guess.”

They took their drinks and she led him, without appearing to lead, to one of the booths along the windows, so Whitney would still have a good view of them over his shoulder.

“So, did that place work out for you?” he asked.

“What place?”

“The place I sent you to get a fake ID.”

“Oh, yeah, that place. Yeah, it was great.”

“Can I see it?”

She had not counted on this. “What?”

“Can I see the ID?”

“Sure, why not?” She pulled out her real Maryland driver’s license, and he studied it in the dim light. The licenses were supposed to be impossible to counterfeit, with their double-photo images, but it had been a few years since they were introduced. Tess was counting on the local forgers to have caught up. She couldn’t give him her private investigator’s license.

“Wow, he just gets better and better. This looks like the real thing.” Steve squinted. “Why does it say you’re thirty-one?”

She took it back, blushing. “I screwed up the math. Added fourteen years instead of four.”

“So, your real name’s Theresa?”

She was so startled to hear the longer version of her name, the one no one ever used, that she almost said no.

“Yes, but I go by… Terry.”

“On-line you sometimes called yourself Rose.”

That had been Whitney’s invention, Tess recalled, in the early days of the hunt. So he had been watching Varsity Grrl before he approached her, tracking her through sites devoted to sports and boy bands and the latest television shows.

“I’d like to be. Rose, I mean. It’s a much prettier name than Theresa.”

“You may be Rose, then.”

“And you will be-”

“Steve. That’s my real name.”

“Don’t I get to check your ID too?” She tried to be kittenish, the way she imagined a seventeen-year-old girl might be, although Tess had never been particularly coy, at that age or any other.

He laughed, but he didn’t produce his ID. Too bad. That was all she wanted. If she could get his full name, her plan was to excuse herself to the bathroom and wait for Whitney, who would meet her there and take down the information. Whitney would then drive to a nearby restaurant and use her cell phone to call their computer source on standby, who would run him through every database in the state to see what they could get on him: his home address, his debts, his criminal record. Once they had his identity, there was no shortage of things they could do to him. Tess would then fake a headache, or a seventeen-year-old’s forgivable cold feet, and disappear into the night. Her car was parked behind the bar, next to the Dumpster.

Steve folded his hands over hers.

“Terry, Terry, Terry,” he began, in what he appeared to think was a dreamy, romantic tone.

Tess had to fight the instinct to yank her hands out from under his, which were moist and sweaty. “I thought I got to be Rose.”

“Check. Rose. You’re really beautiful, you know that? I had no idea. I mean, I thought, I hoped-you think you can tell what someone will look like on-line. But you have so many moods, it was almost as if you were two different people.”

I was, Tess wanted to say. The Irish-Catholic German Jew you see before you and a blond WASP straight out of the pages of Town amp; Country. They had kept copies of their early forays, so they could be consistent. But they couldn’t quite mimic each other’s on-line voices. Whitney was a little clipped and brittle, a little too wary. Perhaps it wasn’t an accident that Tess, with her breezy nonchalance about men, had been the one who had engaged him one-on-one.

“You are beautiful,” he repeated, staring into her eyes with what he obviously intended to be a soulful look. If Tess had been seventeen, she might have experienced it as such. You’re beautiful. It should be illegal for men to say that to women under twenty-five, maybe women under forty-five. She knew she wasn’t beautiful. Attractive, yes. Striking, sure. Not beautiful, never beautiful.

But at seventeen, she had wanted to be, and she would have been suckered by any man who told her she was.

At thirty-one, she found it easy to see through this man opposite her, to detect the little signs that he was not the big success he was pretending to be. His pink shirt had pilled at the underarms, advertising its cheapness. His watch was too big and he wore an aggressively tacky ring on his right hand. His features were even, but his eyes were too close together, his mouth an ugly shape. And his hair was styled in what would no doubt be the first of many attempts to disguise a receding hairline.

“You are so beautiful,” he said again, as if it were a magic spell.

“I’m not-” She used her seeming embarrassment to pull her hands away and drop them in her lap. “I’m not beautiful.”

“Of course you are. Beautiful inside and out. That’s what makes you so special.”