Laura Lippman: The Last Place

A waitress came by to offer them menus. Steve looked impatient at the interruption, but Tess was grateful. She ordered the most adolescent meal she could imagine: a cheeseburger heavy with trimmings, onion rings, and a strawberry milkshake. Steve frowned slightly when she asked for the onion rings, and she longed to taunt him. See, this is what happens when you date children. They don’t know not to order the onions.

“Would you like another drink?”

“I’m not done with this one yet.” Indeed, she had taken only a sip. Tess could hold liquor, but she didn’t want her senses dulled one bit tonight.

“It’s happy hour, two-for-one, but only for a few more minutes.” A cheap bastard too; that was always a nice quality in a man.

“No, really, I’m fine.”

His hands fluttered to his waist, in a sudden reactive burst that Tess had learned to recognize as the Pavlovian response to a vibrating pager. Better than drooling, she supposed.

“My office,” he said. “Shit. An emergency.”

“An emergency at the investment firm?”

“The investment firm-yeah, exactly.”

“But doesn’t the stock market close at”-better not make it too specific; what teenager would know when the closing bell sounded-“at the end of the day?”

“Yes, but finance is a twenty-four-hour business. The… Indonesian markets are open now.”

“Oh.” Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. “Well, I guess you better take it then.”

“I guess I better.”

The pay phones were at the rear of the restaurant, down a long corridor that led to the bathrooms. As soon as Tess saw her date’s back disappear around the corner, she began rummaging through the leather jacket he had left hanging on the hook next to the booth. The night was cool, but not that cool. The jacket was clearly meant to impress. And it probably would have been impressive to anyone whose taste ran to suburban pimp. Tess found it sleazy and cheap, the alleged leather rubbery to the touch. She slipped her hands in the pockets, hoping he had left his wallet there. With one glance at his driver’s license, she would have his real name, which was the key to knowing everything. If he carried a Social Security card, they could destroy him.

The side pockets came up empty, however, with not so much as a piece of lint, as if the jacket were brand-new. She shook it slightly, hearing a rattle somewhere within its folds, then patted it again. There must be an inside pocket. She slipped her fingers inside the concealed breast pocket and pulled out an amber-colored prescription bottle. Bingo! This would have his name and address.

But the bottle was blank. She looked inside at the pills, and suddenly she knew why Steve wanted her to drink faster, to take advantage of the two-for-one special.

The pills were round and white, bland as aspirin. But they had a line on one side and the letters ROCHE on the other, with the number 1 beneath them. They were Rohypnol, roofies, the date-rape drug. She tried to remember what she had read about them since they had become prevalent on college campuses. The victim could lose consciousness within twenty minutes and would have no memory of what happened the night before after passing out. The drugs, legal in Mexico, could be purchased for as little as one to five dollars.

But what to do, how to proceed? The bottle looked full. Had he slipped one into her drink? No, she had watched the bartender make it and then carried it to the table herself. He had probably hoped she would excuse herself during the meal, at which point he would dose her drink. He had pushed that second margarita awfully hard, not unlike the wolf beckoning Red Riding Hood to come closer. The better to drug you and rape you, my dear.

Impulsively, Tess dropped one into his frozen margarita, then a second one for good measure.

“You got everything you need?” the waitress asked, arriving with the food. A college student, she was treating Tess deferentially. Everyone seemed aware of Tess’s age. Everyone except Steve.

“Everything,” Tess said.

“Problem solved,” Steve announced, returning to the table a few minutes later. “I told them not to bother me again. Are we having fun yet?”

“I think so,” Tess said, snapping an onion ring in half with her teeth. It didn’t break cleanly, and she sucked the long translucent string of onion into her mouth with a loud lip-smacking flourish. Steve watched her, beaming goofily. It must be true love, because it was certainly too early for the drug to have taken hold.

“He’s heavy,” Whitney complained from her side. “For such a scrawny guy, I mean.”

“I know,” Tess said. They were like a team of oxen, trying to drag a rubbery, unpredictable yoke toward Whitney’s little cottage, a guest house on the grounds of her parents’ home. They had decided this afforded the privacy they needed, although they still weren’t sure what they were going to do with their unexpected catch. It was like going surf fishing and coming up with a live manatee. Impressive, but possibly illegal and definitely problematic.

The pills had taken almost forty minutes to hit him, and Tess had begun to wonder if she had misidentified them. But when they took hold, it was swift and sudden. His speech began to slur, his eyelids to flutter with sleep.

“I don’t know-maybe the tequila-”

“Let’s pay the check and get out of here,” Tess said, taking charge, no longer concerned with passing for seventeen. He had fumbled some bills and change out of his wallet and stumbled to his feet, grabbing for her hand in what was at once a gesture of intimacy and a desperate measure to stay upright.

“That’s not even ten percent,” she chided him.

“I tip twenty percent for food but not for booze. Booze is… jacked up, all profit for them. Besides, they… I think… they made me sick. I feel really woozy.”

Tess threw a few more dollars on the table and began to drag Steve toward the parking lot, hoping the restaurant staff didn’t notice how out of control his limbs were. No such luck. The host stopped them at the door.

“Certainly, he’s not going to drive.” Good, it was all about liability.

“No, I got the keys,” Tess said. “I’ll get him home.”

She had planned to rifle his pants pockets and leave him in the parking lot, but now that the staff was on full alert, she dragged him to Whitney’s Suburban and shoved him in the back.

“What the-?” Whitney had asked, her features contorted with loathing for the fast-fading man in the backseat.

“I don’t know,” Tess said. “Just drive somewhere.”

“My place,” Whitney said, with her usual conviction.

And now he was lying on his back on a patch of Whitney’s old pine floor, snoozing peacefully. He breathed through his mouth, like a little kid, but this did not inspire tenderness in the two women who stood over him.

Tess worked his wallet out of his back pocket, no mean feat, given how tight his pants were through the rear.

“Mickey Pechter,” she said. “Baltimore County address. And here’s an ID badge, a swipe card for one of those high-rises in Towson. What do you want to bet he’s not even a day trader, much less a stockbroker?”

She called the name, address, and birth date in to their computer liaison, Dorie Starnes, who had been standing by all evening-and charging them an hourly rate, she reminded them gleefully. But every check came up empty.

“Not even an overdue parking ticket,” Dorie said. “This guy’s a clean liver.”

“Or lucky enough not to get caught,” Tess said, hanging up the phone.

“Shit,” Whitney said. “I assumed we’d find something on him.”

“We’ve got his name and number,” Tess said. “Isn’t that enough? We’ll pay a call on him when he’s conscious, convince him to stop E-mailing little girls, and that’s that.”