Laura Lippman - Hardly Knew Her

Dan laughs. He probably wishes that his own wife was so chipper and cavalier about household calamities. Lillian Simmons is a big-boned slob who looks ten years older than her age, but she is also absolutely reliable, the go-to mom of Hamilton Point Elementary, the one who can be counted on to bail out any forgetful snack mom. That’s the thing about wives. All men want them, they just don’t necessarily want the ones they have.

A slip in the bathtub. A fall down the stairs. An accident on the twisty snake that is Old Orchard. A plane falling out of the sky. She should be so lucky. She trips over another pair of Crocs-the things seem to be breeding-and calls the children to dinner, and something in her voice silences the bedlam instantly, bringing them to the table with heads down. Mom’s mad. Walk carefully. She hates seeing her children like this, controlling them through her anger, but her incipient fury seems to be the only power she has over them, over anyone.

BRIAN DUFFY SQUEEZES into the last open spot at the bar, putting his elbows down before he realizes the wood is still damp from the bartender passing a wet dishrag over it. As if that filthy bit of cloth could make anything cleaner, he thinks with a shudder. It takes him several minutes to get the bar wench’s attention, and in the time he waits, his order somehow mutates from a defensible light beer to a vodka martini, a double. Sure, add a quesadilla and some chips. It’s not like he’s going to get dinner on the plane and there’s never anything waiting for him at home.

Airport bars used to be kind of sexy, based on the movies and television shows he had watched as a kid. Sweeping views of planes taking off and landing, well-dressed people sipping cocktails and speaking low, charged encounters between strangers. Now they tend to be like this one, a cramped windowless room in Atlanta Hartsfield, where you have to fight for every inch of space. On the trip down, he read a paperback that began with a man meeting a beautiful blond in an airport bar and he had found that one detail more far-fetched than the high-tech crime caper that had followed. Airport bars are the new saltpeter.

Look at this one. On his left, two honeymooners, post-honeymooners by all appearances, weary beneath their red-tinged tans, barely speaking to each other as they contemplate the rest of their lives together. To his right, one of those corporate women who travels with a roller bag she can barely lift, the kind of woman who won’t make eye contact with a man until she drops her suitcase on his head. A bitch, a ballbuster. Just his type. In fact, she looks uncannily like the woman who fired him three hours ago.

He still can’t believe he had to fly to Atlanta to be fired. All the signs were there-the lack of a clear agenda for today’s meeting, the fact that they wanted him in and out in a day, when they usually brought people in the night before, put them up at the Ritz-Carlton in Buckhead. Funny, he was the company’s de facto executioner for seven years, flying into various branches and firing people under the rubric of “reorganization,” and yet he didn’t see his own death coming. “You know we always do these things face-to-face, Brian,” said Colleen Browne, whom he thinks of as Cold-Faced Bitch, a woman he has wanted to bend over a desk since the first time he saw her, and never more so than when she was firing him. He considered it, for a fleeting second, thought about grabbing her, ripping away her little black suit, forcing her facedown onto her BlackBerry so hard that she would end up sending text gibberish to everyone in her address book.

But negotiating a decent severance had seemed more pressing. At least he had the context to do that, to get a good package. Six months’ salary, a full year of medical, no small thing with four kids. Still, he thinks of the CEOs who fuck up companies and walk away with ten, twenty million, and he thinks maybe he should have fucked the brunette instead. The country’s tiptoeing into a recession; his sector, financial services, is in particularly bad shape. Six months might not be enough, and thanks to Meghan’s free-spending ways, they don’t begin to have the savings they should. He orders another drink. He can’t bear the thought of going home, having to tell Meghan about this. What would happen if he missed his plane? It happens, and he’s in Atlanta Hartsfield, so anything is credible.

But then he would be in some dopey airport hotel, with nothing but porn to keep him company. He wants the real thing, but he can’t kid himself, he has no game left. The only way for him to have sex tonight is to pay for it, something he’s never done. Okay, something he says he’s never done. There have been a few furtive hand jobs here and there, on the way home from Baltimore, but nothing more because he’s worried about catching something.

He pulls out a card given to him by a guy he met three weeks ago, a lobbyist employed by the company, who got a little loose over dinner and started talking about this amazing escort service in the Baltimore-Washington area. The card has nothing but a number and a set of initials: WFEN. Sounds like an AM radio station. His plane gets in at eight, if he’s lucky, but he always fudges his arrivals, tells Meghan he’s coming in at least two hours later. What if he just went to this place instead, telling Meghan that he was still in Atlanta? Ah, the beauty of cell phones, the liar’s best friend.

The woman who answers the phone has an odd voice, a little toneless and loud. “Yes?”

“Is this…WFEN?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to make…a date.”

“And how did you hear about us?”

“How…” He provides the name of the guy and there’s endless clicking, like at an airline ticket counter.

“Name and birth date, please, along with the credit card you plan to use.”

“What?”

“We do not take new customers without a referral and all customers must be subjected to a criminal background check.”

“What if I want to pay in cash?” Meghan does the bills, no way he’s putting this on a card.

“That’s fine, but we still have to have a credit card on file.”

Even in his frustration, he admires the setup. Someone has thought this through. Plus, they’re not asking for the security code, so he doesn’t think they can charge anything, and if they did, it would be easy enough to get the charge off his card. And the lobbyist said the one he had was worth every penny, a real pro. Brian’s just drunk enough to give his real name, although he lowers his voice while reading the card number into the phone.

“Wait, please.” He’s put on hold, very pleasant jazz music to keep him company. The woman comes back on the line faster than most service reps, that’s for sure.

“I’m sorry, we cannot take you.”

“Hey, that card is good.” Shit, has Meghan pushed it beyond the limit again? And he needs this, he has never needed anything more, he decides, than anonymous, nasty sex with someone who has to do whatever he says.

“We cannot take you.”

“Look, if you want another card-”

“We cannot take you.”

“Did something come up on the background check? It has to be a mistake because I’m clean as a whistle.”

“I’m sorry.” The woman hangs up, and when he redials, no one answers.

Seven hundred miles to the north, give or take, Heloise and Audrey sit in Heloise’s refinished basement, the one where Heloise keeps her office, and look at the number on caller ID. Audrey opened a document on the computer as soon as she picked up the phone, per Heloise’s instructions. But there was no criminal background check, no quick peek at credit records. The moment Audrey put the caller on hold, she summoned Heloise to the basement and asked her what to do.