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“That paper trail I laid down for Todd was a blind. I’ve attended that damn conference three years in a row to establish a pattern he wouldn’t question. I’m not cheating on him. Not in the way he thinks.”
“You know he suspects you?”
“He thinks he’s so smooth: Stephen Hawking’s brain in Hugh Grant’s head.” The dimple surfaced again, then vanished. “He can play a wicked hand of poker when it comes to business, but in personal matters he’s transparent as glass. Oh, I’m not saying I didn’t lead him in that direction; the lunch date with a girlfriend that lasts three hours, saying I’m too tired to talk about it when I get home, whispering on the phone, then hanging up when he enters the room, that sort of bullshit. People buy into clichés. That’s how they get to be clichés.”
He returned his gaze to the mirror. She was less intimidating in one dimension. “What’s the point of making him think you were committing adultery?”
“I read an article once about a man who ran an illegal marijuana-growing operation in his home. The police raided him from time to time, gave him thirty days once for possession. That satisfied them so much they never looked beyond the pot. If they’d lifted the flats of soil where it was planted, pulled up planks from the floor, they’d have found a dozen crates of AK-47s and enough ammunition to fight a war. Their small-time drug dealer had been running guns to the Third World for years.”
She drank off the top of her cocktail, set it down, saw the e-cigarette in her hand, put it back in her purse. “He had a stroke and died. His landlord found the guns. Otherwise no one ever would have known except his customers. See, he used a lesser crime to cover up the greater one: an illegal front for an illegal operation.”
“If you’re confessing to a crime,” he said, “I don’t want to hear it. I’ve had my fill of intrigue. All I want to do is go back home and paint.”
“If I weren’t convinced you’re an honest man who won’t rat me out, I wouldn’t be speaking to you at all. I’m saying I’m letting him think I’m giving him evidence to divorce me in order to give me time to divorce him.”
CHAPTER 11
“YOU’RE GOING TO Vegas?”
“Reno. I feel sorry for the old place. It was the divorce capital of the world until the Strip muscled in on its territory. I figured by the time he found out I never got to California I’d have all the papers filed.”
“Yes, but a quickie divorce won’t get you a settlement. Do you know how much you’re giving up?”
“To the penny. I’m a hospital administrator, you know. Half the work is math.” She took her glass between her palms and rotated it in its wet circle on the bar, looking down at it as if it were a crystal ball. “I make good money and I’ve got job security. Getting out of this marriage in a jiffy’s worth sacrificing the rest.”
“It’s that bad?”
“Don’t get me wrong. Todd’s never abused me in the usual sense of the term. He’s a neglecter;distantis the usual description. We both put in long hours at work, but I used to take pains to clear space for us as a couple. He never did. It took me seven years to come to the conclusion that I was the only one who was investing in the relationship. Talk about your dot-com bubble! Seven years. Funny, I don’t remember breaking any mirrors.” The dimple reappeared, but was gone so quickly it might never have been there in the first place.
“Why the cloak-and-dagger?” he said. “Plevin’s chief concern is the sleazy publicity where infidelity’s involved. It seems to me he’d be relieved it isn’t. He’d welcome the quiet way you want to go about it.”
“Too chancy. I said he’s transparent, not predictable. Otherwise he’d never have made it to the top. Better to push the thing through and dump it in his lap tied up with a bow.”
Suddenly she turned her head and looked at him. The gold flecks in her eyes swam in a glistening film. “How old are you?”
“Thirty-five.”
“I’m thirty-one; three years older than Todd. That’s still time to make a baby.”
His ears got hot again.
She laughed, opening her mouth wide and filling the room with the guttural sound. The bartender looked up from his phone, startled.
She paid him no attention. “I didn’t mean withyou,super-stud! I was just curious; you look your age, but you seem younger. I guess that’s the wide-eyed artist in you. I was talking about my biological clock. See, I have to deduct the amount of time it’ll take to find the right man, convince him he’d make a good father, and get to begettin’. I don’t have any of it to waste waiting for you to wake up to what a bad old world this is; no offense, Rembrandt. I was giving myself a pep talk.”
He gulped cold beer. He could almost hear his blush hissing when it hit the drink. “I didn’t think that was a thing anymore. Medical science and all.”
“Spin my eggs on a platter and mix up little Annie or Andy in a test tube? No, thanks. I’m not escaping from one antiseptic lab just to get into another. I’m going to do it the old-fashioned way. I don’t even intend to shop online. What kind of story would that make when our friends ask us how we met?”
“Well, good luck.”
“Don’t be such a grouch. Todd’s a great white in the shark tank, but he never goes back on his word. He told you you’d keep the money and the car. You can take that to the bank. Literally.”
He raised a smile. “Good luck anyway. I mean that.”
“I think you do.” She was looking at him with something on her face that might have been surprise. “I wonder why.”
“We artists are sensitive types. This is the first time we’ve been within twenty feet of each other—sometimes it’s been almost twenty miles—but it seems like it’s been all day, which in a way it has. It’s like I know you better than I knew my ex-wife, and we were together three years.” Hastily he added, “Don’t read anything into that.”
