Prayers For Rain

20

Rain fell softly on sun-drenched streets the afternoon I met Vanessa Moore at a sidewalk cafe in Back Bay. She’d called and asked to meet so we could discuss Tony Traverna’s case. Vanessa was Tony T’s attorney; we’d first met the last time Tony jumped bail, and I had appeared as a witness for the prosecution. Vanessa had cross-examined me the same way she made love-with a cool hunger and sharpened nails.

I could have declined Vanessa’s invite, I suppose, but it had been a week since the night we’d cooked for Diane Bourne, and in that week, we seemed to have taken four steps back. Wesley Dawe did not exist. He wasn’t listed in census records or with the Registry of Motor Vehicles. He did not own a credit card. He had no bank account in the city of Boston or the state of Massachusetts, and after getting slightly desperate, Angie discovered no one by that name existed in New Hampshire, Maine, or Vermont.

We’d gone back to Diane Bourne’s office, but apparently she’d taken our advice to heart. The office was closed. Her town house, we soon discovered, was abandoned. In a week, she hadn’t shown up there, and a cursory search of the place revealed only that she may have taken enough clothing to get by for a week before she had to either do laundry or shop for more.

The Dawes went fishing. Literally, I found out, after I’d impersonated a patient of the doctor’s and learned they were at their summer home in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

We lost Angie’s help when she was assigned by Sallis & Salk to join a team of bodyguards watching an oily South African diamond merchant around the clock as he did whatever it was oily diamond merchants do when they come to our little hamlet.

And Bubba went back to doing whatever it is Bubba does when he isn’t out of the country buying things that could blow up the Eastern Seaboard.

So I was a bit adrift, and caseless, it seemed, when I found Vanessa sitting outdoors under a large Cinzano umbrella, the gentle drizzle bouncing off the cobblestone and spraying her ankles, but leaving the wrought-iron table and rest of Vanessa untouched.

“Hey.” I leaned in to kiss her cheek and she slid a hand along my rib cage as she accepted it.

“Hi.” She watched me take my seat with the amusement that lived in her eyes like twin birthmarks, a lusty vivacity that said just about anything was hers for the taking. It was just a matter of her choosing.

“How you doing?”

“I’m good, Patrick. You’re damp.” She patted a napkin to dry her palm.

I rolled my eyes and raised a hand to the heavens. The shower had come suddenly as I’d walked from my car, broke from a tear in a lone cloud that floated through an otherwise glossy sky.

“I’m not complaining,” she said. “Nothing looks better on a handsome man in a white shirt than a little rain.”

I chuckled. The thing with Vanessa was that even if you saw her coming, she kept coming. Ran right at you and then through you, made you wonder why you’d even tried to ward her off in the first place.

We may have agreed months ago that the sexual component of our relationship was over, but today Vanessa seemed to have changed her mind. And when Vanessa changed her mind, the rest of the world changed theirs with her.

Either that, or she was just trying to work me into a lather, leave me standing alone after I’d made my move so she’d have something even better than sex to get her off that night. With her, you never knew. And I’d learned in the past that the only way to play it safe with her was not to play at all.

“So,” I said, “why do you think I can help you with Tony T?”

She used her fingers to pick a pineapple chunk off her fruit plate, tossed it back in her mouth, and chewed it to pure pulp before speaking.

“I’m working on a diminished capacity defense,” she said.

“What?” I said. “‘Your Honor, my client’s a moron so let him go’?”

The tip of her tongue ran lightly under her upper teeth. “No, Patrick. No. I was thinking more along the lines of: ‘Your Honor, my client believes himself to be under a very real threat of death from members of the Russian crime syndicate, and his actions have stemmed from this fear.’”

“The Russian syndicate?”

She nodded.

I laughed.

She didn’t. “He’s honestly quite afraid of them, Patrick.”

“Why?”

“His last job, he robbed the wrong safe.”

“Belonging to a member of the syndicate?”

She nodded.

I tried to follow the logic of her proposed defense. “So he was so terrified, he blew town and went to Maine?”

Another nod.

“That’ll help on the bail jumping,” I said. “What about the other stuff?”

“Building blocks, Patrick. All I need is to get the illegal flight thrown out and everything can build from there. See, he crossed state lines again. That’s federal. I get the federal charges tossed, the state stuff will fall in line.”

“And you want me to…”

She wiped a thin drop of rain from her temple and gave me a chuckle so dry you could hang a nail on it. She leaned in to the table. “Oh, Patrick, there are several things I could possibly want from you, but in terms of Anthony Traverna, I just need you to attest under oath to his fear of the Russians.”

“But I wasn’t aware of it.”

“But maybe, in hindsight, you remember how fearful in general he seemed during the ride back from Maine.”

She speared a grape with her fork, sucked it off the tines.

She was dressed down this afternoon in a simple black skirt, dark cherry tank top, and black sandals. Her long walnut hair was tied back in a ponytail, and she’d foresaken her contacts for wafer-thin eyeglasses with red rims. And still the sensual power pouring from her limbs and flesh would have blown me out into the street if I hadn’t been used to it.

“Vanessa,” I said.

She speared another grape, propped her elbow on the table, and let the grape hover an inch from her lips as she stared over it at me. “Yes?”

“You know the DA will call me.”

“Well, actually the bail jump’s federal, so it’ll be the AG’s office.”

“Fine. But they’ll call me.”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll try to get what you need on cross.”

“Yes, again.”

“So why ask me down here today?”

She considered the grape, but still didn’t eat it. “If I told you Tony was scared? I mean, terrified. And that I believe him when he says there’s an open contract on him?”

“I’d say you’d attach garnishing to his estate and go on about your business.”

She smiled. “So cold, Patrick. He is, though, you know.”

“I know. But I also know that wouldn’t be reason enough to ask me here.”

“Point taken.” She flicked her tongue and the grape disappeared from the fork. She chewed and swallowed, took a sip of mineral water. “Clarence misses you, by the way.”

Clarence was Vanessa’s dog, a chocolate Lab she’d bought on impulse six months ago and, last time I’d noticed, didn’t have a clue how to raise. You said, “Clarence, sit,” and Clarence ran away. You said, “Here,” and he shit on the rug. There was something likable about him, though. Maybe it was the puppy innocence in his eyes, a wide aiming-to-please that filled his brown pupils even as he pissed on your foot.

“How’s he doing?” I asked. “Housebroken yet?”

Vanessa held her forefinger and thumb a hair’s width apart. “So, so, close.”

“Eaten any more of your shoes?”

She shook her head. “I keep them on a high shelf. Besides, he’s more into underwear these days. Last week he puked up a bra I’d been missing.”

“Least he gave it back.”

She smiled, speared another chunk of fruit. “Remember that morning in Bermuda we woke to the rain?”

I nodded.

“Sheets of it, like walls really, vibrating off the windows and you couldn’t even see the sea from our room.”

I nodded again, tried to hurry her through it. “And we stayed in bed all day and drank wine and messed up the sheets.”

“Burned the sheets,” she said. “Broke that armchair.”

“I got the credit card bill,” I said. “I remember, Vanessa.”

She cut off a small piece of her watermelon wedge, slid it between her lips. “It’s raining now.”

I looked out at the small puddles on the sidewalk. Barely teardrops, their surfaces streaked gold with sun.

“It’ll pass,” I said.

Another dry chuckle and she sipped some more mineral water and stood. “I’ll use the powder room. Take the time to refresh your memory, Patrick. Remember the bottle of Chardonnay. I have a few more at home.”

She walked into the restaurant and I tried not to watch her because a glimpse of her exposed skin and I could all too easily conjure up what hid under her clothes, could see the rivulets of white wine that had splashed over her torso in Bermuda when she’d lain back on the white sheets and poured half the bottle over her body, asked if I was a bit parched.

I watched anyway, as she knew I would, but then my vision was blocked by a man’s body as he stepped from the restuarant out onto the patio and put his hand on the back of Vanessa’s chair.

He was tall and slim, with sandy brown hair, and he gave me a distant smile as he pulled back on Vanessa’s chair and seemed about to drag it back into the restaurant with him.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“I need this seat,” he said.

I looked around at the dozen or so other chairs on the patio, the twenty more inside that weren’t occupied.

“It’s taken,” I said.

The man looked down at it. “Is it taken? Is this seat taken?”

“It’s taken,” I repeated.

He was very well dressed in off-white linen trousers and Gucci loafers, a cashmere black vest over a white T-shirt. His watch was a Movado, and his hands looked like they’d never touched a piece of dirt or work in his life.

“You’re sure?” he asked, still talking down to the chair. “I heard this seat was unoccupied.”

“It’s not. You see the plate of food in front of it? It’s occupied. Trust me.”

He looked over at me and there was something loose and afire in his ice blue eyes. “So I can take it? It’s okay?”

I stood. “No, you can’t take it. It’s taken.”

The man swept his hands out at the patio. “There are plenty of other ones. You get one of those. I’ll take this. She’ll never know the difference.”

“You get one of those,” I said.

“I want this one.” He spoke reasonably, carefully, as if discussing something with a child that was beyond the child’s grasp. “I’ll just take it. Okay?”

I took a step toward him. “No. You won’t. It’s spoken for.”

“I’d heard it wasn’t,” he said gently.

“You heard wrong.”

He looked down at the chair again, then nodded. “So you say, so you say.”

He held up an apologetic hand that matched his smile and walked back into the restaurant as Vanessa stepped past him onto the patio.

She looked back over her shoulder. “Friend of yours?”

“No.”

She noticed a small splatter of rain on her chair. “How’d my chair get wet?”

“Long story.”

She gave me a curious frown and pushed the chair aside, pulled another one out from the closest table and settled back into her original place.

Through the small crowd of patrons, I saw the guy take a seat at the bar and smile at me as Vanessa pulled her replacement chair over to our table. The smile seemed to say, I guess it wasn’t taken after all, and then he turned his back to us.

The interior of the restaurant filled as the rain picked up, and I lost sight of the guy at the bar. The next time I had a clear view, he was gone.

Vanessa and I stayed out in the rain, drinking mineral water as she picked at her fruit and the rain found the back of my shirt and neck.

We’d reverted to harmless small talk when she returned from the bathroom-Tony T’s fear, the Middlesex ADA with the ferret’s head who was rumored to keep mothballs and carefully folded women’s underwear at the bottom of his attaché case, how pathetic it felt to live in an alleged sports town that couldn’t hold on to either Mo Vaughn or Curtis Martin.

But underneath the small talk was the constant hum of our shared want, the echoes of surf and sheets of rain in Bermuda, the hoarse sounds of our voices in that room, the smell of grapes on skin.

“So,” Vanessa said after a particularly pregnant lull in the chitchat, “Chardonnay and me, or what?”

I could have wept from lust, but then I forced myself to conjure up the aftermath, the sterile walk down her stairs and back to my car, the empty reverberations of our approximated passion ringing in my head.

“Not today,” I said.

“It might not be an open-ended offer.”

“I understand that.”

She sighed and handed her credit card over her shoulder as the waitress stepped out onto the patio.

“Find a girl, Patrick?” she asked as the waitress went back inside.

I said nothing.

“A good, low-maintenance woman of hardy stock who won’t give you any trouble? Cook for you, clean for you, laugh at your jokes, and never look at another man?”

“Sure,” I said. “That’s it.”

“Ah.” Vanessa nodded and the waitress came back with her credit card and bill. Vanessa signed and handed the receipt copy to the waitress with a flick of the wrist that was, in itself, dismissal. “But, Patrick, I’m curious.”

I resisted the urge to lean back from the carnal force of her. “Pray tell.”

“Does your new woman do the real wicked things? You know, those things we’ve done with-”

“Vanessa.”

“Hmm?”

“There is no new woman. I’m just not interested.”

She placed a hand to her breast. “In me?”

I nodded.

“Really?” She held her hand out to the rain, caught a few drops, and wiped them on her throat as she arched her head back. “Let me hear you say it.”

“I just did.”

“The whole sentence.” She lowered her chin, caught me in the full impact of her gaze.

I shifted in my chair, tried to wish my way out of this situation. When that didn’t work, I just said it, flat and cold.

“I’m not interested in you, Vanessa.”

The loneliness of another can be shocking when it lays itself bare without warning.

A dire abandonment broke Vanessa’s features into pieces, and I could feel the hollow chill of her beautiful apartment, the ache of her sitting alone at 3 A.M., lover gone, law books and yellow legal pads spread before her at her dining room table, pen in hand, the pictures of a much younger Vanessa that adorned her mantel staring down at her like ghosts of a life unlived. I could see a tiny flicker of hungry light in her chest, and not the hunger of her sexual appetite, but the conflicted hunger of her other selves.

In that moment, her features went skeletal, and her beauty vanished, and she looked like she’d fallen to scraped knees under the weight of the rain.

“Fuck you too, Patrick.” She smiled as she said it. Smiled with lips that twitched at the corners. “Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

“Just…” She stood, a fist clenched around her bag strap. “Just…fuck you.”

She left the restuarant, and I stayed where I was, turned my chair and watched her walk up the street through the drizzle, bag swinging back and forth against her hip, her steps stripped of grace.

Why, I wondered, does it all have to be so messy?

My cell phone rang, and I pulled it from my shirt pocket, wiped the condensation from its surface as I lost Vanessa in a crowd.

“Hello.”

“Hello,” the man’s voice said. “Can I assume that chair’s free now?”