The Best American Mystery Stories 1997

Elizabeth George The Surprise of His Life from Women on the Case

When Douglas Armstrong had his first consultation with Thistle McCloud, he had no intention of murdering his wife. His mind, in fact, didn’t turn to murder until two weeks after consultation number four.

Douglas watched closely as Thistle prepared herself for a revelation from another dimension. She held his wedding band in the palm of her left hand. She closed her fingers around it. She hovered her right hand over the fist that she’d made. She hummed five notes that sounded suspiciously like the beginning of “I Love You Truly.” Gradually, her eyes rolled back, up, and out of view beneath her yellow-shaded lids, leaving him with the disconcerting sight of a thirtysomething female in a straw boater, striped vest, white shirt, and polka-dotted tie, looking as if she were one quarter of a barber-shop quartet in desperate hope of finding her partners.

When he’d first seen Thistle, Douglas had appraised her attire — which in subsequent visits had not altered in any appreciable fashion — as the insidious getup of a charlatan who wished to focus her clients’ attention on her personal appearance rather than on whatever machinations she would be going through to delve into their pasts, their presents, their futures, and — most importantly — their wallets. But he’d come to realize that Thistle’s odd getup had nothing to do with distracting anyone. The first time she held his old Rolex watch and began speaking in a low, intense voice about the prodigal son, about his endless departures and equally endless returns, about his aging parents who welcomed him always with open arms and open hearts, and about his brother who watched all this with a false fixed smile and a silent shout of What about me? Do I mean nothing? he had a feeling that Thistle was exactly what she purported to be: a psychic.

He’d first come to her storefront operation because he’d had forty minutes to kill prior to his yearly prostate exam. He dreaded the exam and the teeth-grating embarrassment of having to answer his doctor’s jovial, rib-poking “Everything up and about as it should be?” with the truth, which was that Newton’s law of gravity had begun asserting itself lately to his dearest appendage. And since he was six weeks short of his fifty-fifth birthday, and since every disaster in his life had occurred in a year that was a multiple of five, if there was a chance of knowing what the gods had in store for him and his prostate, he wanted to be able to do something to head off the chaos.

These things had all been on his mind as he spun along Pacific Coast Highway in the dim gold light of a late December afternoon. On a drearily commercialized section of the road — given largely to pizza parlors and boogie board shops — he had seen the small blue building that he’d passed a thousand times before and read PSYCHIC CONSULTATIONS on its hand-painted sign. He’d glanced at his gas gauge for an excuse to stop, and while he pumped super unleaded into the tank of his Mercedes across the street from that small blue building, he made his decision. What the hell, he’d thought. There were worse ways to kill forty minutes.

So he’d had his first session with Thistle McCloud, who was anything but what he’d expected of a psychic since she used no crystal ball, no tarot cards, nothing at all but a piece of his jewelry. In his first three visits, it had always been the Rolex watch from which she’d received her psychic emanations. But today she’d placed the watch to one side, declared it diluted of power, and set her fog-colored eyes on his wedding ring. She’d touched her finger to it, and said, “I’ll use that. I think. If you want something further from your history and closer to your heart.”

He’d given her the ring precisely because of those last two phrases: further from your history and closer to your heart. They told him how very well she knew that the prodigal son business rose from his past while his deepest concerns were attached to his future.

With the ring now in her closed fist and with her eyes rolled upward, Thistle stopped the four-note humming, breathed deeply six times, and opened her eyes. She observed him with a melancholia that made his stomach feel hollow.

“What?” Douglas asked.

“You need to prepare for a shock,” she said. “It’s something unexpected. It comes out of nowhere and because of it, the essence of your life will be changed forever. And soon. I feel it coming very soon.”

Jesus, he thought. It was just what he needed to hear three weeks after having an indifferent index finger shoved up his ass to see what was the cause of his limp-dick syndrome. The doctor had said it wasn’t cancer, but he hadn’t ruled out half a dozen other possibilities. Douglas wondered which one of them Thistle had just now tuned her psychic antennae onto.

Thistle opened her hand and they both looked at his wedding ring where it lay on her palm, faintly sheened by her sweat. “It’s an external shock,” she clarified. “The source of upheaval in your life isn’t from within. The shock comes from outside and rattles you to your core.”

“Are you sure about that?” Douglas asked her.

“As sure as I can be, considering the armor you wear.” Thistle returned the ring to him, her cool fingers grazing his wrist. She said, “Your name isn’t David, is it? It was never David. It never will be David. But the D, I feel, is correct. Am I right?”

He reached into his back pocket and brought out his wallet. Careful to shield his driver’s license from her, he clipped a fifty-dollar bill between his thumb and index finger. He folded it once and handed it over.

“Donald,” she said. “No. That isn’t it, either. Darrell, perhaps. Dennis. I sense two syllables.”

“Names aren’t important in your line of work, are they?” Douglas said.

“No. But the truth is always important. Someday, Not-David, you’re going to have to learn to trust people with the truth. Trust is the key. Trust is essential.”

“Trust,” he told her, “is what gets people screwed.”

Outside, he walked across the Coast Highway to the cramped side street that paralleled the ocean. Here he always parked his car when he visited Thistle. With its vanity license plate DRIL4IT virtually announcing who owned the Mercedes, Douglas had decided early on that it wouldn’t encourage new investors if anyone put the word out that the president of South Coast Oil had begun seeing a psychic regularly. Risky investments were one thing. Placing money with a man who could be accused of using parapsychology rather than geology to find oil deposits was another. He wasn’t doing that, of course. Business never came up in his sessions with Thistle. But try telling that to the board of directors. Try telling that to anyone.

He unarmed the car and slid inside. He headed south, in the direction of his office. As far as anyone at South Coast Oil knew, he’d spent his lunch hour with his wife, having a romantic winter’s picnic on the bluffs in Corona del Mar. The cellular phone will be turned off for an hour, he’d informed his secretary. Don’t try to phone and don’t bother us, please. This is time for Donna and me. She deserves it. I need it. Are we clear on the subject?

Any mention of Donna always did the trick when it came to keeping South Coast Oil off his back for a few hours. She was warmly liked by everyone in the company. She was warmly liked by everyone period. Sometimes, he reflected suddenly, she was too warmly liked. Especially by men.

You need to prepare for a shock.

Did he? Douglas considered the question in relation to his wife.

When he pointed out men’s affinity for her. Donna always acted surprised. She told him that men merely recognized in her a woman who’d grown up in a household of brothers. But what he saw in men’s eyes when they looked at his wife had nothing to do with fraternal affection. It had to do with getting her naked, getting down and dirty, and getting laid.

It’s an external shock.

Was it? What sort? Douglas thought of the worst.

Getting laid was behind every man-woman interaction on earth. He knew this well. So while his recent failures to get it up and get it on with Donna frustrated him, he had to admit that he was feeling concerned that her patience with him was trickling away. Once it was gone, she’d start looking around. That was only natural. And once she started looking, she was going to find or be found.

The shock comes from outside and rattles you to your core.

Shit. Douglas thought. If chaos was about to steamroller into his life as he approached his fifty-fifth birthday — that rotten bad luck integer — Douglas knew that Donna would probably be at the wheel. She was thirty-five, four years in place as wife number three, and while she acted content, he’d been around women long enough to know that still waters did more than simply run deep. They hid rocks that could sink a boat in seconds if a sailor didn’t keep his wits about him. And love made people lose their wits. Love made people go a little bit nuts.

Of course, he wasn’t nuts. He had his wits about him. But being in love with a woman twenty years his junior, a woman whose scent caught the nose of every male within sixty yards of her, a woman whose physical appetites he himself was failing to satisfy on a nightly basis... and had been failing to satisfy for weeks... a woman like that...

“Get a grip,” Douglas told himself brusquely. “This psychic stuff is baloney, right? Right.” But still he thought of the coming shock, the upset to his life, and its source: external. Not his prostate, not his dick, not an organ in his body. But another human being. “Shit,” he said.

He guided the car up the incline that led to Jamboree Road, six lanes of concrete that rolled between stunted liquidambar trees through some of the most expensive real estate in Orange County. It took him to the bronzed glass tower that housed his pride: South Coast Oil.

Once inside the building, he navigated his way through an unexpected encounter with two of SCO’s engineers, through a brief conversation with a geologist who simultaneously waved an ordnance survey map and a report from the EPA, and through a hallway conference with the head of the accounting department. His secretary handed him a fistful of messages when he finally managed to reach his office. She said, “Nice picnic? The weather’s unbelievable, isn’t it?” followed by “Everything all right, Mr. Armstrong?” when he didn’t reply.

He said, “Yes. What? Fine,” and looked through the messages. He found that the names meant nothing to him, absolutely nothing.

He walked to the window behind his desk and looked at the view through its enormous pane of tinted glass. Below him, Orange County’s airport sent jet after jet hurtling into the sky at an angle so acute that it defied both reason and aerodynamics, although it did protect the delicate auditory sensibilities of the millionaires who lived in the flight path below. Douglas watched these planes without really seeing them. He knew he had to answer his telephone messages, but all he could think about was Thistle’s words: an external shock.

What could be more external than Donna?

She wore Obsession. She put it behind her ears and beneath her breasts. Whenever she passed through a room, she left the scent of herself behind.

Her dark hair gleamed when the sunlight hit it. She wore it short and simply cut, parted on the left and smoothly falling just to her ears.

Her legs were long. When she walked, her stride was full and sure. And when she walked with him — at his side, with her hand through his arm and her head held back — he knew that she caught the attention of everyone. He knew that together they were the envy of all their friends and of strangers as well.

He could see this reflected in the faces of people they passed when he and Donna were together. At the ballet, at the theater, at concerts, in restaurants, glances gravitated to Douglas Armstrong and his wife. In women’s expressions he could read the wish to be young like Donna, to be smooth-skinned again, to be vibrant once more, to be fecund and ready. In men’s expressions he could read desire.

It had always been a pleasure to see how others reacted to the sight of his wife. But now he saw how dangerous her allure really was and how it threatened to destroy his peace.

A shock, Thistle had said to him. Prepare for a shock. Prepare for a shock that will change your world.

That evening. Douglas heard the water running as soon as he entered the house: fifty-two-hundred square feet of limestone floors, vaulted ceilings, and picture windows on a hillside that offered an ocean view to the west and the lights of Orange County to the east. The house had cost him a fortune, but that had been all right with him. Money meant nothing. He’d bought the place for Donna. But if he’d had doubts about his wife before — born of his own performance anxiety, growing to adulthood through his consultation with Thistle — when Douglas heard that water running, he began to see the truth. Because Donna was in the shower.

He watched her silhouette behind the blocks of translucent glass that defined the shower’s wall. She was washing her hair. She hadn’t noticed him yet, and he watched her for a moment, his gaze traveling over her uplifted breasts, her hips, her long legs. She usually bathed — languorous bubble baths in the raised oval tub that looked out on the lights of the city of Irvine. Taking a shower suggested a more earnest and energetic effort to cleanse herself. And washing her hair suggested... Well, it was perfectly clear what that suggested. Scents got caught up in the hair: cigarette smoke, sautéing garlic, fish from a fishing boat, or semen and sex. Those last two were the betraying scents. Obviously, she would have to wash her hair.

Her discarded clothes lay on the floor. With a hasty glance at the shower, Douglas fingered through them and found her lacy underwear. He knew women. He knew his wife. If she’d actually been with a man that afternoon, her body’s leaking juices would have made the panties’ crotch stiff when they dried, and he would be able to smell the afterscent of intercourse on them. They would give him proof. He lifted them to his face.

“Doug! What on earth are you doing?”

Douglas dropped the panties, cheeks hot and neck sweating. Donna was peering at him from the shower’s opening, her hair lathered with soap that streaked down her left cheek. She brushed it away.

“What are you doing?” he asked her. Three marriages and two divorces had taught him that a fast offensive maneuver threw the opponent off balance. It worked.

She popped back into the water — clever of her, so he couldn’t see her face — and said, “It’s pretty obvious. I’m taking a shower. God, what a day.”

He moved to watch her through the shower’s opening. There was no door, just a partition in the glass-block wall. He could study her body and look for the telltale signs of the kind of rough love-making he knew that she liked. And she wouldn’t know he was even looking, since her head was beneath the shower as she rinsed off her hair.

“Steve phoned in sick today,” she said, “so I had to do everything at the kennels myself.”

She raised chocolate Labradors. He had met her that way, seeking a dog for his youngest son. Through a reference from a veterinarian, he had discovered her kennels in Midway City — less than one square mile of feedstores, other kennels, and dilapidated postwar stucco and shake roofs posing as suburban housing. It was an odd place for a girl from the pricey side of Corona del Mar to end up professionally, but that was what he liked about Donna. She wasn’t true to type, she wasn’t a beach bunny, she wasn’t a typical southern California girl. Or at least that’s what he had thought.

“The worst was cleaning the dog runs,” she said. “I didn’t mind the grooming — I never mind that — but I hate doing the runs. I completely reeked of dog poop when I got home.” She shut off the shower and reached for her towels, wrapping her head in one and her body in the other. She stepped out of the stall with a smile and said, “Isn’t it weird how some smells cling to your body and your hair while others don’t?”

She kissed him hello and scooped up her clothes. She tossed them down the laundry chute. No doubt she was thinking, Out of sight, out of mind. She was clever that way.

“That’s the third time Steve’s phoned in sick in two weeks.” She headed for the bedroom, drying off as she went. She dropped the towel with her usual absence of self-consciousness and began dressing, pulling on wispy underwear, black leggings, a silver tunic. “If he keeps this up. I’m going to let him go. I need someone consistent, someone reliable. If he’s not going to be able to hold up his end...” She frowned at Douglas, her face perplexed. “What’s wrong, Doug? You’re looking at me so funny. Is something wrong?”

“Wrong? No.” But he thought. That looks like a love bite on her neck. And he crossed to her for a better look. He cupped her face for a kiss and tilted her head. The shadow of the towel that was wrapped around her hair dissipated, leaving her skin unmarred. Well, what of it? he thought. She wouldn’t be so stupid as to let some heavy breather suck bruises into her flesh, no matter how turned on he had her. She wasn’t that dumb. Not his Donna.

But she also wasn’t as smart as her husband.

At five forty-five the next day, he went to the personnel department. It was a better choice than the Yellow Pages because at least he knew that whoever had been doing the background checks on incoming employees at South Coast Oil was simultaneously competent and discreet. No one had ever complained about some two-bit gumshoe nosing into his background.

The department was deserted, as Douglas had hoped. The computer screens at every desk were set to the shifting images that preserved them: a field of swimming fish, bouncing balls, and popping bubbles. The director’s office at the far side of the department was unlit and locked, but a master key in the hand of the company president solved that problem. Douglas went inside and flipped on the lights.

He found the name he was looking for among the dog-eared cards of the director’s Rolodex, a curious anachronism in an otherwise computer-age office. Cowley and Son, Inquiries, he read in faded typescript. This was accompanied by a telephone number and by an address on Balboa Peninsula.

Douglas studied both for the space of two minutes. Was it better to know or to live in ignorant bliss? he wondered at this eleventh hour. But he wasn’t living in bliss, was he? And he hadn’t been living in bliss from the moment he’d failed to perform as a man was meant to. So it was better to know. He had to know. Knowledge was power. Power was control. He needed both.

He picked up the phone.

Douglas always went out for lunch — unless a conference was scheduled with his geologists or the engineers — so no one raised a hair of an eyebrow when he left South Coast Oil before noon the following day. He used Jamboree once again to get to the Coast Highway, but this time instead of heading north toward Newport where Thistle made her prognostications, he drove directly across the highway and down the incline where a modestly arched bridge spanned an oily section of Newport Harbor that divided the mainland from an amoeba-shaped portion of land that was Balboa Island.

In summer the island was infested with tourists. They bottled up the streets with their cars and rode their bicycles in races on the sidewalk around the island’s perimeter. No local in his right mind ventured onto Balboa Island during the summer without good reason or unless he lived there. But in winter, the place was virtually deserted. It took less than five minutes to snake through the narrow streets to the island’s north end where the ferry waited to take cars and pedestrians on the eye-blink voyage across to the peninsula.

There a stripe-topped carousel and a Ferris wheel spun like two opposing gears of an enormous clock, defining an area called the Fun Zone, which had long been the summertime bane of the local police. Today, however, no bands of juveniles roved with cans of spray paint at the ready. The only inhabitants of the Fun Zone were a paraplegic in a wheelchair and his bike-riding companion.

Douglas passed them as he drove off the ferry. They were intent upon their conversation. The Ferris wheel and carousel did not exist for them. Nor did Douglas and his blue Mercedes, which was just as well. He didn’t particularly want to be seen.

He parked just off the beach, in a lot where fifteen minutes cost a quarter. He pumped in four. He armed the car and headed west toward Main Street, a tree-shaded lane some sixty yards long that began at a faux New England restaurant overlooking Newport Harbor and ended at Balboa Pier, which stretched out into the Pacific Ocean, gray-green today and unsettled by roiling waves from a winter Alaskan storm.

Number 107-B Main was what he was looking for, and he found it easily. Just east of an alley, 107 was a two-story structure whose bottom floor was taken up by a time-warped hair salon called JJ’s — heavily devoted to macramé, potted plants, and posters of Janis Joplin — and whose upper floor was divided into offices that were reached by means of a structurally questionable stairway at the north end of the building. Number 107-B was the first door upstairs — JJ’s Natural Haircutting appeared to be 107-A — but when Douglas turned the discolored brass knob below the equally discolored brass nameplate announcing the business as COWLEY AND SON, INQUIRIES, he found the door locked.

He frowned and looked at his Rolex. His appointment was for twelve-fifteen. It was currently twelve-ten. So where was Cowley? Where was his son?

He returned to the stairway, ready to head to his car and his cellular phone, ready to track down Cowley and give him hell for setting up an appointment and failing to be there to keep it. But he was three steps down when he saw a khaki-clad man coming his way, sucking up an Orange Julius with the enthusiasm of a twelve-year-old. His thinning gray hair and sun-lined face marked him at least five decades older than twelve, however. And his limping gait — in combination with his clothes — suggested old war wounds.

“You Cowley?” Douglas called from the stairs.

The man waved his Orange Julius in reply. “You Armstrong?” he asked.

“Right.” Douglas said. “Listen, I don’t have a lot of time.”

“None of us do, son,” Cowley said, and he hoisted himself up the stairway. He nodded in a friendly fashion, pulled hard on the Orange Julius straw, and passed Douglas in a gust of aftershave that he hadn’t smelled for a good twenty years. Canoe. Jesus. Did they still sell that?

Cowley swung the door open and cocked his head to indicate that Douglas was to enter. The office comprised two rooms: one was a sparsely furnished waiting area through which they passed; the other was obviously Cowley’s demesne. Its centerpiece was an olive-green steel desk. Filing cabinets and bookshelves of the same issue matched it.

The investigator went to an old oaken office chair behind the desk, but he didn’t sit. Instead, he opened one of the side drawers, and just when Douglas was expecting him to pull out a fifth of bourbon, he dug out a bottle of yellow capsules instead. He shook two of them into his palm and knocked them back with a long swig of Orange Julius. He sank into his chair and gripped its arms.

“Arthritis,” he said. “I’m killing the bastard with evening primrose oil. Give me a minute, okay? You want a couple?”

“No.” Douglas glanced at his watch to make certain Cowley knew that his time was precious. Then he strolled to the steel bookshelves.

He was expecting to see munitions manuals, penal codes, and surveillance texts, something to assure the prospective clients that they’d come to the right place with their troubles. But what he found was poetry, volume after volume neatly arranged in alphabetical order by author, from Matthew Arnold to William Butler Yeats. He wasn’t sure what to think.

The occasional space left at the end of a bookshelf was taken up by photographs. They were clumsily framed, snapshots mostly. They depicted grinning small children, a gray-haired grandma type, several young adults. Among them, encased in Plexiglas, was a military Purple Heart. Douglas picked this up. He’d never seen one, but he was pleased to know that his guess about the source of Cowley’s limp had been correct.

“You saw action,” he said.

“My butt saw action,” Cowley replied. Douglas looked his way, so the PI continued. “I took it in the butt. Shit happens, right?” He moved his hands from their grip on the arms of his chair. He folded them over his stomach. Like Douglas’s own, it could have been flatter. Indeed, the two men shared a similar build: stocky, quickly given to weight if they didn’t exercise, too tall to be called short and too short to be called tall. “What can I do for you, Mr. Armstrong?”

“My wife,” Douglas said.

“Your wife?”

“She may be...” Now that it was time to articulate the problem and what it arose from, Douglas wasn’t sure that he could. So he said, “Who’s the son?”

“What?”

“It says Cowley and Son, but there’s only one desk. Who’s the son?”

Cowley reached for his Orange Julius and took a pull on its straw. “He died,” he said. “Drunk driver got him on Ortega Highway.”

“Sorry.”

“Like I said. Shit happens. What shit’s happened to you?”

Douglas returned the Purple Heart to its place. He caught sight of the graying grandma in one of the pictures and said, “This your wife?”

“Forty years my wife. Name’s Maureen.”

“I’m on my third. How’d you manage forty years with one woman?”

“She has a sense of humor.” Cowley slid open the middle drawer of his desk and took out a legal pad anti the stub of a pencil. He wrote ARMSTRONG at the top in block letters and underlined it. He said, “About your wife...”

“I think she’s having an affair. I want to know if I’m right. I want to know who it is.”

Cowley carefully set his pencil down. He observed Douglas for a moment. Outside, a gull gave a raucous cry from one of the rooftops. “What makes you think she’s seeing someone?”

“Am I supposed to give you proof before you’ll take the case? I thought that’s why I was hiring you. To give me proof.”

“You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have suspicions. What are they?”

Douglas raked through his memory. He wasn’t about to tell Cowley about trying to smell up Donna’s underwear, so he took a moment to examine her behavior over the last few weeks. And when he did so, the additional evidence was there. Jesus. How the hell had he missed it? She’d changed her hair; she’d bought new underwear — that black lacy Victoria’s Secret stuff; she’d been on the phone twice when he’d come home and as soon as he walked into the room, she’d hung up hastily; there were at least two long absences with insufficient excuse for them; there were six or seven engagements that she said were with friends.

Cowley nodded thoughtfully when Douglas listed his suspicions. Then he said. “Have you given her a reason to cheat on you?”

“A reason? What is this? I’m the guilty party?”

“Women don’t usually stray without there being a man behind them, giving them a reason.” Cowley examined him from beneath unclipped eyebrows. One of his eyes, Douglas saw, was beginning to form a cataract. Jeez, the guy was ancient, a real antique.

“No reason,” Douglas said. “I don’t cheat on her. I don’t even want to.”

“She’s young, though. And a man your age...” Cowley shrugged. “Shit happens to us old guys. Young things don’t always have the patience to understand.”

Douglas wanted to point out that Cowley was at least ten years his senior, if not more. He also wanted to take himself from membership in the club of us old guys. But the PI was watching him compassionately, so instead of arguing, Douglas told the truth.

Cowley reached for his Orange Julius and drained the cup. He tossed it into the trash. “Women have needs,” he said, and he moved his hand from his crotch to his chest, adding. “A wise man doesn’t confuse what goes on here” — the crotch — “with what goes on here” — the chest.

“So maybe I’m not wise. Are you going to help me out or not?”

“You sure you want help?”

“I want to know the truth. I can live with that. What I can’t live with is not knowing. I just need to know what I’m dealing with here.”

Cowley looked as if he were taking a reading of Douglas’s level of veracity. He finally appeared to make a decision, but one he didn’t like because he shook his head, picked up his pencil, and said, “Give me some background, then. If she’s got someone on the side, who are our possibilities?”

Douglas had thought about this. There was Mike, the poolman who visited once a week. There was Sieve, who worked with Donna at her kennels in Midway City. There was Jeff, her personal trainer. There were also the postman, the FedEx man, the UPS driver, and Donna’s too youthful gynecologist.

“I take it you’re accepting the case?” Douglas said to Cowley. He pulled out his wallet from which he extracted a wad of bills. “You’ll want a retainer.”

“I don’t need cash, Mr. Armstrong.”

“All the same...” All the same, Douglas had no intention of leaving a paper trail via a check. “How much time do you need?” he asked.

“Give it a few days. If she’s seeing someone, he’ll surface eventually. They always do.” Cowley sounded despondent.

“Your wife cheat on you?” Douglas asked shrewdly.

“If she did. I probably deserved it.”

That was Cowley’s attitude, but it was one that Douglas didn’t share. He didn’t deserve to be cheated on. Nobody did. And when he found out who was doing the job on his wife... Well, they would see a kind of justice that Attila the Hun was incapable of extracting.

His resolve was strengthened in the bedroom that evening when his hello kiss to his wife was interrupted by the telephone. Donna pulled away from him quickly and went to answer it. She gave Douglas a smile — as if recognizing what her haste revealed to him — and shook back her hair as sexily as possible, running slim fingers through it as she picked up the receiver.

Douglas listened to her side of the conversation while he changed his clothes. He heard her voice brighten as she said, “Yes, yes. Hello... No... Doug just got home and we were talking about the day...”

So now her caller knew he was in the room. Douglas could imagine what the bastard was saying, whoever he was: “So you can’t talk?”

To which Donna, on cue, answered, “Nope. Not at all.”

“Shall I call later?”

“Gosh, that would be nice.”

“Today was what was nice. I love to fuck you.”

“Really? Outrageous. I’ll have to check it out.”

“I want to check you out, baby. Are you wet for me?”

“I sure am. Listen, we’ll connect later on, okay? I need to get dinner started.”

“Just so long as you remember today. It was the best. You’re the best.”

“Right. Bye.” She hung up and came to him. She put her arms round his waist. She said. “Got rid of her. Nancy Talbert. God. Nothing’s more important in her life than a shoe sale at Neiman-Marcus. Spare me. Please.” She snuggled up to him. He couldn’t see her face, just the back of her head where it reflected in the mirror.

“Nancy Talbert,” he said. “I don’t think I know her.”

“Sure you do, honey.” She pressed her hips against him. He felt the hopeful but useless heat in his groin. “She’s in Soroptimists with me. You met her last month after the ballet. Hmm. You feel nice. Gosh. I like it when you hold me. Should I start dinner or d’you want to mess around?”

Another clever move on her part: he wouldn’t think she was cheating if she still wanted it from him. No matter that he couldn’t give it to her. She was hanging in there with him and this moment proved it. Or so she thought.

“Love to,” he said, and smacked her on the butt. “But let’s eat first. And after, right there on the dining room table...” He managed what he hoped was a lewd enough wink. “Just you wait, kiddo.”

She laughed and released him and went off to the kitchen. He walked to the bed where he sat, disconsolately. The charade was torture. He had to know the truth.

He didn’t hear from Cowley and Son, Inquiries, for two agonizing weeks, during which he suffered through three more coy telephone conversations between Donna and her lover, four more phony excuses to cover unscheduled absences from home, and two more midday showers sloughed off to Steve’s absence from the kennels again. By the time he finally made contact with Cowley, Douglas’s nerves were shot.

Cowley had news to report. He said he’d hand it over as soon as they could meet. “How’s lunch?” Cowley asked. “We could do Tail of the Whale over here.”

No lunch, Douglas told him. He wouldn’t be able to eat anyway. He would meet Cowley at his office at twelve forty-five.

“Make it the pier, then,” Cowley said. “I’ll catch a burger at Ruby’s and we can talk after. You know Ruby’s? The end of the pier?”

He knew Ruby’s. A fifties coffee shop, it sat at the end of Balboa Pier, and he found Cowley there as promised at twelve forty-five, polishing off a cheeseburger and fries with a manila envelope silting next to his strawberry milkshake.

Cowley wore the same khakis he’d had on the day they’d met. He’d added a Panama hat to his ensemble. He touched his index finger to the hat’s brim as Douglas approached him. His cheeks were bulging with the burger and fries.

Douglas slid into the booth opposite Cowley and reached for the envelope. Cowley’s hand slapped down onto it. “Not yet,” he said.

“I’ve got to know.”

Cowley slid the envelope off the table and onto the vinyl seat next to himself. He twirled the straw in his milkshake and observed Douglas through opaque eyes that seemed to reflect the sunlight outside. “Pictures,” he said. “That’s all I’ve got for you. Pictures aren’t the truth. You got that?”

“Okay. Pictures.”

“I don’t know what I’m shooting. I just tail the woman and I shoot what I see. What I see may not mean shit. You understand?”

“Just show me the pictures.”

“Outside.”

Cowley tossed a five and three ones onto the table, called “Catch you later. Susie,” to the waitress, and led the way. He walked to the railing, where he looked out over the water. A whale-watching boat was bobbing about a quarter-mile offshore. It was too early in the year to catch sight of a pod migrating to Alaska, but the tourists on board probably wouldn’t know that. Their binoculars winked in the light.

Douglas joined the PI. Cowley said, “You got to know that she doesn’t act like a woman guilty of anything. She just seems to be doing her thing. She met a few men — I won’t mislead you — but I couldn’t catch her doing anything cheesy.”

“Give me the pictures.”

Cowley gave him a sharp look instead. Douglas knew his voice was betraying him. “I say we tail her for another two weeks,” Cowley said. “What I’ve got here isn’t much to go on.” He opened the envelope. He stood so that Douglas only saw the back of the pictures. He chose to hand them over in sets.

The first set was taken in Midway City not far from the kennels, at the feed and grain store where Donna bought food for the dogs. In these, she was loading fifty-pound sacks into the hack of her Toyota pickup. She was being assisted by a Calvin Klein type in tight jeans and a T-shirt. They were laughing together, and in one of the pictures Donna had perched her sunglasses on top of her head the better to look directly at her companion.

She appeared to be flirting, but she was a young, pretty woman and flirting was normal. This set seemed okay. She could have looked less happy to be chatting with the stud, but she was a businesswoman and she was conducting business. Douglas could deal with that.

The second set was of Donna in the Newport gym where she worked with a personal trainer twice a week. Her trainer was one of those sculpted bodies with a head of hair on which every strand looked as if it had been seen to professionally on a daily basis. In the pictures, Donna was dressed to work out — nothing Douglas had not seen before — but for the first time he noted how carefully she assembled her workout clothes. From the leggings to the leotard to the headband she wore, everything enhanced her. The trainer appeared to recognize this because he squatted before her as she did her vertical butterflies. Her legs were spread and there was no doubt what he was concentrating on. This looked more serious.

He was about to ask Cowley to start tailing the trainer when the PI said. “No body contact between them other than what you’d expect,” and handed him the third set of pictures, saying, “These are the only ones that look a little shaky to me, but they may mean nothing. You know this guy?”

Douglas stared with know this guy, know this guy ringing in his skull. Unlike the other pictures in which Donna and her companion-of-the-moment were in one location, these showed Donna at a view table in an oceanfront restaurant. Donna on the Balboa ferry, Donna walking along a dock in Newport. In each of the pictures she was with a man, the same man. In each of the pictures there was body contact. It was nothing extreme because they were out in public. But it was the kind of body contact that betrayed: an arm around her shoulders, a kiss on her cheek, a full-body hug that said. Feel me up, baby, ’cause I ain’t limp like him.

Douglas felt that his world was spinning, but he managed a wry grin. He said, “Oh hell. Now I feel like a class-A jerk.”

“Why’s that?” Cowley asked.

“This guy?” Douglas indicated the athletic-looking man in the picture with Donna. “This is her brother.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. He’s a walk-on coach at Newport Harbor High. His name is Michael. He’s a free-spirit type.” Douglas gripped the railing with one hand and shook his head with what he hoped looked like chagrin. “Is this all you’ve got?”

“That’s it. I can tail her for a while longer and see—”

“Nah. Forget it. Jesus, I sure feel dumb.” Douglas ripped the photographs into confetti. He tossed this into the water, where it formed a mantle that was quickly shredded by the waves that arced against the pier’s pilings. “What do I owe you, Mr. Cowley?” he asked. “What’s this dumb ass got to pay for not trusting the finest woman on earth?”

He took Cowley to Dillman’s on the corner of Main and Balboa Boulevard, and they sat at the snakelike bar with the locals, where they knocked back a couple of brews apiece. Douglas worked on his affability act, playing the abashed husband who suddenly realizes what a dickhead he’s been. He took all Donna’s actions over the past weeks and reinterpreted them for Cowley. The unexplained absences became the foundation of a treat she was planning for him: the purchase of a new car, perhaps; a trip to Europe: the refurbishing of his boat. The secretive telephone calls became messages from his children who were in the know. The new underwear metamorphosed into a display of her wish to make herself desirable for him, to work him out of his temporary impotence by giving him a renewed interest in her body. He felt like a total idiot, he told Cowley. Could they burn the damn negatives together?

They made a ceremony of it, torching the negatives of the pictures in the alley behind JJ’s Natural Haircutting. Afterward, Douglas drove in a haze to Newport Harbor High School. He sat numbly across the street from it. He waited two hours. Finally, he saw his youngest brother arrive for the afternoon’s coaching session, a basketball tucked under his arm and an athletic bag in his hand.

Michael, he thought. Returned from Greece this time, but always the prodigal son. Before Greece, it was a year with Greenpeace on the Rainbow Warrior. Before that, it was an expedition up the Amazon. And before that, it was marching against apartheid in South Africa. He had a resumé that would be the envy of any prepubescent kid out for a good time. He was Mr. Adventure, Mr. Irresponsibility, and Mr. Charm. He was Mr. Good Intentions without any follow-through. When a promise was due to be kept, he was out of sight, out of mind, and out of the country. But everyone loved the son of a bitch. He was forty years old, the baby of the Armstrong brothers, and he always got precisely what he wanted.

He wanted Donna now, the miserable bastard. No matter that she was his brother’s wife. That made having her just so much more fun.

Douglas felt ill. His guts rolled around like marbles in a bucket. Sweat broke out in patches on his body. He couldn’t go back to work like this. He reached for the phone and called his office.

He was sick, he told his secretary. Must have been something he ate for lunch. He was heading home. She could catch him there if anything came up.

In the house, he wandered from room to room. Donna wasn’t at home — wouldn’t be at home for hours — so he had plenty of time to consider what to do. His mind reproduced for him the pictures that Cowley had taken of Michael and Donna. His intellect deduced where they had been and what they’d been doing prior to those pictures being taken.

He went to his study. There, in a glass curio cabinet, his collection of ivory erotica mocked him. Miniature Asians posed in a variety of sexual postures, having themselves a roaring good time. He could see Michael and Donna’s features superimposed on the creamy faces of the figurines. They look pleasure at his expense. They justified their pleasure by using his failure. No limp dick here, Michael’s voice taunted. What’s the matter, big brother? Can’t hang on to your wife?

Douglas felt shattered. He told himself he could have handled her doing anything else, he could have handled her seeing anyone else. But not Michael, who had trailed him through life, making his mark in every area where Douglas had previously failed. In high school it had been in athletics and student government. In college it had been in the world of fraternities. As an adult it had been in embracing adventure rather than in tackling the grind of business. And now it was in proving to Donna what real manhood was all about.

Douglas could see them together as easily as he could see his pieces of erotica intertwined. Their bodies joined, their heads thrown back, their hands clasped, their hips grinding against each other. God, he thought. The pictures in his mind would drive him mad. He felt like killing.

The telephone company gave him the proof he required. He asked for a printout of the calls that had been made from his home. And when he received it, there was Michael’s number. Not once or twice, but repeatedly. All of the calls had been made when he — Douglas — wasn’t at home.

It was clever of Donna to use the nights when she knew Douglas would be doing his volunteer stint at the Newport suicide hotline. She knew he never missed his Wednesday evening shift, so important was it to him to have the hotline among his community commitments. She knew he was building a political profile to get himself elected to the city council, and the hotline was part of the picture of himself he wished to portray: Douglas Armstrong, husband, father, oilman, and compassionate listener to the emotionally distressed. He needed something to put into the balance against his environmental lapses. The hotline allowed him to say that while he may have spilled oil on a few lousy pelicans — not to mention some miserable otters — he would never let a human life hang there in jeopardy.

Donna had known he’d never skip even part of his evening shift, so she’d waited till then to make her calls to Michael. There they were on the printout, every one of them made between six and nine on a Wednesday night.

Okay, she liked Wednesday night so well. Wednesday night would be the night that he killed her.

He could hardly bear to be around her once he had the proof of her betrayal. She knew something was wrong between them because he didn’t want to touch her any longer. Their thrice-weekly attempted couplings — as disastrous as they’d been — fast became a thing of the past. Still, she carried on as if nothing and no one had come between them, sashaying through the bedroom in her Victoria’s Secret selection-of-the-night, trying to entice him into making a fool of himself so she could share the laughter with his brother Michael.

No way, baby, Douglas thought. You’ll be sorry you made a fool out of me.

When she finally cuddled next to him in bed and murmured. “Doug, is something wrong? You want to talk? You okay?” it was all he could do not to shove her from him. He wasn’t okay. He would never be okay again. But at least he’d be able to salvage a measure of his self-respect by giving the little bitch her due.

It was easy enough to plan once he decided on the very next Wednesday.

A trip to Radio Shack was all that was necessary. He chose the busiest one he could find, deep in the barrio in Santa Ana, and he deliberately took his time browsing until the youngest clerk with the most acne and the least amount of brainpower was available to wait on him. Then he made his purchase with cash: a call diverter, just the thing for those on-the-go SoCal folks who didn’t want to miss an incoming phone call. No answering machine for those types. This would divert a phone call from one number to another by means of a simple computer chip. Once Douglas programmed the diverter with the number he wanted incoming calls diverted to, he would have an alibi for the night of his wife’s murder. It was all so easy.

Donna had been a real numbskull to try to cheat on him. She had been a bigger numbskull to do her cheating on Wednesday nights because the fact of her doing it on Wednesday nights was what gave him the idea of how to snuff her. The volunteers on the hotline worked it in shifts. Generally there were two people present, each manning one of the telephone lines. But Newport Beach types actually didn’t feel suicidal very frequently, and if they did, they were more likely to go to Neiman-Marcus and buy their way out of their depression. Midweek especially was a slow time for the pill poppers and wrist slashers, so the hotline was manned on Wednesdays by only one person per shift.

Douglas used the days prior to Wednesday to get his timing down to a military precision. He chose eight-thirty as Donna’s death hour, which would give him time to sneak out of the hotline office, drive home, put out her lights, and get back to the hotline before the next shift arrived at nine. He was carving it out fairly thin and allowing only a five-minute margin of error, but he needed to do that in order to have a believable alibi once her body was found.

There could be neither noise nor blood, obviously. Noise would arouse the neighbors. Blood would damn him if he got so much as a drop on his clothes, DNA typing being what it was these days. So he chose his weapon carefully, aware of the irony of his choice. He would use the satin belt of one of her Victoria’s Secret slay-him-where-he-stands dressing gowns. She had half a dozen, so he would remove one of them in advance of the murder, separate it from its belt, dispose of it in a Dumpster behind the nearest Vons in advance of the killing — he liked that touch, getting rid of evidence before the crime, what killer ever thought of that? — and then use the belt to strangle his cheating wife on Wednesday night.

The call diverter would establish his alibi. He would take it to the suicide hotline, plug the phone into it, program the diverter with his cellular phone number, and thus appear to be in one location while his wife was being murdered in another. He made sure Donna was going to be at home by doing what he always did on Wednesdays: by phoning her from work before he left for the hotline.

“I feel like dogshit,” he told her at five-forty.

“Oh, Doug, no!” she replied. “Are you ill or just feeling depressed about—”

“I’m feeling punk,” he interrupted her. The last thing he wanted was to listen to her phony sympathy. “It may have been lunch.”

“What did you have?”

Nothing. He hadn’t eaten in two days. But he came up with shrimp because he’d gotten food poisoning from shrimp a few years back and he thought she might remember that, if she remembered anything at all about him at this point. He went on, “I’m going to try to get home early from the hotline. I may not be able to if I can’t pull in a substitute to take my shift. I’m heading over there now. If I can get a sub. I’ll be home pretty early.”

He could hear her attempt to hide dismay when she replied. “But Doug... I mean, what time do you think you’ll make it?”

“I don’t know. By eight at the latest. I hope. What difference does it make?”

“Oh. None at all, really. But I thought you might like dinner...”

What she really thought was how she was going to have to cancel her hot romp with his baby brother. Douglas smiled at the realization of how nicely he’d just unhooked her little caboose.

“Hell. I’m not hungry, Donna. I just want to go to bed if I can. You be there to rub my back? You going anywhere?”

“Of course not. Where would I be going? Doug, you sound strange. Is something wrong?”

Nothing was wrong, he told her. What he didn’t tell her was how right everything was, felt, and was going to be. He had her where he wanted her now: she’d be home, and she’d be alone. She might phone Michael and tell him that his brother was coming home early so their tryst was off, but even if she did that, Michael’s statement after her death would conflict with Douglas’s uninterrupted presence at the suicide hotline that night.

Douglas just had to make sure that he was back at the hotline with time to disassemble the call diverter. He’d get rid of it on the way home — nothing could be easier than flipping it into the trash behind the huge movie theater complex that was on his route from the hotline to Harbour Heights where he lived — and then he’d arrive at his usual time of nine-twenty to “discover” the murder of his beloved.

It was all so easy. And so much cleaner than divorcing the little whore.

He felt remarkably at peace, considering everything. He’d seen Thistle again and she’d held his Rolex, his wedding band, and his cufflinks to take her reading. She’d greeted him by telling him that his aura was strong and that she could feel the powder pulsing from him. And when she closed her eyes over his possessions, she’d said, “I feel a major change coming into your life, not-David. A change of location, perhaps, a change of climate. Are you taking a trip?”

He might be, he told her. He hadn’t had one in months. Did she have any suggested destinations?

“I see lights,” she responded, going her own way. “I see cameras. I see many faces. You’re surrounded by those you love.”

They’d be at Donna’s funeral, of course. And the press would cover it. He was somebody after all. They wouldn’t ignore the murder of Douglas Armstrong’s wife. As for Thistle, she’d find out who he really was if she read the paper or watched the local news. But that made no difference since he’d never mentioned Donna and since he’d have an alibi for the time of her death.

He arrived at the suicide hotline at five fifty-six. He was relieving a UCI psych student named Debbie who was eager enough to be gone. She said, “Only two calls, Mr. Armstrong. If your shift is like mine, I hope you brought something to read.”

He waved his copy of Money magazine and took her place at the desk. He waited ten minutes after she’d left before he went back out to his car to get the call diverter.

The hotline was located in the dock area of Newport, a maze of narrow one-way streets that traversed the top of Balboa Peninsula. By day, the streets’ antique stores, marine chandleries, and secondhand clothing boutiques attracted both locals and tourists. By night, the place was a ghost town, uninhabited except for the new-wave beatniks who visited a dive called the Alta Cafe three streets away, where anorexic girls dressed in black read poetry and strummed guitars. So no one was on the street to see Douglas fetch the call diverter from his Mercedes. And no one was on the street to see him leave the suicide hotline’s small cubbyhole behind the real estate office at eight-fifteen. And should any desperate individual call the hotline during his drive home, that call would be diverted onto his cellular phone and he could deal with it. God, the plan was perfect.

As he drove up the curving road that led to his house, Douglas thanked his stars that he’d chosen to live in an environment in which privacy was everything to the homeowners. Every estate sat, like Douglas’s, behind walls and gates, shielded by trees. On one day in ten, he might actually see another resident. Most of the time — like tonight — there was no one around.

Even if someone had seen his Mercedes sliding up the hill, however, it was January dark and his was just another luxury car in a community of Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, BMw’s, Lexuses, Range Rovers, and other Mercedes. Besides, he’d already decided that if he saw someone or something suspicious, he would just turn around, go back to the hotline, and wait for another Wednesday.

But he didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. He didn’t see anyone. Perhaps a few more cars were parked on the street, but even these were empty. He had the night to himself.

At the top of his drive, he shut off the engine and coasted to the house. It was dark inside, which told him that Donna was in the back, in their bedroom.

He needed her outside. The house was equipped with a security system that would do a bank vault proud, so he needed the killing to take place outside where a peeping Tom gone bazooka or a burglar or a serial killer might have lured her. He thought of Ted Bundy and how he’d snagged his victims by appealing to their maternal need to come to his aid. He’d go the Bundy route, he decided. Donna was nothing if not eager to help.

He got out of the car silently and paced over to the door. He rang the bell with the back of his hand, the better to leave no trace on the button. In less than ten seconds. Donna’s voice came over the intercom. “Yes?”

“Hi, babe,” he said. “My hands are full. Can you let me in?”

“Be a sec,” she told him.

He took the satin belt from his pocket as he waited. He pictured her route from the back of the house. He twisted the satin around his hands and snapped it tight. Once she opened the door, he’d have to move like lightning. He’d have only one chance to fling the cord around her neck. The advantage he already possessed was surprise.

He heard her footsteps on the limestone. He gripped the satin and prepared. He thought of Michael. He thought of her together with Michael. He thought of his Asian erotica. He thought of betrayal, failure, and trust. She deserved this. They both deserved it. He was only sorry he couldn’t kill Michael right now too.

When the door swung open, he heard her say, “Doug! I thought you said—”

And then he was on top of her. He leapt. He yanked the belt around her neck. He dragged her swiftly out of the house. He tightened it and tightened it and tightened it and tightened it. She was too startled to fight back. In the five seconds it took her to get her hands to the belt in a reflex attempt to pull it away from her throat, he had it digging into her skin so deeply that her scrabbling fingers could find no slip of material to grab on to.

He felt her go limp. He said, “Jesus. Yes. Yes.”

And then it happened.

The lights went on in the house. A mariachi band started playing. People shouted, “Surprise! Surprise! Sur—”

Douglas looked up, panting, from the body of his wife, into popping flashes and a video camcorder. The joyous shouting from within his house was cut off by a female shriek. He dropped Donna to the ground and stared without comprehension into the entry and beyond that the living room. There, at least two dozen people were gathered beneath a banner that said SURPRISE, DOUGIE! HAPPY FIVE-FIVE!

He saw the horrified faces of his brothers and their wives and children, of his own children, of his parents, of one of his former wives. Among them, his colleagues and his secretary. The chief of police. The mayor.

He thought, What is this, Donna? Some kind of joke?

And then he saw Michael coming from the direction of the kitchen. Michael with a birthday cake in his hands, Michael saying, “Did we surprise him. Donna? Poor Doug. I hope his heart—” And then saying nothing at all when he saw his brother and his brother’s wife.

Shit, Douglas thought. What have I done?

That, indeed, was the question he’d be answering for the rest of his life.