And When She Was Good (15 page)

And then her brain adds,
Shelley was murdered.

“It's a weird thing about the photo,” Jolson says. “It was on the seat beside her, in the car. Like it mattered. If it had been a suicide, it would be sentimental. But we never thought it was a suicide. And you know what? I don't think whoever did it wanted us to think it was a suicide. The person who killed her—this is either someone excessively stupid or someone who just doesn't give a shit that we know it's a murder. It was almost like he—or she—was offering us a little cover by putting her in the car, giving us some lead time. Very deliberate. So why would this person leave the photo there?”

Heloise maintains eye contact, unafraid to let Jolson see her disdain. Her complete lack of interest, which is not the same thing as disinterest.
Why the fuck would I know, asshole?

“Michelle Smith is connected to Valentine Deluca,” Jolson says. “So are you. I'm not sure anyone expected us to figure that out. But maybe they did and you're supposed to be able to tell us who the other woman is. What do you think, Heloise?”

“I don't know,” she says. “I'm not very good at things like this. That's why I'm not a detective.”

“But as a concerned citizen—”

“I'm not,” she says.

“You're not?”

Well, that had come out wrong.

“I'm very sorry someone has been murdered,” she says. “I wish I could help. But I know nothing about Michelle Smith.”

“Didn't even know she was visiting the man you visited?”

“I had no clue.” She's being honest there.

“There's nothing you want to tell me?”

She has stood to go, figuring it's the one thing she can do that Tyner can't.

“No, no. Come to think of it, there is one more thing.” Tyner has grabbed her elbow, his grip almost painful, but she won't stop talking. “I would hope that this woman's professional life wouldn't blind you to the fact that there could be other people who wanted to kill her, for other reasons. I'm afraid all you see is a dead prostitute.”

“And what do you see?”

“A dead woman.”

But also: a woman sitting on Val's lap the night he shot Martin, whispering in his ear, consoling him. Shelley. Yet it was meaningless. He never cared about Shelley.

So why was she on his visitors list? Why did someone leave a photograph of Shelley with Bettina?

“A dead woman,” she repeats. “It's tragic, and I hope you figure out what happened, but I really don't see how I can be of any help. I'm afraid this is nothing more than a coincidence.”

Someone's daughter, someone's sister, someone's mother.
That's what she'd said to the snooty woman in the Starbucks, the one who wanted Heloise to disavow the Suburban Madam when she was a stranger to her.

And now she has done exactly that.

2000

Y
ou got fat,” Val said.

“A little.”

“I never would have let you run yourself down that way.”

“Anxiety eating. I was so worried—”

“And now you're fat and I'm in prison for life, so all the eating in the world didn't solve a thing, did it?”

“No.” She hung her head as if ashamed, but she was relieved that Val believed her puffy body was the result of bad eating habits.

Scott had been born only seven weeks ago, on the final day of the year. “Oh, look,” the nurse said. “He showed up in time to give you a tax deduction. How considerate.”

It had been a long, hard labor, almost thirty-six hours, complicated by the fact that Hector decided to die in the middle of it, almost as if he were giving up his place in line to his grandson. Beth, forced to choose between life and death in a way almost no one ever is, not really, decided she'd rather be at Hector's bedside. Helen understood. Sort of. She even believed that it was probably the best choice, a dying man's final hours over a baby's seeming infinite number to come.

Besides, Beth might as well get used to not seeing Scott, because Heloise didn't intend for her mother to spend any time with him at all, once she was cleared by the doctors to head back to Baltimore.

Considerate, the nurse had said, and Scott was that. Ten pounds at birth, he began sleeping through the night before he was a month old. But the delivery hurt. Lord, it hurt. Heloise had believed there was no new pain or indignity that could be visited on her body at this point in her life. Men had pretty much punished every inch of it over the years, but here were completely new sensations. Perhaps there were always new pains, fresh injuries that one couldn't imagine.

But this was the only pain that brought joy. Pure, uncomplicated, terrifying joy. She would show her mother how it was done, what a woman was supposed to be to her child. And the first step of that was to cut her mother completely out of her life.

Val's case went to the jury about a week after Heloise brought Scott home. They deliberated for three days, which his lawyer thought a good sign. But the jurors returned a guilty verdict, and he was given the death penalty. The news jolted her. She realized she didn't want Val to die. She just wanted him to stay inside forever and ever.

The news jolted Val, too. He was furious, but his anger had nowhere to go. George I was in prison, somewhere on the Eastern Shore. That didn't mean he was safe from Val's wrath, or so Val said, but there would be no face-to-face retribution. The confidential informant had died in the autumn, as Tom had promised. Bettina, the fake informant to the fake informant, was long gone, almost certainly dead from her own bad habits. Still, Val focused angrily on her. How could she have known where he had hidden the gun? She was an idiot. Had Helen ever noticed her looking for anything in the garden?

She almost started to say,
But it wasn't in the garden—it was in a copse of trees at the edge of the property.
She could no longer remember if that information had been shared, discussed. Would she know that? Should she know that?

“Stupid people make discoveries all the time,” she offered instead. “They just don't see the bigger picture. That's what makes them stupid.”

He liked this answer. It fit with Val's sense of himself—a smart person who saw the big picture and the tiny details. No one had outwitted him. He had just been unlucky.

“So what are you going to do?” he asked Helen.

“Figure out a way to make a living.” She remembered that Val thought she'd been doing that all along. “I'm not cut out for the street life, Val. I'm just not. I stayed independent, thinking you would be free, but now—” She shrugged. She noticed a dampness in her bra and prayed that she wouldn't spurt breast milk in front of Val. She had fed Scott before she left her mother's house, pumped in a truck-stop restroom. She hunched over, as if ashamed of her body.

Val gave her an appraising look. “You doing as well as you used to?”

“No.” That was honest at least.

“You ought to consider moving into the management side of things.”

“You mean—” They had never used the word “pimp.” Val found it undignified. Not to mention incomplete. He had a lot of operations going. His hospitality business—his term—was only one facet. Again, his term.

“You mean do what you did?”

“No, that's the wrong model for you. How are you going to offer protection? Or intimidate anyone? If you tried to run a straightforward business like mine, the girls would end up ripping you off because there would be no downside to it.”

“I'm not soft.”

“No, you're not. But you don't scare people either. Anyway, I've been thinking. I have a lot of time to think. You know this Amazon.com?”

She was surprised he did. Why would Val know about a bookstore, much less an online enterprise? He knew almost nothing about computers.

“A guy in here, he told me about it. The business model was really simple. They started with books because they're portable, easy to ship, never spoil. But now they're moving into all sorts of things. They got an auction site, they're selling CDs now. They're going to sell everything one day.”

She couldn't follow his train of thought.

“It's the future,” he said. “And it's perfect for escort services. I'll show you how to do it—in exchange for a share.” A beat. “A big share. A forever share.”

“Why do you need money?”

“Because I'm not going to be in here forever.” Val had high hopes for his appeal, too high in almost everyone's opinion. Only Helen would be unsurprised when he got his death penalty knocked down to life. Unsurprised and strangely relieved.

At the time Helen didn't even own a computer. She couldn't begin to understand how she would set up a Web site, generate traffic to a site without risk. She and Val agreed that she should apprentice herself to someone who was beginning to make use of these tools—then steal every idea and customer she could.

Her unwitting mentor called herself Madame Dundee. She worked out of a Catonsville storefront that did psychic readings. That was clever, Helen had to give her that. Madame Dundee's Web site asked all sorts of questions about “love”:
Have you met your true love? What will she look like? How will you know her?
The use of the feminine pronouns should have been a tip-off; men do not go to psychics asking questions about love. Men who contacted the service were asked to come in for a reading. Madame Dundee had a special tarot deck, featuring photographs of her girls. She laid out the cards in the traditional format, and the gentleman indicated which card was to his liking. He picked a girl and a service.

“Aw, the Queen of Cups,” she might say, “and the Hanged Man. Yes, I see a big love in your future.”

The man, if he was a return customer, would then be ushered into a lounge behind the parlor, meet his girl, and go upstairs. It was an all-cash business, which made it easier for the girls to earn extra behind Madame Dundee's back. Helen was not one of the more popular ones, not at first, which was new and humbling for her. Val encouraged her not to brood on the problem but to address it as she would a bad evaluation from a boss. What could she do better?

She lost her pregnancy weight and used her earnings to improve herself as she could. Her teeth had never been properly cared for. She got them whitened but decided against veneers. The idea of taking one's real teeth down to stubs to make them look healthy—the paradox gave her chills. She began getting regular facials, expensive treatments for her skin. Her skin was her business, her business was her skin. If she had been motivated by sheer vanity alone, she never would have taken the time, much less the money, to do these things. But one had to reinvest capital. Helen put her money into herself and waited, knowing that her time would come.

Madame Dundee was busted, eventually. She made the mistake of not reporting the bulk of her income, thinking her all-cash enterprise would protect her. Helen, meanwhile, was dutifully filing quarterly taxes, claiming she was employed as a freelance masseuse. She didn't report all her income, but she reported most of it.

“Proving someone is having money for sex is hard,” Val counseled her. “But mail fraud, income-tax evasion—those things are easier to prove and carry real time. Don't be stupid. Don't be greedy.”

With Madame Dundee busted, it was time for Helen to make her move. She was ready now. Val agreed. But she didn't want to do it as Madame Dundee had, maintaining a physical space. It was too much of a risk. It was also too much overhead. But she also would never conduct business in her home, not with Scott there. She needed to use hotels, or have clients who could afford them.

“This is what you do,” Val told her. He had ideas about everything. She leaned her head toward the glass, eager to absorb what he knew. Unconsciously he mirrored her posture, and their foreheads inclined toward each other, only the glass between them. Val was not in prison, Helen told herself, because he was stupid about business. He was here because had lost his temper over something silly and inconsequential. Men and their stupid pride. If Helen had picked up a gun every time her pride had been wounded, she would have killed half a dozen or so people by now.
Bam-bam,
Daddy.
Bam-bam,
Barbara Lewis, and here's a volley of shots for your horrible sons, who yell at me in the street. (She would spare the youngest, Meghan, who was too polite or too scared to taunt her.)
Bam,
Billy, and maybe Billy's mother, too.
Bam,
Bettina, for trying to beat her up that time, and
Bam
for every girl who thought she could displace Helen as Val's favorite.

Bam,
Val.

But she had as good as killed him when she put him here. Did that make it hypocritical to take his advice, to let him instruct her in how to set up her own illegal enterprise?

Probably. But if there were no hypocrisy in the world, there wouldn't be any prostitutes.

M
ONDAY,
O
CTOBER 17

T
he restaurant on Thirty-ninth Street has had many lives, but Heloise still remembers it as Jeannier's. Val took her there once, as a treat. It was an odd thing for him to do. He didn't like to go out, he didn't care about food, and he wasn't particularly interested in making her happy. But he had been away for almost a month, and he seemed unusually solicitous upon his return. So he took her to Jeannier's, where he solved the problem of not being able to read the menu by telling the waiter to bring whatever he thought best, the specialties of the house. These included sweetbreads, which neither Val nor Heloise had ever had. They liked them, and Heloise, still Helen, decided to risk appearing ignorant and ask if the “bread” was the crispy coating. Once the dish was explained to her, she felt queasy. Val teased her. “You liked it going down,” he said. “Why does knowing what it is change that?”

A good question, in all things.

But now Jeannier's is Italian, less grand to her eye, although perhaps that's a reflection on her, the restaurants she has seen, the meals she has eaten since that night almost thirteen years ago. She wonders why Sophie has chosen this particular place. She thought she would prefer the most expensive spot possible, soak Heloise for the cost of a pricey meal with wine. Heloise hadn't wanted a meal at all, only a meeting, and had asked if they could do it at lunch. Sophie insisted on dinner. She is dictating all the terms—the place, the time.

Sophie arrives twenty minutes late. Her apartment is around the corner; she could have crawled here in that amount of time. She orders a martini. Heloise, a forty-minute drive home looming at the end of the meal, is allowing herself one glass of wine, no more.

“You look well,” she tells Sophie.

“Not really. I just don't look as sick as you think I should,” Sophie says.

She really does look fine. If one didn't know of Sophie's former glory, she might even seem reasonably attractive. But the lusciousness is gone. She's like a piece of fruit on its way to being overripe. There's no visible decay, but you wouldn't want to bite into her for fear that the sensation would be mushy and mealy.

“Leo tells me you want workers' comp.” Heloise has decided, for now, not to mention what else transpired during Leo's visit.

“I'm entitled, under the law. It was a direct consequence of my work for you.”

“Not necessarily. You know that none of your clients came back positive, right?”

“Did everyone get tested?”

Sophie has her there, not that Heloise will ever admit it. “The bottom line is, it's incumbent on you to prove that this is work-related, and you can't do that. It's like if someone threw out his back at home, he can't get compensation from his employer just because he works on a loading dock.”

“I didn't have any contact that wasn't through the firm,” Sophie says. “Firm” is the nomenclature on which Heloise has always insisted. It's a good sign, she thinks, that Sophie is still using it.

“Did you share needles?”

“I don't use needles. You know I'm not a junkie.”

Heloise did know. Like Val, she won't tolerate drug use among her employees. Still, a few girls have slipped through from time to time.

“I've gone over this with Leo,” Sophie continues. “Workers' comp is my best bet. It's for life. No one can ever take it away from me.”

“It's for life if you can prove a permanent disability,” says Heloise, who has studied the law in preparation for this discussion. She quotes from the state Web site: “ ‘Both arms, both eyes, both feet, both hands, both legs; or a combination of any two of the following: an arm, eye, foot, hand or leg.' I don't think vagina counts.”

“Well, it would be interesting to find out, don't you think? Besides, it's my only option. Unless”—she gives Heloise her best look, the one that once melted every man and almost every woman in her life—“you want to give me a large enough cash settlement so I won't have to do that.”

“You're blackmailing me.”

“I don't see it that way. I am entitled to workers' comp. I got sick on the job. You're lucky I don't go to one of the big asbestos lawyers, start a class-action suit.”

“I'm not Beth Steel, Sophie. If you go to the state, I'll be shut down, and then there's no money for anyone.”

“Then I guess you'd better come up with a solution.”

Sophie has ordered an enormous amount of food—two appetizers, a salad, and an entrée—and she seems to take great pleasure, as the meal proceeds, in wasting it all, taking a bite here and there, mucking her fork through things so they can't even be carried away in doggie bags. She's already establishing her right to use Heloise's money as she sees fit. Few things make Heloise angrier than someone presuming to waste anything of hers—money, time, energy.

“And what if the business just goes away?”

Sophie looks scornful. “What else would you do? You didn't even graduate high school.”

Heloise had been parrying, trying to find a foothold in the argument. Val persuaded her a long time ago that no one can afford to be blackmailed, that you have to find a way to end the threat before it gets too far. But what leverage does she have over Sophie?

“Do your parents know you're ill?”

“I don't talk to them anymore.”

This is sadly typical, a commonality among almost every girl who has worked for her. They're not close to their parents. To anyone. It's true of Heloise, too.

“Sophie, I understand that you're scared. You think money will make you less fearful, but I simply don't have it. The firm isn't as profitable as you think.”

“Leo says you live pretty well.”

Ah, here it is. She is dealing with two punks, not one. “What else does Leo say?”

Sophie leans across the table. “He says he loves me. He says he'll do whatever he can to help me. He says it even when I'm
not
blowing him.”

“Isn't he scared of being infected?”

“We practice safe sex.”

“If only you had done the same when you were working.”

“Don't be so prim, Heloise. You all but told me it was a way to sweeten what I earned, to make up for the obscene cut you take.”

“It's not obscene. I provide a lot for what I take. The clients, security. All the overhead is on me.”

“Yes, you keep the girls in the dark as much as possible. We don't know one another, can never compare notes. Divide and conquer, right? But Leo knows everything.”

“Leo knows what's on the ledger. That's all. He's seen the books for a lobbying firm and a personal shopping service.”

“It's enough.”

“I don't think so.”

“Well, I guess we'll find out, won't we? I want a half million, Heloise—and for you to continue paying for my meds, whatever happens. My meds, then a monthly stipend. I know you don't have that much cash on hand, but Leo thinks the house will get that much, and you don't have a huge mortgage.”

“Where will I live?”

“Not my problem,” Sophie said. “Figure out a way to meet my demands by Thanksgiving or I file a claim with workers' comp. Look, I'm not stupid. I know I won't get anything from the state. But I will get famous. The story will go everywhere—the sex worker with HIV, demanding equal treatment under the law. You could argue that I should go straight to Plan B, not ever bother messing with you, that's it more lucrative for me in the long run.”

“How so?”

“A book deal, a movie deal, who knows? The sky's the limit.”

She orders dessert, tiramisu, and takes exactly one bite from one ladyfinger.

H
eloise calls Leo on the drive home. She says his services will no longer be required. Attempted rape might have been overlooked if he'd apologized convincingly, but telling someone about her personal finances is unforgivable. Tomorrow she will have Tyner follow up, send Leo a scary-proper letter reminding him of the confidentiality agreement he signed when she hired him. She doesn't vent or say anything about the meeting with Sophie. She doesn't tell him he's an idiot, that she now realizes Sophie will use him up and throw him away like the condoms she should have used for her work.

At home, Scott wants to show her things he has found on YouTube, including a lot of programs he loved when he was younger. One of the hardest things about raising Scott was having no real base on which to build, no role model. That had been one of the rare advantages of having her half sister Meghan living nearby. Meghan was a wretched person but a good mother, a combination that Heloise had not realized was possible. She wondered if that meant it was possible to be a good person and a wretched mother. Possibly, although she doubts it.

As a self-taught mother, she was a reborn child. She and Scott had watched things and read things that seemed odd to others, such as the Mary Martin version of
Peter Pan.
Now someone had transferred it to YouTube, complete if fuzzy in picture and sound, and Scott was delighted with this bit of piracy about pirates, so delighted that Heloise didn't want to lecture him about property rights. He showed her their favorite part of all, Captain Hook's tarantella. She had forgotten his little dip of melancholia in the middle, his realization that he could be victorious but still not be beloved. “That's where the canker g-naws.”

“G-naws,” Scott repeats, knowing it is one of her favorite lines, and she tries to smile, focus on him, but her mind keeps drifting back to Sophie. The dig about her education is what really hurt. For almost a decade, she has helped girls fund and finish the education she was denied. True, she never got a real M.B.A., but she had taken courses online and worked her way through list after list of so-called Great Books. She read the newspaper carefully. She was better informed on current events than almost anyone she knew. To have Sophie laugh at her, to throw her lack of formal education in her face—

That's where the canker gnaws.

She wanders over to the Mom cubbyhole. The envelope from Pennsylvania, the one she is sure she shoved into a drawer, is on top. It hasn't been opened, best she can tell. Was Scott snooping? Audrey? It didn't seem like something either one would do. She plays with the glue on the seal. It opens with suspicious ease, but—it's a cheap envelope. Of course her mother would buy a cheap envelope. Heloise looks at the handwriting, so neat and orderly, a relic of days when penmanship was an entry on one's report card. The words suck her in; she reads in spite of herself.

Shit.

“Mom—that's a five-dollar fine,” Scott says, pointing to the curse jar instituted by Audrey. Heloise wasn't even aware that she had spoken out loud.

“Bath time,” she says.

“Five-dollar curse word,” Scott replies, making her laugh. Audrey doesn't think it's funny at all when Scott does that—“It's just like saying the curse, if you ask me”—but Heloise can't help admiring the way he has figured out the loophole in Audrey's plan. It's not as if profanity is a problem in this household.

Once she hears the water running, she picks up the phone and calls Audrey, who is enjoying her girl's night out—one girl, singular, an evening that usually revolves around Chick-fil-A and a movie—and asks her to juggle the schedule for the day after next, subbing out Heloise's two appointments, picking up Scott from soccer, although chances are she will return in time. Lord, she hopes it doesn't take more than a few hours.

“Where are you going?” Audrey asks, probably stunned that Heloise would allow any of her girls to take on these two appointments, regulars of whom she's quite fond.

Where indeed? She doesn't even want to say the town's name, much less refer to it as home. “I have to settle an old account,” she says at last.