38
Two days later, I took Mama’s car to work—I told her I would need to drive press releases out to different media outlets, which wasn’t a lie. I did that in the morning. What I didn’t tell her was that I would also be staked out in her car with a scarf over my hair and sunglasses on outside Larry’s office, waiting for Linda to come out on her lunch break. Assuming she wasn’t making it a “working” lunch in the loosest of all possible interpretations.
I had no idea what her status was with Larry. I had stopped by to see Nancy the day before. With anyone else, I would have beaten around the bush, but I think that’s the true definition of friendship—where you can ask absolutely anything with no qualifying information needed.
“I don’t know,” Nancy said. “I told Arnie that if he so much as mentioned that jerk’s name again, he’d be crashing on Larry’s couch instead of the other way around.”
“When was that?”
“Right after Larry left.”
And even if he had still been seeing her, a lot could change in a couple of months.
But without warning, Nancy stood up and crossed to the kitchen phone. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“Getting your answer.”
I was by her side in a flash. “You can’t call Larry!”
She stopped dialing. “Have you lost your mind? I’m calling Arnie.”
“Oh,” I said weakly, sinking into the chair closest to the phone.
She told the secretary she needed to speak to her husband and tapped her foot impatiently while she waited. “Get him out of his meeting,” she said. “Yes, it’s an emergency.”
“It’s not an emergency,” I whispered.
Nancy held her hand over the mouthpiece. “How many times have I seen you in the last two months?”
I had picked the kids up from her house a couple of times after my mother had dropped them off there. And we’d met up at the playground a few times. And the Fourth of July. But when you considered that we were at each other’s houses at least four times a week before I started working ...
“Arnie,” she said into the phone. “Is Larry still fooling around with his secretary?” She waited while he said something. “The kids are fine. But I need to know about Larry.” Another pause. “Yes, it’s an emergency. Never you mind why.” I could hear a muffled response and fought the urge to crowd around the receiver with Nancy. “I know I said that, but now I’m asking.” More muffled words. “Uh-huh. Thanks. That’s all I needed.” She hung up without saying goodbye.
“He said yes. Larry made some comment about convenience.” She scrunched up her nose. “Listen, if the divorce isn’t going well, I’ve got a backyard and a shovel.” Her face lit up as an idea hit her. “If we put a pool in over the body, they’ll never find him.”
I laughed, despite myself. Getting Linda to testify would have been a lot easier if he had broken things off. But that shovel was a great plan B.
Which led to me sitting outside Larry’s office at lunchtime in my admittedly shabby disguise.
I had been there the better part of an hour, ducking behind the steering wheel whenever anyone I recognized walked out, before Linda’s blonde bob came into view. I slipped out of the car as she passed it and followed her down the block and around the corner before removing my scarf and calling her name.
She turned around, a smile on her lips, which froze and then died as she recognized me. Then she glanced over her shoulder and turned one foot to flee. “Stop,” I said, reaching out and grabbing her wrist.
“Let me go!”
I dropped her wrist. “Don’t run. I just need to talk to you.”
“I have nothing to say,” she said, starting to walk away.
“Linda,” I said, “I need your help. You owe me that much.”
She stopped walking but didn’t look at me. “I don’t owe you anything.”
“How about my kids, then?”
Her shoulders dropped.
“Look,” I said, “I’m not here to argue with you. If you want Larry that bad, you can have him. But I do need your help first—and actually it helps you too. He’ll be free sooner.”
At that, she finally turned around, her brows together in a wary expression. “What do you want?” she asked.
I took a deep breath. “I want you to testify that he committed adultery.”
Her eyes widened. “I can’t do that.”
“Why not? It’s the truth. And if you don’t, it’ll be another year before he’s single.”
“I don’t care about that,” she said, and my heart sank. Of course she didn’t care. If she was willing to have an affair while he was married with kids, why would another year matter? But when I met her eyes, there was something pitiful in them. And as much as I wanted to hate her, it was hard to hate someone who looked that pathetic and scared.
“Then what’s the problem?” I asked, gentler this time. Not because I felt any real sympathy for her, but my mother always said you caught more flies with honey than with vinegar.
For a few seconds that felt like an eternity, she didn’t reply, and I was worried she was going to say she was in love with him. There would be no reasoning with that kind of ridiculousness. Never mind that I once thought I was in love with him too. That was a different person. A different life.
“He’ll fire me,” she whispered.
“That’s all?” I asked with a chuckle. “That’s easy. You can come work for Michael, then.”
She looked suspicious. “Why would you do that?”
I exhaled. “Because I need the divorce to go through. And Larry is threatening to take the kids.”
Her expression turned to unsure. It was helpful that she had no poker face. She was maybe twenty-two or twenty-three, but I doubted I had ever been that naive, even at her age. “That doesn’t sound like Larry.”
No. It didn’t sound like the Larry I had thought I knew a few months earlier. “Larry cares about Larry,” I said, trying to keep the bitterness out of my voice. “And he wants to win this campaign. He’s threatening me so I’ll drop out, and Michael will lose.”
“Then just do that,” she said. “Isn’t that easier?”
I looked at this girl. I remembered when Larry hired her—she had to have been fresh out of high school then. Which should have set off a warning bell, as she couldn’t have possibly gone to secretarial school. I remarked on how pretty she was, but I was more worried about Sam or someone else in the office being lecherous. Yes, I had been in the exhausted haze of new motherhood, but Larry was attentive back then. Perhaps attentive wasn’t the right word as that attentiveness was primarily in the bedroom. But I had been secure in our marital life, and it never occurred to me that he would be the problem.
But age and appearance were far from the biggest difference between us if that was her suggestion.
I shook my head. “I can’t do that. I may have taken the job to get back at Larry, but it’s not about that now.”
She nodded knowingly. “I heard him talking to Sam about that.”
I recoiled. “About what?”
“Your affair with him.”
An alarm rang in my head, though I didn’t connect the dots just then.
“There’s no affair,” I said. “I’m there because he’s a good person. He cares about making the world better more than about himself. He’s exactly who we want making decisions for our country.”
Her mouth opened, and then she shut it again. She did this twice more as she wrestled with something, and for a few seconds, I held out hope.
“No,” she said. “I’m sorry. I can’t help you.” And she turned to walk away.
I grabbed her arm one more time. “Linda,” I said. “Think about it. He’d be free. You could marry him. Start your own family.”
She looked back at me, her face naked of any real emotion. “He’d leave me if I helped you. If he asked me to testify, I’d do it. But if I help you, I lose everything.”
I released her arm and stood on the sidewalk as she walked away from me.
Sinking onto a nearby bench, I put my head in my hands. And I wished that tears would come. Anything to help wash this feeling of dread from my chest.
But eventually, I picked my head up. I had to get the Post endorsement. And if the PI hadn’t turned anything up by the time I did, that would have to be enough. I would have to quit.
I just hoped that doing enough for Michael wasn’t the same as doing too much for Larry to back off.
Which was a problem for another day. Right now, I needed to talk to my mother and make sure she had called Anna Wainwright.