44. Joy and Happiness
Roman
When the phone rang, I wanted to turn it off and roll over again, because I’d been fathoms deep. I couldn’t remember why I felt so good, and then I did, because I was pressed up against something very sweet and very curvy. Soft skin. Soft hair. In fact—Summer.
I said, “Bloody spam calls. Ignore it,” held her closer, and wondered, in a sleepy sort of way, whether I most wanted to start her up again or fall asleep again. Proof that I was nearly forty, you’re thinking, and you could be right, but the woman had wrecked me.
I didn’t get to decide, because she was sitting up in bed, saying, “Voicemail. Delilah.”
I shoved up myself, the phone rang again, and Summer said, “Hi. Didn’t you get my text? Are you OK?” A pause, and she said, “I’m fine. I told you I was fine. What time is it? Four?” Now, she was out of bed.
“Put it on speaker,” I said. Summer said, “What?” so I repeated it, and added, “If something’s wrong, you’ll need my help.”
“Oh,” she said. “Hang on.”
Delilah’s perky-squirrel voice, not sounding one bit panicked. “So Roman rented this five-bedroom house. This beachfront house, which the new friends say is probably the most expensive holiday rental in Mount Maunganui, which is already not one bit cheap, and you’re not even here? This was just your changing room? Why, exactly?”
I thought, Because we couldn’t wait, and because it’s too bloody hard for Summer to feel swept away by passion when she’s wondering every minute whether that’s you at the door. Summer didn’t answer, which was probably wise, but said, “Maybe tell me why you’re calling me at four in the morning, unless you actually are worried about me.”
“Well, see,” Delilah said, “I may have a tiny problem. Or Roman may. I’m guessing he’s going to pay extra for this. Oh, well, right? Since he’s good for the most expensive rental in town and then doesn’t even stay in it?”
“Oh, no,” Summer said. “What did you do? I told you?—”
“Who, me?” The squirrel, wrinkling her nose in innocent bewilderment. “I didn’t do anything except rescue somebody who needed rescuing. And bring a couple other people back with us, but that was totally necessary. We couldn’t just leave her there!”
“But Roman told you,” Summer said. “No parties.”
“It’s not exactly what you’d call a party,” Delilah said. “Or maybe it’s a Roman party. Not the man, the civilization. With the barfing and all.”
“I am so,so sorry about this,” Summer was still saying ten minutes later, as I pulled the car out onto the deserted road. Chilly, empty, and lonely out here in the predawn darkness, not much at all like holding a warm, curvy, delicious woman close in a king-sized bed. A woman who loved having her neck and shoulders and back kissed, as I now knew, and I wasn’t doing it.
“I’m almost used to it by now,” I said. “Besides, ‘The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.’ Thich Nhat Hahn.”
“I have a feeling you’re going to have to be really attentive this time,” she said. “But if you have to pay for extra cleanup, I’ll pay you back.” When I sighed, she went on, “Not up for discussion. Esther sent me four firms that are looking for a software engineer with my kind of experience, which means I could actually be making some decent money in another week or so. Well, if they don’t care about the fraud charges, but I still have an emergency fund. I can?—”
I said, “I liked you better naked.” When she uttered something inarticulate and outraged, I said, “Let’s see what happened first. If there’s been a murder, you can apologize like mad whilst I try to dredge up some joy and happiness.”
When we got back to the big house on the beach, most of the lights appeared to be on, to my non-surprise. And when I came through the door, there were signs of occupancy. Specifically, retching. And Delilah’s voice saying, “That’s the way. Let it all out.” Also two young blokes, one dark and one fair, but both bleary-eyed and possibly not unaffected by alcohol, standing in the passage. When we came in, the fair one piped up with, “Hi. Bloody cock-up here. Give us a lift, mate?”
I said, “No,” and walked past them. Summer, though, stopped and said, “You need to go home.”
“The point, isn’t it,” the fair kid said, blinking some more. “Got no way to get there.”
“Uber,” she said. “The bus. Or you could always walk.”
“Can’t walk to bloody Tauranga,” the fair kid said.
“Then why did you come here in the first place?” Summer asked. “Also, of course you can walk it.”
I needed to chuck them out, but I also needed to find out what was going on. I didn’t need to find out why it smelled like vomit, because there was only one reason for that. Vomit.
“We were helping,” the fair kid said. “Helping, uh …” He waved an arm. “Her.”
“Erica,” the dark kid said.
Right. I was back again. “Out,” I said.
“Mate,” the fair kid whined. The dark one just blinked at me, his hair sticking out at mad angles. They’d both clearly been asleep.
“Out,” I said. “You’re not helping. You’re just standing here. Call your parents. Call a friend. Walk it. Out.”
“Harsh,” the fair kid said, but they went, and the door slammed behind them. Two down.
I looked at Summer. “For a woman who keeps telling me how low-drama and average she is, you’ve made my life pretty interesting. But I reckon I’ll take it. Also, we didn’t talk about birth control. Remind me to bring that up later, because I don’t think once is going to be nearly enough.”
Weirdly, the color drained out of her face. She stared at me, then shook herself and said, “I need to go see what’s happening.”
She followed the noise—and the smell—into one of the formerly unused bedrooms, which would probably require fumigation, and I followed her. We found a girl being sick into the toilet like it wasn’t anything close to the first time, and Delilah on her knees, holding back the girl’s long dark hair. I waited until she was done, then said, “This would be why I said no parties.”
Delilah said, “I called the cops.”
I hadn’t thought there was any way this could get more interesting, in the wrong sense of the word, but that was one. “Why?”
“She was completely out of it,” Delilah said. “That’s why I brought her back here. Give me a break. I heard you, OK? We’d only been at the bar maybe an hour, and it was only about ten. The rest of us were playing darts, but she was talking to this other guy. Older guy. Hot, but kind of like Darryl Harshbarger from the trailer park, you know?”
Summer said, “Well, yeah, Darryl.”
The girl said, “Uggghh,” dropped the toilet seat, and laid her cheek down on it as she moaned, “I’m so sick.”
“Oh, you poor thing.” Summer wet a couple of facecloths, crouched down in her pretty dress and pretty shoes, wiped the girl’s mouth, then folded the other cloth and pressed it to her forehead. “You’re going to be all right. We’ve got you.”
Delilah said, “She was stumbling around, kind of floppy, like she was seriously about to pass out, so I went over there to check and the Darryl-type guy said she’d had too much to drink and he’d take her home, so I said, no, I’d take her home, and he said, ‘What the fuck is it to you?’ and I said, ‘She’s my friend, that’s what’—well, not exactly, but you know, girl code—and then this guy Colin—where is he, by the way? He said he had to get home, and I said you’d pay for an Uber, Roman, because he’s broke and he did help—came over to say he’d come with me, even though he was drunk, and then this other guy, called something weird like Baz, said he’d come too. Nobody else was helping, so what was I supposed to do? She weighs about forty pounds more than me—sorry, Erica—and I couldn’t have carried her or even pulled her out of an Uber. I could have called you, of course, but it seems to me that would’ve been a very bad idea. Aren’t you glad I didn’t?”
“Yes,” I said.
Delilah said, “I thought you’d see it that way. The boys sort of half-carried her back here between them, and I stuck her in a bedroom to sleep it off and went and made tea for them, because that’s what you do in this country, right? Make tea? But when I came down again, they were asleep in the other bedroom, so I figured, hey, they’re not causing any trouble. It’s not a party if people are just sleeping! So I went to bed, too, but then Erica—I think Colin has a crush on her, which was why he helped—anyway, she woke up about an hour ago, and she’s been sick ever since. Really sick.” Which was when Erica banged the toilet lid up and the retching started again, with Summer holding back her hair this time. When it was over and Summer was repeating the facecloth routine, Delilah said, “The thing is—she doesn’t remember any of it, and looking back, she didn’t have time to get that drunk. She wasn’t drunk at all before the bar, and we weren’t there that long. So I thought of roofies, right? I mean, from what I’ve read, because I wasn’t old enough to drink in bars in Seattle. I did some drinking at parties—with friends, not assholes, so stop looking like that. I was a senior in high school! But I am modestly aware of the dangers of modern life. So I called the cops.”
The faint, two-toned sound of a siren outside, and Summer said calmly, “You should go meet them, Roman, and bring them in here. You’re better at seeming in charge than I am.”
“Beginning to doubt that I’m better at actually being in charge, though,” I said.
“Ha,” Summer said. “Erica probably does need to go to hospital for a blood test or whatever they do, though, and to get rehydrated. Did you ring her parents, Delilah?”
“No,” Delilah said. “She was too sick, and besides, I didn’t want to get her in trouble. She barfed in the bed, too, by the way, and there’s some stuff on the floor. I would’ve cleaned up, but, you know, I was helping her. Plus, gross. I tried to wake the boys up to do it, but?—”
“OK,” Summer said. “I’ll deal with that. We’ll see what the cops say, but you did right. Oh, Erica, sweetheart. I’m so sorry.” Erica had raised a red, tear-stained face, and a more miserable sight you couldn’t imagine. “You’re the witness,” Summer told Delilah, “so you’re going to need to talk to them. Meanwhile, I’m going to start cleaning this up. We’re here another night, and anyway, Roman’s not paying for anything extra if I can help it.”
“What about the boys?” Delilah asked.
“Roman and I threw them out,” Summer said.
“But I told them Roman would pay for an Uber!” Delilah said.
“Then they’ve just learned one of life’s important lessons,” Summer said as the doorbell rang. “Don’t drink too much if you don’t have a way to get home.”
Not what I’d had in mind for this night, but nothing had gone to plan in the weeks since I’d met Summer, so no difference there. The worst part was watching her go straight back into I’ll-fix-this mode. The minute the ambos summoned by the cops took Erica away, while the cops were still standing there, in fact, Summer was saying, “She’s going to need somebody there with her. Too scary to be in the hospital alone. Can you drive Delilah there, Roman? Try to get her parents’ number from her, Delilah, because they’re probably frantic by now if she still lives at home. I have no idea how old she is.”
“Hard to tell when somebody’s barfing,” Delilah said helpfully.
“Anyway,” Summer said, “when you get back from dropping off Delilah, Roman, you can go back to sleep, so that’s one good thing. She can Uber back. Give Roman back his credit card, though, Delilah.” She’d already bunged the girl’s sheets into the washing machine, in fact, and had the duvet cover off. Now, she sniffed the duvet itself, made a face, and said, “Right. That’s another load.”
The older of the two cops, who were standing in the bathroom with Delilah and me, making it pretty crowded, said, “Before you start on any of that, we’ll need information from all of you.”
Summer said, “Oh. Right. Sorry.”
When I gave the cop my name, he looked at me from under some eyebrows that probably had their own postcode and asked, “Where were you at the time this happened, sir? At the bar with the girls?” His body language shifted, too, as if he were assessing my threat potential.
Which was his job. Breathe in, breathe out.
I said, “I was somewhere else for the night. Not with them.”
Summer said, “He wasn’t there or here.”
“Pardon?” the cop asked.
“At the bar or here at the house,” Summer said. “Neither was I. We’d only just got here when you showed up. Didn’t you tell them, Delilah?”
Delilah said, “What, I was supposed to get my statement letter-perfect? Hey, I’ve been up half the night, and besides, doesn’t that just make the cops think you’re lying? Dude,” she told the cop, “I told you which bar. Why aren’t you over there? I told you those two guys helped me get her home, too, not Roman. What, I made them up?”
“And you don’t know their names,” the cop said.
“Yes, I do,” Delilah said. “Colin and Baz. There you go. I told you.”
“Their surnames,” the cop said.
“No,” Delilah said. “We didn’t exchange passports and life stories. We were at the beach, and then playing darts. Go look at the bed they used if you don’t believe me. Sorry, Summer, but they left kind of a mess in the bathroom, too.” Of course they had.
“And your permanent address is in …” The cop turned back a few pages in his notepad. He was one of those deliberate fellas, the kind where you want to finish his sentences for him.
Delilah did just that, in fact. “Dunedin. Not exactly permanent, though.”
“Where in Dunedin?”
Delilah said, “It’s been about one week. I don’t have the address memorized. Why are we still talking about this? Who cares?”
Summer said, “Hang on,” stopped pouring toilet cleaner into the bowl, and checked her phone. “Here you go.” And gave it to them.
“And you live in Dunedin as well, sir,” the cop said. “So this is …”
“A holiday home,” I said, grabbing the toilet brush from Summer and muttering, “Stop that.” To the cop, I said, “Only booked for the weekend.”
“A holiday home,” the cop repeated. “For the weekend. But you weren’t here.”
“No,” I said. Summer was starting to look outraged. In another minute, she was going to be trying to take care of me, too.“Only Delilah was here. And the others, as it turned out, Erica and … those two blokes. Summer and I were at the Clarence Hotel in Tauranga.”
“On the same night you’d hired this place,” the cop said. “Hired it to throw a party for teenagers?”
Delilah said, “Like that would ever happen. You clearly don’t know my cousin, and you sure don’t know Roman. Or, what, you think we’re lying and Roman drugged Erica? First, why would he do that and then call the cops? That’s got to be, like, Police Logic 101. Nobody does the crime and then calls the cops! Second, he’s ultra respectable. Look at him. Look at how he’s dressed. He’s about forty years old! He works in his home office until late at night, probably every single night, and his idea of a good time is working out in his home gym or, for a really wild and crazy splashout, going for a hike.”
The cop said, “And you know his daily routine how, miss?”
“Because Summer and I lived with him. Without exchanging sexual favors. We cleaned the flood damage in his house, and for entertainment, he and Summer fought about everything. It wasn’t exactly erotic, even when Summer sat around in her robe and showed cleavage and all. Probably because Roman is old, and pretty grumpy, too, and Summer’s repressed her sexuality due to traumatic life experiences.”
I was not enjoying this line of chat. I’d opened my mouth to say something, and so had Summer, but Delilah wasn’t giving us a chance. “But let’s say you don’t believe that. What’s your alternative theory? I came home and saw what was happening, or Summer and I came home and saw it, like Miss Perfect would ever be at a bar until four A.M. unless she was doing missionary work or something, and we called the cops but are also protecting Roman? That’s like some kind of complicated thriller plot. Occam’s Razor, dude. The simplest answer is usually right. Besides, can’t you just check with the hotel? It was, what, a few hours ago? Even a night clerk can probably hold the memory of the two of them—checking in with no baggage, like, guess why!—for a couple of hours. Also, here’s a startling idea. You could actually check with the bar. They probably have camera footage of Erica and whoever it was. Everybody has camera footage now, right? Maybe they have a recording of the guy slipping whatever it was into her drink, but are you looking at that? No, you’re standing here letting the trail get cold and suspecting Mr. Roman Boring Old D’Angelo instead. I’m really wondering about New Zealand police training here. I’m just saying.”
The cop had been getting increasingly wooden during all this, and the younger cop was glancing at him as if wondering how much it would take before he blew. Now, the older one said stiffly, “We need to get everybody’s movements down for the record. It’s procedure. So you and this lady were staying at the Clarence Hotel, sir. Not in this house.”
“That’s right,” I said.
Delilah was already starting to talk again when Summer broke in. “I can confirm that. I’m Summer Adair. Summer like the season, and Adair like—” She spelt it, then went on, “Same address as Delilah, because she’s my cousin. And to answer the question I’m sure is uppermost in your mind, we were at the hotel instead of here as planned because we hadn’t had sex before and weren’t planning to, but we went out to dinner in their restaurant—you can check that, too—and I decided I wanted to. Have sex. I decided I wanted to have sex with Roman. I didn’t want to wait, and I also didn’t want my cousin to know, so we stayed at the hotel. While my cousin was here at the house. As we thought, alone.”
“Excuse me,” Delilah said. “Out all night? How stupid do you think I am?”
“I was planning to come back before you got home,” Summer said. Her cheeks were flushed pink, and pink looked good on her. “Unfortunately, we fell asleep.”
“Right, so, got that?” Delilah asked. “Everybody? Now can I go to the hospital? If I stay here, Summer’s going to have me cleaning up puke, even though I already did that twice tonight and Roman would rather just get out his checkbook. He’s rich, and he’s scrubbing the toilet right now. Why? Predatory capitalism is wrong, but if you’re marinating in predatory capitalism, if you’re benefiting from it, shouldn’t you at least be consistent and embrace it?”
Summer said, “You and I are entitled to exactly none of Roman’s generosity. Bringing Erica back here was the right thing to do, but that doesn’t mean you don’t take responsibility for it and clean up after yourself!”
I said, “We can talk about this later. If that’s all …”
“Wait,” Summer said. Her color was still high, but her voice was level again. “I still have a question for the police. Officer …”
“Rayburn,” the older cop said. “Sergeant. This is Constable Padgett.”
“Sergeant Rayburn,” she said, “I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job, but you are going to review that bar footage, right? Assuming Erica actually was drugged, but it sounds like it. The bartender may even know who the man is. I doubt that was the first time. Maybe there’s a pattern.”
“Thank you, miss,” Rayburn said, more stolidly than ever. “Bars close at four, but no worries, we’ll look into it if the drug test comes back positive. ”
“If that’s it, then,” Summer said, “can Roman go on and take Delilah to hospital? I need to know that somebody’s called Erika’s parents. I need to know that she isn’t alone.”
I said, “I have an excellent way for you to know all that.” And handed her the car keys.
That was when the fun really began.