Chapter 7
What have you got to lose?
The next night, Havisham’s question echoed through my head as I slid into the last booth at Finnegan’s.
I longed for my usual seat at the bar, complete with an unfettered view of the haunted doll.
The booth seemed better for conducting my new petty business, but I liked to know where that doll was at all times. Just in case.
Most of the patrons around me were taking advantage of Winedown Wednesday. They sat in pairs, threesomes, quartets, leaning in to share work gossip or get to know each other a little better. I sat alone. It was just me and the larger-than-life Liverpool FC flag that hung above me.
I am not alone. I am flying solo. Intentionally.
“Can I at least have a glass of wine?” I asked when Havisham came around to check on the patrons in the booths.
“You can have your wine after you meet with your clients,” Havisham said. “I’ll bring you a lime and soda for now.”
“Clients? With an s?”
“Clients. But first up is the big spender, so you’d best have your A game.”
I saluted her. She scowled at me.
When she returned and set down a whiskey glass full of bubbles with a lime on the rim, I gestured to the pub around us. “We have a bar as a base of operations, so I don’t think a drink would be out of place.”
“And? People want to feel like you’re taking their situation seriously. I said ‘petty Perry Mason,’ not ‘petty Sam Spade.’ You can’t nurse bourbon until a dame comes to hit on you or a heavy comes to beat you up.”
“More’s the pity,” I said as I took my lowball of very little flavor and absolutely no alcohol. In truth, there were few things I took more seriously than righting wrongs, but that didn’t mean I had to be happy about forgoing my evening glass of wine.
At least I could rest assured that if anyone could take being a petty personal assistant from cottage industry to full-fledged business, it would be Daisy Salcedo, marketing major.
After countless texts and emails, I was beginning to think she wanted to both create and rule a pettiness industrial complex.
While I’d spent the morning serving papers and finishing up my paralegal homework, she’d made sure to reserve all socials under “LittleMissPetty.” Part of me wanted to ask her if she was taking care of her own homework, but I let it be.
She felt awful about Ken’s reaction to her glitter bomb.
I was halfway through my nonalcoholic concoction when an impossibly slender woman with sleek blond hair walked through the door.
Damned if she didn’t look like a femme fatale from one of the noir films Havisham had referenced.
She had to be my new client because she telegraphed “trophy wife,” and only a trophy wife would have a spare $3,000 lying around to throw at me.
Sure enough, Havisham pointed her in my direction.
Everything about her screamed “money,” from her exquisitely coiffed hair and tailored clothing to her understated manicure and overstated jewelry.
I smiled, despite feeling sloppy in my customary uniform of skinny jeans—sorry, not sorry, Gen Z—with an oversize button-down.
Older than I was, but by an indeterminate number of years thanks to both makeup and a better gym regimen, my client had style.
Of course, she also had money. Funny how style and money so often went together.
“You must be looking for Little Miss Petty,” I said with a smile.
“Yes, I’m Trista,” she said as she slid onto the bench across from mine. “And you are . . . ?”
“Your new petty personal assistant, Anonymous McGee.”
She nodded. “Plausible deniability. I like that in a person.”
“How can I help you today?”
“I feel like such a cliché, but I’m living the true tale as old as time.
Girl falls in love with boy. Boy gets bored.
Falls out of love with girl. Checks out of fatherhood and marriage.
Almost certainly has a younger woman on the side.
Girl decides to be proactive and get her shit together to serve him with divorce papers before he can serve her. ”
My eyebrow couldn’t help but lift. “You would think life could find some new plots.”
She chuckled. “You really would.”
“Okay then. What is your vision?”
“My vision is to feed my husband through a sausage grinder, but he is the father of my children, so I suppose I could settle for some good old-fashioned karma. My friend, Jackie, is the person you helped with the Tinder password. She came back later to thank you again, saw your flyer, and sent me a picture. The part about how karma doesn’t work fast enough? That really spoke to me.”
“So, you don’t want me to look for his side chick?”
She brushed her hair behind her ear, and a diamond stud earring caught the light.
Well over a carat, best I could tell. “No. It won’t do me any good to show that he’s cheating on me.
The state of Georgia doesn’t care. Mind you, if I were the one cheating, then it could affect custody arrangements and my alimony, but since he’s the primary breadwinner, he can sow his wild oats in anyone’s field. ”
She paused as Havisham placed a glass of chardonnay in front of her. Warmth suffused her features. “Chardonnay?”
“Yep.”
“How’d you know?”
“I have a sixth sense about these things.” Havisham had observed that women of a certain age and income bracket tended to like oaky, buttery chardonnays—especially when single or about to become single. She’d taken to calling chardonnay “cougar juice.”
I hoped the wine’s nickname became a self-fulfilling prophecy for Trista. Didn’t she deserve a future rebound fling with a younger man? If I were truly in charge of karma, I would make it so.
My client took a sip of wine, then closed her eyes before taking in a breath, holding it, then releasing. Either she was no stranger to yoga, she had her own mantras to chant, or both. Once centered, she met my eyes with a gaze that was once again steely. “Now, where was I?”
“You were about to tell me how I could help karma find your husband.”
“Yes, that. It may be childish, but I need to see him reap at least some of what he’s sown. It’s exhausting and exasperating to see him get away with so much.”
“Exhausted” and “exasperated”: These were two adjectives I knew only too well. “And you saw the fine print on the flyer about logical consequences rather than random revenge?”
She sighed. “If we must.”
“We must. A wise woman once said, ‘Karma’s only a bitch if you are,’ so I’d rather . . . identify areas of improvement for your husband.”
She snorted, and the sound was incongruous to her polished exterior. “Plenty of fertile ground there.”
“Enlighten me, then. Other than his aversion to fidelity, what are some lessons your husband needs to learn?”
She took another sip of wine before looking out into the distance, tapping her chin while she thought. “He’s the antithesis of gracious or generous. He wouldn’t lift his pinkie to help someone in need.”
“So a soup kitchen would do him good?”
“I wouldn’t trust him to cook for others. He might accidentally poison them.”
“Something more labor intensive, then?”
She spewed a bit of her wine. “I would pay dearly to see him do manual labor.”
“Paying for what you want to see is the plan, isn’t it?” I said with a grin.
“The filthier, the better.”
“Challenge accepted. What else?”
“Ugh. He’s so dismissive of any woman with power. Won’t vote for a woman. Won’t watch women’s sports. We have three daughters, and he won’t let them listen to Taylor Swift in the car if he’s driving, much less buy tickets for the girls to see her in concert. And he has the money, I assure you.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask why she’d married him in the first place, but I kept that to myself.
Sometimes people showed you only one face until you were invested in the relationship.
Sometimes being in love was like wearing blinders.
Often, the truth of a relationship gone wrong lay somewhere in between.
“And another thing.” She paused to take another sip of wine.
“I swear he lost interest in me because I had the audacity to get ‘old.’ Being a few years older than him didn’t seem to be a problem back when he was trying to get into my pants.
Now he has no use for women over the age of thirty-five. Not even his own mother.”
I thought of Ken’s dewy-faced bride and how Soft Hands had muttered “saggy-ass bitch” with such rancor. “How dare we women age. How dare we?”
“Yes!” She continued in this vein, really warming to the topic with a colorful selection of four-letter words.
I smiled and nodded while waiting for her to move on to the next topic.
Finally, she said, “And he always wants things just so, with his clothes clean—all name brands, of course—his house neat, and a home-cooked meal the second he gets home. But no casseroles, heaven forbid! ‘That’s cheating,’ he says, as if he’s ever so much as boiled water. ”
Having worn herself out with her very legitimate grievances, she stared beyond me with glassy eyes. While waiting for her to compose herself, I mentally summarized what she’d said:
No casserole—noted.
Fastidious about clothing and surroundings—also noted.
Stranger to manual labor and not in the least charitable—most duly noted.
Total chauvinist. Oh, how much sweeter that made being the woman who’d be making his life difficult for the next few weeks.
When she looked up at the ceiling and began blinking furiously, I looked away. I had been known to use that trick to quit crying back when I actually could cry. After a few more deep breaths, she said, “Do you think you can get photos or video of him doing any of those things?”
“That’s my plan, but I need to know who he is and where he lives.”
“His name is Blake Malone—”
Malone? My heart sank in irrational disappointment. Surely, her husband wasn’t my “Man in Finance.”
“—and I think he’s currently living in some dump of an apartment off Delk Road—”
Of course. A Malone in a dump off Delk? At least you found out who he was before you fantasized too much.
“Here’s what I know: His company, Malone Construction, has an apartment that they’ve leased for years, supposedly for out-of-town guests.
Perfect place for him to hole up. We visited it once or twice back when we were dating.
Bell Something Apartments. He claims he needs to find himself. I’m just hoping—”
“Bel Air.”
And why did I have to blurt that out? So much for anonymity.
She paused. “I think that’s right. But how . . . ?”
“Because that’s where I live. What does your husband look like?”
She hesitated, unsure now that I’d figured out something for myself. “Tall, brown hair, early forties—”
“White guy with aviators? Italian loafers? Drives a silver Lexus? Always on his phone?”
She almost choked on her wine. “Yes! But how did you know this already?”
“Haven’t you guessed? I, too, am a woman who had the audacity to age.
Twenty years wasted, and that’s how I came to reside in a crappy apartment off Delk Road.
There’s a Malone who lives across the breezeway from me, in .
. . Bel Air Apartments.” I thought of those strong hands on my shoulders, and something inside me again ached with the disappointment of knowing he was not what he’d seemed. “I ran into him yesterday.”
“Impossible.”
“Ah.” I held up one finger. “Improbable, but not impossible—”
“I’m so sorry,” Trista said, all the blood having drained from her face. “I didn’t mean to imply you lived in a dump.”
I waved away her concerns. “Oh, it’s a dump. Not my first choice, but needs must.”
She lifted her wineglass, then frowned at its emptiness. “Is that going to be a problem?”
“Oh, no,” I said with a grin. “Things just got a lot easier.”
Slumping back against the booth, she allowed herself a tiny smile.
I grinned back. This ludicrous idea just might work. “Now, about payment . . .”