Twenty years ago, when Sam Coyne was ten, downtown Northwood was a poorly zoned collection of vacuum-repair stores, coin shops, a discount furrier, a used book store, and a handful of eateries (including a few second-tier chains) all claiming to grill “the North Shore’s Best Hamburger.” Northwood’s homes were as old and stately as the neighboring suburbs, but its zip code was less prestigious and its public services reliant on property, rather than sales, tax. If any of its residents needed a birthday gift or a nice meal, they got it in the city or at the malls in Skokie and Gurnee.
Then came revitalization. Almost in unison, Chicago suburbs began reimagining themselves as self-contained communities. Tax breaks were offered; boutiques and clothing stores and fine restaurants gobbled them up. Within five years Northwood had a face-lift and the kind of prestige that its residents – many of them had bought homes here as a compromise when they realized they couldn’t afford the neighboring towns – always coveted.
Tony Dee, a Chicago chef who had bounced for ten years between Taylor Street’s three-star Italian restaurants, opened Mozzarell here with the following simple calculus: low taxes plus low rent plus high incomes. On a Saturday night these days, there were as many Mercedes leaving the city to dine in Northwood as there were BMWs headed in the opposite direction, and Mozzarell was one of the toughest reservations. Despite Sam’s usual desire to impress dates with one of his downtown culinary discoveries, he had asked Martha to meet him here because he guessed (rightly) she’d find it pleasantly upscale and also because he knew she’d save money on a babysitter if he brought her home before eleven, a consideration he made sure to mention when she had called him. That’s right, he reminded himself. She called him.
The salads arrived and Martha had just finished describing all the places she had lived. “Then Terry and I moved to Northwood shortly after all this stuff went in, I guess. I never saw it the way it used to be.”
“What a shit hole,” Sam said, and then sputtered a quick apology that he didn’t wait for her to accept. “It’s nice now, but I hated this town when I was a kid.”
“I guess we all resent the place where we grew up,” she said. “Because it reminds us of all the stupid stuff we wish we could do over again.”
“You sell real estate now, though?”
Martha tipped her head to the left and back, a sideways nod that was something of a tic and often imitated in fun by people who knew her well. “Yeah. I made out pretty well with the alimony, but it’s still not enough with a boy in the house. Not if you don’t want to deprive him, anyway, and he shouldn’t have to suffer because his dad is a, well, you know. It’s a good time to be selling homes in Northwood, though. The market is tight here. Let me know if you ever decide you want to move back home.”
Sam made a sarcastic face. A scenario such as you describe, the face said, is highly unlikely. “How about you?” he asked. “Where do you come from?”
That’s sort of a funny way to put it, Martha thought. Where do you come from? It reminded her of the questions – the nonstop, vaguely existential questions – that Justin was always putting to her. “South suburbs,” she said.
“Huh,” Sam said. He’d hardly ever been south of Thirty-fifth Street, where the Sox play, but he’d seen a concert or two at the outdoor theater in Tinley Park. “So… Terry… what did he do?”
“Futures trader. The whole LaSalle Street thing, you know. Make a ton of money one year and try not to spend it all before the market turns against you the next. He did okay.”
“Where is he now?”
“New Mexico. He’s remarried.”
“Hunh. You’d think he’d want to stay closer to Justin and all.”
“Yeah, you’d think.” She smiled and then looked down at her salad, a sign she didn’t want to talk about her ex-husband anymore.
Obliging, Sam offered, “You said you wanted to ask me about something.”
“Yeah,” she said. “And please tell me if I’m out of line.”
“Not at all. Please,” he said.
“You know the murder trial in Nebraska? The one where the victim was a private detective from here?”
“Sure.”
“Well, I’m sort of… involved,” Martha mumbled.
“Why? What do you mean?”
Her reply wasn’t really an answer. “I’m on both the prosecution and defense lists of potential witnesses.”
“You’re kidding. Why?”
Martha told the story of Sally Barwick’s friendship and betrayal. How the photos of her boy ended up in the dead private eye’s possession via the wife of her former physician, Dr. Davis Moore. “Terry and I had some trouble getting pregnant,” she explained. “We went to New Tech and Dr. Moore helped us conceive Justin.”
Sam paused and drew a breath through his nose until he was certain he’d locked in a vaguely concerned but otherwise unreadable expression. “What’s Moore’s connection to all this?”
“I haven’t gotten much from the defense attorney – he said he might not even call me – but the district attorney’s office has been a little more helpful. From what they can piece together about his defense, this guy, the defendant, Ricky Weiss, he claims Dr. Moore sent Phil Canella to kill him.”
Sam paused, pretending to chew his veal. He wanted to be careful not to let on how much he knew about Moore. She was apt to start asking a lot of questions and he was in no mood to keep track of his lies tonight. “The news accounts haven’t been real clear, but you can sort of piece it together. Some crazy story about a football player murdering the doctor’s daughter, right?”
“Right. Moore says that’s not true, but the D.A. tells me Moore had hired a detective agency in Gurnee, and they had hired Sally to take pictures of my son for him. Lots of them over five years. I only knew Sally as a photographer and I had her take photos of Justin a couple times a year. You know, for family.”
Dr. Davis Moore, pedophile? Sam thought. If this gossip were true it would be more delicious than the meal. “ Jesus. Are you kidding? What did the doctor want the pictures for?”
“I don’t know. Moore apparently says it was for some sort of study he was doing, a fertility study, but the D.A. isn’t really buying it.”
“That’s creepy. Are they looking into it anymore?”
“They say it’s not part of their theory of the case.”
“And what is their theory?”
“Well, Sally was some sort of freelancer. It’s not clear she even knew the pictures of Justin were going to Dr. Moore. But Phil Canella was working a case for Dr. Moore’s wife. She thought he was cheating on her, apparently, and I guess Dr. Moore and Dr. Burton had gone to Brixton to meet with Ricky Weiss, and Canella followed him there to spy on them for Mrs. Moore.”
“And he runs into Ricky Weiss and he’s a paranoid freak and he blows the dude away,” Sam said. “I got that much from the Tribune.”
“Anyway, the D.A. thinks maybe the defense is going to bring in these pictures of Justin as evidence. They’re going to throw all of these bizarre connections at the jury and hope that they buy the conspiracy theory Weiss is floating.”
“It sounds like there are a lot of coincidences,” Sam said.
“It gets worse,” Martha whispered, leaning forward and hunching down below an invisible blind that might shield them from the eyes of other diners. “Terry and I hired a detective agency six years ago. Not North Shore. One based downtown. One of Terry’s buddies from the pit had used them.”
“What did you need a private eye for?”
She dismissed the relevance of the question with a wave of her hand. “It was a – a genealogy project. Just going through birth records back east, looking for one of Terry’s lost ancestors. But guess who they sent for the job?”
“Sally? Now you’re just making the shit up.”
She nodded. “It’s all true. But I didn’t know. I never met her back then.”
“Unbelievable. Have you been deposed yet?”
“No, and the D.A. says I probably won’t be unless they decide to call me, and even then it might be at the last minute. If that happens, I was hoping you’d help prepare me for it. Not as a favor. I mean I’d pay you.”
Sam frowned and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Don’t worry about it. Is there some reason you think you might need a lawyer?”
She closed her eyes, her lashes long enough, it seemed to Sam, to graze her cheeks. “I’m just confused. Feeling a little betrayed. A little embarrassed that I ended up as a tangential player in a weird Nebraska murder. I’m just feeling really cautious right now.”
“I can recommend a criminal lawyer if you’d be more comfortable…”
“No, I don’t think it’ll get that serious,” she said. “I’m just nervous. This isn’t the easiest thing to talk about.”
“It’s so fucked up,” Sam said, wondering if he should have cursed like that, but then again, he decided it was a ridiculous thing to be sensitive about, considering what he had planned for Martha later. He became conscious of the silence in the impolite wake of his comment and filled it with a casual remark. He thought it best to tell a little bit of the truth. “I think I went to high school with Davis Moore’s daughter.”
Unsurprised, Martha said, “The D.A. from Nebraska said he wasn’t certain Dr. Moore had done anything illegal with regard to the photos. He didn’t have jurisdiction, in any case.”
This was getting interesting, Sam thought. He remembered how much Anna Kat had craved her father’s approval. How difficult she said it was for her to get his attention. “Illegal? Maybe. Maybe not. It sounds a lot like stalking to me. Invasion of privacy. Exploitation of a minor. You might think about pressing charges. That could help pave the way for a civil suit.”
“Really?”
“Sure. Whatever he was up to, it was sleazy. He was your doctor. A doctor who betrayed you. Nine juries out of ten would fall all over themselves just to stick it to him.”
She blushed. “I can’t tell you how upset I’ve been over it. I can’t imagine what he would want pictures of Justin for unless it was something-” She shivered.
“Pederast,” Sam spit. “He’s a pervert, I bet.”
“I really liked him,” Martha said. “And Dr. Burton, too. I can’t believe she would have anything to do with something like that. It makes me think there’s a lot more to the story. But then I never dreamed that Sally was spying on us all those years, either. It’s so strange.”
“Well, that kind of case – I guess it would be medical malpractice – isn’t really my bag, but if you decide to pursue it, I’ll give you the name of someone at my firm.”
She smiled. “Gosh, I’d appreciate that.”
Gosh, Sam thought. Just great.
Sam paid for dinner with his Platinum Card and for the waitress he added a generous tip, in case Martha was looking over his shoulder.
At her home, the same one Martha had moved to with Terry eleven years ago (“He still pays the mortgage,” she said with an embarrassed turn of her mouth), Sam insisted on paying the babysitter from the cash-station twenties folded into his money clip and tiptoed upstairs with her to peek in on sleeping Justin, whose body was contorted, facedown on top of the sheets as if he had been dropped there from a great height. His snoring had a delicate, white- noise quality that Sam, a snorer himself, found something close to soothing.
The room was filled with books – more books than toys, even – and in the darkness, although he could not make out any titles or authors, Sam noted from their thickness and from their serious-looking spines that they seemed to be books for older kids, or even adults. Martha had said he was smart, but he figured moms say that about the dumb kids, too.
They closed the door and Sam followed Martha downstairs. If Sam’s intuition was right, Justin’s wouldn’t be the last bedroom in the Finn house he would see from the inside tonight. Who would have imagined, at age thirty, that Sam Coyne would be trying to bed an older woman? Certainly not Sam, although he figured the differences in their ages couldn’t be more than four or five years.
Martha opened a bottle of red wine and Sam, with his twin prejudices about the suburbs and single moms, correctly guessed it would be Merlot. Martha sat on the couch and Sam settled in daringly close to her. He stared at her for a minute, letting a smile develop slowly, and not taking his eyes off her when he leaned the bowl of his glass on his bottom lip for a long drink. Martha became nervous in the silence, and when she couldn’t think of anything to say, broke the stare and looked away, shyly.
“It’s been a while since… since I’ve been on a date,” she said.
“I can’t believe that,” Sam said, reaching his right hand for the ends of her hair.
When Martha had called him for dinner, he had agreed without hesitation and immediately began planning their first intercourse. Sam made notes in a pocket-sized leather-bound notebook he carried (coded notes, in case they were ever lost or discovered), with everything he knew about Martha (which was little) and everything he assumed based on women like her he had known. The letters and symbols added up to a formula (of sorts) equal to some combination of techniques, positions, and bawdy requests from his sexual repertoire.
So determined was he to get it exactly right, he arranged for a run-through the week before, hiring a pricey hooker, whom he arranged to meet at the Swissotel (he never gave hookers his real name, and never brought hookers to his apartment – if they knew who he was, he couldn’t be unrestrained, and it protected him if things got out of hand, which, regrettably, had happened twice). He was specific with the escort service, describing Martha’s height and weight and hair color, the relative size of her hips and waist and shoulders, and even her voice, which was in a lower register and rounded on the edges without the nasal Midwestern vowels. Martha sounded as if she came from either money or Ontario, and that was how he put it to the service’s automated receptionist.
They did well with the match. She called herself Fonia (“as in Sinfonia,” she said at the bar, as if that was supposed to have relevance for him), and while her features didn’t especially resemble Martha’s, they certainly could have shared wardrobes, so close were their shapes. She was much younger than Martha (she might have been as old as twenty), but up in the room, once he had started the script, he could easily imagine Fonia’s thighs and ribs and nibbles and moans were Martha’s. He never gave her specific words to say, but several times asked her to tone down the enthusiasm when he thought she was overplaying her part. “You’re making it hard, baby,” Fonia said over her shoulder, and Sam smiled and said nothing more about it.
Once, he slapped her across the jaw a little harder than he intended. Not hard enough to leave a mark, but harder than he thought Martha would accept from him. Fear crossed Fonia’s eyes for just an instant, but Sam apologized and sounded sincere and Fonia seemed fine with it after. Just a little startled, she said. This was exactly why he wanted to practice.
On Martha’s couch, Sam grabbed tangles of her hair and put down his wine and leaned forward, head tilted so his open mouth could make a landing on her neck. Startled, she set her glass on the coffee table in a panicked rush and it tipped on the edge of a thick magazine, spilling onto the beige carpet.
“Oh shit, ” she said.
“Leave it,” Sam whispered sternly, hoping to set the tone for the kind of sex he had in mind: unhurried, choreographed, a little bit painful in the moments just before release, but not so harsh as to leave a lasting mark. Something she’d never experienced before. She hesitated, the arm that wasn’t pinned between them suspended in the air over the glass, then kissed him uncertainly – with curiosity and hunger and ambivalence. She hadn’t been on a date in a long time, Sam thought. She had been lonely. She had felt unwanted. He was counting on all three.
With a wrestler’s control, he grabbed her wrist and spun her away from him, facedown on the couch, pressing his hips against her spine and twisting her head back so her mouth could join his. She protested unconvincingly, struggling in small fits but still reciprocating with her lips and tongue. He lifted her dress and pushed down on her shoulder, waiting for her to submit completely before he entered her. Sam wriggled free of his shirt and belt and threw them past her head onto the floor. She cried out for him to stop: once, twice, and again, the third time desperately as he pressed harder against her. She lifted herself onto the armrest like a frightened swimmer to a pier, and told him again, no. He laughed and pushed and waited. She would give in soon. If he was right about her, she would give in.
Instead she reached for a ballpoint pen on the end table and, clicking it once, drove it backward into the soft part of his thigh.
Sam yelped and reared back on his knees. The point hadn’t entered him with great force, but it surprised him. He looked down to see if the mark there was blood or ink as Martha wriggled free and slid to the floor, gasping. Sam composed himself and silently customized his conciliation speech, the one he pulled out on nights of miscalculation like this one. I’m sorry, baby. I thought that was what you wanted. I was getting a thing from you, a vibe. Wow, you haven’t been out on the scene in a while, have you? A lot’s changed in ten years. Men and women are less inhibited. More in tune with their animal urges. Hell, they write about S amp;M and rough sex in the weekend section of the Tribune now. But we can do it your way. Any way you want.
He never got a chance to deliver it.
When he lifted his head he saw Martha on the floor beside the sofa, her hair dissembled, her eyes angry and wet, her lips shaking with bewildered rage, her neck red where he had gripped her, her body bent roughly like an Adirondack chair, propped up on her arms, her legs tensed, ready to bolt if he moved toward her. She was waiting for him to say something, trying to think of something to say, in that segment of a second before she saw in Sam’s face that he’d seen something shocking, and she figured out that the boy was standing behind her.
She flipped and crawled to Justin in a scramble, standing and wrapping her arms around him, forcing his face to her shoulder so he couldn’t see her or the half-dressed man in their living room. “I’m sorry, baby,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, Justin.”
Sam stepped off the couch, glad that he hadn’t undone his pants completely. He stepped the long way around the coffee table to avoid mother and child and wondered if she was going to send the kid out of the room so they could resolve this. If he could rattle off an insincere apology and get an indication from Martha that she wasn’t going to call the cops, he’d feel better about leaving.
“Get out,” Martha said. Her words were less hysterical than they might have been if she didn’t have the boy pulled against her, shielding him from Sam, from even the sight of him. She was exposing a degree of shame with which Sam was unfamiliar, and it made him pity her a little.
“Okay, yeah, okay,” he said softly. “Jesus, sorry.” He picked up his shirt and flipped his arms through the sleeves. He didn’t bother to button it. He folded the belt in his hands, the way he had intended to do later when he thought she might let him raise a wonderful red-and-blue mark across her buttocks. Now he slid past Martha and Justin, turning away from them as he walked toward the front door, thinking how fucked-up this all was and, from the way she was holding her kid, that she was raising a little wuss. A mama’s boy. As much as the thought of doing a hot suburban mom had excited him this past week, he should have known better.
As his midsection twisted in the narrow space between Martha and Justin and a glass cabinet against the wall, Sam’s shirttail flew up and away from his body, revealing his bare back and a few inches of blue boxer shorts where his unsuspended pants had slid down his hips. As it happened, Justin opened his eyes and peered past his mother’s shoulder, bare now where the strap of her dress had fallen, and he wiped his damp nose against her skin, which smelled faintly like the deodorant he was only now beginning to use every day; and he watched the man leave and realized even in that instant that he could never tell his mother that he remembered the man from the store or how much of what happened tonight he had seen and understood.
On the porch, Sam yanked the door shut behind him just to hear the sound of heavy things thudding together, and he walked stiffly to his black BMW, casually glimpsing about to see if a neighbor had heard or seen anything of concern. When he turned the corner, he barked at the microphone in the steering column, and the in-dash phone dialed information. He asked the automated operator for a number downtown, and the call was forwarded.
“Lily Escorts.” It was yet another automated female, produced with more sophisticated voice-recognition software than even the phone company had access to.
“I was wondering if Fonia was available tonight,” Sam said.
“Have you been on a date with Fonia before?” The voice was pleasant and real-sounding, but tinny and shallow, like what you might expect from an undersized woman.
“Yes, I have.”
“What night was that, sir?”
“Three nights ago. Wednesday. We met at the Swissotel.”
“And your name, sir?”
“Paul.” That was the name he used for prostitutes and phone-sex lines and Internet chat rooms. He couldn’t even remember when he’d started using it.
There was a short pause. “Yes, Mr. Paul. Fonia is on call tonight.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means she can see you for her usual rate plus half.”
“Fine.”
“Where would you like her to meet you tonight, Mr. Paul?”
“Mother’s. On Rush Street. At the bar.”
“She can be there in an hour.”
“Perfect.”
Sam turned down the ramp onto the Edens Expressway and leaned on the accelerator. It was a clear night and the concentration of fluorescent city lights made an artificial glowing dome in the distance. His skin was hot and his heart was throbbing and he could feel the pulse in the muscles of his neck without even putting a finger to it. The ache that sometimes came to his head spread in a high arc over his right ear. He opened the glove compartment at sixty-five miles per hour and fished out a bottle of pills, forcing two down his dry throat, but they wouldn’t make the ache go away or stop the artery to his brain from flexing. The only thing that could help would be the sight of a woman’s face contorted in pain beneath him and then, just before she cried out, the sight of that pain transformed into pleasure, lips twisted in fear becoming round, a wince turning into a wicked grin, narrow eyes becoming wide with understanding. Yes, my God, yes!
He was about to drop a thousand dollars on a hooker and he wouldn’t even enjoy it. Not really. But he needed the release. The violent release.
Later that night, around the time Sam could feel the ache in his head subsiding, when Justin could no longer hear his mother sobbing in her bedroom down the hall, Justin slipped from the sheets again and opened his closet door. There was a cheap mirror mounted on the inside, and when his mother dressed him in nice clothes, she liked to stand behind him and look at him in it, as if she could see more of him in the reflection than she could by inspecting him directly. Justin turned to his left and in the glow of the reading lamp from his nightstand, tried to make out the birthmark on his hip, the one he rarely gave a thought to, and he wondered if there were many other boys or men who had it also, or if somehow he and the man from downstairs, the man who had tried to hurt his mother, were just special.