The Back Seat

The Alder Room had two doors, a service corridor behind the bar, and a man in the corner pretending to read a newspaper he hadn't turned in twenty minutes.

Rainer counted all of it from the threshold. Then he counted the woman at the window table, because she was the only reason he'd come.

She didn't wave. She watched him cross the room with her hands folded beside a white teapot, and when he reached the chair across from her, she said, "You're early. Good. You like to see the room first."

"Where's your friend?"

"Which one?"

"Corner. Gray crew cut. He's on page four of the sports section and hasn't moved his eyes."

"That's Mr. Reese. He's very good." She poured a second cup of tea, set it in front of the empty chair, and slid it two inches toward him. "He's here so I'll feel safe. You may sit, or you may go. I'd rather you sat."

Rainer sat. He moved the cup to the side without touching the handle.

Up close she wasn't what he'd rehearsed. He'd spent three years building her out of a photograph, a voice on Jose's phone, a signature on a transfer slip. Cold, he'd decided. Polished like a stone. What sat across the table had lipstick on perfectly and no sleep behind it. Her wedding ring was turned so the stone faced her palm. She'd been twisting it. He could see the pale band the metal left.

"Ginger," she said, nodding to the pot. "I'd offer you something else, but I understand you don't."

"Water's fine."

"Eleven years in March."

He didn't answer.

"Gus Marek is a lovely man," Camille said. "He has a seven o'clock shift at the food bank."

"Stay away from Gus."

"I have." She tilted her head. "I only wanted you to know I could have."

The waiter arrived with a glass of water. Rainer waited until he'd gone.

"You asked me here," he said. "So."

"So." She straightened a spoon. "Your hand. Who stitched it?"

"A friend."

"They did it badly. The knots are too tight. It'll pucker." She looked at it. "I paid twenty-two thousand dollars for that hand, you know. Tommy Brandt's orbital."

"I'll write you a check."

"I don't want your money."

"What do you want?"

"I want to talk about Jose."

"No."

"No?"

"I'm not discussing him with you." He put both palms flat on the cloth. "You can have the Tommy Brandt thing. You can have the clip. Put it on a billboard. But he's not a topic."

"He's the only one," Camille said. "That's what I keep trying to tell people."

She took a sip of tea. The cup made a small click on the saucer when she put it down. She hadn't put the saucer down gently. Rainer noticed that.

"Do you know what he said to me last Thursday?" she asked.

"I'm sure you'll tell me."

"He said, *I'll come home.* Standing in the kitchen. Four words." She smiled, and it was a good smile, small and private, and it didn't reach her eyes. "Forty minutes later he was in the bathroom with a locked door, and by midnight he was in a cab. To you."

"I didn't ask him to come."

"No. You never do. That's your whole trick." She leaned forward. "You wait. He always comes."

Rainer looked at her for a moment. "Is that why I'm here? To be told what I do to him?"

"You're here because I know something you don't want me to."

"I don't think you do."

"Victor Lang had a mother in Dayton."

Nothing changed in his face. He had spent eleven years learning how to arrange it, in rooms with folding chairs, in kitchens at four in the morning. But something happened under the table, and he knew she'd seen it, because his boot had scraped the floor.

"His car was found in long-term parking at the airport in April," Camille said. "Wiped. His mother filed a missing-person report in June. It was closed in September as a voluntary disappearance." She paused. "Do you know who asked them to close it?"

"No."

"Neither do I. Not by name. But I know it was done by someone who didn't want an investigation. And I know that someone is not the police." She folded her hands. "I have a friend. A man who manages money for people who don't like to be asked questions. He doesn't tell me much. But he told me, in March, that there was a *matter* from three years ago that had never been closed in the way they'd have liked."

"Friends like that don't tell you things."

"They do if you're useful."

"Are you?"

"I've been very useful," Camille said. "For a long time."

Rainer found that he'd taken the chip out of his pocket and was holding it in his fist under the table, the edge cutting into the fresh stitches. He didn't loosen his grip.

"They know it was you," she said. "They've always known. They let you live because you kept Elias dead. A dead beneficiary is a clean beneficiary. Money moves, nobody asks, everyone's grateful. You've been the best thing that ever happened to their accounting."

"That's a lot of conversation to have with a man who killed someone, according to you."

"I didn't say that."

"You said Lang."

"I said Lang had a mother." The corner of her mouth moved. "You said *killed.*"

His hand opened. The chip slid across his palm and he caught it before it hit the floor.

She watched him do it.

"You're not afraid of me," Camille said, almost gently. "I find that interesting. You're afraid of what I know. They aren't the same."

"What do you want, Camille?"

"I want you to leave him alone."

"He called me."

"He called you because he can't tell the difference between being needed and being hurt. You taught him that. In a house with no heat and a mother who made you all sleep in the same room." She said it without cruelty. "You aren't a bad person, Rainer. I've never said you were. You're a man who found the one way to be loved and never let anyone talk him out of it."

"And you?"

"I give him quiet."

"You give him a leash."

"That's what quiet looks like from outside." She looked toward the window. "From inside, it looks like a house."

Rainer picked up the water glass and put it down without drinking.

"If you go to the police," Camille said, "you know what they'll find. A body, eventually. A motive. A man who'd been sleeping in the bed of the victim's family for years. And Jose, who has been seen in your company all week, at crime scenes, in motel rooms, on video."

"That's a threat."

"It's arithmetic."

"Then do some more." His voice hadn't risen. "I'll show him what happened the night of the pills. All of it. The supplier, the date, who was in that room before I got there. You think he's forgiven me? He can't forgive me. But he'll forgive me before he forgives you."

"You don't know what I did."

"I know enough to make him ask."

For the first time, she didn't have an answer ready. It lasted about a second. Her hand went to the ring again and turned it all the way around.

"You'd tell him," she said.

"Yes."

"Knowing what it does to him."

"I'd rather he hated me honestly than loved you."

"And I'd rather he were alive and furious at me." She stopped. "Than free."

"You'd put him in prison."

"I'd put him somewhere safe."

"That's the same thing."

"Is it?" She picked up her bag. "Ask your brother."

The word hung in the air. Rainer looked at her. She seemed to hear it a half second after she'd said it. Her face didn't change, but she stopped, with the strap halfway onto her shoulder, and looked at the cup she'd poured for him.

"*Which* brother?" Rainer said.

"I meant Jose."

"You don't call him that."

"Don't I?"

She stood. The chair slid back. At the corner table, Reese folded his newspaper and rose with her, and she raised one hand, a small flat palm, and he sat down again.

"I wanted to see you," Camille said. "That's all. I wanted to look at your face once, across a table, without a crowd."

"And?"

"You look like a man who's been keeping something warm for a long time."

He didn't breathe.

"I saw a car, you know." She buttoned her coat, unhurried. "At the funeral. Three hundred yards past the cemetery gate, at the end of the access road. A gray sedan with its engine running. I thought it was a mourner who couldn't manage the hill."

"Lots of people drive gray cars."

"They do." She nodded. "I only started wondering a few days ago who was in the back seat."

She walked out through the main door. The waiter held it for her. Rainer sat with the chip in his hand, and across the room the man with the newspaper rose and followed her out, and for a while nobody moved at the table at all.

The tea she'd poured for him had gone cold. A skin had formed on it. Under the saucer, folded very small, was the receipt. She had paid for both of them in advance and written, at the bottom, in neat blue ink, a telephone number he didn't recognize.

Below it, two words.

*Call me.*