Obsession, Deceit and Really Dark Chocolate Read online

  I was about to say no but then quickly reconsidered. My initial goal had been to hide my face from anyone who would recognize me, but that hadn’t worked out, so why not take Mary Ann up on her offer? I liked Errol Flynn in the few movies of his that I had seen, and I felt that the reputation he’d had as a hot-tempered, sex-crazed alcoholic bonded us in an abstract kind of way. I pulled out The Man Who Knew Too Much and tucked it under my arm. “Your place or mine?”

  Less than a half hour later we were in Mary Ann’s large studio apartment on Lake Street getting ready for our impromptu movie night. Dena, Mary Ann and I had a “movie night” tradition. Every Monday the three of us would get together at my place and watch a video. But we had let that lapse over the past several months, and besides, this was Tuesday night and Dena wasn’t there. I was actually a lot closer to Dena than Mary Ann, partly because Dena and I were in the same grade together in high school and Mary Ann was a full two years behind, which at that time made her barely fit to speak to. But there was more to it than that. If I was asked to describe Dena to a stranger, lots of words would leap to mind: strong, outspoken, fun, abrasive, dynamic, loyal, intelligent, entrepreneurial,nymphomaniac—I could go on and on. But if someone were to ask me to describe Mary Ann, only one word would come to my lips—sweet. That single word seemed to sum up all of her qualities from her heart-shaped mouth to her generous nature. And it was Mary Ann’s simplicity that kept me from seeking out her company as frequently as I sought out the company of her cousin.

  Mary Ann was taking a moment to water the plants while I went through her cupboard looking for microwave popcorn. I found one box, Orville Redenbacher’s Sweet ’n Buttery. How Mary Ann remained a size two was beyond me.

  “I don’t suppose you have any vodka on hand?” I asked. I have found that after one cocktail, calories became much less of an issue for me.

  “No vodka,” Mary Ann said distractedly as she fed her ficus a few drops of plant food. “But I think I might have a baby bottle of wine in the cupboard.

  “What’s a baby bottle of wine—oh wait, do you mean this?” I pulled out a mini bottle of white zin produced by a winery that I was fairly sure I never wanted to become familiar with. Most of the label was covered up by another, makeshift label that read “Elaine and Dave’s Wedding 1994.”

  “That’s it,” Mary Ann said. “You can have it if you want it.”

  “I don’t.” I put it back and reached for the popcorn. I’d rather feel guilty than get drunk on cheap wine that had aged too long.

  “So what made you decide to get a facial and an eyebrow wax?” Mary Ann asked as she put the plant food away under the sink.

  “Long boring story. Why don’t I just pop this and you can put the movie on.”

  “Please, Sophie? I’m so curious.”

  “Fine,” I said as I placed a bag in the microwave. “That Tiff girl who worked on me? Well, she’s the sister of the guy who killed himself in Brooke’s headquarters.”

  “Peter Strauss? Rick was telling me about him the other day.”

  My eyes widened. “Really? What did he say?”

  “He said…” Mary Ann looked down at her slender hands and her curls hid her face. “He said that his death was the first of a lot of negative news stories about Anne and her campaign staff. Rick didn’t think that was fair because, well, none of us really knows why Peter Strauss did what he did, but it probably didn’t have anything to do with his politics. Rick thinks that the media’s attempts to somehow link his death with the congressional campaign is sort of disrespectful and ghoulish…that’s the word he used. He said the press was kind of ‘ghoulish.’”

  “I can see his point,” I said, not at all sure that I did. I went on to recount everything Tiff had told me, right down to the details of his vacation destinations.

  “He went to Iowa?” Mary Ann asked with unexpected enthusiasm. “Rick loves Iowa. He says it’s beautiful in the wintertime.”

  “Why was Rick in Iowa?”

  “There was some political convention or something that Fitzgerald needed to attend.”

  “The caucus?”

  Mary Ann looked at me blankly.

  “The caucus is…you know what? It doesn’t matter. So Fitzgerald took Rick to Iowa, huh?”

  “Mmm-hmm.” Mary Ann was now picking at her cuticles. She never picked at her cuticles.

  “Mary Ann, are you keeping something from me?”

  “Not really.” Mary Ann still wasn’t looking at me. “It’s just that it was during their trip to Iowa that Rick found out that he and Fitzgerald didn’t agree on as much as he used to think they did, and, well, Rick told me a bunch of really personal stuff that I really can’t talk about it. I promised I wouldn’t.”

  I hesitated a full minute before articulating the horrible thought that was forming inside my head. “Mary Ann,” I said slowly, “is it possible that Rick had something to do with what happened to Peter?”

  “No!” Mary Ann exclaimed, making eye contact for the first time since we got on the subject of her new man. “That’s not what I meant at all!”

  “Then tell me what you do mean.” I guided her to the couch and sat down next to her. “Come on, since when have we ever kept secrets from each another?” That last question was a gamble, because if Mary Ann stopped to think about it she would recall that there had been several occasions when Dena and I had kept things from her. The secrets never lasted very long; we all talked too much to be discreet for any length of time.

  Mary Ann scooted farther back onto the sofa and pulled her knees to her chest. “He’s beginning to question whether or not it was a good idea to take this job with Fitzgerald. This isn’t Rick’s first campaign, but he thinks that Republicans are kind of different now than when he started. Rick says that in a few years he might register as a liberator.”

  “A liberator? Wait, do you mean Libertarian?”

  “Yes, that’s it.” Mary Ann nodded enthusiastically. “But I guess the big problem right now is that Rick thinks that Fitzgerald is trying to become one of the new different Republicans, but that in his heart that’s not who he is. He thinks Fitzgerald’s kind of confused.”

  “How is he confused?” I asked, feeling a little befuddled myself. I would have thought that the “new different Republicans” would have been the Rick Santorums of the world: religious, conservative and morally righteous, and that “old school” would have been more like Nixon and the Rockefellers. But if that was the case, then Fitzgerald wouldn’t have to try to be new and different. You didn’t get more morally righteous than Fitzgerald. So who were these new different Republicans that Rick was talking about?

  Mary Ann shrugged. “It’s just Rick’s opinion. He thinks Fitzgerald isn’t as traditional as he tells everybody. He thinks he’s just too afraid of what people will think if they find out that he’s open-minded.”

  “Fitzgerald’s open-minded?” I asked skeptically.

  “Again, it’s just what Rick thinks. Sophie, he would kill me if he knew I told you all this. Fitzgerald is his boss and he’s totally loyal to him. Rick says that if Fitzgerald gets elected he could be a great friend to have, even if Rick does do the whole liberation thing.”

  “I won’t tell a soul. And it’s Libertarian.”

  “Libertarian, you just told me that, too. I’m so stupid sometimes.”

  I rolled my eyes again and reached for the DVD/VHS remote. “Come on, of course you’re not stupid.”

  “Please, Sophie,” Mary Ann said in a voice barely above a whisper, “I never lie to you.”

  I froze, seriously disturbed by the direction this conversation was going. “Mary Ann…”

  “No, I’m serious. I am so tired of people lying to me just to make me feel better about myself. I know I’m not smart.”

  “Where is this coming from?”

  “Did you read last month’s 7x7?”

  “Are you kidding? Marcus bought me eight copies.” 7x7 is a San Francisco magazine. Last month they’d
named Marcus as one of the Bay Area’s top ten hairstylists.

  “When I saw what they said about Marcus I was totally happy for him,” Mary Ann said wistfully. “He really deserves to be recognized for his talent.”

  “Marcus would agree with you on that.”

  “I know this is awful,” Mary Ann continued, “but I felt a little jealous. You’re a bestselling author, Dena owns her own business and now Marcus has been named one of the best hairstylists around. What am I? Just a makeup artist at Lancôme who had to struggle just to graduate high school with a 2.8.”

  I dropped the remote and took a deep breath. “Mary Ann, I lie to a lot of people but never to you, Dena or Marcus. So you’re just going to have to trust me when I tell you that you’re not stupid. Stupid is investigating a murder when you’re not even an investigator. Stupid is going out of your way to argue with a former boyfriend you’re trying to forget about. Believe me, Mary Ann, I’m an expert when it comes to being stupid and you’ve never even come close.”

  Mary Ann smiled weakly. “Now you sound like Rick.”

  “You had this conversation with Rick?” Mary Ann was one of those people who always assumed that her problems weren’t important enough to burden others with. The heart-to-heart we were having was a little out of character, but the very idea that she had talked about this with someone she had known for less than a decade was downright shocking.

  “Sort of. He’s just so complimentary, telling me how thoughtful I am and what incredible people skills I have. He makes me feel important.”

  “You are important.”

  Mary Ann shrugged but for once she didn’t protest. “I tried telling Rick that I’m not as great as he thinks I am but he won’t hear of it. He says my humility just proves that he’s right about me.”

  “I think I like Rick.”

  “You and me both,” Mary Ann said with a grin. “Okay, enough about me, what’s bothering you these days?”

  “You mean other than the fact that my mentor’s husband was shot to death thirty seconds after I left his company and that I have now put myself in the position of having to spend an exorbitant amount of time with corrupt, obnoxious and possibly murderous politicians, not to mention my ex-lover whom I’m trying really hard to hate?”

  Mary Ann winced. “That was another one of my dumb questions, huh?”

  “No, no,” I said quickly. “There actually is something else. I was talking to Tiff about her brother and for some weird reason I started thinking about my dad.”

  “You started thinking about your dad,” Mary Ann asked carefully, “or about how hard it was to lose him?”

  Maybe there was more to Mary Ann than sweetness. She was by far the most perceptive airhead I had ever met.

  “About losing him,” I admitted. “Jeez, how long has it been…I’m thirty-one now so I guess it was twelve years ago. God, I’m getting old!”

  Mary Ann smiled sympathetically. “It’s not how old you are that matters. It’s how much Botox you get.”

  I laughed and got up to retrieve the now-popped popcorn before rejoining her on the couch. “Do you remember how my dad and I used to fight?”

  “You two were always arguing about something and it was always something kind of…weird.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “Like who was a better physicist, Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking. I still think Hawking wins the prize.”

  “Really weird stuff,” Mary Ann muttered, grabbing a handful of popcorn.

  “I think we just liked debating, but the problem was we both really liked to win, too. I can’t tell you how many times we’d get into a major blowup over some subject that neither of us really cared about. We once went an entire week without speaking to each other because he insisted Shakespeare didn’t write his own plays and I refused to accept that. I mean really, who cares who wrote Hamlet as long as I don’t have to watch Ethan Hawke massacre the play on screen?”

  Mary Ann nodded and kicked off her shoes. “I always felt bad about not being there for you when your dad had his heart attack.”

  I shrugged. “You were in L.A. trying to make it big as a makeup artist to the stars. It wasn’t your fault that you weren’t here.”

  “But you were alone! Dena was off at UC Irvine and you didn’t even know Marcus yet. Of course, you had other friends, but you never seemed all that close to them.”

  “I wasn’t,” I admitted. “And my mother and Leah were predictably a mess. I tried to be strong for them, but I think I just made things worse when I…well when I made the biggest mistake of my life.”

  “You’re talking about Scott now, right?”

  I winced. I hadn’t been kidding when I said I was an expert when it came to being stupid. What kind of woman runs off to Vegas to elope with her womanizing boyfriend just so she could avoid dealing with her grief? Couldn’t I have done something a little more healthy, like get a therapist or start abusing illegal narcotics? I’m fairly sure a heroin addiction would have cost me less money than my ex-husband and I know it would have been easier to kick.

  “I didn’t know Scott very well,” Mary Ann said carefully, “but he didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would be good at doing things like…well, like listening.”

  “He was awful at listening. He was awful at a lot of things—academics, fiscal responsibility, sobriety, fidelity—but he was good at making mixed drinks. I think I married him for his lemon drops…or maybe I married him because I drank too many of his lemon drops.”

  Mary Ann eyed me suspiciously. “Were you really that drunk when you got married?”

  “No, my blood-alcohol level wasn’t high enough to account for my decision to enter into unholy matrimony, although I do blame it for our choice in officiants.”

  Mary Ann giggled. “I forgot about the female Elvis impersonator. I kind of wish I had been there to see that.”

  “She actually looked a lot like the male Elvis impersonators wandering around Vegas, only she was a little more butch.”

  “So what was the real reason you married Scott? I always wanted to know but I was afraid that if I asked it would sound like I didn’t approve or something.”

  I leaned my head back against the sofa and pondered her question. I had been divorced for almost ten years now and I still wasn’t a hundred percent sure why I had specifically chosen to marry Scott. Maybe it had been the fact that making cocktails was just a small part of a greater talent that Scott rightfully laid claim to. That talent was for escapism. Scott knew how to distract a girl. Sometimes it was with a spontaneous vacation, a wild party or an even wilder lovemaking session. Regardless, you could always count on him to support you in your quest to avoid dealing with anything that was too unpleasant or too real. On the other hand, maybe I had just married him because he was there and willing.

  “I don’t know why I married him,” I admitted. “I just know that it didn’t help me deal with the loss of my dad.”

  “How did you end up coping with that? You would never talk to me about it.”

  “That’s another long story,” I said with a laugh. “As you know, I was attending USF, and while I was doing pretty well in all my courses, I was the absolute star of my creative-writing class, if I do say so myself. But after dad died, my work began to suffer. Eventually my professor asked me to stay after class. I thought she was going to ream me for handing in a paper a day late, but instead she just sat me down and looked at me for what felt like forever. Finally she just said ‘Tell me.’ And just like that I fell apart. I was crying and talking all at the same time, which probably made it difficult to understand what I was saying, but she never once stopped me to ask for a clarification. She just passed me the Kleenex and listened.”

  “Wow, your professor must have been an incredible person. Is she still teaching at USF?”

  I shook my head. “I’m talking about Melanie Allen…now O’Reilly.”

  “And now you’re helping her!” Mary Ann exclaimed. “That is so neat!”

 
I studied a brown color variance on Mary Ann’s hard-wood floor.

  “Sophie? It is neat, isn’t it?”

  I remained silent. I hadn’t really thought about that moment for a very long time, but now I could see it unfold in my mind’s eye as clearly as I could see the popcorn I was now shoving into my mouth. There I was, sitting in Melanie’s office shedding enough tears to fill one of the Great Lakes and she was just nodding and listening. And then I had stopped crying and I let my inner bitch slip out and my bitch was pissed.

  “I want to make someone pay for my father’s death,” I had hissed. “If only there was a doctor who screwed up, or an ambulance that didn’t arrive in time, or…or…a company that was knowingly distributing products that increased people’s chances of having a heart attack. I just want a villain that I can rip apart.”

  Melanie had sat back in her chair and regarded me thoughtfully. “How would you go about ripping apart this villain?”

  “I’d kill him,” I said without hesitation. “But not before making him suffer in the most horrible ways imaginable, and I’d be sure that the whole world knew what an asshole he was. Hell, maybe I wouldn’t even have to kill him. By the time I was done mentally and physically tormenting him he’d probably want to take his own life!”

  What I was saying was more than a little dark and incredibly insane. That’s why I hadn’t voiced those thoughts before. I didn’t want people referring to me as “that dark crazy chick.” Yet there I was confessing my most evil and whacked fantasies to a woman who wore a gold crucifix and had a silver Christian fish attached to the back of her car. I reluctantly made eye contact with her, expecting to see evidence of her horror and disapproval, but instead she just looked thoughtful. Eventually she took a deep breath and said the most shocking thing imaginable: “Do it.”

  “Excuse me?” I had asked.

  “Destroy a villain. Get your revenge.” She reached into her desk drawer and pulled out a three-and-a-half-inch floppy and handed it over. “You’re a writer, Sophie, so write it up. Create a bad guy. Make him responsible for whatever you want him to be responsible for and then make him pay the way you see fit. It’s your story and no one is going to be grading it, so you can make up any rules you want. You’re the one in control of this.”