“Why do you do this for a living?”
“I don’t do it for a living. It doesn’t pay enough. But it rounds off the edges.”
“Of what?”
“Poverty.” He stubbed his cigarette out in the black plastic ashtray. “Why do you want your husband dead?”
“That’s private.”
“Not from me it’s not.” He removed his sunglasses and stared across the table. His eyes were the barely blue of new metal. “If you lie, I’ll know it. And I’ll walk.”
“I’ll find somebody else.”
“Where?” he said. “Under the hit-man hyperlink on Craigs-list?”
She looked out at the water for a moment because it was hard to say the words without a violent tremble overtaking her lower lip.
Then she looked back at him, jaw firm. “He beats me.”
His eyes and face remained stone still, as if he’d been replaced with a photograph of himself. “Where? You look perfectly fine to me.”
That was because Alan didn’t hit her hard every time. Usually, he just held tight to her hair while he flicked his fingers off her chin and nose or twisted the flesh over her hip. In the last couple years, though, after the markets collapsed and Alan and men like him were blamed for it in some quarters, he’d often pop the cork on his depthless self-loathing and unleash on her. He’d buried a fist in her abdomen on three different occasions, lifted her off the floor by her throat, rammed the heel of his hand into her temple hard enough for her to hear the ring of a distant alarm clock for the rest of the day, and laid her out with a surprise punch to the back of the head. When she came to from that one, she was sprawled on the kitchen floor. He’d left a box of Kleenex and an ice pack by her head to show he was sorry.
Alan was always sorry. Whenever he hit her, it seemed to shock him. His pupils would dilate, his mouth would form an O, he’d look at his hand like he was surprised to find it attached to his wrist.
After, he’d fill the bedroom with roses, hire a car to take her to a spa for a day. Then, after this last time, he’d sent her and Lana to Paris.
She told this to Kineavy. Then she told him some more. “He punched me in the lower back once because I didn’t move out of his path to the liquor cart fast enough. Right where the spine meets the ass? You ever try to sit when you’re bruised there? He took a broomstick to the backs of my legs another time. But mostly he likes to punch me in the head, where all my hair is.”
“You do have a lot of it,” Kineavy said.
It was her most striking attribute, even more than her tits, which were 100 percent Nicole and had yet to sag; or her ass, which, truth be told, had sprouted some cellulite lately but still looked great for a woman closing in on thirty-six; or even her smile, which could turn the heads of an entire cocktail party if she entered the room wearing it.
Her hair trumped all of it. It was the dark of red wine and fell to her shoulders. When she pulled it back, she looked regal. When she straightened it, she looked dangerous. When she let it fall naturally, with its tousled waves and anarchic curls, she looked like a wet dream sent to douse a five-alarm fire.
She told Kineavy, “He hits me mostly on the head because the hair covers the bruises.”
“And you can’t just leave him?”
She shook her head and admitted something that shamed her. “Prenup.”
“And you like living rich.”
“Who doesn’t?”
Nicole had grown up in the second-floor apartment of a three-decker on Sydney Street in Savin Hill, a neighborhood locals called Stab-’n’-Kill. Her parents were losers, always getting caught in the petty scams they tried to run on their soon-to-be-ex-employers and on the city and the welfare system and DSS and the Housing Department and just about anybody they suspected was dumber than they were. Problem was, you couldn’t find dead fucking houseplants dumber than Jerry and Gerri Golden. Jerry ended up getting stomach cancer while in minimum-security lockup for check-kiting, and Gerri used his death to justify climbing into a bottle of Popov and staying there. Last time Nicole checked, she was still alive, if toothless and demented. But the last time Nicole checked had been about ten years ago.
Being poor, she’d decided long ago, wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Plenty of people had nothing and didn’t let that eat their souls. But it wasn’t for her.
“What does your husband do?” Kineavy asked.
“He’s an investment banker.”
“For which bank?”
“Since the crash? Bank Suffolk.”
“Before the crash?”
“He was with Bear Stearns.”