Page 67 of Such a Good Wife

I hand them to her in the corner clipped from an envelope, taped at the top.

“I already crushed them up, so all you have to do is puncture the paper and pour it into his drink.”

“You sure he can’t taste it?”

“Yes, positive. And here.” I hand her the pepper spray I’ve had in my purse for years. “Just in case.” She looks down at it, and I can tell she’s probably second-guessing this whole bizarre plan.

“Thanks,” she says, nodding, sliding it into her bag.

“So, listen. Call as soon as he’s out. FaceTime me so I can see the screen as you go through the computer and we can look together. We screenshot anything we can use.” I drop her at the door to his building and tell her I will be just feet from the front door with the car running if she needs me.

As she walks to the door, I watch her enter a circle of fluorescent light and push some numbers on a metal box to ring up to him. She props open the front door with a rolled-up newspaper as I instructed, in case she needs me. She charts the stairs just inside the door, and when her feet hit the sixth stair, she’s out of my sight line, and I mumble soft pleas to God for this to end well.

If we find anything useful, I don’t know if I bring it to his sergeant, as an anonymous tip that one of their own is hiding a secret and needs to be investigated himself? Or do I hold on to it awhile?

Time seems to slow down as my adrenaline speeds up. It’s nearly an hour before she calls, and there are a couple times I almost ruin it all by going up and knocking to make sure she’s okay.

“Goddamn it. You scared me!” I shout, once her face pops up on my phone.

She shushes me immediately. I don’t have time for the details on how it all unfolded, but I see Joe’s body on a leather sofa behind her. His arm hangs limp, knuckles brushing the floor. His mouth hangs open like he’s about to scream, but he’s asleep with his head tilted back on a pillow, and an empty drink sits on a coaster on the coffee table in front of him. She turns the phone so I can see the laptop. She quickly punches in his birth date password, and she’s in. Just like that.

First, she noses around a bit in the files on the desktop. Mostly work stuff. She clicks on something that displays dozens of bondage porn images.

“Oh my God,” she yelps, looking away and clicking blindly to open to a different page.

“Just try Facebook.” I repeat Valerie’s full name and have her scroll through his messenger. It’s evident, as she scrolls down his recent messages, that he’s having multiple intimate conversations with a number of women. She doesn’t seem fazed by this. She’s used to it, I guess. It appears that he’s having a sexual relationship with a dozen women.

When she opens the chat between Valerie and Joe, a long history of communication reveals itself. I tell Lacy to start at the very first date they spoke. It was over two years earlier. He thanks her for accepting his friend request and asks if she remembers him from the Special Olympics Young Athletes event in New Orleans the week before, and he sends her a few photos from the event he thought she’d like to have. There, she is pictured with her wheelchair-bound daughter who proudly holds a basketball in one hand and a medal, hanging from a yellow ribbon around her neck, in the other.

Valerie says that of course she remembers him, and thanks him for the photos and his volunteering with special needs kids.

“Jesus Christ,” I mutter.

“What?” Lacy asks, she doesn’t know what I have just put together. This is what he does. This is why he volunteers, so he can reel them in by playing the selfless humanitarian card. Even Lacy says that’s how he got her interested, the attention he paid to Ronny Lee.

“Nothing, just take photos of all this with your phone.”

She does and as she continues reading down the thread of communication, I see it’s eight months later before they make contact again. Her daughter passed away due to complications from her condition, and he just wanted to “reach out to give his condolences.” It moved slowly, the bond between the two of them. It was weeks before he talked her into meeting him for a drink, and slowly, the relationship became sexual, as evident in the nude photos exchanged.

Lacy takes the screenshots. It’s what I came for, though a sadness starts to well up somewhere deep inside me for Valerie, and even though she is going to great lengths to ruin my life, I feel an overwhelming sense of compassion for her. She was, ultimately, preyed upon herself.

Beyond the computer screen where Lacy has propped the phone for me to see, I have an obscured view of Joe’s outstretched legs on the couch. As Lacy exits all the tabs she’s opened and closes the laptop, I get a better look at him, and suddenly, he moves. He pulls his knees up and lies on his side, and then reaches his hand around near the coffee table as if feeling for something.

“Go! Get out of there. Now!”

Lacy fumbles, trying to grab her things and run out in a panic. Our call cuts out. I watch the stairs on the other side of the glass door in the entryway and wait to see her feet meeting that sixth stair and run out to me. Her footfalls don’t appear. It should only take seconds before I see her materialize from his second-floor apartment, but she’s not there. I can’t call the police. I have to go up there. The gun I kept in my purse to meet Valerie is safe back in its lockbox at home. I hadn’t even thought about needing it. I should have. But we’re not going to shoot a cop. I should have thought of that! Shit!

As I stand outside the building a moment, a tingling whispers through my body, a helpless hollowness keeps me frozen in place. Just before I kick the rolled-up paper out of the way and go in, she is running down the stairs, two at a time, and I turn to run behind her as she whizzes past and we leap into my car and drive away.

“What the hell! What happened?”

“I’m sorry!” she says, an almost-smile on her face, but I’m holding my heart with one hand as I grip the steering wheel with the other, dramatically, waiting for my pulse to slow and my hands to stop shaking.

“God. I thought you were dead!”

“I know, I’m sorry, but he was just turning over. From what you told me about that drug, he wouldn’t even be close to waking up, so I still had to get to the date of the murder and see if they spoke around then.”

“Did they? What did you see?” I ask in disbelief.

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