The Perfect Wife

Before Jessie could respond, the door from the garage opened and a burly thirty-something guy with a shock of unruly red hair burst into the room.

“Morgan!” Kimberly exclaimed happily. “What are you doing home?”

“I left my report in the study,” he replied. “My presentation is in twenty minutes so I have to get back fast.”

Morgan, apparently Kimberly’s husband, didn’t look at all surprised to see half a dozen women in his living room. He barreled through them, offering general greetings to the group. Joanne leaned over to Jessie.

“He’s some kind of engineer,” she said quietly, as if it was some kind of secret.

“For whom? One of the defense contractors?” Jessie asked.

“No, for some real estate outfit.”

Jessie didn’t understand why that merited such discretion but decided not to pursue it. Moments later, Morgan blasted back into the living room with a thick ream of paper in his hand.

“Nice to see you, ladies,” he said. “Sorry I can’t stick around. Kim, remember I’ve got that thing at the club tonight so I’ll be back late.”

“Okay, sweetie,” his wife said, chasing after him to secure a kiss before he rushed out the door.

When he was gone, she returned to the living room, still flushed from the unexpected visit.

“I swear he moves with such purpose, you’d think he was a criminal profiler or something.”

The comment sent the group into a wave of giggles. Jessie smiled, not sure exactly what was so funny.

*

An hour later, she was back in her own sitting room, trying to find the energy to open the box in front of her. As she carefully sliced through the tape, she went over the coffee outing. There was something odd about it. But she couldn’t quite place what.

Kimberly was a sweetheart. Jessie genuinely liked her and especially appreciated the effort she was making to help the new girl. And the other women were all nice and personable, if a little bland. But there was something…mysterious about their interactions, as if they were all in on some shared secret that Jessie wasn’t privy to.

Part of her thought she was paranoid to suspect such a thing. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d incorrectly jumped to faulty conclusions. Then again, all of her instructors in the Forensic Psych program at USC had praised her for her intuitive sense. They didn’t seem to think she was paranoid so much as “suspiciously inquisitive,” as one professor had called her. It had sounded like a compliment at the time.

She opened the box and pulled out the first item, a framed photo from her wedding. She stared at it for a moment, looking at the happy expressions on her and Kyle’s faces. On either side of them were family members, all beaming as well.

As her eyes drifted over the group, she suddenly felt the melancholy from earlier rise up again inside her. An anxious tightness gripped her chest. She reminded herself to take deep breaths but no amount of inhaling or exhaling calmed her down.

She wasn’t sure exactly what had brought this on—the memories, the new environment, the fight with Kyle, a combination of all of it? Whatever it was, she recognized one fundamental truth. She was unable to control this on her own anymore. She needed to talk to someone. And despite the feeling of acute failure that began to overwhelm her as she reached for the phone, she dialed the number she had hoped she’d never have to use again.

CHAPTER SEVEN

She made an appointment with her old therapist, Dr. Janice Lemmon, and just knowing that going would necessitate a visit back to her old stomping grounds set her at ease. The panic had subsided almost immediately after she scheduled the session.

When Kyle came home that night—early even—they ordered takeout and watched a cheesy but fun movie about alternate realities called The 13

Floor. Neither of them formally apologized but they seemed to have rediscovered their comfort zone. After the movie, they didn’t even go upstairs to have sex. Instead, Kyle just climbed on top of her right there on the couch. It reminded Jessie of their newlywed days.

He’d even made her breakfast this morning before he headed out for work. It was awful—burnt toast, runny eggs, and undercooked turkey bacon—but Jessie appreciated the attempt. She felt a little bad about not telling him her plans for the day. But then again, he hadn’t asked so she wasn’t really lying.

It wasn’t until she was on the freeway the next day, in sight of the downtown Los Angeles skyscrapers, that Jessie truly felt the gnawing pit of nervousness in her gut subside. She had made the midday trip from Orange County in under an hour and got into the city early just so she could walk around a bit. She parked in the lot near Dr. Lemmon’s office across from the Original Pantry at the corner of Figueroa and West 9

.

Then she got the idea of calling her former USC roommate and oldest college friend, Lacey Cartwright, who lived and worked in the area, to see if she could hang out. She got her voicemail and left a message. As she started down Figueroa in the direction of the Bonaventure Hotel, Lacey texted her to say she was too busy to hang out that day but that they’d hook up the next time Jessie was around.

Who knows when that will be?

She put her disappointment out of her head and focused on the city around her, taking in the bustling sights and sounds that were so different from her new living environment. When she hit 5

Street, she made a right and continued ambling.

This reminded her of the days, not so long ago, when she would do this exact thing multiple times a week. If she was struggling with a case study for class, she’d just step outside and stroll along the streets, using the traffic as white noise as she turned the case over in her mind until she found a way to approach it. Her work was almost always strongest if she’d had time to wander around downtown and noodle with it a bit.

She kept the imminent discussion with Dr. Lemmon at the back of her head as she mentally revisited yesterday’s coffee at Kimberly’s house. She still couldn’t pin down the nature of the mysterious secretiveness of the women she’d met there. But one thing did jump out at her in retrospect—how desperate they’d all been to hear the details of her profiling studies.

She couldn’t tell if it was because the profession she was entering seemed so unusual or simply that it was a profession at all. Looking back, she realized that none of the women worked.

Some used to. Joanne had been in marketing. Kimberly said she used to be a real estate agent when they lived in Sherman Oaks. Josette had run a small gallery in Silverlake. But they were all stay-at-home moms now. And while they appeared happy with their new lives, they also seemed hungry for details from the professional world, greedily, almost guiltily devouring any morsel of intrigue.

Jessie stopped, realizing she had somehow arrived at the Biltmore Hotel. She’d been here many times before. It was famous for, among other things, hosting some the early Academy Awards in 1930s. She’d also once been told it was where Robert Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan in 1968.

Back before she decided to do her thesis on NRD, Jessie had toyed with the idea of profiling Sirhan. So she’d shown up one day unannounced and asked the concierge if they gave tours of the hotel that included the site of the shooting. He was perplexed.

It took a few embarrassing moments for him to understand what she was after and several more for him to politely explain that the assassination had not occurred there but at the now-demolished Ambassador Hotel.

He tried to soften the blow be telling her that JFK had gotten the Democratic nomination for president at the Biltmore in 1960. But she was too humiliated to stick around to hear that story.

Despite the shame, the experience taught her a valuable lesson that had stuck with her ever since: Don’t make assumptions, especially in a line of work where assuming wrong might get you killed. The next day she changed thesis topics and resolved to do her research from then on before she showed up at a location.

Despite that debacle Jessie returned often, as she loved the old-fashioned glamour of the place. This time, she immediately settled into her comfort zone as she meandered through the halls and ballrooms for a good twenty minutes.

As she passed through the lobby on her way out, she noticed a youngish man in a suit standing nonchalantly near the bellhop station, perusing a newspaper. What drew her attention was how sweaty he was. With the air-conditioning blasting through the hotel, she didn’t see how that was physically possible. And yet, every few seconds, he dabbed at the beads of perspiration constantly forming on his forehead.

Why is a guy just casually reading a paper so sweaty?

Jessie moved a little closer and pulled out her phone. She pretended to be reading something but put it in camera mode and tilted it so she could watch the guy without really looking at him. Every now and then she took a quick photo.

He didn’t seem to actually be reading the paper but rather using it as a prop while he intermittently looked up in the direction of the bags being placed on the luggage cart. When one of the bellhops began pushing the cart in the direction of the elevator, the man in the suit put the newspaper under his arm and ambled along behind him.

The bellhop pushed the cart into the elevator and the suited man followed and stood on the other side of the cart. Just as the doors closed, Jessie saw the suited man grab a briefcase from the side of the cart that wasn’t visible to the bellhop.

She watched the elevator slowly go up and stop at the eighth floor. After about ten seconds, it began to descend again. As it did, she walked over to the security guard near the front door. The guard, an amiable-looking guy in his late forties, smiled at her.

“I think you’ve got a thief working the hotel,” Jessie said without preamble, wanting to give him the situation fast.

“How’s that?” he asked, now frowning slightly.

“I saw this guy,” she said, holding up the photo on her phone, “swipe a briefcase from a luggage cart. It’s possible that it was his. But he was pretty sneaky about it and he was sweating like a guy who was nervous about something.”