Killer Move

“Yeah, right. I mean, for god’s sake. How lame do you have to be to do this? Never mind the lying.”

“Lying?” I said, confused.

“Good lord. You don’t even realize how clearly you’ve screwed up, do you?”

She jabbed her finger at the screen, where the last of the sequence of pictures—a relatively innocuous one, showing Karren in the process of leaving the room via a door—was still in view. I saw that Steph was indicating the sequence of numbers in the corner.

09•14•2011

A date, of course. The fourteenth of September. Yesterday. So the lie had been . . .

“Steph, I’ve got to see a client,” Steph snarled, seeing the penny had dropped. “Steph, it’s so cool, I’ll get the commission. Oh no, honey—Karren won’t be there. And of course, she actually wasn’t—except via what you could see through your putrid lens.”

“Steph,” I said. I was mirroring how she’d just spoken, but couldn’t help it. I was starting to get angry, but defensively assuming the offensive. “I don’t even have a zoom lens. I’ve got a three-hundred-dollar compact. You know that. You bought it for me.”

“Sure, I bought that one,” she sneered. “But who knows what other gadgets you’ve picked up in the meantime? From Amazon, maybe? Your favorite online retailer, from what I gather.”

Having done the head work over the book earlier in the day, I knew the corner I was now in. I could suggest she search the house, and she could choose to believe I’d stowed the camera elsewhere. I could demand she look through the last year’s credit card statements: she could laugh in my face and ask me how hard it was to get a couple hundred bucks out of an ATM and take a quick drive to the Bradenton Outlet Mall. Every time I set up one of these barriers for her to knock down, it would just make me look more and more as if I was not only lying, but doing it with malice and forethought. The harder I tried and the better I argued, the more it would look like I had my story straight, and that would just make it worse.

And anyway, the camera wasn’t the point.

I said all this. Steph agreed. She agreed all too readily. She agreed that the real point was that I had snuck around to Karren White’s apartment—on the pretense of being out at a meeting that (surprise, surprise) hadn’t materialized and thus couldn’t be checked. The real point, she was happy to see that I’d grasped, was not only was I obsessed with my coworker, but that I was enough of a loser to take stealth pictures of her naked, instead of having an affair like any normal person.

“Hold on,” I said. “Whoa. I’m not obsessed with Karren. What are you talking about?”

“No? So how come you’re always mentioning her?”

“What?” I couldn’t help being distracted by each untruth as it arrived. “Of course she crops up—we work in the same office. I know the names of everybody you work with at the magazine. I know the names of their children. Karren’s an operator, you know that. I only bring her up to say how I’m trying to get around her, to get my thing going, to build my rep.”

I took a step toward her. She stepped back, making a sound like a can of soda being opened.

“Don’t even try it,” she said.

“Steph, listen. Something else happened today. An e-mail.”

“You e-mailed her?”

“Just listen. When I got back from returning that book to Amazon, Janine was sitting in the office laughing at some joke she thought I’d sent.”

“Yeah, you sent it to me, too. It wasn’t funny.”

“That’s just it—I didn’t send it.”

“What?” Steph looked angry at being derailed.

“I didn’t send it. To you or Janine or anyone. Somebody else did, using my e-mail account. The reason I was late home this evening—before you even start speculating about that—is because I was talking to the IT guy from Shore, trying to work out what happened, how the e-mail got sent.”

She snorted. “Why would I believe that?”

I yanked out my phone. “His number’s top of the outgoing call list. Call him right now, Steph. Ask him if we just sat and had ice cream outside the parlor on the Circle. Ask him if he had a chocolate sugar cone. Or do you think I’ve gone so far into the heart of darkness that I’d recruit some random patsy to lie about my whereabouts?”

She didn’t say anything. The expression on her face remained lodged in a mixture of anger, hurt, and disgust.

“Wait one second,” I said, and sent up a prayer to whatever tiny god looks after Realtors who are in serious trouble not of their own making. I leaned over the laptop and fired up my e-mail app. Five e-mails came straight in. A couple of positivity newsletters, two from clients . . . and one from Kevin the Geek. Thank god.

I opened the e-mail. “Look.”

Reluctantly, Steph bent forward and read what was on the screen. A reference to the meeting I’d just described, a page of complex instructions on how to check for a keystroke checker, and an introduction to Wifi Spying 101.