A Well-Laid Trap: The Story Of A Professional Hotwife (4 page)

D
OUBT

I was partially relieved, when I pulled into the driveway, to see my headlights roll over the dark silver of Jordan's vehicle.

But my heart was thumping with excitement, still, and I also felt uneasy.

Was I disappointed, somehow, that she was home? That with every passing moment it seemed like the woman at the bar had been a figment of my imagination?

It was a relief, I told myself. It was a relief that most things pointed at my wife not having an affair. Most things pointed to her not being a high-class hooker, or a nymphomaniac, or any of the things I had just spent the better part of half an hour playing over and over in my mind. Savoring the sweet pain of the idea. Making my fantasies as vivid and detailed as possible. 

I opened the garage door.

It seemed odd, actually, now that I thought about it, that Jordan's car was in the driveway, and not the garage.

I needed to stop. What was I doing? Why was I
trying
to make my wife guilty of something?

It wasn't like I
wanted
my wife to be cheating on me.

I resolved to stop making myself crazy.

I resolved to do this, and I was thinking about how I was not going to do this.

But we can tell ourselves all kinds of things, and still do something that doesn't align with our best intentions. We can, for example, say to ourselves: stop suspecting your wife, and trying to catch her in compromising situations.

When can say that, and then immediately afterward, park the car outside and enter the garage from the side door. So that no one hears the garage door open.

The entrance to the house from the garage passes, like almost every expensive suburban home, through a laundry room and into the kitchen.

And this is what I saw.

Or this is what I thought I saw, though I can't be sure, because they scene seemed to transform so rapidly after I entered the room that I couldn't trust my own judgment.

Jordan had a cup of coffee to her lips. She had a hand up, waving it toward Olivia, who I could not see. She was slurping the drink, and talking at the same time.

Hurried.

“Here,” I thought she said, though it's hard to be sure. “Give me that.
I have to go
.”

Olivia's arm appeared and handed a phone to Jordan. I saw Jordan drop it into her purse.

It would only be later, replaying this scene in my mind, that I would see the color of that phone, take note of the fact that it was white and not black.

But a witness's memory is never to be trusted 100%. Everyone sees what they want to see, what they think someone else wants them to see. The phone was probably black, I would tell myself later, when I wanted her to not be guilty.

Jordan was dressed in a suit. A very nice suit, a very expensive suit. It was cream-colored, and tailored to cling to her shapely figure. Her shirt was black, a satin-like material, and deeply, deeply cut in the center of her breasts. A pendant drew my eyes right to the soft, mirrored curves between her two full tits.

I have to go,
her voice repeated in my head, over and over.

I stepped into the room. There really was no way to stand there and lurk, which was an impulse I had. “Go where?” I said,

I watched Jordan. I watched Jordan the way I watched a witness on the stand. The way I had watched videos of confessions and interrogations with investigators. The eyes have it. Then the mouth.

Jordan looked surprised. Real surprise contorted her mouth.

Her eyes, though, stayed dull. Not a big enough surprise to dilate her pupils. The phone dropped into her purse.

“Honey!” she exclaimed. “Jesus. You scared me. I didn't hear the garage.”

Was it strange that she looked to Olivia then? Wildly, almost accusatorially? With a look that seemed to say,
Olivia, you little shit, why didn't you hear the garage door?

“Did you?” Jordan said to Olivia.

The garage door was notoriously loud.

“The battery is out on my opener,” I said calmly, surprising even myself with the intelligence of the lie. I set it up, she started to feel at ease.

Get them comfortable, guard down, and then whack them again. I let only half a second pass before I started in. “
Where
are you going so late?”

I turned on a light. The kitchen was mysteriously dark.

“Going?” Jordan said.

Her face was the picture of confusion. It seemed so legitimate.

You
did
hear her, don't lose your nerve now. She
did
say “give me that. I have to go.”

Did she, Paddy? Is that what she said? Was it possible I had heard her wrong?

“I thought you were saying you were going somewhere,” I said. I was less convinced now that I said it aloud.

I watched Jordan's face and she looked confused. “What?”

She's buying time. It's not like she doesn't know this stuff. It's not like she never listens to you, it's not like she doesn't work in a PI's office. Cover up your lie, buy yourself time being utterly confused. Most people have their counter-explanation all ready. Too soon. It's a dead giveaway. You have to act confused, mishear the other person, clarify the question several times. Tell yourself another story while you do. Then, the other person looks as confused as you do, and pretty soon it's all just a big misunderstanding...

“When I came in,” I said. “Weren't you saying you were going somewhere?”

Two things, here. Jordan, if she was lying, was a very good liar. She had already started taking off her suit jacket and hanging it on the chair. Pretending to still be sorting out what I was saying to her.

But Olivia. Olivia was stiff. Olivia was looking back and forth from Jordan to me.

It was Olivia, standing there looking like she herself was being accused of something, that would keep my suspicion stoked. Because Jordan furrowed her brow. She took her phone from her purse (black, this one, there could be no doubt) and plugged it in to the charger.

“I just got home,” she said. As if I had asked the most ridiculous question in the world. She took her purse, and disappeared down the hallway.

I set my briefcase down and turned to Olivia. She had her thumb up against her front teeth, and flicked it out. “I made coffee,” she said. And then she walked away.

Jordan was gone a little too long. I had plenty of time to go through several cycles of paranoia, have several conversations with myself in which I told myself I was acting like a crazy person, and then convince myself that I was not.

What did I want to prove anyway?

Why didn't I just talk to my wife?

I started to walk down the hallway, in the direction Jordan had gone.

What was I hoping? To catch her on the phone, telling a lover she couldn't meet him tonight?

She appeared in front of me, and jumped. “Jesus!” she said.

I had my mouth open to ask her where she had gone, but she extended her hand, with something in it. Something she wanted to give me. “Here.”

I held my hand out, and felt the weight of two batteries drop into it.

I looked down at the batteries without comprehending.

When I looked back up at Jordan, her eyes were narrowed. Now she was the one with suspicions.

“For the opener?” she prompted.

She pushed past me, and I thought I saw her shake her head.

“I made coffee,” she said. “I have a lot of work to do. You?”

My heart started to thump against my chest again.

It was something like that, some little detail, that always gave everything away, if two people try to tell a lie together.
Who made the coffee?

No one forgets whether they made the coffee or not; no one tries to claim credit for making someone else's pot of coffee.

So one of them was lying. And the question was, why? Why tell a lie like that, unless you were already lying about something else?

I stared down the darkened hallway to the study. “Yeah,” I said, miles away, in answer to her question.

There was no answer from the kitchen.

And so, I headed to the study.

In the study, I opened my computer and waited for it to decrypt itself. At some point it must have asked me for my password.

I stared at it, unable to recall, by any stretch of my imagination, the thirty characters, assigned at random and painstakingly memorized by me, required to decrypt my laptop. It was the requirement, if one wanted to bring work home from the DAs. Only I knew the password. If I forgot it, IT had informed me many times, I was fucked.

In that moment, with my head filling with scenario after scenario, I was sure I was fucked. In more ways than one.

Jordan. She
did say,
“I have to go.”

She
was putting
things into her purse, not the other way around.

Right?

My wife is having an affair.

But what the fuck was she doing?

She could have told me she had to go back to work.

That she was on her way to an emergency meeting.

Any lie. She could have told any lie, and I couldn't have called her out on them. She worked for a PI.

So why, when I caught her leaving, did she decide to stay home, instead?

The cursor blinked at me.

It was all so absurd, suddenly.

I laughed at myself.

I was making myself crazy. I was making bad decisions. I was allowing myself to see evidence where there was none. All because of
one thing
I had witnessed. And I could not be sure of it anymore. Was Jordan the woman in the bar? Did I talk to her? Did I confront her? No.

And why not?

Probably because I
knew
it wasn't her, and I wanted it to be her.

The perfume, Paddy?

The perfume. The perfume was a problem.

Except...was I really an expert in perfumes?

I began to grill myself. I had always wanted to be a defense lawyer, really. Standing around and sowing doubts.
“Isn't it true, Mr. Goodall, that you smelled a perfume. And that you were already suspicious of your wife, and that you allowed yourself to believe that the perfume you smelled on her was the same as the perfume you smelled in the bar?”

Objection. Leading.

“Are you a smoker, Mr. Goodall? But you were in the past. Has smoking affected your sense of smell at all? It does for most people.”

Objection.

What about the makeup?

What about the shaved pussy?

You're seeing what you want to see, Paddy.

The question before you is not one of whether or not there is evidence to make you doubt the accused's innocence. Remember that. The question before you is whether or not there is
reasonable doubt
about the accused's guilt
.

Was it reasonable to doubt that my wife was the woman in the bar? That my wife was having an affair?

Doug's voice, like a voice-over, crackled in my head:

It's not your job to doubt, Paddy. You are the fucking prosecutor.

This is not a courtroom.

This is my life.

I heard the bathwater running next to me.

I looked at my screen.

Honestly. Really. I had no idea what the goddam password was. Not the first character, not the last. My head had been flooded and now everything was flotsam.

I slapped the screen closed.

And then, not knowing what I was as I entered the room – prosecutor or defender; loving or jealous husband – I went into the master bedroom.

Jordan gave no indication that she saw me. She was already in the tub, and the water, clouded over by a few bubbles, had not reached her breasts. They were there, spectacularly on display, a swirl of milky white soap curling up at their full base, the color of cum -

Jesus fucking Christ, Paddy.

It smelled, to be honest, like the same perfume I had believed so fervently had been the perfume at the bar, and then again when I saw her at home.

I looked at the container.

Lemon-mint.

So much for having a good nose.

I sat on the edge of the tub.

I was feeling almost sick, a strange kind of sick. The kind of sick I got when I finally got the balls up to ask Jordan to marry me. The kind of sick I felt when she told me she was pregnant fifteen years ago. The kind of sick I felt the first time I stood up in court.

Excited-sick. Doomed-sick. Adrenaline-sick. All of it combined together.

I willed myself to not shake, including my voice.