Free Conjugal Rites (Kit Tolliver #7) (The Kit Tolliver Stories) by Lawrence Block Page A

couple of months.”
    “Honey,” Barb said, “that man’d settle for private time with a nanny goat. Will he go in the truck with you? You’re kidding, right?”

    But when they brought her in to see Peter Fuhrmann, it wasn’t in the designated trailer, and you couldn’t call it quiet time. After she’d passed through a scanner and been strip-searched by a matron, she wound up sitting in front of a long window. There were women on either side of her, talking to men in orange jumpsuits on the other side of the window. There was an empty chair across from her, but it didn’t remain empty for long. A man appeared, wearing the orange jumpsuit that seemed to be standard here, walked to the empty chair, and looked at her for a long moment before sitting down.
    Would she have recognized him?
    She knew him right away, saw the man she’d spent a night with in the man who sat across from her now. But she’d been expecting him. If she’d encountered him across the aisle in a subway car, or at adjacent tables in a diner, would any mental bells have rung?
    No way to tell. And what did it matter? He was here now, and so was she.
    He said, “Audrey Willard.”
    “That’s right.”
    “Do I know you? Because the name didn’t register when my lawyer mentioned it.”
    Well, how could it? She’d never used it before. She sort of liked Audrey, it was unusual without being weird, old-fashioned without smelling of lavender sachets. He’d have known her by another name, and she was clueless as to what that name might have been.
    “I may not have given you my real name,” she said.
    “You look familiar, but I can’t—”
    “You pulled me out of a bar in Riverdale,” she said, “or I pulled you, or we pulled each other. And the next thing I remembered was waking up the next morning.”
    “Oh, God. I owe you an apology.”
    “Not really,” she said, “because you gave me a repeat performance that got rid of my hangover faster than any aspirin ever did.”
    “Jennifer.”
    Entirely possible, she thought. She’d been Jennifer often enough back then. It had been a sort of default alias at the time.
    “I knew you looked familiar. I remember you. You gave me your number. But when I called—”
    “I gave you a wrong number.”
    “I tried switching digits, but nothing worked.”
    “So I’m the one who owes you an apology,” she said.
    “Well—”
    “Or maybe it’s a wash,” she said. “A wrong number, a couple of Roofies—”
    “You could have died,” he said.
    “Like that girl.”
    He nodded. “Like Maureen McConnelly,” he said.

    She was in Ohio when she discovered what had become of Peter Fuhrmann. She sat at a computer terminal and went to work, and she’d have found him in a couple of keystrokes if she’d had any idea what to look for.
    His name, for instance. Google Peter Fuhrmann and he’d pop up in a heartbeat, with a flood of articles providing extensive coverage of the case. And it got a ton of ink—a good-looking Wall Street guy, a Choatie, a Yalie, all of that preppy street cred topped off with a Columbia MBA, who wakes up one fine morning with a beautiful girl in his bed. She’s a BIC, which is to say Bronx Irish Catholic, and she’s all of nineteen, in her second year at Marymount Manhattan College. And she’ll never graduate, nor will she ever be twenty, because, see, she’s dead.
    If she’d been in New York when it happened, she’d almost certainly have known about it. That’s where it got a big play in the press. The story made the wire services, but it wasn’t that big a story and it didn’t play that well out of town, because Peter Fuhrmann never denied the charges. Yes, he’d picked up Maureen McConnelly in a Riverdale bar. Yes, he’d brought her home to his apartment—his bachelor pad, one tabloid called it. And yes, he’d poured her a drink, and helped his cause by dissolving a pill in it. The pill was Flunitrazepam, more popular under its trade name of Rohypnol. It was