Mirror Image

told me?”
    Irritably, Fancy snatched up the ice pack and held it against her eye. She knew her aunt was right.
    “Do you want some peroxide for your lip? An aspirin? Something for the pain?”
    “I had enough beer and grass to dull the pain.”
    Fancy was confused. Why was Carole being so nice to her? Since coming home from that luxury palace of a clinic, she had been freaking weird. She didn’t yell at the kid anymore. She looked for things to do instead of sitting on her ass all day. She actually seemed to like Uncle Tate again.
    Fancy had always considered Carole stupid for playing Russian roulette with her marriage. Uncle Tate was good-looking. All the girls she knew drooled over him. If her instincts in this field were any good, and she believed them to be excellent, he’d be terrific in bed.
    She wished she had somebody who loved her as much as Uncle Tate had loved Carole when they had first gotten married. He’d treated her like a queen. She had been a fool to throw that away. Maybe she had reached that conclusion herself and was trying to win him back.
    Fat chance,
Fancy thought derisively. Once you crossed Uncle Tate, you were on his shit list for life.
    “What are you doing up so late,” she asked, “sitting all by yourself in the dark?”
    “I couldn’t sleep. I thought cocoa might help.” There was a half-empty cup of chocolate on the table.
    “Cocoa? That’s a hoot.”
    “A proper insomnia remedy for a senator’s wife,” she replied with a wistful smile.
    Fancy, never one to beat around the bush, asked, “You’re mending your ways, aren’t you?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You know damn well what I mean. You’re changing your image in the hopes that Uncle Tate will get elected and keep you on when he goes to Washington.” She assumed a confidential, just-between-us-girls pose. “Tell me, did you give up humping all your boyfriends, or just Eddy?”
    Her aunt’s head snapped up. Her face went pale. She pulled her lower lip between her teeth and wheezed, “What did you say?”
    “Don’t play innocent. I suspected it all along,” Fancy said breezily. “I confronted Eddy with it.”
    “And what did he say?”
    “Nothing. Didn’t deny it. Didn’t admit it. He responded as a gentleman should.” Snorting rudely, she headed for the door that led to the other rooms of the house. “Don’t worry. There’s enough shit flying around here already. I’m not going to tell Uncle Tate. Unless…”
    She spun around, her attitude combative. “Unless you pick up your affair with Eddy again. It’s me he’s gonna be screwing from now on, not you. G’night.”
    Feeling smug and satisfied for having made herself so unequivocally understood, Fancy sashayed from the kitchen. One look in the mirror over her bedroom dresser confirmed that her face was a mess.
    It didn’t occur to Fancy until days later that Carole was the only one in the family who had even noticed that she was sporting a black eye and a busted lip, and that she hadn’t ratted on her.

Twenty
    Van Lovejoy’s apartment was
House Beautiful
’s worst nightmare. He slept on a narrow mattress supported by concrete building blocks. Other pieces of furniture were just as ramshackle, salvaged from flea markets and junk stores.
    There was a sad, dusty piñata, a sacrilegious effigy of Elvis Presley, dangling from the light fixture. It was a souvenir he’d brought back from a visit to Nuevo Laredo. The goodies inside—several kilos of marijuana—were but a memory. Except for the piñata, the apartment was unadorned.
    The otherwise empty rooms were filled with videotapes. That and the equipment he used to duplicate, edit, and play back his tapes were the only things of any value in the apartment, and their worth was inestimable. Van was better equipped than many small video production companies.
    Video catalogs were stacked everywhere. He subscribed to all of them and scoured them monthly in search of a video he didn’t already have or hadn’t seen. Nearly all his income went to keeping his library stocked and updated.
    His collection of movies rivaled any video rental store. He studied directing and cinematographic techniques. His taste was eclectic, ranging from Orson Welles to Frank Capra, Sam Peckinpah to Steven Spielberg. Whether filmed in black and white or Technicolor, camera moves fascinated him.
    Besides the movies, his collection included serials and documentaries, along with every inch of tape he had shot