Martha Grimes - The Lamorna Wink

“Me? Sure. A lot.” She rolled away and looked up at the ceiling, sighing. “We’re not good marriage material, us.”

He turned to look at her. “No, I expect ‘us’ aren’t, not if you look at us like bolts of cloth to be cut and stitched.” After another moment’s reflection, he said, “I’m pretty rich.”

“Uh-huh.” Peacefully, she yawned.

Melrose turned to look at her as she yawned again and did something blubbery with her lips. “You look like a fish.”

“Ta, very much. That’ll really get your proposal up and running.”

“Who said I was proposing?”

Bea spread her hand to catch a beam of moonlight. “What are you trying to sell, then, if not yourself?”

Melrose reached up and took her hand and kept it. “I’m doing an inventory.”

“Of what?” She yawned, loudly.

“Myself, my things.”

“Sure.”

“It’s true. I try to do one every year. It’s quite extensive. For instance, down in my wine cellar, I have a whole case of a Premier Cru from Puligny-Montrachet. And that’s just for starters.”

She lay in silence, turning this over. She said, “Down in my basement cubicle I have a case of Malvern water, fifty cans of mixed nuts, and a giant cactus. Just for starters.”

He looked at her sideways, surreptitiously. She’d found some gum-not, he hoped, a plug from under the end table. She was chewing raucously: crack crack crack. “I could never marry a woman who did that in my ear all day.”

“Good thing, ’cause I could never marry a man who’s so snobby.”

This brought Melrose up and resting on his arm. “A snob. Me? ”

“Um.”

“Well, I’m not.” He fell back on the bed again. “Haven’t we strayed from the point?”

“We? You’re the one strayed; I was just listening to you go down your wine list. You should’ve been one of them blokes like at Dotrice’s.”

Dotrice was her favorite restaurant, French and expensive. “The sommelier? Thanks. Anyway, we were talking about marriage-in a general, very hypothetical way.”

She did not reply. Her eyes were closed.

“Are you asleep?”

“No, but I’m considering it.”

She was just trying to irritate him. “What are you thinking?”

“About this painting I’m stuck on.”

Not terribly complimentary that here he was maybe proposing and all she thought about was work, work, work. However, he’d humor her. “Exactly what are you stuck on?”

“The mouth. It’s a portrait.”

“Who of?”

“A friend. Just a bloke I know. But I know a lot of blokes. Friends-like, you know.”

This friendly bloke-ness irritated him, as he knew the bloke himself would.

“Come on, get up”-she was sitting up herself now, pulling at his hand-“and I’ll show you.”

“I don’t want to get up.”

“Suit yourself.” She was out of bed and putting on a man’s white shirt that she kept on a hook behind the door as if she were used to wearing it. Melrose frowned. Given the size, the shirt must belong to a very big man. Now she was out the door. “Hell,” he said to himself and fell back against the pillow. He heard her rummaging around in the living room. Crash. Clang. Bloody hell. Was she so enmeshed in her art she couldn’t leave it behind for one night?

Then she was back lugging a large painting, which he was quite prepared to dislike. She turned it around for him to see and his mouth opened in astonishment. “My God. It’s me.” He could scarcely believe it.

“Clever of you to recognize it.” She was chewing gum again and trying not to smile.

In the painting he was seated in a leather wing chair, but leaning forward a little as if talking to an invisible companion. The viewer might have been that companion. The eyes were a gritty green that stonewalled any attempt to glamorize him, just as she’d kept the firelight from sparking his hair.

“My God, Bea, how on earth did you do this without me?”

“I guess I wasn’t.”

“Wasn’t what?”

“Without you.” She grinned and chewed. Crack.

On her way downstairs from her flat, Carole-anne Palutski heard the telephone ring in Superintendent Jury’s flat and quickly took the chain from around her neck where his key was warm from her skin (as the Super said, “That key could defrost the stubbornest lock”). She unlocked the door. By the time she got across the room, the ringing stopped. Hell, she thought. Hell. Her spirits had lifted momentarily, thinking it could be him calling. Whoever it was didn’t leave a message. She had bought this answering machine secondhand for a couple of quid. The Super hated answering machines, which she said was really strange for a policeman, as police lived by emergencies and what if there was one? What if she got arrested (wrongfully, of course) and only got to make the one phone call? He said he didn’t think there was much chance the answering machine would go along to the nick and bail her out. “Ha ha, always quipping, aren’t you?” she’d said. “An answering machine’s a way you can call and leave messages. You know, for me or Mrs. W.” Well, he actually had called and left messages, four for her and two for Mrs. W. He told Mrs. W he really missed her chicken soup. He told Carole-anne he really missed her fortune-telling and wondered if this Irish lass he presently had his arm around was in the cards.

Ha ha, she thought, winding the tape back and listening again to his last message and wondering again what the background noise was, all of that loud yelling and what sounded like exploded glass. Was it bombs going off? Or just a room full of loud people breaking windows in their drunken, loutish ways?

He hated e-mail, too. He’d said, “There was always that bit of suspense after you wrote a letter, thinking about the other person reading it and wondering when and what he’d answer. And the self-righteous feeling of, There that’s done. Proud of yourself because you’d finally written that letter. But now? You send e-mail; before you can even think or feel those things, the answer’s back, no thinking between yours and theirs. It’s all too fast; everything’s immediate, now now now.”

He didn’t think she listened to him. Well, she did. Now she went to the calendar tacked up on the wall and took it down and filled in another square. She wrote in all sorts of things she and the Super had done, like going down the pub or to the Nine-One-Nine to listen to Stan or seeing some film or other. Again, she wondered why he’d gotten it. It was put out by some farming association and she couldn’t see how the Super would have been put on their mailing list. Each month had a picture of a farm animal. September’s was a cow, with its head turned to face the camera, looking squarely at her as if it knew she was filling the squares in with false information.

He’d been gone for nearly a month. September was filling up with all the entries she’d made. Wouldn’t he be surprised to see how busy he’d been? She looked back at August. Nothing, blank squares all. It was the same for July and June. Why did he have a calendar, if there was never anything on it? Her own calendar was so heaped up with entries she had to write along the sides.

Yet she thought it was strange that his July and August looked full, and when she pictured her own calendar in her mind it looked empty. Carole-anne wondered if there were people that, when they weren’t there, it made you wonder if you were. Made you wonder if you were real. When they weren’t there to tell a person she looked like a Key West sunset, did she look like anything at all?