Ed Gorman - Rough Cut

"You look a little better than you did an hour ago," she said.

After leaving the office and Merle Wickes, I'd come home and, in a frenzy of self-pity, gotten myself hopelessly drunk.

Her knocking and ringing at the door had awakened me.

I sat down on the couch, rubbing my face. "How are you doing?"

"All right," she said. "I just…"

When she didn't finish, I looked up. "You just what?”

She smiled. "This afternoon something strange happened to me."

"What?"

"I found myself actually missing somebody. Somebody I really wanted to be around because it would make me feel better than I had in years."

"I hope you're talking about me."

She laughed. "I am."

"I missed you too."

"Why don't I make you some food?"

"I'm not sure what's in the fridge."

"There's bound to be something."

There was. Eggs and bacon and bread for toast. In fifteen minutes I was at the table, eating. She spread jam on toast and ate with me.

"You're watching me," I said after a time.

"Yes."

"I bet I look great. All hungover."

"You look great to me." She flushed. "God, I'm sorry. I mean, I don't want to come on too strong or anything. I mean, I don't know how to do this very well."

With toast in my mouth, I said, "You're doing just fine."

"I really did miss you."

"Me, too."

"I kept thinking, what if it had been you in that library where I'd met Clay all those years ago."

"Would've been nice."

"Do you have anything against Lutherans?"

"Not a single damn thing."

"Do you think we could go to bed?"

"I think that would be swell.”

For a while following separation from my wife, I tried the one-night-stand scene. Not for long. A peculiar loneliness results from sleeping with somebody you scarcely know. At least for me. But then I'm probably doomed to being old-fashioned in many ways. Sex is better for me when I care about someone.

The nice thing with Cindy Traynor was that I cared about her, was starting to fall in love with her.

So I took to bed some long-unsated lust plus a real sense of wanting to know more about the woman, physically as well as psychologically.

Her flesh was silken, the curves of her body tender hollows, the taste of her mouth and the smell of her hair overwhelming there in the darkness. At first there was some awkwardness as I moved down her breasts and stomach but after a few minutes, her breathing sharper, my senses beginning to dizzy, we began making love as if we'd been lovers for years.

She was the right combination for me of sentiment and skill. The things she whispered were as tender as they were sexy, as much about loneliness as need.

There was a lot of thrashing when we both finished within seconds of each other, thrashing and a certain young joy.

Afterward, we lay there listening to each other breathing in the shadows, our hips touching, her cold toes occasionally nuzzling my foot. On the bedroom window I could see snowflakes hit the glass and vanish, big wet flakes making me feel snug inside.

"Do you think you'll get married again?" she said.

"I hope so." I paused. "How about you?"

"I'd really like to be somebody's partner, you know?"

"Yeah. I know. That's what I want, too."

"I really like you, Michael."

"Once all this gets resolved-" I started to say.

She sighed. "I just wish it would get over with. I-asked Clay about it."

"You accused him of it?"

"As I said, I think he knew about Denny and me and I think he killed him. I don't flatter myself that Clay has any special feeling for me. It's just his pride." The snowflakes continued to melt and run down the window in rivulets made golden from the parking-lot light below. "Of course," she said, "I'm not positive it was Clay. Actually, it could have been Merle Wickes."

"Merle? Why would he kill Denny? Denny was his idol."

She exhaled smoke. "One night they all came back to our house very late at night. There was Clay and Denny and Ron Gettig and Merle Wickes. They'd all been drinking and there was a lot of noise. They woke me up and kept me up. Finally, I went downstairs to ask them to quiet down. In the den I saw Merle trying to lunge at Denny and take a bag from him. It was a black bag, like a doctor's bag. Denny was drunk and very mean. He kept laughing at Merle, holding the bag out to him, then pulling it back, like a kid's game. Merle kept screaming, 'If I tell what you three have been up to, you're all done.' It should have sounded ominous. The only person who looked upset about Merle was Clay. Clay finally grabbed him and pushed him against the wall and said, 'You're a part of this, Merle, don't forget that. You're a part of this.' Then Clay saw me standing outside the door and really blew up. He told me to get back upstairs."

"But you never found out exactly what was going on?"

"No. Clay closed the downstairs doors. And they kept their voices down. But I wouldn't consider Merle and Denny the best of friends."

"Good. That's what we need."

"What?"

"One more suspect." She laughed.

"You mind if I turn on the light?" I asked.

"You really want to see me in the nude? I'm not twenty years old, you know."

"Neither am I. If you're self-conscious, cover up."

I turned on the light. She had opted for covering up. I was disappointed.

From my sports jacket draped over a chair I took the newspaper clipping and handed it to her. It was a brief story:

QUARTER MILLION IN GEMS REPORTED STOLEN

Police report that Mrs. Bradford Amis, wife of financier Bradford Amis, was robbed of more than a quarter million dollars in gems during her recent house party for the March of Dimes.

Police officials were quoted today as saying that Mrs. Amis did not want any publicity on the matter, which is why the three-week-old robbery is only now reaching the press.

Those close to Mrs. Bradford say that the theft occurred even though a private guard had been hired to protect the gems. The guard's name has not been released.

The story went on with more details, none of them seeming to be particularly relevant.

As she read the clipping, Cindy's face looked confused. Then at some point a beautiful clarity came over her face and she smiled. Obviously she had gotten the same idea I had.

"That night downstairs," she said.

"The argument. The doctor's bag," I said.

"But why-?"

"That's the part we don't know exactly-why."

"But we're not even sure they took the gems."

"No, not yet we're not. But I have the feeling if we spend a day or two looking into this thing, we will be."

The confusion was back on her face. "But why would they become thieves-Clay and Denny especially? They had very good salaries. I mean, thieves…"

I turned out the light

Any more speculation tonight would be useless. For now, there were other things to occupy our time. "I've got to go home in a while," Cindy said, as I leaned toward her in the darkness.

"A while can be a long time," I said.

Even though there was one more funeral to attend-Ron Gettig's-you could tell the shop was getting back to normal by the tone of the arguments I had with several copywriters, art directors, and media directors. Good, hard arguments about the craft of advertising, everything from the tone of copy to the style of illustrations, and whether country-western radio stations were worth the cost-per-thousand they were currently charging. My feeling was, they weren't. There are a lot of guys out there who drive pickup trucks with gun racks in the back, but how many of them do you really want to talk to unless you're selling chewing tobacco or beer?

I even managed to get some writing done on the Traynor account, which, despite everything that had happened, still paid the majority of salaries and bills around here.