Sheldon Lord - Savage Lover [= Sinner Man]

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said. “You can get up now. No matter how long you lie there, nobody’s gonna give you a fucking Academy Award for it.”

No response. I noted the trickle of blood from her temple, the angle of her head where it met the surround of the fieldstone fireplace.

I stood there, waiting for someone to run the film backward, waiting for her to rise up from the carpet, waiting for my hand to draw back from her face, to delete the blow that had sent her stumbling and falling and cracking her head on the stone with a sound that still echoed through the room.

Waiting for the past five minutes to erase themselves.

I don’t know how long it took for me to kneel down next to her. I felt for a pulse that wasn’t there, tried to remember what else you were supposed to do. In movies they’d see if there was a trace of breath to fog a pocket mirror, but strangely enough I didn’t happen to have a mirror in my pocket.

There was a large mirror mounted above the fireplace. I thought of hauling Ellen to her feet and pressing her face against the mirror, but that didn’t strike me as a very good idea. Or I could try smashing the thing and holding a piece of it to her lips, but I had the feeling I was already in for enough bad luck, I didn’t need seven years more.

I could just wait a few hours and see if she cooled to room temperature. That would be a pretty good sign, wouldn’t it?

Not that I needed a sign.

What I needed was someone to blame.

How about Ray Danton? Or Legs Diamond, the slick fellow I’d watched him play a few hours earlier? Or another slick fellow, Johnnie Walker by name, whose picture was on the bottle on the mantel over the fireplace. The bottle was half empty or half full, depending on whether you were an optimist or a pessimist.

But there looked to be two bottles, one the mirror’s reflection of the other. One was half empty, I decided, and the other was half full.

I dismissed the bottle in the mirror and uncapped the real one.

Haven’t you had enough to drink?

Ellen’s voice, clear as a bell in my head, as if it were still echoing around the room. God knows she’d spoken the sentence often enough over the years, and the answer was always no, I hadn’t had enough to drink, now that she mentioned it.

But maybe this time she was right. I’d need a clear head, wouldn’t I?

For what?

I compromised by taking a short pull straight from the bottle, then recapped it and set it down.

My wife was dead. And while I might try to blame her — for provoking the blow, for falling clumsily, for landing wrong — it was clearly my fault and not hers. Nor could I blame those three old smoothies, Ray and Legs and Johnnie.

Though they’d all played their parts...

It’s hard to say where anything starts, but it may have been that day at lunch, and it wasn’t Johnnie Walker but his cousin Gordon who supplied the jigger in the woodpile. Gordon’s Gin, that is to say, and when my lunch companion suggested a second round of martinis, I thought it sounded like a good idea.

After lunch we went our separate ways, and my way was supposed to lead to an appointment with a client. I’d been softening the guy up for a while now, and he was just about ready to bite on a hefty straight life policy, and all I had to do was meet with him and reel him in.

That second martini loosened me up just enough to question the need to waste the afternoon in that fashion.

Not that it was an afternoon that made one rush to the beach, or hike in the mountains. It was a gray day, constantly threatening to rain but never quite getting around to it. A day to sit in a movie house and watch something dark and nasty.

I was in my car, driving in the direction of my afternoon appointment. And I caught a red light at the corner of Wayland and Lamonica, and I looked over to my left at a movie marquee. The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond , I read.

I’d read something about the film. It had just opened. And I knew a little about Legs Diamond, who’d operated in New York and up the Hudson Valley to Albany, which is not that far away from Danbury.

And I’ve always loved gangster movies.

I parked the car, checked the schedule, discovered that the picture was going to start in twenty minutes. That gave me just enough time to find a pay phone and cancel my appointment, and find a liquor store and switch from Gordon to cousin Johnnie. Just a half pint, to keep me company while I watched Ray Danton bring the late Jack “Legs” Diamond back to life.

For a while at least, until a hail of bullets cut him down.

I watched the film through to the end, and when it was over I wished it was the first half of a double feature. But there was just the one picture, and I walked out thinking that maybe that was just as well, because I’d sipped my way through the half pint of scotch while Legs was occupied with rising and falling.

I suppose I was a little bit drunk. Closer, certainly, to drunkeness than to sobriety. But I didn’t feel drunk. I felt deeply relaxed, very comfortable within my own skin, and at the same time I felt energized, ready for something to happen.

Yeah, right.

I sat in the car, left my key unturned in the ignition, and gave myself over to the film I’d just seen. Somewhere in there, buried beneath the drama and action, there looked to be a moral. And, because that’s how Hollywood works, it pretty much had to be Crime Does Not Pay .

And I suppose it didn’t, if you went by the ending. Legs Diamond wound up dead.

But doesn’t everybody? All of us, even those of us who wear Brooks Brothers suits and sell whole life, wind up the same way.

But Legs sure had fun while it lasted...

I stopped at a liquor store on the way home, and my house was empty when I walked in the door. I cracked the seal on the bottle — Johnnie Walker Red Label, a fifth of the same medicine I’d had a half pint of in the tenth row at Loews Danbury. I used a glass, and when it was empty I filled it up again, and when it was full I sipped at it until it needed filling.

Somewhere along the way Ellen came home.

I don’t remember how the argument started, or what it was about. The fact that I’d been drinking was mentioned, you can be sure of that, and that line — Haven’t you had enough to drink? — was spoken, and answered silently, unless you count the sound of liquor transferred from bottle to glass.

She put dinner on the table, though neither of us had much of an appetite for it. And then the argument resumed, and she said something about the folly of breaking appointments with valuable clients, and I said something about having to see movies during the daytime, because I could no more stomach the Rock Hudson-Doris Day crap she liked than she could sit through a good gangster movie. And it got nasty, the way an argument can, and that’s what you get in a marriage that’s not very good and probably never should have happened in the first place.

But that would have been nothing new, an argument, with each of us saying things we shouldn’t have said, and me drinking too much, and in the morning we’d pretend it hadn’t happened.

Nothing we couldn’t live with.

Except her mouth just wouldn’t quit, and I reached for the scotch bottle, and she said it was already half-empty. I could have said that was a pessimistic way of looking at it, that you could as easily say it was half-full, but that sort of banter wouldn’t have matched my mood. I had hold of it by the neck, and her eyes widened as I stepped toward her, bottle raised overhead.

She thought I was going to hit her with the bottle. But I swear that was never in my mind, it was enough that the threat cut off the flow of words. I set the bottle down.