Эд Горман - Murder on the Aisle

“I know you are.”

“You being sincere?”

“Yeah.”

“I mean it. Oh, fuck it.”

“Yeah.”

And then he left.

Frank called to him, and then Michael Dailey, and then Marcie Pierce, but he needed to be outside and alone.

He stood in the hard cold of the night. Snow plows like yellow burrowing bugs worked their way up the street while a group of Salvation Army singers flung their voices uselessly into the whipping wind and snow. He started to cry and actually managed to convince himself he was only tearing up because of the cold.

Then from behind him he heard the sort of whistle you can only get when you put two fingers in your lips and are willing to risk future lung capacity to set world records. All over the city, dogs were probably going crazy.

She was a few feet behind him, doing the whistling. Her coat was flung over her arm and here she was, subzero, wearing a summer cocktail dress. She’d even managed to bring her cocktail along.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Whistling for a cab.”

“Why?”

“Because we need one.”

“Why do we need one?”

“Because we’re going to your place and I read this article about you one time that said you always took cabs.”

“That’s because I got drunk once and was picked up for driving under the influence. Fortunately, I didn’t hurt anybody. But I handed over my license and haven’t been back to pick it up.”

“Yeah, I read that, too.” She nodded to a Checker kind of fishtailing toward them in the flurries. “Here’s the cab.”

“You sure you want to do this?”

“Positive.”

Tobin and Marcie got in, then the Checker started fishtailing its way up the street again.

Marcie pressed into Tobin with her lovely breasts and whispered to him, “But if you think I’m going to tell you anything about my deal with Michael Dailey, you’re fucking nuts.”

“Where to?” the cabbie said.

“You want some of this?” Marcie Pierce said, splashing her champagne like golden water across the air of the cab.

11:38 P.M.

“Boy, this is nice.”

“Thanks.”

“You decorate it?”

“No, actually my last girlfriend did.”

The ride and the cold and the snow had made Marcie reasonably sober again and now there was an anxious edge in her voice. She was no longer a femme fatale but instead a very young woman in an older man’s apartment.

She walked around, glancing up at the skylight, at the wide fieldstone fireplace, at the bay windows that overlooked Fifth Avenue ablaze with Christmas trees and Santa Clauses lit from the inside so their cheeks were bright pink and their eyes a startling blue.

“God,” Marcie said. “Wouldn’t it be nice to be young again and believe in all that shit?”

Crikers — could you really be that maudlin at her age? he wondered. Then he smiled. Of course you could. He’d been so himself.

“Well, now there are compensations.”

“Such as what?”

“I think I appreciate living more the older I get.” Plus he got to see movies. Movies balmed and moved and excited him as nothing else did. It was holy to sit in the darkness of a theater.

She offered him a bruised smile. “I guess I’m not at that age yet.”

“You’re really unhappy?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I.” Then she saw his cassette library and moved toward it as if a preacher had called her forth. “Wow, how many tapes do you have?”

“Three hundred.”

“Do you mind?”

“Not at all. As a matter of fact, I think I’ll go wash up.”

She rubbed her bare shoulders as if she were freezing. “Do you ever sort of, you know, just sleep with women, I mean without doing anything?”

“Sometimes. Sure.”

“If I decided that’s all I wanted to do, would that be all right?”

“Of course.”

“You wouldn’t push it or anything.”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“Thanks. That makes me feel better.”

He smiled. “Maybe even a little bit happy?”

“Yeah. Maybe even a little happy.”

He was halfway to the bathroom (he was planning on removing his liver and taking it downstairs to the laundry room and putting it in the drier) when the living-room phone rang.

Neely, his lawyer, said, “Huggins may call you in for questioning tomorrow.”

“How’d you learn that?”

“Since I decided to be your lawyer, I also decided I better start calling in some favors from my DA office days.”

“So I’m still his favorite?”

“Afraid so.”

Tobin looked back to Marcie Pierce. Against the built-in bookcases and the jungle of ferns and plants, against the 45-inch TV set, against the sliding-glass library of video cassettes she looked almost frail and girlish. A huge poster of Orson Welles as Citizen Kane gazed down on her, seeming to leer appreciatively at her young flesh. Tobin whispered into the phone, “Neely, I’m really scared.”

“It’s going to be all right.”

“Really?”

A pause. “I’m not one hundred percent positive it’s going to be all right. But I’m pretty positive.”

“Well, give it to me in percentages.”

“What in percentages?”

“If you’re not one hundred percent positive things are going to be all right, then what percentage positive are you?”

“Jeeze, Tobin. That’s not fair.”

“What percentage?”

“Well, at least forty.”

“Forty!”

Marcie turned around as if Tobin had thrown something at her.

“Well, fifty then,” Neely said.

“That’s the best you can do? You’re supposed to be reassuring here, Neely, and you’re not reassuring me for shit.”

“All right, then, let’s make it between fifty-five and fifty-eight?”

“Fifty-five and fifty-eight?”

“Yeah, I’m between fifty-five and fifty-eight percent positive that things are going to be just fine.” By the end he was gushing with optimism. “Fifty-five to fifty-eight. No doubt about it.” Then he paused. “How’s your list coming?”

“I added two more names tonight.” And he had, too: Michael Dailey, because he had apparently been embezzling from Dunphy, and a man named Harold Ebsen because he may have been the one to break into Dunphy’s Hunter office.

“Good boy. Bring them along to Huggins’s office. They’ll help. And keep your chin up, okay?”

“Yeah. Fifty-five to fifty-eight.”

“Exactly, my man, exactly.”

“I see you’ve got Anthony Mann’s The Naked Spur out there.”

“Yes.”

“It’s one of my favorite movies.”

“Mine, too.”

“Jimmy Stewart really shocks you, doesn’t he? I mean, you don’t expect him to even be capable of a performance like that. So crazed and everything.”

“We’ve always underestimated him. We take him for granted too much.”

They were in his bed. She’d made him light the tiny Christmas tree on his bureau, and now the room was cast in deep shadows from red and yellow and blue and green lights.

She had let her hair down and wore a pair of his pajamas and was propped up against the back of the bed as if she planned to sit up and talk all night. She’d taken a shower and smelled wonderfully clean. Tobin had one of those punitive erections that he could find nothing to do with, just lie there and sort of try to flick down and be miserable with.

Thus far, in an attempt to show her that he was a nice guy with whom she had a lot in common (in fact, their taste in films was identical), he’d let her talk on about many of the mutual favorites: Budd Boetticher and Douglas Sirk and Bernard Herrmann, the composer, and Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro and Out of the Past and Charley Varrick.