Эд Горман: Murder on the Aisle

“Then go around the corner, Frank.”

“Around the corner?”

“To Delaney’s. Have Delaney put you up with an IRA cocktail.”

“What’s that?”

“You don’t need to ask questions, Frank. You just need to drink it. Now go — all right?”

Frank straightened up, thankful that somebody was telling him how to live his life. In his blue blazer and white shirt and yellow striped regimental tie, he was a formidable-looking man. Just as long as he kept his mouth shut. Just as long as you didn’t look at his eyes.

Frank had just turned his back to the exit door, apparently considering Tobin’s advice, when his wife Dorothy appeared from the east wing.

Dorothy’s age was kept a secret. She was one of those women who might have been thirty-five or fifty. She was tall, slender, and elegant and spent at least as much money on her blond hair, her red nails, and her tanned legs as the Pentagon did on nuclear submarines. Tobin liked her sometimes, disliked her others. He had never been able to form a final opinion of her.

“Hi, Tobin,” she said, leaning in and giving him a Hollywood kiss on the cheek. She smiled and took his hand. Her touch felt wonderful and he decided to like her for sure and for good. “My husband here is all shaken up about what happened with you and Richard last night. But let’s try to assure him that everything’s going to be fine.”

Frank said, “Tobin thinks I should go over to Delaney’s and have something called an IRA cocktail.”

Dorothy laughed. “That sounds like something you could have used this afternoon at the club. Did he tell you about it, Tobin?”

“I tell Tobin everything,” Frank said. “I always tell him he should have been a priest.”

One of the grips came up. “Mr. Emory, there’s a call for you.”

Frank nodded.

Then the grip said, “Mr. Tobin, Linda said to tell you she’s waiting.”

“Thank you,” Tobin said.

Dorothy kissed him on the cheek again. “Don’t worry, Tobin, between your efforts and mine, we’ll get my husband to act like a real man someday.”

Then he remembered why he didn’t like Dorothy sometimes. She couldn’t resist belittling her husband — even when he had it coming.

“As soon as I’m done with this phone call, I’m definitely going to have one of those cocktails,” Frank said. “What are they called again?”

“IRA,” Tobin said.

Dorothy drifted back to the east wing, where there was a comfortable lounge. “I’ll see you both later.”

Frank watched her go. “She’s a wonderful woman,” he said. And then he smiled at Tobin. “Sometimes.”

“You didn’t shave very well.”

Tobin leaned forward in the chair and looked into the mirror. “No, I didn’t.”

“But you still look cute.” Linda, the makeup woman, laughed. She had a great laugh. A great butt, too.

“Are you sure forty-one-year-old men can still be cute?”

“Sure.”

“Are you sure that forty-one-year-old men want to be cute?”

Linda laughed her great laugh again. “Beats being ugly.”

“True enough.”

A knock came. This was the makeup room upstairs, where stars of lesser magnitude prepared. Who’d be calling on him here?

“You want me to see who’s there?”

“If you wouldn’t mind,” Tobin said. He felt like a child. She had put a bib on him to protect his shirt from the makeup.

Linda took her great butt (which Tobin watched with a good deal of reverence in the mirror) over to the door and opened it.

The woman on the other side of the threshold caught his gaze immediately. “I just wanted to see if Tobin was here.”

Linda knew who she was, of course, and apparently liked her because her tone was very friendly. “Sure, come on in. I’m all done anyway.”

Tobin watched the mirror as she came in. She was a suburban beauty. Not the exotic sort you found in fashion magazines but the sort you found in supermarkets pushing a shopping cart and two kids. Freckles. Blue eyes. A lovely if not quite spectacular body. She knew at least something about Emmanuel Kant (she’d been a 3.7 student) and she was perfect company on rainy Friday nights for sharing a joint and listening to old Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young albums. She got sentimental very easily but it was a deadly mistake to think of her as uncomplicated because she had as many secrets as a movie star’s secretary. She had responded to her husband’s unfaithfulness by being unfaithful herself. Though she had always been Dunphy’s girl, Tobin had known her first (he still remembered the brilliant autumn afternoon when she’d walked into the student union in her fawn-colored suede jacket and her mysterious blue gaze) and loved her first, and so it had made sense that when Jane wanted to have an affair (not to pay Richard back, only so she could have some sense of purpose in her own life) that Tobin would be the man.

“Well, good luck on the show tonight,” Linda said as she was leaving.

“Thanks,” he said.

“She’s sure a nice woman,” Jane Dunphy said.

Tobin decided to get it over with. “You haven’t been returning any of my calls lately.”

“I thought we were taking a break.”

“Some break. We haven’t been together for four months. Now I don’t even get phone calls.”

“I’ve really been busy. You know, with the holidays and all.”

“Why the hell don’t you just tell me what’s going on?”

“Nothing’s going on.”

He got up out of his chair and went over and tried to kiss her but she turned away.

“Things are more — complicated than that,” she said.

“Jesus.”

“I just came in to say hello. I didn’t want a scene.”

“Why can’t you be honest with me?”

She reached out to touch his cheek. Gently. “Did it ever occur to you that I might be trying to spare your feelings?”

“I don’t want them spared. I want the truth.”

She drifted over to the mirror and looked without self-consciousness at her beautiful face. “I’m starting to count the wrinkles.”

“You’re beautiful. You know that.”

“We’re not young anymore, do you ever think about that?”

“Sometimes.”

“It’s going so fast.”

“Very fast.”

“I wish there were somewhere I could go. Hide out. You know?”

“I know.”

“I’ve started thinking of time as this kind of shambling figure, like a hobo. Sometimes I look out my front window and I imagine I see him there, waiting. I’d like to hide, as I say, but I don’t know where I’d go.”

“ ‘I have an appointment in Samarra.’ ”

“What?”

“John O’Hara lifted that from Somerset Maugham, who lifted it from Arabian literature. A man leaves a town fleeing from Death. On his way to Samarra he sees Death on the road and asks whom he’s going to see, and Death says, ‘I have an appointment in Samarra.’ ”

“God.”

“Right.” Then: “I’ve missed you. I’ve missed you a lot, Jane.”

“Well, I’ve missed you, too.”

“Somehow I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing.”

“Oh, please, Tobin. I really did just stop in to see how things were going.”

“You know how they’re going. Richard and I probably aren’t going to be partners anymore.”

“I know.”

Tobin went over and leaned against the dressing table. “So you’re not going to tell me?”

“Tobin, please, I—”

“You owe it to me.”

She said nothing. She looked at her beautiful hands and then at her beautiful face in the mirror again. “I’ve started thinking about reincarnation a lot lately.”

“Last year it was transcendental meditation.”

“I think studying reincarnation has been more helpful for me.”