Ed McBain - Sadie When She Died

By Saturday afternoon at about three, the first signs of anxiety begin to set in as this or that luscious lovely announces that, Oh my, I would have been thrilled and delighted to accompany you even into the mouth of a cannon, but oh goodness here it is Saturday afternoon already and you can’t expect to call a girl at the last minute and have her free on D*A*T*E N*I*G*H*T U*S*A, can you? Last minute? What last minute? It is still only three in the afternoon, four in the afternoon, five in the evening. Evening? When did it become evening? And desperation pounces.

A quick brush of the hair, a sprinkle of cologne in the armpits, a bold adventurous approach to the phone (cigarette dangling from the lip), a nonchalant scanning of the little black book, a forthright dialing, and, Oh my, I would have adored going with you to the moon or even Jupiter and back, but here it is almost six o’clock on the most R*O*M*A*N*T*I*C N*I*G*H*T of the week, you don’t expect a girl to be free at this late hour, do you? The Snf has arrived. It has arrived full-blown because it is now six o’clock, fast approaching seven, and at the stroke of seven-thirty you will turn into Spiro Agnew.

At the stroke of seven-thirty, Bert Kling called Nora Simonov, certain that she’d be out having a good time, like everybody else in the United States of America on this Saturday night.

“Hullo?” she said.

“Nora?” he said, surprised.

“Yes?”

“Hi. This is Bert Kling.”

“Hullo,” she said, “what time is it?”

“Seven-thirty.”

“I must’ve fallen asleep. I was watching the six o’clock news.” She yawned and then quickly said, “Excuse me.”

“Shall I call you back?”

“What for?”

“Give you a chance to wake up.”

“I’m awake, that’s okay.”

The line went silent.

“Well . . . uh . . . how are you?” Kling asked.

“Fine,” Nora said, and the line went silent again.

In the next thirty seconds, as static crackled along the line and Kling debated asking the risky question that might prolong his misery eternally, he could not help realizing how spoiled he had been by Cindy Forrest, who, until four weeks ago at least, had been available at any hour of the day or night, and especially on Saturday, when no red-blooded American male should be left alone to weep into his wine.

“Well, I’m glad you’re okay,” Kling said at last.

“Is that why you called? I thought maybe you had another suspect for me to identify,” Nora said, and laughed.

“No, no,” Kling said. “No.” He laughed with her, immediately sobered, and quickly said, “As a matter of fact, Nora, I was wondering . . .”

“Yes?”

“Would you like to go out?”

“What do you mean?”

“Out.”

“With you?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

In the next ten seconds of silence, which seemed much longer to Kling than the earlier thirty seconds of silence had been, he realized he had made a terrible mistake; he was staring directly into the double-barreled shotgun of rejection and about to have his damn fool bead blown off.

“I told you, you know,” Nora said, “that I’m involved with someone . . .”

“Yes, I know. Well, listen . . .”

“But I’m not doing anything tonight, and . . . if you want to go for a walk or something . . .”

“I thought maybe dinner.”

“Well . . .”

“And maybe dancing later.”

“Well . . .”

“I hate to eat alone, don’t you?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. But Bert . . .”

“Yes?”

“I feel sort of funny about this.”

“Funny how?”

“Leading you on,” Nora said.

“I’ve been warned,” he said. “You’ve given me fair warning.”

“I would like to have dinner with you,” Nora said, “but . . .”

“Can you be ready at eight?”

“You do understand, don’t you, that . . . ?”

“I understand completely.”

“Mmm,” she said dubiously.

“Eight o’clock?”

“Eight-thirty,” she said.

“See you then,” he said, and hung up quickly before she could change her mind. He was grinning when he looked into the mirror. He felt handsome and assured and sophisticated and in complete control of America.

He did not know who Nora’s phantom lover was, but he was certain now that she was only playing the age-old maidenly game of shy resistance and that she would succumb soon enough to his masculine charm.

He was dead wrong.

Dinner was all right, he couldn’t knock dinner. They exchanged thoughts on a wide variety of subjects:

“I once did a cover for a historical novel,” Nora said, “with a woman wearing one of these very low-cut velvet gowns, you know, and I was bored to tears while I was doing the roughs, so I gave her three breasts. The art director didn’t even notice. I painted out the third one when I did the final painting.”

“I look at myself,” Kling said, “and I know I’m not a pig, I’m a fairly decent human being trying to do his job. And sometimes my job involves getting into situations that are distasteful to me. You think I like going onto a college campus and breaking up a protest by kids who don’t want to die in a stupid war? But I’m also supposed to see that they don’t burn down the administration building. So how do I convince them that keeping law and order, which is my job, is not the same as suppression? It gets difficult sometimes.”

“Contact sports,” Nora said, “are all homosexual in nature, I’m convinced of it. You can’t tell me the quarterback isn’t copping a feel off the center every time he grabs that ball.”

And like that.

But after dinner, when Kling suggested that they go dancing at a little place he knew in the Quarter, three-piece band and nice atmosphere, Nora at first demurred, saying she was awfully tired and had promised her mother she would take her out to the cemetery early tomorrow morning, and then finally acquiescing when Kling said it was still only ten-thirty, and promised to have her home by midnight.

Pedro’s, as Kling had promised, was long on atmosphere and good music. Dimly illuminated, ideal for lovers both married and un-, adulterated or pure, it seemed to work as a deterrent on Nora from the moment she stepped into the place. She was not good at hiding whatever she was feeling (as Kling had earlier noticed), and the ambience of Pedro’s was either threatening or nostalgic (and possibly more), with the result that her eyes took on a glazed look, her mouth wilted, her shoulders slumped, she became the kind of Saturday-night date red-blooded American males feared and avoided; she became a thorough and complete pain in the ass.

Kling asked her to dance in the hope that bodily contact, blood pulsing beneath flesh, hands touching, cheeks brushing, all that jazz might speed along the seduction he had so successfully launched during dinner. But she held him at bay, with a rigid right arm on his left shoulder, so that eventually he tired physically of trying to draw her close, being afflicted with bursitis, and tired mentally of all the adolescent fumbling and maneuvering. He decided to ply her with booze, having been raised in a generation that placed strong store in the seductive powers of alcohol. (He was, incidentally, a cop who had tried pot twice and enjoyed it. He had realized, however, that he could not very well go around offering grass to young ladies, or even lighting up himself, and had abandoned that pleasant pastime.) Nora drank one drink, count it, or to be more exact, half a drink, toying with the remainder of it while Kling consumed two more and asked politely, “Sure you don’t want to drink up and have another?” To which she politely shook her head with a wan little smile.