William McGivern - Night of the Juggler

“Of course.” Ransom’s voice was suddenly warm; Rusty Boyle could imagine that he was smiling.

“Well, here’s why I’m calling. I got to thinking. This is something you might check out. I mean, what hit you is just as much an accident as if it was a truck. Maybe you could ask your doctor about it.”

“I appreciate your interest, but I don’t see what good it would do.”

“Maybe not. It was just a thought. It might have some effect on your pension-”

Ransom laughed weakly. “If I had one, Sergeant.”

Please take the hook, Rusty Boyle thought. Please. Don’t make me a goddamn accessory before and after the fact.

“But I can’t say how much it helps to have you call me like this, Sergeant. I’ve never talked about it with anyone except the doctors. That’s the hardest part of it.” Ransom’s voice was trembling emotionally.

“Carrying it around with you and not being able to talk about it.”

All right, Boyle thought, you’re in this far, so use a sledgehammer.

“I thought ‘accident’ because that might apply if you’ve got a double indemnity clause in your insurance policy. . ”

Ransom was silent for a dozen or more seconds, but Boyle could hear the altered rate of his breathing; it was ragged and uneven, and unless Boyle was imagining things, it was threaded with a touch of apprehension. At last, Ransom said, “I believe I understand what you mean, Sergeant.”

“It’s just something you might check out. . ”

“I intend to, Sergeant. Thank you”-Ransom’s voice was close to breaking-”and God bless you.”

As Rusty Boyle let himself into Joyce’s apartment, he was remembering the first time he had met her, five months ago when she had called the precinct to report a burglary. A ring with a sentimental value but very little else was missing. He had filed a report and forgotten about it. But he couldn’t forget Joyce Colby. She was slim and tall, in her late twenties, with a fair complexion that was in flawless complement to her fire-engine red hair. And she was honest and intelligent, and Rusty Boyle loved her so much that she could melt his heart with a laugh or a gesture.

She had been married at eighteen to a construction worker, who had been killed in a fall from the forty-second floor of a building being put up near Times Square. From that experience and from Rusty Boyle’s own occupational hazards, Joyce believed that brave men were always in danger, simply by virtue of their maleness and courage, and she considered it not only her privilege but her duty to reward such men with understanding intelligence and share with them the sexual excitements of her body.

When he closed the door, she called a hello to him from the kitchen.

She was wearing green velvet Levi’s and a white silk shirt buttoned only at the waist, and when he kissed her and took her in his arms, the lovely swell of her breasts charged his whole body with excitement.

When she turned away from him, however, he noted a touch of resignation in her manner.

“Anything wrong?”

She smiled and shook her head slowly.

He picked up a bottle of scotch and two glasses from the bar adjoining the sink, but she shook her head again and put a hand on his arm.

“There’s a steak, an avocado salad, and a bottle of good cold wine,”

she said. “But later.”

“Goddamn it to hell,” he said.

“That’s right. Tonnelli called.”

“Goddamn it,” he said again, but he was already on his way to the front door.

It was late afternoon on October 15 that Barbara Boyd’s nerve failed her; she told the cabdriver to let her off at Sixty-fifth Street, several blocks from her apartment, and after giving the man a bill without even looking at its denomination, she walked swiftly along the sidewalk toward the Grosvenor Hotel, where she knew there was a small, intimate piano bar just off the lobby.

Luther would have listened to the tapes a dozen times by now, she thought, analyzing and weighing her every word, listening alertly for a revealing pause or stammer, a nervous laugh, or contradictions in what she knew he would think of as her “evidence.”

She sat at the end of the bar with her long legs crossed, twisting the stem of her martini glass with restless fingers, a flex of nervous energy. When she was at ease (which she wasn’t at present), there was a lithe and almost feline grace in her movements, a challenge in the directness of her eyes and in the clean planes of her face. She was wearing a bottle-green tweed suit and a blue scarf knotted loosely about her throat, and if it hadn’t been for the nervous tremor in her fingers, a casual observer would have taken her for an artist or designer or possibly an actress sipping a drink while waiting to keep a rendezvous with some fortunate man.

At this hour there were only a half dozen customers along the bar, and one of these, a large, florid man with cold eyes, was staring with frank and deliberate interest at Barbara’s elegantly slim legs. In the rear of the room the piano player was singing a medley of Noel Coward songs.

“. . I’ll see you again. . ”

His voice was sad and muted, the words as blue as the air in the smoke-filled little bar.

Her thoughts were sad and splintered with pain, like the music.

What was London, where she had first met and loved Luther Boyd, if it was not as she had once read, the mighty fleet of Wren, with top gallants and mainsails of stone?. .

And for some idiotic reason, maybe only because they had been so happy sitting in the lounge bar of the Dorchester, she had said to him, “Time held me green and dying, though I sang in my chains like the sea.”

And he had asked her, “Is that T. S. Eliot?”

“No, Dylan Thomas,” she had said, and he had made a note of the quotation and the name in his small leather appointments book, and she had liked him for that, had found it touching.

The martini did nothing to ease a bruise that seemed to be in the center of her heart.

Kate had been their child, but Buddy had always been her child even though Luther had adopted him and given him the Boyd name. But was that a fair assessment or just her depressed imagination at work?

The psychiatrist had asked her if she had any feelings of guilt about not having given Luther Boyd a son. She hadn’t been prepared for that question and hence had blurted out a quick and honest answer: “No, I’m glad I didn’t, Doctor.”

Why had she said that? It was simple enough, and one didn’t need diplomas on the wall from Harvard and Vienna to interpret it. She could not bear even the thought of losing another son.

She asked the bartender for a second martini, knowing she needed this additional crutch for her meeting with Luther, but as she did so, she experienced a revulsion for her own weakness and an active dislike for the person she seemed to be turning into, a neurotic female taking liquid courage under the insolent stares of the florid man at the other end of the bar, who, she knew quite well, would offer to pay for her third drink. .

Chapter 11

“God created man, and finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a female companion so that he might feel his loneliness more acutely.”

Luther Boyd closed the book he was reading with an irritable snap of his powerful hands and dropped it with a dismissing gesture on the table beside his deep leather chair.

“-feel his loneliness more acutely. . ”

A draining, weakening thought. . He had made an honest effort to involve himself in poetry and ballet and opera because these were art forms Barbara was passionately fond of. But how far could a man force himself? At what point did his simulated interest, his patient study of areas that bored him, wear into thin hypocrisy?