John Lutz - Darker Than Night

Quinn must have noticeably recoiled at the thought.

“On the other hand,” Pearl said, “there might be some booze left in that bottle. You’re going to my place and catch up on the sleep you should have had last night.”

“Pearl, I really don’t think I’m at that point.”

“You look like a goddamn wino, Quinn. C’mon.”

She stood up and reached for her coat.

Quinn looked again at his stained cuff and his unsteady hands. His head throbbed and his stomach was sour. He decided not to argue with Pearl. He trailed her meekly out of the diner.

As they were walking toward the car, she said, “I think you need a real breakfast instead of that jolt of caffeine and sugar you were working on.”

Pearl taking care of him. Maternal Pearl. Quinn couldn’t help wondering where this might lead.

“After you get something to eat, you sack out on my sofa and I’ll tell Fedderman and Drucker you’re not feeling well today.”

“Listen, Pearl…”

“Don’t thank me, Quinn. And don’t question what I say. It’d be best if you skipped working today and were sharp tomorrow, instead of being a booze zombie two consecutive days.”

Less than an hour later he sat with his sleeves rolled up at her tiny kitchen table, where she served him a cheese omelette and toast with a glass of orange juice, no coffee.

When he’d finished breakfast and was ensconced on Pearl’s sofa with his shoes off, she tinkered around in her bedroom a few minutes, then left. He opened a narrowed eye and caught her smiling at him as she went out the door.

It was a particular kind of smile that Quinn recognized, both affectionate and proprietary.

Lord, Lord, Lord…, he thought, and dropped into a sleep blacker than black.

Claire had just finished washing the bedroom windows when there was a knock on the door. That was odd, she thought. Someone had bypassed the intercom and somehow gained entrance to the lobby and elevators.

On the other hand, not so odd. Probably whoever was knocking had simply entered along with another visitor or one of the tenants. Or maybe for some reason the intercom wasn’t working today.

Claire’s lover, actor Jubal Day, had lost his role in Metabolism when it folded last week in Kansas City; he was back in New York with Claire. He’d decided to stay with her, even if it meant having to accept roles he didn’t want in off-off-Broadway theaters with folding chairs and leaky ceilings. Though she feigned disappointment about the Kansas City play, Claire was delighted. Handsome, lanky Jubal, with his tousled dark hair and piercing blue eyes, belonged with her. Belonged to her.

As she entered the living room, still holding the folded rag she’d been using on the bedroom windows, he was standing up from where he’d been dozing on the sofa. She grinned and waved him back down, since he looked too sleepy to be coherent anyway, and continued to the door.

When she opened it, she needed a few seconds to recognize the man standing in the hall. He was tall, blond, and muscular, wearing a black suit with a black pullover beneath the coat.

He smiled. “Lars Svenson,” he reminded her.

“I know. It took me a while.”

“I’m not always a furniture mover. I have another life.”

Claire grinned. “Everybody has several.”

“I thought in this one,” Svenson said with an easy confidence, “I’d come by and see if you wanted to share a little of it.”

“Uh, Mr. Svenson…”

He shook his head, widening his smile that was too obviously meant to charm. “Claire, it’s Lars. And I don’t mean any harm. It’s just that for some reason you stuck in my mind. I move furniture for a lot of people, and usually it’s just a job. But-”

He stopped talking abruptly and his expression changed. The smile was gone as if Claire had Windexed it off with the rag in her hand.

“Somebody looking for a job?” Jubal asked behind her.

Svenson recovered nicely and the smile was back. “Already did the job,” he said, his full attention now aimed at Jubal. “I just came by to make sure everything was to the lady’s satisfaction. We do that.”

“We?”

“Mr. Svenson was one of the movers who schlepped all our furniture up here,” Claire said.

“You shittin’ me?” Jubal asked Svenson, nudging Claire a few inches to the side. “You mean you actually get dressed up like a Midwesterner’s idea of a New Yorker and visit all your customers days later to make sure you put the sofa in the right place?”

“Mostly, we only do that with the pretty ones.” Svenson’s smile was the same, but something had changed in his pale eyes. “I know you’re not Claire’s husband; are you her brother?”

“Closer than her brother.”

Svenson’s unblinking gaze didn’t waver, but now he seemed amused rather than angry. “Like maybe her bodyguard?”

“Among other things,” Jubal said. Claire caught something in his voice; he was afraid, but he wasn’t backing off.

“Hopefully, bodyguarding isn’t necessary,” Svenson said.

“Hopefully.”

Svenson smiled again at Claire, then nodded. “If you decide you want anything rearranged, you know how to get in touch with me.” He backed away, then turned and sauntered to the elevator, not in any rush. Everything in his body language said he was in control and unconcerned.

Claire made a move to close the door, but Jubal reached out above her and held it open. They both watched until the elevator arrived.

“Thanks again for the business,” Svenson said to Claire, and gave a little wave as he stepped inside and the elevator door slid closed behind him.

“Guy’s some creep,” Jubal said as he shut the apartment door and latched it.

“He does have a nerve,” Claire agreed, “coming back like that.”

“And he doesn’t look at all Swedish. I doubt his name’s really Lars Svenson.”

“We can’t hold that against him,” Claire said jokingly. “Your own name’s been changed.”

“That’s common among actors, but not furniture movers.”

Jubal slumped down again on the sofa and used the remote to switch on cable news. The screen was split four ways to accommodate two men and two women in severe business garb arguing about the Supreme Court. It reminded Claire of a rerun of Hollywood Squares that had gotten out of hand.

She went into the kitchen and got a fresh bottle of Windex from beneath the sink to use on the spare bedroom’s windows.

Whether he was Swedish or not, she couldn’t get Lars Svenson out of her mind, which aggravated her because she knew that was exactly what he wanted.

Well, not exactly. He was, after all, a man.

Claire realized she wasn’t really attracted to Svenson. At least not in the usual way.

She was afraid of him.

The woman in the mirror hadn’t been rich before, or what she’d describe as poor, and hadn’t been married before. This was quite a change. The woman was smiling.

The mirror, bolted to the wall near the door to the hall, was a leftover from the previous tenant. Reflected in it was Mary Navarre, a woman in her twenties, with her mother’s ginger hair and her father’s Spanish eyes, and what he used to call her noble nose. She was of average height and slender, dressed in a light tan Gucci knockoff she’d bought before the inheritance.

Mary turned away from the mirror and looked around the spacious apartment on West End Avenue. She began mentally placing her furniture, which was still in a rental storage building in New Jersey. She was grateful again for the inheritance, but she would have preferred to wait a few years.

She missed her mother, who’d drowned while swimming off the coast of Florida five years ago. And she missed her father, who’d died of emphysema six months ago, soon after her marriage to Donald Baines. She and Donald hadn’t thought they could make it on one salary, even though he’d received a raise along with his transfer to the New York office, so Mary assumed she’d have to find some kind of work in or around Manhattan.