Джон Макдональд - A Key to the Suite

She dropped her toilet articles on her bed and went around and stood close in front of him. “You’re all tensed up, darling,” she said.

“A little bit.”

She put her hands on his shoulders. “I’m the best of all possible sleeping pills, you know. No barbiturate hangover.”

“I knew I’d run into a girl at this convention,” he said, and his voice had already changed in the husky way she knew.

She dropped the robe into the chair, and stretched out beside him on the bed, welcoming his arms, and all the familiarities of the sustaining, readying hands. This is where the meaning is, she thought. The final meaning, always so good that even when this too is gone, we’ll live the time left in the glow of it. Thousands of times of love with this man, so that we are a single creature. And no other man has known me.

“Want to share?” he said huskily.

“Not close enough, darling. Next time around. Make it all for you.”

So, reading the small clues rightly, she went astride him and took the guided depth of connection, and became lovingly industrious while he stroked the long lines of her back, until he surged under her, and gave a choking gasp, stilled the tumult of her hips with the strength of his hands, and gave a long dwindling sigh. She put her head on his chest and listened to the slowing canter of his heart.

“Getting better girls at these things all the time,” he said sleepily.

“We’re carefully screened,” she said.

“Love you, Con.”

“And I love you, Jesse Mulaney.”

When she came out of her shower he was snoring just loud enough so she could hear him over the endless exhalation of the airconditioning grill. She put a blanket over him. She called the desk from the phone in the small sitting room and left a call for five fifteen.

She turned her bed down and got in and looked over at him.

It isn’t fair, she thought. It just isn’t the least bit fair. Thirty-two years with them, almost. Maybe, if I get the right chance, I can talk to Floyd Hubbard. I don’t think he’s like the others. He might be. That look of warmth and honesty might mean nothing at all. That would make him worse than the others. I think he ought to know what it will do to Jesse.

I wonder what Freddy Frick was being so darned conspiratorial about, taking Jesse off in a corner like that before we even got our luggage off the flight? Freddy is a shifty little bastard. When they came back to me, Jesse had that look he gets. Whenever he’s guilty he looks right at me and makes his eyes rounder, and he speaks more carefully.

A few moments later she was asleep.

At a few minutes after five the phone rang in 1102, and Fred Frick stopped his pacing and grabbed it.

“Mr. Frick? This is Miss Barlund. I’m in the lobby.”

“Oh! Come right on up, please. Eleven-oh-two. Can I order a drink for you while you’re on your way up?”

“Yes, thank you. Scotch and water, tall, please.”

After he placed the drink order, he opened the door a few inches and resumed his pacing. He had been almost positive Jesse would veto the idea. But he’d had to go through the motions with Alma, to be covered in case Jesse and Alma got together this trip. But Jesse had thought it over and said, “Why not? No matter what happens to me, I’d like to catch one of those little bastards acting human just one time.”

“It could be a good piece of money, Jesse.”

“Now are you trying to talk me out of it?”

“No. Nothing like that. But Hubbard shouldn’t find out about it.”

“Are you going to tell him? Am I? And Alma wouldn’t send over anybody who’d pull anything cute. As far as the money goes, I’m not about to pinch a penny on a thing like this. If Alma says she’s good, that’s enough. How is Alma?”

“Same as ever. She’s telling the girl she has a personal interest in this working out. And she’d like you to phone her. I’ve got her new number. She wants to thank you for the way the stock thing worked out.”

“Go ahead with it, Freddy. Set it up. You make an outlay, you’ll get it back. But Hubbard isn’t going to be easy.”

So now he was in it, and nervous about it, convinced it was a mistake before it had even begun.

At the knock on his door he hurried to it and opened it and got his first look at Corinna Barlund. Though he maintained the smile on his salesman face, he felt acute disappointment. She was of medium height, and to Frick she looked more scrawny than willowy. Her hair was more nearly brown than blonde, soft, cropped, casual, with a careful-careless arrangement of bangs. She wore a blue sheath dress, a little white cape effect, blue high-heeled sandals, white gloves, smoked glasses, and a Jacqueline pillbox hat. She carried one of the largest handbags Frick had ever seen.

“Mr. Frick,” she said gravely.

“Nice you could make it, Cory,” he said as she walked in.

“Thank you.”

He stared at the rearview of her as he closed the door. She certainly walked in a pleasant, classy way, but who goes for the walk? Most teenagers had her whipped in front, and all she had in back was tan skinny legs and about as much can on her as any eleven-year-old boy.

“Sit down, Cory. Sit down. Drinks will be right along.”

She turned and smiled and lifted the big handbag. “I didn’t know the uniform of the day, so I brought a change along, dinner dress and goodies to go with it.” She turned the straight chair away from the desk, sat down and put the bag on the floor beside her. She put her dark glasses on the desk, shrugged her cape off her shoulders onto the back of the chair, and pulled her gloves off. She bent and delved in the big bag and came up with cigarettes. Frick hurried to light her cigarette. He sat on the bed and smiled at her and said, “Well, now!” Her bare shoulders were nicely tanned, but they looked too bony to him.

There was a second rap on the door. A waiter brought the two drinks in. He seemed far more polite and attentive than waiters usually were, Frick realized, when they brought you and a broad a drink. She had style, certainly. And what he classified as a society manner. This was the kind of bitch you’d see playing tennis when you looked over the wall into one of the private clubs. He suddenly decided she was maybe some society house-wife Alma had lined up, a bored doll short of money and looking for kicks.

She sipped her drink. He smiled at her. He wondered what was the most graceful way to bring up the problem.

“You do have the money, Mr. Frick?”

“Uh? Oh, yes. Yes, I got it right here.” He took the envelope out of his inside pocket and took it over to her and went back to sit on the bed.

She counted it and put it in her purse. “And you do understand the way it’s set up?”

“Alma said you’d make up your own mind, as you always do, and if you say no dice, you give me the money back, except for a hundred bucks.”

“Fifty for me and fifty for Alma. But she’ll try to find somebody else for you, of course. As I understand it, an old friend of yours and Alma’s will be helped out if a certain youngish married man makes a fool of himself at this convention. I’ll have to meet him and have a chance to talk to him a little bit before I tell you if I’ll take it on. I have an instinct for these relationships, Mr. Frick. And I can make a very good guess — which will keep you from wasting your money. Now tell me about this man.”

“His name is Floyd Hubbard, and lately he’s been working out of the Houston office. His wife is named Janice, and he’s got a little boy four years old and a little girl not a year old yet. He gets good money, and he’s a metallurgist by trade, on the research end.”

“Describe him.”

Frick did, to the best of his ability. As he had been talking, he had been looking at her. He had the strange feeling he could not bring her face into the proper focus. When he looked at the flat planes of her cheeks, he could not see the rest of her face. When he looked at her eyes, dark and gray-blue, the rest of her seemed blotted out somehow. Feature by feature, from the lean little nose to long firm heavy lips, to the small round imperative chin, everything seemed just right, except he could not see it all at once, as a face.