Эд Макбейн - Love, Dad

“We’ve always welcomed your friends in our home, but whenever you bring guests here...”

“Oh? When did your daughter suddenly become a guest?”

“I didn’t say that. Sparky’s the guest, Sparky’s ...”

“Sparky’s a person I love and admire, and if you could for a moment see past the fact that’s he black, then you might be able to share my feelings, which apparently you’re unwilling to do. It seems the only thing that’ll please you and Mom would be a goddamn Harvard graduate, knowing how much education means to you, even if the only reason it’s important is as a means of making money. Money doesn’t mean very much to me, Dad. I was living in India on thirty cents a day. The important thing to me is experiencing life and living it to the fullest, and also loving someone with whom I can completely share that fulfilling experience. I’m trying to make it clear that I won’t tolerate any unkind remarks about a person I love deeply. I don’t consider Sparky a guest in my house. I don’t consider Sparky...”

“I do,” Jamie said.

“Well, I don’t.”

Jamie sighed.

“When are you coming home, Liss?” he asked.

“Not for a while. I’m going back to Boston, and I’ll...”

“That’s not what I meant. I meant when are you coming back from wherever you disappeared to last April?”

She looked at him steadily for a moment, and then said, “I’m back, you know I’m back.”

He shook his head. “Someone’s back,” he said, “but I’m not sure it’s Melissa Croft.”

“It’s Melissa Croft,” she said and nodded emphatically.

He sighed again. “Two things,” he said.

“Yes, what are they?”

“First, I don’t think your grandparents appreciate the kind of language you use with such frequency these days. Nor do I. It makes you sound cheap, Lissie, and if you had any respect for...”

“The way I talk is the way I talk,” she said. “What’s the second thing?”

“I’d like you to go downstairs and apologize to your grandfather.”

“No way,” she said.

Jamie was parked several buildings up the street from Dr. Mandelbaum’s building, sitting behind the steering wheel of the Corvette and reading a copy of House Beautiful in which there was a layout of pictures he’d taken of a poet’s house in Katonah. When someone knocked on the curbside window, startling him half out of his wits, he threw up his hands and the magazine as if a gun had just been thrust in his back. The face that materialized in the car’s window frame was round and beaming, with brown eyes magnified behind thick-lensed glasses and a gray Freudian beard clinging to the jowls and chin of none other than Dr. Frank Lipscombe, Rutledge’s own psychological seer.

Jamie rolled down the window. “Hello, Frank,” he said.

He knew Lipscombe worked on this street, had in fact cautioned himself a thousand times to be careful of Ninety-sixth Street where Dr. Frank Lipscombe dispensed psychological tidbits cheek by jowl with Dr. Marvin Mandelbaum. But if Lipscombe worked here then what was he doing in the street here at a quarter to two in the afternoon, instead of upstairs making some schizophrenic patient whole and sound again? What the hell are you doing downstairs, Jamie wondered, five minutes before Joanna is due to come out of number sixty up the block?

“What brings you to Nightmare Alley?” Lipscombe asked, smiling through the open window.

Jamie could not immediately think of a lie. He smiled back at Lipscombe, hoping desperately that a lie would miraculously appear on his lips, flow mellifluously from his mouth — “What am I doing here? Why, what I’m doing here is is is is” — but not a single lie would come, not a single fabrication to explain why a man would be sitting in a parked automobile reading House Beautiful at 1:45 P.M. on a bitterly cold winter’s day. He pulled an old psychiatric trick: he asked a question in answer to a question.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. “Shouldn’t you be working?”

“Came down for lunch,” Lipscombe said. “One to two every day. Late lunch. My last appointment is at six, which means I’m through at six-fifty and home in Rutledge at eight-thirty. If I eat a late lunch, I can wait for a late dinner. How about you?” He said all this hunched over, his arms folded on the frame of the window, his smiling face peering into the car, the blustery March wind gusting around him.

“I’m waiting for my assistant,” Jamie said.

“Assistant?”

“Guy who works with me,” Jamie said. “Had to drop off some lenses.”

“Ah,” Lipscombe said.

“And pick up a strobe.”

Snow him with jargon , Jamie thought.

“Should be down any minute now, in fact,” he said, and looked at his watch.

The little hand was almost on the two and the big hand was almost on the ten, which meant that in about thirty or forty seconds, Joanna would leave Mandelbaum’s office, and take the elevator down seven floors to the street, and come sashaying out of number sixty up the street and right over to the car where Frank Lipscombe was leaning in the window, oblivious to the cold. But no, she was smarter than that; if she saw Frank, she’d walk right on by, she’d know better than to—

Still looking at the watch, he saw the minute hand lurch perceptibly. It was now exactly one-fifty. Joanna was bidding Mandelbaum goodbye and perhaps handing him a check for his deep perceptions during the month of February.

“Mind if I sit down?” Lipscombe said, opening the car door.

“What?”

“Sit for a minute?”

“Well, uh, sure, but he’s, uh, he’ll be down in a minute, he...”

“I just wanted to say,” Lipscombe said, opening the door and sliding onto the front seat beside Jamie, “that you did a hell of a job at that memorial service.” The door slammed shut behind him. He rolled up the window. Jamie glanced into the rear-view mirror. Up the street, he could see the green awning over the door to Mandelbaum’s building. No Joanna yet. The dashboard clock read five minutes to two, but it always ran fast. He looked at his own watch again. Only a minute had gone by. She was probably still up on the seventh floor, pressing the button for the elevator.

“A very nice job,” Lipscombe said.

“Thank you,” Jamie said.

“With more insight into what’s troubling today’s kids than one might expect from a layman.”

“Well, thank you, Frank.”

“The entire concept of leaving before they ever got here. I liked that. It created an instant image, almost a double-exposure, coming and going at the same time, a concept of speed ... perhaps an unconscious association with drugs, eh? I’ll bet any amount of money you see the entire world through a viewfinder, am I correct, Jamie, you don’t have to answer me.”

Through the viewfinder that was the rear-view mirror, Jamie saw a blonde in a blue overcoat coming out of Mandelbaum’s building. His heart leaped. No, she was too short, her walk was different, her hair—

“I’ll tell you something I’ve never told to anyone else in the world,” Lipscombe said, and stretched out, leaning his head back against the seat. Oh, Jesus, Jamie thought, he’s making himself comfortable, he’s going to be here for the next fifty minutes, unburdening himself. How much should I charge? What does Mandelbaum charge Joanna? Please, honey, please notice him sitting here in the car before you pull open the door and say hello, okay? Please!

“Are you interested?” Lipscombe asked.

“In what?” Jamie said.