by Ed McBain
“Stupid fuck,” Sal said, and Michael visualized him shaking his head. There was a long silence. Jackie looked at Michael. Michael shrugged. They waited.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” Sal said, “this is already out of my hands, Dom. You really stepped out of line this time. I call Frankie about this, he’ll tell me to break both your fuckin’ legs and throw you in the river.”
“Maybe when you call him, you can ask him to talk to …”
“I call him, I can tell you what his response is gonna be. He’s gonna say don’t bother me with this shit, take care of it.”
“Maybe Jimmy’d be willing to guarantee the loan …”
“Why would …”
“. . . while I work it off.”
“Work it off how? You mean deliver some more coke and get paid for it and then go lose the money in some other crap game, is that what you had in mind, you stupid shit?”
“He’s getting mad all over again,” Jackie said.
“Could you at least ask him?” Dom said.
“Ask him what?”
“To sit down with Jimmy, talk it over.”
“He’ll say fuck Jimmy and fuck you too. He already went out of his way, and this is how you show your gratitude? That’s what he’ll say, I’m tellin’ you right now.”
“Just ask him, Sal. Please.”
“A sitdown, huh?”
“Please.”
“If I call Frankie … and I’m only sayin’ if . . . he’s gonna want this on his terms and at his convenience, I can promise you that. You caused a lot of fuckin’ trouble here, Dom, the two families, and now you want a sitdown, which is bringing two important people together to discuss your fuckin’ fuckup. That takes balls, I gotta tell you. How do you know Angelli’ll guarantee the loan? How do you … ?”
“Well, I don’t know. My friend’ll have to ask him.”
“Who you’re fuckin’.”
“Well.”
“I better be some kind of diplomat,” Sal said.
“You’re gonna call him?”
“Wait right here. You move out of this booth, you better run all the way to Yugoslavia.”
There was the sound of footsteps retreating. And now that the two men were no longer talking, Michael could hear other sounds in the restaurant, the muted voices of busboys and waiters as they began closing down for the night, the clink of silverware as the tables were set for tomorrow’s lunch crowd, the sound of a radio being tuned to a talk show. They waited. The snow kept falling.
“Okay.”
Sal’s voice again.
Closer as he slid into the booth.
“You’re a very lucky man, Dominick. He said Jimmy should call him, they’ll set something up for after Christmas.”
“Thank you,” Dominick said.
“You better fuck his cousin good between now and then,” Sal said.
It was still early enough in the afternoon for the beach to be unbearably hot. Even in the shade of the striped umbrella, Sarah felt uncomfortable, but she suspected this had less to do with the heat than with her sister’s conversation. Heather was telling her that she’d wanted to kill her husband the moment she’d found out. The island was French, women went topless on the beaches here. Heather sat bare-breasted on the blanket under the umbrella, saying she’d wanted to smash in his face with a hatchet. Her sister sitting topless made Sarah feel yet more uncomfortable, people walking by. She herself had not yet found the courage to take off her bikini top. Probably never would.
“Like when he was sleeping,” Heather said. “I wanted to pick up a hatchet and smash in his face.”
“Oh come on,” Sarah said.
“I mean it. Smash his face in. Then leave the house, fly somewhere out of the country, disappear from sight.”
The beach was on the southern side of the island, in an isolated cove far from the many hotels clustered on St. Bart’s Atlantic side. The house their parents owned was on a small verdant hill overlooking the beach, a good thousand yards from the nearest house, a twenty-minute Mini-Moke ride to the nearest good hotel in Morne Lurin. Mollie was inside the house, napping. Yolande, her mother’s housekeeper, was sweeping off the wooden verandah that ran around the house on three sides. The sound of her broom swished a whispered counterpoint to their conversation, such as it was. The tide was going out. Lazy wavelets lapped the shore. All was tranquil and serene, but her sister was telling her she’d felt like doing murder. Sarah didn’t want to hear any of this. She felt trapped on the sweltering beach.
“This was after I found out about his little bimbo,” Heather said. “He used to come home late from the office, tell me he was working after hours on this important account, that important account, I believed him. Her name was Felicity, I wanted to kill her, too. I kept wishing I’d come home and find him in bed with her, kill them both with the same hatchet, chop up their faces, disappear from sight. Come down here afterward, but this’d be the first place the police would look, am I right?”
“Probably,” Sarah said.
“This was right after Halloween, when I found out. It was a Sunday night, a woman in the building was giving a Halloween party. I went dressed as a sexy witch. Doug went dressed as a hairy warlock. Some guy supposed to be Dracula kept chasing me all over the place, telling me he wanted to bite me on the neck. Doug had the gall later to tell me it made him jealous, the count wanting to bite me on the neck. He’s screwing little Felicity blind two, three nights a week, he pretends to be jealous of some drunken jackass with fake fangs.”
She shook her head in wonder. A drop of sweat rolled down between her naked breasts.
“He called her later that night,” she said. “That’s how I found out.”
“How?” Sarah asked.
“I got up to pee—I always pee the whole night through when I’ve had too much wine, don’t you? Doug wasn’t in bed. This is three in the morning, I think, ‘Where’s Doug?’ Reasonably, no? Three in the morning? Is Doug in the bathroom? Is Doug also peeing? Will I have to wait in line? Or shall I go use the bathroom down the hall, off the study? But no, Doug is not in the bathroom, the bathroom is empty. So I relieve myself, as they say, and I go back into the bedroom, and Doug still isn’t in bed, so where is Doug? Overwhelmed by curiosity—as who wouldn’t be, my dear, it’s three in the morning—I go out in the hall, and I see a light burning in the study, and I call out ‘Doug?’ and I hear a click. Click. Just a tiny little click but I know it’s somebody hanging up a phone. Three o’clock in the morning, and my husband’s making a phone call down the hall. Well, he comes out of the study wearing nothing but pajama bottoms and a shit-eating grin, and he tells me he had to look up a word in the dictionary. A word? I say. Driving me crazy, he says. Couldn’t sleep. A word? I say again. What word? I’m still believing him, you see. I’m still thinking I must be mistaken about that click, it couldn’t have been him hanging up the phone, it had to be something else, maybe he was just closing the dictionary. Eohippus, he tells me. That’s the word he was looking up, three o’clock in the morning. Eohippus. You mean like the horse? I say. He says, ‘Yes, exactly, but how do you spell it? That’s what was driving me crazy.’
“Well, that’s reasonable, too, no? I mean, that’s something a person can understand, am I right? The burning question of whether it’s i-o or e-o? Three o’clock in the morning, we’re standing in the hall; and he’s telling me he got out of bed to go look up eohippus and it’s e-o, and now he can go back to sleep, which he promptly does, snoring, with his hand tucked between my legs. The next night, when I get home from work and he’s still at the office with one of his important accounts, the bastard, I look up eohippus. It’s e-o, all right. I figure, ‘Listen, there are stranger things than a man looking up eohippus three o’clock in the morning.’ But then the phone bill comes on November seventh.”
“Uh-oh,” Sarah said.
“I’m glad you didn’t,” Sarah said.
“Cooler heads prevailed,” Heather said, and smiled.
She herself looked nineteen when she smiled. Big girlish grin cracking her face, blue eyes squinching shut. Thirty-two years old, still looked like a teenager, firm cupcake breasts, flat tummy, the long legs and lithe body of a team swimmer—which she’d been in high school. Well, no children. Which, considering her present situation, was a blessing, Sarah guessed.
“I called a lawyer recommended to me by the woman who threw the Halloween party who’s herself been divorced three times. I told her a friend of mine was having trouble with her husband, and so on and so forth, lying in my teeth, I don’t think she believed me for a minute. Anyway, the lawyer tells me I should put a tail on Mr. Douglas Rowell, which I agree to do, and it turns out I was mistaken in my surmise, he isn’t screwing young Felicity blind two, three times a week, he’s screwing her deaf, dumb, and blind every day on his lunch hour, plus the two, three times a week he has to work late on all those important accounts of his. You should hear the tapes, Sarah, they’re …”
“You’ve got tapes?”
“Well, a tape, actually. I’ll play it for you some night.”
“Here? With you?”
“No, no. Actually, it’s in the lawyer’s office. Strictly X-rated, not for the kiddies. Doug’s Delicious Dick, starring nineteen-year-old Felicity Cooperman in the role she made famous, delivering the unforgettable line, ‘I just adore sucking your gweat big dick, golly gee, I can just come heaps sucking that big bee-yoo-ti-ful dick of yours,’ the little bitch!” Heather said, and flicked angrily at a sand fly. “I could kill them both,” she said. “With a hatchet!”
“Don’t tell that to Michael when he gets here.”
“When will that be, anyway?”
“As soon as he can get away. Something important came up.”
This was the twenty-eighth of December. Sarah had taken Mollie down on the day after Christmas. Michael was still up north; apparently some sort of big meeting was to take place today, and the DA had insisted he stay in town for it. Heather hadn’t yet told her parents that she and Doug were separated. Wait till she dropped that bombshell. Little Dougie? Sweet little Dougie? Yes, Mom, sweet little Dougie with the big bee-yoo-ti-ful dick little Felicity just adores sucking. They were in London at the moment, at Claridge’s, where they went every year at this time. Stay as long as you like, darlings. We won’t be back till the middle of January.
“And when he does get here …”
“Yeah?”
“Put on your top.”
“Mom?”
Twelve-year-old Mollie, standing on the verandah looking as sleepy-eyed as an eight-year-old and wearing only white cotton panties in possible emulation of her aunt. Brown as a pudding after only two days in the Caribbean sun, she blinked into the glare and said, “Can I go in the water now?”
“Come on down, sweetie,” Sarah called.
Her sister shot her a look. She wasn’t yet finished with her one-sided conversation, and she didn’t need a child intruding. Impatiently, silently scowling, she watched as Sarah hugged her daughter close and asked if she’d had a good nap, and why didn’t she ask Yolande to give her some cookies and milk, and then she could put on her bathing suit and maybe Mommy and Aunt Heather would go in the water with her. Aunt Heather sat frowning through all of this. There were more important conversations than those with a twelve-year-old child. Besides, why did Sarah persist on calling herself Mommy and talking virtual baby talk to a twelve-year-old with perceptibly budding breasts? All this was on Heather’s face as Mollie walked flat-footed back into the house.
“I wanted to go to bed with every man in sight,” Heather said. “Have you ever felt that way?”
“No,” Sarah said.
“Kill him first, then go to bed with every construction worker in New York,” Heather said.
Sarah glanced toward the verandah. Her daughter had already gone into the house.
“I mean, this was a violent need for revenge. This wasn’t your garden-variety urge to stray—which I never did, by the way, fool that I was, and more’s the pity. Have you ever?”
“Ever what?” Sarah asked.
“Strayed.”
“Cheat on Michael, do you mean?”
“Well, who else would you cheat on? He’s your husband, isn’t he?”
“I’ve never cheated on him, no.”
“I’ve gone to bed with sixteen men since I found out about Doug. That was on the day after Halloween, less than two months ago. Sixteen men in less than two months, that comes to a different man every four days, give or take a few percentage points. If my lawyer knew, he’d kill me.”
“I think you ought to be careful,” Sarah said.
“Not with that tape in our hands.”
“I’m not talking about a divorce settlement. I’m talking about …”
“Fuck safe sex, I don’t care anymore,” Heather said. “Was Michael your first one?”
“No,” Sarah said.
“Who was?”
“A boy at Duke.”
“You never told me.”
“I feel funny telling you now.”
“I was a virgin when I married Doug,” Heather said, and suddenly her voice broke. “Shit!” she said, and reached for her handbag, and yanked a lace-edged handkerchief from it just as the tears welled in her eyes. “I hate that bastard,” she said, “I really hate him. I can forgive her, she’s just a dumb impressionable … no, goddamn it, I hate them both!” she said, and covered her face with the handkerchief and began sobbing uncontrollably into it.
“Did you see that?” Andrew asked.
“Very healthy girl,” Willie said.
They were walking up the beach together, back toward where Andrew had parked the VW. Half an hour earlier, there hadn’t been anyone on the beach here in front of the big house, just the blanket and the striped umbrella and a paperback novel lying open on a towel. Andrew noticed details like that. The paperback novel. A romance novel. He’d wondered at the time who was reading it. Now he wondered which of the two blondes the book belonged to. The topless one who was crying, or the one trying to comfort her. He wondered if they were sisters. He wondered if they lived together in the house there.
“I meant did you notice she was crying?” he said.
“No. Who?”
“The one without the top.”
“No, I didn’t notice. If you want my opinion, they’re asking for it when they parade around naked like that. Even if that’s the custom with the French here.”
“Those two weren’t French,” Andrew said.
“How do you know?”
“The book was in English. I saw the title.”
“What book?”
“The one on the towel.”
When Andrew was a child, he’d been as blond as either of the two women they’d just passed. His hair had turned first a muddy blond and then the sort of chestnut brown it now was. His eyes, too, were a darker blue than they’d been when he was a boy
, and whereas his ears were still a bit large for his face, they were not quite as prominent as they’d been then. He’d eventually grown into them, all kids with big ears do, but he still wore his hair somewhat long, perhaps as a reminder that he’d once worn it that way deliberately, to hide the big ears.
The beach ahead of them was empty now. The striped umbrella was some hundred yards behind them. It was a good half-mile to the car, perhaps a bit more than that. Their conversation turned to business again.
“How much are they asking?” Andrew said.
“You have to understand these people are amateurs,” Willie said.
“Worst kind of people to deal with. Did you explain the exchange to them?”
“They understand all that. Andrew, let me tell you something,” Willie said, and looked around to make sure they weren’t being overheard, even though the beach ahead and behind was empty.
Andrew admired the way Willie looked. He had to be at least sixty, some thirty years older than Andrew, but he had the well-toned, tanned appearance of a man who spent a lot of time swimming and sunning in the Caribbean. Andrew figured they were about the same height and weight—six feet tall, a hundred and eighty pounds, give or take—but Willie seemed in much better shape. Both men were wearing swimming briefs. Andrew was still relatively white; he’d flown down only yesterday.
“They don’t care,” Willie said. “They just don’t have the vision. They think what they’ve got going’ll last forever, the demand’ll never dry up. What they’re saying is they don’t need what we can provide, they’re doing fine, they’ll keep on doing fine. If nothing’s broken, why fix it, you follow? So they just aren’t interested. I told them we’d be doing all the work, we’d do the spadework with the Chinese, we’d provide the ships, load and unload on both ends, this doesn’t matter to them. Since they don’t think they need us, the swap doesn’t interest them. They’re dumb amateurs, they can’t see the beauty of this thing.”
“Who’ve you been talking to?” Andrew asked.
“Alonso Moreno.”
“Does he know I’m here?”
“He knows you’re here.”