The Cold Blue Blood

by David Handler

  This one, its studio’s major $160 million Fourth of July weekend release, was all about evil aliens inhabiting the body of the president and first lady. Fortunately for mankind, first daughter Heather noticed the difference. And knew how to operate a ray gun. It was painfully awful, Mitch felt. He was not alone in this. Several very distinguished New York film critics started talking back to the screen. One even stormed out in the middle. Mitch would never do either of those things. Movies were his religion. Every film, no matter how awful, was sacred. And every theater was a temple.

  But he did find himself drifting away, his thoughts straying toward how contrived and false Hollywood’s big-budget thrills seemed compared to what real life had had to offer him lately. How devoid of genuine personal consequences such films were. How mindless and predictable and safe. Real life? Real life was not predictable and it was not safe. And there were no stunt doubles or feel-good Spielbergian moments to soften its blows. Real life was Maisie rotting away before his eyes. Real life was the sound of that shovel colliding with Niles Seymour’s leg.

  Real life was that someone had just tried to kill him. But who? And why? Did he know something? What, damn it?

  After it was over, Mitch headed back downstairs, momentarily disoriented by the late-day sunlight and the bustling cab traffic that greeted him out there on the avenue. Blinking and yawning, he trudged his way westward to his second screening, this one in an editing lab in a Times Square office building. All in a day’s work.

  Mitch hated what had happened to Times Square. His Times Square was the spiritual cradle of the Jim Brown double bill, the Sonny Chiba triple bill and the peep show that never quit. It was garish, grotesque and glorious, an aging streetwalker with smeared lipstick and runs in her stockings. Mitch had always adored it. It was real. It was vulgar. It was New York.

  The new Times Square was clean, safe and bogus—a processed cheese food theme park. Disney started the transformation when it cleaned up the New Amsterdam Theater so tourists would come see The Lion King roar on Broadway. And then pause afterward to shop at the smiling, happy Disney store, a giant shopping mall emporium festooned with billboards hawking the studio’s latest fun-filled family classics. Seemingly overnight, the genuine Times Square had been morphed into a Disneyfied version of Times Square—a soulless, fresh-scrubbed, crime-free urban tourist zone. All that was missing, Mitch felt, was a hologram of Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Jules Munchin dancing down Eighth Avenue in their sailor suits.

  His second screening was the new Bruce Willis, which he found to be very much like the old Bruce Willis. If pressed, he could have written his entire review in five choice words: More broken glass, less hair.

  Afterward, he met Lacy at Virgil’s, a boisterous two-story barbecue emporium on West Forty-fifth. Lacy came loaded with some choice office gossip—one of the paper’s editorial page columnists was sleeping with one of its Washington correspondents—and neither her husband, who was the managing editor, nor his wife, who worked for CNN, knew about it.

  “If that’s the case, then how do you know about it?”

  “Because I’m the one who used to be sleeping with him,” Lacy shot back, washing down a huge mouthful of pulled pork with a gulp of Dos Equis. Mitch’s editor was needle-thin, yet she ate and drank like a longshoreman. She could also chow down on barbecue while wearing white linen and not get a single drop of sauce on herself. He didn’t know how she did it. Any of it. “But enough about newsroom yakahoola,” she said. “I am way more anxious to hear about you, young sir. Tell me what it’s like to be mixed up in a true life murder.”

  “It’s revealing,” he answered, chewing thoughtfully. “Fear has a way of bringing out the things that people ordinarily do their damnedest to hide about themselves. Human nature, I guess. We drop our guard. Say things to other people—people such as me—that we wouldn’t ordinarily say.”

  “Such as … ?” Lacy asked eagerly.

  “What I’m discovering is that you’ve got this privileged, sheltered little enclave—let’s call it old money’s last bastion, because that’s literally what it is. And on the surface it’s all so beautiful and carefree and perfect. But, underneath, these people are just incredibly unhappy, messed up and obsessed with keeping up appearances.” He paused to sip his beer. “Dolly’s husband, Niles Seymour, didn’t belong there. They didn’t approve of him. He wasn’t one of them. And so one of them took him out. All three murders, I’d swear, spring from that single fact. And a single pathological fear.”

  “Of what?”

  “The outside world,” Mitch replied. “That’s what this is all about, Lacy. It’s not about some evil Freddie Kreuger lurking in their midst, sadistically picking off his victims one by one. It’s about the future. It’s about change.”

  “You’ve changed,” Lacy observed, studying him carefully. “What’s her name?”

  Mitch frowned at her. “Whose name?”

  “The woman you’ve met.”

  “I haven’t met anyone.”

  “Oh, yes, you have.”

  “Lacy, I haven’t met anyone.”

  “Trust me, I know about these things,” Lacy assured him. “Other people’s love lives happens to be the only subject I’m truly an expert on. In every other way, I am a complete fraud, as you and I both know.” She delicately dabbed barbecue sauce from her mouth with her napkin and reached for her alligator handbag. “I’m very happy for you, my child. Mother approves. And now I have to go. My Wall Street titan will be asleep, limp dick in hand, in precisely one-half hour. The madman gets up at five A.M. Can you imagine?” She rose to her feet, snatching up the check. “You should do a piece on this for the Sunday magazine, Mitch. You really should.”

  “Maybe I will. When it’s all over.”

  Mitch lingered for a few minutes after she was gone, finishing his beer. Several young career women were seated together at the bar, drinking and laughing. One of them was quite pretty, with shiny eyes and a brilliant smile. She noticed that he was looking at her. And returned his gaze, steadily and frankly. Mitch looked away, suddenly feeling very alone.

  He had never missed Maisie more than he did at that moment sitting there by himself in Virgil’s.

  The night air was breezy and fresh. He strolled across town to the Havenhursts’ apartment with his hands in his pockets, enjoying it. The theaters were beginning to let out. The sidewalks were swarming with animated, excited people. Policemen on horseback patrolled the streets. Vendors hawked pretzels. It was life in New York at its finest—something that Mitch never grew tired of.

  Still, he glanced over his shoulder every once in a while to see if he was being followed. He was not.

  He reached the well-tended brownstone on East Sixty-fifth Street just after ten. He buzzed, as he’d said he would. But Mandy didn’t come down. Instead, she told him through the intercom to come on up. He did. The building was elegant and spotless inside, with ornate hallway lamps, charcoal-gray herringbone wallpaper and a banister of polished hardwood. There were two apartments to a floor. The Havenhursts’ was on the third floor, in back, and it had to run them at least three thousand dollars a month.

  “We rented it furnished,” Mandy said in reference to the decor, which had the just so look of a Bloomingdales showroom display. “Don’t you just hate it?”

  “Not at all,” said Mitch, although the gold-veined mirror over the ornamental fireplace did strike him as a bit overwrought. So did the screechy Michael Bolton CD Mandy was listening to. “I thought we were going out.”

  “I didn’t feel like getting dressed again,” she said offhandedly. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “I guess not.”

  In fact, what Mandy was wearing was outrageously sexy. A white, gauzy, see-through summer shift that buttoned all the way down the front. She’d left the top two and several of the bottom ones undone, and near as Mitch could tell she didn’t have a stitch on underneath. Her bare legs were shapely and shiny. She was barefoot, her toenails
freshly painted the same shade of crimson as her fingernails. Her newly trimmed hair seemed an even creamier shade of blond than it had that morning.

  Mandy was a very desirable woman. But she was still married to Bud Havenhurst. And she was still no one who Mitch wanted to get mixed up with.

  She was drinking white wine. She offered him some. He accepted it.

  “This is nice, isn’t it?” she said, pouring him a glass. “Getting away from that island, I mean. I spoke to Bud on the phone this afternoon. He said the press had been calling all day long, wanting to talk to me. I am so glad I’m here. It is so narrow out there. It is so impossible to hide.”

  And she was, Mitch suddenly realized, so drunk.

  “I didn’t tell him you were coming over,” she added, handing him his glass.

  “Why not?”

  “He would not understand. He just gets terribly jealous.”

  He sipped his wine. “What was it you wanted to tell me, Mandy?”

  Mandy stared at him, dazed and dumbfounded. “Don’t believe in wasting time with small talk, do you, Mitch?”

  “It’s been kind of a long day.”

  “Well, then have a seat,” she commanded, waving him over toward the sofa. “Relax.”

  He sat on the sofa, but he did not relax. She turned off the music and curled up next to him, one bare leg folded underneath her.

  “It’s about the night of Dolly’s cocktail party,” Mandy began. She suddenly seemed edgy and distracted, as if she were trying to listen to a radio broadcast in the other room. Only no radio was playing. “The night when the Weems man was murdered, remember?”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “Well, Bud did not come to bed that night,” she revealed. “Truth of the matter is, he was not even home.”

  “Where was he?”

  Mandy took a sip of her wine. “With her,” she said to him over the rim of her glass.

  “Dolly?”

  She nodded her head, slowly and gravely.

  “What are you saying exactly?”

  “I’m saying that he and that bitch are still sleeping together,” Mandy replied, her voice now low and menacing.

  “How do you know this?”

  “I know because he slips out in the night on me all the time. I’ve followed him to her place. I’ve seen him.”

  She wasn’t necessarily telling Mitch anything he didn’t already know. He knew that Bud kept an eye on Dolly in the night. He’d run smack into the lawyer in her kitchen. “Go on,” he urged.

  “He didn’t come home that night until almost five in the morning. And when he did he was wet—and I mean soaking wet. Not from running next door in the rain. But from being out in it for a long, long time.”

  “I see …” Mitch considered this for a moment, wondering where else Bud had been on that stormy night. Where had he gone after Mitch was safely back in his own bed? For that matter, where else had Dolly gone? Mitch had no idea. And his mind was racing now. Because the two of them could have killed Weems together. “Did you tell Lieutenant Mitry this?”

  Mandy lowered her eyes and gave a brief shake of her head.

  “Why not?”

  She didn’t respond, other than to shake her head again.

  “Why are you telling me?”

  Now her blue eyes met his. And she did not seem the least bit drunk. She seemed cold sober, her gaze piercing, her body tensed. “Because I want there to be trust between us.”

  “Well, sure. Trust is important between friends.”

  “Is that what we are … friends?” she asked him imploringly. “People who can say anything to each other? No shame? No fear?”

  “Absolutely, Mandy. We’re friends.”

  She untensed now, smiling at him. “Good, I’m so glad. Because there is a favor I wanted to ask of you. It’s kind of a humongous one …”

  Mitch sipped his wine. “Name it.”

  “Do you remember me mentioning how much I want to start a family?”

  “Two or three little Havenhursts, as I recall.”

  “Well, Bud can’t anymore,” she said matter-of-factly. “His sperm count’s too low or something. Actually, I’m not sure what it is, since he refuses to go see a fertility specialist. In fact, he’s dead set against the whole idea of starting a new family with me. And so what I thought was …” She trailed off, swallowing. “He’ll believe it’s his baby, Mitch. And he’d never find out the truth. I swear I’d—”

  “Whoa, freeze frame!” Mitch broke in sharply. “What are you saying—that you want to have my test tube baby?”

  Mandy frowned at him prettily. “Why, no, Mitch. I’m saying I want to go to bed with you.”

  “Whew,” he gasped, fanning himself. “Is it getting weird in here or is it just me?”

  “I’m perfectly serious, Mitch.”

  “You can’t be serious!”

  “Do I look like I’m kidding?”

  “Well, no, but …”

  “Save my marriage, Mitch,” she pleaded. “Save me. Make love to me.” Her voice was a soft purr now. And she had moved very close to him on the sofa, her hand caressing his chest. “I am way serious.” She took his hand and guided it along her bare leg, her skin like electric velvet to his touch. “And way good.” Now she moved his hand under her shift … up, up, up … there. “And way ready,” she whispered. Which she most definitely was.

  Briefly, Mitch could not believe this was happening to him. Utterly amazing. Also utterly out of the question. He snatched his hand away from hers and got up and crossed the room toward the faux fireplace, Mandy’s eyes following him.

  “You barely know me,” he said hoarsely.

  “I know plenty,” she countered. “I know you’ve got brains. You scored at least fourteen hundred on your SAT exams, am I right?”

  “Well, yes, but that doesn’t necessarily equate with—”

  “You’re smart. I want someone with smarts. I’m a big, healthy girl, a good athlete, pretty. Between us, we’ve got all the bases covered. Our kid would be great, Mitch. Pure dynamite.”

  Mitch cleared his throat, swallowing. “Look, I’m very flattered. And I think you’re incredibly attractive. But there’s something you have to understand about me …”

  “What is it?” Mandy wondered anxiously.

  “I haven’t slept with anyone since my wife passed away. And when I do—if I do—I want it to be someone who I’m seriously involved with. I want it to be special. Can you understand that?”

  She let out a sad laugh and got up and came over to him. “Of course, I do. You’re a romantic. I think that’s wonderful. Quaint and sweet and wonderful. I really do. Only answer me this …” She set her wineglass down on the mantle, then whirled and slapped Mitch across the face as hard as she could, an open-handed blow that stung like fire. “What am I, a goddamned bag lady?! Do you know how gorgeous I am? Do you know, how many men want me? How dare you say no to me?! What are you, some kind of fag?” Now she hurled herself at him, pummeling his chest and shoulders with her fists, kicking him, kneeing him.

  The woman was out of control. The woman was totally mad.

  Mitch tried to subdue her. He grabbed her by her bare arms, gripping her tightly. They wrestled. They grappled. They fell to the floor with a loud thud, her nails raking his face, an animal snarl coming from deep down in her throat. She was coiled and strong, but he was stronger. And he did outweigh her. And now he had her pinned to the carpet with his body. And as the fight slowly began to seep out of her, her eyes grew softer and her body began to shift and writhe and undulate beneath his, her lips pulling back from her teeth, her breathing becoming shallow and swift. She was, Mitch realized much to his horror, intensely aroused by this. She wanted this.

  “God, give it to me right now, Mitch,” she moaned, her arms and legs entwining around him now, clutching him to her. One bare, perfect breast was fully exposed, her breath was hot on his face, her tongue in his ear. “Give it to me!”

  Recoiling from he
r as though she was toxic to the touch, Mitch scrambled to his feet and fled out the door, Mandy screaming curses after him at the top of her lungs. He caught a cab home. His driver didn’t seem to notice—or care—that he was bleeding from his face, neck and hands. His lip was swollen and numb. His shirt was torn. He felt as if he had just been mauled by a tiger. He had. She was a tiger. Also a card-carrying lunatic. And the knife cut both ways—if Bud wasn’t home in bed the night Weems was murdered, then she had no one to vouch for her own whereabouts either. What if she and Niles Seymour had been an item? What if Niles had tried to break it off with her after he took up with Torry? What if Mandy had murdered them both? She did not exactly cope well with rejection, Mitch now felt safe in saying. And she was certainly capable of it. What if Weems found out and had to be done in, too? Mitch could believe it. He could believe all of it.

  Mitch took the longest, hottest shower of his entire life when he got home. But he still did not feel clean. He applied antibiotic ointment to his scratches, an ice pack to his lip. He helped himself to a pint of Häagen-Dazs chocolate-chocolate chip. Popped Angels with Dirty Faces into his VCR. Turned off all of the lights in the apartment and sat there in the darkness, watching Cagney trade spunky, crackling barbs with Ann Sheridan.

  And, slowly, life began to make sense again. And it was fair and it was just and it was fun. And, for the umpteen-millionth time in his thirty-two-year life, Mitch Berger remembered why they made films and why he loved films and why it was that they purposely had nothing whatsoever to do with real life.

  After a while he dug out Lieutenant Mitry’s business card and called her pager number. She got back to him in exactly two minutes, her voice alert and anxious.