Privileged Conversation

by Ed McBain

  “I’d like to fax this to you, hmm?” Stanley says. “Do you have a fax in your office?”

  “No,” David says.

  “Well, can I leave it with your doorman then?”

  “Where?”

  “The office, the apartment, wherever.”

  “The office would be better,” David says.

  “I’ll drop it off later. Meanwhile, can we go over it on the phone?”

  “Yes, let’s.”

  “I really don’t want any contradictions here, Dave. This is too important for either of us to be saying something the other one contradicts. What’d you tell Helen?”

  “That Syd Markland …”

  “With a ‘y,’ right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Syd with a ‘y.’”

  “Yes, had put together the program and invited all the guests.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s the name you gave me …”

  “Yes, he doesn’t exist.”

  “Good.”

  “Did you say the APA was sponsoring it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. That’s what I told Gerry. Did she question any of this? Helen?”

  “No.”

  “Good. What I’ve tried to do, Dave, is set up a practically morning-to-night round of talks, meetings, panel discussions … I’m sorry to do this to you, I know you’ll just be killing time here in the city …”

  “I have work to do, don’t worry.”

  “I truly appreciate this, Dave.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “I just want to seem busy and involved all day long, hmm?” Stanley says. “That’s why I’d like you to look over the schedule carefully, so in case Helen asks where you’re going to be on such and such a night …”

  “She probably will.”

  “Why?” Stanley asks at once. “She doesn’t suspect anything, does she?”

  “No, no.”

  “You didn’t tell her about me and Cindy, did you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why would she want to know where you’re going to be? Gerry never asks where I’m going to be.”

  “It’s the sort of information we normally exchange,” David says.

  “Why? Doesn’t she trust you?”

  “Yes, she trusts me.”

  “Well, Gerry certainly trusts me. Which is why she never asks.”

  “Then why’d you work out such a complicated schedule?”

  “In case she asks. Besides, it isn’t complicated.”

  “You said panels, meetings, lectures …”

  “Yes, but scattered throughout the day, hmm? It isn’t complicated. Besides, I didn’t leave her a copy of it. But in case she asks what’s happening tonight, for example, I can tell her I’ll … where the hell is it? Here. Dr. Gianfranco Donato from Milan will be giving a talk on Learning and Motor Skill Disorders.”

  “Okay.”

  “At the Lotos Club.”

  “Okay.”

  “Five East Sixty-sixth.”

  “Got it.”

  “You don’t have to write this down, I’ll be dropping the schedule off. Are you at the office now?”

  “No.”

  “Where are you?”

  “In a coffee shop. A phone booth in a coffee shop.”

  “Shall I bring it to you there?”

  “No, just drop it at the office. I’ll pick it up later.”

  “Are you sure? Suppose Helen calls you ten minutes from now?”

  “Stanley …”

  “All right, all right. But you can’t blame me for wanting to be careful, Dave. You have nothing to lose here. I realize the favor you’re doing, but even so, please try to understand my caution, hmm?”

  “I understand completely.”

  “When will you be at the office?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I’m just afraid you’ll talk to Helen before you get the schedule, and you won’t know where the hell we’re supposed to be all day.”

  “I won’t be talking to Helen until later tonight.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because that’s what we arranged.”

  “Doesn’t she trust you?”

  “Stanley, we’ve been over that.”

  “I mean, calling on schedule, that sounds like a woman who doesn’t trust you.” His voice lowers. “Cindy’s with me now,” he says. “You should see her.”

  “Stanley, I have to go now.”

  “No, wait. Wait! Let me read this to you. At least, this afternoon’s meetings and tonight’s schedule. In case you talk to her.”

  “I won’t be …”

  “In case, okay? In fact, you’d better write it down, after all. Have you got a pencil?”

  David sighs.

  “All the lectures are at the Lotos Club,” Stanley says, “but I’ve put the panels and meetings at different places, in case anyone tries to get to us. By the way, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t give all of this to Helen. I mean, if she asks, you can tell her where you’ll be at any given point in time, but I wouldn’t volunteer the entire schedule.”

  “I wouldn’t do that, anyway.”

  “That’s in case she talks to Gerry. Though I can’t see why they’d be talking in the next few days, can you?”

  “No, I can’t imagine that happening.”

  “Neither can I. But just in case. Okay, this afternoon at two, there’ll be a panel discussion on Mood Disorders, chaired by Dr. Phyllis Cagney who’ll also be doing the one on Eating Disorders tomorrow afternoon. She doesn’t exist, either. I’ve got those at a meeting room at the Brewster, that’s a small hotel on Eighty-sixth off Fifth, this isn’t supposed to be a huge convention or anything, you know.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “I’ve already given you Dr. Donato at the Lotos Club tonight …”

  “Yes, what time?”

  “Eight. I told Gerry you and I would be having dinner together first, hmm?”

  “Where?”

  “Bertinelli’s. On Madison and Sixty-fifth. Actually, I’ll be taking Cindy there,” he says, his voice lowering again on her name. “I’ll put it on my credit card, and say it was you.”

  “Fine. I’ll do the same.”

  “I didn’t tell her where. That’s just in case she asks later. I didn’t think we have to give them any restaurant names in advance. Unless they ask.”

  “Okay.”

  “Will Helen ask?”

  “I’m sure she will.”

  “So where do you want to say?”

  “Well, not Bertinelli’s. If you’ll be there with her.”

  “Cindy.”

  “Yes.”

  “You should see her. So where will you say?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Well, pick something, just in case Gerry …”

  “You can tell Gerry it was Bertinelli’s, I’m sure Helen won’t be calling her. I’ll tell Helen whatever. Wherever I finally end up tonight. I’ll let you know in the morning where it was.”

  “But not too early, hmm?” Stanley says.

  He has never before used the call-forwarding feature on the telephone in their apartment, but when he goes there late that morning he first calls the Vineyard to tell Helen he’s arrived safely, and then he consults the manual. The manual says:

  • Call Forwarding Works Like This

  TO USE CALL FORWARDING, DIAL: 7 4 #

  LISTEN FOR A DIAL TONE. THEN DIAL THE TELEPHONE NUMBER YOU WANT YOUR CALLS TO BE FORWARDED TO. LISTEN FOR TONE(S) FOLLOWED BY RINGING. CALL FORWARDING WILL BE ESTABLISHED WHEN SOMEONE ANSWERS. TELL THE PERSON WHO ANSWERS TO EXPECT YOUR CALLS.

  He reads the instructions yet another time. He keeps the manual open before him as he punches out 7, 4, #. He listens for the dial tone. He dials Kate’s number. He hears a beep and then her phone begins ringing.

  “Hello?” she says.

  “It’s me,” he says.

  He feels like a spy.


  Later that afternoon, he records an outgoing message on Kate’s answering machine, and then, from a pay phone on the corner, he dials his own number. There is a single ring, and then an almost imperceptible click, and then another ring, and another, and another, and Kate’s machine kicks in, not with her familiar, “Hi, at the beep, please,” but instead with David’s recorded voice: “Hello, no one can answer your call just now, but if you leave a message at the beep, someone will get back to you as soon as possible.”

  Aside from that tiny click—which could, after all, have been the answering machine switching modes—there is no way that anyone on earth can know that the call is not being answered in the Chapman apartment. If Helen calls from the Vineyard, she will have no way of knowing his voice is coming from Kate’s machine rather than their own. She will have no way of knowing that her husband is a lying cheat.

  “Does it work?” Kate asks.

  “Yes,” he says.

  Smiling, she takes his arm.

  After dinner that night, they go back to her apartment.

  He feels relatively safe.

  Sort of.

  “Your boyfriend’s on the phone,” Mistoffelees says.

  Already in costume for the Wednesday matinee performance, he comes bouncing down the hall as part of his warm-up exercises, a virtual jack-in-the-box in black, springing up and down and up again as he gestures toward the wall phone and leaps away out of sight.

  The receiver is hanging from its cord.

  She picks it up.

  “Hi, darling,” she says.

  “Well,” he says approvingly, “that’s better.”

  A chill races up her back.

  “Who is this?” she asks at once.

  “Who do you think it is, Puss?”

  “Go away,” she says.

  “Don’t hang up,” he warns.

  She stands transfixed, a barrage of thoughts bombarding her mind. This number is unlisted, how did he get it? Does he know someone in the show? Is he an investor? Is he an actor who once worked the Winter Garden? Has he dated one of the …?

  “How are you?” he asks pleasantly.

  “I’m going to hang up.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Obedience,” he says.

  “Leave me alone. I’ll go to the police again.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Have you gone to the police?”

  “No. But I will if you don’t …”

  “Have you?”

  “I will go. I said I will”

  “No, you said again.”

  “No. But I will.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “I will.”

  Her voice weakening.

  “I’m watching you, Puss.”

  “Please. You have to stop …”

  “I’ll be there tonight.”

  “No. Please.”

  “Watching. Dance nice.”

  “No. Don’t come. Please. I don’t want you to come.”

  “You don’t want me to come, darling?” he says, and begins laughing.

  She hangs up at once. She is shaking violently. She stands by the phone, her open hand pressed to her pounding heart.

  “You okay?” someone asks.

  She looks up.

  Rum Turn Tugger.

  “Yes, fine,” she says.

  But immediately following the performance that afternoon, she limps over to the stage manager and tells him she thinks she sprained her ankle during the “Growltiger” number.

  “I want to check with my doctor,” she lies. “But meanwhile I wouldn’t count on me for tonight.”

  David has chosen a place he’s read about in New York, a dim, wood-paneled, clubby sort of dinner-dancing spot in the Village. “The steaks are terrific,” wrote the magazine’s restaurant critic, “and the eight-piece band plays much bigger-band music.” The tunes these musicians are playing now are hardly reminiscent of those David grew up with. Starting with when he was twelve or thirteen and first beginning to notice girls, the doowop songs he favored seemed to reflect his every adolescent mood and emotional shift, ranging from Brenda Lee’s “All Alone Am I” to “So Much in Love” by the Tymes, and all the other hanging-out, malt-shop, jukebox tunes that dominated the radio waves.

  When he was fourteen or fifteen the charts exploded with “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “I Feel Fine” and “She Loves You,” and more Beatles tunes than he could county, all of them an integral part of his tumultuous adolescence—when you were in love, the whole damn world was Paul, John, Ringo and George. And then when he was sixteen, the song that possibly best expressed his own inner turmoil, the song that seemed to speak directly to him, was the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” of which he, too, couldn’t seem to get none nohow. Oddly, when he was seventeen and his taste began to change somewhat, he played Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” day and night, longing for that stranger in the night who would fill his arms one day. Or night. Or anytime, for that matter.

  When he got out of high school and decided early on in college that he wanted to be a doctor, his musical taste took a more serious turn. “Ode to Billie Joe” was perhaps his favorite song that year, all haunting and solemn with ominous cello passages and dark hints of abortion or infanticide or both. When he turned nineteen, pop music seemed to go out of his life completely. The future was looming. “Mrs. Robinson” perhaps best exemplified for him the turn from a silly childish past to a mature responsible future. He was, after all, twenty-six and already a doctor when he first met young Helen Barrister on the bank of the Charles.

  Tonight, much older but perhaps no wiser, he holds in his arms a radiant twenty-seven-year-old who floats with him to the strains of “Moonlight Serenade” and “You Made Me Love You,” rendered as Glenn Miller and Harry James must have done them back in the dim, dark forties before either he or Kate was born. He knows how foolhardy it was for a clumsy oaf like himself to have asked a dancer, a professional dancer, to go dancing with him, but here they are and she makes him feel like Fred Astaire in Top Hat, makes him feel like Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain, makes him feel light-footed and light-hearted and light-headed as he glides her airily about the floor to these Golden Oldies neither he nor she recalls. To David, a Golden Oldie is Elvis Presley’s “Surrender.” To Kate, a Golden Oldie is Styx’s “Too Much Time on My Hands.”

  Most of the patrons here have come to dance. Many of the women are wearing ballroom gowns, although this is a mere Wednesday night. One dark-haired woman in a long red gown is even wearing a tiara. The couples drift about the floor like so many versions of Velez and Yolanda, showing off their ballroom training in whirls and dips and fancy turns—but their brilliance kneels to Kate’s luster. You have witchcraft in your lips, Kate, he thinks out of nowhere, and wonders again about the wisdom of bringing her here to a place where he can be seen dancing with her in public.

  She is wearing black tonight.

  He is beginning to think that any color is her color, but she wears black superbly, her fingernails painted not to match the sleeveless, V-necked mini she is wearing, thank God, but echoing instead the carnivorous red lipstick on her mouth and the dangling red earrings on her ears. She has left a sheer, black, long-sleeved jacket over the back of her chair, and she steps out now in just the short flirty dress, piped in white at the hem and neck, flaring out dramatically over long legs sheathed in black. Her hair is swept up and away from her face, ribboned with the same piped fabric entwined around a fake white carnation tilted recklessly onto her elegant brow. Black high-heeled strapped sandals designed for a runway rather than a dance floor add several inches to her already spectacular height.

  She is leading him, he realizes.

  But perhaps she’s been leading him from the start.

  He suddenly remembers her seduction of poor hapless Charlie. And wonders why s
he did that. And wonders again why she soul-kissed that kid from the bicycle shop. But the frown that creases his forehead is only momentary. He is lost in the scent of her perfume, lost in the dazzle of her flying feet, lost in the silken feel of her in the gossamer gown.

  But perhaps, too, he was lost from the very start.

  He has developed the philanderer’s habit of checking out a room the moment he enters it, reconnoitering it further as the evening progresses, wanting to be prepared for any unexpected contingency that will force him to explain, plausibly he hopes, what he is doing here with this young and beautiful dancer. As they come off the floor now …

  The bandleader has announced something called “Elk’s Parade” which turns out to be a jumpy tune David has never heard in his life, and something neither he nor Kate would care to dance to, though he’s sure she can dance to anything and make it look spectacular …

  … as they come off the floor, he scans the room again, checking out the diners, checking out the men and women moving off the floor or onto it, even searching the faces of the waiters and busboys to make sure there are no surprises lurking in the shadows here. He has thought of how he might introduce Kate if he ran into anyone he knows, but he has not come up with anything that would sound even remotely plausible. This is a psychiatrist from Seattle, we’re attending the same seminar. Nice try, David. This is a student of mine at Mount Sinai, I’m instructing her in Dance Therapy as a course of treatment for premenstrual dysphoric disorder. Oh yes, completely believable, David. Hi, this is my daughter’s first-grade teacher, I’m filling her in on Annie’s feats and foibles. Sure, David. Nudge in the ribs, accompanied by sly conspiratorial wink. The vast Brotherhood of Philanderers. Or, as it is known in the profession, the Order of Priapic Disorder Victims. Just kidding, folks. But he finds none of this funny.

  The steaks are good.

  He doesn’t very often eat red meat because he is a physician and well aware of the fact that his father suffered a serious heart attack when he was only fifty-seven, eleven years from now on David’s personal calendar. Moreover, until six years ago, he was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day—Marlboros, no less—and he knows his former habit increases his relatively high genetic risk. No need, therefore, to increase the old cholesterol intake, hmm? No need either, he supposes, to take this risk tonight, perhaps far more dangerous to his health than any tiny little cholesters, as he thinks of them, swimming around and clogging his arteries.