Manhattan Heat

by Alice Orr

  He rounded his shoulders to make himself appear shorter, and crossed the street, heading in the direction of the sedan that was on the other side of the avenue. He kept close to the parked cars so he wouldn’t be too obvious, though he felt he might as well be dressed in Day-Glo the way he stood out from the style setters around him. He had to try for a look at whoever was in that sedan. He could make out that it was one person not two. If this was the creep hoods’ car, one of them had come solo, unless the other one was out prowling the street already. Memphis glanced up and down the avenue but didn’t see anybody he recognized.

  He was as close as he dared get to the sedan now and he strained to see who was inside. This time a flash of recognition did hit him, but he wasn’t sure what direction it came from at first. This guy wasn’t one of the thugs, but Memphis had seen him before, and recently, too. He made the connection and turned around to head down the avenue. The guy in this particular pricey, dark sedan was none other than the man whose clothes Bennett was in the process of stealing at this very moment. The guy in the sedan was Quint Leslie.

  Memphis forced himself not to run. That would make him too conspicuous. He was making a beeline for the tailor shop all the same. He was also thinking how Bennett wasn’t able to second-guess Quint’s every move as perfectly as she thought she could. That made Memphis feel good somehow. He hadn’t liked that she seemed to be under another man’s skin. Memphis hadn’t liked that one bit.

  He bounded through the doorway of the tailor’s building and took the stairs to the second floor two at a time. Memphis wasn’t sure how he’d handle this once he was inside the tailor shop. That would be a tricky situation. The last thing they wanted was to attract suspicion, and it would definitely look suspicious for him to grab Bennett and take her out of there. Luckily, that wasn’t necessary because she was on the way out of the shop door just as Memphis hit the stair landing.

  “We’ve got to move fast,” he said, taking her by the hand and starting back down the stairs with her in tow. “Quint just pulled in up the street. I think he’s on his way here right now.”

  “Oh, no,” she gasped.

  She was carrying a vinyl, zippered garment bag so she’d already copped Quint’s suit. That might be tougher to explain than Memphis was.

  “We’ll go out the side door,” she said. “If we take the front way, we could run right into him.”

  “Okay.”

  Memphis almost smiled at the way she could think like somebody on the run and on the edge, even though he was sure she’d never been either of those things in real life. She’d shown how good she could be at it last night, but he had thought that might have been sort of a game to her. Today, she was back to her old self, looking as uptown as anybody can. Still, she knew how to be street savvy when need be. For a part of an instant, he let himself think that maybe they weren’t so different after all. The rush of warm air that hit him in the face as she hurried them through the back door and onto the street brought him back to his senses. He reminded himself once more about not believing in fairy tales.

  Bennett was crouched down, peeking around the doorway. Memphis peeked around above her. He didn’t see Quint. Maybe he’d passed the corner already. Maybe he hadn’t. One of them had to go out and try to spot where Quint was.

  “I’m going to go take a look,” Memphis said.

  Bennett grabbed his arm. “I don’t know if you should do that.”

  “One of us has to do it, and that means me. He didn’t get that good a look at me last night, but he’d definitely recognize you.” Memphis took a pair of dark sunglasses out of his jacket pocket and handed the jacket to her. “Hold this for me,” he said as he put on the glasses. “Maybe he won’t recognize me with these on.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “You’re pretty unforgettable.”

  Memphis stopped in his tracks and turned to look her full in the face. “Are you sure about that?” he asked.

  “I’m sure.”

  He could hear in the way she said those words that she wasn’t talking about Quint. She was telling Memphis she wouldn’t forget him. She was talking about after they went their separate ways. Memphis could hear that, too. There were so many things he would have liked to say, but they wouldn’t do any good. What is, is. He was clearheaded enough about life to know that. So he didn’t say anything to her. He just took off out of the doorway and down the side street toward the corner where he’d been hanging out at the mailbox before.

  Quint was coming down the street, on the other side, so that was lucky. Memphis should have hurried back to tell Bennett that straight off. They could duck into the doorway and wait till Quint got past and take off then. Memphis didn’t do that just yet because he couldn’t resist the chance to get a good look at the man who was going to end up with Bennett. Memphis couldn’t hope to deny the pain he felt in his heart from thinking that.

  He also couldn’t deny that Quint Leslie actually looked like a decent guy. He walked tall and fast, like a man with a purpose. The cut of his features was clean and straightforward. If Memphis had been wanting to see something weak in this man, he was bound to be disappointed. At least on the surface, Quint Leslie looked to be the kind of man Memphis could respect. That was the last thing he cared to be admitting, but he was too honest with himself to do otherwise. Quint turned to cross the avenue toward the tailor shop. He was facing in Memphis’s direction now and getting too close for comfort. Memphis headed back toward the doorway where Bennett stood waiting.

  “Did he see you?” Bennett asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t be too sure about that. Quint is very observant. He doesn’t miss much, and you stayed up there near the corner long enough for him to notice you.”

  “I said he didn’t see me,” Memphis snapped. He didn’t want to hear her talk about how smart her boyfriend was.

  “Okay,” she said. “You don’t have to take my head off.”

  “Let’s get out of here. He’s passed by now.”

  Memphis could have kicked himself for yelling at her like that when what he really wanted to do was wrap his arms around her and hold her so tight she could never escape. Instead, he was acting as if he wanted to push her away from him.

  “Which way are we headed?” he asked much more softly.

  “Uptown,” she said, and moved out of the doorway looking cautiously to the right and left before stepping to the curb and raising her hand to flag down a yellow cab.

  “Where are we going, anyway?” he asked, suddenly realizing that he had no idea what came next.

  “To my house.” She’d spotted a cab and was waving it over to the curb. She looked at Memphis, probably wondering why he made no move to join her there.

  “Is this your family’s house?” he asked.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “I don’t think that’s a very good plan, not for me at least.”

  The cab was at the curb. She opened the back door.

  “What other options do you have?” she asked.

  Memphis thought for a moment, but he couldn’t come up with a single one. He shrugged and followed Bennett into the cab. Whatever would happen, would happen. He just hoped he’d be ready for it when it came.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Bennett was almost certain her mother would be home and that explaining to her what was going on would not be easy. Dilys St. Simon was, above all things, a practical woman. What Bennett was doing would not seem sensible to her mother. There was too little chance of success in the enterprise. Bennett was too inexperienced in such matters to have any advantage at all. Dilys was a strong proponent of advantage. She knew how to get it, how to use it and how to keep it. Bennett’s behavior would appear to her mother to be pure foolishness with no saving grace to recommend it. Even Bennett understood that her mother was at least partially right on that score.

  Bennett had not told Memphis that her mother was likely to know he was in the house. Hardly anyth
ing ever happened at the St. Simon town house overlooking the east side of Central Park that Dilys didn’t know about. Bennett’s escape had been a fluke, and even then, Dilys had known within minutes when Bennett had left the house. Dilys kept an overseer’s eye on everything from the ordering of the groceries to the most minute details of her husband’s health and schedule. She would not be likely to miss the presence of an accused felon and hunted fugitive within the regularly patrolled boundaries of her realm.

  Maybe Memphis sensed that when he saw the immense, carved oak door with the St. Simon crest above it worked in brass and surrounded by an impressive curlicue pattern in black metal. Bennett was about to turn the key in the wrought iron front gate, which had been designed by the same craftsman who did the doorway crest, when she felt Memphis back away from her side. “This is not a good idea,” he said, just as he had on Madison Avenue and again several times in the cab. “I’m going to take off now.”

  Bennett’s heart leapt to her throat in near terror. She told herself to remain calm. If she let him know how desperately she wanted him to stay, that might spook him even further. Still, she felt she had to play the personal card because it was the only one left in her hand.

  “If you leave now, we may never see each other again,” she said. “Is that really what you want?”

  It was a gamble, and she knew it. She tried to read the expression in his eyes, but he had tucked his emotions away for the moment behind a facade of blankness. Perhaps he had to do that because those emotions were as confused and chaotic as her own. A single flash of response gave her hope. She might have won her gamble.

  “No,” he said in a voice that was low-pitched but resonating with feelings he apparently couldn’t tuck away. “That isn’t what I want.”

  Bennett turned back toward the gate and finished unlocking it. She pushed the heavy metal open and stepped through into the courtyard, willing him to follow. She tried not to make her sigh of relief too audible when he did follow. She closed the gate as gently as possible so there would be no clang of metal against metal. If that happened, he might think she was locking him into something.

  Up the stone steps to the massive door, he was still in her wake though not as close behind as she would prefer. She guessed that he was hanging back in case he needed to make a run for it. She wished the place she lived in looked more like an ordinary house. All of this pomp and circumstance was enough to spook anybody who wasn’t used to it. In fact, sometimes it even spooked her.

  Bennett pushed through the heavy door without letting on that she noticed how far Memphis was lagging behind. He continued to trail her at a distance but still kept following as she hoped he would. The door shut after them, and she knew he wasn’t about to make himself look foolish by trying to scramble out of it again. She already understood Memphis well enough to be certain he wasn’t the kind of man who cared to appear ridiculous if he could help it.

  She was afraid her mother might make him feel that way, just by being what and who she was. There was no way to keep him from Dilys. No way short of sprouting wings or becoming invisible or something equally fantastic. A wild thought struck Bennett with the force of wonderful possibility. What if her mother liked him? The elation of that prospect lasted hardly as long as it took them to cross the parquet foyer. The thought was even more fantastic than sprouting wings. The sight of Dilys emerging from the library confirmed that reality.

  She looked cool as January as always. She was dressed in a dove gray outfit, a color that brought out the soft lights of her eyes. Bennett wondered if she had ever seen her mother frazzled. It was a word that sounded foreign as Swahili in Dilys’s world, almost as foreign as Memphis looked in his jeans and T-shirt with the leather jacket slung over his arm.

  Dilys must have been deep in thought, because she didn’t appear to notice Bennett and Memphis. Last chance to make a run for it, Bennett thought, but she held her ground until Dilys looked up from studying the parquet in front of her Italian leather-clad toes as she walked, more slowly than usual, toward the staircase. As she drew closer, Bennett could see the lines of tension etched across her mother’s normally smooth brow. Perhaps Dilys St. Simon got frazzled after all.

  “Mother, I’m home,” Bennett said, feeling for the first time in her life that she should treat her ever-in-control mother gently.

  Dilys looked up and her manicured hand shot to her lightly tinted mouth. “Bennett,” she gasped. She reached for the banister to steady herself. “Thank God.”

  Her eyes glistened with a show of emotion Bennett could not remember ever having seen before from her mother. That film of tears prompted an equally strong flood of feeling in Bennett. She dropped the tailor’s bag she had been holding and hurried to Dilys’s side.

  “I’m fine, Mother. Really I am,” Bennett answered her mother’s searching gaze.

  “Are you truly?”

  “Truly,” Bennett said, and took her mother’s trembling hand, which had drifted from her mouth to midair.

  Ordinarily the St. Simons didn’t do much embracing, but there was nothing ordinary about today. Suddenly Bennett found herself in her mother’s arms. The difference in height placed Bennett’s chin almost atop her mother’s head. Bennett was glad of that because she would be blocking the view of Memphis still standing in the foyer. She dreaded her mother’s reaction to him now more than ever.

  Dilys’s desperate grip on Bennett’s body told her these had been terrible hours for her mother. Bennett felt surprisingly guilty about that, much more than after her Mexico escapade when she’d mostly been annoyed for being dragged home. She’d always felt admiring toward her mother but distant from her. At the moment, however, that feeling was very much changed. Bennett returned the embrace while her own tears churned inside her.

  Then Dilys pulled abruptly away. At first Bennett thought her mother might have reconsidered this uncharacteristic show of vulnerability and snapped herself back to her trademark cool facade. Actually Dilys must finally have taken note of Memphis’s presence. She had pushed herself arm’s distance away from Bennett but did not let her go.

  “Who is that?” Dilys asked. She didn’t sound happy about what she saw. “It’s him, isn’t it?”

  “This is Memphis Modine,” Bennett said.

  She also maintained her grasp on her mother’s arms. She couldn’t imagine Dilys tearing after him, but for one wild moment that seemed possible, as she breathed audibly through her narrow, patrician nose and glared at Memphis.

  “He is my friend, Mother,” Bennett said softly. She would have preferred to shout, but that felt like the wrong tactic here.

  “Your friend?” Dilys exclaimed. “Isn’t this the man who dragged you off with him last night and stole Royce Boudreaux’s car? Isn’t this the man who threatened to shoot Quinton Leslie?”

  “Mother, Royce was the one with the gun.”

  Bennett would have attempted to explain, but Memphis stepped forward. He had picked up the tuxedo bag and draped it over the newel post at the foot of the stairs.

  “Yes, Mrs. St. Simon,” he said. “I did those things. I didn’t have a gun, as Bennett says. But I had a knife, and that’s just as bad. I’m not proud of what I did, and I’m very sorry to have caused you so much worry. All I can say in my defense is that I would never have harmed Bennett in any way.”

  “You think that kidnapping a young woman and frightening her out of her wits is not harmful?”

  Bennett understood that Memphis wanted to talk for himself, but she spoke up against her mother’s anger anyway.

  “I am not harmed. You can see that.”

  “You certainly don’t look yourself, either,” Dilys said. “Your hair,” she exclaimed as if noticing her daughter’s shorter, darker locks for the first time.

  “I cut it so I wouldn’t be recognized,” Bennett said.

  “Did he force you to do that?”

  “Memphis hasn’t forced me to do anything. At least, not since shortly after we met. I made mys
elf less recognizable because I didn’t want us to be caught.”

  “I can hardly believe what I am hearing,” Dilys said. “This must be one of those hostage syndrome situations. He has brainwashed you into becoming his accomplice. I am going to call your father and the police right now.”

  Dilys moved to pass Bennett in the direction of the library, but Bennett took a firmer grip on her mother’s arms and would not let her leave.

  “There is no brainwashing here, Mother. Everything I’ve done has been of my own free will.” Bennett took a deep breath before plunging on. “I care for Memphis very much.”

  Bennett heard two gasps, one from her mother and one from Memphis. Bennett didn’t dare look in his direction for fear of what she might, or might not, see.

  “That is absurd,” Dilys cried out so loudly that Bennett expected servants to come scurrying forth in response.

  “Your mother’s very right about that,” Memphis said. His voice was deep and quiet and rumbled through Bennett like thunder rolling. “I think I’d best be going now.”

  He turned toward the door, but Bennett was after him in a flash across the polished parquet.

  “Are you sure that’s what you want?” she asked, planting herself solidly across the path of his escape. “To walk out of here and never see me again?”

  “You are likely to see one another again in court,” Dilys interjected.

  Bennett heard her mother but didn’t respond right away. The answer Bennett sought was in Memphis’s eyes. He could not hide his struggle from her—the struggle that told him he should go, while he knew how much he wanted to stay. She didn’t wait to find out which powerful force would win.

  “There is something crucial you don’t know, Mother,” Bennett said without taking her eyes off Memphis. “Something that changes everything.”

  “What could that possibly be?” Dilys asked, sounding as if her patience couldn’t stretch much further.