by John Lutz
Not that she’d given him the slightest sign she was in the game; but still, you never could tell. For now, it better be mostly business, maybe a cautious feeler now and then.
He said, “You’ve seen our operation, know some of our needs.” Only some, lover. “In the fashion business, security’s vital. The length of our spring hemline can be as important a secret to us as a new weapon might be to a defense contractor. The fashion world may seem trivial and whimsical at times, but I assure you it’s a very serious and competitive place. Few moves are against the rules.”
Allie smiled. “You make it sound like a jungle.”
“So it is. The business jungle. Debits are as deadly as vipers.”
Mayfair couldn’t read her eyes. He wondered what she thought of him. Usually he could tell when women liked him. Even now that he was past fifty, many of them still were receptive to him. His features remained boyish until a close look revealed the crow’s-feet and sagging eyelids. The deep lines swooping from the wings of his nose to the corners of his lips. His hair was streaked with gray in a way that made him look distinguished, he thought. He’d been lucky there, still had most of it, though it was thinning at the crown. He was dressed today in a dove gray Blass suit with a maroon tie and matching handkerchief, a white-on-white shirt, and black Italian loafers. Casual, but obviously a man with time and money to spend.
The waiter brought their coffee, placing the cups on the table with dramatic flair, then withdrew smoothly as if he were on rollers.
“Though we’re primarily concerned with design, inventory control, and payroll,” Mayfair said, “we gotta have a secure system. One that can’t be broken into by a computer hack with a compulsion for industrial espionage. Maybe a system only a few key personnel could access.”
“That can be done,” Allie said. She leaned down far enough for her left breast to brush the edge of the table when she drew a little leather-bound notebook from the briefcase propped against her chair leg. What did she carry in there? Schematics? Spread sheets? Was she wearing a bra?
He knew this: She was methodical and ambitious and overdrawn at the bank, and the account they were here to discuss was important to her survival.
Mayfair had ordered personnel to check her out thoroughly, and knew more about her than she thought. Knew she’d come to New York six years ago from the small town of Grafton, Illinois, and had no surviving family members. She was alone in the world, and she lived alone in the West Seventies. He also knew that two months ago she’d done an excellent job in setting up a payroll system for Walton Clothiers on Sixth Avenue.
She said, “I’ll need some basic figures.”
Mayfair pondered again the possible future with this woman who needed his business, what they might do for each other. It was a quid-pro-quo world; always something for something. She had to know that, if she had her own company. Beyond the Fortune Fashions account, what yearnings did she have? What fires that he might quench while finding the satisfaction that his former wife Janice had never given him? What interesting and possibly kinky drives? So many of these hot-shit female execs were intriguing that way. He’d find out about her someday, find out everything.
Then he concentrated on the here and now and satisfied her yearning for statistics, watching the way she cocked her head to the side to listen, the way the muted light played off her blond hair.
Thinking, while he paused so she could catch up taking notes, Soon, baby.
Chapter 4
ALLIE was optimistic after her breakfast with Mayfair. He’d been all business, which was a relief. He looked like an aging lothario in his tight double-breasted suit and matching tie and handkerchief, his just-so hair style that was too young for him. Time held at bay by ego. But except for what might have been a few exploratory remarks, he’d stayed on the subject of the computer system Fortune Fashions wanted Allie to set up, and they’d had hours of involved and fruitful discussion. It was nice to know she didn’t have to worry about Mayfair in that regard, sex being an occupational hazard.
The account was a rich one, and when final payment was made, Allie’s monetary problems would be solved for a while. Meaning she’d no longer be financially dependent upon Sam; she wasn’t sure why that dependency bothered her, but it did. Perhaps because she was emotionally dependent on him, financial dependency as well left her with nothing.
Just before eleven o’clock, when she’d parted with Mayfair outside the restaurant, the clouds had drifted away and the sun had transformed gloom into light and hope. A dictatorial Hollywood director couldn’t have ordered it improved. Why not believe in omens? she’d thought, watching Mayfair wave to her from his cab as it pulled away.
Still buoyed by fate falling right, she wandered around for a while, window shopping. Then she strode from the subway stop to West 74th through the rare and sunny September day, her light blue raincoat with the white collar folded over her arm.
She realized she was hungry. The breakfast she’d had with Mayfair was delicious but hardly filling. That and a cup of coffee this morning with Sam was all she’d had so far today. I need fuel, she told herself.
She stopped in at Goya’s, a restaurant on West 74th three blocks from the Cody Arms. It was a large place with an ancient curved bar and a plank floor. A faded mirror behind the bar reflected shelves of bottles and an antique cash register. The waiters and waitresses all looked like hopefuls waiting for their big break in show business, though some of them were over forty. All wore black slacks and red Tshirts with GOYA’S stenciled across the chest. Allie hadn’t been in there before, but she immediately liked the rough-hewn and efficient atmosphere. If the food was good and the prices were right, she knew she’d come back, maybe become one of the regulars.
She ordered a chef’s salad and allowed herself a Beck’s to celebrate the way things were going with the Fortune Fashions account. Then she thought about how she and Sam would celebrate when he came home that evening. Sam. Scheming and ambitious as he was in business, he never resented her successes. Liberated man meets liberated woman.
When the waiter brought her salad, she realized he looked familiar. But she didn’t ask where she might have met him. Possibly she’d passed him on the street often when he was on his way to or from work at Goya’s. New York was like that; people making casual connections over and over, not really recognizing each other because their memories’ circuits were overloaded. So many people, an ebbing and flowing tide of faces, movements, smiles, frowns. Pain and happiness and preoccupation. Good luck and bad. Bankers and bag ladies. All in a jumble. Millionaires stepping over penniless winos. Tourists throwing away money on crooked three-card-monte games. The hustlers and the hustled. A maelstrom of madness. A world below the rabbit hole. If you lived here, you took it all for granted. My God, you adapted. And, inevitably, it affected mind and emotion. It distorted.
This man, the waiter, was in his mid-thirties, with one of those homely-handsome faces with mismatched features and ears that stuck out like satellite dishes. He wore his scraggly black hair long on the sides in an effort to minimize the protruding ears, but the thatch of hair jutting out above them only served to draw attention. The impression was that without the ears to support it, the hair would flop down into a ragged Prince Valiant hairdo. He was average height but thin, and moved with a kind of coiled energy that suggested he could probably jog ten miles or wear down opponents at tennis.
When he came back and placed her beer before her on the table, he did a mild double-take, as if he thought he knew her from someplace.
Then he nodded and went back to the serving counter to pick up another order, probably trying to remember if she’d been in Goya’s before, and what kind of tipper she was.
Chapter 5
GRAHAM Knox had recognized her when he’d served her in Goya’s that afternoon. Allie Jones. It was the first time he’d seen her in the restaurant. He’d considered introducing himself to her but didn’t quite know how. “Hi, I live upstairs from you and can he
ar everything that goes on in your apartment through the duct work,” didn’t seem a wise thing for a waiter to say—it was the sort of remark that might prompt the flinging of food.
Several months ago, curiosity had goaded Graham to find out what his downstairs neighbor looked like. He’d lurked about the third-floor hall like a burglar until he’d seen her emerge from her apartment. Already he’d gotten her last name from her mailbox in the lobby.
Seeing her up close this afternoon had changed things somehow, made her vividly real and his eavesdropping both more intimate and shameful, no longer an innocent diversion before sleep. But the vent was beside his bed; there was no way not to hear what went on in the apartment below. Even in his living room, when he was working and didn’t have the stereo or TV on, sound from her living room carried through the ducts. It wasn’t exactly as if he were in the room with her and whoever she was talking with, but he might as well have been in the next room with his ear pressed to the door.
And now he’d seen her up close, and she was interesting. In fact, fascinating. Much more attractive than from a distance. Direct gray eyes. Soft blond hair that smelled of perfumed shampoo. Firm, squared chin with a cleft in it. She had a sureness about her that was appealing and suggested a certain freedom. Not like the rest of us; a woman with a grip on life.
Graham’s apartment was cheaply furnished, mostly with a hodgepodge of items he’d bought at second-hand shops. The living room walls were lined with shelves he’d constructed of pine and stained to a dark finish. The shelves were stuffed with theatrical books, mostly paperbacks, that he’d found in used bookstores on lower Broadway. One glance at the apartment might give an interior decorator a month of nightmares, but it was neat, functional, and comfortable. Despite the deprivation, Graham liked it here.
Both apartments were quiet now. Graham was in his contemplative mode, and Allie and Sam had either left or gone into the bedroom.
Graham puffed on his meerschaum pipe and paced to the window, then stared out at the darkening city. Some of the cars had their headlights on, and windows were starting to glow in random patterns on the faces of buildings. New York was putting on her jewelry, hiding squalor with splendor.
Four years ago he’d been divorced; he’d put a genuinely horrific marriage out of its misery before children arrived. Six months later, after quitting his job in Philadelphia to pursue his true calling, Graham had moved to New York and attempted to get one of his plays produced.
Some move! Even the lower echelons of the New York theater world weren’t impressed by a real-estate agent from Philadelphia with the chutzpah to fancy himself a playwright. Didn’t he know there were a million others in his mold?
With a final glance outside, he turned from the window and crossed the living room to an alcove directly above the one in Allie’s apartment. There a thick sheet of plywood was laid over two black metal filing cabinets, creating a desk that supported a used IBM Selectric, a phone and answering machine, stacks of paper, and several reference books. Graham sat down on the folding chair in front of the makeshift desk and got Dance Through Life out of the top drawer of one of the filing cabinets. Dance was the play he’d been working on for over a year. An off-Broadway company had expressed interest in producing it, if he could satisfy them with some suggested revisions in the last act. He didn’t agree with some of the advice, but this would be his first produced play. So he was in the process of following suggestions, doing the minor and, here and there, major revisions, trying all the while to preserve the essence of the play.
He picked up a red-leaded pencil and began tightening dialogue and making notes in the margins. The last scene needed more emotional punch, he’d been told. The theme had to be more clearly defined. Well, he could supply punch and clarity to order, if only they’d produce his play. If only he could see real actors walking through his script, mouthing his lines. Striking life in it onstage.
The evening, his apartment in New York, faded to haze, and he was in Chattanooga, Tennessee, at the Starshine Ballroom, where the play was set. Smoke from his pipe swirled around him as dancers and dialogue whirled through his mind.
He hunched over his typewriter and script, absently puffing on the pipe and absorbed in his work, and forgot about his downstairs neighbor until he’d gone to bed at eleven-thirty. The Scotch and water he’d downed after leaving the typewriter had eased the tension fueled by his intense concentration on the revisions, and he’d almost fallen asleep when he heard the muted ringing.
Her bedroom telephone.
He stared into darkness, not liking himself very much, but telling himself he was a playwright and the study of human nature was his business. It was almost a professional obligation. Arthur Miller wouldn’t pass up this kind of opportunity. Would he?
The phone abruptly stopped ringing. Allie had answered.
Graham rolled over on the cool, shadowed sheet.
To the side of the bed near the vent.
Lying on his stomach, he nestled his forehead in the warm crook of his arm and guiltily listened.
Chapter 6
ALLIE drifted up from indecipherable dreams, pulled like a hooked sea creature by some sound … she wasn’t sure what. Then she felt a moment of panic as the jangling phone chilled her mind. She hated to be awakened by phone calls; almost always they meant bad news. The worst of life happened at night.
Oblivious, Sam was snoring beside her, sleeping deeply on his side with one arm flung gracefully off the mattress as if he’d just hurled something at the wall. As she reached for the phone, Allie glanced at the clock on the nightstand. Only quarter to twelve. She’d thought she’d slept longer, that it was early morning. Maybe the phone call wasn’t bad news. Maybe somebody who thought everyone stayed up till midnight.
The darkness in the humid bedroom felt like warm velvet as she extended her arm through it and groped for the phone. She pulled the entire unit to her so she could lift the receiver and quiet it as quickly as possible. No sense in letting the damned thing wake Sam.
She settled her head back on the pillow, in control now, and pressed the cool plastic receiver to her ear. Her palm was damp, slippery on the phone’s smooth surface. She had to adjust her grip to hold on. “‘Lo.”
“I want to speak with Sam, please.” A woman’s voice. Young. Tense. And something else: angry.
“Who’s calling?”
“Tell him Lisa.”
“Well, listen, Lisa, Sam’s asleep.” Something cold and ugly moved in Allie’s stomach. Its twin awoke in her mind. “Is it important? About work?”
“Not about work.” Was that a laugh? “I don’t work with Sam. But it’s important, all right.”
Allie didn’t say anything. She was fighting all the way up from sleep, reaching out for answers and finding only questions. Lisa … Did she and Sam know a Lisa? Had Sam ever mentioned the name?
Lisa said, “Gonna let me talk to him?”
“It’s almost midnight; he’s asleep. Sure it can’t wait till morning?”
“It can’t wait.”
Allie stared into deeper darkness where she knew ceiling met walls. A corner; no way out. “Hold on.”
She nudged Sam’s ribs and whispered his name.
He rolled over, facing her. She caught a whiff of his warm breath, the wine they’d had with dinner. His upper chest and neck gathered pale light but his face was in shadow. “Whazzit?”
“You awake?”
“‘Course not.”
“Well, you got a phone call. Woman named Lisa.”
“She on the line now?”
“Now. Waiting. ”
Sam was quiet for a long time. Allie could hear him breathing rapidly. She felt her world sliding out from under her. It was making her sick, dizzy. Too casually, he said, “Tell her I’ll call her in the morning.”
Allie pressed the receiver back to the side of her head, so hard that it hurt. She gave Lisa Sam’s message.
“You’re his wife,” Lisa said, sounding fur
ious and determined. “I know he’s married, ‘cause I followed him home from my apartment. Saw you two through the window, then saw you come out together and followed you. Saw how you acted together. Tell him that. Explain to him I know his name’s really Jones, just like it says on his mailbox. Tell him he better fucking talk to me, or I’ll talk a lot more to you.”
Allie listened to her own breathing. “I don’t think I will tell him. Anyway, he’s asleep again.”
“I really think you should.”
“Sorry, I don’t agree. You’ve got a lot of your facts wrong, Lisa.”
“Not the essential one. Wake up Sam, if he really is asleep. Put him on the goddamn phone.”
“No.”
Lisa laughed, not with humor. The bitter sound seem to flow from the phone like bile. “You poor, dumb bitch.” She hung up. Hard.
Allie lay unmoving, the receiver droning in her ear. The darkness closed in on her tightly, making it difficult to breathe. Poor, dumb bitch … There had been more than bitterness in Lisa’s voice; there had been pity. Allie slowly extended her arm, hung up the receiver with a tentative clatter of plastic on plastic. The buzzing of the broken connection continued in her head, like an insect droning.
After a while she said, “Sam?”
Seconds passed before he said, “Hmmm?” Drowsy. Pretending to be asleep. Maybe it was all a dream. Maybe hope could make it so, glue it where it was broken so nobody would know the difference and nothing was changed from the time they’d gone to sleep.
But Allie knew it couldn’t be repaired.
“Lisa told me to say she knew you were married. That she followed you home.”
He gave a long, phony sigh, as if this didn’t concern him and he resented it interfering with his rest. “Whaddya say her name was?”
