Margin of Error

by Edna Buchanan

  “Hey, guy,” I called in to Lance, “your true love’s got a record, minor stuff, here and in California: petty larceny, DUI, and one for soliciting.”

  “She should get a refund. The potion still ain’t working,” Lance muttered.

  “I don’t think I want to meet any more of the women in your life,” I said, as Niko and I helped Lance up to bed. “You know, you’re taking this pretty well, actually.”

  “Ah, it ain’t so bad,” he said. “I had to wear contact lenses, red ones, for Night of the Red Death, back when I was starting out. Scratched up a cornea and had to wear a patch for a couple of days. The best thing about these is they come off tomorrow.”

  Niko got him stripped down to shorts while I fixed a light supper and sent it upstairs in the handy electric-powered dumbwaiter. We ate in Lance’s room, listening to TV news reports. His king-sized circular bed could be rotated to face either Biscayne Bay or a huge TV screen. Too bad he could not see either one.

  Stoked on coffee, I took first watch. Niko promised to spell me at 3 A.M. I dragged a comfortable chair up to his bedside. “Can I have a cigarette?” he asked.

  “I’m surprised you smoke.” I shook a Marlboro out of the pack and put it in my mouth. “You work out, you’re in great shape, you’re a health-conscious guy”

  “You one a those militant ex-smokers?”

  I struck the match and lit up. He licked his lips.

  “Nope.” I exhaled. “I kicked it in high school. Never really liked it. Only tried it because everybody else did. Then it became uncool, but I guess smoking is making a comeback in movies.”

  “Never went away,” he said. I brought the cigarette to his lips. They moved like those of a blind baby searching for the comfort of its mother’s nipple. He took it in his mouth and sucked down a deep drag.

  “Nice,” I said. “Smoking in bed. Hope this place has smoke alarms. We can try for two trips to the ER in one day.”

  “I’m counting on you to beat out the flames.” His lips curled in a half smile.

  “Hate to see them use a fire hose on you, after all you’ve been through today.” I positioned the ashtray near his fingers.

  “Unlike most people,” he said, one arm under his head, “I didn’t smoke as a teenager. Had to learn for my first movie. Looks good on camera. Dramatic, sexy. Remember how Bogart used to dangle a cigarette out of his mouth? They still call it Bogarting, he was that good. Can you picture Bette Davis without a cigarette?”

  “My favorite is that scene in Now, Voyager,” I said softly, “where her lover lights two cigarettes, one for each of them.”

  “Paul Henreid. Right. Suggestive and intimate. You light a woman’s cigarette, she looks up into your eyes, steadies your hand with hers.”

  Almost made me want to start smoking. “Remember James Dean with the pack in the sleeve of his T-shirt?” he said, sinking back on his pillow. His biceps were like those of a sculpted Roman gladiator. Had I seen him as one in a movie? “In Paris and South Beach,” he was saying, “in the outdoor cafes, everybody lights up. Hazy blue smoke can set a scene. Look at Die Hard. You can tell the good guys from the bad guys just by the way they smoke.”

  “You’re right. I hadn’t thought about that.” I liked the way his abs moved when he exhaled and the fact that he could not see me watching.

  “If it hadn’t been Sir Walter Raleigh, some actor would have invented it. The action pauses, you light up. Gives you all kinds of business. Tamp down the cigarette, scratch the match, toy with a lighter. George Raft could do more with a cigarette … You’ve got the angry exhale—”

  “My mother is good at that one.”

  “—and the seductive inhale. Smoking is a terrific device. You can be flirtatious, or hyper, or menacing like Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. Decadent, sophisticated—remember David Niven?” He reached for the ashtray, dropped his cigarette, and lost it in the bedclothes. “Uh-oh.” He groped with both hands.

  “Now that’s sophisticated.” I snatched it from between sheet and comforter and brushed away the ashes. He had swung his feet off the far side of his bed and sat there looking sheepish. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said. “I’ve got it. This one was more Larry, Moe, and Curly than David Niven.”

  Smiling, he settled back onto his pillow.

  “Want me to read to you?” I browsed though the stack of books and scripts on his bedside table.

  “I think I’ll just go to sleep.” He yawned.

  “Okay. Just speak up if you need anything. I’ll be right here. If I’m not, Niko will be.” I leaned over and pecked him on the cheek. “Pleasant dreams.” Don’t know why I said that. My mother always did when she tucked me in at night. Maybe because my recent dreams had not been pleasant.

  I curled up in the big comfortable chair and began to read the Margin of Error script, careful to turn the pages quietly. I had never read a movie script before. I instantly envisioned Lance as the hero. He and the female lead shared no love scenes in this script; the character Meredith Page was to have played was a nuclear physicist with a husband in the military and a young son menaced by terrorists. I wondered how the new writers would change the relationship. When I finished, I switched off all but a soft nightlight. The room was comfortably cool and smelled of rose petals, a potpourri in a crystal bowl on the dresser. I did not fight the drowsiness; sleep had been so elusive lately. Should Lance stir or need anything, I would hear.

  La mala hora, the bad hour of my life, invaded my dreams. Again, that dark rutted road, a sea of night closing in around me. Then the captive moon, ripe and full, sailed free from cloud cover, spilling silver across the treetops and the face of the man who wanted me dead. Fighting his iron grip, the weight of my gun in my hand, an explosion lighting up the night. Blood in the moonlight. Smoke trailing from the barrel.

  I awoke disoriented and gasping in the dark. In that moment between dream and reality, the brutal struggles between a man and a woman in the elevator and on the staircase down the hall replayed at warp speed across the wilderness of my mind. Or was it my own struggle to survive in a place surrounded by darkness and death?

  Lance was sleeping peacefully, naked from the waist up. I stared at his broad chest and muscular arms in the faint glow from the nightlight. His sheet was rumpled. Eyes covered. Trapped in darkness. Helpless.

  Like someone in a dream, I arose and locked the door.

  8

  I peeled the sheet back and touched him. His head jerked, instantly awake. “Who’s that?”

  “Shut up,” I said. “You don’t need to know.”

  “Britt?”

  “I said, shut up,” and roughly cut off his words with my mouth.

  “You’ve got me at a disadvantage here,” he mumbled, voice ragged from sleep.

  He reached out for me and touched my bare breast. “Whoops.” Startled, he was already aroused.

  So I deliberately joined the ranks of women who had been attacking him in one way or another all day: Stephanie, Lexie, Karen Sawyer. He did not resist, as I tickled, bit, tortured, clawed, tormented, and assaulted him. Shuddering, he reached for me as I pulled away, just out of reach. “I can’t chase you,” he muttered. “I can’t find you.”

  “I know,” I whispered. Then startled him again.

  “Want to tie me up too?”

  “No.” I smiled and rudely freed the captive bulge in his undershorts.

  “Just asking.”

  How incredibly exciting to make love to a helpless man. Totally free, a role in a fantasy, not something actually happening. I could ravish him, as beautiful and powerful a man as I had ever seen, but he was lost in the dark and I was invisible. His mind’s eye saw me only through other senses. Never had I felt so uninhibited, so sexually aggressive—and busy, as though I were an incubus plundering the sex and sapping the strength of my helpless victim before vanishing at dawn.

  “I have to see you.” His body glistened with perspiration, th
ough the night was cool. “I have to see you.” His hands went to the tape holding his eye patches in place. I jerked his fingers away roughly.

  “No.” Straddling his body, I pinned his hands. “You can’t. Take those off and I disappear.”

  “But … okay…” He could have flung me across the room one-handed, but this was an agreeable victim. “You can put a choke collar and a leash on me and lead me around, whatever you want.” His voice was husky. “Just don’t stop.”

  My hips slowly rotated above his erect penis. My hair fell across his face. I felt his heart pound. “What is it that you want?” I whispered in his ear, catching the lobe unmercifully between my teeth.

  “Please,” he begged. “Please.”

  The man was far from helpless. He filled the dark places in my psyche with his presence and the wet places in my body with his own. We had sex until we were raw. Then we did it again.

  “When I first saw you I knew we would be together,” he whispered, “but I never thought it would be like this.”

  “What movie is that from?” I disengaged myself and padded barefoot and naked into his bathroom. His bedside clock said nearly three.

  “Can I have a cigarette?” he called.

  I thought a moment. “No.”

  “Hold me?”

  Ignoring his pleas to come lie down beside him, I cleaned him up with the efficient, impersonal touch of a nurse, straightened his bed, got dressed, unlocked the door, and resumed my seat, somewhat gingerly.

  A rap at the door came at exactly three. Niko opened it and I smiled. “He’s been good,” I said softly. “He’s been dreaming.”

  I walked down the paneled hall to a charming guest room decorated in Laura Ashley prints, opened the French doors to a balustraded balcony, and gazed across black water at the city burning bright and wicked in the night. After a few minutes I stepped back inside, closed the doors, stretched out on the bed, and was asleep at once.

  I awoke at seven, refreshed, energized, and hungry. The room was cheerful, the bed soft and comfortable, and the morning face of the city reflected innocently from the bay. Oh, shit, I thought, glimpsing my not-so-innocent face in the mirror. Did it really happen? My sore bottom told me it did. What was I thinking? No excuses. I was cold stone sober. Lance, I thought. Oh my God. I took some deep breaths out on the balcony, resisting the urge to make a run for it before Lance awoke. I didn’t even have a car on the premises.

  The movie crew would be in town for a while. How would I explain my disappearance?

  The oval tub in the guest bath was equipped with a Jacuzzi and stocked with delights like French milled complexion soap, honey-almond shampoo, bath foam, and ginseng body lotion. I used them all, then donned a soft fleecy robe that hung on the back of the door. This leased estate had all the perks of a world-class hotel.

  The house was quiet, so I crept downstairs, brewed a pot of coffee, found some bacon, and began scrambling eggs.

  While I was at it, I squeezed some orange juice. The kitchen lacked nothing. My most domestic adventure in years would have been almost pleasant, surrounded by opulence, had I not been haunted again by the hungry eyes of Angel Oliver’s children and by my own aberrant behavior the night before.

  Shame did not curb my appetite. I wolfed down breakfast, then fixed trays, slid them into the dumbwaiter, and hit the button. I dashed upstairs to meet it, ducking into my room first to slip into my dress.

  “Good morning,” I said cheerfully, smiling sweetly as I opened the door. Miss Goody Two-Shoes. Wholesome was my middle name.

  Niko was watching the morning news. Lance was sitting up in bed, smoking a cigarette, wearing a robe.

  “Is it a good morning?” Lance said. What did he mean by that?

  “The sun is shining,” I said, glad he couldn’t see me. No way to know what he was thinking. He said little.

  Niko arranged Lance’s plate: eggs at three o’clock, bacon at twelve, toast at nine. He neglected to mention the salt shaker at five. When Lance knocked it to the floor, we both moved to help but he scooped it up himself.

  “Amazing what you can find if you grope around long enough,” he said, and smiled.

  I ignored his remark. Apparently he had said nothing, but Niko was not stupid. He looked curious as I poured coffee, keeping my distance. Luckily I was saved by the bell. The front gate. He checked a small monitor on the massive wooden desk.

  “It’s the guys. They’re here.” Niko picked up the attached telephone.

  I trotted downstairs to let them in, eager to get lost in a crowd.

  Pauli, Dave, Frank, and Al. Huge, muscular, and fresh off the red-eye. Dave and Al were fair-skinned and blond. Pauli wore dark sunglasses and was shiny bald, as though his head had been shaved and polished, with a nose broken so often that it now rested on his upper lip. Frank was black and short-haired with wide shoulders. Wearing windbreakers and lugging black duffel bags, they resembled a mean lean pro football team taking to the road.

  They took the stairs two at time while I went to brew more coffee and take care of the flowers. Most funerals have fewer. The off-duty Miami Beach cop at the gate had been checking out and accepting deliveries.

  One stood out. Red roses, with a silver Mylar I LOVE YOU balloon. Niko zeroed right in on it as the beef trust came stampeding down the stairs. He opened the card. “Sweetheart, I should be there taking care of you. We’ll be together again soon. Forever. I love you. Always, Stephanie.”

  Niko arranged to retrieve the Town Car from Metro-Dade Center and have my T-Bird brought from the hotel. The press conference there seemed so long ago, yet it was less than twenty-four hours.

  Lance interrupted my goodbyes. “Hang in awhile longer, would you, Britt? Just till the patches come off?”

  No hint in his voice of what had happened between us. I casually agreed, then drove home to change clothes. Only one way to deal with this situation, I told myself: Pretend it never happened. If I did not mention it, perhaps Lance would not either. He had had a stressful day, been traumatized and medicated—too bad it was with nothing more mind-altering than eyedrops.

  Mrs. Goldstein was watching for me, excited and full of questions. She’d read the paper and seen the TV reports. Her inquiring mind wanted to know much more. Her husband, at age eighty-one, even climbed down from the roof he was patching over one of the units.

  “How is he?” she wanted to know.

  “Oh, he’s good, very good,” I said, wondering what they would think of me if they knew the truth.

  She wanted me to persuade Lance to autograph a picture for Seth, her teenage grandson, a star reporter for the Eastside Junior High Gazette, in Hopewell, New Jersey. I promised to try.

  I changed into a pale silky blouse with tiny mother-of-pearl buttons right up to my chin, matching slacks, and a flowery vest. Prim and proper, I noted, studying myself in the mirror.

  This time we arrived at Bascom Palmer in the Town Car with Niko, Al, and Pauli, no sirens.

  Dr. Alonso removed the patches as though unveiling a work of art.

  Lance studied me for a long moment. Forgetting my embarrassment, I smiled. His vision was fine but he would need sunglasses for a few days. His eyelids were still red and swollen; I wondered about his private parts.

  The doctor seriously suggested that Lance wear safety glasses when greeting fans in the future. Made sense in this city, where to many motorists a stop sign means time to reload.

  Lance had agreed to let Lottie shoot his first pictures since the incident. She was waiting and returned to Star Island with us in the Lincoln, happily chatting up Lance and his bodyguards. She and Pauli had crossed paths years ago when he worked for Stallone and she had photographed the star for a magazine assignment.

  She shot more photos at the house, where two maids and a housekeeper were now on the job.

  “Life is simpler on the police beat,” I told Lance, as he signed a picture for Seth Goldstein. “It’s easier to tell
the good guys from the bad guys.”

  He thanked me, almost formally, for my help and I left.

  “So what was it like, sleeping under the same roof with Lance Westfell?” Lottie demanded, as I drove her back to her car. “Tell me everything.”

  “I’m not good at playing nurse,” I confessed.

  “But wasn’t I right about him?” she said. “The bigger the star, the more down to earth.”

  “Sure, with paparazzi scaling the walls and bodyguards everywhere.”

  “Celebrities that big have to build walls around themselves,” she said. “It ain’t an easy life. But when push came to shove, he turned out to be real. He protected you when he had no idea what that woman had in the bottle. Lord knows what woulda happened if that love potion had landed on you.”

  She grinned. I said nothing and she cut her eyes at me. “You okay, Britt? You ain’t telling me something?”

  I was lucky. Late for another assignment, she had no time to give me the third degree.

  I was off until next morning but stopped by the office. I got some coffee, emptied my mailbox, printed out my messages, and sat at my desk, relieved to be back to normal.

  The first letter I opened was handwritten and began with a grabber.

  I want to expose one of the most violent and dangerous criminals Miami has ever seen, a sadistic monster who will stop at nothing.

  That person is my mother.

  The next one began:

  I AM MISSING!

  I need to be found! I miss my home and my family. Please help me. If you can’t, or won’t, please, please let me know at once. You are my only hope and I am desperate. I am praying and anxiously awaiting your answer.

  Signed, Jane. Postmarked Miami, no return address.

  I sighed. Jane? Jane Doe? Would she wonder why she did not hear from me? Would she write again?