Manhattan Heat

by Alice Orr

  She pulled up on the handle, and the door swung open.

  “I can see that,” he said.

  She ducked down to climb onto the driver’s seat on one knee, just far enough to get to the car phone on the console between the seats.

  “I asked what you’re doing,” he insisted. “Don’t give me any half-baked answer. Just tell me straight out.”

  “What will you do if I don’t?” His belligerence seemed to be contagious.

  “This is what I’ll do,” he said.

  He turned sharply and walked away. Bennett needed a second to comprehend that he was leaving. He was headed at a determined pace down the street in the direction of the marina. He had been coming from that direction when she first saw him. She needed an additional second to realize she should go after him.

  “Memphis, wait. Please,” she called as she hurried toward his rapidly retreating back. “We have to talk.”

  He kept on walking, though his pace might have slowed a bit. Or she could have been imagining that because she wanted so much for it to be true.

  “Please, Memphis, I have to talk to you,” she pleaded. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

  He stopped still in his tracks at that, but he didn’t turn around. She crossed the distance between them as fast as she could go without breaking into a full run. Max, the doorman at the Water Club, was already paying them more attention than she would have liked. When she got to where Memphis was standing, so stiff-backed she could almost see a dense moat of stubbornness around him, she scurried around in front of him to block his path in case he decided to run off again.

  His eyes were hooded by the set of his lowering forehead. She could not remember ever having seen a man look so unmistakably belligerent. Even so, the flash in his shadowy eyes blazed straight to the pit of her stomach and made it leap and ache all at the same time. He was not the most handsome man she had ever seen, but he was certainly the most forceful. The naked power of that force was part of what had such a deeply felt effect on her. It occurred to Bennett that his naked thighs had a powerful effect on her, as well. There was no point in trying to pretend they did not.

  “You said you had something to tell me,” he said, and his tone of voice was just as uncompromising as his facial expression.

  “I came over here to get a look at Royce’s car,” she said.

  “How did you know where to find it? I left it on the street waiting to be stolen or towed away.”

  “I called Royce’s answering service and found out. I had his card in my dress pocket from last night.”

  “You called up and asked the whereabouts of his car? Didn’t they think that was kind of strange?”

  “Maybe they did. They didn’t say.”

  “You just dropped the St. Simon name and, no questions asked, they spilled their guts about everything you wanted to know.”

  Bennett sighed at the sneer in his words. They really did seem to have become enemies almost as fast as they had become lovers.

  “Something like that,” she answered, because it was true. “First, I asked them where Royce was. Then I said I’d heard his car was taken and wondered if he got it back yet. They told me he had it with him and drove it to lunch at the Water Club, which happens to be a favorite place of his.”

  “Because it’s so close to the marina and his buddy Quint’s yacht, the Fiddlehead?”

  There was the sarcastic edge again, heavier than ever.

  “The Fiddlehead isn’t usually docked here. It has a slip at the New York Yacht Club.”

  “I seem to remember picking up that piece of info this morning.”

  Bennett ignored the references to her bathroom phone call. She didn’t want to get into that right now.

  “So, what’s your big interest in the Jag?” he asked.

  “Come back to the parking lot with me, and I’ll show you.”

  She put her hand on his arm to steer him in that direction, but he shook her off. His action made her undeniably sad. She could have walked away from him then, but she didn’t. If he saw her sadness in her eyes, he would probably also see that she felt more for him than was wise. She almost wished he would see that, and how she was hurting because he obviously resented her so much. She had been raised to hide that kind of vulnerability at all costs. She wasn’t entirely sure why she was willing to cast aside those years of breeding for him, especially since he was making no secret of the fact that he had none of the same feelings for her.

  “Come with me,” she repeated. “I think you might find this interesting.”

  She started walking back toward the parking lot. She was gambling that he would follow her. She wasn’t sure she could handle the humiliation of running after him again if he took off in the other direction. Fortunately, she didn’t have to find out how much humiliation she was ready to endure at his hands. He came up almost next to her, and they continued back to Royce’s car in silence.

  Bennett had left the low-slung door ajar when she went after Memphis. She pulled it wider open and slid inside again. She went through the same routine of activating the car phone that she had followed the previous evening when Memphis was driving around Columbus Circle with her as his unwilling passenger. She pushed the top button in the row of preset automatic dialing numbers. She pressed the control that turned on the speaker phone and waited while the dial tone reverberated throughout the compact interior of the small car. The sound of a machine going on to answer made Bennett’s heart jump. She was about to find out who she had left her message with last night. She knew that had to be the same person who had sent Nick and Rudy after her and Memphis.

  “This is your time and weather line,” a mechanicalsounding voice said. “At the tone, it will be 1:27 p.m.” The tone buzzed. “The weather for this afternoon is sunny and mild, with—”

  Bennett disconnected the call before the voice could say just how mild this afternoon was going to be. The sunny forecast didn’t please her as it might have on a usual day. The weather inside her was hardly balmy at the moment. In fact, she felt something like a storm coming on, a storm of frustration that this clue she had counted so much on leading to an important revelation had turned out to be a dead end instead.

  “What was that all about?” Memphis asked as she exited the car and shut the door.

  “Last night, while you were driving us toward that hotel at Forty-second Street, I managed to send out a message over this car phone. I pressed that same automatic dial button to do it. Did you hear what happened just now when I did it again?”

  “I heard.”

  “Well, I don’t understand it. I know it was a machine that answered last night, and it could have been that recording I heard.” Bennett began walking slowly away from the car, without thinking much about where she was going. “But, if my message went out to nothing more than a weather and time tape, who was it that told those two hoodlums where we were?”

  Memphis grabbed her arm and spun her around. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You’re telling me that you got on that car phone and sent out an SOS about where I was taking you?”

  “That’s right. I did.”

  Bennett didn’t like the way he was gripping her arm. She hated being manhandled. This also reminded her of being dragged through the park by him last night, and of how they had really gotten together in the first place because he just might be a murderer. She liked thinking about that even less than she liked his grip on her arm. She felt suddenly too discouraged to make even the effort to pull away. This situation was too hopeless to be believed, too maddening to be borne.

  “You figured out that this message of yours must have been passed on to those two creeps who tried to take us out in that flophouse. Is that right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Tell me something, Bennett. Did you plan on telling me this ever? Or were you going to keep it to yourself along with the other secrets you’ve been holding on to?”

  There wasn’t really an answer
to that, but Bennett tried anyway. “I was trying to save myself,” she said. “I was your hostage, and you seemed very desperate to me. I needed to protect myself in any way I could.”

  “Did you still feel you had to protect yourself from me after we made love to each other?”

  There was no possible answer this time. Bennett didn’t even try to come up with one. He waited a moment, then dropped her arm and turned away. She expected him to make another exit then. She didn’t think she would have the energy to run after him again. She felt too dispirited right now to imagine she had anything even close to a run left in her.

  “I didn’t know who to trust so I decided not to trust anybody,” she said.

  “You could trust me inside your body but not with the stuff inside your head. Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  “Something like that.”

  Bennett felt the color mounting in her face. She wasn’t really embarrassed, though she could hear the illogic of her thinking about trust stripped bare by his words. Actually it was his mention of being inside her that made her skin temperature rise. She wondered if references in the future would always cause her to think of him and be aroused by the memory of their bodies rocking and plunging together on the Plaza’s fine, soft sheets. She guessed she would be plagued that way for quite some time.

  “I know you don’t care very much for me right now,” she said to cover the emptiness his silence made her feel. “We need to stick together for a while longer anyway. Then you can be on your way.”

  He was looking down at her. She thought she saw an edge of something else, maybe surprise or regret, invade his angry scowl for a moment. He said nothing.

  “We need to stay together because I want to find out the truth and you want to clear your name.”

  “That’s true,” he said.

  “I think we can accomplish both of those things better together than apart.”

  “That may be true. Then again, it may not.”

  She had to overcome his skepticism. She felt as if her entire life might depend on that. What did depend on it was whether he would go or stay. That was truly why her entire body was pulled taut with urgency. She cared about Quint and whoever else among her friends might be involved in something damaging here, but what she cared about most was Memphis. Realizing that under such discouraging circumstances made her wish she had a corner to run off into and cry heartbroken tears. Instead she pressed on in her quest to keep him around as long as she possibly could.

  “I have a plan,” she said, though that was probably an overstatement of what she actually did have.

  “What plan is that?” He didn’t sound as interested as she would have liked him to.

  “There’s an event tonight. Most of the same crowd from the Stuyvesant Club reception will be there.”

  “You folks sure do get around, don’t you? A reception last night, an event tonight. I’m impressed.”

  His voice told her that he wasn’t really very impressed at all. He had a point, of course. This round of social gatherings that Bennett and her acquaintances frequented often felt like little more than a way to compensate for having too much idle time. Tonight’s gala was another charity affair. That was her excuse for attending. She wondered if that was the real reason. Maybe she was just as much in need of filling the emptiness of her life as the Sonia Jades of their circle had to be. It occurred to Bennett that what she really wanted to fill that emptiness with was somebody to love. Standing next to Memphis, as she was doing now, gave that thought a poignant sting that threatened to knock her over right there on the edge of the Water Club parking lot.

  “If we show up at that event tonight,” she said, despite the weight of her discouragement dragging her down, “I believe we might be able to ferret out the killer.”

  “How would we do that?”

  “By letting him think we know a lot more than we actually do. That could bring him out in the open.”

  “Because he’ll think he has to do to us what he did to Pearlanne Fellows?”

  Bennett nodded. “That’s what I had in mind.”

  The words actually spoken sounded even flimsier as a plan of action than they had inside her head. She hoped he might come up with something better, but he didn’t.

  “I take it you want to bring me along to this classy gig,” he said.

  She nodded again. “Yes, that was my plan.”

  “I’m not sure I’d fit in.” He cast a downward glance at his black leather jacket and well-worn jeans.

  “I have a plan for that, too.”

  “I’ll just bet you do.”

  Bennett could tell that he was agreeing to stick with her for this one last attempt to uncover the truth. She also couldn’t help hearing the sneer behind his words, any more than she could help longing for it not to be there. That longing clung to her like a sodden, hopeless veil as she signaled Max to get them a cab.

  IF BENNETT HAD NOT been so consumed by the effort to keep herself moving forward despite her near despair, and if Memphis hadn’t been so preoccupied with wrestling against the jumble of his thoughts and feelings—if they both had been paying more attention to what was happening around them at the moment, they might have looked up toward the second floor of the Water Club. If they had done that, they would have seen Royce Boudreaux watching them with great interest.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  When Bennett explained the details of what she had in mind, Memphis couldn’t say he liked it very much, especially the part about boosting a tuxedo right out of the tailor shop where it was being made. Memphis had never worn a tux in his life, and he wasn’t crazy about ending that tradition now. If he’d been a hundred percent straight with himself, he would also have admitted that he wasn’t sure he could carry off wearing a tux and looking like he belonged in it. Even tougher to swallow was the fact that these were Quint Leslie’s clothes they were planning to make off with. He was Bennett’s fiance, or whatever. She hadn’t been too clear about that.

  What did come across clear as glass, at least to Memphis, was that she was still involved in this mess—exposing herself to danger and the whole nine yards—because she thought Quint might be mixed up in it somehow. Memphis didn’t doubt that for a minute, and that was truly why he didn’t want to wear her fiance’s suit. She’d talked him into it anyway. She just might be able to talk him into anything without half-trying. That didn’t happen to him very often. The opposite was more likely. Somebody could rattle off a list of facts and figures a mile long. Memphis wouldn’t buy it till he’d seen the proof right in front of his eyes. Till then, he was from Missouri.

  He’d learned that in the orphanage. Believing people, counting on what they said could leave a kid with his heart broken more often than not. Memphis didn’t ever count on anybody. Now here he was laying it all on the line for her, a woman who had hidden important information from him when he needed it. Why was he doing such a stupid thing? Because she asked him to, that’s why. He’d never let any woman twist him around her little finger like this before. But, with Bennett, if he could fit around her finger, that’s where he wanted to be.

  In the cab on the way uptown, she’d filled him in on how she was going to scam the tuxedo out of the tailor. She’d gone to the shop with Quint when the tux was fitted. She said it would be ready by now, and they wouldn’t think there was anything out of line about her going in there to pick it up. Memphis asked if Quint might be picking it up himself to wear to the gig they were all going to tonight, but she said he’d wear his regular tux tonight. The new one was for something coming up in a couple of weeks.

  The guy owned not just one tuxedo, but two. Memphis knew how far out of his league he was wandering with all of this. He was in very unfamiliar territory. That made it even more possible that he could slip up and get caught and end up behind bars in the bargain. He was going along with it all the same, and he knew why. Sure, he wanted to find out who really killed poor Pearlanne. He could get himself off the hook f
or a murder rap that way. Still, what he wanted even more was to stick with Bennett for as long as he could. She would be back in her own life soon enough. He’d be history then. In the meantime, he’d go along even if it was just to be in range of the smell of her perfume. That’s why he was hanging out here now, on the corner of Madison Avenue and Sixty-second Street in Manhattan, feeling like the squarest peg in the roundest hole there ever was.

  Memphis couldn’t help thinking he’d been set down on this particular corner to let him know just how far out of place he was in Bennett’s part of the world. Most of the people hurrying past appeared to have gotten dressed that morning with a fashion magazine open in front of them to follow. Memphis had taken his leather jacket off and slung it over his arm. He thought he might be too noticeable, hanging around the corner mailbox the way he was, but nobody gave him a look or a thought. They were all in too much of a hurry for that.

  Memphis shook his head. He was definitely a downtown type of guy, and this was so far uptown he could be in danger of getting the bends. The chances of him ever being able to fit in here were slim to none, and he knew it. He imagined that if any of these people passing by slowed down long enough to give him a good look, they would know it, too. Memphis shook his head again, in amazement at himself this time that he could have been fool enough to think even for a minute about him and Bennett making it as a couple.

  She had disappeared into a granite-faced building near the corner. “The tailor’s up there,” she had said, pointing to the second story with its balconies and scrolled ironwork. There were drapes at the windows, no mannequins sporting the tailor’s handiwork. Memphis supposed this neighborhood was too discreet for anything that showy. He glanced up there now, hoping he’d catch a glimpse of her, but she was nowhere to be seen. He checked out the street, as he’d been doing regularly ever since she left him here. He hadn’t forgotten he was on the run, not for a second. That’s when he spotted the sleek, dark sedan up the block a ways, negotiating for a parking place by waiting for the car already in it to pull out. Memphis was surprised anybody would bother with that on streets this crowded when there were parking garages around just about every corner.