Chill of Night

6

The present, New York

Bev Baker was forty-eight but looked thirty-eight. She stood nude before the steam-fogged full-length mirror in the bathroom and watched the exhaust fan clear the reflecting glass to reveal a woman still wet from her shower. Her breasts were lower than a girl’s but still full, and what Lenny Rodman, in that way of his, had just called bouncily bountiful. Her long legs were still curvaceous, her hips and thighs slim, her abdominal muscles taut from daily workouts. Her auburn hair was wet and tousled. Her smile was wicked.

Aging nicely and not a bad package, she decided, and one Lenny certainly appreciated, which is what made her appreciate Lenny.

Lenny was in the bedroom on the other side of the door. Bev figured he was still lying back in bed, smoking a cigarette, even though it was a no-smoking room. Lenny didn’t like obeying rules, which was part of what had led him to the midtown Manhattan hotel room for sex in the afternoon with Bev. The other part was Bev.

It wasn’t the first time they’d enjoyed an afternoon assignation. Three months ago Lenny, thirtyish and handsome as a soap actor, had come into Light and Shade Lamp and Fixture Emporium and asked to see the buyer, who was Bev, who was also head of the sales department. She’d had an argument with her husband, Floyd, that morning, and was still smarting from some of the insults he’d sent her way. In retrospect, she knew that was what had made her vulnerable to Lenny, who could spot a broken wing like a hawk.

Floyd was almost fifteen years older than she was, and his increasing absence from home and her bed, his constant whining about his heart condition, were symptoms of what Bev knew was a failing marriage. It was why she insisted on continuing working, though Floyd was retired now, with a decent pension and Social Security, and they could get by comfortably if she stayed home. But Bev didn’t want to stay home, cooped up in a one-bedroom New York apartment-not with Floyd. They both understood that was the reason she continued to work. Floyd had become disinterested except for when he wanted to be verbally abusive. But he wasn’t dumb. He knew as well as she did that their marriage was headed for a train wreck.

Bev could be insulted only so much, and ignored only so long. What happened with Lenny seemed so natural, she wasn’t sure if he’d seduced her or vice versa. She’d listened carefully to what he had to sell that day, in her office right off the display floor. He was handsome in a smooth way, with lazy eyes and an easy smile, and full of bullshit from the get-go. It seemed he’d made a deal to purchase hundreds of obsolete fire extinguishers, which he’d had made into “novelty lamps.” He was now trying to market them discount because of increasing demand and decreasing storage space, due to a rental dispute.

Bev could be a charmer herself. Never bullshit a bullshitter, she told Lenny, but in a nice way, not using those exact terms. He got the message, and with his sexy grin admitted he was stuck with a warehouse full of fire extinguisher lamps and needed to sell them cheap or he’d have to give them away.

“Have you always been in the lamp business?” Bev asked.

He settled back in his chair and crossed his legs real cool-like, the drape of his gray slacks saying they were well tailored. Lenny knew how to dress the part. Something Bev liked in a man. Some of the stuff Floyd had been wearing lately looked like it came from a retirement home fire sale. And if she told him about it…well, never mind.

“Before this I was in the coffee table business,” Lenny said. “I made this deal with a cemetery near the Hudson that was being moved. They weren’t going to reuse the damaged marble slabs that rested on top of the coffins.”

“Why on top?” Bev asked.

“That’s to keep the coffins from rising to the surface when the water table gets higher during the wet seasons. Good, beautifully veined marble. So I bought them, ground and polished them, and put some fancy legs on them for coffee tables.”

“How’d they sell?”

Lenny smiled. “What would look good on them would be those fire extinguisher lamps.”

“The ones I’m going to buy?”

“You serious?”

She glanced at her watch. “You want to go to lunch, we’ll talk price.”

His hooded gaze traveled over her body, lingering on her breasts. She was sitting behind her desk, and she knew he was wondering what her legs were like. He wouldn’t be disappointed. Legs, I got.

“I’m picking up the check,” she said. “Company business.”

“Then I can’t say no.”

“I know the feeling,” she said.

That fateful lunch had been three months ago. The fire extinguisher lamps still sat in the showroom, unsold. If anyone else had been head of sales, they would have been priced down and out or junked.

“You die in there?” Lenny called, from the other side of the bathroom door.

“No, out there, with you.”

Bev didn’t bother with a towel as she opened the door and went into the bedroom to let Lenny see what she’d been looking at in the mirror. She got the result she expected.

“C’mon back to bed with me,” Lenny said, snuffing out his cigarette in a room service glass he was using as an ashtray.

“It’s almost two o’clock, Lenny. I’ve gotta get back to work.” Bev moved toward where her clothes were folded on the chair near the bed. Too near. His hand closed gently but firmly around her wrist. She pretended to struggle but didn’t really pull away. “I just took a shower, Lenny.”

“You took one, you can take another in no time. You’re already undressed for one.”

She laughed. “I don’t think a shower’s what you have in mind.”

He pulled her toward the bed. “Mind reader, you.”

At twenty after three they left the hotel together. It was one of the big chain hotels, the lobby was crowded, and it was midday in Midtown. No one paid much attention to them.

Out on the sidewalk, after the dim room with its closed drapes, it seemed unusually bright and sunny. While the doorman was standing with one foot on the curb and the other in the street, trying to hail a cab, Lenny kissed Bev on the cheek. “Gonna ride back to work?”

“No. It’s a nice day. I’ll walk.” A cab veered toward the curb and the doorman stepped out of the way, then opened a back door.

“I thought you were late.”

“I am. I’m also sales manager.”

Lenny grinned as he lowered himself into the cab, simultaneously tipping the doorman. “Must be nice being boss,” he said.

“It sure is some days, around noon.”

She watched the cab pull out into heavy Midtown traffic. Lenny lifted a hand, so a wave went with his grin.

Bev began striding along Fifty-first Street, a tall, attractive woman, well dressed but with her hair, fluffy from the hotel drier, mussed by the breeze as soon as she crossed the intersection. She drew appreciative stares, even a honking horn that might have been for her. She might be married to Floyd, but she wasn’t a fossil like Floyd. Not yet by a long shot.

Halfway back to Light and Shade, she got the feeling she’d been getting too often lately. It was a prickly uneasiness, like a slight pressure on the back of her neck, and sometimes when she turned around it was as if there might have been someone there if she’d only turned faster. Once, when Floyd was out of town with his golf buddies, and she’d come home from work exhausted and kicked off her high heels and fallen into a leather armchair, she could have sworn the cushion was still warm, as if somebody had been sitting there and left only minutes before she arrived. It was creepy, and she had an idea what it might be.

Floyd suspected something and had hired someone to investigate her. A detective.

Bev almost grinned at the thought. If Floyd wanted a divorce, he could have one. They had an iron-clad pre-nup, so there was no logical reason he should hire a detective other than to satisfy his curiosity. No monetary reason, anyway.

Of course, there were other reasons and other kinds of satisfaction. Floyd didn’t get it up very often these days, but he still had an active mind.

Hell with it.

Bev crossed the intersection against the light, taking her time even though traffic up the block was bearing down on her. If anyone honked she’d give him the finger. That was the kind of mood she was in.

But no one honked.