Daddy's Gone a Hunting

6

Even before she started openly flirting with Majestic, Douglas Connelly had become thoroughly bored with Sandra. He knew that her story of being runner-up to Miss Universe was total fiction. He had looked her up on the Internet and learned that she had been runner-up in a local beauty contest in her hometown of Wilbur, North Dakota.

He had been faintly amused by her fantasizing until at dinner he had seen the scorn in Kate’s face and knew she was contemptuous of him and his lifestyle.

He also knew that he deserved that contempt.

A favorite expression his own father used when he had a difficult decision to make ran constantly through his mind. I feel as though I’m between the devil and the deep blue sea, and be damned to them both. No matter how much I drink, I feel that way all the time, Doug thought as he sipped the last of the champagne.

Between the devil and the deep blue sea. It was a singsong refrain that he could not turn off.

“I like to go to places like this,” Sandra was saying. “I mean you might meet someone who’s casting a movie or something like that.”

How much bleach does it take to get her hair that color? Doug wondered.

The maître d’ was approaching with a fresh bottle of champagne. “Compliments to the beautiful lady from Majestic,” he said.

Sandra gasped. “Oh my goodness.”

As she leaped from the chair and hurried across the room, Douglas Connelly got up to slip out. “The usual tip,” he said, hoping he wasn’t slurring his words. “But be sure that bottle gets charged to Majestic or whatever he calls himself.”

“Certainly, Mr. Connelly. Is your car outside?”

“Yes.”

That’s another thing that drives Kate nuts-my having a chauffeur, Doug thought as a few minutes later he slumped in his limo and closed his eyes. The next thing he knew, Bernard, his driver, was opening the door at his East Eighty-second Street building and saying, “We’re here, Mr. Connelly.”

Even with the doorman’s arm guiding him through the lobby, it was an effort for Doug to keep his legs moving in the same direction. Danny, the elevator operator, took the key from Doug’s hand after he had fumbled it out of his pocket. On the sixteenth floor, Danny escorted him to his apartment, unlocked and opened the door, and led him to the couch. “Why not rest here for a little while, Mr. Connelly?” he suggested.

Doug felt a pillow being placed under his head and the top button of his shirt being opened and his shoes being removed.

“Just a little under the weather,” he mumbled.

“You’re fine, Mr. Connelly. Your keys are on the table. Good night, sir.”

“’Night, Danny. Thanks.” Doug fell asleep before he could say anything else.

Five hours later he did not hear the constant ringing of the landline phone on a table only a few feet away from the couch or the equally insistent buzzing of the cell phone in his breast pocket.

Finally, in the waiting room reserved for families with patients in surgery, Hannah, her face ashen, put her cell phone away and folded her hands in her lap to keep them from trembling. “I’m not going to try him again,” she said to Jack. “Let him sleep it off.”