Loving Time

thirty

A slick of sweat gathered on Clara’s upper lip and between her breasts and thighs as she brooded about Hal’s many betrayals in the hot sun by the pool at Arch Candel’s beach house on Sleepy Key, a prime spot in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Sarasota, Florida. She had considered the situation with Hal on the plane from New York to Florida and was sure she was doing the right thing, wondered how long it would take to end. In front of her, thousands of diamond lights from the Gulf winked between the palms that studded the thick green lawn bordering the beach.

Senator Candel himself sat farther back on the patio at an antique iron table that had been made for his family at the turn of the century. The valuable table with the signs of the zodiac arranged in a circle around its top was badly rusted from the salt and humidity and heavy rains of many summers. Its owner showed the same signs of wear. Born fair, Arch Candel was permanently reddened and freckled from a lifetime of deep and dangerous sunburns. Even now he was indifferent to the hazards of sun worship. He was shirtless at noon, wore only a pair of navy swimming trunks with a Polo insignia on them. Beneath his shrewd and penetrating blue eyes, the sun damage could be seen on jowly cheeks and a red nose that was needle-thin and peeling. His long bony legs supported a thick upper body that had begun softening many years ago. A substantial slab of gut spilled over the edge of the waistband of his trunks.

Clara studied him reading at his rusty table.

He felt her gaze and looked up. “What?”

She was mentally reliving her old grievances about Hal when she thought she loved him, and the recent incidents of Hal’s harassment now that he wanted her back. The complete bastard! The arrogant old fool to think he could get away with this. She pumped up her outrage and didn’t even hear Arch speak.

The first message she’d received had come nearly six months ago. It was composed of letters cut from newspaper headlines and pasted on a piece of hospital stationery. The neatly folded paper had been on the podium when she’d gone up to introduce a seminar. She’d silently read the words Someone you love is going to die standing in front of an auditorium full of people, then had crumpled up the paper and begun her welcome speech. At the time the episode passed immediately from her mind. She’d thought the thing was a joke, possibly not even meant for her. Someone you love is going to die. Clara had a literal mind; she didn’t love anyone, so she wasn’t vulnerable in that way. Therefore, the note probably was intended for someone else, another speaker. Only after, when there had been several more nasty threats, had she become annoyed.

“Darlin’?”

Clara shook her head, adjusting the brim of her straw hat to hide her face. She was lying on a chaise with a green-and-white-striped mattress under an umbrella by the pool. Her bathing suit was basic black, cut low in the bosom and high on the hips. She crossed her legs the other way to even her tan.

Distracted, Arch removed the reading glasses from the end of his sharp nose and twirled them between two fingers. For the last two hours he’d been studying the thousand-page committee report he’d have to debate in Senate hearings the following week. Without the ballast of his elbows, the sheaf of printed pages fell shut from its own weight, closing on his notes and the list of questions he was preparing to ask Clara to get her opinion on the issues.

“Darlin’, I know something’s bothering you. And whatever bothers you bothers me.” His soft lazy voice came from between thin chapped lips, but no one who heard it was ever fooled. Arch Candel was as tough as the ’gators he grew up with.

He was also a man who knew what he wanted. When he met Clara Treadwell, he was still reeling from the long decline and death from cancer of his wife of twenty-eight years. He had been instantly impressed by Clara’s energy, her electric smile and shrewd intelligence. He’d wanted to marry her immediately despite the undisguised misgivings of his two grown children. He’d shown Clara his houses in Florida and Washington and told her she could redecorate them as she wished, she would be the mistress of all he owned.

At the time Clara had just emerged from her second divorce, still childless and with nearly a million dollars in her pockets. Her mother, like Arch’s wife only a few months before, was in the final stages of cancer and not taking it well. On her deathbed, she reviled her daughter for abandoning her years ago, then for using one man after another to get ahead Clara’s dying mother repeatedly called her a slut and a whore. Her mother’s words never touched Clara. She knew it wasn’t any parade of men that enraged her mother. What her mother bitterly resented was that Clara had succeeded and succeeded on her own terms.

Clara was successful, but she had also been burned a few times in her rise to power. Though she would not admit it in any conscious way, deep inside she felt she had been hurt, even abused, by the men in her life. She touched the bandage covering the cut on her hand. The cut was healing and now itched unbearably. Clara knew she had reached the top of her profession. She knew there were people out there who could hurt her if she wasn’t constantly vigilant. She also knew she had to be careful who she married next. Arch was almost too eager to get her. He was crowding her, pushing.

Arch stood up, patted his belly, and stretched. Then he crossed the mossy stone patio to the pool area where Clara lay. “You’re awful quiet, gorgeous.” He lowered his bulk to the edge of her recliner and began stroking Clara’s carefully tanned thighs.

This close she could see the telltale dry patches on his leathery skin and the sweat trickling down his sagging breasts, tiny rivulets catching in his graying chest hairs. “Come on, baby, tell Daddy what’s bothering you.” Arch’s freckled hands traveled up her leg, two fingers heading toward the tight elastic bands of her bathing suit.

This one liked tight places—elevators, backseats of cars. His fantasy was pretending he was still a boy who had to grab any opportunity he could get, fight the good battle with unyielding undergarments so he could get to the magic buttons with his fingers and his tongue and hit the jackpot. Clara knew what he liked. At the moment the trusty appendage he called his dick—which hadn’t been much in use for the previous several years—was already straining against the confines of his swim trunks. Arch believed that Clara made him young again, and for that he was excessively grateful. He leaned over her, heavy and hot, his chapped thin lips and peeling nose diving first into her perfumed cleavage.

He smelled of soap and shaving cream, for he didn’t even bother to use suntan lotion or sunblock. Clara closed her eyes against the insult of his ruined skin and saw behind her eyes the mountain of edema that had been her mother in those final appalling days. Lying in her hospital bed with a hugely swollen belly and legs, cadaverous arms and face, and hair falling out by the fistful, she’d bitterly predicted Clara’s own end. “You’ve never cared about anybody but yourself,” she’d shrilled. “When you die no one will care about you.” Her mother’s last words had been a curse; Clara did not grieve for her.

She did worry about Arch, though. Clara had warned him many times to see a doctor and have his skin examined, to stop sitting like this in the sun. But the Senator was a stubborn man, focused only on what interested him, and what interested him now was a foray into the damp and musky depths of her body.

Sucking on a freed nipple, he was simultaneously working his way into the crotch of her bathing suit with two fingers and moaning deep in his throat. His concentration was complete. He was indifferent to the possibility that anyone walking on the beach and pausing to look at the splendid house through the trees could see them.

Clara squeezed her eyes shut. She allowed the familiar sensations of a man’s overwhelming and reckless lust to soothe her. She let her body take over and provide him with a feast of the senses he couldn’t resist. He loved her body, the tempting contours of her breasts, her neck and shoulders, her hips and belly unblemished by the ravages of procreation or illness. He loved the expert suppleness of her female parts well-lubricated and used to pleasure, and so did she. None of it ever failed her. She was a sex queen, a goddess meant for adoration. This old Lothario groaned and panted, another middle-aged man out of control. The excitement of his ardor enflamed her from crotch to belly. She roiled at his probing of her slippery labia, demanding more than fingerplay.

“Let’s go inside,” she murmured.

An hour later, lying on the bed he had shared for so many years with his wife, Arch Candel gazed at his beloved with the devotion she had come to expect from her lovers.

“Darlin’, let’s not wait anymore. Let’s tie the knot.”

Clara pulled up the sheet. “It’s not that simple, Arch.”

“We’re two mature adults in love. What could be more simple?”

Crows screamed in the Australian pines outside. Clara shook her head. She had to be careful, real careful, now. She had a feeling Arch had her under some kind of surveillance. He was interested in that kind of thing, talked about having friends in the FBI.

“Oh, I know you’ve been married before. I know some old patient of yours died this week. In fact, I know your whole history.” Arch waved the history away.

Clara pushed some air through her nose. “How?”

“Never you mind how.”

“What do you know about me, Arch? Tell me.”

“Darlin’, don’t argue with me. I said I know your history—let’s leave it at that.”

“You had me investigated?” Silently she dared him to admit he had.

“No, darlin’, nothing big like that. I just have some sources. Wouldn’t want you to marry me for my groves, would I?”

His orange groves? Clara laughed out loud.

“Or my money.” He laced his fingers across his stomach. “So what’s bothering you? If you can’t trust me with it, who can you trust?”

She could trust no one with all of her. But maybe she could trust Arch with a few pieces. What the hell, maybe he’d be useful. Clara cocked her head to one side and caught sight of a storm cloud gathering in the Gulf.

“Oh, I’m dealing with someone who used to be a nuisance and now is”—she pursed her lips—“getting dangerous.”

“Politically?”

“No, physically.” She sighed with irritation, her mood plunging again.

“Somebody threatening the hospital?”

“Not like that case out West.”

“What was that?”

“There were incidents in one of the genetics labs out there. Did you read about it?”

Arch shook his head. “No, what happened?”

“Well, it’s everybody’s nightmare in every institution—sabotages that could end in tragedy. In hospitals, it’s staff that could hurt a patient. In pharmaceutical companies it’s someone contaminating the medication. In the government it’s the fired employee who comes back with an assault weapon or a bomb. In this case it was threatening notes, a birthday cake with poisoned frosting, slashed tires.”

“Who was doing it?”

“Oh, they couldn’t prove it. They thought it was a midlevel associate who was in love with one of the women he worked with. She had slept with him once, then decided he wasn’t for her. Apparently, he didn’t take rejection well. But they never proved it was him.” Clara chewed on her lip, thoughtfully. “It was the genetics lab.”

“Clara, honey, you’re losing me here.”

“They couldn’t get him. They just couldn’t catch this guy. He was brilliant, after all. They tried everything, put in surveillance cameras everywhere, even hired a DNA expert to test the saliva on the flap of the envelopes he was using for his threatening notes.”

“How would that help?” Arch was bewildered.

“They had the DNA from the saliva. They made everybody on the staff give a saliva sample. They thought with a match, they would have cause to get rid of the guy.”

“And?”

“That’s the irony. It was a genetics lab, so the guy fooled them. He contaminated everything he touched with genetic material from a dozen different sources. The saliva on the envelopes they tested came from a dog. So they couldn’t nail him. The incidents stopped, and for all I know he’s still there.”

“How does this relate, baby? You got some genetic material you want to test?”

Clara stared at him, stunned. How could he know about the week when she got back to New York? “You know all this already?”

The Senator smiled. “No, sweetheart, you’re telling a story, I’m just trying to see where it’s heading.”

Clara watched a trio of dolphins out in the Gulf playing in the wake of two Jet Skis before replying. “For a while it was just stupid stuff—someone trying to scare me. I knew who it was. I thought he’d get tired of it.”

“Who?” Arch indicated the dolphins with a finger. “Nice, huh?”

Clara clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Somebody pretty high up. He was my supervisor when I was a resident. We had an affair.” She looked at Arch quickly.

He leaned over to scratch a mosquito bite on his thigh.

“He’s nobody now,” she added quickly.

He sat back, didn’t say anything.

“Ray got married. I got married. Hal lost his clout at the Centre when biology took over the field.”

Arch rubbed his lips with the backs of two fingers. “Who’s Ray?”

“Ray’s the patient who died this week.”

“Did you have an affair with him, too?”

“No!” Clara exploded like a flare. “He was my patient!”

“And the other guy was your supervisor. You had an affair with him.” Arch frowned. “Was he your supervisor with this particular patient? With Ray?”

Clara nodded again.

The dolphins were gone. Arch concentrated on Clara’s face. “Now, this … former patient, is there any relation between his death and your—”

“Harold?” She stared back at Arch, suddenly uncomfortable, screwed up her face. “It’s possible,” she said slowly. “Yes, I would say anything is possible.”

“So it’s muddy, my dear.”

“Yes. Because any investigation into Ray’s treatment will involve Harold. He was my supervisor. He studied my notes and determined the course of the therapy. I suspect he’s involved in Ray’s death because he was the first person the police questioned after they found the body.”

“Darlin’, is this a suicide?”

Clara closed her eyes. “It could be.”

“So you’re in a pickle.” Arch tapped his lips and thought for a while. “How does it stand with this Harold …?”

“Dickey. I, uh, told him he had to leave.”

“I thought it was practically impossible to fire people in these institutions.”

“It is, unless they’re in administration, I could be fired in a second,” she said bitterly. “But he’s a tenured professor. The committee will have to meet, determine he’s unfit to hold his position …”

Arch slapped his thigh. “I think you have to do what they did at the lab out West, put the surveillance in all over the place. If this guy does anything else, you’ll catch him in the act.”

“Oh, he’d know. He’d stop.”

“Fine, then he stops.”

“But that wouldn’t be the end of it. He’s insane. He wants me. He’ll think of some other way to get me. He has to be let go on the basis of his mental fitness.”

“Fine, then we’ll bring in the FBI. That’s what they’re there for. Leave this Harold alone, baby. In the end he’ll hang himself.”

“I’m counting on it.” Clara smiled. So Arch did have the FBI watching her.

He tossed her a towel. “Let’s go get some lunch, honey—and stick with me; there are ways of dealing with everything.”

Clara nodded solemnly. “I’ve always thought so,” she said.