Murder on the Aisle

15

11:38 P.M.

“Boy, this is nice.”

“Thanks.”

“You decorate it?”

“No, actually my last girlfriend did.”

The ride and the cold and the snow had made Marcie reasonably sober again and now there was an anxious edge in her voice. She was no longer a femme fatale but instead a very young woman in an older man’s apartment.

She walked around, glancing up at the skylight, at the wide fieldstone fireplace, at the bay windows that overlooked Fifth Avenue ablaze with Christmas trees and Santa Clauses lit from the inside so their cheeks were bright pink and their eyes a startling blue.

“God,” Marcie said. “Wouldn’t it be nice to be young again and believe in all that shit?”

Crikers — could you really be that maudlin at her age? he wondered. Then he smiled. Of course you could. He’d been so himself.

“Well, now there are compensations.”

“Such as what?”

“I think I appreciate living more the older I get.” Plus he got to see movies. Movies balmed and moved and excited him as nothing else did. It was holy to sit in the darkness of a theater.

She offered him a bruised smile. “I guess I’m not at that age yet.”

“You’re really unhappy?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I.” Then she saw his cassette library and moved toward it as if a preacher had called her forth. “Wow, how many tapes do you have?”

“Three hundred.”

“Do you mind?”

“Not at all. As a matter of fact, I think I’ll go wash up.”

She rubbed her bare shoulders as if she were freezing. “Do you ever sort of, you know, just sleep with women, I mean without doing anything?”

“Sometimes. Sure.”

“If I decided that’s all I wanted to do, would that be all right?”

“Of course.”

“You wouldn’t push it or anything.”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“Thanks. That makes me feel better.”

He smiled. “Maybe even a little bit happy?”

“Yeah. Maybe even a little happy.”

He was halfway to the bathroom (he was planning on removing his liver and taking it downstairs to the laundry room and putting it in the drier) when the living-room phone rang.

Neely, his lawyer, said, “Huggins may call you in for questioning tomorrow.”

“How’d you learn that?”

“Since I decided to be your lawyer, I also decided I better start calling in some favors from my DA office days.”

“So I’m still his favorite?”

“Afraid so.”

Tobin looked back to Marcie Pierce. Against the built-in bookcases and the jungle of ferns and plants, against the 45-inch TV set, against the sliding-glass library of video cassettes she looked almost frail and girlish. A huge poster of Orson Welles as Citizen Kane gazed down on her, seeming to leer appreciatively at her young flesh. Tobin whispered into the phone, “Neely, I’m really scared.”

“It’s going to be all right.”

“Really?”

A pause. “I’m not one hundred percent positive it’s going to be all right. But I’m pretty positive.”

“Well, give it to me in percentages.”

“What in percentages?”

“If you’re not one hundred percent positive things are going to be all right, then what percentage positive are you?”

“Jeeze, Tobin. That’s not fair.”

“What percentage?”

“Well, at least forty.”

“Forty!”

Marcie turned around as if Tobin had thrown something at her.

“Well, fifty then,” Neely said.

“That’s the best you can do? You’re supposed to be reassuring here, Neely, and you’re not reassuring me for shit.”

“All right, then, let’s make it between fifty-five and fifty-eight?”

“Fifty-five and fifty-eight?”

“Yeah, I’m between fifty-five and fifty-eight percent positive that things are going to be just fine.” By the end he was gushing with optimism. “Fifty-five to fifty-eight. No doubt about it.” Then he paused. “How’s your list coming?”

“I added two more names tonight.” And he had, too: Michael Dailey, because he had apparently been embezzling from Dunphy, and a man named Harold Ebsen because he may have been the one to break into Dunphy’s Hunter office.

“Good boy. Bring them along to Huggins’s office. They’ll help. And keep your chin up, okay?”

“Yeah. Fifty-five to fifty-eight.”

“Exactly, my man, exactly.”

“I see you’ve got Anthony Mann’s The Naked Spur out there.”

“Yes.”

“It’s one of my favorite movies.”

“Mine, too.”

“Jimmy Stewart really shocks you, doesn’t he? I mean, you don’t expect him to even be capable of a performance like that. So crazed and everything.”

“We’ve always underestimated him. We take him for granted too much.”

They were in his bed. She’d made him light the tiny Christmas tree on his bureau, and now the room was cast in deep shadows from red and yellow and blue and green lights.

She had let her hair down and wore a pair of his pajamas and was propped up against the back of the bed as if she planned to sit up and talk all night. She’d taken a shower and smelled wonderfully clean. Tobin had one of those punitive erections that he could find nothing to do with, just lie there and sort of try to flick down and be miserable with.

Thus far, in an attempt to show her that he was a nice guy with whom she had a lot in common (in fact, their taste in films was identical), he’d let her talk on about many of the mutual favorites: Budd Boetticher and Douglas Sirk and Bernard Herrmann, the composer, and Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro and Out of the Past and Charley Varrick.

Then finally he just rolled over and did it, brought her to him and really kissed her. They’d made a pass at it before, but this time it truly happened. She even parted her lips and let his tongue come in and then it was as if he were in the electric chair and she had just dropped the switch.

Fortunately, she seemed to be as much in need of him at that moment as he of her. So she didn’t stop him when his hand found her heartbreakingly gorgeous breast, nor when his legs began to entwine with hers.

It was one of those sweet little sessions, very passionate at first but ending up very tender, his head between her legs, almost as if he were praying in a shrine, her hand gently stroking his head (he might have been her child) as he brought her to release, and finally, when he was cradled inside her and just about to come himself, she said, “Thanks for putting up with me tonight, Tobin.”

“That’s all right,” he whispered back. “Thanks for putting up with me. I’m not exactly a prize.”

And then he died the death of pure pleasure and laid beside her watching as snowflakes hit the bedroom window and melted and slid down the black glass, and as the Christmas tree’s lights alternated flashing colors.

She was asleep in moments, and moments later he was, too.

He woke up a few hours later subconsciously expecting to find her across the bed from him. But he patted empty space. Cold empty space. Then one eye came open, then another, then he did a half-push-up and looked around the bedroom. Her prom gown was tossed with teenage abandon over the chair. Where had she gone?

When he decided she was in the living room, he assumed she was watching a movie, maybe The Naked Spur they’d been discussing.

But instead she was curled up by one of the windows, looking out over the city. Her hair and her pajamas were tousled and she looked very young and very pretty and he found himself moved in some simple way he hadn’t been for many years.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

“Couldn’t sleep, huh?” He found his voice tender, the way it was with his own kids. Or a woman he’d cared about a long time.

“Guess not.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“I’ll give you a quarter if you’ll turn around and look at me.”

Which she did. Sort of grinning. “Sorry. I guess that is kind of rude.”

“So what’re you thinking about?”

“Honest?”

“Honest.”

“I’m thinking about what I’m going to tell you when you ask me why Michael Dailey was handing me an envelope yesterday afternoon.”

“I see.”

“Because you are going to ask me, right?”

“Right.”

“So I’ve got to come up with an answer.”

“You could always tell me the truth.”

“Then I’d have to give the money back.”

“I see.”

She read the disappointment in his eyes. “That makes me sound like a real bitch, doesn’t it?”

He shrugged, not quite sure what to say.

“The trouble is,” she said, “I really like you now. I really do.”

“And I like you.”

“And the fact is, I don’t like Dailey at all. He’s really a creep.”

She was going to talk herself into telling him the truth. He knew better than to interrupt the process by encouraging it. He simply sat on the edge of a leather recliner and listened to her.

“Do you have any hot chocolate?”

He thought. “Maybe some of that instant stuff.”

“That’d be okay.”

“Fine. I’ll fix some.”

“You wouldn’t have any marshmallows, would you?”

“I can look.”

“Then will you sit on the couch next to me, when you come back, I mean?”

“Sure.”

In the kitchen he made instant cocoa in big fancy cups in the microwave and dropped half a dozen pearl-like marshmallows in the cups and carried them back to the living room and sat next to her.

She leaned over and kissed him and then said, “The only thing we need now is some Christmas music. I mean it’s so nice here with the little tree and everything. So peaceful.”

“You serious?”

“Yeah.”

“Could you stand Perry Como?”

“Perry Como? Really?”

“Yeah.”

“I used to watch his Christmas specials. I love Perry Como.” She smiled. “Just don’t tell anybody, okay?”

“Okay.”

So he found his Perry Como record, which he kept in a file behind a lot of other albums — he got tired of record snobs going through his albums whenever he had a party and finding the Como and then running around all night showing it to people and laughing — so he put it on and went back to the couch and sat tight against her there in the Christmas-light darkness and they sipped their cocoa and didn’t say anything much at all, just sort of touched each other and smelled each other, just sort of listened to Como do wonderful things with “The Christmas Song” and “Silent Night” and songs like that.

She put her head on his shoulder and said, “This reminds me of being with my father.”

At first he felt insulted, at least a bit, seeing that the season and her own turmoil had caused her to turn to him as a father substitute, but then he realized that he’d been able to give her something more substantive than he was able to share with many one-night stands. It wasn’t just quick forgettable sex; there was real kindness between them, and he loved her for it.

She started to talk about her father, an insurance salesman, and how he’d died of heart disease, and the struggle her mother had had ever since with money and loneliness and, ironically, with her own heart disease.

Then she surprised him by saying, “But I still shouldn’t have taken money from Michael Dailey. I mean, there are people a lot worse off than I am.”

“We do what we have to.”

“I think he’s broken into Dunphy’s office.”

“Dailey did the break-in?”

“Not the break-in. That came later.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There were two break-ins. One earlier. One later.”

The Como record ended and he got up to start it again but she said, “No, that music makes me too sentimental about my father. Leave it off while I talk, all right?”

“All right.”

He went back and sat next to her again.

“I usually work in the department at night on my film. That’s what I was doing last night when I heard this noise down the hall. It was around seven o’clock and pretty dark and I got kind of scared, you know, thinking maybe somebody had broken in, or it was some rapist or something. But I went down the hall anyway, just to check it out, and that’s when I found him there.”

“Dailey?”

“Right. Dailey.”

“What was he doing?”

She grinned. “Making a jerk out of himself, actually. He was bent over in front of Dunphy’s door and trying to pick the lock with a credit card. Obviously it was something he’d seen on TV. The trouble was it didn’t have the right kind of lock.”

“So what happened?”

“I just kind of stood there and watched him. I wanted to see what he did next.” She smiled. “Then the security guard came along.”

“What did Dailey do?”

“Really panicked. Plus he looked very dorky. He had on this red lamé dinner jacket and this cummerbund and he was running all over the office trying to find someplace to hide when he heard the guard coming.”

“He still hadn’t seen you?”

“No.”

“So the guard came.”

“So the guard came, and I... I don’t know why I did this — I stepped in his way and said hello. He’s sort of a young guy and always vaguely putting the moves on me. So he stood there and talked with me and then he went on without checking out the inner offices.”

“So Dailey got away?”

“No, he was hiding under the secretary’s desk. I went in and stood above him and told him I knew what was going on and that if he didn’t come out I’d call the security guard back.

“So he got up and tried real hard to have some dignity but it wasn’t easy.”

“I can imagine.”

“Then he made me his offer.”

“Which was?”

She sighed. “I’m going to sound crass here, aren’t I, because I took it and all?”

“I’ve done a few things I’m ashamed of in my life.” He touched her hand. “About six-thousand-seven-hundred-and-eighty-three things, to be exact.”

“He asked me if I could help him get into Dunphy’s office.”

“Could you?”

“As a matter of fact, I knew where the secretary kept her spare keys, in case one of the professors locked himself out.”

“So you let him in?”

She sighed. “Yeah. And I’m really sorry I did.”

“How long was he in there?”

“About fifteen minutes. I kind of stood sentry, in case the guard came back.”

“Did he seem to find anything?”

“He found something. He had several sheets of paper rolled up in a tube when he left.”

“But you don’t know what they were?”

“No idea.”

“He didn’t say anything.”

“No... oh, except that he didn’t have much cash on him.”

“That’s what this afternoon was all about?”

“Right. He met me on the corner of Sixty-eighth and handed me the money in an envelope.”

“How much?”

She sighed again. “Five hundred dollars.” Now it was her turn to touch his hand. “But I haven’t spent any of it and I’m going to send it back to him.”

“Good.”

“I shouldn’t have done it.”

“I don’t think you need to say that anymore. Really.”

“Will you hold me?”

“Sure.”

“I don’t want to kiss or anything. Just be held.”

“I understand. I get like that a lot myself.”

So he held her for a long time and thought about his own daughter and about his ex-wives (two of whom had botched the marriage; two of whom he caused to leave him), and then a pink-and-yellow dawn was at the frosty window.

She was asleep again. He went in and showered and shaved. He had a lot to do. When he came back out she was making coffee. He’d already decided what he was going to do. He had a check in his pocket and he went over to her at the Mr. Coffee and slipped it into her pajama pocket. “This is for you and your mother. For Christmas gifts.”

“God, Tobin—”

He kissed her on the cheek. “No arguments. I’ll probably talk to you later today, if I get a chance.”

“I really am going to send him the money back.”

“I know you are.” He kissed her, this time on the nose. “And that’s why I like you so much.”

“Can I sort of hang out here and watch The Naked Spur before I go home?”

“Sure.”

“I had a great time last night.”

He laughed. “You beat me to it. I was just going to say that myself.”