SWF Seeks Same

JOHN LUTZ

Copyright © 1990 by John Lutz

Chapter 1

ACROSS West 74th Street the Cody Arms loomed like a medieval castle that had given birth to and formed the foundation of a thirty-story urban building. The lower four floors were constructed of ornate concrete and brownstone, framing a brass and tinted-glass entrance flanked by stone pillars. Spaced about ten feet apart on the first-floor ledge were leering gargoyles with chipped features that only added to their grotesqueness. They’d once been functional drains to divert rainwater from the entrance, but now a dark brown canopy served that purpose. The gargoyles didn’t seem to mind; now they could concentrate full-time on leering at passersby too preoccupied to glance up and notice them. There was iron grillwork over all the windows on the ground floor—for security. It only added to the baroque, lingering elegance of the old apartment building.

In better times the Cody Arms had been the Cody Hotel. But in the Sixties business had fallen off and new owners milked profits without putting money into upkeep. The Cody had declined so far that it was impossible to reestablish its validity as a respectable hotel, so it was sold again to a faceless corporate entity that converted it into apartment units and turned it over to Haller-Davis Properties to manage. Again it was in a state of gradual decline, which was what made the rent there relatively reasonable for this part of town, though still not cheap.

Allie Jones waited for a parade of cabs to growl and rattle past, then hurried across the rain-glistening street and up the old concrete steps to the entrance. She pushed through the door and crossed the tiled lobby to the elevators. There were dark smudges on the yellowed tile floor where cigarette butts had been ground out beneath heels. A faint scent of ammonia hung in the air. Apparently Gray the super, or the janitor service, had made a cursory pass at cleaning and disinfecting something, but not the graffiti on the wall by the mailboxes and intercoms. Boldly scrawled in black marking pen, as it had been for years, was the message LOVE KILS SCREW U. Allie occasionally wondered who had written it and what it meant exactly, though she had no desire to meet the author and ask.

Squeezing her damp bag of groceries tighter, she leaned close to the wall between the elevator doors and pressed the Up button with her elbow. The round white button glowed feebly. Above the paneled sliding doors the ancient brass arrow that had been resting on 15 began its herky-jerky descent to the L that signified Lobby.

There was no point in trying the intercom to make sure Sam would have her door unlocked when she reached the third floor. So often was it not working that tenants seldom used it, even when there was no “Out of order” sign taped beneath it. Though there were security precautions at the Cody Arms, people usually came and went as they pleased. With so many tenants, that was simply how it worked out. The street doors, on which any apartment key would work, were often locked after midnight, but just as often forgotten. The elevators were operable only with a tenant’s key inserted in their panels, but as long as Allie could remember, the same twisted keys had been in the slots. Once, out of curiosity, she’d tried to remove one and found it stuck in the keyhole as if welded there.

The groceries got heavy, and Allie shifted them to her other arm just as the elevator arrived. It squeaked and groaned as it adjusted itself to floor level.

The doors hissed open and an elderly man and a middle-aged redheaded woman stepped out. They didn’t seem to be together and didn’t look at each other or at Allie as they crossed the lobby toward the street door. Allie listened to the beat of their heels on the tile floor as the man moved ahead of the woman. He didn’t bother holding the door open for her. Neighbors. They probably hadn’t so much as glanced at each other in the elevator.

New York was a city of strangers. The Cody was a building of strangers.

That had its advantages.

Such as making possible secret live-in lovers.

Secret was the operative word.

On the third floor, she walked down the narrow, musty-smelling hall to apartment 3H. She balanced the grocery sack on her outthrust hip while she fumbled her key from her purse and unlocked the door. Shifting her weight, she shoved the door open.

“Sam? Me!”

But the answering silence and stale, unmoving air told her she was alone.

Chapter 2

ALLIE lay quietly and listened to the night push through the open window: the low, ocean sound of traffic that never ceased in Manhattan. The irrational and impatient blasting of a car horn. A woman’s high laughter from nearby down in the street. A distant shout demanding an answer. No answering shout. More laughter. The singsong wail of a siren that seemed to be getting nearer, then faded.

Beside her Sam was sleeping, snoring lightly. They’d made love less than an hour ago, and the stale scent of their coupling still permeated the sheets and wafted occasionally into the fresh night air that was cleansing Allie’s bedroom.

She lay very still, not wanting to break the magic of time and contentment. Loving Sam had opened doors and windows in her mind, showed her depths of herself she’d never suspected existed. With it had come the need, the dependency on him that she’d fought so hard against. That, dammit, was something she hadn’t expected, at least not in its intensity.

Finally she’d realized he needed her as much as she had to have him, and it was all right to be human, to risk—because he was risking too. The past six months of total commitment to Sam had been fantastic, but nothing like the last two months, after he’d given up his apartment and moved in with her. Those two months had been perfect, a confirmation of their love. It was the kind of thing she used to laugh at in lurid romance novels. Until she found romance.

Sam Rawson was a broker’s representative for Elcane-Smith on Wall Street. He’d made a few clients wealthy, and had some of his own money invested and was waiting for it to build. He wanted to be rich; he’d smiled and told Allie it would be for her, however rich he became. She liked to let him talk about options and puts and calls and selling short, and technical graph configurations that foretold the future and seduced its followers with an accuracy and superstition arguably as potent as voodoo. Allie remotely understood what he was saying.

Each day they’d kiss good-bye after breakfast and he’d cab downtown and merge his soul with the markets. Allie, who worked freelance as a computer programmer consultant, would go to her latest job and help to set up systems that would make someone’s business easier and more profitable. It often struck her as ironic that she and Sam were both in occupations that helped to make other people rich, while each of them needed to juggle their finances to pay their bills.

Outside in the night, the woman had stopped laughing. A man yelled, “Hey, c’mon fuckin’ back!” Allie couldn’t be sure, but he sounded drunk.

The woman screamed shrilly (if it was the same woman). Something glass, probably a bottle, shattered. In a softer but vicious voice, the man said, “Teach you, bitch!”

Careful not to disturb Sam, Allie climbed out of bed and padded barefoot across the hard floor to the window. She looked down at the street. A few cars passed, gliding and ghostly. A cab with headlights shimmering and roof light glowing. Other than that, there was no movement on West 74th. No one in sight. Down the long avenue and on receding cross streets, strings of moving car lights traced through the night like low-flying comets in mysterious lazy orbit. Allie stared at the cars, wondering as she often did where they were all going at this lonely hour. What darkside destinations had the people in that beautiful, never-ending procession?

She knew where she was going—back to bed.

She retraced her steps across the cool, hard floor. Stretched out on her back, she laced her fingers behind her head and thought how violence always seemed to lurk near beauty, as if eager to balance the universe with its ugliness, like one of those fairy tales with underlying meanness. That was how it was in New York, anyway. Maybe everywhere, only not so close to the surface and evident, not breathing so deeply and not so bursting with corruption and raw life as in New York.

She left the sheet tangled around her bare feet and lay stretched out nude, her arms at her sides, as if waiting to be sacrificed in some primitive religious ceremony, letting the breeze play over her. The cool pressure seemed to be exploring her as sensually as a lover, softly brushing the mounds of her breasts, caressing the sensitive flesh of her inner thighs. She felt a tension deep inside her, like taut strings vibrating, and for a moment thought about waking Sam.

But it was so timeless and peaceful lying there, and they’d made love violently, leaving her somewhat sore. Sleep was the more sensible course.

She reached down languidly and drew the light sheet up around her, deadening the night breeze’s sexual caresses.

And fell asleep.

When she awoke the next morning she was cold.

Sam was in the shower.

She lay and listened to the roar of pressured, rushing water, then silence when the shower was turned off.

A few minutes later he emerged from the bathroom with a towel around his waist, his dark hair wet and plastered against his forehead. He was average height and lean, with muscle-corded arms and legs. Thick black hair matted his chest and flat stomach. His face was lean, too, with nose and jaw a bit too long. Thin lips. It was an austere New England face except for his kind dark eyes. He carried himself erectly, with an oddly stiff back, and walked lightly as a dancer, as if suspended by a string attached to the top of his head. Allie knew he weighed a hundred and sixty pounds, but he gave the impression that if he stood on a scale, it would register less than twenty.

He smiled and said, “Awake, huh?”

“What time’s it?” Allie asked, not bothering to glance at the clock on the nightstand.

“Ten after eight.”

“Damn! I’ve got a nine o’clock appointment! Why didn’t you wake me?”

“Didn’t ask me.”

True enough; she’d forgotten. Last night hadn’t been conducive to reminding one’s self about morning business appointments. God, last night …

Enough about that.

She swiveled sideways on the mattress to a sitting position, shivered in the column of cold air thrusting in through the window. Sam had removed the towel from around his waist and was using it to rub his tangled hair dry, studying her nakedness with a bemused expression on his dark features. She wondered, if she sat there long enough, would he get an erection?

No time to find out. She stood up, trudged to the window, and forced it shut with a bang that rattled the pane. Someday the glass would fall from the ancient window, shatter on the sidewalk three stories below, and maybe kill someone. She remembered the shouts and the sound of breaking glass last night. No one had died. But even if they had, it probably wouldn’t make the news. Things like that happened all too frequently in New York. All those people. All that desperation. Fun City. Nobody seemed to call it that anymore.

Sam said, “You got goose bumps on your butt. It’s still beautiful, though.”

She turned. He was smiling at her. That narrow, tender smile. She loved him enough just then to consider forgetting about her nine o’clock meeting with the representative of Fortune Fashions. At times it was almost painfully obvious what was and wasn’t most important in life.

But Sam had stepped into his jockey shorts and was slipping into his blue pin-stripe suit pants. White shirt and red tie waited on a hanger. Working duds. A time for everything, she thought. Was that the Sunday school Bible of her youth echoing in her mind? To everything there is a season? Or campus concerts? Bob Dylan, borrowing from scripture? Whatever the source, the sentiment applied. She hurried into the bathroom to shower.

Allie scooped up the tailored jacket that went with her gray skirt. She wrestled into the jacket, wondering if it was tighter on her than the last time she’d worn it. She picked up her small black purse, then her matching black briefcase.

After working the array of chain-locks and sliding bolts on the door, she stepped into the hall first, the procedure she and Sam followed out of habit whenever they left the apartment together. Subleasing and apartment sharing were strictly forbidden and a flagrant lease violation in the Cody Arms. It was essential that no one in the building get a hint of their living arrangement, and they’d worked this knowledge into the fabric of their everyday lives. Apartment space in Manhattan had a scarcity and value that could bring out the worst in neighboring tenants as well as management. In the minds of those around them, there must be no connection between Sam and Allie.

The long, angled hall was empty. She moved ahead, and Sam followed and edged sideways while she did a half-turn and keyed the three locks on the door. It was almost like a dance step they’d perfected. He drifted along the hall to the elevator, punched the Down button with the corner of his attaché case, and stood waiting for her to catch up.

She was almost beside him when the elevator arrived. It clanked and growled in hollow agony, groping for the floor level like a blind creature. When its doors slid open it was empty.

Allie and Sam stepped into the elevator and Sam punched the button for the lobby. After the doors had slid shut, he kissed her passionately, using his tongue. When he drew away from her he said, “I love you. Know that?”

“If I didn’t,” she said, “I do now.” She felt a little breathless and disheveled, and was afraid it might show when the elevator doors opened on the lobby.

Neither of them spoke the rest of the way down. What needed saying had been said.

Chapter 3

MIKE Mayfair rotated his wrist to shoot a glance at his watch. It was already nine-fifteen. He was supposed to meet the computer whiz at nine and she hadn’t shown. Maybe the cunt should program her own computer to wake her up in the morning.

He stood just inside the hotel restaurant on West 51st, aware of the subtle aromas of breakfast being served, watching pedestrians stream past the stalled traffic outside the window. Horns blared in meaningless cacophony, each solitary blast setting off a flurry of sound. New Yorkers used their car horns more as a means to relieve tension than as warning signals to other drivers or pedestrians. On the other side of the street, a short man with flowing gray hair and beard was holding out an opened display case to show passing potential customers, jabbering his sales pitch. Almost everyone glanced at his glittering merchandise—possibly imitation Rolex watches—but no one stopped and bought. Most of them were on their way to more sophisticated cons.

Where was the bitch? Mayfair wondered, glancing at his own watch again—a genuine Rolex—peeking out from beneath his white French cuff. Nine-twenty. Another ten minutes and fuck her, he’d head back to the office and see how the new line was selling out west.

Then the fancy oak door swung open and she entered the restaurant. She was in a hurry, kicking out nicely curved ankles and high heels to cover ground fast, looking worried and a little frazzled despite her crisply tailored gray blazer and skirt. She saw him and smiled with something like relief. Whew! She hadn’t missed him. Hadn’t blown a commission. Blow something else, baby.

“Mr. Mayfair,” she said, gliding over and shaking his hand. She was composed now, though there was still a slight sheen of perspiration on her forehead. “Nice to see you again.”

He mustered up a smile. “Same here, Miss Jones. But can we make it Mike and Allison?”

“That’d be nice. I go by Allie, though.”

“Fine, Allie.” He moved gallantly to the side, then hesitated before helping her remove her coat. Never could tell about these liberated women. Had to shake them hard sometimes before their artificial balls dropped off. He said, “They’re holding our table.”

“Sorry I’m late. Got snarled up in traffic.”

“I got here only a few minutes before you,” he lied.

The restaurant’s walls were oak-paneled on the bottom, flocked wallpaper on top with a gold fleur-de-lis pattern. Wood partitions jutted out from the back wall, not quite forming booths but providing a certain degree of privacy. It was a restaurant designed for business conversation and expense-account dining, with trendy, overpriced, merely passable food. Just the place to impress out-of-town buyers. After meeting Allie last week at the office of Fortune Fashions, Mayfair had chosen the restaurant in the hope of impressing her.

When they were settled and had ordered coffee, he studied her across the white-clothed table. She wasn’t a beautiful woman, but there was something about her. Strong, squarish features, green-flecked gray eyes, wavy blond hair cut short so it could be easily managed. Dyed, it looked like, but what did he know at this point? That full lower lip and the cleft in her boxy chin gave her a determined look. She was a self-possessed, confident woman, but now and then a word, a gesture, allowed a glimpse of soft vulnerability that Mayfair wouldn’t mind exploring.

Not that she’d given him the slightest sign she was in the game; but still, you never could tell. For now, it better be mostly business, maybe a cautious feeler now and then.

He said, “You’ve seen our operation, know some of our needs.” Only some, lover. “In the fashion business, security’s vital. The length of our spring hemline can be as important a secret to us as a new weapon might be to a defense contractor. The fashion world may seem trivial and whimsical at times, but I assure you it’s a very serious and competitive place. Few moves are against the rules.”

Allie smiled. “You make it sound like a jungle.”

“So it is. The business jungle. Debits are as deadly as vipers.”

Mayfair couldn’t read her eyes. He wondered what she thought of him. Usually he could tell when women liked him. Even now that he was past fifty, many of them still were receptive to him. His features remained boyish until a close look revealed the crow’s-feet and sagging eyelids. The deep lines swooping from the wings of his nose to the corners of his lips. His hair was streaked with gray in a way that made him look distinguished, he thought. He’d been lucky there, still had most of it, though it was thinning at the crown. He was dressed today in a dove gray Blass suit with a maroon tie and matching handkerchief, a white-on-white shirt, and black Italian loafers. Casual, but obviously a man with time and money to spend.

The waiter brought their coffee, placing the cups on the table with dramatic flair, then withdrew smoothly as if he were on rollers.

“Though we’re primarily concerned with design, inventory control, and payroll,” Mayfair said, “we gotta have a secure system. One that can’t be broken into by a computer hack with a compulsion for industrial espionage. Maybe a system only a few key personnel could access.”

“That can be done,” Allie said. She leaned down far enough for her left breast to brush the edge of the table when she drew a little leather-bound notebook from the briefcase propped against her chair leg. What did she carry in there? Schematics? Spread sheets? Was she wearing a bra?

He knew this: She was methodical and ambitious and overdrawn at the bank, and the account they were here to discuss was important to her survival.

Mayfair had ordered personnel to check her out thoroughly, and knew more about her than she thought. Knew she’d come to New York six years ago from the small town of Grafton, Illinois, and had no surviving family members. She was alone in the world, and she lived alone in the West Seventies. He also knew that two months ago she’d done an excellent job in setting up a payroll system for Walton Clothiers on Sixth Avenue.

She said, “I’ll need some basic figures.”

Mayfair pondered again the possible future with this woman who needed his business, what they might do for each other. It was a quid-pro-quo world; always something for something. She had to know that, if she had her own company. Beyond the Fortune Fashions account, what yearnings did she have? What fires that he might quench while finding the satisfaction that his former wife Janice had never given him? What interesting and possibly kinky drives? So many of these hot-shit female execs were intriguing that way. He’d find out about her someday, find out everything.

Then he concentrated on the here and now and satisfied her yearning for statistics, watching the way she cocked her head to the side to listen, the way the muted light played off her blond hair.

Thinking, while he paused so she could catch up taking notes, Soon, baby.

Chapter 4

ALLIE was optimistic after her breakfast with Mayfair. He’d been all business, which was a relief. He looked like an aging lothario in his tight double-breasted suit and matching tie and handkerchief, his just-so hair style that was too young for him. Time held at bay by ego. But except for what might have been a few exploratory remarks, he’d stayed on the subject of the computer system Fortune Fashions wanted Allie to set up, and they’d had hours of involved and fruitful discussion. It was nice to know she didn’t have to worry about Mayfair in that regard, sex being an occupational hazard.

The account was a rich one, and when final payment was made, Allie’s monetary problems would be solved for a while. Meaning she’d no longer be financially dependent upon Sam; she wasn’t sure why that dependency bothered her, but it did. Perhaps because she was emotionally dependent on him, financial dependency as well left her with nothing.

Just before eleven o’clock, when she’d parted with Mayfair outside the restaurant, the clouds had drifted away and the sun had transformed gloom into light and hope. A dictatorial Hollywood director couldn’t have ordered it improved. Why not believe in omens? she’d thought, watching Mayfair wave to her from his cab as it pulled away.

Still buoyed by fate falling right, she wandered around for a while, window shopping. Then she strode from the subway stop to West 74th through the rare and sunny September day, her light blue raincoat with the white collar folded over her arm.

She realized she was hungry. The breakfast she’d had with Mayfair was delicious but hardly filling. That and a cup of coffee this morning with Sam was all she’d had so far today. I need fuel, she told herself.

She stopped in at Goya’s, a restaurant on West 74th three blocks from the Cody Arms. It was a large place with an ancient curved bar and a plank floor. A faded mirror behind the bar reflected shelves of bottles and an antique cash register. The waiters and waitresses all looked like hopefuls waiting for their big break in show business, though some of them were over forty. All wore black slacks and red T-shirts with GOYA’S stenciled across the chest. Allie hadn’t been in there before, but she immediately liked the rough-hewn and efficient atmosphere. If the food was good and the prices were right, she knew she’d come back, maybe become one of the regulars.

She ordered a chef’s salad and allowed herself a Beck’s to celebrate the way things were going with the Fortune Fashions account. Then she thought about how she and Sam would celebrate when he came home that evening. Sam. Scheming and ambitious as he was in business, he never resented her successes. Liberated man meets liberated woman.

When the waiter brought her salad, she realized he looked familiar. But she didn’t ask where she might have met him. Possibly she’d passed him on the street often when he was on his way to or from work at Goya’s. New York was like that; people making casual connections over and over, not really recognizing each other because their memories’ circuits were overloaded. So many people, an ebbing and flowing tide of faces, movements, smiles, frowns. Pain and happiness and preoccupation. Good luck and bad. Bankers and bag ladies. All in a jumble. Millionaires stepping over penniless winos. Tourists throwing away money on crooked three-card-monte games. The hustlers and the hustled. A maelstrom of madness. A world below the rabbit hole. If you lived here, you took it all for granted. My God, you adapted. And, inevitably, it affected mind and emotion. It distorted.

This man, the waiter, was in his mid-thirties, with one of those homely-handsome faces with mismatched features and ears that stuck out like satellite dishes. He wore his scraggly black hair long on the sides in an effort to minimize the protruding ears, but the thatch of hair jutting out above them only served to draw attention. The impression was that without the ears to support it, the hair would flop down into a ragged Prince Valiant hairdo. He was average height but thin, and moved with a kind of coiled energy that suggested he could probably jog ten miles or wear down opponents at tennis.

When he came back and placed her beer before her on the table, he did a mild double-take, as if he thought he knew her from someplace.

Then he nodded and went back to the serving counter to pick up another order, probably trying to remember if she’d been in Goya’s before, and what kind of tipper she was.

Chapter 5

GRAHAM Knox had recognized her when he’d served her in Goya’s that afternoon. Allie Jones. It was the first time he’d seen her in the restaurant. He’d considered introducing himself to her but didn’t quite know how. “Hi, I live upstairs from you and can hear everything that goes on in your apartment through the duct work,” didn’t seem a wise thing for a waiter to say—it was the sort of remark that might prompt the flinging of food.

Several months ago, curiosity had goaded Graham to find out what his downstairs neighbor looked like. He’d lurked about the third-floor hall like a burglar until he’d seen her emerge from her apartment. Already he’d gotten her last name from her mailbox in the lobby.

Seeing her up close this afternoon had changed things somehow, made her vividly real and his eavesdropping both more intimate and shameful, no longer an innocent diversion before sleep. But the vent was beside his bed; there was no way not to hear what went on in the apartment below. Even in his living room, when he was working and didn’t have the stereo or TV on, sound from her living room carried through the ducts. It wasn’t exactly as if he were in the room with her and whoever she was talking with, but he might as well have been in the next room with his ear pressed to the door.

And now he’d seen her up close, and she was interesting. In fact, fascinating. Much more attractive than from a distance. Direct gray eyes. Soft blond hair that smelled of perfumed shampoo. Firm, squared chin with a cleft in it. She had a sureness about her that was appealing and suggested a certain freedom. Not like the rest of us; a woman with a grip on life.

Graham’s apartment was cheaply furnished, mostly with a hodgepodge of items he’d bought at second-hand shops. The living room walls were lined with shelves he’d constructed of pine and stained to a dark finish. The shelves were stuffed with theatrical books, mostly paperbacks, that he’d found in used bookstores on lower Broadway. One glance at the apartment might give an interior decorator a month of nightmares, but it was neat, functional, and comfortable. Despite the deprivation, Graham liked it here.

Both apartments were quiet now. Graham was in his contemplative mode, and Allie and Sam had either left or gone into the bedroom.

Graham puffed on his meerschaum pipe and paced to the window, then stared out at the darkening city. Some of the cars had their headlights on, and windows were starting to glow in random patterns on the faces of buildings. New York was putting on her jewelry, hiding squalor with splendor.

Four years ago he’d been divorced; he’d put a genuinely horrific marriage out of its misery before children arrived. Six months later, after quitting his job in Philadelphia to pursue his true calling, Graham had moved to New York and attempted to get one of his plays produced.

Some move! Even the lower echelons of the New York theater world weren’t impressed by a real-estate agent from Philadelphia with the chutzpah to fancy himself a playwright. Didn’t he know there were a million others in his mold?

With a final glance outside, he turned from the window and crossed the living room to an alcove directly above the one in Allie’s apartment. There a thick sheet of plywood was laid over two black metal filing cabinets, creating a desk that supported a used IBM Selectric, a phone and answering machine, stacks of paper, and several reference books. Graham sat down on the folding chair in front of the makeshift desk and got Dance Through Life out of the top drawer of one of the filing cabinets. Dance was the play he’d been working on for over a year. An off-Broadway company had expressed interest in producing it, if he could satisfy them with some suggested revisions in the last act. He didn’t agree with some of the advice, but this would be his first produced play. So he was in the process of following suggestions, doing the minor and, here and there, major revisions, trying all the while to preserve the essence of the play.

He picked up a red-leaded pencil and began tightening dialogue and making notes in the margins. The last scene needed more emotional punch, he’d been told. The theme had to be more clearly defined. Well, he could supply punch and clarity to order, if only they’d produce his play. If only he could see real actors walking through his script, mouthing his lines. Striking life in it onstage.

The evening, his apartment in New York, faded to haze, and he was in Chattanooga, Tennessee, at the Starshine Ballroom, where the play was set. Smoke from his pipe swirled around him as dancers and dialogue whirled through his mind.

He hunched over his typewriter and script, absently puffing on the pipe and absorbed in his work, and forgot about his downstairs neighbor until he’d gone to bed at eleven-thirty. The Scotch and water he’d downed after leaving the typewriter had eased the tension fueled by his intense concentration on the revisions, and he’d almost fallen asleep when he heard the muted ringing.

Her bedroom telephone.

He stared into darkness, not liking himself very much, but telling himself he was a playwright and the study of human nature was his business. It was almost a professional obligation. Arthur Miller wouldn’t pass up this kind of opportunity. Would he?

The phone abruptly stopped ringing. Allie had answered.

Graham rolled over on the cool, shadowed sheet.

To the side of the bed near the vent.

Lying on his stomach, he nestled his forehead in the warm crook of his arm and guiltily listened.

Chapter 6

ALLIE drifted up from indecipherable dreams, pulled like a hooked sea creature by some sound … she wasn’t sure what. Then she felt a moment of panic as the jangling phone chilled her mind. She hated to be awakened by phone calls; almost always they meant bad news. The worst of life happened at night.

Oblivious, Sam was snoring beside her, sleeping deeply on his side with one arm flung gracefully off the mattress as if he’d just hurled something at the wall. As she reached for the phone, Allie glanced at the clock on the nightstand. Only quarter to twelve. She’d thought she’d slept longer, that it was early morning. Maybe the phone call wasn’t bad news. Maybe somebody who thought everyone stayed up till midnight.

The darkness in the humid bedroom felt like warm velvet as she extended her arm through it and groped for the phone. She pulled the entire unit to her so she could lift the receiver and quiet it as quickly as possible. No sense in letting the damned thing wake Sam.

She settled her head back on the pillow, in control now, and pressed the cool plastic receiver to her ear. Her palm was damp, slippery on the phone’s smooth surface. She had to adjust her grip to hold on. “‘Lo.”

“I want to speak with Sam, please.” A woman’s voice. Young. Tense. And something else: angry.

“Who’s calling?”

“Tell him Lisa.”

“Well, listen, Lisa, Sam’s asleep.” Something cold and ugly moved in Allie’s stomach. Its twin awoke in her mind. “Is it important? About work?”

“Not about work.” Was that a laugh? “I don’t work with Sam. But it’s important, all right.”

Allie didn’t say anything. She was fighting all the way up from sleep, reaching out for answers and finding only questions. Lisa … Did she and Sam know a Lisa? Had Sam ever mentioned the name?

Lisa said, “Gonna let me talk to him?”

“It’s almost midnight; he’s asleep. Sure it can’t wait till morning?”

“It can’t wait.”

Allie stared into deeper darkness where she knew ceiling met walls. A corner; no way out. “Hold on.”

She nudged Sam’s ribs and whispered his name.

He rolled over, facing her. She caught a whiff of his warm breath, the wine they’d had with dinner. His upper chest and neck gathered pale light but his face was in shadow. “Whazzit?”

“You awake?”

“‘Course not.”

“Well, you got a phone call. Woman named Lisa.”

“She on the line now?”

“Now. Waiting. ”

Sam was quiet for a long time. Allie could hear him breathing rapidly. She felt her world sliding out from under her. It was making her sick, dizzy. Too casually, he said, “Tell her I’ll call her in the morning.”

Allie pressed the receiver back to the side of her head, so hard that it hurt. She gave Lisa Sam’s message.

“You’re his wife,” Lisa said, sounding furious and determined. “I know he’s married, ‘cause I followed him home from my apartment. Saw you two through the window, then saw you come out together and followed you. Saw how you acted together. Tell him that. Explain to him I know his name’s really Jones, just like it says on his mailbox. Tell him he better fucking talk to me, or I’ll talk a lot more to you.”

Allie listened to her own breathing. “I don’t think I will tell him. Anyway, he’s asleep again.”

“I really think you should.”

“Sorry, I don’t agree. You’ve got a lot of your facts wrong, Lisa.”

“Not the essential one. Wake up Sam, if he really is asleep. Put him on the goddamn phone.”

“No.”

Lisa laughed, not with humor. The bitter sound seem to flow from the phone like bile. “You poor, dumb bitch.” She hung up. Hard.

Allie lay unmoving, the receiver droning in her ear. The darkness closed in on her tightly, making it difficult to breathe. Poor, dumb bitch … There had been more than bitterness in Lisa’s voice; there had been pity. Allie slowly extended her arm, hung up the receiver with a tentative clatter of plastic on plastic. The buzzing of the broken connection continued in her head, like an insect droning.

After a while she said, “Sam?”

Seconds passed before he said, “Hmmm?” Drowsy. Pretending to be asleep. Maybe it was all a dream. Maybe hope could make it so, glue it where it was broken so nobody would know the difference and nothing was changed from the time they’d gone to sleep.

But Allie knew it couldn’t be repaired.

“Lisa told me to say she knew you were married. That she followed you home.”

He gave a long, phony sigh, as if this didn’t concern him and he resented it interfering with his rest. “Whaddya say her name was?”

“Lisa.”

“Last name?”

“You tell me.”

Nothing but silence from the darkness on Sam’s side of the bed. A jetliner roared overhead like a lion in a distant jungle. The echo of traffic rushed like flowing black water in the night.

She watched him in silhouette. “She’ll call back, Sam.”

Lying on his stomach, he raised himself up so that his upper body was propped on his elbows, head hanging to stare at his pillow. It was a posture of despair. His hair had fallen down over his forehead and was in his eyes. “Yeah, I guess she will.”

Allie said in the calm voice of a stranger, “Who is she, Sam?”

He flopped over to lie on his back. The mattress swayed beneath his shifting bulk; springs squealed. The back of his hand brushed her bare thigh and quickly withdrew, as if he’d touched something forbidden.

“Sam?”

“Yeah.” Resigned.

“Who is she?”

“A girl, is all.”

Allie was thrown by the simple evasiveness of his answer. He was speaking to her as if she were twelve years old. She didn’t like what was welling up in her but she couldn’t stop it. She couldn’t even put a name to it. “Christ, is that what she is, a girl is all? Is that what you’ve got to say, like some goddamned adolescent caught two-timing his steady?”

“I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry. But really, that’s all she is to me.”

“Sam, that’s so shabby. So fucking banal.”

“So maybe I’m banal. I’m sorry about that too.”

He was working up anger now, preferring it to guilt. The hell with him. He wasn’t fooling her.

“How long you two been being banal together?” she asked.

“This isn’t an ongoing relationship,” he said. “Something happened one time. Only one. Damn it, Allie, I wish it hadn’t happened. I sure didn’t plan it. Neither did she.”

“God’s plan, huh?” she said bitterly.

“More like the devil’s,” Sam said. “A moment of weakness on my part, and it led to something. I thought that kinda thing only happened to the clowns on soap operas, but I was wrong.”

She said, “I don’t believe things like that just happen, Sam.”

“But they do. Then the people involved regret it but can’t change the past. Please, Allie, try to understand this. Try not to be—”

“Try not to be what?” she interrupted.

“I dunno. Naive, I guess.”

She sat up, and switched on the lamp by the bed. Sam twisted his head away from the light, shielding his eyes, as if he might decompose under the glare like Dracula caught in the sun. Allie knew it was the truth that was making him come apart.

“You have to do that?” he asked. “Turn on that damned light?”

“What do you mean by naive? That I trusted you?”

Now he did roll onto his side to face her, his head resting on his upper arm so that his cheek was scrunched up. His eyes were still narrowed to the light. “No. But I don’t want you to think an accidental affair with another woman means anything important.” He scooted toward her, touched her hip gently with his fingertips, making her suddenly aware and ashamed of her nakedness. She pulled away violently, startling him. “Allie, please!”

Allie kept her distance. “She said on the phone she thinks you’re married. Talks as if you lied to her, led her to believe she was the only one in your life. The way you’ve been lying to me.”

“The point is, it doesn’t matter a gnat’s ass to me what she thinks.”

“Sure, I can believe that.”

“Oh, c’mon, Allie. You’re mad right now, not thinking straight. Not putting this in perspective. And I don’t blame you. But it was a one-time affair of the glands, not the heart. And it’s over, I swear it! It meant no more than a shared dance that can never happen again.”

“Lisa would disagree with you, I bet.”

“Maybe. But so what? I only care what you think, Allie. That’s all that’s important to me in this crazy world. Honestly. You believe me, don’t you?”

“No.”

He made a sound almost like a moan. “I don’t know what I can do about that. I only wish I could do something to make you see the facts. The Lisa thing just sort of happened and then ran its course and no longer matters. Please, Allie, accept that as the truth, because it is.”

“You’re not denying it, only repeating that it doesn’t matter.”

“I don’t like lying to you. Never did. I admitted I slept with Lisa Calhoun. If you need to hear it again, I’ll admit it again. I can’t see why you don’t realize the rest of what I’m saying’s true.”

“I don’t need to hear it, Sam. Not anymore.”

“Well, yeah, I guess not. Allie?”

She knew his wheedling, little-boy voice. Right now it sickened her. Sam was about to ask her forgiveness. She couldn’t handle that. She reached out an arm and hurriedly switched off the lamp.

“That’s better, Allie.” He’d assumed she wanted to go back to sleep, that their discussion was over at least until morning.

She said, “Get out, Sam.”

“What?”

“Out. Now.”

“Hey, I know it’s your place, but it’s midnight.” He switched on the lamp on his side of the bed, then glared at her so she could see he was furious. He hadn’t expected this, his look said. Didn’t deserve it. She was being damned unreasonable, and all because of some insignificant one-night stand that had come to light. “Where do you expect me to go at this hour?”

“Find a hotel. Come back tomorrow for your things. Or the next day. Or don’t come back at all. I don’t care, Sam, not anymore.”

He appeared puzzled for a while. Injured. Then he tried a smile. It was male mastery time. But he was acting out of desperation and she knew it. “I don’t believe you,” he said, like a line from a movie, as if the script was on his side and their destiny was in the last reel.

She wasn’t sure if she believed herself, but she looked away from him. “Get out.”

Sam clutched her arm and she slapped his hand away. She was startled by how loud a sound it made.

He stood up, naked, his maleness wilted between his legs. He located his jockey shorts and danced into them, yanking them tight. You’ll hurt yourself that way, Sam. He found his pants.

She turned away from him, watching his madly writhing shadow on the wall as he stormed around, wrestling angrily into his clothes. A button clattered on the floor, bouncing and rolling.

Then the shadow was still. He’d worn himself out; she could hear his deep and rapid breathing, like right after sex.

Calmly, he said, “All right, Allie. I’ll send for the rest of my stuff.”

Allie felt something pointed and sharp swell in her throat; she was afraid if she tried to answer him she might sob. She lay very still, listening to the night sounds of the city, to Sam’s ragged breathing.

She heard him leave the bedroom. Heard the thump of his rubber heels as he crossed the apartment to the door. The metallic snick and rattle of the locks being worked on the door to the hall.

The door slammed.

Allie lost it. She pressed her face deep into her pillow and sobbed.

At four-thirty A.M. she gave up on trying to sleep and climbed out of bed. She switched on the lamp and put on her white terry-cloth robe.

She padded barefoot into the living room and to the alcove where she had her desk and IBM-clone computer. It felt good, settling down before the computer; this was a world she knew, a dance whose steps were no mystery. She flipped the computer switch and booted the system.

At first she’d considered working on the Fortune Fashions job, but she realized this wasn’t the time for that. In the green glare of the monitor screen, she sat idly toying with the keyboard, trying to relax her whirling mind. Computers and Allie were compatible. Right now, she envied them. Computers thought, in their basic way, but they didn’t feel. Allie didn’t want to feel. She wanted to see herself from a distance, so she could analyze and convert emotion to cold fact. An IBM clone—that’s what she wanted to be.

She keyed in her household budget program and looked over the figures. Made a few calculations and studied the results on the screen.

The computer played fair with her and gave her the hard truth. Without Sam, if she wanted to stay in the Cody Arms and pay her bills, she’d need help, even with the Fortune Fashions account.

There was a way to obtain the right kind of roommate, she knew. She’d considered it before Sam had moved in with her.

Allie keyed in the word-processor program. She typed “Wanted, roommate to share apt. W.70s,” then her phone number.

Tomorrow she’d look at the classified pages of some newspapers and decide where she might place the ad. She wanted to do this right; didn’t want to attract the wrong kind of people. She’d read the ads in some of the underground papers. Desperate singles, divorcées, shutins, and gays. People looking for sex partners who shared their particular perversions. There was a loneliness there, a sadness she didn’t want to touch her.

She spent the next half-hour composing and printing out rental application forms.

She couldn’t leave the computer; it was like a friend she could rely on, one that wouldn’t deceive, or switch allegiance. There was comfort in predictability.

When the windows were beginning to brighten with the dawn, she switched off the computer, went back to bed, and finally slept.

Chapter 7

ALLIE slept until almost noon, then awoke to the sinking realization of what had happened. Lisa. A woman named Lisa. She felt a hollowness when she thought about Sam, and beyond that a deep resentment and anger. Love could do a quick turn to hate, sudden as a tango step, and she didn’t want that. She chose not to have that kind of corrosiveness inside her. The task would be to exorcise him from her mind, a necessary knack if she wanted to continue her life.

For a few minutes she lay in bed, getting used to the new Allison Jones in her state of existence without Sam. Then she rolled her tongue around her mouth, making a face at the bad taste, and struggled out of bed.

Slightly stiff from sleeping so late, she staggered into the bathroom and brushed her teeth with the final surrender of the Crest tube. She picked up Sam’s toothbrush from the porcelain holder and dropped it, along with the distorted corpse of the toothpaste tube, into the wastebasket. Then she turned on the shower and adjusted the water temperature. She stood for a long time beneath the hot needles of water, waking up all the way and working up courage to face what was left of her Saturday. Of her life.

After toweling dry, she put on black slacks and a baggy white T-shirt with SIMON AND GARFUNKLE CENTRAL PARK CONCERT lettered across the front; she’d bought it the day after she’d attended the concert several years ago, and the letters were faded. Simon, who was still hard at it, probably had a song about that. He was doing fine without Garfunkle; she could make it without Sam.

She stepped into the comfortable soft leather moccasins she wore on weekends and wandered as if lost through the apartment, pausing here and there and running her fingertips over the furniture, as if to reassure herself it was real.

Jesus, she thought, how maudlin. She walked over to the office-alcove, ripped the fan-fold paper from the computer printer, and read the classified ad she’d composed before dawn. It was simple and to the point. Effective. She’d been thinking clearly enough when she considered advertising for a roommate to share expenses.

It occurred to Allie that she might have a problem, telling potential roommates they’d have to live surreptitiously in the apartment, be coconspirators in an arrangement that fooled neighbors and management company. On the other hand, apartments in Manhattan were so expensive and difficult to obtain that most renters would find the required discretion only a minor inconvenience. It might even appeal to the more adventuresome. Beating the system was a New York way of life, a point of pride as well as a means of survival in the cruelest of cities.

She got her purse from the bedroom, folded the computer printout in quarters, and poked it in behind her wallet. Then she thought for a moment, pulled the wallet out, and counted her money. Twenty-six dollars. She thought about how much she had in the bank. Depressing. Even with the Fortune Fashions retainer, within a month she’d really be feeling the pinch. Something had to be done, and soon; if the wolf wasn’t at the door, it was prowling the corridors.

Allie had slept through breakfast; she realized she was starving. Considering the scarcity of edible food in the refrigerator, she could treat herself to eating lunch out despite having to watch the flow of pennies.

She locked the apartment behind her carefully. Woman alone now. Then she disdained the elevator and took the stairs down to the lobby too fast, as if to assert her physical capability and spirit.

Breathing hard, she trudged outside and walked until she found a newsstand, where she bought three likely papers in which to place her classified ad. An obese man beside her bought a magazine with a cover illustration of a nude woman seated on a yellow bulldozer. He followed Allie half a block before falling behind her rapid pace and giving up. She glanced back and saw him standing near a wire trash basket, leafing through his magazine. Possibly he meant no harm, but New York had more weirdos per square yard than any other city.

She tucked the newspapers more firmly beneath her arm and returned to West 74th. It was a little past one when she entered Goya’s.

The restaurant did a good lunch business of neighborhood regulars and tourists. She had to wait for a table, and then was ushered to a tiny booth wedged in a corner. On the table were a napkin holder, salt and pepper shakers, a Bakelite ashtray, a half-full Heinz catsup bottle, and a two-dollar tip from the last diner. Allie found herself staring at the creased bills, thinking that theft, on a larger scale than this, was a way out of her financial difficulties.

She shook that thought from her mind when the waiter arrived and stood by the booth. Stealing was stealing, a risk and a moral compromise she was unwilling to explore.

The waiter said, “Something to drink?”

She looked up. It was the same guy who’d taken her order when she was here the day before, the one with the intense, familiar face, the black hair and satellite-dish ears. Homely in the way of Abe Lincoln, or dogs you wanted to take home and feed. There was something clumsy and rough-hewn about him; a long way from Sam’s smoothness and grace. He laid a closed menu before her with ceremony. Like a good book he was recommending.

“I’ll order now, drink and all,” she said, and looked at the grease-spotted menu. It was a computer printout, she noticed. The microchip was everywhere.

The waiter said, “You’re Allison Jones.”

She looked away from the menu, up into the homely face. Dark, earnest eyes gazed back at her, amiable despite their intensity, not devious or threatening.

He smiled and said, “I live in the apartment above yours over at the Cody Arms. I’ve seen you around. Got your name from the mailbox.” He extended a hand and she shook it without thinking. “I’m Graham Knox.”

The guy seemed friendly enough, not putting moves on her. “Glad to meet you, Graham.”

He said, “The double burger and the house salad are good.”

“I’ll have them, then, with fries and a large Diet Pepsi. I’m hungry today.”

He scribbled her order in his note pad and scooped up the tip from the table in the almost unnoticeable manner of waiters everywhere. He smiled his lopsided smile and said, “Back soon.”

And he was. Goya’s kitchen must have cooks falling all over themselves.

He placed her food on the table and straightened up, dangling the empty tray in his right hand. “We’re neighbors, Allie, so anything you need, you let me know.”

Oh-oh, where was this going? She gave him her passionless, appraising stare. The same one she’d given the obese man with the sex magazine when their gazes met. Turn it off, buddy, whatever you’re thinking.

“Not that kind of anything,” he assured her, smiling. He had long, skinny fingers that played nervously with the edge of the round tray. His nails were gnawed to the quick. “Don’t get me wrong.”

Okay, so he wasn’t interested in her that way. Now she wondered, was he gay? She mentally jabbed herself for being so egotistical and unfair. Any man who wasn’t interested in going to bed with her on first meeting wasn’t necessarily gay. And there was something about this man she instinctively liked, but in the same platonic fashion in which he seemed to see her. “Okay, Graham, thanks for the offer. And if you ever need a thumbtack, knock on my door.”

“Not many people at the Cody would say that. Most of us don’t even know each other and don’t want to meet.”

“New York,” Allie said, dousing her French fries with catsup. New York, like a disease.

“Most big cities, I’m afraid.”

“Maybe, but it’s special here.”

“Could be it is. Well, I better get moving—orders are piling up. Come in sometime when we’re not busy and we’ll talk.”

She nodded, holding the catsup bottle still, and watched him smile and back away, moving among the tables toward the serving counter.

Did he want something? Or was he simply as he’d presented himself? Was she being cynical? Everyone didn’t have an act, an ulterior motive and an angle, even in New York. She had her choice now: she could stop coming into Goya’s, or she could become a friend, or at least an acquaintance, of Graham Knox.

She sampled the salad with the house dressing, and bit into the double burger. Graham was right, they were both delicious. And among the cheaper items on the menu. She decided what the hell, she could use a casual friend who didn’t clutter up her life with complications. Allie sensed that was all Graham wanted to be to her, someone she could talk to, and someone who’d listen if he felt compelled to talk. She almost laughed out loud at herself, thinking she could trust her instincts about people. She and Lisa.

Allie wolfed down the rest of the salad and hamburger, then ate what was left of her fries more slowly.

Afterward she ordered another Diet Pepsi and sat sipping it through a straw while most of the lunchtime crowd drifted outside. A vintage Beatles tune, “Strawberry Fields Forever,” came over the sound system. Softly. People came here to eat, not listen to music. It was one of Allie’s favorite Beatles numbers, so she leaned back, closed her eyes, and let it play over her mind. And she was thinking of Sam, trying not to cry.

When Stevie Wonder took over, she opened her tear-clouded eyes and saw that Graham was staring curiously at her from the other side of the restaurant, like a confused terrier.

Allie nodded to him and he looked away. Not ill at ease, but as if he didn’t want to cause her embarrassment.

She slid her cool glass to the side and examined the classified columns of the newspapers she’d bought, laying each one flat on the table, not caring about the spreading damp spots from puddles left by her glass.

She decided to call her ad into the Times. The other ads in their ‘Apartments to Share’ column seemed respectable enough—not placed by creeps or swingers trying to make contact. Abbreviations abounded in the small print: Single white female was, in the lexicon of the classified columns, ‘SWF.’ Also being sought to share ‘Apt W Pvt Rm’ were ‘Yng Prof’l Fem,’ ‘GWM,’ ‘SBF,’ and ‘SBM prof nSmkr.’ Allie took these to mean ‘Young professional female; gay white male; single black female; and single black male professional, nonsmoker.’

She decided to make the wording of her ad more economical and change it to read “SWF seeks same.”

Graham took the order of a middle-aged couple who’d just entered the restaurant, then walked over to Allie. For the first time she noticed that he had an oddly bouncy sort of walk, jaunty, with a lot of spring in his knees. A tall Groucho Marx. He used his sawed-off pencil as a pointer. “Refill on the Pepsi?”

“No, thanks, I’m going in a minute.”

He tucked the pencil behind his ear, then thumbed through the torn-off order slips stuck into the cover of his note pad. He laid Allie’s check on the table with practiced precision, as if dealing her a card face up. “You can pay the cashier up by the door. See you next time, Allie.”

“Right.” She watched him bustle away, the busy waiter, showing her he wasn’t the sort to get smarmy and make a pest of himself.

Allie chewed on the crushed ice in her glass for a while, thinking about how life could change so drastically and unexpectedly. A phone call in the night, and the center of her universe had shifted. A simple phone call, and a relentless momentum had taken hold. Everyone’s fate was so precariously balanced, even if people didn’t seem to know it.

She paid for her lunch and left a tip, nodding to Graham Knox as she pushed open the door to the street. In the bright sunlight outside the restaurant she stood still for a few minutes, as if trying to decide which direction to take.

Then she walked back to her apartment and phoned in the ad.

Chapter 8

ALLIE’S classified ad appeared in the Wednesday Times. Seated in bright sunlight at her kitchen table, steaming coffee cup before her, she read it to make sure it was worded correctly, then found herself scanning the news. The city’s murder rate was up (a bloodless statistic listed along with the birth and divorce rates and per capita income). A woman’s body had been found in her apartment, dismembered and decomposed. Yesterday a man’s body had been discovered hidden in the bushes in Central Park, only a few hundred feet from Fifth Avenue. Someone had struck him in the back of the head with a sharp rock, perhaps during sexual intercourse, and severed his hands. New York was a tumult of souls seeking fulfillment bright and dark, where sanity and madness converged often and sometimes violently. Allie grimaced. A nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to die there.

The rest of that week her phone rang almost continuously. Most of the people who answered her ad were eliminated almost immediately by the amount of rent, or the apartment’s precise location, or the fact that Allie preferred a nonsmoker without a pet. Or for various personal reasons.

After the initial winnowing process, five seemed promising enough to interview.

Allie set up appointments and had each person who arrived fill out the rental application form she’d composed and printed out on her computer. It asked for present and previous addresses. Occupation, salary, reason for wanting to move, approximate work/sleep schedule. Whether friends would be entertained in the apartment and if so how often. Any hobbies or activities that might cause problems.

Afterward, mulling over the interviews and rental applications, she reflected that no matter how much information you gleaned about someone, you were still taking a chance on any prospective roommate. It figured to be that way. Even people who’d known each other for years and then married, sometimes found out when living together day in, day out that they hadn’t really known each other. She felt a cold weight in the pit of her stomach. She hadn’t really known Sam, and she’d lived with him for two months.

Allie finally settled on Hedra Carlson, a twenty-nine-year-old temporary office worker with a hesitant smile and a shy manner. Hedra wasn’t the perfect applicant, but she certainly was the best bet out of those who’d responded. And Allie, smiling inwardly, realized the real reason she’d chosen Hedra was that the diffident and quiet woman was the least likely of any she’d seen to leave dirty socks on the floor and hair in the shower drain. So it came down to personality rather than employment records, pastimes, or schedules. To DNA, maybe. With Hedra as a roommate, Allie would be giving up as little of her independence as possible. Simple as that.

As soon as she’d informed the ecstatically grateful Hedra by phone that she could move in immediately, Allie tore the other applications in half and dropped them in the wastebasket. They hadn’t proved very useful, since this business of choosing a roommate had reverted to emotion and a certain positive feeling about the applicant. But that was okay. Maybe in something like this, unknown territory, instinct was the most reliable compass; the floating needle in the heart.

Allie had already shuffled the items that had been stored in the second bedroom, spreading some throughout the apartment, transferring most of them to her insecure though padlocked storage area in the basement. At a used-furniture store, she bought a four-section folding screen to isolate the alcove she used as her office. The screen was quite a find. It had a few stains on it, but it was gray silk and adorned with a delicate black Chinese willow design. She thought it added something to the décor while concealing her desk and computer.

Hedra moved in by degrees over the next few days. She didn’t have that many possessions, and the one short trip by a moving company to bring in a bed, dresser, chair, and several boxes went smoothly. Allie was sure no one who mattered had seen which apartment the movers actually entered and left.

The smoothness of the move seemed a good omen. The first night with Hedra in the apartment, Allie slept soundly, not once waking to lie restless and wondering about money and the near future. Something in her life was going right. Maybe there was balance in the world.

Friday, in the sun-drenched kitchen that smelled of burnt toast, the roommates had their first breakfast together. After asking politely, Hedra had turned on the radio at low volume. WRNY was playing soft rock from the Seventies—Jefferson Airplane, the Beach Boys. God, the Beach Boys! Harmonizing about innocence and surf and sand, nothing deeper than a dime. Allie was glad Hedra liked the Beach Boys.

The agreement was that each roommate would have an assigned set of shelves in the refrigerator, and each would prepare her own meals. Allie, dressed for a meeting with Mayfair, sat before coffee and two slices of toast with grape jam. Hedra, still in her robe, was swigging Coca-Cola from a can and munching a cold slice of the sausage-mushroom pizza she’d had delivered last night. Pizza, especially with mushrooms, was something Allie didn’t like to look at so early in the morning, but she decided she could stand it, considering Hedra was paying half the rent and utilities.

Gazing across the table at Hedra, Allie wondered for the first time if the woman’s appearance had a great deal to do with why she’d settled on her for a roommate. Hedra was average height and slim, but without much of a figure. Her face was oval with small, even features and pale green eyes too close together beneath eyebrows that could use shaping despite the current unplucked, natural fashion. Hers was the sort of face you’d expect to see when opening a Victorian locket. The set of her eyes lent her an apprehensive, searching expression, as if she were afraid one wrong move would lose the entire game. She would have been somewhat attractive if she’d only done something with her medium-length brown hair. She wore it pulled back tightly with a center part, but hanging loose on the sides, like a Sixties folksinger. She wasn’t the type to duck into Bloomingdale’s and get made over. There was an inherent plainness about her, a subservience. Hedra, Allie knew, was no threat.

Hedra used a finger to tuck a strand of cold cheese into her mouth. “I’m sure this is gonna work out, Allie.” Her voice was soft and carefully modulated. It suggested the same apprehension as her eyes. Had she ever in her life really been sure of anything?

Allie the practical said, “You going to work today?”

Hedra giggled, her hand covering her mouth, for a moment looking like sixteen-year-old concealing braces. Surprising Allie. “You sound like my mother.”

Her mother! Jesus, loosen up, Allie told herself. Back away and breathe. She smiled. “Yeah, I guess I do. Sorry. I was just making conversation, not checking up on you. Hey, for all I care, you can stay out all night for the prom.”

“I’m way past those years,” Hedra said. “Never was much of a dancer anyway. Do you dance?”

“I used to,” Allie said, remembering nights out with Sam. “I love to dance.”

“I never actually went to a prom. Did you?”

“Twice. Back in Illinois. In a green world I barely remember.”

“Musta been nice.”

“No, not really. A little nerd named Pinky tried to rape me in the backseat of a ‘sixty-five Chevy.”

For a second Hedra seemed shocked. Then she said, “Well, those things happen.”

“I guess. It wasn’t really much of an attempt. Not the sort of thing you go to the police about.”

“Oh, you should have reported him.”

Allie laughed. “Then half the girls at the prom should have signed complaints against their dates. I mean, there’s attempted rape and then there’s attempted rape.”

“I can’t see much difference.”

Allie took a bite of toast. Swallowed. Now who should lighten up? Next they’d be discussing the social ramifications of date rape. “Well, maybe you’re right, but it was the consequence of teenage hormones, and a long time ago.”

Hedra shot a frantic glance at the wall clock, as if suddenly remembering there was such a thing as measurable time. “Golly, almost eight-thirty. I am working today. Gonna be a receptionist for a while at a place over on Fifth Avenue. I better shower and dress.” She stood up and placed her dishes in the sink, carefully not clinking them too hard against the porcelain. “You are done with the bathroom, aren’t you?”

“Sure. All yours.”

“I’ll do my dishes when I get home,” Hedra said. “Yours, too, if you want.”

“I’ll take care of them this time,” Allie said. “I’m coming home around noon to do some computer work.”

“I won’t be here … home till this evening.” Hedra yanked the sash of her robe tight around her thin waist and carefully tied it in a bow, though she was on her way to the shower.

She paused in the kitchen doorway and turned to look at Allie. “I think this is gonna work out just great, you and me. No, I don’t just think it, I’m positive of it!” She was like an enthused ingénue in a movie.

Allie put down her half-eaten crescent of toast and started to agree, but Hedra was already gone. Deferential ghost of a girl, wanting to be somewhere else.

She has a real problem with her shyness, Allie thought. A shame, because she wouldn’t be nearly as unattractive as she seemed to believe, if she’d learn to dress effectively and use makeup to advantage.

But maybe she fancied herself the intellectual type. Those boxes she’d had brought in might have been stuffed with books. Or maybe, looking and acting as she did, she attracted the sort of men she liked. Who knew about men? Joan Collins? Madonna?

Not Allie.

Goddamn you, Sam!

Hedra was humming what sounded like a hymn in the shower when Allie left to meet Mayfair.

Chapter 9

HEDRA said, “I envy you, Allie. I mean, your looks, your clothes, guys always calling and leaving messages on your answering machine.”

“My answering machine?”

Hedra looked away from Allie’s gaze. “I can’t help hearing you check for messages now and then. I’m sorry, Allie, I don’t mean to be nosy.”

In the two weeks since Hedra had moved in, this was one of the few evenings they were spending together in the apartment. It was storming outside, and the wind was slamming sheets of rain against the window, rattling the panes. Hedra was sitting in the small wing chair next to a lamp. She’d been reading a mystery novel, something with “death” in the title, while Allie was slumped on the sofa, idly watching the “MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour.” Hedra traded paperbacks at a second-hand bookshop, she said. She had a small and ever-changing collection of dogeared mysteries lined up on her bedroom windowsill. The fear on her pale young face prompted a pang of pity in Allie.

“Listen, I know you’re not nosy,” Allie said. “Two people in the same apartment, we’re gonna know something about each other’s lives. No way around it. I suppose we’ll have to trust one another. And what’s this about my social life? You’ve been out with someone at least five times in the past two weeks.” Which was not only true but a conservative estimate. Each time, Hedra had gotten dressed up, even combed her mousy brown hair to fall below her shoulders, and left to meet her date before dinner. She’d explained to Allie that this way he wouldn’t attract the neighbors’ suspicions by picking her up at the apartment. Allie appreciated her discretion, though she didn’t think it necessary to carry it to that extreme. What was this guy going to do, hop out of a limo with a bouquet of roses in each hand?

Wind and rain crashed at the window, as if determined to get inside. Gentle Jim Lehrer was lobbing kindly, probing questions at an Alabama prosecuting attorney who thought an island penal colony should be established off the U.S coast to incarcerate hardcore criminals. Lehrer was making comparisons to Devil’s Island while the prosecuting attorney was talking about a land east of Eden.

Hedra settled back in her chair and closed the novel. She fidgeted with it so violently Allie thought the lurid cover might tear. “Truth is, Allie, I haven’t really been going out on dates. I got a job working nights, typing reports at a company over near Lincoln Center.”

Huh? The girl could surprise. “Then how come you lied to me?”

Hedra dropped the novel; she jerked when it thumped on the floor, but she didn’t bother to pick it up. “I was jealous of you, I guess. The way you’re so assertive and active and all. I didn’t want you to think I was some wallflower wimp, so when I took the temporary night job, I decided to tell you I was going out to meet a man instead of a typewriter.”

“There was no reason to lie,” Allie assured her. “I don’t consider you any kind of wimp, Hedra. And your private life’s none of my business.”

Hedra blushed; it was obvious even in the yellow lamplight. The wind drummed rain against the window. Sounded as if the storm had claws and was clambering to get in. “There’s another reason I said I was meeting a man. I didn’t want you to think … you know.”

Allie didn’t know. Not at first. Then she laughed. “I never doubted your sexual preference, Hedra, or I wouldn’t have chosen you for a roommate.”

Squirming in her chair, Hedra said, “It’s just that I have trouble meeting men, while you seem to have trouble holding them off. Oh, I mean, I can see why. You have such confidence and style and all.”

Allie was getting tired of Hedra’s unabashed admiration that bordered on idolatry. It was the one thing in their otherwise smooth relationship that bothered her. “Hell, I’m no beauty contest winner, Hedra. Not even a runner-up.”

“Beauty comes from inside,” Hedra said solemnly.

What could Allie say to that? So does a fart? From the corner of her eye she saw that Lehrer was talking with the U.S. Attorney General now. What would the Administration think about resurrecting Devil’s Island American style? Well, it was a possibility. She stood up from the sofa. “It’s a crummy night outside. I’m gonna make a cup of tea. You want one?”

“Yes, please. No—wait, I’ll help you.”

“No you won’t. Stay put.”

The command had come out sharper than Allie intended. The subdued roommate sank back into her chair and seemed prepared to stay in that position for days.

In the kitchen, Allie filled two cups with water, placed them in the microwave, and set the timer for three minutes.

While she was waiting for the water to boil, she wished again that Hedra would stop idolizing her for what she no doubt considered an outgoing if not downright hedonistic lifestyle. Not that Allie wasn’t somewhat complimented by Hedra’s open admiration. Who wouldn’t be? But at the same time it made her uncomfortable. This wasn’t part of the deal. She didn’t want to be anyone’s big sister.

It was true that word of her and Sam’s breakup had gotten around, and unctuous, curly-haired Billy Stothers from Sam’s office had phoned her several times for a date. Allie had gone out with him once, to a boring off-Broadway play and then a late dinner and dancing.

Stothers hadn’t tried to bed her that night; he was the patient sort. But he bored the hell out of her with his stock, predictable lies, and she was trying to dissuade him, but nicely. Which prompted the spate of messages on her machine. Actually Stothers and Mayfair had been the only men who’d phoned during the past two weeks.

Sam was lurking like a persistent interloper in the far reaches of her mind, always with her. How long would that last?

The microwave timer chirped, and Allie removed the cups and dropped tea bags into them. Waited. Removed the soggy bags and added cream. She carried the two steaming cups into the living room.

MacNeil/Lehrer all-purpose theme music was on; the program was over. The air in the apartment was warm and sticky, but the storm made tea seem appropriate. A cozy and proper beverage, tea. Veddy, veddy English.

“You didn’t have to do this for me,” Hedra said, accepting her cup.

“I know,” Allie said, irritated by all this subservience. She’d just heated some water and dropped in a bag; she hadn’t donated a kidney. “So maybe next time you make the tea.”

Hedra smiled. “I’d like that. Sort of earn my keep.”

Hedra, Hedra, Hedra … Allie switched off the TV and settled back down on the sofa. “You’re paying half the rent and utilities, remember?”

“Oh, sure. But I can’t forget this was your place to begin with. I mean, I know how hard it is to get any apartment in this part of town. I appreciate your taking me on as a roommate.”

“So you’ve told me.”

“Yeah, I guess you get tired of me telling you.”

God, she was even apologizing for that. “It’s okay, Hedra. But be assured I believe you.”

Hedra sipped her tea and said, “Just right.” She set the cup on the upholstered arm of the chair, balancing it there with a light touch of her right hand. Allie felt guilty about losing her patience. Hedra was, in many ways, a more agreeable roommate than most. She was certainly preferable to a loudmouthed egotist who’d try to take over and run things. Or a lover who’d throw away your heart like a used Kleenex.

Allie said, “It’s nice having you around, Hedra. I mean that.”

“I … well, thanks, Allie.” She was actually pretty when she smiled, a kind of animated Mona Lisa. “Oh, I forgot to tell you, a guy was by here looking for you yesterday morning after you left. Said his name was Sam.”

Allie almost spilled her tea, which was too close to the rim. She hadn’t drunk any, waiting for it to cool. “Sam, you said?”

“Right. Something wrong?”

“Sam’s the man I was living with here. Before we decided to part. I decided, actually.”

“Oh. You were… ?”

“We were lovers.”

“I’m sorry about the breakup, Allie. Those kinda things happen.”

“All the time,” Allie agreed. But not to me. Not so suddenly. With a phone call in the night that knocked the entire world out of kilter. Damn it, she was straightening that world and Sam had no right coming around and trying to complicate things. He’d sent Billy Stothers to collect the rest of his belongings before Hedra had moved in; there was nothing of him left in the apartment, and Allie wanted nothing left of him in her life. That was the only way to stay off the roller coaster. He’d deceived her once and he would again, if she weakened and gave him the chance. He was booze and she was an alcoholic—one drink and she was lost.

“Did you tell him you lived here?” Allie asked.

“No. He didn’t ask, so I didn’t have to lie. And he didn’t seem to suspect. Probably figured I was just a friend waiting for you to get home.”

“I doubt it,” Allie said. “He knows me and my finances.”

The wind and rain took another whack at the window, rattling the glass, almost breaking through. Or maybe the noise seemed louder because the TV was turned off. Who the hell needed “Wall Street Week”? “Sam seems nice,” Hedra said.

“Seems.” Allie sipped at her tea. It was almost cool enough to drink without burning her tongue.

Hedra said, “He left a message. Told me to tell you he was sorry he missed you and he’d be back.”

Allie said, “I was afraid of that.”

Chapter 10

AS soon as she swung the door open, Allie was sure someone was in the apartment. The air hadn’t the usual stale stillness of a room unoccupied since morning. Something had stirred it not long ago. There was no discernible sound, yet the silence wasn’t complete.

She stood paralyzed on the threshold. Hedra was working all day at her temporary receptionist job. Sam. Maybe Sam had forced his way in. Her glance darted to the locks on the door. She found them intact and without scratches on the surrounding wood. But it was possible Sam had an extra key made before returning his. He’d deceived her in other ways, why not that?

Damn him! Damn him!

She took a stiff step inside and glanced around the living room. Everything was normal, the television and stereo—candy for burglars—were still in place.

Sam.

Had to be Sam.

Anger rose in her and supplanted fear. She moved farther into the apartment and quietly shut the door.

She slipped off her high heels and laid them gently aside, then padded in her nyloned feet across the floor toward the short hall to the bedrooms. She peered into Hedra’s room and found it unoccupied, the bed, unlike Allie’s, neatly made in almost military fashion. It was possible to bounce a quarter off the spread and watch it glance off the ceiling, Allie thought. Hedra the good soldier. She’d delight the most demanding drill instructor.

The faintest of sounds was emanating from Allie’s bedroom. Someone moving around, the soles of their shoes lightly scraping the floor. Odd. Almost as if they were dancing.

Allie edged forward, her heartbeat quickening. She reached out her right hand and touched the wall as if for balance. Should she be in here? she wondered. Should she be doing this? Of course, damn it! This was her apartment. She lived here, not Sam.

At the door she paused and drew a deep breath. Then she stepped boldly into the room. “Sam—”

Not Sam.

Hedra.

She was standing very erect in the middle of the room. Before the full-length mirror mounted on the closet door.

Hedra’s body twitched and her head snapped around. Her eyes and mouth grew round as she saw Allie. She said something like “Whaa—” More a rush of breath than an exclamation.

She was wearing Allie’s expensive blue dress from Altman’s, with the silver belt, silver shoes, and even Allie’s dangling silver earrings with the cubic zirconia stones. Transformation. Night-on-the-town time.

Allie stood rooted in surprise, not knowing what to say, and wondering what was happening. Hedra’s slim body hunched over violently, as if she’d been punched in the stomach. She wobbled back a few steps in Allie’s high heels, like a little girl playing dress-up, and groaned, “I thought you were going to lunch …” As if Allie had cheated by returning home.

Allie said, “The lunch was canceled. I thought you were working today.”

“Didn’t need me today.” Hedra’s lower lip quivered. Her face was flushed with embarrassment. If Allie handed her a shovel, she’d try to dig a hole in the floor so she could climb in and hide. “I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry about this …”

A hot rush of anger welled strong in Allie. Then it quickly waned. She’s about to cry, she thought, staring at Hedra. Oh, no! I don’t want to fucking see that! Or hear it! She’s about to collapse into a sobbing jag that might last for an hour.

Then pity forced aside the anger, and she crossed the room and placed her hand on Hedra’s quaking shoulder, on the smooth material of her own dress. She thought selfishly for a moment that she didn’t want tear stains on it. Hedra shrank away as if Allie were preparing to strike her.

Allie managed a cardboard smile. “S’okay, Hedra. Okay. We’re only talking about a dress here, not international espionage. No harm done.”

“My God, I mean, I was trying on your clothes. I don’t know why I did it, what possessed me. Honest.”

“I believe you.” She patted the shoulder, still vibrating beneath her touch. “Now you believe me. It’s all right; it really is.”

The flesh at the corners of Hedra’s lips arced down and danced; tears still glistened and threatened in her injured-animal eyes. “It’s just that I envy you so. I mean, how you seem to make your own way so confident and all. You’re always sure of yourself and I’m always in doubt. It sounds crazy, but I thought, well, maybe if I put on the dress you look so great in …”

“That some of it would rub off?” Allie finished for her. “A kind of personality transfer?”

Even in her humiliation Hedra had to smile. “No, not exactly. But I guess, well, yeah, maybe something like that. I just wanted to try on the dress and see how I’d look, is all.”

“Then it’s simple as that,” Allie said. “No point getting uptight and Freudian about it.”

“I guess not,” Hedra agreed, after seeming to consider for a moment whether to let Freud in on this.

Allie moved away from her and sat down on the edge of the mattress. The bedsprings sang. Sam. “Don’t envy me, Hedra. My life’s not as good as it seems from the outside. I have doubts, problems. Just like you do. Big problems sometimes.”

“Only sometimes, though. And you solve them.”

“Not always.”

Hedra frowned, puzzled. “You mean Sam?”

“Yeah, him.”

“That’ll work out eventually.”

“I don’t want it to work out.”

“You want it to be over? Permanently?”

“It is over. And as permanently as I can make it.”

“You’re really sure?”

“Most of the time.”

“Well, the way you look, Allie, men’ll never cause you to suffer forever. I seem to have big problems all the time. And it shows and just makes things worse for me.”

“It doesn’t show as much as you think. You’re attractive and smart, Hedra; you need to believe in yourself more.” Christ, I sound like Dear Abby, she thought.

Hedra ran a hand over the silky front of the dress. “That’s easy enough to say.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. But you’re a kind of Pygmalion determined to make yourself over, and that’s all right. Shows there’s lots of hope and plenty to work with. You’ll be okay, Hedra, I can sense it.”

“Sense it? Actually?”

“Actually. And it’s not like me to be wrong, is it?”

Hedra giggled. “I suppose not. Oh!” She suddenly unbuckled the silver belt, then reached around and unzipped the dress. As if she’d abruptly remembered her transgression and wanted to set things right, like a child seeking parental forgiveness.

Allie sat and watched her strip to panties and bra. She really didn’t have a bad figure. Better than it appeared in the drab and poorly cut clothes she favored. “Leave on the earrings, Hedra. Maybe I’ve got another dress you’d like.”

She turned and stared at Allie with disbelief. “You don’t mean, after this…?”

“You didn’t steal or destroy anything,” Allie reminded her.

“I’d never purposely destroy anything of yours,” she said with all the fervor of a Girl Scout uttering a sacred oath.

Allie got up from the bed and walked to the closet. Wire hangers whined on the steel rod as she separated her clothes and found an inexpensive beige dress. It was styled very much like the blue one Hedra was now fitting with precision back on its hanger. Less full, longer hemline, but similar. “Try this one on,” Allie said, and withdrew the beige dress from the closet with the kind of flourish she’d seen salespeople use in exclusive boutiques.

Hedra was impressed. “You mean it?”

“Mean it,” Allie assured her.

Within a few minutes Hedra was wearing the beige dress, pivoting in front of the full-length mirror. Her movements were exaggerated yet controlled, almost like a dance.

She moved away from the mirror, smiling, and slipped into her brown shoes with the medium-height heels that had been lying near the bed. Took another look in the mirror, then spun neatly in a tight two-step so the skirt billowed. “What do you think, Allie?”

“I think it looks terrific on you.” The dress was flattering. “Better than on me.”

“No, that could never be.”

“You’re good for my ego, Hedra, even if you’re not very realistic.”

“I hope I’m good for something,” she said timidly.

My God! Allie thought. She said, “You need a drink. In fact, I need a drink.” Do I ever!

“Now?”

“Especially now.”

“Okay, Allie. Let me get this off.” She contorted her arms, elbows out, to grope behind her back for the zipper.

“No, leave the dress on. It’s yours.”

“But I can’t afford to pay for it.”

“I don’t want you to pay. It’s a gift.”

“You’re kidding!”

“I’m not kidding, damn it!” Too sharp again.

Hedra didn’t seem to know why Allie was suddenly irritated. She lowered her arms and said, “Thank you, Allie,” and almost curtsied.

Allie said, “I’m not royalty, Hedra.”

“What do you mean?”

“Never mind. Let’s go. The glass coach is waiting.”

No coach. Not even a cab. They walked through the gloomy gray afternoon to a restaurant and bar over on Broadway near West 76th. Before they entered, Allie noticed that the lighted time-and-temperature sign on the Apple Bank said it was one o’clock, but she wasn’t at all in need of lunch. The bedroom encounter with Hedra seemed to have killed her appetite. Intense emotion did that to her, be it anger or pity.

There was piped-in music in the bar, heavy-metal rock, but it wasn’t loud. The restaurant was through a low arch; Allie could see several people seated at red-clothed tables, eating lunch.

She and Hedra sat in the bar, at one of the small wooden tables against the wall. Allie looped her purse strap over the back of her chair, close to the wall where no one could snatch it, and looked around.

The place was darkly paneled, with a lot of high shelves lined with fancy beer mugs. Spicy cooking scents wafted in from the adjoining restaurant. Half a dozen people were perched on stools at the long bar. About a dozen more sat at tables. Allie’s gaze drifted back to the mugs. A few of them looked like antiques. She wondered if they were worth something to collectors. The bar owner might not know, might be ignorant of such things.

Not likely, she told herself, not in New York. Everybody but tourists seemed to know the price of everything in the city. Except for the slowly exacted price they were paying for living here.

A tired-looking barmaid plodded over to their table. She stood poised with her order pad, waiting, looking indirectly and dispassionately at them as if she didn’t know or care if they were genuine human beings or cardboard cutouts. She finally said, “Yeah?” then took their order.

Allie had two martinis. Hedra drank a Tab, then a martini. She seemed to enjoy the olive more than the drink. A matched pair of guys in gray business suits interrupted their loud conversation about the Jets long enough to size up the two women. One of the men had bad teeth and appeared drunk. Allie looked away before Hedra did. She saw in the mirror that the other man winked at Hedra.

Swiveling in her chair to face Allie, Hedra said, “No thanks.”

“They didn’t offer,” Allie said.

“They would if we gave them encouragement.”

“Most likely.”

Football talk began again. Louder. Then the subject was changed abruptly to the stock market. Probably to impress anyone who might overhear. Be a bear, said the guy with crooked teeth. The one who’d winked at Hedra was bullish on more than America.

Hedra glanced again in the men’s direction. “Couple of creeps.”

“Maybe not,” Allie said. “You never know.”

“Nobody knows for sure about anything,” the philosopher Hedra said.

That was the truth. When they got back to the Cody Arms, Sam had just come out and was jogging down the steps.

Chapter 11

SAM saw Allie and Hedra and took the last few steps slowly, then came to a complete halt outside the Cody Arms and stood still, like a wind-up toy that had run down. He was wearing gray sweatpants, a blue pullover shirt, and his maroon Avia jogging shoes. He needed a haircut badly. Allie thought he might have lost a few pounds. Not in a healthy way, but as if he’d been sick. She stifled a thrust of concern for him, watching his eyes dart from her to Hedra and then back.

He said, “I was out for a run, and I thought it might as well be in this direction so I could see you.”

Allie said, “About what?”

He frowned. “Is that where we are? It has to be about something?”

“‘Fraid so, Sam.”

He stared at Hedra until silence began to build on itself and someone had to speak.

Finally Allie said, “This is Hedra Carlson. Hedra, Sam Rawson.”

Allie saw him give Hedra a quick up-and-down glance, show mild surprise as he recognized the beige dress. She’d worn it one weekend they’d spent in the Catskills; he’d removed it from her in a way she couldn’t forget. Sam shook Hedra’s hand gently. “You an old friend of Allie’s?”

Ill at ease, Hedra said, “Not so old. I mean, we haven’t been friends all that long. But we’re friends.”

Sam showed his amiable smile. “Wait a minute! We met the other day when I came by the apartment to see Allie. You were visiting. Waiting for her inside. Remember?”

“Sure. Now I do.”

He adjusted an elastic sweatband on his right wrist. It was blue and white, lettered Yankees. “I told you my name, but you forgot to introduce yourself.”

“I’m, uh, sorry.”

“Anyway,” he said, “I think it’s great Allie’s got a close friend like you. Wear each other’s clothes, that sorta thing. New York’s not the kinda place where you usually have somebody close.”

Allie’d heard enough. “Sam, we’re in kind of a hurry.”

“Oh?”

“I thought you were out jogging.”

“On my way to run in the park, actually. So I thought I’d drop by But you weren’t home. You are now.”

“Not quite, Sam, but I’d like to be. Nice seeing you.”

She moved around him and started up the steps.

Suddenly he had her elbow in a firm grip. Desperation flowed like electricity through him into her. “Allie, listen, please!”

Hedra said, “I’ll just run on upstairs.”

Sam said, “Pleasure meeting you, Hedra. I’m sure we’ll see each other again.”

Allie yanked her elbow free, sending a jolt of pain up her crazy bone. She wasn’t the crazy one here. “I’m going with her, Sam.”

He shuffled in a half-circle and blocked her way. There was an agonized look on his face. “Allie, I only wanna talk.”

“And I don’t.” But she knew she did. Goddamnit, she did! “Wait for me, Hedra.”

Hedra was standing at the top of the steps, a confused expression on her face. In the beige dress and high heels, her legs looked very shapely from the sidewalk. Sam stared at her for a moment, as if he were seeing Allie in the dress. His teeth were clenched and his breath hissed like steam escaping under great pressure. Allie could smell liquor on his breath. Had he seen them in the bar? Beaten them back to the Cody and set up this scene?

No, she decided, it was possible but unlikely.

It began to rain then, slanting under the entrance canopy. Not hard, but steadily enough so another few minutes of standing outside and they’d all be soaked. Windshield wipers on passing cars started their metronome action. Some of them had their headlights on, wary yellow eyes lessening the chance of collision in the lowering gloom. The wet street became opaque glass, reflecting the late-afternoon traffic in muted colors.

A trickle of rainwater broke from Sam’s hair and ran down his forehead. Finally he stood aside and gave Allie room to go up the steps. She moved past, barely brushing his arm.

She took each step with deliberation, keeping the sway of her hips to a minimum, knowing he was watching. Behind her, the swish of tires on wet pavement was like harsh and secret whispering. Hedra reached out a firm hand as if to help her achieve the final push of a climb up a mountain. And maybe that’s what it was—climbing up out of Sam’s influence. Maybe.

She grasped Hedra’s hand, squeezed it as if to say “Thank you,” and pushed ahead of her, through the door into the cool, dry lobby. Sanctuary.

“We’ll talk later, Allie!” Sam called up the steps.

She didn’t answer. A raindrop clung to her eyelash; she brushed it away impatiently with the back of her hand.

As they were rising in the elevator, Hedra said, “An awkward situation, but you handled it fine, Allie.”

Fine? Allie interpreted it differently. “Did I?”

“I mean, you seemed so calm. So in control. More so than I coulda been; that’s for sure.”

“Didn’t seem that way to me, Hedra. I wasn’t so calm on the inside.”

“That doesn’t matter. You’re here, and you and Sam aren’t having the conversation he was demanding. You didn’t let yourself get bullied. That’s the important thing.”

“No, it isn’t,” Allie said. “The important thing is that now Sam’s sure we’re living together.”

“Huh? How could he be? He only saw me in the apartment that one time, and he supposed I was a friend waiting for you to get home.”

“Don’t believe what he says.”

“But what could he prove?”

“I don’t mean he could prove anything,” Allie said. “But he doesn’t have to.”

“What do you mean?”

“If he wanted, he could notify Haller-Davis I have a roommate and get us both evicted.”

“Would they believe him?”

“They’d send someone to look over the apartment, and they’d see there are two people living there. No way you can conceal that from somebody looking for it.”

“What if we didn’t let them in?”

“They’d sneak in with a pass key. Then they’d serve an eviction notice, and it’d be up to me to prove I was living alone. They’d know I couldn’t do that.” Allie wasn’t sure that was exactly how the eviction would go, but she was sure Haller-Davis could and would force her out.

She remembered how Sam had noticed the beige dress, how he’d said he recognized Hedra from when she’d answered the knock on the apartment door. He was letting Allie know that he knew: Hedra was her secret roommate. She didn’t like that at all. There was no way to predict what might happen; divorces, from affairs as well as marriages, could take unexpected bitter turns.

The elevator arrived on their floor and the doors rumbled open, admitting a press of warm air from the hall.

A vision of the countless street people she passed every day invaded Allie’s mind. The ones the rest of the human race avoided thinking about, even avoided seeing, with a convenient selective blindness. She might become one of them. Sam had it in his power to do that to her. A Svengali in jogging shoes. That was what really ate at her, the knowledge that he could do it.

Absurd! she told herself. I’m self-supporting and every bit as capable as Sam. My life’s in my own hands.

Hedra stopped halfway down the hall and stared incredulously at Allie. “Sam wouldn’t really turn you in to the management company, would he?”

“I don’t know,” Allie said. “A month ago I wouldn’t have thought so, but he’s hall of surprises. All men seem to be full of surprises.”

“Not to me.”

Allie smiled. “I know what you mean, Hedra.”

But she didn’t.

In the apartment, the phone rang and Allie absently answered it, still thinking about Sam.

“Allie?” A man’s voice. Not Sam’s.

“Yes?” There was only silence on the line. “Hello?”

A steady buzzing erupted in her ear. Whoever was on the other end of the connection had hung up.

Chapter 12

AT Fortune Fashions, Mayfair sat at his wide desk, before his IBM computer, and went through the routine taught to him by Allie Jones. His fingers pecked at the gray keys with dexterity now, sure of themselves. She’d done an excellent job of setting up the programs. Inventory, payroll, graphics for sales and manufacturing projections, all reduced to relatively simple commands. She was about fifty percent through the project, she’d told Mayfair. Which meant it was time for him to do what he’d intended from the first moment he’d seen Allie Jones. And why not? You were vice president of a company like this, certain perks were implied.

Allie had too much time invested to give up the Fortune Fashions account now, and she stood to lose too much money. Without a doubt she’d be vulnerable to pressure. And she’d recently broken up with whatever guy had been balling her; Sam something, he thought she’d called him. So Mayfair figured she was ripe enough to fall. Ah, timing was so important in life.

Not that he’d explain the facts to her in such crude terms. He was too practiced for that. But in varied and subtle ways, Mayfair would let her know that now he had enough knowledge to call some other programmer in to finish what Allie had started. Even his secretary Elaine must be getting proficient with a computer by now. The basic software systems were on line, so no problem there. Allie had gotten a small amount of money up front. Gradually, over a week or so, he’d make it clear that if she wanted to finish the Fortune Fashions job and see her big payday, he, Mayfair, was part of the arrangement. It wasn’t so unusual; she’d probably done some job-related screwing before. Part of landing accounts, he was sure, a piece of the deal from the beginning, or there wouldn’t have been a deal. An attractive woman didn’t need a computer to figure that one out. Let’s face it, software was software.

The door to the anteroom swung open, allowing traffic noises from the street ten stories below to infiltrate Mayfair’s plush and virtually soundproof office. The thick carpet and drapes, the flocked wallpaper and deeply upholstered furniture, seemed even to absorb sound produced from within the office.

Elaine, tall and gaunt as a model, dressed in a Fashion Fortunes fall outfit, swished in and gave a perfunctory nod to Mayfair. They had run through a hot and frantic affair five years ago, but they seldom talked about it now. At the time, Elaine had known sleeping with him was a prerequisite for employment. Somewhat the same dilemma that would now face Allie.

Elaine had been married then, but so what? That shouldn’t have caused such a problem. He hadn’t asked her to go off on a guilt spree and spill her guts to her husband, who went crazy and came looking for Mayfair at home. At fucking home with the wife and kids, no less. Jesus, what a scene? What a night!

Mayfair had forgiven Elaine for that error in judgment, and even helped to find her an apartment to begin the single life she still led. So it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to the bitch. She was having a ball now, dating different guys all the time, accepting gifts from them. Not a hooker, though. A secretary. Mayfair almost smiled.

The scene with Elaine’s husband had hastened his own inevitable divorce. His wife Janice and the kids were living in Buffalo now. Everybody seemed better off. Mayfair was certainly happier. He supposed that indirectly he could thank Elaine for that.

He leaned back in his padded swivel chair and studied her as she bent over a lower file drawer. She still had the wasp waist and trim ass, the nice legs.

Elaine straightened up and smoothed her skirt. Her calf muscle bulged as she swiveled a foot back into one of her high-heeled shoes that had worked halfway off. Sexy. She was holding the file folder she’d been seeking.

She turned around and aimed her heavily made-up eyes at him. “Allie Jones coming in today?”

“She’s scheduled,” Mayfair said. Allie was tutoring Elaine in the use of the computer. Elaine was in the fold and would stay there. Mayfair would point this out to Allie to let her know the company’s need for her expertise had decreased. In fact, she herself wasn’t actually essential at this juncture. But he’d hint that there was no problem; she might increase her value in other ways.

About ten o’clock Allie and Elaine would isolate themselves in a corner of the anteroom, Elaine at her new computer while Allie sat next to her in the red and brown Danish chair pulled over from where it was usually angled against the wall. Patiently, professionally, Allie would explain to her what she was doing right, what she was doing wrong. Tutor and student got along well; both were bright and adaptable people.

He smiled. It wouldn’t be long before they had something else in common.

She was getting ready to leave the apartment and ride the subway downtown to Fashion Fortunes when the phone rang.

Allie put down the earring post she’d been trying to work through her pierced ear, turned away from her dresser, and answered it with an absent “‘Lo.”

Her face became serious. Then bone white. She squared her jaw and slammed down the receiver so violently she pinched a finger between it and its cradle.

A psycho. Whoever had called her had to be a psycho to say the things she’d heard on the phone, to even imagine what he’d said he’d do to her. Go someplace and masturbate, buddy! But leave me alone!

She remembered the phone call she’d received earlier, the man who’d hung up on her. Might both callers have been the same person? It was possible, but she knew the odds didn’t necessarily favor it. The city was full of sick people who regarded telephones as a means of erotic stimulation, Allie told herself. Any single woman in this city could expect that sort of phone call now and then. It was as much a part of life in Manhattan as being approached by panhandlers or getting cursed at by cabbies.

Yet there was a familiarity about both calls that chilled her. The man—or men—had used her name. Casually called her “Allie.” Not “Allison”—“Allie.” Old chums. More than chums.

She grimaced and wiped her hand on her skirt, as if contact with the phone had soiled it.

Jones was such a common surname that she’d used her first name in the phone directory instead of merely her initial, as was the custom of most single women who wanted or needed to be listed. Allie had been uneasy about it at the time, and would have preferred an unlisted number precisely so she could avoid the kind of sick and random call she’d just received. But because of her business she needed to be accessible. An unlisted number might cost her accounts and income. She couldn’t afford it.

Returning to stand before her mirror, she told herself whoever had phoned almost certainly wouldn’t call again. Probably a sicko hunched over a public phone and running his finger down the directory pages, calling whichever female names appealed to his perverted sexuality. Maybe right now he was making the same kinky suggestions to some woman whose name began with K, a woman he’d never met. No need to worry about a sorry individual like that, whose sex life depended on Ma Bell. Allie made herself smile out at the world from the mirror. A philosophical, confident smile.

But as she attempted again to work the earring post through her earlobe, her hand trembled so that it was almost impossible to do.

Chapter 13

OTHER than a massive Hispanic youth in shorts and a black muscle shirt, Allie was the only customer in Goya’s. Apparently the restaurant didn’t do much morning business. On the other hand it was past nine o’clock; she’d slept late, then decided to eat a quick breakfast out before her appointment at Fortune Fashions with Mayfair’s secretary. She’d pushed the obscene phone call as far from her thoughts as possible.

Goya’s was cool. The air conditioner and ceiling fans were toiling away despite the briskness of the morning. The young guy in the shorts and sleeveless shirt ought to be shivering instead of sitting there calmly sipping what looked like a Pepsi and gazing out the window. His leather jacket was slung over the back of the chair next to him.

Graham Knox, the skinny waiter with the jug-ears and bushy black hair, took Allie’s order, then returned a few minutes later with her bagel with cream cheese and coffee. He seemed to be fighting back a grin as he placed the order before her on the table. Good cheer was like pressure beneath the skin of his face.

He began to walk away, hesitated, then turned back. A neat pivot. He said, “I know simply being your neighbor gives me no claim on your time, but … well, I’ve gotten some good news and I guess I just have to share it with somebody. Business is slow and you’re here and we are neighbors, so you’re it, Allie. You mind?”

Allie set the bagel back on its plain white plate. What was this about? Had Graham hit the lottery? “I don’t mind at all. I like hearing good news, even somebody else’s.” She smiled, which Graham took as a signal to put on his lopsided grin. He looked like an amiable puppy when he did that. Allie liked this sincere and friendly man with the protruding ears and intent dark eyes.

He did an embarrassed little dance. “It happens I’m a playwright, and I’ve been working on a script for over a year. Way over a year, actually. And finally it sold. It’s going to be produced.” He waited a beat or two, then he shrugged, as if, on second thought, having a play produced was no big deal and he shouldn’t have mentioned it. “Anyway, that’s my good news.”

“It’s great news!” Allie said. “Congratulations! I mean it.”

“The title’s Dance Through Life. It’ll be onstage at Creative Playhouse down in the Village. Know the place?”

“‘Fraid not. I love live theater, though. Especially off-Broadway.”

He widened his grin. “This is far enough off Broadway you’ll need binoculars and a guide to find it.”

“Don’t be silly. That is a hell of an accomplishment. God, to come to New York and actually have a play produced. You realize how many people try that and fail?”

“Oh, believe me, I do.”

“I’ll go see it when it opens.”

“Really? I’ll make sure you get free tickets—good seats. For you and your—” He suddenly clamped his mouth shut. “I mean—”

Allie knew who he meant. Hedra. But how had he found out about her?

He glanced around like a conspirator in occupied territory. The big Hispanic kid stared back at him with flat, wary eyes, as if suspecting he was the subject of derision. “It’s all right by me if you have a roommate,” Graham said softly. “What am I, the police? I noticed her in the Cody lately, saw her a few times with you. Then one day I heard you two talking as you got off the elevator, and you or she said something that revealed she was living with you. That’s a major taboo in the Cody. I got out of sight in a hurry so you wouldn’t see me. Didn’t want to let you know that I knew.”

“How long have you known?”

“Oh, a couple of weeks. It’s okay, though, your secret’s safe with me. Honest!”

“I believe it is, Graham.” What choice did she have? “But don’t mention it to anybody else. Please!”

“My word of honor on that, Allie. In this friggin’ city, I never know when I might have to advertise for a roommate myself to share expenses.”

“Not you, Graham. Not a successful playwright.”

She was afraid she’d sounded patronizing, but he didn’t seem to think so.

He wiped his hands together as if drying them on an invisible towel. Blushed. “I wouldn’t say successful. At least not yet. And there’s not that much money in it. Besides, Dance might fold after a week. Maybe after one performance. It happens.”

“Don’t jinx yourself.” Allie spread cream cheese on her bagel, took a bite, and sipped her coffee.

He began to back away, embarrassed. She realized for the first time that he had a crush on her. Well, that was all right. A natural enough phenomenon that happened between men and women. Mature, normal people didn’t let it upset their lives, didn’t act on those low-level emotions and let them develop into more than friendship, into something that seized control.

Then she remembered the obscene phone call.

Graham?

No! Ridiculous. I won’t let life in this city poison me. Graham Knox was the nicest and least threatening male she’d met in months. She wouldn’t let urban paranoia destroy a burgeoning friendship.

He said, “I better get busy or I’ll be fired and have to write like crazy.” He picked up a catsup bottle from the next table, then walked another table down and picked up a second bottle. A third. Where was he going, into the kitchen to water down the stuff so there’d be enough to last through lunch and dinner? “Hey, I mean it about those tickets, Allie.”

“You better. I want opening night.”

“No, let’s make it a few performances later. When all the bugs are worked out.”

“Okay, you’re the playwright.”

The lopsided grin. “Enjoy your breakfast.”

“Already have.”

After she’d eaten, while she was digging in her purse to pay the check, Allie realized she’d forgotten a disk she wanted to program into the Fortune Fashions computers. No problem. She could hurry back down the street to the apartment and pick it up, then still make Mayfair’s office on time.

When she opened the door, she was surprised to find Hedra home. As soon as she saw Allie, she stood up from where she was sitting on the sofa. Her hands hung awkwardly at her sides, fingers working, kneading air.

“Thought you were at work,” Allie said, striding to the alcove where her computer was set up.

Behind her Hedra said, “I was just about to walk out the door.”

Allie found the floppy disk she was searching for, slid it into a protective hard plastic cover, then stuffed it into her purse.

When she walked out from behind the silk folding screen that formed a fourth wall of the alcove, she said, “I had an interesting conversation with a waiter down at Goya’s.”

Hedra adjusted the belt of her brown skirt. The skirt’s hem hit her at an unflattering angle, Allie noticed. “It’s too easy in this city to have interesting conversations with waiters.”

“This one turned out to be a nice guy.”

“Far as you know from talking to him over the soup. You shouldn’t mix with strange men that way, Allie.”

“He’s one of our neighbors.”

Hedra frowned. She had more makeup on today and looked almost attractive. Allie recognized the eyeshade and lipstick. Colors like her own makeup. “He lives here?” Hedra asked. “In the Cody?”

“Right.”

“Like I used to,” Sam said, walking in from the kitchen. He was using a spoon to scoop low-fat yogurt from a plastic container. Dressed for business today: dark blue pin-stripe suit, white shirt, red tie. It was an outfit the dress-for-success books said was supposed to inspire trust.

Allie realized her mouth was open. She looked at Hedra, who couldn’t meet her eyes and seemed to be studying the toe of her black loafer. Hedra mumbled, “I tried to let you know …”

Allie glared at Sam. “What are you doing here?”

“Came to see you, but Hedra said you’d left.”

“Hedra—”

“Don’t blame her,” Sam interrupted. “I sorta forced my way in.”

“I wasn’t gonna blame anyone but you for being here,” Allie assured him. Anger gathered deep in her. “If you think you have the run of this place just because you can notify the landlord I have a roommate, think again, Sam.”

He gave her his smile that could melt cold steel. Usually. “I only wanted to see you. I still love you, Allie. I can’t help it.”

Hedra coughed nervously, then said, “I better get moving or I’ll be late for work.”

Neither Allie nor Sam spoke as she grabbed up her purse and a light coat and went out, moving jerkily and too fast.

“I’m leaving, too,” Allie said.

“I’ll go with you down to the street.”

She knew she couldn’t stop him from doing that. Not unless she wanted to leave him here in the apartment by himself. “You sure will. You don’t think I’d leave you here alone, do you?”

“I don’t suppose you would,” Sam said.

Allie locked the apartment door behind her while Sam stood in the hall, watching. There was the slightest hint of a smile on his face, as if he’d just heard a good joke and it lingered in his mind.

Hedra had already gone down in the elevator. Allie and Sam waited silently while it rose slowly back to the third floor. It seemed to take long enough to rise three hundred floors.

Allie heard the cables thrum as the elevator adusted to floor level. The doors slid open. Sam stood back like a gentleman to let her enter first. She felt like waiting until the doors were about to close, then stepping into the elevator so he wouldn’t have time to follow. The old rattletrap didn’t have the kinds of doors that opened automatically if someone stuck a hand between them. But she knew that was foolish and would accomplish nothing in the long run.

Alone with him in the elevator, she reached around him to press the button. Gave it a twist with her thumb.

Sam said, “I’m asking for your forgiveness, Allie.”

She was silent, trying not to let his nearness affect her in the cramped space. She could smell his familiar aftershave, feel the warmth of him. The doors slid closed and the elevator hummed into motion.

Neither she nor Sam said anything until the elevator doors opened. Allie started to step out, then realized they weren’t at lobby level. She looked at the floor indicator light, saw she’d pressed the wrong button on Three. The elevator was on the thirtieth floor. Sam was smiling faintly, as if he suspected she’d done it with subconscious purpose as some kind of Freudian slip. My God, might he be right?

She very deliberately stabbed a finger at the Lobby button, and the elevator began its descent. She felt a hollowness in her stomach, as if they were plunging straight down the shaft at dizzying speed. Down to the center of the earth.

He said, “Other women forgive other men for less.”

“We’re not other women and other men.”

He gave a humorless soft chuckle. “Somebody has to be. How else could Gallup and Harris take all those polls?”

“I never took part in a poll.”

“My life’s not good without you, Allie.”

“You don’t seem to have any trouble finding stand-ins.”

He clenched his fist and stared down at it, as if what had happened to his hand troubled him. Then he banged it into the elevator’s steel wall. “So I’m a fucking sinner! Who are you, Mother Teresa? Isn’t a human being allowed one mistake? For God’s sakes, are you shooting for the ministry? I need you, Allie!”

Allie’s heart was slamming. The abruptness of his outburst had startled her. The unexpected violence, and the heat of his words. Words that penetrated like darts because they recognized an imperfect world and made undeniable sense.

He was staring at her, his deep dark eyes angry and injured. She didn’t know quite how to react. She heard a voice something like hers say, “What now, Sam? You grab me and kiss me into submission like in the movies? Or give me a good shake until I see reason? Get what you want by force if it isn’t given willingly?”

“I don’t play the game that way and you know it.”

He was right, of course. She did know that about him. “Game, huh?”

The elevator stopped on Ten. The doors opened to an empty hall, then closed again. They continued their descent.

“Don’t twist what I say, Allie.”

“All right, I suppose that wasn’t fair. Mother Teresa apologizes.”

He wiped a hand down his face in slow motion, a gesture of remorse. “I shouldn’t have lost my temper.”

“No, but maybe I shouldn’t blame you.”

He bent down and kissed her gently on the forehead. “I’m sorry, Allie. So sorry.” She didn’t move. Felt him bend lower as he braced with one hand against the elevator wall. His lips were against hers. She was suddenly tired of resisting, and all this time she hadn’t realized she was resisting him. Perhaps that was the most exhausting kind of self-denial.

Allie parted her lips, felt the probing warmth of his tongue. She felt herself catch fire.

He shifted position and his arms were around her, pressing her to him.

The fire spread throughout her body. Jesus, she didn’t want this! Yet she wanted it fiercely! So fiercely! She was ashamed of herself but couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop needing Sam. This was the kind of crap that happened in romance novels, not in her life.

They were no longer plunging through the core of the building. They’d been at lobby level for some time while the elevator adjusted position. The doors hissed open on the empty lobby, to faint sounds of traffic and the outside world.

Allie pulled away from Sam. She stared at the world beyond the street doors, and suddenly she didn’t want to go any further. She was held by a force stronger than her pride. Sam pulled her close to him again, as if she were as weightless as she felt. She heard him say, “Can you phone wherever you were going and say you’ll be late?”

She nodded, her cheek pressed against his white shirt and red tie. Trusting him. Wanting him. She nodded again, more vigorously, so he could feel the motion of her head against his chest even if he couldn’t see it.

She reached around him and pressed the Up button.

Chapter 14

SAM played it light and easy, continuing to live at the Atherton Hotel over on West 44th Street. He told Allie he wished he could move back into the apartment with her so things could be the way they had been, but it wasn’t necessary; things could be even better this way. He took her out a couple of times a week, to restaurants, for walks in Central Park, for easy jogs along early-morning deserted West Side streets, nurturing what he’d coaxed back to life. He hung around the apartment some weekends, but not in any way that created tension. If he sensed he was interfering with even normal domestic activity, he left. Allie was sure he was going out of his way to demonstrate to Hedra that he posed no threat to her secret living arrangement with Allie.

The two of them—the three of them—became close friends, learned how to coexist with minimum friction. Allie and Sam were falling back into their old relationship, bodies slipping into familiar orbit. Hedra was dressing more stylishly, going out more often in the evenings. Allie never asked where she went, suspecting that sometimes her reason for leaving was to make the apartment available for her and Sam. And Hedra never pried into Allie’s affairs.

Allie received a few more obscene phone calls. Not only obscene, but puzzling, and with that eerie familiarity that made her stomach drop.

But all in all she was happy in her reconstructed world. The roommate arrangement was working out.

However, other things in Allie’s world were not. Hedra was a comfort when Allie needed her most. Sam was in Chicago, at something called a new-issue seminar, when Allie entered the apartment sobbing without inhibition, seeking shelter and thinking she’d be alone.

But there was Hedra, standing near the door and wearing Allie’s blue coat with the white collar; she was doing temporary office work nearby for an orthopedic surgeon, had come home for lunch, and was about to leave.

When she saw Allie’s agony, the pained look that came over Hedra’s face almost made Allie momentarily forget her own problem and feel sorry for Hedra. Then she realized it was pain reflected—her pain.

Hedra’s hand was on her arm, fingers gently kneading. “So what’s the matter? What’s going on, Allie?” Her voice was throaty, urgent, and weighted with concern.

Allie pulled away from her, from the surprising intensity of her compassion, and was immediately sorry. What the hell was she thinking, drawing back from a friend’s attempt to console her? She paced in front of the window, trying to organize her thoughts, then came back and sat down on the sofa. Listened to the refrigerator droning in the kitchen. Something was vibrating inside it; glass singing on a wire shelf. It was a subtly piercing sound, like an accepted and ignored scream.

“Allie…?”

Allie swiped at a tear on her cheek and said, “Goddamned Mike Mayfair!”

“Mayfair? What happened?”

Allie made an effort to even out her breathing, not look like such a crushed idiot. The universe was still in place, the earth revolving. Talk, she told herself. Talk about this latest kick in the gut and it might not seem so devastating. “He made it clear to me that if my services for Fortune Fashions were to continue, I’d have to supply certain services for him.”

“Huh? Oh, I get it …”

“And Mike Mayfair’s not going to get it. I made a pact with myself when I moved to this shit-hole city. My body, the essential me, wasn’t for sale. I wouldn’t let myself be devoured by what’s outside that window. And, dammit, I still feel that way!”

“Maybe you oughta tell Sam about Mayfair.”

“That’d only cause more trouble, and it wouldn’t really change anything.”

Hedra crossed her arms and studied Allie as if peering through flesh and bone and observing the wheels of her mind, coolly assessing this situation that had broken their lives’ tranquility. It gave Allie an odd feeling, glimpsing this unexpected, calculating side to Hedra. As if the family pet turned out to know how to balance a checkbook. “The company hired you and the job’s not finished,” Hedra said. “So don’t they still need you?”

“Not much. Not at this point. I did too good a job. The systems they need are on line and simple enough so that even Mayfair’s secretary can run and expand the programs. Even Mayfair himself. It’ll take some time, and there’ll be minor fuck-ups, but the truth is they can get along fine without me.”

Hedra bit her lower lip so hard Allie thought blood might appear. Hedra said, “Well, I think it’s … just rotten!”

That made Allie feel better, almost made her smile. Hedra being Hedra again. But it didn’t tell her anything she hadn’t known. Rotten. That was Mayfair, all right.

Hedra stared at the floor and ground her high heel into it, as if trying to bore through wood and plaster to the apartment below. “You were counting on the money from this assignment, weren’t you?”

“Hell, yes. That’s the card Mayfair was trying to play. He was smooth and he made it all seem halfway respectable, but it came down to prostitution and we both knew it. What we were talking about was ass for cash.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“Christ, Hedra!”

“I’m sorry. I meant what’d you say to him?”

“Nothing at all. I simply left.”

“Best thing, maybe.”

“I passed up some solid accounts because the Fortune Fashions job was so lucrative, and now here I sit with empty pockets and empty time.”

“Empty pockets?”

“Well, they’ll be empty soon.”

Hedra gave a careless backhand wave, as if shooing away a mosquito instead of financial devastation. “I can carry us for a while. And Sam’ll help, I’m sure.”

“Yeah, I’m sure, too. If I ask him. But I don’t know if I want that.”

“That isn’t prostitution, Allie. Not with Sam.”

Allie worked her shoes off and let them drop to the floor. One landed on the soft throw rug, the other thunked on wood. “I guess it’s not,” she said. She began massaging her foot. In her anger after leaving Mayfair, she’d walked blocks along Seventh Avenue before hailing a cab; her legs were tired and her feet were sore and felt clumsy and heavy. Her soles tingled as if she’d been marching barefoot on sandpaper. She leaned back and closed her eyes. “God, I really feel shitty, Hedra.”

“Anybody would, after what happened.” There was a hitch in Hedra’s voice; she seemed about to cry. “I don’t like seeing you like this.”

“I know you don’t,” Allie said, her eyes still closed. “I don’t like it, either.”

Hedra spoke from the blackness. “If you want, I can get you something.”

Allie wasn’t sure what she meant. “No, I’ll be okay. But thanks.”

“You sure?”

“What do you mean by ‘something’?” Allie asked.

“You know. A pill.”

Allie opened her eyes and met Hedra’s guileless stare. “What kind of pill?”

“Just something to make you feel better, that’s all.”

“What kind of pill?” Allie repeated.

“I dunno, it’s something like Demerol. You heard of Demerol?”

“Sure. In hospitals.” Allie stared at Hedra, who was outlined against the bright haze of light streaming through the window. There was something unreal about her, as if she were someone’s strayed shadow rather than solid substance. Here was yet another side of Hedra. “It’s none of my business if you do drugs, Hedra; I’m not preaching. But it’s not for me and thanks anyway.”

The figure silhouetted against the light writhed with discomfort. “Wait a minute, Allie, it’s not like I’m a drug fiend. It’s just that I got used to taking certain drugs when I was in the hospital in St. Louis.”

“I didn’t say you were an addict.”

“No, I guess you didn’t. Guess you wonder what I mean, though, about being hospitalized and all.”

Allie sat quietly, waiting, knowing Hedra felt compelled to tell her about this. Allie had been wounded and brought down to earth. The weak could safely confide in the weak.

“I was just a kid,” Hedra said, “and a car hit me when I was on my bike. It tossed me twenty feet and injured my spine. The doctors couldn’t figure out exactly what was wrong; injured backs can be like that. Anyway, I was in the hospital for a while, and they had me on this drug and that drug for pain. They were doing that to a lot of people in those days if they couldn’t diagnose what was wrong; I even saw a TV documentary on it once. Well, eventually the pain just went away by itself, but I was in the habit of taking drugs when I felt bad. I still do it, but it’s not as if I’m hooked or anything. There are millions of people like me, using drugs the way I do sometimes, to help them over the rough spots.”

“I suppose there are,” Allie said. “But it’s a habit I never fell into. Where was your family when all this was going on?”

Hedra stepped out of the light and Allie was shocked by the dismay and rage on her face. “My family situation was never good. I try not to think much about those people, after the way they let me down. Heck, the way the brain can block out bad stuff, I hardly even remember them. Except for my father’s hands, and the things he did with them. That’s the way I see him now, just a pair of big powerful hands with dirt under the nails. I can’t even picture my mother at all.”

Her mood passed abruptly, as if a dark cloud blown across her mind had dissipated. Her mental sky was clear and blue again. She smiled. “Oh, well, it’s all in the past. Doesn’t matter anymore. It’s today that matters. And tomorrow. Don’t you think?”

Allie nodded. The end of the month would matter, when the rent had to be mailed to Haller-Davis. She said, “When you don’t have any remaining family, like I don’t, sometimes you think even bad family’s better than nobody at all.”

“Oh, you’re so wrong, Allie.”

“Maybe. I guess it depends on the seriousness of the problem.”

The phone jangled and she jumped at the noise. Lord, she was wired. Tempted to gulp down that pill.

“Easy,” Hedra said, “I’ll get it.”

She crossed the room and lifted the receiver. Said, “Hello. No, but she’s right here. Just a minute.” She held the receiver out for Allie. “For you.” She cupped her hand over the mouthpiece. “Maybe it’s that Mr. Mayfair calling to apologize.”

“He’s not the type,” Allie said, hoping Hedra was right. She got up from the sofa and padded in her stockinged feet to the phone, pressed the receiver to her ear, and said hello.

A male voice said, “Allie, I’m gonna tie you to the bed and whip your ass till you come. Make you eat shit with a rough wooden spoon. Listen, bitch, I’m gonna …”

The voice faded to silence as Allie lowered the receiver in her trembling hand. Let it drop the final few inches to clatter into the cradle. Her breathing was ragged, her throat tight.

She tried to remember the voice of whoever had made the other obscene calls. She couldn’t know for sure if this caller was the same man.

“Who was it?” Hedra asked.

“A crank call.”

“You okay?”

“Sure.” She turned around and faked a smile that didn’t fool Hedra, then felt it go brittle on her face.

“Oh! That kinda call, huh? Think it was that Mayfair jerk?”

Despite her loathing for the man, Allie was unable to imagine him making such a call. “No, not his style.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Hedra said. “Remember, the creep asked for you by name.”

That was what Allie couldn’t forget.

Hedra walked over to the window, her hands jammed deep in the pockets of Allie’s coat as if she were cold.

Staring outside, she hunched her shoulders and shook her head. She said, “It takes all kinds, Allie. And they don’t wear indentifying labels.”

Chapter 15

HE looked like a computer-game figure weaving through a maze. Allie watched Graham Knox’s slender body maneuver among the crowded tables at Goya’s as he brought her the hamburger and Diet Pepsi. Though he actually moved gracefully, there was that inherent and somehow appealing awkwardness about him that seemed to stem more from the tentative, intense expression he habitually wore than from physical motion. He always seemed preoccupied and puzzled by some inner conflict.

“You’re busy tonight,” she said as he placed her order on the table. The charred-beef scent of the hamburger wafted up to her. She wasn’t sure if it made her feel hungrier or slightly ill.

“And you have something on your mind.”

Allie was amazed. “How’d you know?”

Graham gave his canine-like lopsided smile and wiped his hands on the small white towel tucked in his belt. “I’m sort of a student of human nature. Gotta be, in my profession.” A Beatles song, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” began blasting from the speakers. The decibel level of conversation in the restaurant rose to challenge it. The result was a maelstrom of noise. Graham leaned down close to her, his mouth near her ear. “You need to talk, Allie?” She felt his warm breath, like the life-breath of a lover.

“You shared your good news,” she said, “I thought I might share my bad—tempered with some good news, though.”

“The bad news isn’t too bad, I hope.” He glanced at his watch, one of those with a moon phase dial on it to make it more complicated. “It’s just past seven o’clock. The rush is almost over, and I can get off around eight. Wanna combine talking with walking?” He made it sound like a trick of coordination.

Allie thought a walk was a good idea; the noise might not abate in the usually quiet Goya’s. And it was a beautiful late September night, warm and clear. “I’ll eat slow,” she told him.

“I can sneak you some dessert, on the house. Give you an excuse to hold down the table. Unless you’re on a diet.”

She smiled sadly. “No, I’m not in a dieting mood.”

Graham touched her shoulder in sympathy; she noticed his fingers were long and tapered. He retreated through the melee of noise and laughter, toward the swinging doors to the kitchen, his lanky frame swaying among the tables with practiced precision and efficiency. From behind, he appeared not at all awkward or tentative. Someone in a far corner called to him. He waved a hand to confirm that he’d heard. Somebody somewhere turned down the volume of the canned music. The Beatles were finished with “Lucy” and were singing now about “Sergeant Pepper.”

Allie blocked out the voices around her, the laughter and the clinking of glasses and flatware. She gnawed on her hamburger and listened to the music. John Lennon. Christ! How could anyone shoot John Lennon?

Graham had brought her a scoop of vanilla ice cream with fresh strawberries over it. Allie was often amazed by how available fresh produce was in the concrete world of New York. Fresh flowers, too. As if there were a garden on every cloud-high roof.

After dessert and coffee she felt better. Her guilt at eating so many calories was assuaged by the fact that the strawberries and ice cream were free. She suspected even Richard Simmons would accept free dessert in a restaurant. He would if he saw those strawberries, anyway, and his appetite was heightened by other unfulfilled yearnings.

Now she and Graham were walking west on 74th Street, toward Riverside Park. There was a light breeze blowing in off the Hudson. The night was cool and, despite the exhaust fumes, the air smelled remarkably fresh for Manhattan. The sidewalks were crowded with people who seemed to be dawdling, enjoying the unseasonably fair weather; even traffic seemed to be moving slower, car windows cranked down, drivers’ elbows jutting out in vehicle after vehicle as if an amalgamation of flesh and metal formed each machine.

Graham walked on the street side, slowly so Allie could keep pace, and listened intently with his head bowed as she told him about Sam.

“There’s something doubly good when somebody you love is out of your life, then reenters it.”

“Second time around and all that,” Graham said. He didn’t sound happy about what Allie had told him. “Sounds as if you really love this Sam.”

“I don’t seem to have much choice, Graham.”

“Sure, I understand. Lucky Sam. He smart enough to know he’s lucky?”

“I think so.”

“You’d better know it.”

She couldn’t help remembering Lisa. “That’s not an easy thing to know for sure.”

“Yeah. Well, that’s the human condition. What keeps people like me from ever running out of material to write about. Anyway, tell me the bad news you wanted off your chest. If I sound more eager to hear it, don’t blame me.”

She told him about Mayfair and losing the Fortune Fashions assignment. Then she told him about the obscene phone calls in which her name was used.

“You tell Sam about any of this?”

“Just some of the phone calls.”

“Why not about Mayfair?”

“I’m afraid of what he might do. Men like Mayfair are everywhere; Sam getting embroiled in a fight or a lawsuit wouldn’t change society—or get the account back.”

“I suppose not. It’s the phone calls that are really bothering you, right?”

“You know me like a good friend, Graham.”

“That’s because I am a good friend.” They stopped and stood on the corner of West 74th and West End Avenue. “Didn’t you say your full name’s in the phone book?” Graham asked. The breeze riffled his dark hair, mussing the wings over his protruding ears.

Allie nodded.

“Then I wouldn’t worry so much about the phone calls. Just some pervert who chose you because he spotted the complete listing in the directory and knew he could shake up a woman by using her first name. It’s probably not as personal as you think. Or as you feel it is. You’d be surprised at the number of obscene phone calls made every day in this city. Every hour.”

“What bothers me,” Allie said, “is that my address is in the directory along with my number. This sicko—if it is only one man—knows where to find me.”

“Yeah. Well, I can see where that makes you uneasy, and that’s exactly what a bastard like your caller wants you to worry about. But believe me, the kind of nut who phones women and makes sexual references almost always does it because he’s too intimidated to confront them face to face. These are usually the last people who’d show up at your door and try something.”

‘“Almost always,’ huh? ‘Usually’?”

“Those words apply to virtually everything, Allie.”

True enough. But she didn’t agree with him out loud.

“What’d Sam say about the phone calls?” he asked.

“Pretty much what you said. He doesn’t think they’re anything to worry about. That’s what most men would say; they don’t feel the vulnerability in that kind of situation.”

“Can’t help that,” Graham said. “We’re not afraid of mice, either.”

They began walking down West End. A raggedy man wearing incredibly wrinkled, oversized gray pants, and a green wool blanket draped over bare chest and shoulders, approached them and in an almost unintelligible mumble asked if they had any spare change. The breeze carried his odor of stale perspiration and urine. Graham shook his head no and said, “Sorry.” Allie wondered how it would feel to be rejected that way by an indifferent world. To live on the streets of a city as cruel as Manhattan. Delusion might be essential to deflect the pain.

She watched the beggar veer toward a well-dressed couple waiting to cross the intersection. Trying to muster pity but feeling only fear, she said, “It must be a bitch, having to exist like that, struggling to survive through each day.”

Graham said, “It is, but he asked the wrong people for money. You’re out of work, and I’ve only been paid the first half of the advance on my play.”

“We don’t have to justify not giving a beggar money,” Allie said, a bit surprised at the vehemence in her voice.

“Yes, I’m afraid we do.”

At a newspaper and magazine kiosk, Allie paused to buy a Village Voice. She enjoyed reading the weekly paper, and it also contained help-wanted ads, maybe for computer programmers.

She abruptly yanked the Voice out from beneath the rock that was weighting it down on the stack of papers, and handed over a dollar bill for the paper to the grizzled old woman inside the kiosk, but after taking a step and starting to shove her wallet back into her purse, she stopped, realizing something was wrong.

She squeezed the wallet with probing fingers.

Opening it, she checked the plastic card and photo holders. She pried apart the leather compartments, her movements quicker and less controlled.

“They’re gone!” she cried.

Graham was staring at her, puzzled. “What’s gone?”

“My Visa and MasterCard.”

“You sure?”

She examined the wallet again, more slowly and carefully. “Positive. And something else is missing. My expired Illinois driver’s license.”

“Expired, is it? Good. Somebody might be surprised if they try to use it to cash a check. You sure this stuff was in your wallet at the restaurant?”

“Not absolutely sure. It might have been gone and I didn’t notice. The wallet felt different to me just now, not as bulky. I haven’t charged anything in over a week. Shit! The cards might have been gone for days!”

“Don’t panic, Allie, you can only be held responsible for fifty dollars on each card, even if the thief uses them to travel to Europe. It’s a law.”

“I know. Still …”

“And they’ve probably only been gone a short time, or you’d have missed them earlier.”

Allie didn’t answer, trying to remember how the wallet had felt in Goya’s when she’d gotten out money to pay for dinner. She hadn’t actually taken the wallet out of her purse, letting it rest inside so it and the folding money would stay out of sight below table level. Couldn’t be too careful.

“Better get on the phone,” Graham said, “and report the cards missing. They’ll cut credit on them and issue you some new plastic with different numbers.”

“I don’t understand how I lost them.”

“You probably didn’t lose them. Credit cards are stolen every day.”

Every day. Like obscene phone calls to single women. “But no one’s had the opportunity.”

“Haven’t they? Thieves can be damned clever. And no woman guards her purse every minute she’s out.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“Maybe the creep who stole your credit cards and driver’s license is the same guy who phoned you. Maybe that’s how he settled on you to pester. If so, it’ll lose its thrill after a while and he’ll stop.”

“You sound sure of that.”

“I told you, I’m a student of human nature. But if it’ll make you feel better, maybe you should go to the police. Report the obscene calls and the stolen cards and license. Might not help, but it can’t hurt.”

“I’ll think about it,” Allie said. “Meanwhile, I’d better notify somebody about the missing cards. Whoever stole them might be off on a shopping spree right now. Buying one of everything at Bloomingdale’s.”

“I’ve gotta admit, that sounds like fun.”

She responded with morose silence.

“Maybe they’re only lost, not stolen,” Graham said to comfort her. “That wouldn’t be so bad.”

Allie thought inanely that nothing could be worse than being lost; she’d been lost for a while and knew.

She tucked the folded Voice under her arm, clutched her purse tightly, and she and Graham began walking at a fast pace back toward West 74th. Their heels clopped out a relentless rhythm on the hard concrete.

The night no longer seemed friendly.

Chapter 16

WHEN Allie reached the Cody Arms she happened to glance up as she crossed West 74th and saw a shadow flit across the drawn shade in Hedra’s bedroom window. Again. It was moving rapidly, arms flailing. Allie suddenly realized someone was dancing madly in Hedra’s room, whirling, shaking her head, hair flying.

She went upstairs and let herself into the apartment. As she walked silently down the hall to her bedroom, she heard the floor creaking in Hedra’s room and saw darkness pass across the lighted crack beneath the closed door. Allie moved nearer and put her ear close to the door. There was no music inside the room, only the swish swish scuff scuff of Hedra frantically dancing.

Allie knocked on the door. “Hedra? You okay?”

The noise on the other side of the door ceased abruptly. Then Hedra’s voice said, “Sure, Allie. I was practicing a new dance step, that’s all.”

Allie hadn’t even known Hedra danced. She stood there a while longer, but Hedra said nothing more. The light washing from beneath her door suddenly disappeared.

As long as she’s all right, Allie figured, what she does in her own room is her business. That was part of the understanding when they’d become roommates. Still, there was something about the absence of music and the uncontrolled wildness of the dance that gave Allie the creeps. On the other hand, a backlighted figure moving in silhouette could be deceptive.

Apparently Allie’s roommate had danced enough that night and had gone to bed. Allie decided that was a sound idea. She turned away from the blank face of the door and went to her bedroom.

Allie woke the next morning to the sound of a sanitation truck grinding away at garbage that had been piled high at the curb. Loud metallic clanking, then high-pitched whining and rending was followed by the coughing roar of the truck engine, then the squeal and hiss of air brakes. Now and then one of the workers handling Manhattan’s throwaways would shout frantically or bark loud laughter. It was an adventure, picking up trash.

She opened one gritty eye and studied the dust motes swirling in a sunbeam bisecting her bedroom, then slowly shifted her gaze to the red digital numbers on the clock by the bed. Eight-thirty. Still early.

Then she realized, late, early, it made no difference. She had no appointments. Nowhere to go.

No work and no immediate income.

She heard tap water run for a moment in the kitchen, then Hedra stride across the apartment and open and close the hall door, leaving for whatever job she was working.

Allie remembered last night’s discovery that her I.D. and credit cards were missing from her wallet. She would look up the card numbers on her monthly statements, then she’d call the credit companies and inform them of the missing cards. Their numbers would soon be listed among those stolen, among hundreds and perhaps thousands listed on the hot sheets for salesclerks and cashiers to scan while infuriated customers waited in checkout lines.

New plastic would be sent, but Allie would be left without much cash and with no credit until her replacement cards arrived. She realized, with an edge of subtle panic, that getting new charge cards might take a while. It was almost as if an integral piece of her were missing; plastic had become essential in her life.

She rolled over to lie on her back and gazed listlessly at the ceiling, listening as the metallic mayhem of the trash pickup moved down the street like a raucous carnival. Finally the noise drifted faint and echoing from the next block.

As she ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth, she realized she was parched and thirsty. She’d lain in bed for a long time last night before falling asleep, and she hadn’t drunk anything since dinner at Goya’s.

Still, she was more tired than thirsty. She watched a tiny insect on the ceiling make its gradual, indirect way to the corner near the window. It stopped, started, slowly detouring around cracks in the plaster, moving through life with the care necessary for survival. Finally it disappeared in deep, angled shadow. Into safety? Or danger?

Allie sighed, stood up, and plodded barefoot from the bedroom. The floor was hard and unyielding beneath her soles. She could feel the individual cracks between strips of wood. She returned to the bedroom to get her slippers, but she couldn’t find them. Hedra had been wearing them last night; maybe they were in her room.

But the slippers were nowhere in sight in Hedra’s bedroom. Allie peeked beneath the bed. Nothing there. Not even dust. She walked to the closet to see if compulsively neat Hedra had placed the slippers in there.

A moment after she opened the closet door she stepped back in surprise. The clothes. Hedra’s clothes. They looked so much like … they were Allie’s own clothes.

Allie turned and hurried to her own room. She flung open the closet doors.

Her clothes were there, as they’d always been.

She sat down on the edge of the mattress, gazing at the rows of dresses, blouses, and slacks on hangers. There were a few variations in color and material from Hedra’s closet, but not many.

Wherever possible, Hedra had bought exact duplicates of Allie’s clothes.

Allie sat very still on the edge of the bed, wondering what it meant.

Later that day she phoned Sam and told him about it. He seemed more amused than alarmed. “What the girl wears is her business,” he said, “and you know how she idolizes you.”

“She does idolize me,” Allie said. “More than I find comfortable.”

Sam laughed. “You deserve it. Have I ever told you that?”

Allie had to smile, remembering. “Yeah, you’ve told me.”

“Meant it, too.”

“Seeing Hedra’s clothes this morning, after losing my credit cards last night, is what’s got me rattled, I guess.”

“You lost your credit cards? As in Master and Visa?”

“Yeah. I don’t know how.”

“Get the cards back?”

“No, they might have been stolen.”

“Better phone in the numbers.”

“I already have. I notified the police, too.”

“Well, your liability’s limited when you lose credit cards, and maybe they’ll turn up.”

“I can’t use them if they do; I have to wait for replacements. That’ll take a while.”

“By the way, Allie, I’ve got some bad news.”

Her heart took a dive. “Bad news? Dammit, Sam, that’s not what I need this morning.”

“Christ, not that bad.” He laughed. “I only meant I have to be away for a couple of weeks. A conference in Milwaukee, then a junk-bond seminar in Los Angeles. Can you live without me?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, I can’t live without you. Not for more than a few weeks. I’ll phone you.”

“You’d better,” she said.

“Try not to worry so much, okay, lover?”

“Sure. That’s probably good advice.”

Loudly, only half-jokingly, he blew a kiss into the receiver.

When she hung up on Sam, the phone rang almost immediately. She thought it might be Sam, calling her back to say something he’d forgotten.

But as soon as she picked up the phone she knew it wasn’t Sam.

No voice on the other end of the connection, only heavy, uneven breathing.

Then, “Allie, baby? Sweet Buns? I know it’s you. Soon we’re gonna—”

She slammed the receiver into its cradle.

Chapter 17

DISGUSTING habit, Detective Sergeant Will Kennedy thought. And I’m disgusting for indulging.

He snubbed out his cigar in the ashtray, knowing even then that he’d soon light another despite his doctor’s advice to stop smoking. Sitting at his desk in the squad room, he peered through the noxious haze hovering above the ashtray. A woman was standing at the wooden restraining rail that ran parallel to the booking desk. She leaned forward, her pelvis against the rail, and spoke earnestly and rapidly, as if she wanted to get her story out in a hurry.

Kennedy watched Sergeant Morrow listen to her in his patient, speculative way, then say something and point in Kennedy’s direction. The woman smiled at Morrow, and walked purposefully toward Kennedy.

Davis, who was working undercover in Narcotics and looked like a street punk, blatantly leered at her. It didn’t matter, Kennedy figured, she’d think he was a suspect and not a cop. The other detectives and a couple of uniforms contented themselves with sly glances in her direction. This was a busy precinct, but there was always time to appreciate beauty in the midst of police work. For the contrast.

As she got closer, Kennedy pretended to notice her for the first time and glanced up, smiling warmly. She was in her early thirties, average height and build, short blond hair, good eyes, firm, squarish jaw, and a mouth that looked as if it had smiled plenty but which now was a grim red slash. She was wearing a lightweight raincoat, powder blue with a white collar and oversized white buttons. High heels, good ankles. Not a stunner, but an attractive woman up close as well as viewed from across the room.

She stood in front of his gray metal desk, leaning forward as she had against the railing. “Sergeant Kennedy?”

“Me,” he told her.

“The desk sergeant said I should see you about my … complaint.” She was obviously nervous, not used to being in places like this. A respectable citizen in a bind.

He nodded and motioned for her to sit in the chair alongside the desk. Kennedy was a large, shambling man of middle age who knew he presented an avuncular, soothing image to women. He was six feet tall and close to two hundred and fifty pounds, with bushy, raggedy gray hair and sleepy blue eyes. Well into his fifties. Not a handsome man or a sexual threat. A slow and amiable old bear, that was Kennedy. If he hurt anyone, it would be accidental. He fostered that impression and capitalized on it. Being underestimated could be a great advantage.

The precinct house was warm and felt uncomfortably humid because of the rain that fell silently on thick windows reinforced with steel mesh. It even smelled damp. Fetid as a swamp. Though the ceiling didn’t quite leak, there were ancient water stains on it that always appeared wet. The air was so thick and sticky it seemed to deaden sound and coat bare flesh like oil.

When the woman had unbuttoned her coat and settled down in the straight-backed chair, Kennedy said, “Get you a cup of coffee? Maybe a soda or glass of water?”

She seemed surprised by his hospitality. “No. No, thank you.”

“You mentioned a complaint, Miss… ?”

“My name is Allison Jones, and I live at One Seventy-two West Seventy-fourth Street.”

He smiled. “And you sound like a very nice and well-prepared twelve-year-old reciting in front of the class. Relax, Miss Jones. Like the PR ads say, your police department cares. This old cop does, anyway.”

“Not so old,” she said, smiling back as the tension loosened its grip on her. The set of her shoulders changed beneath the blue coat, became less squared and then slumped wearily. But the rigid cast of her jaw and mouth remained grim. She was wrapped tight and ticking, this one.

“Thank you, Allison Jones. Could be there’s some good years left in me at that.” He picked up a ball-point pen and idly rotated it between sausage-like powerful fingers, wishing he could smoke the damned thing. Despite his huge, rough hands, he had beautifully manicured nails. He wore a plain gold wedding ring, though Jeanie had been dead almost ten years. Ah, Jeanie! He said, “Now, dear, what seems to be troubling you?”

“Well, phone calls, among other things”

“Oh? Of an obscene nature, do you mean?”

“Yes. Very obscene.”

“In what way?”

“The man—if it was the same man—talked about doing things to me.”

Kennedy cautioned himself. Gently now. “What sorts of things, Miss Jones? What I mean is, could you be more specific?”

“Tying me up, gagging me, whipping me. Making me … do things I never would do.”

“Of course not.”

“Bondage, it’s called,” she said flatly.

“Yes, I know.” He stared sadly for a moment at the ball-point pen almost lost in his big hand.

“You get a lot of complaints like mine?”

“Oh, yes. We see everything on this job. Soon lose the capacity to be shocked, I’m afraid.”

“He talked as if I’d enjoy sado-masochism.”

“He might well have believed that. The sick sort of man who’d make such a call generally has some very twisted ideas about the fair sex.”

“Not just twisted,” Allison Jones said, “positively kinky.”

Without a change of expression, Kennedy studied her more closely. Was she enjoying this? Getting her kicks by reporting phone calls that never occurred? It happened. All sorts of people wandered into precinct houses and reported all sorts of crimes, real or imagined. And for reasons only the psychiatrists ventured to guess, most often wrongly. This woman certainly didn’t seem that type, but Kennedy knew better than to classify by appearance and mannerism. He remembered an apparently typical young mother who’d murdered her two children as casually as one might destroy unwanted kittens.

Allison Jones seemed suddenly aware that he was assessing her. She frowned and stirred in her chair. Crossed her legs the other way. He heard taut nylon swish.

“This sort of thing’s been happening,” Kennedy said quickly. “Keeping us poor civil servants busy.” As if she were the twentieth woman that day to complain of obscene phone calls, and not the fifth or sixth.

“It doesn’t usually happen to me,” she said sharply. He decided she was probably telling him straight.

“The caller might never have laid eyes on you,” he told her. “He could’ve punched out your number at random. That’s how most of these characters operate. The odds are greatly against it being your number, so you assume he knows you personally in some way and you lose sleep over it. Just what anonymous callers want; they feed on fear.”

“That’s so sick.”

“Oh, it is.”

“And another thing, he called me by name.”

“Ah!” Kennedy seemed to make a special mental note of that.

“There’s something else,” she said, leaning forward. And she told him about stopping to eat at Goya’s, the walk with Graham Knox, and the disappearance of her expired driver’s license and credit cards.

He tapped the pen several times on the gray metal desk, leaving tiny dark slashes, then noticed what he was doing and rubbed the desk clean with the heel of his hand. There was cigar ash on the desk; he brushed that away. “And did you notify the credit people of the loss of your cards?”

“Of course. Soon as I realized they were gone. It’s the phone calls and the cards being stolen that I guess has me spooked.”

“You sure the cards were stolen, not misplaced?”

“Almost certain.”

“Almost?”

“I’m almost certain the sun will set tonight, Sergeant Kennedy.”

He smiled. “Now, now, no need to get testy.”

She nodded and tried a return smile that barely broke the surface. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“The city’s full of sick and tortured people who use the telephone for reasons not dreamed about by Alexander Graham Bell. It’s probably nothing that should cause you undue concern.”

“But what about him calling me by name?”

“Well, I’m assuming you’re listed in the directory.”

“Yes. My full name, since I have such a common last name. But he didn’t say Allison, he said Allie. And that’s what I’m called, Allie.”

“Could be he guessed that. It must be the most popular nickname for Allison.”

“But what if he does know me?”

Kennedy put down the pen and leaned back in his chair. The buttons on his shirt threatened to pop. “Well, that’s possible, but I’ll tell you, Miss Jones, it’s been my experience that men who talk dirty to women on the phone usually don’t carry the matter any further. The psychiatrists could tell you why. I can only tell you the psychiatrists are right. These men are often sexual and social misfits who are too afraid of women to talk to them face to face. That’s why the miserable wretches use the phone.”

“That’s what Graham said.”

“The Graham who was with you when you noticed your credit cards were missing?”

“Yes, and he’s my neighbor. He’s also a playwright. And as I told you, a waiter at a restaurant near my apartment.”

“Well, Graham’s right about obscene callers.” Kennedy sat forward slowly and placed his elbows on the desk, rested one hand on top the other. “Tell you what. If it happens again, we can have the phone company put a tap on your phone.”

“Tap?”

“It’s a tracer, actually. It would enable us to find out what telephone any future obscene calls came from. But again, in my experience, these men usually call from public pay phones. And they don’t often use the same phone twice.”

“Then a tracer probably wouldn’t do much good.”

“To be candid, no good at all, most likely.”

“What about my stolen credit cards?”

“You should make a complaint on that one. At least give us the account numbers. But I need to be honest with you, there isn’t much chance they’ll be recovered. People who steal credit cards, if they’re pros, either sell the cards immediately or charge everything they can on them before they might be reported stolen. On the street, stolen credit cards depreciate by the hour. Whatever’s going to be done with them is done fast, then they’re often destroyed.” He clucked his tongue. “Some sad society we live in, isn’t it?”

Allie Jones smiled and shook her head in futility. “Have I wasted my time coming here, Sergeant Kennedy?”

“Maybe not. You never know. I’d advise you to fill out the forms, report the credit card theft. The cards might turn up on somebody we bring in. It’s happened.”

“All right, then,” she said. “I’ll do that.”

Kennedy ran the appropriate form into his typewriter and one-fingered out the information as she answered his questions. She was alert and efficient. From working with computers, Kennedy thought. He was uncomfortable around computers, didn’t understand them. What were microchips, miniature potato chips?

When he was finished he read over what he’d typed. After making a few sloppy corrections with Whiteout, he ratcheted the form from the typewriter and had Allison Jones sign it.

He said, “I promise we’ll call you right away if there’s any progress on this.”

She thanked him and stood up. There was something about this troubled young woman that intrigued Kennedy, evoking pity and concern. Did she resemble Jeanie? Maybe. A little. And it was the cruelest of cities out there, a crouching monster that waited patiently for as long as it took and then devoured its victims.

“Miss Jones,” he said, “is there anything else bothering you?”

She gave him her slow and appealing smile. “It shows?”

“Afraid it does.”

“Not a police matter,” she said. “It’s just that my life hasn’t gone very well lately. My job, my … Well, never mind that.”

“What about your, ah, romantic life?”

She seemed to consider telling him something, then decide against it. “My love life’s fine, Sergeant, believe me. But that’s irrelevant.”

“We can’t be sure about that.”

“We’ll have to be.”

Testy again.

“My personal problems are more job-related. Financial.” She straightened and shrugged as if none of it mattered. “It’s how the world works sometimes,” she said.

“Isn’t that the truth for all of us?” He stood up halfway, leaning on his desk, and shook her hand. It was limp and cool. “Hang on,” he told her, squeezing the narrow fingers reassuringly. “Things’ll take a favorable bounce. They always do, eventually.”

She said, “I’m sure you’re right. Thanks for reminding me.”

He watched her walk from the squad room and out the large oak doors to the street. Then he sat back down heavily. The chair groaned beneath him. His hemorrhoids flared. God, his health was deteriorating like the South Bronx.

“What we got there?” a voice said behind Kennedy. His partner, Hector Vasquez.

“Obscene phone calls, stolen credit cards.”

“Nice-looking woman,” Hector said. “The sort that’d attract that kinda call.”

“Isn’t she, though?” Kennedy picked up the complaint form Allie Jones had signed and considered it. Stolen credit cards were seldom recovered.

“Better file that so we can get going,” Hector urged. “Lieutenant wants us to drive over to Queens and pick up that prisoner.”

“My hemorrhoids are on fire,” Kennedy said. “I don’t want to drive to Queens.”

“I sure feel sorry for you,” Hector said with mock sympathy, “but that’s how the world works sometimes.”

“Funny,” Kennedy told him, “that’s just what she said, about how the world works sometimes. Her words exactly.”

“Whose words?”

“Allie Jones’s. The woman who just left.”

“Forget her and come on,” Hector said, “unless you wanna receive an obscene phone call from the lieutenant.”

Kennedy braced with his hands on the arms of his chair and levered himself to a standing position. He tucked in his wrinkled white shirt around his ample stomach and wrestled into his tweed sportcoat. After even that brief effort, he was breathing hard. Better watch the blood pressure, he told himself. Lose some weight. Really lay off the cigars, like the doctor advised, or someday he might be waddling after a suspect and collapse and die from a heart attack.

But he knew he wouldn’t change the way he lived. Or the way he’d probably die. Suicide by cigar.

He filed the complaint form and trudged after Hector.

Chapter 18

ALLIE walked home from the precinct house unsure of how she felt. Around her the wet pavement had a mirrorlike effect. The rain had become a cool, persistent mist that found its way down the back of her collar. She moved through it as if it were the atmosphere of dreams, unconcerned about getting wet or catching cold. The tires of passing cabs shiiished. Windshield wipers thunk, thunked.

Though she felt better after having told Sergeant Kennedy about the phone calls and missing credit cards, she was sure the police couldn’t help. Reporting a crime was a long way from seeing that crime solved. Kennedy himself had as much as said that. He seemed to see the city as a festering, vile creation out of control. The good guys were overwhelmed.

When finally she reached the apartment, she found Hedra concerned about her. “For Pete’s sake, Allie, what are you doing out wandering around in the rain?”

“I went to the police station.”

“You walked?”

“Took the subway there, but I decided to walk back.”

“The doctor’ll be your next stop.” There was a mothering quality to Hedra’s voice; a different Hedra, with Allie in trouble.

She hurried across the living room and helped Allie shrug out of the blue raincoat. After shaking the coat so that hundreds of drops of water caught the light and glittered like scattered diamonds, she hung it in the hall closet, well away from the other coats. Hedra had always liked the blue raincoat and took special care of it, though she hadn’t bought one like it, probably because the coat was four years old and the style was no longer in the stores.

“I told them about the obscene phone calls and the stolen credit cards,” Allie said.

“I gathered that. Why don’t you get out of those wet shoes and sit down. I’ll fix you a cup of hot chocolate.”

“Thanks, but I don’t think I want anything.”

“Don’t be ridiculous; you’ll catch pneumonia or worse.” She rested a hand on Allie’s shoulder and pushed and guided her to the sofa, like the stern guardian of a recalcitrant child.

Allie let herself be pushed. She was tired, she missed Sam, and a cup of hot chocolate would taste good and damn the calories.

While Hedra was clattering around in the kitchen, Allie sat and stared at the rain that was falling hard again and reflecting distorted light as it flowed down the windows. It was a perilous world out there beyond the glass. She’d been blind, preoccupied since she’d come to the city, and hadn’t realized how very hostile and dangerous it was.

Hedra was back with the cup of hot chocolate for Allie and one for herself. She sat down next to her on the sofa. The steady patter of the rain made the apartment seem smaller, cozier. “So what’d the cops say?”

“They were nice, but not very helpful.”

“They’re busy,” Hedra said. “Too much crime in this city. Too much evil.”

“That’s more or less the impression I got. Obscene phone calls, stolen credit cards—these things happen every hour, so they don’t get excited about them. They concentrate on more important crimes. Until the person who got the phone call becomes one of the important crimes.”

“Don’t worry so,” Hedra said. “Nothing’s gonna happen to you.” She sipped at her chocolate. She’d put marshmallows in both cups. Thoughtful. “By the way, Allie, I hope you don’t care about me wearing your sweatshirt.” She used her thumb and forefinger to stretch the gray material of the FORDHAM shirt she was wearing. Allie had bought it at a street bazaar two years ago. “I looked through my closet and didn’t have much to lounge around in. I’ll wash it for you when I’m done with it, I promise.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Allie said. She took a long, painful swallow of the scalding chocolate, burning the roof of her mouth. Lowered the cup and wiped melted marshmallow off her upper lip, leaving her hand sticky. She looked up at Hedra. “I opened your closet door, Hedra. I saw how you bought so many clothes exactly like mine.”

Hedra’s lower lip quaked.

Allie said, “Don’t do that, Hedra, please. Both of us can’t be basket cases.”

“You mad?” Hedra asked.

“Not exactly mad. Puzzled.”

“Well,” Hedra said, “I saw how good your clothes looked on you, and I figured if they only looked half as good on me, it’d be an improvement.”

Allie sighed. She didn’t feel like coping with this unabashed admiration, not right now. “Don’t buy any more duplicates, Hedra. Borrow whatever you want from my closet.”

Hedra beamed as if she’d been pronounced royalty. “Thanks! And you’re welcome to borrow anything in my closet.” Her expression sagged. “‘Course, you’re not likely to wanna wear any of my stuff.”

Concerned, mothering Hedra was gone; deferential Hedra was back. Allie didn’t know what to say. She finally mumbled, “Lucky we’re about the same size.”

“Lucky,” Hedra agreed. “Want some cold milk in that chocolate to cool it down?”

“No, thanks,” Allie told her. “I’ll wait for it to cool. Then I think I’ll rest awhile.”

“Sure, rest’ll make everything seem better.”

Allie seldom went out of the apartment during the next week. Sam phoned several times and sensed her despondency. He tried to cheer her up, told her he loved her and would be back soon. After talking to him she usually felt better, for a while. The few acquaintances who called her soon caught on that she wanted to be left alone. Oily Billy Stothers, probably on the make with Sam out of town, called several times, but he stopped when she made it plain that she preferred loneliness to his company.

And she couldn’t help it; she found herself wondering about Sam, so far from her arms. Was that part of the reason for her depression? The Lisa factor?

She was alone most of the time. Hedra went out every day to a temporary office job. She had to dress well for it, she’d said, and usually left the apartment wearing a duplicate of something of Allie’s. Allie sometimes lent her clothes. She didn’t care; she had no place to wear her nice clothes now. The ads she’d placed in the classified columns brought her no business, and the resumés she’d sent around garnered no replies. Work was scarce for computer programmers; colleges were churning them out by the thousands. And she was sure Mike Mayfair, his male vanity bruised, had spread stories about her so that prospective clients would be scared away. She should hate Mayfair, but that required effort. The acidity of hate was in her, but not the energy.

Sometimes she thought she was becoming a hermit, not going out, not concerned about her appearance, not taking care of herself. What made one a recluse by definition? Leaving shelter only once a week? Twice? Did recluses have roommates? From time to time she wondered if she might be lapsing into a clinical depression. Endorphins in decline.

After watching a Donahue program on agoraphobia, and seeing a woman interviewed who for years had been terrified to leave her apartment, Allie became frightened. She’d never been the type to pull the walls in around herself, yet that was what she was doing. What was happening to her? Come back, Sam!

She put on her old Nikes, struggled into her jacket, and immediately went out. Breathed deeply. Walked for miles.

She fell into the habit of walking every day, and every day brought Sam’s return that much closer. He’d phoned and told her the conference would be longer than originally planned, and to expect him when she saw him.

Surprisingly, money was no worry. Hedra had been assigned a lucrative job filling in for an executive secretary at a catering firm who was on extended maternity leave. It made Allie miserable at times, gave her a feeling of guilt and uselessness, knowing Hedra was paying for rent and groceries. But she told herself that when things got brighter she’d pay Hedra back and add generous interest. What she wouldn’t do—couldn’t do—was borrow from Sam.

Some days, like this morning, she couldn’t stop thinking about Sam. She had him on her mind from her first moment of wakefulness, and lay staring at the ceiling, slipping in and out of sleep.

She and Sam were in Mexico, where they’d often talked about going, and were lying on the beach in soft white sand. A huge full moon drifted lazily on the black waves, like a lost and luminous beachball. The breeze off the ocean sighed warm secrets. New York was far away. Sam said he loved her and her only, and loosened the top of her wet bathing suit. Ran his fingertips over her pulsing nipples. Then her stomach and the insides of her thighs. Parted the suit from her crotch, brushing her lightly with a knuckle.

Whispered, “Lisa …”

She awoke trembling. Her eyes were juiced with tears that threatened to flow any moment. Her legs thrashed of their own accord. She had to get up.

Out of the bed.

Walk.

Outside, in the vibrant and beautiful morning, she felt better. She cut over to Broadway and walked for block after block, taking long strides, as if trying to exhaust something accompanying her so it would eventually give up and turn back.

But whatever it was, it strode side by side with her and drew its energy from her desperation.

Finally, when a muted sun had climbed much higher in the lead-gray sky, she began wending her way home.

On the corner of West 74th and Amsterdam, a man wearing baggy Levi’s faded the exact color of the sky, and a red windbreaker with the sleeves turned up, approached her. At first she thought he was gazing beyond her, at someone else. But no, he was definitely looking at her. She glanced away but knew it hadn’t been in time. Make eye contact on a teeming Manhattan street and anything can happen.

“Hey! Allie Jones?”

She stared into his face. A short guy in his mid-thirties, with curly, sandy-colored hair and uptilted green eyes. There was something vague and a little wild about those eyes, a touch of dangerous disorientation. His flesh was freckled and ruddy, and though there was a fullness to his cheeks, his legs and the torso beneath the windbreaker were very thin, almost emaciated. The wrists protruding from the turned-up sleeves were bony and fragile. Allie knew she’d never seen him before. She said, “Sorry …

He looked scared and unsure of himself for a moment, then said, “Listen, I’m ready.” His words were slightly slurred.

“Ready?”

“You know. To do what we talked about.” He glanced around. Grinned. They were coconspirators. “What we decided at Wild Red’s. I wasn’t as shtoned as you might think. Hell, I always said I’d try anything at least once, then give it a second go-round. That’s always been my motto, you might shay.”

Confused, Allie backed away. “You and I never talked about anything.”

She might as well not have spoken. He ran a bony hand through his already ruffled hair. Something ugly and desperate moved across his face. His nostrils twitched, in that instant reminding her of a pig. “Thing is, any fuckin’ condition’s okay with me. Whatever action turnsh you on, lover, even if it’s rollin’ in shit.”

“Goddamnit, I don’t know you!” Allie almost screamed.

That startled the man and he shuffled away from her, studying her with his opaque green eyes. He seemed to be dazed, as if he might be drunk or on drugs and peering at her through an internal haze. “Hey, maybe I made a mistake, thought you was shomebody else.” He sprayed saliva when he talked, tattooing her face with it.

“But I am Allie Jones.”

Out of patience, he said, “Well, shit!” as if he’d never figure this out. He clenched a fist angrily and extended it toward her. She didn’t think people outside of comic strips actually did that. She was ready to run, but he didn’t advance. There was something hypnotic about the way he was looking at her, something twisted and intimate.

Then he seemed to relax. His fist came unclenched. He dropped his hand to his side and let it dangle, as if to say she wasn’t worth the effort of striking her.

Stunned, Allie could only stare as he turned and walked away, weaving in and out among shifting currents of pedestrians to lose himself on the crowded sidewalk.

She dragged her fingers across her cheeks, feeling repulsive wetness, and stood staring after him, ignoring the streams of hurrying New Yorkers who were ignoring her. Several people bumped into her and walked on.

She wiped her damp fingertips on her jacket. “I don’t know you!” she said again.

No one acknowledged in any way that she’d spoken.

Everyone was careful not to make eye contact.