“Why on top?” Bev asked.
“That’s to keep the coffins from rising to the surface when the water table gets higher during the wet seasons. Good, beautifully veined marble. So I bought them, ground and polished them, and put some fancy legs on them for coffee tables.”
“How’d they sell?”
Lenny smiled. “What would look good on them would be those fire extinguisher lamps.”
“The ones I’m going to buy?”
“You serious?”
She glanced at her watch. “You want to go to lunch, we’ll talk price.”
His hooded gaze traveled over her body, lingering on her breasts. She was sitting behind her desk, and she knew he was wondering what her legs were like. He wouldn’t be disappointed. Legs, I got.
“I’m picking up the check,” she said. “Company business.”
“Then I can’t say no.”
“I know the feeling,” she said.
That fateful lunch had been three months ago. The fire extinguisher lamps still sat in the showroom, unsold. If anyone else had been head of sales, they would have been priced down and out or junked.
“You die in there?” Lenny called, from the other side of the bathroom door.
“No, out there, with you.”
Bev didn’t bother with a towel as she opened the door and went into the bedroom to let Lenny see what she’d been looking at in the mirror. She got the result she expected.
“C’mon back to bed with me,” Lenny said, snuffing out his cigarette in a room service glass he was using as an ashtray.
“It’s almost two o’clock, Lenny. I’ve gotta get back to work.” Bev moved toward where her clothes were folded on the chair near the bed. Too near. His hand closed gently but firmly around her wrist. She pretended to struggle but didn’t really pull away. “I just took a shower, Lenny.”
“You took one, you can take another in no time. You’re already undressed for one.”
She laughed. “I don’t think a shower’s what you have in mind.”
He pulled her toward the bed. “Mind reader, you.”
At twenty after three they left the hotel together. It was one of the big chain hotels, the lobby was crowded, and it was midday in Midtown. No one paid much attention to them.
Out on the sidewalk, after the dim room with its closed drapes, it seemed unusually bright and sunny. While the doorman was standing with one foot on the curb and the other in the street, trying to hail a cab, Lenny kissed Bev on the cheek. “Gonna ride back to work?”
“No. It’s a nice day. I’ll walk.” A cab veered toward the curb and the doorman stepped out of the way, then opened a back door.
“I thought you were late.”
“I am. I’m also sales manager.”
Lenny grinned as he lowered himself into the cab, simultaneously tipping the doorman. “Must be nice being boss,” he said.
“It sure is some days, around noon.”
She watched the cab pull out into heavy Midtown traffic. Lenny lifted a hand, so a wave went with his grin.
Bev began striding along Fifty-first Street, a tall, attractive woman, well dressed but with her hair, fluffy from the hotel drier, mussed by the breeze as soon as she crossed the intersection. She drew appreciative stares, even a honking horn that might have been for her. She might be married to Floyd, but she wasn’t a fossil like Floyd. Not yet by a long shot.
Halfway back to Light and Shade, she got the feeling she’d been getting too often lately. It was a prickly uneasiness, like a slight pressure on the back of her neck, and sometimes when she turned around it was as if there might have been someone there if she’d only turned faster. Once, when Floyd was out of town with his golf buddies, and she’d come home from work exhausted and kicked off her high heels and fallen into a leather armchair, she could have sworn the cushion was still warm, as if somebody had been sitting there and left only minutes before she arrived. It was creepy, and she had an idea what it might be.
Floyd suspected something and had hired someone to investigate her. A detective.
Bev almost grinned at the thought. If Floyd wanted a divorce, he could have one. They had an iron-clad pre-nup, so there was no logical reason he should hire a detective other than to satisfy his curiosity. No monetary reason, anyway.
Of course, there were other reasons and other kinds of satisfaction. Floyd didn’t get it up very often these days, but he still had an active mind.
Hell with it.
Bev crossed the intersection against the light, taking her time even though traffic up the block was bearing down on her. If anyone honked she’d give him the finger. That was the kind of mood she was in.
But no one honked.
7
Even though he’d taken a pill, Beam didn’t sleep well.
His dreams were a jumble of images. Lani leaping without hesitation from a balcony high in the night, da Vinci smiling at him and holding out a badge, swastikas, pale stone buildings with columns, people lying dead with red letter Js on them, da Vinci again, still smiling, pointing at something on the sidewalk, something that had fallen.
He awoke after a dream of waking and finding someone had taped red ribbons all over the room. Ribbons in bows, in loops, simple strands of ribbons.
When he sat up and switched on the lamp, he almost expected to find them.
But it was his bedroom as usual. Their bedroom. He remained sitting up in bed, wondering what dark specter of the mind had plucked his wife from the balcony. Witnesses had said she’d put down her drink at the charity function cocktail party she was attending, then walked calmly and resolutely out to the twenty-fourth-floor balcony. She’d been alone out there, and apparently she’d simply let herself fall over the railing into space. The railing had been higher than her waist, so it couldn’t have been an accident. Something like that, something so…monstrous and profound, what had moved her to do it?
Beam had been sure things had changed between them, but was that true? Had it been more that things had finally come to a head? Had it been the death of their only child, so long ago? Had all the years of doubt and wondering that any cop’s wife endures finally taken its toll?
The fact was, when people committed suicide without leaving notes, they left agonizing, unfinished business behind. Questions that would never be answered. Guilt that might never be firmly affixed. Their survivors had to learn to live with uncertainty, and get used to being haunted.
Uncertainty was something that had always bothered Beam. Lani had known that about him, yet she’d chosen her anonymous and eternally mysterious death.
Or might it have been an accident? Somehow…
He knew he wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. Light brighter than the lamp was beginning to show around the edges of the closed drapes. Glancing at the clock radio by the bed, he saw that it was quarter to five. Morning enough, he thought, swiveling on the mattress so he could stand up. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, still lean and strong but with undeniably more fat collecting around his waist, musculature still there, but now that of a fifty-three-year-old man. There on his right thigh was the scar where the bullet had been removed, a pink-edged pucker about two inches in diameter. He ran a hand through his mussed gray hair and looked away from his image. Getting older fast.
Well, at the same speed as everyone else. Some solace.
Usually he showered and shaved, then walked to the diner where he had breakfast. The walk was part of his physical therapy to regain at least some of the wind and endurance he’d lost to his injury. He experienced normal stiffness and joint aches at first when he climbed out of bed-he hadn’t been easy on his body over the years-but nothing connected to the gunshot wound actually hurt anymore. And he knew he should be pleased; his endurance had improved considerably. But it was only months since Lani’s death, and to Beam she was still beside him, still in his dreams and his life awake. He knew she would be for some time to come.