Before she got out of the cab, she asked if I would like to come up for a drink. She said she would leave the lobby door unlocked. She said she would be waiting for me. Apartment 401, she said. She would leave the door unlocked. She would be in bed, she said. Waiting for me. Please hurry, she said. I’ll be waiting.
The streets down there are empty at that time of night. There are hardly any apartment buildings. Everything is closed that time of night. The offices, the shops, the restaurants. Everything closed. It was very cold in the streets. Empty and cold. I parked the taxi, and locked it, and went to her building. The lobby door was unlocked, as she’d promised. I took the elevator up to the fourth floor. The door to apartment 401 was unlocked. As she’d promised.
The apartment was dark.
I could hear her breathing in the dark.
I found her in bed. I took off my clothes and got into bed beside her.
When I climbed on top of her, she began screaming.
I ran.
I grabbed my clothes and ran.
I dressed in the elevator.
The policemen came to get me two hours later.
* * * *
‘It was consensual,’ Kumar said now, scooping foam out of his coffee cup, licking the foam off his finger. ‘The detectives realized that. She invited me. I don’t know why she changed her mind. This was an old woman! Who would want to rape an old woman?’
You’d be surprised, Kling thought.
And wondered if that was why the case had been filed away as ‘unsubstantiated.’ Because who would want to rape an old woman, right? A woman in her fifties? Easier to believe she’d invited the cabbie upstairs, and then changed her mind, and phoned the cops to boot.
But had she?
Or had Kumar, in fact, tried to rape her?
Had this been a matter of an elderly lady kicking up her skirts for one last fling, or a lonely young man tasting alien wine, however aged in the cask?
Had Christine Langston been reaching back to her lost youth and the exciting days she’d known as an exchange student in India? Or had Balamani Kumar been clutching at any kind offer in an inhospitable land? Fifty years old? Sixty? Who cared? A warm bed on a cold January night. In his own apartment, he slept with five other refugees like himself, three of them on the floor.
Who knew?
Who would ever know whether the lady had invited him into her bed - or been violated there?
And, really, who cared anymore?
The lady was dead, and the skinny young Indian was still driving a taxi.
One thing they felt certain of.
There was no resentment here.
No hidden grudge.
No old scores to settle.
Balamani Kumar was not the man who’d pumped two nine-millimeter slugs into Christine Langston’s head last night.
Or anyone else’s head, for that matter.
* * * *
The two priests sitting and drinking wine in the rectory of St. Ignatius Church could both remember celebrating Mass in Latin.
Father Joseph was seventy-six years old and already retired. Father Michael would be seventy-five in July. He had already advised his bishop that he planned retirement, but now he was having second thoughts. The Code of Canon Law set the age of retirement at seventy-five, but Father Michael still felt young and energetic, still felt he could lead his parishioners in celebrating Mass, hearing confessions, baptizing, ministering the sacrament, performing any and all things necessary to the advancement of the Church.
‘How is it where you are, anyway?’ he asked Father Joseph.
‘Actually, the center’s very nice,’ the other priest said.
‘I mean, what do you do all day long?’
‘Well, it’s not like having an active ministry, that’s for sure.”
‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ Father Michael said.
‘But it affords opportunity for contemplation and prayer…’
‘I contemplate and pray now.’
‘… without the rigors and demands of a priestly ministry. And I’m quite comfortable, Michael, truly. The Priests’ Pension Plan sees to my basic needs, Social Security gives me Medicare and additional income…”
‘I’m not worried about any of that.’
‘It’s you’re worried about not being active.’
‘Yes. It’s retiring, damn it!’
‘You know, you could always consider merely lessening your administrative responsibilities. Take an assignment as a senior associate for a period of time…”
‘Sounds delightful.’
‘Or just accept the path the good Lord has chosen for you,’ Father Joseph said, and made the sign of the cross, and finished his wine, and rose. ‘Michael,’ he said, ‘it was wonderful spending some time with you, but I must get back before they lock the doors on me and call the police.’
The two men shook hands.
‘Remember when we were at Our Lady of Grace together?’ Father Michael asked, and led the other priest out into the walled garden. The roses were in full bloom, and the Oriental lilies spread their intoxicating scent on the balmy June night. They shook hands again at the gate, and Father Joseph walked off to the next corner, where he would catch a bus back to the retirement center.
Father Michael took a deep breath of the night air, and then closed and locked the gate behind him. As he was walking back to the rectory, he thought he heard a sound behind him.
Turning, he said, ‘Yes?’
‘It’s me, Father,’ a voice from the shadows said. ‘Carlie. Remember?’
6.
REGGIE WAS IN the bathtub singing when Charles got back to the hotel at eleven thirty that Thursday night.
‘Everything go all right?’ she asked.
‘Yes, fine,’ he said. ‘You have a nice voice.’
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘They’re from my cabaret act.’
He looked puzzled.
‘The songs,’ she explained. ‘From when I came east two years ago. Seventeen and full of beans. Well, almost eighteen, I’ll be twenty this September. I had a choice of three places. L.A., Vegas, or here. I figured I’d do best here. But this is one tough town, believe me. Even getting in a booking agent’s door is a monumental task. I was playing little dives out on Sands Spit, ever been out there in January or February? I’m singing about fiddlers fleeing while all I’ve got is a piano player at an upright behind me, and when it was time to pay the bill there were only two or three people in the place.
‘Finally, in one of these joints there was this stand-up comic, good-looking blonde girl in her thirties, had an act where she mostly trashed her ex-husband. We got to talking one night, and she told me the way she made ends meet was to moonlight with an escort agency, though sometimes she wondered which was the moonlighting and which was the act, the stand-up she did in these dives, or the girl who dressed up in flimsy lingerie and went wherever she was sent.
‘Which by the way,’ Reggie said, ‘I haven’t called the agency in more than a week now, they must be wondering what the hell happened to me. I told them I had my period, but how long can that last, am I right? I just hope they don’t send one of their goons looking for me. Annie told me they have these goons, though I’ve never had the pleasure, thank you. Annie is the stand-up comic who first put me in contact with Sophisticates, that’s the agency you called, remember?
‘Anyway, Annie told me everything in life has its side effects. You do one thing, you take one road, it leads someplace, it has its side effects. What if I’d gone to L.A., and landed a good gig in a club on the Strip, and what if a movie director or an agent had spotted me there, I could be a movie star now, am I right? I could have a house in Palm Desert. Would you like to go to Palm Desert sometime? I would love that. You know, I still think of myself as a singer who’s turning tricks on the side so I’ll be able to sing. But maybe it’s the other way around, maybe I’m just a hooker with a good voice, maybe the singing is just a side effect of the hooking, or is it vice versa?’