He sat in the car debating whether or not to go to the police. There would be questions. Problems. He couldn't chance it. Maybe it would be better to call them anonymously later. Where had she gone?
No, there hadn't been any messages for him at the office. He started the car and drove home, blindly, mind buzzing with the possibilities. Another man? Illness in the family? She'd been so happy when they'd been together last time. Jackie loved him. She couldn't just pick up and leave. Something had happened to her. Should he call the hospitals? The word abortion nudged him for a second.
He knew that his worst fears were right — that something had happened — when he pulled into his driveway and saw two official-looking guys standing there waiting. They walked over and were standing beside the door when he got out of the car. They had the smell of cops, or private heat.
"Mr. Childress?" the first one said, a rough-looking man who seemed out of character in a three-piece business suit. Warren's heart started hammering; he feared something awful had happened to Jackie.
"Yeah?"
"We represent Mrs. Childress. May we see your keys, please." The hand outstretched — no question mark in the statement.
"My keys?" he started.
"Hand your keys over," the other man said. In a thickening fog, he handed his key ring to the first guy.
"Do you have duplicate house keys and car keys, Mr. Childress?"
"No."
"The house keys have been changed," the first man told him. "Step this way, sir." They escorted him to an unmarked Pontiac, and Childress sat in the back seat. The second man sat in the front. "You guys going to tell me what this is all about?" "We're employed by Mrs. Childress's attorneys, sir. They'll be in touch with you as to the details of the divorce." The words stabbed into him like sharp knives.
Lois got the house. The Corniche. The neo-Impressionists. The CDs, of course. He was getting to keep whatever he could pull out of the agency, but he was to immediately «relinquish» the monies that Jackie had told them about. Jacqueline Jordan, whose fucking deposition was one of the sharp knife wounds that left him bleeding as the man spoke. When he was through, the man tapped a small envelope that lay in the seat between them. Something rectangular, about an inch thick. "You can keep this. Mrs. Childress said it was a little souvenir for you." He said it without any irony.
Warren picked it up and looked down into the envelope, knew what it was the moment he saw the TDK T-120HS on the top of the box. A copy of a videocassette. Shot from the clothes closet, he supposed.
They let him out at a cab stand, opened the trunk of the Pontiac and unceremoniously plunked his luggage beside the first cab. They didn't ask him if he had cab fare, even — they just pulled out. Hell, he'd never tumbled a hooker he didn't slip fifty bucks to for a taxi.
He got into the cab and the driver loaded his luggage, getting in with a grunt of effort, turning and saying, "Where to, bud?"
"Just drive," he said.
"It's your money," the driver sneered, dropping the meter. It's your money, chump.
Warren Childress, head of the biggest agency in North Kansas City, sighed and leaned back into the seat of the cab as it pulled out into traffic. All he could do was see his wife say to him, "Tell Mother," over and over, "what hurts Daddy — "and know now that she was cutting his nuts off even then. She'd probably already watched the videotape. Seen and heard him getting off. Heard «Daddy» and "Daddy's girl." God — she must have been enjoying herself.
The car. The CDs. The house. The paintings. And that bitch cunt even told her about the money he had squirreled away. It couldn't get much worse than this, he thought. But he was wrong.
Because Warren Childress had everything. And that night, in a lonely hotel room, watching the cancerous mole begin to bleed, he would start to comprehend just how much worse it could get.
ROCOCO
Graham Masterton
It was such a warm spring day that Margot had decided to brown-bag it in the plaza outside the office, next to the ultramodern Spechocchi-designed waterfall. The plaza was always bustling with pedestrians, but after the high-tension hyper-air-conditioned chill of her single-window office in the Jurgens Building, eating lunch here was almost as good as a Mediterranean vacation.
She was as classy at brown-bagging it as she was at her job; and she laid out a crisp pink Tiffany napkin with sfinciuni, the thin Palermo-style pizza sandwich, with a filling of ussmoked ham, ricotta and fontina; a fruit salad of mangoes and strawberries macerated in white wine; and a bottle of still Malvern water.
It was while she was laying out her lunch that she first noticed the man in the dove-gray suit, sitting on the opposite side of the plaza, close to the edge of the waterfall. Most of the time he was half-hidden by passing pedestrians, but there was no doubt at all that he was staring at her. In fact he didn't take his eyes away from her once; and after a few minutes she began to find his unswerving gaze distinctly unsettling.
Margot was used to being stared at by men. She was tall, just over five feet nine inches, and she had striking dark brown hair that was upswept into curls. Her ex-fiance Paul had told her that she had the face of an angel about to cry: wide blue eyes, a straight delicately defined nose, and subtly pouting lips. She was large-bosomed and quite large-hipped, like her mother, but unlike her mother she could afford to flatter her curves in tailored business suits.
She was the only female account executive at Rutter Blane Rutter. She was the highest-paid woman she knew; and she was determined to reach the very top. No compromises. The top.
She began to eat, but she couldn't help raising her eyes to see if the man was still staring at her. He was — no doubt about it. He was sitting back on one of the benches in a very relaxed pose, one leg crossed over the other. He must have been about thirty-eight or thirty-nine years old, with shining blond hair that was far too long and wavy to be fashionable, at least in the circles in which Margot moved. He wore a pale cream shirt and a dove-gray bow tie to match his suit. There was something about his posture which suggested that he was very wealthy and very self-indulgent, too.
Margot had almost finished her sfinciuni when Ray Trimmer appeared. Ray was one of the hottest copywriters at Rutter Blane Rutter, although his lack of personal organization sometimes drove Margot crazy. He slapped a huge untidy package of sandwiches onto the concrete tabletop and sat down too close to her.
"Mind if I join you?" he asked, opening up his sandwiches one by one to investigate their fillings. "My daughter made my lunch today. She's eight. I told her to use her imagination."
Margot frowned at the sandwich on the top of the pile. "Tuna and marmalade. You can't say that's not imaginative."
Ray began to eat. "I wanted to talk to you about that Spring Flower spot. I'm working toward something less suburban, if you know what I mean. I know a bed-freshener is an entirely suburban product, but I think we have to make it look more elegant, more up-market."
"I liked your first idea."
"I don't know. I ran it past Dale and he wasn't too happy. The woman looks like she's fumigating the bed to get rid of her husband's farts."
"Isn't that just what Spring Flower's for?"
Ray bent forward to pick up another sandwich. As he did so, Margot became conscious again that the man in the dove-gray suit was still staring at her. Blond shining hair, a face that was curiously medieval, with eyes of washed-out blue.