“I didn’t kill him.”
“Right.”
“Fuck yourself, Starrett.”
He kept combing. “Every one of you bled the poor man. Every one of you.” Starrett loved to give courtroom sob stories, apparently even in the men’s room. “Frank didn’t pay him what he was worth. His wife clung to him even though she knew he didn’t love her. And even his own agent stole from him.”
The last bit of news surprised Tobin. “Michael Dailey stole from him?”
“Get ready for one of the biggest lawsuits you’ve ever seen. By the time I get done with that lounge-lizard son of a bitch, Alpo wouldn’t buy him.”
“You’re sure of this?”
“You’re damn right I’m sure.” Then he smiled. “But a lawsuit’s nothing compared to what you’re going to get.”
Finally, he put his comb away. “You’re going to get the chair, Tobin. The chair.”
“Been watching Cagney movies again, huh, Tommy?”
Starrett was six-two. Tobin five-five. Starrett said, “If you weren’t such a little bastard, I’d beat your face in.” Then he smiled again. “But I’m just going to let the cops do that.”
Then he patted his hair and went back into the party.
Tobin wandered back via the phone booth. He checked in for messages. Nothing urgent except that his daughter, sixteen, needed money. But that did not fall under the heading of new news.
When he got back to the party room, he saw that Marcie Pierce had managed to get herself bombed and was standing in the corner hugging her drink to her wonderful chest as if it were a teddy bear.
He went over and said, “Do you like In a Lonely Place?”
She just stared at him. “You’re trying to tell me you like Nicholas Ray?”
“Sure I do.”
“Then why don’t you ever mention him on that shitty show of yours?”
“Ask Frank. He has research that says viewers hate Golden Oldies shows.”
“Research. It sucks.”
“I agree. But I’m not the boss.”
She nodded to Frank. “Well, he won’t be boss much longer.” She smiled then at Tobin, smiled in a way that chilled his middle-aged soul. “I mean, without Dunphy there, you and Emory are out of a job. Dunphy was the show.”
She’d meant it to hurt him, and for some reason he was stupid enough to let it do just that. He stood there as if frozen — feeling at the moment completely isolated from the rest of humanity (no man is an island but some are peninsulas) — and then he couldn’t hear anything, as if he were tripping out on some exotic drug (hashish used to do such things to him), and he felt as if he would cry or go machine-gun-berserk, he wasn’t quite sure which.
All he knew for sure was that he needed to get away from it all — the bitchiness, the malice, the careering, and the ludicrous Gang Girls who were still offering themselves like big bikinied presents. He missed seeing his children, and thought of his dead father, and worried in a dumbstruck way that he was just as shallow and amoral as he sometimes feared. This was a very dangerous kind of drunkenness and he knew it.
She saw it in his face, Marcie Pierce did, because suddenly the hardness was gone and she looked embarrassed and then sad and started to reach out for him, but this time it was he who shook her hand away.
“Tobin, Jesus, that didn’t come out the way I meant it.”
“Screw it,” he said.
“C’mon, I’m sorry. Really.”
“I know you are.”
“You being sincere?”
“Yeah.”
“I mean it. Oh, fuck it.”
“Yeah.”
And then he left.
Frank called to him, and then Michael Dailey, and then Marcie Pierce, but he needed to be outside and alone.
He stood in the hard cold of the night. Snow plows like yellow burrowing bugs worked their way up the street while a group of Salvation Army singers flung their voices uselessly into the whipping wind and snow. He started to cry and actually managed to convince himself he was only tearing up because of the cold.
Then from behind him he heard the sort of whistle you can only get when you put two fingers in your lips and are willing to risk future lung capacity to set world records. All over the city, dogs were probably going crazy.
She was a few feet behind him, doing the whistling. Her coat was flung over her arm and here she was, subzero, wearing a summer cocktail dress. She’d even managed to bring her cocktail along.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Whistling for a cab.”
“Why?”
“Because we need one.”
“Why do we need one?”
“Because we’re going to your place and I read this article about you one time that said you always took cabs.”
“That’s because I got drunk once and was picked up for driving under the influence. Fortunately, I didn’t hurt anybody. But I handed over my license and haven’t been back to pick it up.”
“Yeah, I read that, too.” She nodded to a Checker kind of fishtailing toward them in the flurries. “Here’s the cab.”
“You sure you want to do this?”
“Positive.”
Tobin and Marcie got in, then the Checker started fishtailing its way up the street again.
Marcie pressed into Tobin with her lovely breasts and whispered to him, “But if you think I’m going to tell you anything about my deal with Michael Dailey, you’re fucking nuts.”
“Where to?” the cabbie said.
“You want some of this?” Marcie Pierce said, splashing her champagne like golden water across the air of the cab.
15
11:38 P.M.
“Boy, this is nice.”
“Thanks.”
“You decorate it?”
“No, actually my last girlfriend did.”
The ride and the cold and the snow had made Marcie reasonably sober again and now there was an anxious edge in her voice. She was no longer a femme fatale but instead a very young woman in an older man’s apartment.
She walked around, glancing up at the skylight, at the wide fieldstone fireplace, at the bay windows that overlooked Fifth Avenue ablaze with Christmas trees and Santa Clauses lit from the inside so their cheeks were bright pink and their eyes a startling blue.
“God,” Marcie said. “Wouldn’t it be nice to be young again and believe in all that shit?”
Crikers — could you really be that maudlin at her age? he wondered. Then he smiled. Of course you could. He’d been so himself.
“Well, now there are compensations.”
“Such as what?”
“I think I appreciate living more the older I get.” Plus he got to see movies. Movies balmed and moved and excited him as nothing else did. It was holy to sit in the darkness of a theater.
She offered him a bruised smile. “I guess I’m not at that age yet.”
“You’re really unhappy?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I.” Then she saw his cassette library and moved toward it as if a preacher had called her forth. “Wow, how many tapes do you have?”
“Three hundred.”
“Do you mind?”
“Not at all. As a matter of fact, I think I’ll go wash up.”
She rubbed her bare shoulders as if she were freezing. “Do you ever sort of, you know, just sleep with women, I mean without doing anything?”
“Sometimes. Sure.”
“If I decided that’s all I wanted to do, would that be all right?”
“Of course.”
“You wouldn’t push it or anything.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“Thanks. That makes me feel better.”
He smiled. “Maybe even a little bit happy?”
“Yeah. Maybe even a little happy.”
He was halfway to the bathroom (he was planning on removing his liver and taking it downstairs to the laundry room and putting it in the drier) when the living-room phone rang.