“You serious?”
“Yeah.”
“Could you stand Perry Como?”
“Perry Como? Really?”
“Yeah.”
“I used to watch his Christmas specials. I love Perry Como.” She smiled. “Just don’t tell anybody, okay?”
“Okay.”
So he found his Perry Como record, which he kept in a file behind a lot of other albums — he got tired of record snobs going through his albums whenever he had a party and finding the Como and then running around all night showing it to people and laughing — so he put it on and went back to the couch and sat tight against her there in the Christmas-light darkness and they sipped their cocoa and didn’t say anything much at all, just sort of touched each other and smelled each other, just sort of listened to Como do wonderful things with “The Christmas Song” and “Silent Night” and songs like that.
She put her head on his shoulder and said, “This reminds me of being with my father.”
At first he felt insulted, at least a bit, seeing that the season and her own turmoil had caused her to turn to him as a father substitute, but then he realized that he’d been able to give her something more substantive than he was able to share with many one-night stands. It wasn’t just quick forgettable sex; there was real kindness between them, and he loved her for it.
She started to talk about her father, an insurance salesman, and how he’d died of heart disease, and the struggle her mother had had ever since with money and loneliness and, ironically, with her own heart disease.
Then she surprised him by saying, “But I still shouldn’t have taken money from Michael Dailey. I mean, there are people a lot worse off than I am.”
“We do what we have to.”
“I think he’s broken into Dunphy’s office.”
“Dailey did the break-in?”
“Not the break-in. That came later.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There were two break-ins. One earlier. One later.”
The Como record ended and he got up to start it again but she said, “No, that music makes me too sentimental about my father. Leave it off while I talk, all right?”
“All right.”
He went back and sat next to her again.
“I usually work in the department at night on my film. That’s what I was doing last night when I heard this noise down the hall. It was around seven o’clock and pretty dark and I got kind of scared, you know, thinking maybe somebody had broken in, or it was some rapist or something. But I went down the hall anyway, just to check it out, and that’s when I found him there.”
“Dailey?”
“Right. Dailey.”
“What was he doing?”
She grinned. “Making a jerk out of himself, actually. He was bent over in front of Dunphy’s door and trying to pick the lock with a credit card. Obviously it was something he’d seen on TV. The trouble was it didn’t have the right kind of lock.”
“So what happened?”
“I just kind of stood there and watched him. I wanted to see what he did next.” She smiled. “Then the security guard came along.”
“What did Dailey do?”
“Really panicked. Plus he looked very dorky. He had on this red lamé dinner jacket and this cummerbund and he was running all over the office trying to find someplace to hide when he heard the guard coming.”
“He still hadn’t seen you?”
“No.”
“So the guard came.”
“So the guard came, and I... I don’t know why I did this — I stepped in his way and said hello. He’s sort of a young guy and always vaguely putting the moves on me. So he stood there and talked with me and then he went on without checking out the inner offices.”
“So Dailey got away?”
“No, he was hiding under the secretary’s desk. I went in and stood above him and told him I knew what was going on and that if he didn’t come out I’d call the security guard back.
“So he got up and tried real hard to have some dignity but it wasn’t easy.”
“I can imagine.”
“Then he made me his offer.”
“Which was?”
She sighed. “I’m going to sound crass here, aren’t I, because I took it and all?”
“I’ve done a few things I’m ashamed of in my life.” He touched her hand. “About six-thousand-seven-hundred-and-eighty-three things, to be exact.”
“He asked me if I could help him get into Dunphy’s office.”
“Could you?”
“As a matter of fact, I knew where the secretary kept her spare keys, in case one of the professors locked himself out.”
“So you let him in?”
She sighed. “Yeah. And I’m really sorry I did.”
“How long was he in there?”
“About fifteen minutes. I kind of stood sentry, in case the guard came back.”
“Did he seem to find anything?”
“He found something. He had several sheets of paper rolled up in a tube when he left.”
“But you don’t know what they were?”
“No idea.”
“He didn’t say anything.”
“No... oh, except that he didn’t have much cash on him.”
“That’s what this afternoon was all about?”
“Right. He met me on the corner of Sixty-eighth and handed me the money in an envelope.”
“How much?”
She sighed again. “Five hundred dollars.” Now it was her turn to touch his hand. “But I haven’t spent any of it and I’m going to send it back to him.”
“Good.”
“I shouldn’t have done it.”
“I don’t think you need to say that anymore. Really.”
“Will you hold me?”
“Sure.”
“I don’t want to kiss or anything. Just be held.”
“I understand. I get like that a lot myself.”
So he held her for a long time and thought about his own daughter and about his ex-wives (two of whom had botched the marriage; two of whom he caused to leave him), and then a pink-and-yellow dawn was at the frosty window.
She was asleep again. He went in and showered and shaved. He had a lot to do. When he came back out she was making coffee. He’d already decided what he was going to do. He had a check in his pocket and he went over to her at the Mr. Coffee and slipped it into her pajama pocket. “This is for you and your mother. For Christmas gifts.”
“God, Tobin—”
He kissed her on the cheek. “No arguments. I’ll probably talk to you later today, if I get a chance.”
“I really am going to send him the money back.”
“I know you are.” He kissed her, this time on the nose. “And that’s why I like you so much.”
“Can I sort of hang out here and watch The Naked Spur before I go home?”
“Sure.”
“I had a great time last night.”
He laughed. “You beat me to it. I was just going to say that myself.”
16
Thursday 9:17 A.M.
Harold Ebsen lived in a little stucco house too close to Red Hook to make realtors happy. When Tobin got out of the cab, he told the driver to wait and then he stood inhaling air from the golden winter morning. The block of little houses was occasionally dwarfed by Christmas ornaments that managed to look both cheap and endearing at the same time. Ebsen was not apparently the festive sort. The only decoration on his front door was a single tiny piece of holly, as if somebody had gotten Ebsen down on the ground and threatened to break his arm if he didn’t put up something that said Christmas. A couple of kids who looked like lumbering spacemen in their snowsuits walked past Tobin and gave him the sort of openly suspicious look-over only four-year-olds are capable of. One kid had red stuff on his mouth. The other kid had brown stuff. The kid with red stuff also had green stuff but not on his mouth, rather running from his nose. “It’s that TV guy,” one of them said.