“You decide if you want to call him. Tell him I sent you. He’ll give you a price.”
By this time I was less sociable and J. C. was perceptive enough to realize it, so she left soon after the cops did but returned minutes later with half a tray of pasta and the bottle of wine.
“I can’t eat all this.”
“Sure you can. Just don’t eat it all tonight. And I think you need the wine more than I do. Watch your back.”
I would. I’d lost my appetite but not my thirst. I double-locked the door, put the ziti in the fridge, and poured myself a drink. I’d told Connie Anzalone that I’d help her choose an outfit for the Friday night reception, but I didn’t have the first clue what I’d be wearing so I started rifling through Lucy’s closet for something to borrow.
New York closets were notoriously small and Lucy had rather ingeniously installed a drapery rod and curtain that partitioned two feet from one end of the bedroom, thereby creating a giant closet. Presumably this was done without the help of her former paramour, since the number of holes in each side wall rivaled the number of holes at the Alamo. Still, it worked, especially if you didn’t mind the occasional clump of dry wall. Maybe I’d be a really good houseguest and fill them in with Spackle.
Some women were inordinately proud of their linen closets or china cabinets. Others had rows of shoes lined up in formation like some phantom Busby Berkeley routine. Lucy could rightly be proud of this closet. Her clothes were arranged by color and length. Skirts, dresses, and slacks were hung with boutique precision on matching flat, black velvet hangers for maximum efficiency. I thought of my closet in Springfield: T-shirts, sweatshirts, painter’s pants, and jeans folded in slightly listing stacks, the bulk of my work clothes from my previous life still in boxes and garment bags.
I hadn’t had a nine-to-five job even when I worked in television, but occasionally I had to look professional and for me that meant jeans, boots, and a good jacket. It was all in the accessories. These days I was more likely to accessorize with a pair of nippers and Womanswork garden gloves than an Hermès scarf or pricey handbag, so shopping in Lucy’s closet would be fun—and free.
Luckily we were about the same size. We even had the same coloring. Not that that mattered much. Ninety percent of the items in Lucy’s closet were black—she did, after all, live in New York and work in the media. Three items that weren’t black caught my eye. I put down the wineglass and stripped to my underwear to try on the first: a lilac one-shoulder number held together on the left side by sequined Velcro tabs. In its way, it looked fabulous. I could decorate the booth with lilacs from the Koreans and be color coordinated. But then I worried about the Velcro tabs opening and David having to duct-tape me back together, so I said no to the dress.
On and off quickly was a beige lace sheath. Pretty but practically see-through. The third nonblack item was a sleeveless red dress, short and made of spandex. I flashed on Scarlett O’Hara being forced to wear a red dress to Miss Melly’s party after being caught in a clinch with Ashley Wilkes. And a brazen Bette Davis as Jezebel daring to wear red to the Olympus ball, even though uptight fiancé Henry Fonda warns she’ll be ostracized. “But this is 1854 … 1854!” Bette trumped Henry; I had to try it on.
I wriggled into the dress and slipped off my panties to eliminate VPL, visible panty line. I went the whole nine yards with a pair of strappy stilettos. Jeez, the truckers at the Paradise Diner would have heart attacks if they saw me in this instead of my Old Navy tops and Columbia Sportswear bottoms. But could I really pull off this look? It was one thing to parade around in fancy dress in a fitting room or at home, quite another to go out into the world. I took a swig of wine for courage and did a modified runway walk in front of Lucy’s full-length mirror. It was ridiculous enough when rail-thin models did it but downright impossible for a normal-sized woman. Ah, that’s because we have thighs. I posed, I preened, I parted my lips and practiced looking lobotomized. I reached for the wine again with one hand on my hip, fingers splayed in the standard celebrity pose. Lucy’s phone rang. I imagined it was her telling me which purse to wear with the dress.
“Hello?” There was silence for a beat. “Is this the guy from the convention center? Are you calling about the bag?”
There was a huge intake of phlegmy air and a gravelly voice said, “I prefer the red.” Click.
It took me three full seconds to realize what had happened. I dropped the wine, kicked off the shoes, and ran downstairs to J. C.’s, banging on her door like a crazy woman. “Call nine one one, call nine one one!”
Wilson and Vargas were back in less than thirty minutes. Once again, we received them in J. C.’s apartment, this time J. C. in her jammies, clutching her door bar, and me, barefoot and in a red spandex dress.
“If we’d known you were dressing for dinner we would have stayed for the ziti.”
Twenty-four
Nothing could have induced me to sleep at Lucy’s that night. Not J. C.’s offer of protection with her all-purpose weapon. Not Wilson and Vargas, who’d assured me they’d check in every two hours even after their shift ended in the morning. I wasn’t the nervous type and it was true, nothing serious had happened. As if reciting from the manual, Vargas had said nine times out of ten prank calls were nothing more than bored kids getting their jollies.
If he’d said nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand I might have liked the odds better, but I wasn’t going to get a good night’s sleep, wondering if I was the unlucky tenth time out of ten. I didn’t really think I’d be raped or murdered in Lucy’s bed, but I needed a good night’s sleep and that wasn’t going to happen if I had to keep one eye open all night.
J. C. and the cops tried to talk me out of it. She even offered me a spot on her sofa—an enormous concession from someone who greeted most strangers with a bar in hand—and I was grateful but adamant. The cops agreed to give me a ride to the St. George Hotel. I threw some essentials and Lucy’s stilettos in a hard-sided suitcase with rotating wheels and an extending handle. I wasn’t about to give a Peeping Tom another girlie show, so I left the red dress on. It was quite a look with my own sensible Merrells.
“Did you call us from this phone?” Wilson asked, as I finished packing.
“No. Why?”
Wilson pressed *69 on Lucy’s phone. He took out his pad and wrote down the number that appeared.
“Worth a try,” he said, pleased with himself. He dialed the number, but there was no answer. He walked over to the window. “Come here,” he said. I felt a sermon coming.
Lucy lived around the corner from a high-rise as big as one of those mammoth cruise ships with hundreds of little windows. If they’d wanted to, anyone from the fifth floor on up could see directly into Lucy’s bedroom, where I’d been sashaying in my underwear and practicing for my turn on the catwalk. In the sliver of street between the apartment house and a movie complex was another line of sight and a bank of pay phones backlit by the theater’s marquee.
“It’s far away but could be one of those, too,” Wilson said, looking at the traffic coming out of the theater. “Easy enough to find out.”
“I didn’t know there still were pay phones.”
“Yeah. And there are still people who don’t have E-Z-Pass and know how to parallel park. Where are you from?” I wasn’t in the mood for that discussion again, especially since I had started the evening feeling like a savvy New Yorker and now felt like a rube.