And all this followed the death of Bob Walters — a death that occurred before he could get me the information he said he had. And that, of course, followed the death of Joshua Carpenter, the innocent guy in the Public Garden. And of course, there were the stranglings of three young women in various parts of town.
I bring this up to explain why I was in the gymnasium of the University Club at four in the afternoon on what could have and should have been a critical day of reporting and writing at the Boston Record. Mongillo, in his inimitable way, told me, and I quote, “Go get some sleep, some sex, or some exercise, before you ruin this entire story.”
The first presented option, I was too antsy for. The second, I had few possibilities and even less desire. The third, well, I could use a tour through the gym, so that’s where I went.
The place was barren, given the hour. The lunch crowd was long gone, and the evening crowd wouldn’t arrive for another hour, so I sat on an exercise ball and knocked out seventy-five crunches, feeling my abdominal muscles tighten more with each successive one. I worked the lat machine and the bench press, and did some flies. I skipped a little rope. I did more abdominals. I struggled through the shoulder press.
The work felt good. The sweat that opened up on my forehead and flowed down my face felt even better. The stereo system was turned down, and the only sounds in the gym were the plates of weight clinking against one another and my own labored breathing, all of which gave me a little time to think.
I thought of the call I had yet to return to Maggie Kane. I decided we weren’t engaged anymore; that designation expired one way or another with the passage of a wedding day.
I thought of the call I had just received from Peter Martin, telling me that the publisher wasn’t yet ready to run the Phantom’s letter, and maybe never would be. He basically told me to be on high alert the next morning, in expectation that we or someone else would face the Phantom’s wrath.
I tell you, newspapers will break your heart just about every time.
I did one last set of leg lifts, then sprawled across a hard blue mat and felt the energy flow from my torso, down my limbs, and right out of my fingers and toes. After a few minutes of nothingness, I collected myself, wandered downstairs into the locker room, stripped down, and headed for the steam room.
The place was still empty, which was nice, because I could sprawl across the tile bench without the fear that one of the older members would toddle into the room, not see me through the steam, and park his flabby ass somewhere on top of me. Granted, it’s not a normal fear, but it’s there nonetheless.
With the whoosh of steam blowing into the room, I thought again of Maggie Kane, and one more time thought it a shame that something that starts so good inevitably has to end so bad. Or maybe this wasn’t really that bad. Maybe we rushed toward matrimony because of how it all looked on paper, when in real life we didn’t really know. Maybe the fact that both parties put a halt to it in the final hours made it obvious that it wasn’t meant to be — no marriage, no harm, no foul.
But here she was on the phone talking about being lonely and wanting to get together, and the only emotion that kept flowing over me was complete and total detachment, which may not be an emotion at all. If ever I should have missed Maggie Kane, it should have been now, when my professional world seemed to be falling in on me. And yet I barely felt a thing.
Elizabeth Riggs.
The steam kept blowing all around me, the temperature rising, and there she was, in my head, mostly because she never actually left it. She was beautiful that night in the waiting lounge of San Francisco International Airport — composed, elegant, sexy, relaxed — just as she was beautiful in Logan International Airport that day she left for California and I did nothing to stop her. She wanted me to yell out, to grab her shoulder, to block the door, to do something, anything, and instead I simply watched her leave, because I figured that’s what people do in life — they leave. And nobody, not even Maggie Kane, has yet to prove me wrong.
The power of hindsight is sometimes a heady thing. It’s showed me these last couple of years that Elizabeth didn’t so much leave of her own volition as she was guided to the door by yours truly and encouraged in every implicit way to go. Maybe I never outright told her to get out, but my aloofness, born of my own past, manifested in my hesitance to allow anyone else to get too close, and proved impossible to take. God knows, Elizabeth Riggs tried. She really did.
Outside the glass door, one of the locker-room attendants, either Mike or Angel, flung open a nearby supply closet, the sound jarring me out of my heat-and-exhaustion-induced reverie. I could hear him fiddling with some equipment. He knocked absently against the door, and he was off.
Inside, the steam started surging full bore again out of a pipe on the floor, and the room was approaching the point of being unbearable, which was just the way I liked my steam rooms, if not my women. The thermometer on the wall read 117 degrees, and I told myself I’d gut it out until this round of steam stopped and then I’d go take a cool shower.
Another minute passed, and the steam was still flowing with abandon. The thermometer read 119 degrees. I lifted myself up from a lying position and began counting to twenty, waiting for the steam to shut off. It didn’t.
So I started thinking like Ernest Hemingway might write, though I can’t explain why. The room was hot. The man was sweaty. He wanted a cool shower. He would get a cold glass of beer. The beef he’d have for dinner would be charred and juicy.
Another minute later, it was showing no signs of abating — the steam, not the Hemingway impersonation. The temperature had risen to a heady 121 degrees, and the room had grown so thick I was about to lose sight of the thermometer. I wasn’t a science or home economics major, but at 121 degrees, can’t you boil sheep’s milk?
So I gave up. In fact, I got up, staggered toward the door, opened it, and proceeded to take the most delightfully reinvigorating cool shower that anyone could ever possibly imagine, the memory of which would hang with me for a lifetime.
That was the plan anyway, but I ran into a problem, that problem being the door. It didn’t budge. So I pushed against it again. Again, it didn’t move. I shoved my shoulder into it. Still nothing.
Meantime, the steam was roaring out of the small pipe as hard as ever, and that pipe happened to be near the door, which meant that my feet were about to be scalded off.
I stepped back and gave myself a little bit of a running start, figuring that the door must have swelled in the heat and was stuck on the frame. I took two long, fast steps and hit it hard with the sole of my foot. I might as well have been pushing against the side of a Greyhound bus, though I’m not sure why I’d ever do such a thing. The door wasn’t going anywhere, and its sheer physical obstinateness knocked me to the hard, hot floor.
I scrambled up. Steam everywhere. I took a different approach now, trying to jigger the door around, maybe loosen it from whatever had it stuck. But again, it wouldn’t move.
The gushing sound was all-consuming. The heat was raging. The thought struck me that I could die in the steam room of my private club, and I wondered how that would look in my obituary. How long before my fellow club members began using the room again? A day? Probably more like an hour. The coroner wouldn’t even be halfway down the street. How odd it would be to have my boiling body shoved in the back of a refrigerated van.
I yelled. I had no choice. “Help!” I called out. Granted, it wasn’t particularly original, but my brains were melting down into my neck.
Nothing but the gush of steam in response. I hollered, “Please open the steam room door! Help! The door is stuck. Help!”