Real life was that someone had just tried to kill him. But who? And why? Did he know something? What, damn it?
After it was over, Mitch headed back downstairs, momentarily disoriented by the late-day sunlight and the bustling cab traffic that greeted him out there on the avenue. Blinking and yawning, he trudged his way westward to his second screening, this one in an editing lab in a Times Square office building. All in a day’s work.
Mitch hated what had happened to Times Square. His Times Square was the spiritual cradle of the Jim Brown double bill, the Sonny Chiba triple bill and the peep show that never quit. It was garish, grotesque and glorious, an aging streetwalker with smeared lipstick and runs in her stockings. Mitch had always adored it. It was real. It was vulgar. It was New York.
The new Times Square was clean, safe and bogus-a processed cheese food theme park. Disney started the transformation when it cleaned up the New Amsterdam Theater so tourists would come see The Lion King roar on Broadway. And then pause afterward to shop at the smiling, happy Disney store, a giant shopping mall emporium festooned with billboards hawking the studio’s latest fun-filled family classics. Seemingly overnight, the genuine Times Square had been morphed into a Disneyfied version of Times Square-a soulless, fresh-scrubbed, crime-free urban tourist zone. All that was missing, Mitch felt, was a hologram of Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Jules Munchin dancing down Eighth Avenue in their sailor suits.
His second screening was the new Bruce Willis, which he found to be very much like the old Bruce Willis. If pressed, he could have written his entire review in five choice words: More broken glass, less hair.
Afterward, he met Lacy at Virgil’s, a boisterous two-story barbecue emporium on West Forty-fifth. Lacy came loaded with some choice office gossip-one of the paper’s editorial page columnists was sleeping with one of its Washington correspondents-and neither her husband, who was the managing editor, nor his wife, who worked for CNN, knew about it.
“If that’s the case, then how do you know about it?”
“Because I’m the one who used to be sleeping with him,” Lacy shot back, washing down a huge mouthful of pulled pork with a gulp of Dos Equis. Mitch’s editor was needle-thin, yet she ate and drank like a longshoreman. She could also chow down on barbecue while wearing white linen and not get a single drop of sauce on herself. He didn’t know how she did it. Any of it. “But enough about newsroom yakahoola,” she said. “I am way more anxious to hear about you, young sir. Tell me what it’s like to be mixed up in a true life murder.”
“It’s revealing,” he answered, chewing thoughtfully. “Fear has a way of bringing out the things that people ordinarily do their damnedest to hide about themselves. Human nature, I guess. We drop our guard. Say things to other people-people such as me-that we wouldn’t ordinarily say.”
“Such as…?” Lacy asked eagerly.
“What I’m discovering is that you’ve got this privileged, sheltered little enclave-let’s call it old money’s last bastion, because that’s literally what it is. And on the surface it’s all so beautiful and carefree and perfect. But, underneath, these people are just incredibly unhappy, messed up and obsessed with keeping up appearances.” He paused to sip his beer. “Dolly’s husband, Niles Seymour, didn’t belong there. They didn’t approve of him. He wasn’t one of them. And so one of them took him out. All three murders, I’d swear, spring from that single fact. And a single pathological fear.”
“Of what?”
“The outside world,” Mitch replied. “That’s what this is all about, Lacy. It’s not about some evil Freddie Kreuger lurking in their midst, sadistically picking off his victims one by one. It’s about the future. It’s about change.”
“You’ve changed,” Lacy observed, studying him carefully. “What’s her name?”
Mitch frowned at her. “Whose name?”
“The woman you’ve met.”
“I haven’t met anyone.”
“Oh, yes, you have.”
“Lacy, I haven’t met anyone.”
“Trust me, I know about these things,” Lacy assured him. “Other people’s love lives happens to be the only subject I’m truly an expert on. In every other way, I am a complete fraud, as you and I both know.” She delicately dabbed barbecue sauce from her mouth with her napkin and reached for her alligator handbag. “I’m very happy for you, my child. Mother approves. And now I have to go. My Wall Street titan will be asleep, limp dick in hand, in precisely one-half hour. The madman gets up at five A.M. Can you imagine?” She rose to her feet, snatching up the check. “You should do a piece on this for the Sunday magazine, Mitch. You really should.”
“Maybe I will. When it’s all over.”
Mitch lingered for a few minutes after she was gone, finishing his beer. Several young career women were seated together at the bar, drinking and laughing. One of them was quite pretty, with shiny eyes and a brilliant smile. She noticed that he was looking at her. And returned his gaze, steadily and frankly. Mitch looked away, suddenly feeling very alone.
He had never missed Maisie more than he did at that moment sitting there by himself in Virgil’s.
The night air was breezy and fresh. He strolled across town to the Havenhursts’ apartment with his hands in his pockets, enjoying it. The theaters were beginning to let out. The sidewalks were swarming with animated, excited people. Policemen on horseback patrolled the streets. Vendors hawked pretzels. It was life in New York at its finest-something that Mitch never grew tired of.
Still, he glanced over his shoulder every once in a while to see if he was being followed. He was not.
He reached the well-tended brownstone on East Sixty-fifth Street just after ten. He buzzed, as he’d said he would. But Mandy didn’t come down. Instead, she told him through the intercom to come on up. He did. The building was elegant and spotless inside, with ornate hallway lamps, charcoal-gray herringbone wallpaper and a banister of polished hardwood. There were two apartments to a floor. The Havenhursts’ was on the third floor, in back, and it had to run them at least three thousand dollars a month.
“We rented it furnished,” Mandy said in reference to the decor, which had the just so look of a Bloomingdales showroom display. “Don’t you just hate it?”
“Not at all,” said Mitch, although the gold-veined mirror over the ornamental fireplace did strike him as a bit overwrought. So did the screechy Michael Bolton CD Mandy was listening to. “I thought we were going out.”
“I didn’t feel like getting dressed again,” she said offhandedly. “You don’t mind, do you?”
“I guess not.”
In fact, what Mandy was wearing was outrageously sexy. A white, gauzy, see-through summer shift that buttoned all the way down the front. She’d left the top two and several of the bottom ones undone, and near as Mitch could tell she didn’t have a stitch on underneath. Her bare legs were shapely and shiny. She was barefoot, her toenails freshly painted the same shade of crimson as her fingernails. Her newly trimmed hair seemed an even creamier shade of blond than it had that morning.
Mandy was a very desirable woman. But she was still married to Bud Havenhurst. And she was still no one who Mitch wanted to get mixed up with.
She was drinking white wine. She offered him some. He accepted it.
“This is nice, isn’t it?” she said, pouring him a glass. “Getting away from that island, I mean. I spoke to Bud on the phone this afternoon. He said the press had been calling all day long, wanting to talk to me. I am so glad I’m here. It is so narrow out there. It is so impossible to hide.”