“… about the Leyden case. She came to the squadroom…”
“I’ll just bet she has information,” Cindy repeated, a bit hysterically, Kling thought. “I’ll bet she has information even Cleopatra never dreamt of. Why don’t you get out of here and leave me alone, okay? Just get out of here, okay? Go get all that hot information, okay?”
“Cindy…”
“I thought we were in love…”
“We are.”
“I thought we…”
“We are, damnit!”
“I thought we were going to get married one day and have kids and live in the country…”
“Cindy…”
“So a cheap little floozie flashes a smile and…”
“Cindy, she’s a nice girl who…”
“Don’t you dare!” Cindy shouted. “If you’re here to defend that little tramp…”
“I’m not here to defend her!”
“Then why are you here?”
“To tell you I love you.”
“Ha!”
“I love you,” Kling said.
“Yeah.”
“I do.”
“Yeah.”
“I love you.”
“Then why…”
“We were going out for a cup of coffee, that’s all.”
“Sure.”
“There’s nobody in the whole world I want but you,” Kling said.
Cindy did not answer.
“I mean it.”
She was still silent.
“I love you, honey,” he said. “Now come on.” He waited. She was standing with her head bent, watching the floor. He did not dare approach her. “Come on,” he said.
“I wanted to kill you,” Cindy said softly. “When I saw you together, I wanted to kill you.” She began weeping gently, still staring at the floor, not raising her eyes to his. He went to her at last and took her in his arms, and held her head cradled against his shoulder, his fingers lightly stroking her hair, her tears wetting his jacket and his shirt.
“I love you so much,” she said, “that I wanted to kill you.”
Shotgun, 1969
Kling felt pretty lousy.
His condition, he kept telling himself, had nothing to do with the fact that Cindy Forrest had broken their engagement three weeks before. To begin with, it had never been a proper engagement, and a person certainly couldn’t go around mourning something that had never truly existed. Besides, Cindy had made it abundantly clear that, whereas they had enjoyed some very good times together, and whereas she would always think upon him fondly and recall with great pleasure the days and months (yea, even years) they had spent together pretending they were in love, she had nonetheless met a very attractive young man who was a practicing psychiatrist at Buenavista Hospital, where she was doing her internship, and seeing as how they shared identical interests, and seeing as how he was quite ready to get married whereas Kling seemed to be married to a .38 Detective’s Special, a scarred wooden desk, and a detention cage, Cindy felt it might be best to terminate their relationship immediately rather than court the possibility of trauma induced by slow and painful withdrawal.
That had been three weeks ago, and he had not seen nor called Cindy since, and the pain of the breakup was equaled only by the pain of the bursitis in his right shoulder, despite the fact that he was wearing a copper bracelet on his wrist. The bracelet had been given to him by none other than Meyer Meyer, whom no one would have dreamed of as a superstitious man given to beliefs in ridiculous claims. The bracelet was supposed to begin working in ten days (Well, maybe two weeks, Meyer had said, hedging) and Kling had been wearing it for eleven days now, with no relief for the bursitis, but with a noticeable green stain around his wrist just below the bracelet. Hope springs eternal. Somewhere in his race memory, there lurked a hulking ape-like creature rubbing animal teeth by a fire, praying in grunts for a splendid hunt on the morrow. Somewhere also in his race memory, though not as far back, was the image of Cindy Forrest naked in his arms, and the concomitant fantasy that she would call to say she’d made a terrible mistake and was ready to drop her psychiatrist pal. No Women’s Lib man he, Kling nonetheless felt it perfectly all right for Cindy to take the initiative in re-establishing their relationship; it was she, after all, who had taken the first and final step toward ending it.
Early Monday morning, on Kling’s day off, he called Cindy Forrest. It was only seven-thirty, but he knew her sleeping and waking habits as well as he knew his own, and since the phone was on the kitchen wall near the refrigerator, and since she would at that moment be preparing breakfast, he was not surprised when she answered it on the second ring.
“Hello?” she said. She sounded rushed, a trifle breathless. She always allowed herself a scant half hour to get out of the apartment each morning, rushing from bedroom to kitchen to bathroom to bedroom again, finally running for the elevator, looking miraculously well-groomed and sleek and rested and ready to do battle with the world. He visualized her standing now at the kitchen phone, only partially clothed, and felt a faint stirring of desire.
“Hi. Cindy,” he said, “it’s me.”
“Oh, hello, Bert,” she said. “Can you hold just a second? The coffee’s about to boil over.” He waited. In the promised second, she was back on the line. “Okay,” she said. “I tried to reach you the other night.”
“Yes, I know. I’m returning your call.”
“Right, right,” she said. There was a long silence. “I’m trying to remember why I called you. Oh, yes. I found a shirt of yours in the dresser, and I wanted to know what I should do with it. So I called you at home, and there was no answer, and then I figured you probably had night duty, and I tried the squadroom, but Steve said you weren’t on. So I decided to wrap it up and mail it. I’ve already got it all addressed and everything.”
There was another silence.
“So I guess I’ll drop it off at the post office on my way to work this morning,” Cindy said.
“Okay,” Kling said.
“If that’s what you want me to do,” Cindy said.
“Well, what would you like to do?”
“It’s all wrapped and everything, so I guess that’s what I’ll do.”
“Be a lot of trouble to unwrap it, I guess,” Kling said.
“Why would I want to unwrap it?”
“I don’t know. Why did you call me Saturday night?”
“To ask what you wanted me to do with the shirt.”
“What choices did you have in mind?”
“When? Saturday night?”
“Yes,” Kling said. “When you called.”
“Well, there were several possibilities, I guess. You could have stopped here to pick up the shirt, or I could have dropped it off at your place or the squadroom, or we could have had a drink together or something, at which time…”
“I didn’t know that was permissible.”
“Which?”
“Having a drink together. Or any of those things, in fact.”
“Well, it’s all academic now, isn’t it? You weren’t home when I called, and you weren’t working, either, so I wrapped up the goddamn shirt, and I’ll mail it to you this morning.”
“What are you sore about?”
“Who’s sore?” Cindy said.
“You sound sore.”
“I have to get out of here in twenty minutes and I still haven’t had my coffee.”
“Wouldn’t want to be late for the hospital,” Kling said. “Might upset your friend Dr. Freud.”
“Ha-ha,” Cindy said mirthlessly.
“How is he, by the way?”