“I’m sorry, honey.”
“Instead…”
“I’m sorry.” He hesitated. Then, cautiously, he said, “We can still make love.”
“No,” she said, “we can’t.”
“Wh—?”
“I just got my period.”
He looked at her. And suddenly he knew she’d been lying about the party at Bianca’s and the ride crosstown with the Santessons and the dinner at Ah Wong’s and the cab she’d caught on Aqueduct, knew she’d been lying about all of it and putting up the same brave blustery front of a murderer caught with a smoking pistol in his fist.
“Okay,” he said, “some other time,” and went to the television set and snapped it on again.
Kling should have realized his marriage was doomed the moment he began tailing his wife.
Carella could have told him that in any marriage there was a line either partner simply could not safely cross. Once you stepped over that line, once you said or did something that couldn’t possibly be taken back, the marriage was irretrievable. In any good marriage, there were arguments and even fights — but you fought fair if you wanted the marriage to survive. The minute you started hitting below the belt, it was time to call the divorce lawyers. That’s why Carella had asked him to discuss this with Augusta.
Instead, Kling decided he would find out for himself whether she was seeing another man. He made his decision after a hot, sleepless night. He made it on the steamy morning of August 11, while he and Augusta were eating breakfast. He made it ten minutes before she left for her first assignment of the week.
He was a cop. Tailing a suspect came easily and naturally to him. Standing together at the curb outside their building, Augusta looking frantically at her watch, Kling trying to get a taxi at the height of the morning rush hour, he told her there was something he wanted to check at the office, and would probably be gone all day. Even though this was his day off, she accepted the lie; all too often in the past, he had gone back to the station house on his day off. He finally managed to hail a taxi, and when it pulled in to the curb, he yanked open the rear door for her.
“Where are you going, honey?” he asked.
“Ranger Photography, 1201 Goedkoop.”
“Have you got that?” Kling asked the cabbie through the open window on the curb side.
“Got it,” the cabbie said.
Augusta blew a kiss at Kling, and the taxi pulled away from the curb and into the stream of traffic heading downtown. It took Kling ten minutes to find another cab. He was in no hurry. He had checked Augusta’s appointment calendar while she was bathing before bed last night, when he was still mulling his decision. It had showed two sittings for this morning: one at Ranger Photography for nine, the other at Coopersmith Creatives for eleven. Her next appointment was at two in the afternoon at Fashion Flair, and alongside this she had penned in the words “Cutler if time.” Cutler was the agency representing her.
Goedkoop Avenue was in the oldest section of town, its narrow streets and gabled waterfront houses dating back to when the Dutch were still governing. The area lay cheek by jowl with the courthouses and municipal buildings in the Chinatown Precinct, but whereas the illusion was one of overlap, the business here was neither legal nor administrative. Goedkoop was in the heart of the financial district, an area of twentieth-century skyscrapers softened by the old Dutch warehouses and wharves, the later British churches and graveyards. Here and there in lofts along the narrow side streets, the artists and photographers had taken up residence, spilling over from the Quarter and the more recently voguish “Hopscotch” area, so called because the first gallery to open there was on Hopper Street, overlooking the Scotch Meadows Park. Standing across the street from 1201 Goedkoop, where he had asked the cabbie to let him out, Kling looked around for a pay phone, and then went into a cigar store on the corner of Goedkoop and Fields, where he looked up the phone number for Ranger Photography. From a phone booth near the magazine rack, he dialed the number and waited.
“Ranger,” a man’s voice said.
“May I speak to Augusta Blair, please?” he said. It rankled every time he had to use her maiden name, however damn professionally necessary it was.
“Minute,” the man said.
Kling waited.
When she came onto the line, he said, “Gussie, hi, I’m sorry to break in this way.”
“We haven’t started yet,” she said. “I just got here a few minutes ago. What is it, Bert?”
“I wanted to remind you, we’re having dinner with Meyer and Sarah tonight.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Oh, okay, then.”
“We talked about it at breakfast,” she said. “Don’t you remember?”
“Right, right. Okay, then. They’re coming by at seven for drinks.”
“Yes,” she said, “I have it in my book. Where are you now, Bert?”
“Just got here,” he said. “You want to try that new Italian joint on Trafalgar?”
“Yes, sure. Bert, I have to go. They’re waving frantically.”
“I’ll make a reservation,” he said. “Eight o’clock sound okay?”
“Yes, fine. Bye, darling, I’ll talk to you later.”
There was a click on the line. Okay, he thought, she’s where she’s supposed to be. He put the phone back on the hook, and then went out into the street again. It was blazing hot already, and his watch read only nine twenty-seven. He crossed the street to 1201 Goedkoop, and entered the building, checking to see if there was a side or a back entrance. Nothing. Just the big brass doors through which he’d filleted, and through which Augusta would have to pass when she left. He looked at his watch again, and then went across the street to take up his position.
She did not come out of the building until a quarter to eleven.
He had hailed a taxi five minutes earlier, and flashed the tin, and had told the cabbie he was a policeman on assignment and would want him to follow a suspect vehicle in just a few minutes. That was when he was still allowing Augusta at least twenty minutes to get to her next sitting, crosstown and uptown. Her calendar had listed it for eleven sharp; she would be late, that was certain. The cabbie had thrown his flag five minutes ago; he now sat picking his teeth and reading the Racing Form. As Augusta came out of the building, another taxi pulled in some three feet ahead of her. She raised her arm, yelled “Taxi!” and then sprinted for the curb, her shoulder bag flying.
“There she is,” Kling said. “Just getting in that cab across the street.”
“Nice dish,” the cabbie said.
“Yeah,” Kling said.
“What’d she do?”
“Maybe nothing,” Kling said.
“So what’s all the hysteria?” the cabbie asked, and threw the taxi in gear and made a wide U-turn in an area posted with “No U-Turn” signs, figuring, What the hell, he had a cop in the backseat.
“Not too close now,” Kling said. “Just don’t lose her.”
“You guys do this all the time?” the cabbie asked.
“Do what?”
“Ride taxis when you’re chasing people?”
“Sometimes.”
“So who pays for it?”
“We have a fund.”
“Yeah, I’ll just bet you have a fund. It’s the taxpayers are footing the bill, that’s who it is.”
“Don’t lose her, okay?” Kling said.
“I never lost nobody in my life,” the cabbie said. “You think you’re the first cop who ever jumped in my cab and told me to follow somebody? You know what I hate about cops who jump in my cab and tell me to follow somebody? What I hate is I get stiffed!. They run out chasing the guy, and they forget to pay even the tab, never mind a tip.”