He got back in bed. “If I have them in the house, I might light up without even thinking about it. The patch will take care of the physical withdrawal. I might miss the oral gratification, though.” He looked down at her. “Maybe I’ll think of something,” he said.
They thought about going out for dinner, wound up ordering from Hunan Pan. He put on a record, Thelonious Monk, solo piano. They sat cross-legged on the bed, eating off paper plates, listening to the music. Afterward he pulled up a chair and asked her how she knew. “Before you read the books. What made you order them in the first place?”
“When I met you,” she said, “I felt something.”
“So did I, though it didn’t register consciously. I was high as a kite on the auction and everything that went with it. I told you what Roger Delacroix said.”
“Yes.”
“But there had to be a reason why I kept your card. It’s still in my sock drawer. I missed my chance to call, but I wasn’t going to throw away your number. What made you come over to the table, though? The whole room must have been talking about my book deal. From a jail cell to the bestseller list, ladies and gentlemen. You wanted to see what kind of guy made that kind of leap?”
She shook her head. “I was already interested in you.”
“How come?”
“I can’t explain it, not in any way that makes sense. I was drawn to you before I knew your name. Or what you looked like, or anything about you.”
“That’s very mysterious.”
“I know, and I don’t mean to be mysterious. I’m trying to think how to say this, but what difference does it make? I’ll just say it. I knew Marilyn Fairchild.”
“Oh.”
“Not well, we weren’t friends, we were barely acquaintances. She found me my apartment. We were friendly enough, but I never saw her after that. And then I heard she’d been killed, and there are murders every day, it’s a fact of life, but somehow...”
“It got to you.”
“I wondered who it could be, how it could have happened. And then they announced your arrest, and it turned out you were a writer, you lived in the Village. It wasn’t some degenerate who crawled out of the sewer, some drooling psychopath who spent his childhood wetting the bed and torturing animals. She met some guy in a bar and took him home and he killed her.”
Before he could say anything she put a hand on his wrist. “I know you didn’t do it,” she said. “But I didn’t know then.”
“How could you? How could anyone?”
“When I learned that was you at Stelli’s, I had to go over there, I had to meet you, to introduce myself. I didn’t know that was your agent, she could have been a wife or a girlfriend, but I had to do what I did. Of course I heard about your good news, the place was buzzing with it, and maybe that gave you more of an aura, I don’t know, but I think I’d have done the same thing anyway.”
A lot to take in, he thought. He leaned forward, touched his finger to the underside of her breast. “When did you get the piercing done?”
“A couple of months ago. Do you like them?”
“Yes, but it must have hurt.”
“It’s an interesting story,” she said, “and one I’ve never told. It’s a long story, though.”
“It’s not as though I’ve got a train to catch.”
“It may show me in an unflattering light.” She sat up on the bed, gathered her legs under her. “But maybe that’s important. You have to know who I am.”
“You never went back.”
“No,” she said, and touched her nipples. “I decided these were enough.”
“And once with Medea was enough?”
“Well, that was her decision. If I went a second time, it would be a simple business transaction.”
“You think she’d have stuck to her guns?”
“Maybe I could have changed her mind. But maybe not. She’s a strong woman, she seems to know what she wants and what she doesn’t want. And maybe once was enough. One piercing was enough.”
“Two.”
“One session of piercing, then. One visit to the piercer. Did you like the story?”
“Well, take a look,” he said. “Consider the physical evidence.”
She reached out, took hold of his hardened penis, held it gently in her cool hand. “I knew your cock would like it,” she said. “What about your mind? Do you like me as much as before you heard the story?”
“More.”
“Because now you know I’m hot?”
“I already knew that. No, because I know you better.”
“And the better you know me, the more you like me? I wonder if that will be true when you hear the rest.”
“I thought you only saw her once.”
“There are other people. I have a lot of stories, and you might not like them all.”
“Try me.”
“Not tonight. It’s late, and you have a book to finish. And I’ve already cost you a day’s work.”
“I got some work done before Maury called.”
“And you’ll work tomorrow, but when will you stop working? And would you like me to come over?”
“Come around dinnertime. Say six-thirty? We’ll have an early dinner in the neighborhood, then come back here. And Scheherazade can tell me another story.”
twenty-seven
At twilight, a trim gentleman in his later years walked at a brisk pace in Riverside Park, approaching the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin. He wore a navy blazer with brass buttons, a pair of white canvas trousers, and a black-billed white cap in the style of a Greek fisherman. He stepped confidently onto the floating dock and walked to his boat, the Nancy Dee. A couple of other boaters saw him and greeted him with a word or a wave, and he acknowledged them with a sort of half-salute, raising his right hand, index finger extended, to shoulder height.
He climbed aboard the ship, and in due course piloted the small vessel away from the pier and out onto the Hudson River.
It would have been simpler, the Carpenter thought, if Peter Shevlin hadn’t gone straight to his boat. If he’d gone home to change first into his idea of what a proper yachtsman ought to wear. But no, he’d gone from the subway to the restaurant and then directly to the Nancy Dee, almost as if he knew this would be his last night at the helm and wanted to maximize his time on the water.
So he’d been wearing business clothes, quite useless to the Carpenter. On the other hand, perhaps it was as well that the man had been bareheaded. A cap might have cushioned the blow.
It had been easy enough to find a blazer. All the thrift shops had them, and he’d been patient enough to search until he found one that was a perfect fit. It was missing one of its cuff buttons, and frayed the least bit at the collar, but that just made it look like a treasured old garment, the veteran of years of faithful service.
The white duck trousers were new, purchased at the bargain store in Greenpoint, along with a fresh supply of socks and underwear. The Greek fisherman’s cap had been harder to find, and he’d decided that any white cap would do, then happened on a store on Eighth Street that sold nothing but caps and had every imaginable kind, including just the one he was looking for. It was a perfect fit, too, which would probably not have been the case with Shevlin’s. The man had had a small head.
Which, minus its teeth, now rested somewhere on the bottom of this very river, wrapped up tightly in plastic along with the tire iron that had served so well to dent Shevlin’s skull and, in due course, to knock the teeth from his jaw. It had done good service, the Carpenter thought, and deserved burial at sea, as did Shevlin, or what was left of him.