“You’re thirty-nine?”
“Fuck you.”
He laughed, delighted. “So you’re thirty-seven. Two years is worth fuck you?”
“We were a year apart,” she went on, “and she was a successful professional woman living alone in the Village, and I’m a successful professional woman living alone in Chelsea, and, oh, I don’t know...”
“You identified.”
“I’m taller by an inch or two. Her figure was fuller. Her hair had a lot of red in it, but I have a hunch it would have been the same dark brown as mine without professional intervention. I don’t smoke, but she did, and that may have given her the throaty voice. She liked a drink.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Did I identify? I suppose.”
“ ‘If it could happen to her...’ ”
“It could happen to me.” She frowned. “Maury, you called me, and probably not because I was thinking of you.”
“I don’t know. Your thoughts are pretty powerful.”
“What did you want?”
“I was thinking it’s been a while, and I was thinking we should have dinner.”
“You still married, Maury?”
“Like you and your apartment,” he said. “Till the day I die.”
“That’s good, and I’d love to have dinner with you. Not tonight, I hope, because—”
“Tonight’s no good for me either. I was thinking the day after tomorrow.”
“Let me check... That’s Friday night? I accept with pleasure.”
“I’ll call you when I know where and when. It’ll be someplace nice.”
“I’m sure it will. And I’ll look forward to it, unless someone strangles me in my bed between now and then. I hope they catch the son of a bitch.”
“They probably will.”
“I hope they put him away.”
“Again, they probably will,” he said. “Unless he gets a good lawyer.”
three
Later on, he could never get over the fact that he’d actually welcomed the interruption. The doorbell rang and he heard it over the music and rose eagerly from his chair, came out from behind his desk, and hurried to let them in.
And his life would never be the same again.
There were two of them, two clean-shaven short-haired white guys wearing suits and ties and polished shoes, and his first thought was that they were Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses, because who else dressed like that outside of bankers and corporate lawyers, and when did those guys start going door to door? And if they had been religious fanatics, well, hell, he probably would have invited them in and listened respectfully to what they had to say, even poured them cups of coffee if their religion allowed them to have it. Not out of fear of hell or hope of heaven, but because it had to be better than staring at a PC monitor on which words stubbornly refused to appear.
An hour ago he had written He walked over and opened the window. He’d stared at it for a while, then deleted and, replacing it with a comma. He played a hand of solitaire before highlighting the last four words of the sentence and replacing them with to the window and opened it. He looked at that, shook his head, highlighted opened it, and changed it to flung it open.
Nothing happened, except that Coltrane gave way to Joshua Redman and cigarette butts began to fill the ashtray. Then, a few minutes before the doorbell sounded, he’d deleted the entire sentence. And now he’d pushed the button to open the downstairs door, and then he’d walked over and opened the door to his apartment, and you could play with that sentence all you wanted, but here he was, standing in the doorway, and there they were, coming up the stairs, and...
“Mr. Creighton? I’m Detective Kevin Slaughter and this is Detective Alan Reade. Could we talk with you?”
“Uh, sure,” he said.
“May we come in?”
“Oh, right,” he said, and stepped back. “Sure. Come right in, guys.”
They did, and sent their eyes around the room, not at all shy about looking at things. He’d noticed that about cops, had watched uniformed officers in the subway and on the street, staring right at people without the least embarrassment.
He stood six two, a bear of a man, big in the chest and shoulders, with a mane of brown hair and a full beard that he trimmed himself. His waist was a little thicker than he’d have liked, but not too bad. He stood a good two inches taller than Slaughter, who in turn was an inch or two taller than Reade.
Slaughter was lean, wiry — reedy, Creighton thought, while Reade was anything but, and had a gut on him that the suit jacket couldn’t hide. They were younger than he was, but that was true of more people every year, wasn’t it? Midthirties, at a guess, and he was forty-seven, which was still pretty young, especially when you kept yourself in decent shape, but it was closer to fifty than forty, closer to sixty than thirty, closer to the grave than to the cradle, and—
And they were standing in his studio apartment, looking at his things, looking at him.
“What’s this about?”
“Music’s a little loud,” Slaughter said. “Any chance you could turn it down a notch?”
“Somebody complained about the music? Jesus, at this hour? I remember years ago we had a saxophone player across the courtyard, he used to practice at all hours, thought he was Sonny Rollins and this was the Williamsburg Bridge, but—”
“It’s just a little hard to talk over,” Slaughter said smoothly. “Nobody complained.”
“Oh, sure,” he said, and lowered the volume. “So if it’s not the music...”
“Just a few questions,” Reade said. His voice was reedy, even if he wasn’t. And Slaughter asked if this was a bad time, and he said that it wasn’t, that he welcomed the interruption, that he’d been writing the same stupid sentence over and over.
“After a while,” he said, “the words stop making sense. They don’t even look right, you find yourself staring at the word cat and wondering if it’s supposed to have two ts.”
“You’re a writer, Mr. Creighton?”
“Sometimes I wonder. But yes” — he indicated the big oak desk at the side of the room, the computer, the big dictionary on its stand, the rack of briar pipes — “I’m a writer.”
“Have you had anything published?” It was Slaughter who asked, and he must have rolled his eyes in response, because the man said, “I’m sorry, was that a stupid question?”
“Well, maybe a little,” he said, and softened the remark with a grin. “I suppose there are people who’d call themselves writers without having published anything, and who’s to say they don’t have the right? I mean, look at Emily Dickinson.”
Reade said, “Friend of yours?” and Creighton looked at him and couldn’t say for sure if the guy was playing him.
“Nineteenth-century poet,” he said. “She never published anything during her lifetime.”
“But you have.”
“Six novels,” he said. “Working on number seven, and the only thing that sustains me on days like this is reminding myself they were all like this.”
“Tough going, you mean.”
“Not every day, some days it’s like turning on a faucet. It just flows. But every book had days like this, and a couple of them had whole months like this.”
“But you make a living at it.”
“I’m forty-seven years old and I live in one room,” he said. “You do the math.”
“Just the one room,” Reade said, “but it’s got some size to it. Plenty of landlords’d throw up a couple of walls, call it a three-room apartment.”
You could stick a plank out the window, he thought, and call it a terrace.