Best Friends (3 page)

It was also true that Francine was extremely ardent in bed, or in any other venue in which they found themselves momentarily alone.

“Francine.”

“I don't care where you've been or who you've been doing,” said she in a voice made throatier by the phone than it was face to face. “I want you to come over.”

“Now?”

“Roy, if you had anything better to do right now, you would not be returning my call.” Having said which, she began to talk dirty. As usual, he was both appalled and aroused.

He began to rebutton his shirt.

S
am suffered sharp chest pains the next morning, not long after Kristin had left for the bank. Luckily it was one of the cleaning woman's days, for he was inept when a situation demanded a prompt response.

By the time Roy was notified, late in the afternoon, his friend was resting comfortably in a hospital room, having undergone an angioplasty and the insertion of a stent to keep the artery open. He should be out in two days.

Roy interpreted Kristin's staccato report as evidence of an intensity of emotion not apparent in her tone, which was mint-cool as always; much the same, he could assume, as that in which she conducted business.

“I'm relieved to get the good news as soon as I got the bad.” Though in reality he was somewhat hurt that he had been informed only now.

“You could see it as a warning,” said she. “He's a good fifty pounds overweight.”

What a time to criticize the man. Nevertheless, Roy found himself vocally agreeing. “I've been after him on that matter for years. Maybe he will have learned his lesson now.” He was appalled at how vapid that sounded in his internal echo. “When can I visit him?”

She gave him the hospital's schedule, then asked, “Know the first thing he said when he saw me? He wanted to know about the Stecchino.”

“Is that a medical term?”

“It's a fancy espresso machine from Italy. It came yesterday afternoon, too late for him to fire it up and give it a maiden run before you were due.”

“That's what he was doing this morning when he felt the chest pains?” Typical of Sam, who was competitive in such matters; he had to establish mastery over a new gadget before displaying it to his friend. Machinery, however powered, being as temperamental as it was, his insistence on putting his pride on the line this way was silly. It happened all too frequently that some new device he believed he dominated would wait until there was a witness on hand to see its sudden failure. At such times Sam might become violent toward the offending object. Roy once saw him fling a twenty-eight-hundred-dollar laptop into a blazing fireplace. At Roy's bon mot, “Now, there's a Grandyose gesture,” Sam had exploded in laughter. There was some reason to believe that he had been in an up mood throughout the incident. It was ominous news that an inanimate adversary could now seriously threaten his health.

“It's polished brass,” Kristin said. “All dials and little spigots and stands almost three feet high. Seven hundred something. For three cups a day.”

“
You
don't drink coffee, do you?” This was hardly news, and sounding the emphasis might be offensive—he was always worried about that possibility—but in fact it was apparently not so here, for she laughed almost carelessly. “I'm usually the joy-killer.”

Maybe it was his imagination, but he heard some poignancy in this statement, the first he had ever identified in her. But also, on general principles, his heart went out to self-critics. “Don't say that! It's not true. You've brightened that guy's life in every way. Take it from me.”

“But you're his friend.”

Roy found this seemingly straightforward assertion to be cryptic. It could mean anything from he was flattering her because her husband was ill to he was Sam's lifelong comrade whereas she was only the wife of a few years. “I sure am,” he said. “That's how I know.”

He was reassured to hear her say, simply, “Thank you.”

 

Sam was probably a little paler than usual and, if assessed by the eyes alone, older than when last seen, but there had certainly not been time as yet for him to diminish in bulk by reason of the starvation diet of which he had complained instead of saying hi.

He made the hospital bed, for all its attendant white and stainless-steel accessories, look smaller than it was. There was an incongruous white identification band on his thick hairy wrist.

“Next time smuggle me some rations. I'll
really
have a heart attack if I have to live long on the cat piss and bird poop they call food.”

“Yeah, a cheeseburger and a hot-fudge sundae,” said Roy, standing at the foot of the bed.

“Also a bottle of any decent double-malt Scotch.”

“If I know you, you mean it.” Roy shook his head. “Pathetic.” He located an enameled steel chair, drew it closer to the bed, and sat down. Sam was now considerably higher than he, a big dark head on the glaringly white pillow. “You're worried about your coffee machine?”

“I wondered if it got turned off before it exploded. I guess it did…. Maybe that thing's bad luck. Kris really hates it. Want to take it off my hands?”

“The Stickerino?”

Sam humorlessly corrected him. “The Stecchino. You won't find a superior—”

“Sure,” Roy told him quickly, finding a lecture on specialty-coffee-making at odds in this setting, that peculiar hospital-stench in his nostrils. “I'll get it tonight. I'll leave a check with Kristin.”

“No! I don't want her attention called to it. Just get it out of there before she comes home…. I'll give you the code. You won't have to write it down. It's—”

“What code?”

“The front door. Didn't you ever notice? Well, I guess you aren't supposed to. The keyhole's for show, but it's dead. The lock is controlled by the touchpad under the house-number plate, to the left of the door.”

“I'll be damned.”

“You won't even have to write it down,” Sam repeated. “It's my birth date, backward. Get it? Okay, you begin with
five sixteen sixty-seven.
You don't just switch it to
sixty-seven sixteen five.
That'd be too easy for somebody to figure out. What you do is reverse the entire thing to
seventy-six sixty-one five.
” He narrowed his eyes. “Got it?”

Roy sighed. “I guess so.” Their birthdays were only ten days apart. For most of their lives they had celebrated in common, on a chosen day between May 5th and 15th. “But I hope you're not telling me to go to your house and swipe the espresso machine while Kristin is at work.”

“That's exactly what I'm asking you to do. She'll get the idea immediately, and neither of us will ever mention it again.”

Was this an example of the kind of delicacy that characterized their marriage and was perhaps essential to its success? Roy was impressed. “All right.”

“Bring a blanket to wrap it in,” said Sam. “So the brass won't get scratched. Kris will already have tossed the bubblewrap.”

“Good idea.” Roy intended to take the machine straight from the Grandy house to Robin's. Not only did he not drink enough coffee to give the Stecchino the work it deserved, but his brother-in-law swallowed gallons of the Starbucks product daily and would surely be comforted by the limitless availability of latte at home, especially with the audit threat looming. Ross also remained a prodigious smoker of cigarettes. How he had lived to the age of fifty-one was a miracle. Roy sometimes reflected that he himself was the only man he knew whose habits were healthy, and yet he was one of the few without familial responsibilities.

He had intended to visit awhile longer with his friend, but Sam was anxious for him to get going, so as to reach the Grandy house while there was no chance of encountering Kristin, who would soon be leaving the bank and driving to the hospital before visiting hours expired.

“I'll make it up to you, kid,” said Sam, rolling his eyes as he thought of a suitable reward. “Next time I'll set you up with my day nurse. She couldn't be cuter: natural red hair, turned-up nose…”

Sam's idea of what attracted Roy was seldom Roy's own. Cuteness, for example, seemed a kind of infantilism to Roy, who had never been drawn to those who demonstrated it, even when he was quite young. In school and college, Sam had dated some cheerleaders, more than one of whom returned his interest though he was not, despite his size, a football player or in fact any other kind of athlete. He was even engaged for a short time, early on, to a girl named Honey Fitzgibbon, whose retroussé nose (always a winner with Sam) was covered with freckles and who walked with a bounce even when barefoot on sand. Kristin was nothing like her predecessors.

“You do what they tell you here,” Roy scolded. “Remember, you came to them for help, not vice versa.” The sermonizing was not like him. If he did more of it, Sam would likely jeer. “Okay, I'm on my way. Consider your problem solved.”

Having accepted the mission, he carried it out with more care than Sam had asked. He took the stairs instead of the elevator on the way out, should Kristin understandably have left work early. Driving the car, he used the rear exit from the parking lot, which debouched on to a back street used mostly for deliveries. He was again driving the Alvis.

The Grandys had bought an existing house with an agreeable stone façade that Sam considered not pulse-quickening enough by his standards; but as yet, so far as Roy knew, the idea of renovating the exterior had not come into play. Kristin might put up with her mate's extravagances of everyday living, but there were limits. Perhaps with this espresso-machine incident, a general pullback might be instituted, which Sam hoped to forestall by getting rid of the device.

The driveway was surfaced with gravel, more chic than blacktop but threatening to the paint on an automobile, vintage or otherwise. Sam saw this as a desirable check on those who might otherwise speed up it. So as not to offend Roy, who for
his
taste always drove too fast, he explained he meant the drunken or stoned teenagers who theoretically menaced prosperous neighborhoods, at least in old television movies. Despite what seemed a general naïveté, Sam regarded everything with a certain irony. Roy saw Sam as more complex than himself.

Roy considered himself pretty much an open book, though women seldom failed to be amazed when they heard that. What he meant was he liked the understandable things: comfort, convenience, good manners, affection; they were easy to name.

He continued along the stretch of driveway that led behind the house and, so as not to throw up a spatter of scarring pebbles, braked gently when he got there. The rear of the building was more glass than stone, with its big sunroom giving onto a tiled terrace, from which the pool, screened by a stand of poplars, was inconspicuous, though it was sizable when you swam there. Roy had occasionally done so, always alone, for Kristin apparently did not care for the sport, and though Sam did nothing to improve his figure, he was averse to revealing it.

At the door to the kitchen Roy remembered that Sam's directions had applied specifically to the coded buttons under the house-number panel near the front door. Naturally, no number was posted in back. Could that mean, for all the security out front, access to the rear was gained by a simple key? Unlikely with anyone else, but to be called possible if not probable in Sam's case.

Well, he could not find a key, either, though he suspected one was secreted someplace in the proximity of the door, perhaps in a fake plastic rock or another disguise. He ended up hiking around front and, using the prescribed method, which surprised him by functioning without a hitch, he entered the Grandy abode. From a blinking red light he became aware of another and more elaborate touchpad that flanked the front entrance on the inside. It was reasonable to assume that punching the code outdoors had disarmed the alarm system throughout the interior, but these gadgets were tyrannical by nature and usually required further pacification measures lest they exact raucous punishment.

Sam, of course, had neglected to instruct him to do more than spring the lock, but Roy punched in the same reversed birth date, with evident success, for the red light stayed on but stopping winking.

The house, unlike most others of his acquaintance, had no smell at all when entered. A restaurant-strength exhaust system disposed of culinary odors, which Roy thought was too bad, for Kristin's were aromas. The greatest contrast would be offered by Robin's residence when he delivered the coffee machine. Children, even though they personally did not stink except with loaded diapers, could cause a place to smell, sometimes by ricochet, so to speak: A grape-juice spill might be treated with a stain remover that left a chemical stench for hours.

In the kitchen the Stecchino was not as prominent as he anticipated. Kristin, or perhaps the Dominican cleaning woman, had moved it into the farthest corner of the polished granite counter at the perimeter of the room, as opposed to where Sam surely had installed it on the center island overhung by the glistening copper hood that housed the exhaust fan. Tall and heavy, bristling with dials, spouts, buttons, and levers, it was even gaudier than promised. Knowing what gadgetry could cost, more from Sam's experience than his own, he who preferred vintage stuff, he saw immediately that the “seven hundred something” of Kristin's estimate would not even be in the same ballpark with the true price.

He had forgotten the matter of padding. Sam was right that this machine should be handled with care—for the sake of the Alvis's upholstery; it was much too big to fit in the boot, which was to say, trunk.

His quest for the linen closet would probably take a while. Living only a few miles away, Roy had never stayed the night under this roof and had not visited the second floor since his initial tour of the place a week before the Grandys moved in. He felt uncomfortable as he mounted the central stairway and had to check an impulse to tiptoe through the upstairs hall as though he were an intruder. He hoped the search would not take him as far as their bedroom or bath.