Cold Night (Jack Paine Mysteries) (9 page)

In that moment he knew he didn't love her, if ever he had. There was no possibility of loving her because she did not love him.

Then suddenly his finger gave up its life to him. The storm ended. He felt everything again.

She walked to him and put her hand on the gun and pressed it to the kitchen table. She held it against the Formica. "I'll get you a cup of coffee," she said.

She made coffee, and he drank some, and while she was putting the cups in the sink he opened the cylinder of the .38 and saw the single bullet stare up at him from the chamber that would have fired.

He sat on the bed in the gray afternoon and looked at the gun in his hand now. There was no more alcohol and no more Ginny. But the same numbness was there that was always there, without the alcohol or with it. It had never gone away. That was what had put the gun in his hand, not the beer or scotch, or the fact that his wife didn't love him, or that his father had killed himself. There was still the fact that it was his own choice. When his finger was doing the job that night, the finger was him. His mind could produce all the metaphors it wanted, confuse them, change them around, but it would still be him. He knew that. But it made no difference because the numbness was still there.

He felt the weight of the gun in his hand. He slipped his fingers around the butt in a smooth motion and put his finger onto the trigger, feeling where it should go. Then he put the barrel to his temple and pulled the trigger.

"Bang," he said.

The gun said
click.

He took the barrel away from his head and turned the gun over and put it slowly back into the drawer, more carefully than he had handled the water glass in the kitchen, and he closed the drawer, and then he changed his shirt and jacket and went out into the gray world of sun.

TWELVE

I
n the gray jail cell, Mary Wagner looked shorter than she had standing with Les Paterna outside Bravura Enterprises. That was because Les Paterna had probably been shorter than he had looked behind his desk. Another businessman with deceptive interior decorating.

He would have to ask Barker if there was a listing in the Yellow Pages for magic furniture that turned creeps into big shots.

"How did you get in?" Mary Wagner asked him. She had been crying. Her mascara was smeared all around her eyes, giving them a haunted look. Up close, her hair coloring was apparent, the soft red locks giving way to mousy brown at the roots. Altogether, she didn't look as New York professional as he had thought. Trick lighting, no doubt.

"I told them I was your lawyer. The guard barely looked at me. He was arguing with his wife on the phone."

She looked at him and didn't even pretend to smile.

"Do you have a lawyer?" he asked her.

"I've got one," she said. "He's the Bravura Enterprises lawyer, Henry Kopiak." She was making nervous motions with the fingers of her right hand; the nicotine-stained place between her middle and forefinger was empty and she was obviously not used to that.

"Sorry, I don't have a cigarette," he said.

Abruptly, she began to cry.

"I had a fight with him," she sobbed, the way people do when they wish they had done one little thing differently which would have saved them from a big hole they had fallen into. "That was all. He was a pain in the ass sometimes, and last night he just got on my nerves. He picked me up at nine, we had a couple of drinks, then we went back to my apartment. He started to bother me, so I kicked him out." She wiped her hand across one eye, showing Paine the technique she had used to smear her mascara.

"Did you call him later?"

She gave him a look as if he really was a lawyer.

Paine waited.

"Yes," she said.

"What time?"

She hesitated. "I'm pretty sure it was around one-thirty."

"Pretty sure?"

"I kicked him out around midnight. I gave him time to get home, and a little more time to steam. I called him because I didn't want him mad at me."

"Because he was your boss?"

She looked at him, and a sob came.

"Do you think he killed himself?" Paine asked.

Again she smeared her mascara. "Oh, God, I don't know. I don't think so. He never talked that way. But I didn't know him all that well. He didn't tell me everything . . ."

"Did he tell you anything about the Grumbachs?"

"Only the business things. He never talked about much of anything."

"Did he ever talk about what he did before Bravura Enterprises?"

"He used to talk about it sometimes. But I got the impression he didn't like to. Like it was something to forget."

Paine took the two envelopes of photos from his pocket. He took the photographs out and handed them to her. She stopped at one of the three Dolores Grumbach had left for him, of a thin-faced man in his mid-forties with receding hair and long sideburns.

"That's Lucas Druckman; Les used to talk about him."

"Did you ever meet him?"

"No. Les kept a picture of him. He showed it to me once, after he'd had a few drinks. He told me that if I ever saw Lucas Druckman I should run the other way. He thought it was funny. He said it a couple of times."

"He thought it was funny?"

"He thought it was hilarious. He'd had a lot to drink . . ." She looked as though sobs were on the way again.

"Where did he have this picture?"

"He took it out of his desk." She moved her hand in front of her, remembering. "It was under the hanging files in the file drawer. I remember him pushing a bunch of them back to get at it. It was in a brown folder."

"Was there anything else in the folder?"

"I remember seeing some papers, maybe another picture."

Paine took the photos back from her and showed her the ones from the other envelope. They drew a blank. He took the photos back and then he called out through the cell bars, waiting for the jailer with the nagging wife to let him out.

"I don't think you have anything to worry about," he said to Mary Wagner. "If this lawyer Kopiak is any good, you'll be out in an hour. If he isn't any good, you'll be out in two hours."

A little light rose in her eyes; that was all she wanted to hear. Already she was beginning to realize how messy she looked; and Paine knew that after he left she would straighten her face and comb her hair. Pretty soon she'd be back out in the big bad world, and it would be time to be hired by some other middle-aged bozo who wanted a secretary who wouldn't mind looking up at him with round brown eyes, and show just enough leg to promise that leg led to thigh. And if her hair wasn't really red but mouse-brown, so what, it looked just fine in night light and that's all she needed. By the time the jailor arrived she was almost smiling.

Paine ate at the diner on Broadway and 250th Street, then he had more coffee and read the paper and waited for it to get very dark. When it got very dark he paid his check and left.

He parked three blocks from Bravura Enterprises and scouted carefully for the blue Chrysler or red Toyota. Neither was there. The door to the building was locked but it was an easy lock.

Once inside, he went past Mary Wagner's desk and down the hail to Paterna's office. He closed the door behind him. The blinds were already drawn so he turned on the desk light.

The file drawer in the desk had a lock on it, but that broke with only a penknife. Paterna's furniture wasn't so magical after all. Paine pushed back the blue hanging file folders and saw nothing. He rammed the folders back farther, and there, pushed to the back edge of the file, was a brown folder.

As he slid it forward and pulled it out, it slipped from his fingers and fell onto the rug, flipping open to show an empty interior.

"Shit," Paine said.

He picked the folder up and slid his fingernail along the edges. There was no split where something had been hidden. He tore the folder down the middle, telling himself that doing so was not frustration but a final check for a hiding place.

The folder turned into a ripped folder.

Paine threw the pieces into the trash can next to the desk. He started to push the file drawer closed, then stopped. He pushed the hanging folders back again, straining his fingers to the back of the drawer, sliding them from side to side. At first there was just smooth cool metal. Then his fingers found a slip of paper and he pulled it out.

One side was empty; on the other was scrawled the name Izzy, the number 33,000 and a Los Angeles phone number.

Paine put the slip of paper in his pocket and left the office. He turned out the light behind him.

O
utside Paine's door someone moved in the shadows. He turned, ready, but it was Rebecca Meyer. "You didn't answer your phone," she said.

"I wasn't home," Paine said. He opened the door for her and she went in. As she passed, something stirred in him, deep down. It was something primal, animal, but it wasn't only sexual. It both frightened and elated him.

She took off her coat. Her hair was more feminine today, brushed back from a center part. She looked older. She was wearing makeup. Her tennis togs were gone, replaced by slacks and a loose cotton blouse that didn't hide the fact that she was not wearing a bra. Paine thought of Ginny, the sweater she had worn, the one that had shown off her breasts.

He decided he had a thing about breasts.

"Do you have anything to drink?" she asked, sitting in one of the armchairs that had held Ginny's bags the day before.

"Ginger ale," he said, turning to get her one from the kitchen before she could say that's not what she meant.

When he turned from the refrigerator with the can, she was standing in front of him. She moved closer. Her face was flushed, through her makeup, as if she had played hard tennis and enjoyed it. Her eyes were filled with intelligence that had been sublimated by something more basic, a human drive that was the basis of life itself.

She took the can from him and he didn't see where she put it.

He didn't need her help this time. There was no laughter between them, no wordplay; there was something frighteningly elemental and unavoidable that removed them from the realm of human debate and made them part of nature. For the first time since he was a young boy and had lain out on the grass under the clouds, imagining himself one with those clouds, moving east with them through the thin pure blue air out to sea, he forgot who he was. He was not Jack Paine but a process, a force like the clouds or wind. There was no thought or time attached to what he was—he was outside thought or time. He was both bathed in release and horribly frightened.

Sometime during the night, it ended, and he became Jack Paine again.

She lay on the bed, and he lay next to her, and there were two of them again instead of one.

Paine stared at the ceiling. "How long did you wait for me outside the door?"

She shrugged, distracted. The flush had receded from her face. She turned gently away from him on the bed, slipping one hand under her head and staring at the window, away from him. For a moment he thought she had fallen asleep.

"I don't know if
I'm
in love with you or not," she said.

If she had said it a different way, Paine might have laughed. But the way she spoke, as if her mind was as unsure as her body had been sure, made him say instead, "Does it matter?"

She shrugged, or maybe it was a shudder.

"I never loved Gerald," she said.

"That's easy to believe."

"I don't know if I've ever really loved anybody, except maybe Dolores." She spoke almost to herself.

Paine let her have silence.

"When we were little girls, Dolores and I played together when she wasn't reading. We had a cat then, and we dressed him up like he was a baby. Dolores was the father and I was the mother. I had to cook on a toy wooden stove I'd gotten one Christmas. I always had to make turkey, because that was Dolores's favorite meal. We always had it on Thanksgiving and then on Christmas, and Dolores said if we had it all the time then it would always be Christmas. I had a toy ironing board, and a little toy iron from F.A.O. Schwarz that really plugged into the wall and got a little warm on the bottom. I had to iron clothes for the cat, and I had to clean and make dinner. My mother never did those things because we had servants for all that, but in our game that was the way we did it.

"As the father, Dolores would come home from her job, and I would lay out the turkey dinner on our play table, with a real little red checkered tablecloth on it, and with plastic vegetables and even plastic cranberry sauce. Dolores would get my father's
Times
from the morning and read it at the table. She even had one of my father's old pipes, and she pretended to smoke it after the meal was finished. We always had chocolate cake for dessert, because Dolores liked it. She had chocolate cake every birthday, with chocolate icing. I fought with her sometimes, because I wanted to be the father and try the pipe and read the paper, but she never let me."