Immoral Certainty (11 page)

The booths were lit with red glass candle lamps and divided above the seat backs by sheets of glass. Anna sipped her rum-and-Coke and studied her reflection. Not bad for nearly thirty. Good eyes, large and black; straight, sharp nose with flaring nostrils. Could have used some more chin, though. It went double the minute she gained a pound over one-ten. Her black hair had been arranged around her small head in a pixie cut, for an outrageous forty-two fifty. The reflection was flattering, she knew. It didn’t show the lines.

The other women in Larry’s were brassy-looking, hot-panted, heavily made-up, and loud. Anna had worn her best little black dress, the only thing she owned from the better dresses department of Macy’s. Now nobody could see it, or the haircut, and if they could, she began to fear, they would think she looked mousy and square.

They all looked like criminals, she thought, but what would a schoolteacher from the Bronx know about how big-time international executives disported themselves. That’s how Felix had described himself when she had timidly brought up the subject of his profession. He always seemed to have money, though. She vaguely recalled that in the old days rich people would hang out with gangsters in speakeasies, for the thrill of it. Maybe this was what was happening now. She tried to feel thrilled.

The other man got up and left, gold chains jingling. Felix finished his Chivas and water and gestured to the waitress for another. He reached over, patted Anna’s hand, and smiled. Anna got the hot chills when Felix smiled at her like that. She felt herself blushing like a kid.

They talked, or Felix talked and she listened, rapt. He had been everywhere and done everything. College at Yale, then Harvard for an M.B. A. On the fast track at several big companies. Business adventures in Europe and the Far East. Driving race cars and piloting his own plane. His life among the glitter people of New York. Did she see him in
People
two months ago? In the picture with Angie Dickinson and Joe Namath? Yes, she had, she admitted. Maybe she had.

What she did know for certain was that for the past four weeks she had been engaged in the hottest affair of her life, as hot as her dreams, long nights and whole weekends full of pounding, ferocious sex. Anna had been to Hunter and had a reasonably sharp brain. Where Felix was concerned, however, it was disengaged in favor of another set of organs entirely.

Now he was talking about the problems he was having with his condominium. “… anyway, then I said to him, ‘Mr. MacReady, I don’t know what kind of people you’re used to dealing with, but I’m not used to being treated this way. My contract specifically guarantees a sauna and a Jacuzzi. I am not satisfied with your excuses. Our dealings are at an end. You will hear from my attorney.’ You should’ve seen the expression on his face.

“So I packed my bags and left. My lawyer, my
attorney,
advised me. He said if I was living there, you know, it would be, like, implied consent.”

“Where have you been staying?”

“Oh, in hotels. My club. But, you know, it’s apt to be a long wait. I mean, it’ll go to court, and all.”

“Yeah, maybe you could rent a furnished place, temporarily.”

Felix looked mournful and sighed. “Yeah. Yeah, I could do that, but … Oh, hell, Anna, I’m tired of living alone! I’m so sick of that golden life I lead. It’s so hollow. I need somebody to share with. Somebody real. Somebody like … like you.”

Anna, a perfect child of the movies and television, took this in without a qualm. A lump filled her throat and tears of joy and gratitude sprang into her eyes.

“Gosh, Felix, I don’t know what … Oh, God, I’m gonna cry.”

“Ah, Baby Doll, don’t. You know how I feel about you.”

She dabbed at her eyes with a crumpled tissue, hoping that her mascara would not run. She said, “When, ah, what do you want? I mean, you want me to move into your place, or what?”

Felix smiled. Anna saw love-light in his smile, but what Felix was thinking was what a great line that was, a line that never failed. He thought it was a winner the first time he heard it on
As the World Turns
a couple of years back. (Felix watched a good deal of daytime TV.) He had written it down in his notebook and used it often.

He squeezed her hand. “Ah, you’re a honey, all right. We can talk about that later. Hey, I’m hungry. Let’s go to dinner.”

And they did, at a very nice little Mexican restaurant in the Village. Felix took her to a different restaurant every time they went out and always paid with one of his large collection of credit cards. “Corporate cards,” Felix called them, and they must have been, because for sure none of them had Felix’s name on them.

Although the summer night was fine and warm, they took a cab back to Anna’s place. It was a two room third floor walk-up on Avenue A, in what realtors called the East Village. The neighborhood was druggy, but the building was fairly clean, and the rent only took two-thirds of her schoolteacher’s take-home. She clerked three nights a week at Macy’s to get by.

The street was lively with kids and strollers as they got out of the cab. While Felix paid, Anna was hailed by a woman sitting on the wide stone ledge. It was her neighbor from down the hall. Anna went over to chat with her and when Felix approached she introduced her.

“Felix Tighe, my friend, Stephanie Mullen.”

Felix took the woman’s hand and shook it, holding it for slightly longer than the woman wanted, as he always did. He smiled to show it was just fun.

“Any friend of Anna’s is a friend of mine,” he said. Stephanie’s smile in return was slight and forced. Anna said, “Stephanie is the building celebrity.”

“Come on, Anna,” said Stephanie, grimacing.

“No, really, Felix. She was married to Willie Mullen, the bass guitar for The Blue Disease,
and
she was one of the original Jersey Turnpikes.” Anna started swaying and singing a song that Felix recognized.

Felix looked at the woman with renewed interest. A hit song they still played meant big money. Why was she living in a dump like this? She wasn’t bad looking for an old broad, he thought. Long blond hair, in hippie braids. Nice big tits and she wasn’t wearing any bra under that T-shirt. He turned up the voltage on his smile.

Stephanie waved her hand as if shooing away flies.

“Stop it, Anna! That was a million years ago. Christ Almighty, every time that thing comes on the radio I practically break my neck trying to turn it off. The kid keeps moving the dial to the oldie station, the little tramp!”

“Your kid, huh?” asked Felix, his interest in Stephanie Mullen draining a little.

“Yeah,” said Stephanie, looking down the street. “That’s him there.”

She pointed to a sturdy yellow-haired boy of about seven years trotting down the street toward them, blasting the passing cars and lounging people with beams from a plastic ray gun. He wore dusty jeans and a Darth Vader T-shirt and his round face was flushed with play.

Stephanie grabbed him as he passed by and plopped him on her lap. He laughed and struggled in her grip. She hugged him tighter and said, “Hey, you know what time it is? School day tomorrow. Time for a bath and bed.”

“Nooo, Ma! It’s still light out. All the kids’re playing,” he complained.

“Don’t make no never mind to me. Come on. Say hello good-night to Anna. And Felix.”

“G’night Anna,” said the boy, squirming out of his mother’s grasp.

“Good night, Jordy,” said Anna, beaming.

The boy looked at Felix unsmilingly for a moment. Then he played the red beam of his gun slowly up and down Felix’s body, from knees to head. Felix’s smile grew tight. In the red beam of the gun it looked to Stephanie almost demonic, not a human expression at all.

“Cute,” Felix said.

“Yeah, he’s my doll, aren’t you, Jordy?” said Anna.

“I’m a Jedi!” shouted the boy, and ran up the steps into the apartment house.

“I got to go,” said Stephanie, rising. Her jeans were skin-tight, almost white with wear, ragged and covered with patches and embroidery.

Felix followed the roll of her backside as she climbed the stairs. Definite possibilities there, he thought, if it weren’t for the kid.

Later, Felix lay in bed, exhausted, watching the smoke from Anna’s cigarette curl toward the ceiling. She ran her fingers along his thigh, along the high ridges of muscle.

“What a man!” she said. “I feel like a million bucks.”

Felix grunted. He was dying for a cigarette. He said, “You know what? You smoke too much.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, baby. Does it bother you?”

“Yeah. Put it out.”

As she did so, he sat up abruptly in the bed. He felt antsy. He was thinking about Stephanie Mullen. When he moved in here, Anna would be at work all day and a couple of nights a week. Maybe he could work something out there.

He felt Anna’s lips brush his shoulder. Christ, the woman never got enough! But he figured he’d already paid the rent. He climbed out of bed and started poking around for his underwear in the heaps of clothes scattered around the room.

“Felix? What’re you doing, honey?”

“Getting dressed.”

“Dressed? Aren’t you coming back to bed?”

“Can’t, babes. You remember, I told you I had a big meeting tomorrow, early. Power breakfast.”

“You did? I don’t remember. I thought, you know, we could spend the night together.”

“Hey, I
told
you. You saying I don’t know what I told you?”

“No. No, of course not, but … it just seems weird, you running off in the middle of the night. Like you were going back to your wife.” She laughed, a sharp titter with little amusement in it.

Felix grunted something about business being business and slipped into his Italian loafers. He kissed her briefly. “I’ll call you,” he said.

Felix walked to the IND station at Houston Street and took the F train to Jackson Heights. He walked to an apartment house not more than a quarter of a mile from where he had been arrested and rode the elevator to the third floor. He opened the lock on apartment 302, eased the door open a few inches and slid his hand inside, lifting a loop of wire off a nail stuck in the inside of the door. He entered the apartment and switched on the light. The living room was furnished with a cheap new living room set in gold velvet. A couple of flower prints and a karate exhibition poster were tacked to the walls.

The most unusual furnishing was a chrome kitchen chair standing in front of the entrance door, a chair that had a cut-down twelve-gauge two-barrel shotgun affixed to its back with duct tape. The wire that Felix had just removed from the door led through a small pulley taped to the leg of the chair and ended at the triggers of the gun. The weapon was set to blow the belly out of anyone who came through the door without first detaching the wire.

Felix walked to the kitchen and took half a loaf of sliced white bread out of the refrigerator. Leaning next to the refrigerator was a piece of broomstick about ten inches long, with a straightened steel coathanger attached to it with duct tape. Felix picked this up too and went into the hallway outside the kitchen.

There was a door in this hallway, shut with a padlock on a shiny new hasp. Felix opened the padlock and went through. On the other side of the door was a short hall, with doors leading to a bathroom and a bedroom. He heard a metallic sound as he approached the bedroom door, the clinking of a long chain moving.

Felix smiled and swished the coathanger through the air a few times, making it whistle. A whining groan, weak and high-pitched came from the room. The bed creaked. Felix went through the door. “Hi, honey, I’m home,” he said.

CHAPTER
6

L
os Angeles was as Karp remembered it: compared to the City it was warmer, sported brighter colors, and the crazy people were in cars rather than stumbling down the street. The sun was impossibly high in the sky when he arrived at his hotel, a unit of one of the tackier lodging chains. It was on a gritty side-street off Sepulveda, convenient to the brake job and bodywork district, and was what he could afford on the miserable per diem paid by the New York D.A.’s office, which did not approve of foreign travel for its agents—except, of course, for the D.A. himself, who was out of town being famous half the year.

Karp felt cranky and disoriented and knew he would sleep badly. He didn’t like to fly or drive. He liked to walk.

He remembered jet lag from the days of his marriage, when he had made the coast-to-coast trip several times a year to visit his in-laws. They paid. He went to the window of his room and looked out past the tiny balcony to the heat-shimmering parking lot and the freeway beyond. He opened the window and the thick air of L.A. summer flowed around him, a melange of smog, chile, eucalyptus and eroded mountains.

It jogged his memory again, and he found himself thinking about Susan, and the uncomfortable occasions he had spent as a guest in her parents’ house in Bel Air. Four years ago, she had gone back to California. She hadn’t actually left him. She was going to get a Masters degree at UCLA. It was a very modern arrangement.

He tried to remember her as she had been in their apartment in New York, and found that he could not, that the image that came to his mind was the nineteen-year-old cheerleader he had married. He remembered a round, open face, a dusting of pale freckles, the red-gold ponytail swaying, the long, tan California legs flashing as she leaped on the sidelines at basketball games. That was before he screwed up his knee.

A perfect girl. A perfect marriage. Right now he should be living here, in Westwood or Beverly Hills, after a successful pro basketball career, probably a partner in her father’s law firm, probably a couple of kids. He felt his chest tighten. That had been one of their jokes: He wanted five boys, so he could coach. He’d be wearing white Guccis now, and doing deals for sitcom stars.

Would it have made any difference if he had stayed? Once again Karp experienced the feeling of hopeless confusion, and an embarrassment bordering on hysteria, that came over him when he recalled the breakup of his marriage. It was like a parody of the sixties, something out of a TV soap: husband preoccupied, wife runs away and joins lesbian commune.