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Authors: Sarah Shankman

Tags: #Thriller, #Suspense

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BOOK: Impersonal Attractions
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“Well, my dear, this is certainly your chance to find out. See, I told you you’d get into this.”

“Oh, damn, he’ll be out of town until next Thursday. Can I wait that long?”

“Why not? You’ve waited your whole life. Anyway, I thought you were complaining about how busy you are. Sure you’ve got time for Mr. Andrews?”

“Of course. I mean, I am busy. And I do have time. For
this.
Jeez, I almost forgot to tell you. I got some responses to the other ad too. Some good ones.”

“Yes?”

“A black female lawyer, a lesbian transplanted from New York, a bisexual painter.” She fanned a hand. “Could be some very kinky stuff there.”

“Speaking of kinky, want to hear about my freeway cruiser?”

“God! Just talking about me, me, me. I’m sorry, I forgot.”

“I guess he did too. Or maybe he just got cold feet. He never showed.”

“After all that!”

“Takes all kinds. But I did run into Sean O’Reilly and we had dinner together.”

“Well, that’s not a bad trade-off. San Francisco’s Finest’s nomination for hunk of the year. He is that gorgeous detective, isn’t he? The tall one, with the dark red hair, the flashing white teeth, the broad shoulders, the big gun. Did I miss anything?”

“No, that’s him all right. But you left out the strawberry birthmark on his right shoulder.”

“Sam! You devil. Did you?”

“No, silly. I’m teasing. We just ate dinner and talked shop. Murder shop. That guy who killed his parents on Mt. Diablo probably isn’t the trail killer.”

“Oh, no.”

“And worse news. Sondra Weinberg?”

“Right! I meant to ask you about that the other day. Any leads?”

“Nothing. Except more of the same.”

“What do you mean?”

“Afraid it looks like the first in a series. Sean said the body of a black woman was found yesterday in her apartment on the edge of the Mission. Looks like the same handiwork. Rape, strangulation, and a knife. Woman named Cindy Dunbar.”

“Oh, Lord!”

“I know. Let’s change the subject.”

“Okay.” But Annie was pensive as she stirred her coffee.

“What?”

“I don’t know. They’re making me nervous, all these murders. I’m beginning to imagine things.”

“Like what?”

“Well…it was probably nothing. But the other night I stayed late in my classroom at State to do some paperwork. It’s always a little creepy out there with no one around.”

“Just you and the sea gulls.”

“Stop interrupting. I finished up and started walking toward my car and I heard footsteps behind me. I stopped and fished around in my bag for my keys—and the footsteps stopped too.”

“Yikes.”

“I know. That’s when I got really nervous. So no fooling around, I was really moving, almost running, and so was he.”

“He?”

“I didn’t figure it was a woman. Sounded like a man. Anyway, just when I got to the car, I couldn’t stand it any longer and I wheeled around.”

“And?”

“Nobody there.”

“What!”

“Just disappeared. I was so scared, I slammed my jacket in the door, but I wasn’t opening it for anything.”

“So what do you think?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I just imagined the whole thing. Maybe it was the wind. Maybe your work”—she reached over and tweaked Sam on her lovely nose—“is getting to
me.

“Well, let’s go get some Woody Allen to aerate our brains.” Sam snagged the passing waitress and paid the check.

Out on the sidewalk, Annie asked, “This isn’t a funny one, is it?”

“No, the reviews said
real
serious.”

They exchanged a look.

“Okay, okay,” Sam agreed. “I know you’re dying to see the Divine Miss M. Let’s do it.”

“You’re so good to me, Missy Samantha,” Annie said, fooling around. “I should be so lucky as to find a man like you.”

“You should be, but your chances are slim to nothing. What is it Gloria Steinem said? ‘We’ve become the men we were waiting for.’”

“Aw, come on, Sammie, let’s don’t get serious about that tonight.”

“You’re right. And you’re probably going to find a perfectly wonderful man. Every bit as cute as me. Right here.” She patted the letters in Annie’s tote. “But while you’re doing this thing, be careful, okay?”

“Sure. But if anything ever does happen to me, you promise me one thing.”

“This is your last wish?”

“Right.”

“What?”

“Promise me you’ll sprinkle my ashes over Robert Redford.”

FOURTEEN

The classroom Annie used at State two nights a week was standard: green chalkboard, rows of uncomfortable desks, a NO SMOKING
sign that she sometimes chose to ignore posted prominently above the podium. But she hoped her classes in creative writing weren’t standard. She really worked to make them good.

“Pass your papers around the circle to me, please,” Annie said. “It’s show-and-tell time.”

The class groaned. Becky Beckwith stammered, “But you didn’t tell us you were going to read them out loud. Mine is very personal.”

“They’re all personal, Ms. Beckwith. Everyone’s story is about a personal experience of meeting someone.”


Mine’s
so personal, this chick’s gonna blush if she reads it out loud,” a tall, young, black man said to his friend.

How little he knew, Annie thought. She hoped some of them would be that good. Grist for her own mill.

She read through the first one quickly. Gladys Chiu, a meter maid, had met her husband Dennis while giving him a parking ticket. He had raised hell with her until he’d noticed the tears rolling down her cheeks. By way of apology, he had insisted on taking her to dinner, and eight months later Dennis was walking her down the aisle.

“Gladys, you one brave lady,” commented the young, black man, whose name was Cornell. “You be giving me a ticket, I sure wouldn’t be marrying you.” Cornell winked at Gladys and flashed Annie a smile, testing the waters. Was banter cool in her class?

She read a few more stories—nothing out of the ordinary.

Cornell volunteered to read his own. He had met his current lady love on the #22 Fillmore bus, which, as it snaked its way from Pacific Heights down through the ghetto of the Western Addition, was better known for muggings and mayhem than romance.

“I was sitting there, reading my karate magazine, and I looked up and there was this chick that knocked me out, man. She was beautiful. She had this little kid in one arm and a bunch of packages in the other and she was trying to stand up on the bus in these skinny high heels. So naturally, being the gentleman that I am,” Cornell’s smile was a dazzler, “I gave her my seat, snowed her with my rap, carried her packages home for her, and man, I ain’t hardly gone home since. Cynthia is one fine lady, for sure.”

“You gonna marry her, blood?” asked Cornell’s friend Mac.

“I don’t know, my man, but if I do, it’s gonna be on the Twenty-two Fillmore and we gonna dress you up like the MUNI man and let you collect the fares.”

The class laughed. It was nice to see them relaxed, having a good time. Of course, the revisions weren’t going to be so much fun.

Eve Gold, a blonde whose zoftig good looks were holding into her early sixties, reached across Annie’s chair, gold bracelets ajingle, to take her paper. She too wanted to read it herself.

Eve had left Long Island years earlier, but her accent would always give her origins away. She patted her carefully coiffed hair and began.

“My daughter Linda is married to her stepbrother. My husband Al is married to his son’s mother-in-law.”

Eve smiled around the circle as people shook their heads, trying to get a handle on what she’d just said. It was a practiced line, one that Eve knew would get them every time.

She continued. “It happened like this. One, my daughter Linda married Richard Gold, who is now a doctor. Two, my husband Leonard died. Three, Richard’s mother, Al’s wife died. Four, I married Al, Richard’s father, my daughter Linda’s father-in-law. But,” she hastened to add, “Al and I weren’t involved before our spouses died. It was all after that.”

Annie nodded, encouraging Eve to go on with the details of her romance with Al.

“And that’s how I came to be my son-in-law’s stepmother,” Eve ended and settled back into her desk. Everyone smiled.

Or almost everyone.

The desk to Eve’s left was pulled back from the circle. The man in it was sleeping, his face down on his folded arms.

Annie glanced at him and shrugged. You couldn’t win ’em all, though she was always puzzled about why students who were bored would bother to sign up. After all, this wasn’t compulsory education.

“This is for next week’s assignment,” Annie said as she passed out copies of the
Bay Guardian
personals column.

“In addition to the dialogue we talked about earlier, find one ad that you like and write a letter answering it. Then write an ad selling yourself. So that’s three pieces of work for next meeting.”

The class broke up with lots of chatter and several pats on the back to Eve Gold and Cornell. The sleeping student awoke and stretched, flopping his fair hair back out of his eyes. He yawned widely as he strolled out of the room. Annie noticed that he didn’t bother to cover his mouth.

“Hey, Ms. Tannenbaum,” Cornell called back from the doorway. “You said you were gonna do these assignments with us. You gonna let us read your personal ad?”

“Maybe you already did, Mr. Jones,” she answered. “And maybe you already wrote me an answer.”

“You wish.” He winked at her and was gone.

*

Annie finished off her evening with a bit of high-stepping. She met Sam and Hoyt and Emmett at the I-Beam, their favorite dance bar on the edge of the Castro, the gay ghetto.

This was one of the many places where the city’s pretty young men gathered to bump and sweat to a disco beat.

But being gay was not a requirement for admission. Everyone in the city knew that the best music was in the gay discos, and more than one gray-suited lawyer or Montgomery Street stockbroker had been seen with his bespangled wife mixing it up under the mirrored ball of the I-Beam.

They each grabbed a beer at the crowded bar in the front and then let 6′ 5″ Emmett blaze a trail through the crush. “This way,” he called, and they all fell into line.

Annie could never get over it. “Have you ever seen so many good-looking men?” she whispered to Sam.

“All 40 percent must be here tonight.”

A recent survey had shown that to be the gays’ cut of the city’s single-male population. “And all smelling good.” Sam sniffed. “Better than me.”

It took them almost five minutes to work their way to the dance floor. A very handsome, black DJ was programming the sound in a Plexiglas booth. He was dressed in a silver lamé cowboy shirt and pants, with gold and silver Lucchese boots to match. A virtuoso with the two spinning turntables before him, Sly held all the strings, winding the crowd up and letting the energy go. He nodded in recognition at Annie. Women who loved to dance to his music were always welcome, and she and Hoyt came here often.

Hoyt grinned at her and wiped his brow. They had barely begun to move and he was sweating already. In ten minutes he would be soaking wet.

They began to rock with the ease of a long-married couple who knew each other’s every move. But then, they had been dancing together for twenty years. Annie and Hoyt had grown up in adjacent Atlanta neighborhoods, but didn’t meet until a freshman English class at Emory. They quickly discovered they liked the same songs, the same movies, the same books and, sometimes, the same young men.

“Flip you,” Hoyt said now, nodding at the model-perfect young man dancing beside them.

“You can have him,” Annie replied. “I was just wondering who cuts his hair.”

“You’re not!” Hoyt exclaimed. He, like most men, loved her long, thick tresses.

“Someday, someday soon. Can’t do Rapunzel forever.”

“Why not?” asked Emmett, who had maneuvered himself and Sam next to them. They changed partners: boy/girl, boy/girl. Then swapped again, and Annie and Sam danced together.

“Just like in eighth grade,” Annie gasped as she whirled Sam around.

“Get used to it, sweetheart. This is how it’s going to be at the Storey Old Folks’ Home.” Sam ran a continuing gag about buying a multi-bedroomed Victorian when she turned sixty that all her single friends could come and live in. A spry older ladies’ commune.

“We’re going to dance all night long?”

“In my house, toots, we’re gonna dance whenever we damn well please.”

FIFTEEN

H
e sat alone in his room drinking a beer. The only light came from the television screen, where the faces from “Dallas” flickered.

He leaned over to switch the channel, then pushed his fair hair back out of his eyes. “Dallas”! What a joke. It sure wasn’t any Texas he’d ever known. But then, his accommodations hadn’t been private.

BOOK: Impersonal Attractions
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