Ladies' Night (2 page)

All new editors, same responses.

Too violent. Too nasty toward women.

Personally I think it's just as nasty toward men. But maybe that's just me.

Anyway, once more I let it lie for awhile. In 1990 I decided to try a screenplay version. Thinking low-budget horror movie I switched the locale from New York City to the suburbs to make for a far cheaper shoot but kept the mayhem basically the same. That script's still being shopped around now and then and I figure you never know. Especially with this yarn. Its voyage has been a long one.

Finally a couple of years ago I was between ideas for a new book, lying fallow, collecting this and that notion and waiting patiently for some pattern to emerge and thought, how about taking a slash-and-burn run at
Ladies' Night
in the meantime? Why not? Might be fun.

And it was. Trimmed by well over half its pages it closely resembled its sister-book,
Off Season
. It had the same simulated "real-time" timescale and worked like a well-made play, everything going on within the course of a single grisly night. It had the same theme of ordinary people being pushed to extraordinary acts of violence. Like
Off Season
its protagonists are not necessarily the nicest of people — Tom's a philanderer and morally something of a coward while Elizabeth's seriously thinking about fucking him, even though his wife's a friend and she babysits his son — the point being that nobody deserves to be pushed to these extremes, not ever.

Like the first book it steals liberally from the movies I happen to love, particularly — again like its predecessor — from
Night of the Living Dead
. Though this time the most obvious influence is David
Cronenberg's
first full-length feature,
Shivers
, aka
They Came From Within
.

I proceeded not from Richard's version but from the original, although many of the cuts I made were cuts he and I agreed were absolutely necessary — and I'm very much indebted to him for his fine eye and ear. Richard's version, I felt, had tried to explain too much of the science and its tone was more measured and serious than necessary for what was essentially just goofy pulp-horror fiction. I didn't want to be distracted by that. I wanted cheap thrills, period.

Hey, this is basically a story about some guy trying to get home after a really bad night at his local bar.

We've all had them.

The fact that it's also jabbing at the un-stuck nuclear family and male/female relationships in general's just gravy. It's there if you want it on your plate and practically unnecessary if you don't.

So I've kept the pulpy style, all the italics, all the exclamations, even some of my less successful sentence constructions for the sake of being true to the feel of the original and all the gore-hound excesses. In recent years I've tried for some slight measure of subtlety, some nuance of character and language, a few grace notes now and then. This has all the subtlety of a hooker selling blowjobs at the entrance to Lincoln Tunnel but I figure that's the way it should be.

~ * ~

Since I wrote the book times have changed — enough so that, happily for me, there are a few venues now for a story as extreme as this and you're looking at one of them.

Thanks, John.

But New York has changed too and probably will have changed again by the time you read this. "People come and go so quickly here," is as true of the Big Apple as it is of Oz. Only it's businesses that disappear overnight here, with new ones flinging themselves all
tarted
up in the morning. Bars, florists, banks, everything. If you're a native New Yorker and especially if you know the West Side you're going to note discrepancies in the novel as to setting. I've updated the neighborhood wherever I could, replacing a bank with, say, HMV Music if that's what's there today. But in some cases that wasn't possible. The butcher shop on Broadway, for instance, is long gone and long lamented. But I needed a butcher shop so I kept it. Author privilege. To do otherwise would be to write a whole new novel, not polish up and older one.

~ * ~

Hollywood's a funny place. You write a screenplay, you go out there and you spend a whole lot more time pitching it than you did in the writing of it or than anybody will ever spend in the reading. Everyone seems to want you to come up with the gist of the thing in a single pithy line, like a sky-hook from which they can suspend their thoughts about what to do or what not to do about "the project." To buy or not to buy. To amend or not to amend — or rather just what to amend. Casting, money, shooting schedule, everything. It all seems to hang on that hook, depend on that line. So I came up with the hook for
Ladies' Night
.

I had to.
Ladies' Night
was the one that simply would not go away. Think I'll leave you with that hook and then let you get on to the novel. Like the book itself I still kinda like the feel of it.

"In the war between men and women, the shooting has begun."

Pow
.

If you could make an arrest for bad temper
, thought
Lederer
,
this whole damn city would be on
Rikers
Island
.

He stepped off the curb into the street. Horns blared behind him. The uniforms had blocked off Riverside from 72nd up to 75th and the diversion onto Broadway was causing an angry tangle. He'd parked on Columbus and walked over. It was easier.

The warm wind gusting off the river tugged at his hat.

The stink was powerful. Sweet. Cloying. He could not say what it reminded him of. But something.

The tanker lay like a huge cracked egg frying in the middle of the street, its spill a great wide slick of dark thick liquid pooling from the center line out along the western curb.

He stepped carefully around it.

A white Buick wagon lay sprawled on its side at the corner of 73rd. There was very little left of its rear compartment. The windshield was shattered on the driver's side and spackled with blood.

He could pretty much guess what happened. The Buick had turned onto Riverside against the light. The trucker was moving fast and hit his brakes to avoid it. Much too late and much too hard.

They were tricky, these tankers. Especially if you ran them full and without baffles, the heavy sheets of steel which lay inside the tank, separating the load into compartments so that they took some of the wave-action when you braked. Without the baffles you could still brake fast if you had to. But you'd better not turn the wheel. Because if you did you had maybe 9,500 gallons behind you and all this weight, this huge wave of liquid back there starts to push forward, jackknifing the cab at the fifth wheel and ramming you with every bit of its weight like a battering ram.

You had to be one hell of a driver to control all that. He guessed this one wasn't.

There wasn't much left of him.

Again it was easy to imagine. The tank had jackknifed the cab all the way around to what was probably no more than a ten degree angle. Then the wave effect started. The first wave went forward, the second back, and the third side-to-side — all of it one great heaving surge of motion. It was the side-to-side that killed the driver — toppling the tank off its sub-frame directly onto his cab, squashing it like a cardboard container. The man inside was nothing but a wide smear of red and grey between the crushed roof and the fake-leather seat. A bug against a windshield.

It had been fast, anyway.

The guy had that much luck.

McCann was standing by the traffic light. He walked over. "What's the cargo?"
Lederer
asked.

"Damned if I know. Smells sweet. Liquid sweetener or something. Take a look at the logo there."

Painted in red letters along the side of the tank were the words LADIES, INC.

"What the hell's that mean?" said
Lederer
.

McCann shrugged. "I guess it means that at least we can assume our feet won't glow in the dark."

Lederer
lit a cigarette and watched the cleanup crew work the spill and the wrecking crew try to pull fifty-five feet of steel off the guy in the cab.

Uniforms held the perimeter. A good-sized crowd had gathered. Some were standing on park benches. A few kids mostly were perched in trees, looking for a better view. It would take a while but they'd get their view all right, when the boys pulled off that tank.

"What about the wagon?"

"Woman in the driver's seat, no passengers. Mid-twenties I'd say. No seatbelt. My wife does the same thing. I tell her, use the goddamn seatbelt but she knows better. And me out here looking at this shit a dozen times a month. They took her down to Roosevelt half an hour ago. You ask me, she's not going to make it."

The wind was up now, blowing west to southeast off the river, and
Lederer
thought I ought to get those kids out of the trees. A little gusting, a few more miles-per-hour and they could get into some trouble up there. Riverside Park, with its thin dark soil and macadam walkways, was a hard place to fall.

"I don't get it," he said. "What the hell was a tanker even doing here?" He pointed to the sign on the streetlight behind them. "Look at that. This whole damn street is posted. Not just here, but back at the corner of 72nd and Broadway and again right there at the entrance to Riverside. NO COMMERCIAL TRAFFIC. Every couple of blocks. Plus he had to be really moving to do that much damage to the Buick. So what the hell was he doing in the first place, highballing it through Manhattan?"

"Maybe we got a driver who can't read," said McCann.

"No way. You can't read you don't move freight. He knew where he was going. He knew it was illegal. He did it anyway."

"The route-sheet in the cab," said McCann. "Maybe we'll get it there."

"Maybe."

But he had a feeling that the only thing they'd find in the cab was a messy driver. Without documentation. Beneath the sickly-sweet scent of the cargo he thought he detected another smell — the stink of greed and corruption.

The usual.

Cut corners, cover-ups. The cheap shot at the fast buck. The city was made of that. More and more that was what it was all about these days as the economy and government and the whole damn shooting match seemed to wind down slowly into disaster.

Naturally there were victims. A young woman in a white Buick. One wrong turn and it all came hurtling down at you.

He watched the progress of the wrecking crew. At this rate it would be hours before they could pry the tank away. In the meantime it would probably be a good idea to talk with the boys in the lab. Find out what this stuff was. Check the plates on the tanker. A company registration, maybe, for LADIES, INC. Punch it up on the computer.

"Listen," he said to McCann, "if anything breaks you call me, okay?"

"Sure."

"Especially on that route-sheet."

"Will do."

Lederer
crossed the street, headed back to his car. It was 2:30 in the afternoon and the day was hot — hot and humid even with the breeze,
ennervating
— and he suddenly had the feeling there was going to be a whole lot of work to do before his shift was over.

Halfway down Columbus it hit him.

The smell.

It was weaker here, weak enough so that he could finally get a handle on it — something specific and not just a too-sweet reek. It made no sense. But what it reminded him of filled him with a kind of strange elation.

Cherry
, he thought.

Cherry lollipops, to be more exact. That good bright artificial smell he remembered liking so much as a kid, wafting along on a westerly breeze. Cherry-flavored lollipops.

His favorite kind.

The winds were island winds swirling off the Hudson.

At Riverside Park a small black boy climbed out of the trees and chased his baseball cap through the gutter as it tumbled away. At Lincoln Center in front of Avery Fisher Hall a fashion model returning home from another round of go-sees stepped into a tiny whirlwind of swirling city debris and felt a speck of grit lodge itself beneath her green-tinted contact lens. In mid-town a stack of the
New York Times
tugged at its paperweight, inching it off-center.

The winds coursed through the wide city streets, swept upwards in a sudden rush against skyscrapers and high-rises to disperse slowly into the calmer air above. By far the winds blew strongest west to southeast — the cool ocean breeze out of the east stopped them dead, forcing steel-and-concrete superheated air up to the cloudless sky like an uppercut to the chin of a boxer. Random currents reached eastward into the 80s and slid south down through the Village and
Soho
, though much diffused in power.

But mostly they poured through the open mouth of the west of Manhattan, down Riverside, down Columbus and Amsterdam, down Broadway, until other currents scattered them, eviscerating their inland thrust.

North as far as West 86th Street, south as far as 39th, east to Central Park and in pockets beyond,
Manhattanites
, tourists, and bus-and-tunnel commuters to New Jersey, Westchester, Long Island and Connecticut could be seen to pause a moment to sniff the air as something rushed by them and then darted swiftly on, something sweet, redolent of memories of near or distant pasts, of sunny summer days much like this one, when their worlds were simpler, easier.