Flight Dreams (14 page)

“Understood,” says Neil with quiet finality. “And now that the great looming ‘question mark’ of the evening has been dispelled, shall we move on to frothier concerns, like dessert?”

“Great idea.” Manning rises and begins to clear the table. As Neil pushes his chair back and slouches into it, getting relaxed, Manning turns to remind him, “You still haven’t told me about the house you built. I want to hear everything.”

Neil needs no further prompting to launch into an energetic recounting of the project, in which he has clearly staked great professional pride. Manning is fascinated by the tale, interrupting to pose thoughtful questions that in turn refuel Neil’s enthusiasm. Hours pass as dessert leads to coffee, coffee to cognac. The two men have talked continuously, exhausting the topic of Neil’s house, moving on to the random trifles found so revealing by those who are getting to know one another. It is well past midnight. The storm howls beyond the windows. The candles on the table have burned low.

Manning tells Neil, “Time to make a decision about something. It’s raining like hell, and there are no cabs on the street—you’d get soaked trying to find one. Would you like to spend the night here?”

“No sex?” It is both a question and a stipulation.

“No,” says Manning, grinning.

“I’d love to stay. But I’d better call Roxanne. She’ll be wondering, I’m sure.”

“I’m
sure,
” echoes Manning while handing Neil the phone.

Neil dials, then waits while the other phone rings. “Hi, Rox, it’s me. Yes, a wonderful evening, thanks. I hope yours wasn’t too awful at the office. Roxanne, I think I’ll be staying here tonight—the rain, you know. Just wanted to tell you not to wait up.” He pauses, blinks, and puts back the receiver.

“What’d she say?” asks Manning.

“She hung up.”

Manning whistles pensively.

B
Y MORNING THE RAIN
has stopped, but clouds still churn the dark sky. At eleven o’clock, the streets are eerily quiet as Neil walks the few blocks from Manning’s loft to Roxanne’s building. An elevator is waiting for him, and he soon stands outside the door to her apartment, hearing the wails of one of her more eccentric recordings within. He braces himself as he enters, setting his shopping bag on the floor.

Roxanne sits in the living room, listening to the music with the morning papers spread messily about. Her eyes are dark, her hair unkempt. The apartment smells heavily of smoke, and a hulky alabaster ashtray is filled with butts. She has been drinking—last night or this morning or both—Neil is not sure.

“Well, good morning, Rox,” he says with an uncertain cheeriness.

“Did you fuck?” she asks flatly, sternly, in a voice he barely recognizes.

Neil is tempted to stretch the truth and confirm her suspicions, but his momentary triumph would quickly be quelled by her rage. On the other hand, if he answers truthfully, his denials would surely be met by her scorn and disbelief. It’s a no-win situation, so he decides not to dignify her question with a response.

He tells her, “I’ve got some work to do on a new project.” He picks up the shopping bag, crosses the room, and disappears down a hallway to the den, where he closes the door behind him.

R
OXANNE REMEMBERS YOUNGER YEARS
when even the worst bitch of a hangover lasted only twenty-four hours. Now the doozies last forty-eight. Her Friday-night binge, which flowed nonstop into Saturday morning, left her vomiting in bed by that afternoon. Sunday she could barely move. Dehydrated, wracked by both fever and migraine, she finally managed to eat something solid by evening while exchanging a few heated words with Neil. She was tempted to call in sick today, but there was far too much work needing her attention—besides, she
deserved
to suffer through a Monday’s penance at the office. So here she sits, propped by her forearms at her desk. Though the worst symptoms of her bout of intemperance have mercifully passed, she feels shaky and depressed in its aftermath.

The latest edition of the
Post
lies before her. Its headline proclaims, waiting game may be over: investigators to get tough on heiress murder suspect. In the bylined story on page one, Humphrey Hasting has written, “The public may soon be offered a modicum of enlightenment into the mysterious circumstances surrounding the disappearance of airline heiress Helena Carter. Deputy Chicago police superintendent Earl Murphy revealed to the
Post
late last night that intensive administrative efforts are under way to bring a prime suspect to justice.”

The article explains that Carter’s houseman, Arthur Mendel, will soon be the subject of an inquest. “The hearing is not technically a trial, as no formal charges have yet been filed. However, Murphy conceded that the inquest will in fact be held in a courtroom before a judge. No date has been set.”

With a disgusted flick of her wrist, Roxanne tosses the
Post
to the floor, where it mingles with sections of the morning
Journal,
which she has skimmed for a similar story. There is none.

Rising from her desk, she begins to pace the office, stopping at the window to bite her lip, looking out across the city without seeing it. She glances toward her feet and at the
Post’s
headline, reading it upside down. Things are heating up, getting messy. She really ought to phone Manning and discuss all this. But
can
she? She was justifiably pissed at him—as well as Neil—and she’s nursing the hangover to prove it. God, what made her do it? The reason has gnawed at her all weekend, but it has not, till now, congealed into thoughts formed in words.

Jealousy? she asks herself. Yes, airhead, it’s got something to do with jealousy. Plenty. You needn’t be so analytical. This is no great mystery. You want to be screwed, right? A perfectly natural drive. Is that so hard to admit? You haven’t betrayed your career—or compromised your feminist instincts—by owning up to your desires.

They’re the two men you’ve wanted most and apparently have the least chance of getting. Neil is the best-looking man you’ve ever met, and you’ve known from the start that he’s not available. Yet you’ve tortured yourself through more than ten years of “friendship,” hanging on to the dim hope that maybe someday he’ll lay you. And then there’s Mark—intelligent, sensitive,
eligible
—a perfect match, or at least a good candidate for a long, comfortable affair. You’ve had him exactly once, but it was years ago, and you sensed even then that his heart wasn’t in it.

Face it: You’ve wanted each of them,
both
of them, to splay you like some damned animal. And what did you get instead? An evening home alone, guest of honor at a party for one, while the two of them spent the night together. God only knows what went on over there—you may have lost them both for good. And who’s to blame? Who brought them together? Wouldn’t it be a scream, the very height of perverse justice, if you ended up losing them
to each other?

Roxanne licks her lower lip, now puffy and raw, grated by her teeth. Squatting clumsily in skirt and heels, she snatches up the
Post
and shoves the tabloid into the wastebasket by her desk. Then she kicks at a section of the
Journal
that lies near her feet. The broadsheets of newsprint respond with a dull, unsatisfying slap against her shoe, so she kicks at Manning’s paper again, breaking a heel. She drops to her knees, pounding the scattered pages into wads that crinkle between her hands, gathering the shreds into her arms, pressing them to her chest and face, finally stuffing the mess into the wastebasket. Tears stream down her cheeks. Her shoulders heave with convulsive sobs.

When she has regained control, she hobbles to the desk and wipes her eyes, as a child might, with swipes of her palms. She takes a mirror from her purse and checks her face, only to find it smeared with streaks of black from her hands, filthy from the
Journal’
s ink. She stares at herself in disbelief for a long silent moment, then erupts into laughter.

Several blocks away, at his desk in the
Journal
newsroom, Manning has also trashed a copy of the
Post,
though without the theatrics indulged in by others that morning.

“Mail call!” intones Daryl as he sidles into Manning’s cubicle. He examines a note-sized envelope. “Looks like a love letter,” he coos. With a single silky movement, he hands over the letter and disappears down the aisle with his cart.

Manning turns the envelope in his fingers and finds no return address on either side. There is the imprint of a generic postage meter, but no postmark. His curiosity stirred, Manning slits the envelope and removes a single sheet of plain white bond. He unfolds it and reads the message, carelessly typewritten:

Mark Manning,


AnyonE with a modicum of imagination could figurE out that thE housEman did it. I sEE thEsE things. I know. Now you do too.


PEoplE in your position should take thEir social responsibility more sEriously. An untimEly End faces thosE who betray thE public trust.


You arE warnEd by


—A FriEnd


Manning holds the letter up to the fluorescent ceiling lights to see if the paper has a watermark. His suspicion confirmed, he laughs openly. Setting the letter on his desk, he reaches for the phone and dials.

Daryl cruises by again with his cart, breaking stride long enough to ask, “A secret love?”

“Nah,” says Manning, bored with it all. “Death threat.”

“I’m
impressed,” Daryl says over his shoulder as he trundles off in the opposite direction.

Manning’s attention returns to the phone. “May I speak to Roxanne Exner, please? This is Mark Manning.”

After several tinny measures of “Tea for Two,” the Muzak cha-cha is cut off by Roxanne’s voice. “Mark!” she says with a strange combination of surprise and restraint. “I was about to call you. You’ve seen the
Post?”

“Sure,” he tells her. “I’ve also just read one of Humphrey Hasting’s less
predictable
literary efforts.”

“Whatever do you mean?” she asks with confused inflections, straining to establish a chatty tone.

“I got something from him in this morning’s mail. Listen to this.” He reads her the note.

“How perfectly dreadful,” she tells him, her concern now genuine. “But what makes you think it’s from Hasting?”

“Even though it’s not signed, his style is unmistakable. What’s more, the stationery carries the
Post’s
watermark. The clincher, though, is the typing. Hasting mentioned at your party that he still uses an old newsroom typewriter. In the days before electronic typesetting, reporters wrote their copy using multiple carbons, and newsroom typewriters usually had their type modified, replacing the lowercase ‘e’ with a block-style capital so that it would remain distinct on fuzzy copies. The letter I got was typed on just such a machine. It
has
to be from Hasting.”

“Good Lord,” she says, convinced of the letter’s authorship. “Do you think he’s actually capable of harming you—physically?”

“I doubt it. More likely, he’s simply trying to lend credibility to his houseman accusations, hoping I’ll jump on the bandwagon, which would enhance his
Post
campaign with the
Journal
’s stamp of legitimacy. I’d actually admire the man’s cunning if he weren’t so inept.”

“Even so,” Roxanne tells him, “it’s frightening to think that he would make a scapegoat of Arthur Mendel, that he’d be willing to sacrifice that dear old man for the sake of concocting a few headlines.”

“He may talk a good line about the ‘public trust,’” Manning tells her, “but his personal ethics are nil. I’m driving up to the Carter estate tomorrow to interview Mendel and see if I can make any sense of this.”

“Good luck,” she tells him.

“Thanks. I’ll let you know if I learn anything. But actually, Roxanne”—his tone is now distinctly less serious—“I didn’t phone you to talk about conspiracies or death threats. I was wondering what you and Neil have planned for Saturday afternoon.”

The mention of Neil’s name hits Roxanne like a slap, reminding her that she’s miffed. She tenses at her desk and grips the receiver with blanched fingers, her nails digging into the fleshy base of her palm. She exhales an indignant puff of breath into the phone before responding tersely, “We have no plans. Why do you ask?”

Manning’s voice buzzes from the earpiece, “There’s a cat show in the suburbs this weekend, one of the largest in the Midwest. I’d like to check it out—to get a bit of background—since Helena Carter was a big-time breeder. As long as you and Neil aren’t doing anything, maybe you’d like to join me. Who knows? Might be interesting.”

Roxanne doesn’t mention that she is allergic to cats. If she declines the invitation, Manning will surely extend it to Neil anyway, and she’s damned not going to hand them
another
opportunity to frolic as a twosome. Thank God for antihistamines—they were invented for just such predicaments. “Sounds like fun,” she tells Manning with feigned enthusiasm. “Are you driving?”

After detailing the logistics of their excursion, Manning tells her, “I’m glad we could work this out. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know Neil. Thanks for introducing us.”

She tells him flatly, “My pleasure.” After a moment’s hesitation, she adds, “It’s too bad that Saturday’s outing will be dampened by the farewells—Neil is leaving Sunday, returning to Phoenix. You knew, didn’t you?”

“No, I didn’t.”

Roxanne could have predicted Manning’s answer. Neil’s decision to cut his visit short was arrived at only last night after her testy confrontation with him. She made it clear to Neil that he had worn out his welcome.

“I’m so sorry,” Roxanne tells Manning. The news has clearly hurt him, and she has summoned with difficulty a facade of sympathy to mask her pleasure in delivering it.

N
EXT MORNING, AS MANNING
drives north again from the city to Bluff Shores, he listens to Bud Stirkham interviewing Humphrey Hasting on his radio program. The author and the reporter are trading platitudes about “the capitalist agenda” and “the common man,” bucking up each other’s zeal with the giddy enthusiasm of two soul mates, long lost, now found. Just at the point when Manning decides he’s heard enough of them, their conversation captures his interest.