SWF Seeks Same (26 page)

Kennedy appeared, breathing hard and looking angry and concerned. He must have ridden down in the other elevator. He’d lost his cigar, and black ash was peppered over his white shirt front. “You okay?” he asked Allie.

“Okay,” she said, pressing her trembling palm to her ear, aware of a trickle of blood snaking down her arm.

One of the plainclothes detectives, a tall handsome man with neatly parted dark hair, entered the elevator and helped Hedra to her feet.

She glared at him, an accusation of unspeakable betrayal in her eyes. Her lips quivered. Parted. “You’re not Andy. You pretended.”

He gave her a fading, lazy smile as he gripped her elbow and ushered her from the elevator, almost as if escorting her onto a dance floor.

He said, “What’s in a name?”

ALLIE moved out of the Cody Arms the next month. Out of the city. She’d been offered a job in the actuarial department of a large insurance company in Rockport, Illinois. The company’s real-estate division found her an affordable place to live, a small house on an acre of wooded land just outside of town.

It was always quiet there. Her mail was delivered to a rural box on a cedar post at the end of her driveway. Her nearest neighbors, a retired carpenter and his wife, waved to her whenever they saw her in her yard. Cars passed only occasionally.

Her old apartment in the Cody Arms was leased and occupied within days after she’d gone. To a pair of single women who said they were sisters.

John Lutz is the prolific author of over 30 novels and 200 short stories. He is perhaps best known for his 1990 novel SWF Seeks Same, which was made into the film Single White Female starring Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Lutz has also created two popular ongoing detective series. The first, beginning with 1976’s Buyer Beware, follows the detective Alo Nudger and has a comic, quirky tone. A second, more serious sequence of novels beginning with Tropical Heat (1986) follows the adventures of the detective Fred Carver. Lutz has published four collections of short stories, Better Mousetraps (1988), Shadows Everywhere (1994), Until You are Dead (1998) and The Nudger Dilemmas (2001). His short stories have won numerous awards including a Shamus in 1982 and an Edgar in 1985.