The Fainting Room (21 page)
Authors: Sarah Pemberton Strong
“Well, it’s a dollar a page, isn’t it? That ought to be easy enough to figure out.”
“Yeah, whatever.” She kicked at the doorframe. “Listen, I’m sorry I was a jerk outside.”
Ray felt a tension he had not been aware of suddenly leave his body.
“You weren’t being a jerk,” he said. “I was prying. And you are a teenager, aren’t you? I suppose you’re entitled to a few curt answers now and then.”
Ingrid ignored this, and indicated with her chin the sheet of paper he’d pulled out of the typewriter carriage. “Did you see what I was writing?”
“Well, yes, I glanced at it. Sorry; you left it right there.”
“I don’t mind—you’re helping me write it, remember?” She came all the way into the fainting room and rummaged on the desk for a handful of pages. “Here—read the rest of it. I’m stuck.”
Thinking about Emily Roseine was tiring work. While I was doing it I fell asleep at my desk.
“Wait a second,” Ray said. “Over on this page he’s watching Emily Roseine bite her lip, and now he’s back in his office?”
“I told you, I got stuck. This is the next scene. Detective Slade goes back to his office the next day, and this guy comes in who seems totally unconnected to the Emily Roseine case.”
“But of course, he’s actually intimately connected. Emily’s secret lover? Or her missing husband, pretending to be someone else.”
Ingrid stared at him. “How did you know?”
“Well, that’s the genre. Don’t look at me like that, it’s a good thing that I guessed it—it means you have a handle on the formula.” He looked back at the papers and read on:
I didn’t hear the bell on the door of the outer office. The gentleman standing in front of my desk looked like old money—he carried a linen handkerchief in the breast pocket of his gray flannel suit. The hanky was the same shade of ecru as his tie.
“Detective Slade?” He held out his hand without introducing himself. His handshake felt like a dead fish stuffed in a wet dress sock. “The job I’m hiring you for should be very quick, but I shall pay you handsomely for your time.”
“How do you know you’re hiring me?” I said.
He didn’t like that. Rich people never do. He started to get all indignant, but then he sneezed. It’s impossible to act like a snob after you’ve just performed a loud, involuntary bodily function. I waited for him to make a big show of unfolding the pocket handkerchief. But maybe he wasn’t really old money after all because he didn’t touch the hanky.
“Gesundheit,” I said.
“Thank you. Now let me try again. I should like to hire you, if you will consent to take my case.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“I will be meeting several gentlemen tomorrow evening to make a transaction with them. I’ve discovered—a piece of information, you could say, that’s worth a great deal to a certain group of people.”
I stood up. “Sorry, bub. I don’t work for blackmailers.”
“Blackmail does not enter into it. This is a normal business transaction in every way except that the purchasers, unfortunately, are not particularly savory characters. All I wish is that you accompany me while I hand over a small envelope in exchange for another envelope. I am prepared to pay you handsomely.”
We stared at each other across my desk for a minute. I didn’t like him. But I do like eating.
He peeled five bills from his money clip and slid them across the desk at me. I looked down at the bills. Each one was a C-note. He’d given me half a grand, just like that.
“My minimum rate per job is less than one of these,” I said.
“I don’t expect to receive your minimum level of service,” he said. “Good day, Mr. Slade.”
A few lines sounded lifted either from Raymond Chandler or Ross MacDonald, Ray thought, but it was just as good as what he’d been able to write himself when he was twenty-one. No, it was better, actually. He looked up at her, this girl with the hair like she’d stuck her finger in a live socket, with the hacked up tee shirt that today said “GangGreen,” this girl with the shy hope in her eyes.
“How did you do it?” he asked.
“Do what?”
“Write this. You have a knack for it.”
Ingrid ducked her head to hide the wide lopsided grin that bloomed over her face. He watched her become aware of her own happiness, watched as her lips folded the smile away again. Only when she was no longer smiling did she look up to answer him.
“Well, what I do is—oh, it’s stupid, really.” She hesitated.
“I want to know.”
She fiddled with a pencil on the desk. “Well, I close my eyes and I imagine everything is a noir film: the world is all in black and white and it’s all noirish, what I see. Like a man’s black shoes stepping down in a puddle and the puddle reflecting his face from a street light, and long shadows from a dark alley and a blonde screams from somewhere that’s lost in time and madness and then—Jeez.” She swung away from him in her chair and looked out the window. “You must think I’m the biggest geek alive.”
“No,” said Ray. “I don’t think that at all.” The gentleness he heard in his own voice made him look away as well. He felt something vulnerable toward her, something tender that seemed a little unseemly. “But why all the stuff about the sneezing and the handkerchief?” he asked, to change the subject.
“The secret formula is written on his handkerchief.”
“The secret formula for what?”
“Something really dangerous and deadly. He’s president of this weapons company called Axtex, and he’s been working for the government making a new kind of bomb out of the most dangerous material on earth.”
“Uranium?”
Ingrid shook her head. “No, deadlier.”
“Plutonium, then.”
“Even more deadly then that.”
“I don’t think there is anything more deadly.”
Ingrid scowled. “It’s something new they’re making. The secret formula is a new substance for a new kind of bomb.”
“Called?”
“It’s very secret. They just call it....” she paused. “X-onium. It kills everything, just like that.” She snapped her fingers.
Ray looked at her dark intense eyes, her crazy hair, her young face. Her so recently-born self already so preoccupied with dying. He felt a rush of protective warmth that went through him and out toward her, leaving behind it a sense of emptiness in his chest.
“All right,” he said. “X-onium, good name.”
He saw the pleased look start in her eyes, warm her cheeks, come to rest on the side of her mouth that smiled.
She traced her finger in a loop on the desk and said, “You know something? You’re easy to talk to. I wish I could talk to my dad this way.”
“You’re a good conversationalist yourself,” he said, though what he felt inside was not so blithe. There was something lovely about Ingrid, something vulnerable and disarming that he had missed at first, hidden as it was beneath the hardcore band tee shirts and punk hair and safety-pin earrings. Something earnest and charming and bright. It was as if he’d been looking at unlit candles that suddenly burst into flame. Birthday candles, on a cake. There was something sweet to celebrate in Ingrid after all.
“I’m a good conversationalist with you,” Ingrid said. “Not in general.”
“You seem to be able to talk to Evelyn all right.”
“Hey, that reminds me.” Ingrid looked up from her doodling finger. “How come you never told me Evelyn was in the circus?”
“She told you that?”
“What, it’s not true?”
“No, it’s true.” Ray took a long swallow of his gin and tonic. The ice had melted and it tasted watery. “She just doesn’t usually talk about her circus days, that’s all.”
“Well, she told me,” Ingrid said. “I asked about her arm, and she pulled up her sleeve and showed me, so then I asked how she got it, of course.”
“Got what?”
“Her scar, whaddaya think?”
“Oh.”
Ingrid looked at him hard. “You were going to say something else.”
“No I wasn’t,” Ray said, seeing in his mind Evelyn’s painted midriff and breasts, the sun on her sternum, the mermaid undulating over the soft flesh of her belly.
“What were you going to say?” Ingrid persisted.
“Don’t get tough with me, Detective Slade.” Ray tried a Bogart voice of his own. “Honestly, Ingrid, I don’t know much about all that circus stuff. I know Evelyn wasn’t very happy there, and she was glad to leave it behind. If you want to know more than that, you’d better ask her yourself.”
“Whatever,” Ingrid said, all disdainful teenager again. “What’s that you’re drinking?”
“Gin and tonic.”
“Can I have a sip?”
“You may not. Now if you don’t mind, I really need to put a little time in on my architecture book before dinner.”
“Big excitement.” Ingrid hopped off the desk and went out.
Ray looked down the hall after her. Why had Evelyn told her about the circus business? And why did he care? Because compared to tigers and tightropes, not to mention the tattoos, he was afraid Ingrid would find him pale. Which he was, literally, his unmarked skin beneath his clothes as white as the belly of a fish. Suddenly he hated his body. How could Evelyn make such passionate love to him? What was there in his body to love?
13.
Ingrid stopped typing, distracted by the remains of her French manicure. In the week since Evelyn had done it, she’d marred every polished fingernail, some by accident and some on purpose by chipping at the edges. She hadn’t wanted to ask Evelyn for polish remover lest Evelyn touch her hands again and set off that strange and dangerous chain reaction through her body. But now, Ingrid decided, she could not stand one more minute of looking at this girly pink cracked lacquer. It had to come off right this minute.
She was alone in the house: Ray was still at work and Evelyn had gone to the dry cleaners or the mall or somewhere. Ingrid checked out the window to be sure neither of them was about to pull into the driveway, then went down the hall to the master bedroom in search of Evelyn’s manicure basket.
She had never really been inside their bedroom before. On either side of the bed stood matching night tables, a reading lamp and a photograph on each one—one photo was of Evelyn, the other of Ray. Ingrid wrinkled her nose at the corny symmetry. Opposite the bed stood a low wooden dressing table whose surface was covered with cosmetics—jars and compacts and bottles all neatly arranged in rows. Ingrid sat down at the dressing table, picked up one of the compacts. The tiny transgression, fingering this small intimate thing that did not belong to her, sent a shiver down her neck. She flipped the lid of the compact open; it contained two different shades of eye shadow. She touched the shiny powder; it turned the pad of her finger a dusky green. She replaced the compact and picked up a small glass bottle with a gold cap. Again the shiver of excitement fizzed through her. This bottle was full of moisturizer; Ingrid shook a dollop of it into her hand and there was the smell of Evelyn, sweet and musky, right there in a creamy blob on her palm.
Without deciding to do it, Ingrid found herself rubbing the lotion onto her cheeks, inhaling it as if she were smoking a new kind of cigarette, drawing the scent deep into her lungs. Then the sound of a car in the driveway: Ingrid froze, then leaped up and ran down the hall to her own room, threw herself on the bed and listened, panting and motionless, to the creak of the front door opening. It was Ray, calling hello and then, getting no response, whistling to himself as he went into the kitchen.
Mister, that was close. And look, Slade, you dumb bunny
—She was still holding the bottle of moisturizer. And her nails were still covered in pink and she hadn’t gotten any polish remover. She couldn’t risk going back into their bedroom now that Ray was home. Maybe she should just scratch off the rest of the nail polish with the tip of a paper clip.
—She was still holding the bottle of moisturizer. And her nails were still covered in pink and she hadn’t gotten any polish remover. She couldn’t risk going back into their bedroom now that Ray was home. Maybe she should just scratch off the rest of the nail polish with the tip of a paper clip.
Ingrid shoved the lotion under her pillow and went into the fainting room, rummaged in the desk drawer. There was a bottle of Wite-Out there: oh, better than a paper clip. She settled into the chair, feet up on the desk, and coated each of her fingernails with correction fluid. That was much better. Now she could think straight.
Evelyn was putting dinner on the table when someone from Dunlap and Scott called for Ray. He took the receiver from her, and after saying hello he was silent the entire time it took Evelyn to get her three courses onto the table and get the silverware and yell for Ingrid. He opened the wine while cradling the phone between his ear and shoulder, the spiral cord bisecting the kitchen so that Evelyn had to high-step over it with the chicken. Ingrid came in, poured a glass of water, ducked under the phone cord and went into the dining room.
“Is that necessary?” Ray said into the phone, and then came the cartoony garble of someone raising their voice on the other end. “I see,” Ray said. “All right, I’ll be there.” He hung up and came into the dining room, did not sit.
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