The Man Who Loved Women to Death (18 page)

“Only when you tell me what I want to hear.”

“As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, I do not happen to have a penis …”

“I have noticed that, Merilee. I myself am not prejudiced, but I know this makes my parents very happy.”

“Hush. As a consequence, I have never fully understood why you look up to Tuttle. Why you are so proud to be his friend. You have no big brother. Maybe he’s like a big brother to you. I don’t know. But what I do know is that you can’t let your relationship cloud your judgment.”

I pondered this a moment. “In other words, you think I should turn him in.”

“No, I think you shouldn’t. Because if he were any other celebrity you wouldn’t. Not until you were
sure.
Believe me, I’d just as soon see Tuttle Cash put away for a long time in a small cell with a mean, mean cellmate. But, darling, you make your living these days working with celebrities. And when it comes to ghosting, you’re
always
sure. That’s why you’re better at it than anyone else.”

“What are you saying, Merilee?”

“I’m saying you should do what you always do—collaborate. Treat this like you would any other project. Because if you do, then you’ll end up doing the right thing, and if you don’t, you’ll end up losing your way. Just promise me one thing.”

“What’s that, Merilee?”

“Promise me you won’t try to be a hero.”

“Heroism is not something I know much about.”

“Promise me,” she insisted.

“I so promise.” I sat there gazing at her. “You’re not the worst, Merilee.”

“You say it but you don’t show it,” she said softly, her eyes twinkling at me.

“Why, Miss Nash, what
are
you getting at?”

Now she gave me her up-from-under look, the one that makes
my
knees weak.

“But Merilee, the cast and crew are right down there on stage.
Luke
is down there.”

“I don’t care,” she said, running her hand up my thigh. “I want you this minute.
Now,
Hoagy.”

And so we, well, we stopped talking for a while. I won’t bother you with the details, except to tell you that what began in my seat ended up in the aisle, rows one through four, and that I ended up with some rather wicked second-degree rug burns on my knees. Lulu stood guard over us, aghast but loyal to the end.

Afterward, we lay there on the balcony floor.

“Merilee, what’s gotten into you lately?”

“Why, whatever do you mean, darling?” she wondered, all wide-eyed innocence.

“I mean this new … amorousness.”

“Merciful heavens, Hoagy, you make it sound like I belong on the cover of
Time.”

“I was thinking more along the lines of the
Guinness Book of World Records.”

“Bother you much?”

“Not even a little. In fact, I’m ready to stand up and salute you.”

“I believe that’s what you just did, sir.”

The stage manager was calling for her now. “Miss Nash? We’re ready for you onstage!
Miss Naaaash?”

“Good gravy.” She lunged for her jeans and did her best to wrestle them back on. I did my best to not help her. “Mr. Hoagy!” she objected primly. “Behave yourself. I have a show to rehearse.”

And with that she gathered up her debauched self and marched out the exit for the stage, her chin held high.

Lulu, she stared at me with withering disapproval.

Me, I drove to Scarsdale.

I
ONCE ASKED AN
old-time cab driver what was the fastest way to get out of Manhattan. He told me the fastest way to get out of Manhattan was whichever way out of Manhattan youse happened to be closest to. I happened to be closest to the West Side Highway. After a while they start calling it the Henry Hudson Parkway, and then you’re in Yonkers, where I caught the Cross County, which merges into the Hutch, which runs through Pelham and then New Rochelle, where the Petries, Rob and Laura and Ritchie, once lived. From there it’s on to Scarsdale, the buttoned-up little burb where the diet doctor Herman Tarnower used to live. Until Jean Harris murdered him, that is.

It was colder north of the city. The frozen rain was a steady snowfall, and there were patches of ice on the shoulder of the road. I kept the speedometer under 65 and my eyes peeled for those cretins who believe the TV commercials and actually think that their four-wheel-drive rolling cushioned shoeboxes make them invincible on slippery roads. They scare me, those people. They have children and the right to vote. Lulu shivered next to me under the ragtop. I wrapped my cashmere scarf around her. She snuggled into it gratefully. She likes cashmere. She likes being warm.

I listened to 1010 WINS news radio while I drove. They were giving out Bridget’s identity now. They were comparing him with Son of Sam out loud now.

If you absolutely must live in a suburb, Scarsdale is not the absolutely worst around. It’s less than an hour from the city. The homes are older and well built, the plantings mature. There’s some semblance of a village. Yes, you can do quite well for yourself in Scarsdale if you have, say, $800,000. But as I worked the Jag through its tidy streets, the place still gave me the creeps. I always get them on those rare occasions when I find myself in a suburb. Any suburb. After the bright lights and the tumult of Gotham, the darkness and calm seem unnatural to me. It’s as if everyone for miles around has just been wiped out by ethnic cleansing. I should also explain that I hold to the perfectly rational belief that people who move to the suburbs gradually grow old, lose their teeth and die. And people who live in the city don’t do any of those things.

My cell phone beeped. It was Vic, checking in from King Tut’s. “The party’s still going on,” he reported, which was his way of saying Tuttle was still in the house.

I thanked him and hung up. It immediately beeped again.

“Hiya, cookie,” that familiar voice brayed in my ear. “How ya doing? Whattaya doing?
Who
are ya doing?”

“Hello, Cassandra. Fine. Nothing. Nobody.”

“Oh yeah? Then why are you in Scarsdale?”

“How did you know I’m in—?”

“Hoagy, you got no secrets from me. C’mon, what’s her name? She married? She swallow it?”

“Thank you large for the Charlie Manson quote. It made my day.”

“Hey, you said it, not me.”

“And what’s with that ‘one-time star novelist’ thing? I
do
happen to have a manuscript going around.”

“Like I didn’t offer to help you. Gimme something and I’ll plug it to death for you.” She was wheeling and dealing now. And even more bare-knuckle than she used to be. The stakes were higher. “Gimme a taste—something, anything—and I’ll have twenty publishers wet for it. So is it true what I hear?”

“I doubt it. Why, what do you hear?”

“That the police bungled the intercept of Chapter Three. That the Bridget Colleen Healey murder could have been prevented.”

“No, that’s not true. It couldn’t have been prevented. At least, not by them.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It was just something to say.”

“Honey, cookie, sweetie, you never say anything just to say it.

“You don’t say.”

“Can I get real here a sec?”

“Don’t let me stop you.”

“I
need
this story. My ratings have hit a wall.”

“It happens to all of us, Cassandra.”

“I need a Pulitzer, Hoagy.”

“I need a new prostate gland. That doesn’t mean I’m going to get one.”

“Work with me, Hoagy. I need you. Say something.”

“Okay, okay. Cassandra?”

“Yeah, cookie?” she said hopefully.

“Good-bye, Cassandra.”

The Spooners, Ezra and Heidi, lived around the corner from a country club in a very large Tudor that was crowded onto a very small lot. It was a brand-new Tudor. In fact, it was a Tudor-in-progress. Piles of lumber, cement blocks and roofing tiles were still stacked there in the driveway. A blue tarp protected the part of the roof that wasn’t finished yet. The grounds were as barren as a moonscape. No shrubs. No lawn. Just bare, frozen dirt crisscrossed with bulldozer treads. There were lights on in the house. And there was a “For Sale” sign at the curb.

Out back there was a garage with an office. Ezra had said I would find him there. I saw the blue glow of a TV downstairs in the house as I made my way back there. Upstairs, I could hear the
thud-thud-thud
of rap music.

It was a paneled office, with French doors overlooking the nongarden. I could see him in there, working away at one of those colossal Power Macs, his thick, wire-framed glasses perched on the end of his stubby nose. He had a peaceful, almost dreamy look on his face. Until I tapped at the door. Then he completely panicked.

“One second, hon!” he cried out, eyes wild with fear. “Just give me one second!” Hurriedly, he cleared the screen of whatever was on it, his fingers flying over the keyboard. Then he shut the thing down and took a deep breath and opened the door, an uneasy smile on his round face.

“Hey, Ez,” I said.

“Oh, it’s
you,
Hoagy.” Ezra Spooner was decidedly tubbier than he was when I saw him last. One might even call him portly. He was also completely bald now, aside from some thin, see-through brown tufts that clung here and there around his head. Actually, Ezra’s head looked a lot more like a scrotum than anyone’s head ought to. He was wearing one of those fleecy polythermal pullovers that are popular with skiers, mountain climbers and middle-aged tax attorneys, a pair of baggy corduroys and Mephisto walking shoes. “I just saw your picture on the news. Some guy in the city who’s wiping out single women and sending you all the gory details. Unreal.”

“That’s certainly one word for it. Am I interrupting something?”

“No, no. Not at all.” He glanced over my shoulder at the house, lowered his voice. “I was just chatting with this divorced labor lawyer out in Eugene, Oregon. We talk every night. Heidi, uh, doesn’t know about her.”

I tugged at my left ear. “Say, is this one of those Internet things?”

“I’ve met a lot of interesting women on-line,” he exclaimed, waving his arms in the air for emphasis, fingers aflutter. Ezra was forever doing that. Ezra had always reminded me of a little boy pretending to be a snowflake.

“Safe sex, huh?”

“Not so safe. You’d be surprised how degenerate some of these women are.”

“I would not.”

“You on-line yet, Hoagy?”

“I am not.”

“You got to get on-line, man.”

“I do not.”

Ezra shook his head at me, grinning. “Same old Hoagy.”

“It’s true. I’m ageless, the Dick Clark of modern lit.”

“Come on in. It’s fucking freezing out there.”

I went on in. A little Jack Russell was curled up by the heater. It immediately came over and tried to get familiar with Lulu. She showed it her teeth. She doesn’t like twerps sniffing her privates. Ezra shooed the Jack Russell outside. Lulu took its place by the heater with a sour grunt. This was her telling me she’d much rather be in her nice warm bed than schlepping all the way out to some frozen burb.

Ezra had himself a full-fledged home office back there. A laser printer. A fax machine. A second computer. All sorts of phone lines and power cords and junction boxes. There were shelves crammed with discs, cartons crammed with papers. For decor he had his high school athletic trophies arrayed on top of a filing cabinet. He did not have the photograph of the three college track stars displayed anywhere.

There were two ergonomically correct desk chairs. I sat in one of them, my eyes taking in all of the equipment. “Ever use a plain old typewriter anymore, Ez?”

“Why would I want to do that? They’re obsolete.”

He sat back down in front of his computer, peering at me. His eyes behind those thick lenses had changed. They were frightened eyes, hopeless eyes. I could remember very clearly the last time I’d seen eyes like Ezra’s—in Tuttle Cash’s office. Tuttle had them, too. Did I have them as well? Maybe I did. Maybe I was just so used to looking at myself in the mirror every day that I didn’t notice it.

Ezra fidgeted, reached for a paper clip, toyed with it. He seemed nervous and preoccupied. “Can I offer you a beer, Hoagy?”

“You can.”

There was a small refrigerator under the worktable. He poked around inside of it. “Sure, sure, a beer … I’m in the Beer of the Month Club now, you know. Just got me a Full Sail Nut Brown in. Most amusing little bottle of ale.” He popped two of them open and handed me one. “To days gone by,” he said jovially. Though his joviality seemed forced. The eyes weren’t playing along.

“To Augie,” I said, feeling vaguely like we’d gone all the way back to the Fabulous Fifties, parked out here in Dad’s rec room with his sports trophies and his New Age ham radio. Hell, all we needed was Chester A. Riley and his pal Jim Gillis and we’d have us some real laffs.

He rested his beer on his tummy. “I guess this is pretty much everything you hate, isn’t it, Hoagy?”

“Looks like a very nice place, Ez.”

“It’s a dump,” he said glumly. “Damned contractor won’t come back and finish my roof, won’t deliver my topsoil. Who the hell’s going to buy a house that’s got half a roof and no lawn? Get this—he claims I have to pay him more money to truck in the topsoil that used to be here until he took it away. First I paid him to haul it away. Now I got to pay him to haul it back. It was
my
topsoil!” He took a gulp of his beer. “Know who used to live right behind us?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Frank Gifford. He lives in Greenwich now, the rich bastard.”

“Yeah, but look at it this way—he has to wake up next to Kathie Lee every morning.” I sipped my beer. “Why are you selling?”

He cleared his throat, reddening. “We’re, uh, relocating out west. Kind of a sudden development. Heidi’s flying on ahead to get us settled. I’ll be driving cross-country with the kids and the dog.” He mustered a sheepish grin. “I guess that sounds pretty horrible to you.”

“You forget, Ezra. I change diapers now.”

“Hey, that’s right. Merilee’s celebrated love child. Sure, I read all about that. Christ, who didn’t. Got a picture?”

“Do I honestly look like the kind of boring father who carries around baby pictures?”