Woman in the Window (19 page)

“To my escape from Staten Island,” he said. And they drank.

“To my aunt and all her snotty cats,” he said. And they drank.

“And to my great and much-deserved success!” And they drank.

“Would you be good enough to elucidate?” Natalie interrupted, laughing. “Along the lines of this success?”

He insisted on getting the ordering of lunch out of the way and then he leaned toward her, kissed her ear. “Tiger,” he whispered, “I’ve actually done it. The mother lode, pay dirt. I, my darling, am quite suddenly in the chips.” He leaned back, grinning at her. “Home free.”

“Well, I’m sure I’m very happy for you.” She went on with her wine while he just kept grinning. “All right, stop looking like an idiot and reveal all—got lucky on the lottery, I expect—”

“Nat,” he went on seriously, “I put aside my big, lumpy novel. Well aside. And for the last six weeks I went to town on an old idea plucked from a notebook. Years old. Something scary. Wrote it in four weeks. Four weeks, Nat! Gave it to Ed Riker, my agent—doesn’t quite move in your circles, of course—and he went to town with a bloody vengeance. He loved the book, said it gave him goose pimples—I told him he was an easily frightened little pansy, which he admitted he couldn’t honestly deny. … However, he insisted it, the book, had a certain something. Deals with a big old house, my aunt’s actually, which is haunted by something really nasty—I mean not my aunt’s, of course, the one in my book, and it is pretty scary—”

“Title?”

“
Spooks
.”

“Oh my, I do like that quite a lot.”

“Well, the long and the short of it is that Donner and Clay is doing it and they made a paperback deal up front, which is two hundred grand for dear old Tony, the penurious scribbler, and over the weekend we got another hundred for the film rights—not an option, but an outright sale to somebody by the name of Claude Davies, who is determined to become a producer. Made his money in fountain-pen clips or something. Anyway, that all adds up to three hundred thousand … and I’m going to LA right after Christmas to meet with Davies. … Nat, Donner and Clay want to do another deal for the next one and I’m working on the outline—”

“More ghosts?”

“But of course! Don’t you love it?”

“I do, Tony, I really do love it.” She was on the verge of tears. “I’m so happy for you.” She clasped his hand tightly. “You were right—much deserved.”

She didn’t pay much attention to the rest of lunch and the conversation for which Tony assumed happy responsibility. She felt an enormous flood of warmth toward him, a kind of love, too. But more than anything else she felt the last ties, the last bonds of responsibility for his welfare, being severed. She could smile at him now while she let him float away into his own life. A life without her. While he was celebrating one thing, she was celebrating something else—his independence, his liberation from everything she had come to represent in his eyes.

Outside the restaurant she hugged him. “Enjoy it all, Tony. That’s the important thing. Enjoy the hell out of it!” The snow was gathering on the brim of his dashing hat. “I’m so happy for you.”

She walked off alone, knowing he was standing quietly watching her go. She looked back and waved, and on his face she believed she saw the beginning of a realization passing like a shadow across his face.

She blew him a kiss and he nodded slowly.

Natalie was guided by the elbow to a tiny makeup room where a girl with bad skin and a bandanna holding back her hair patted her face and pronounced her camera-ready.

On to the Green Room, where the leatherette couch was scarred with cigarette burns and was losing gray stuffing. There was a pot of coffee plugged into the wall, styrofoam cups, powdered creamer, and something posing as sugar. Flattened plastic straws were provided for stirring. She demurred at the bright, smiling suggestion that she might need the coffee and settled down on the couch to watch the monitor. The show went on with a fanfare and several stories about people living in the streets as Christmas approached. A fire had killed a family of three in Brooklyn. Natalie passed the time chatting haltingly with the other guests: a psychiatrist who was going to talk about how to keep from committing suicide during the holiday season; a football player coming off a serious knee operation who would be chatting about the agony of missing his team’s games and working for the United Way; and an actress who was going into a Broadway hit talking about her film career, which had collapsed, as far as Natalie knew, about twenty years ago.

And then it was her turn. During a commercial she was led into a shabby conversation pit, planted in a swivel chair, equipped with a tiny lapel microphone, and introduced to a woman who seemed to have no idea who she was. She kept staring at a sheaf of notes that Natalie sincerely hoped were about her. Apparently they were, because once the little red light went on above the camera lens, the interviewer snapped a dazzling smile into place and asked her to tell our viewers just what it’s like to be the hottest, prettiest agent in the publishing business.

The questions followed in the same wildly humiliating manner and she did her best to field them, explaining a bit about how auctions worked, trying to keep observations about her personal appearance to a minimum. She had no idea how she was coming off but she was sure the ribbing would last for months. In the back of her mind she was damning Jay Danmeier to a particularly fiery corner of hell when she heard the interviewer, good old Betty, talking about something else—the bit in Garfein’s column about the man with the gun. “Tell us, did they ever find the man with the gun? Or should I say, did the man with the gun ever find you?”

“Oh, God,” Natalie said, “isn’t that awfully old news by this time?”

“We can’t help wondering, though. What happened?” Betty was just sitting there, suddenly very serious, staring at her.

“Nothing happened,” Natalie said at last. “I didn’t see the man’s face, of course. So he has nothing to fear from me—”

“I see. Well, I guess you have to say that, don’t you?”

The question hung between them and Natalie decided just to smile back and wait it out.

“Well, turning for a moment to your personal life—”

“Seems to me we’re already there.”
Smile sweetly, Natalie.

“Here you are, the hottest agent, and your husband writes novels under a whole bunch of names, can’t get anything published as Tony Bader. Can’t you maybe help out?”

“Well, Betty, in the first place, he’s my former husband. And he’s a very good writer who makes his living writing in a very competitive field.” She longed for a machine gun to further explain things to Betty. “And no agent can force the publishing industry to do what she wants, not for her husband, not for anyone. An agent tries to cope with the fluctuating state of the marketplace, understand it, deal with it. In Tony’s case, he has a very good agent of his own and I’m glad to report that he’s doing very well. Perhaps you’ll be interviewing him one of these days.”

And then it was over and Betty was shaking her hand and dashing back to the anchor set. Natalie’s previous keeper returned to the scene of the crime and led her away. “Now wasn’t that fun?”

“That woman should be kept in a cage,” Natalie said.

“Oh. She is a pussycat, isn’t she? Men just love her.”

Back in the Green Room, she was struggling into her coat when she caught something on the screen from the corner of her eye. “And now, Joan Brandon, live in Chelsea at the murder scene.” The image on the screen changed to a blond, windblown woman who was clutching her microphone and seemed out of breath. “There has just been a shooting in this loft, David, and the police are here now, they’ve just brought the body down and put it in the ambulance.” The camera panned across the front of a building with snow blowing across the scene. “We’ve got Sergeant Dan MacPherson here.” Joan moved in on MacPherson, held the mike before him and asked him just what had happened. MacPherson’s face wore its supercilious, faintly unconcerned look. He brushed his hair back against the wind. “We don’t really have much to say yet, Joan. We were told there was a body here—anonymous tip, of course—and we came down. Sure enough, there was a body, and we’re just beginning to get a line on things. We’ll try to have a bit more for you later tonight—”

“Then we’ll be talking to you on the eleven o’clock news?”

“You sure can try, Joan.” He ducked away, out of the picture, his smile lingering like the Cheshire cat’s.

“You heard that, David. A murder in a Chelsea loft, not much else yet that’s definite. Back to you, David.”

Natalie grabbed a cab and headed home in the darkness of early evening. Snow blew across the streets and the wind was icy, cutting.

MacPherson. A murder. A Chelsea loft.

She forced herself not to think about it, not to make all the connections that frightened her. But she wondered if MacPherson was already planning a Christmas tree for some lucky new lady in jeopardy. …

Julie’s face was much improved and she had a Bloody Mary ready when Natalie got home. The swelling was almost completely gone, makeup had done quite a lot for the eye and the cheek bone, and she was wearing a long wool robe and a smile.

Natalie changed into her own robe, curled up on the couch before the fire, and slowly put away the Bloody Mary. Julie wanted to know about her reaction to the questions Betty had sprung on her, adding that despite a look of stunned surprise Natalie had carried off the whole thing pretty well. They each had another drink and Natalie dragged out three tired bits of cheese and some stone-ground crackers. They munched their way through the Jets game on “Monday Night Football,” Julie cheering loudly for her art-loving lineman.

Natalie had a third drink to keep her anxieties at bay, waiting for the news, which finally came on half an hour past midnight, once the stupid game was over. Julie was yawning and gave Natalie a good-night kiss of thanks for helping her through the hideous day. Before leaving she looked back at Natalie: “My gosh, I didn’t tell you—the herpes thing? Well, I don’t have it! I think you were right, the doctor was just pissed off at my bugging him. Anyway I called him again today and he’d just gotten the report back—I’m okay.”

Natalie sighed deeply, looked up shaking her head. “Thank God,” she said. “So be warned, all right?”

Julie nodded, held up crossed fingers and left.

Turning her attention back to the television news, she heard the anchorman say, “Next, after these words, a brutal murder in Chelsea. Stay tuned.”

She poured the last bit of the pitcher of spicy Mary into her glass, sipped at it, waited. The anchorman switched to a reporter in the studio, an intense-looking woman with huge glasses. “Sometime today, the time hasn’t yet been fixed, a network television sales executive was murdered in Manhattan’s Chelsea district.” The screen filled with a pan down the street and up at the building she’d seen earlier on the monitor at the studio. “It was here, in a fourth-floor loft, that Bradley Nichols, a thirty-one-year-old television executive, lived and—today—died at the hands of an unknown assailant.” The screen now filled with a close-up of Dan MacPherson, his breath hanging in clouds before him like steam from a struggling engine, talking with the woman in the huge glasses. A voiceover continued, “We spoke with Sergeant Daniel MacPherson, who is in charge of the investigation.” The voiceover ended, was replaced by conversation, a wintry wind in the background. “What can you tell us now?” she was asking. “Are there any suspects?”

“Well, Anne, the victim was stabbed repeatedly—do you hear what I’m saying? Rage. We’re talking about rage. And all we really have to go on now is the information that the victim did apparently have a roommate. Naturally we’d like to talk to him. And we’re talking to other people in the building, people at his place of employment—we’re right at the beginning of this thing, Anne, but the kind of killing it was, the manner in which it was carried out, makes it very high on our priority list.” He wasn’t smiling. Then his face was gone and the camera was on Anne, back in the studio.

“We do have a photograph of the victim. …” She waited, staring at the camera. “If we could just show that—there it is.” A black-and-white photograph appeared, a smiling face, innocent and happy. “Bradley Nichols, brutally murdered in Chelsea today. We’ll keep a close eye on this one as it develops.” She turned back to the anchorman. “You know, Bill,” she said in the spirit of conversational, one-big-family news, “MacPherson, the cop I was just interviewing, has headed up several murder investigations in the last few years and he’s always helpful, very professional, and, you know, good copy, candid. But I’ve never seen him quite so tight-lipped as he was tonight. When he said that this killing was done in rage, let me tell you—though he wouldn’t go into details—he wasn’t kidding.”

The screen again filled with the face of the victim, then slowly faded away as they went to a commercial.

There wasn’t a shadow of doubt in Natalie’s mind.

On Saturday night she had held Bradley Nichols in her arms.

Four o’clock in the morning and Natalie was beginning to wonder if the clocks were broken, if the night would ever end. Her breath stuck jaggedly in the center of her chest, like a stake between her breasts, and her face was damp with perspiration. She hardly noticed Sir grumbling and shifting at the foot of the bed. But she couldn’t shake the sound of MacPherson’s voice.

Rage. We’re talking about rage. …

Then she saw Bradley Nichols’s frightened, vulnerable face, heard him crying softly in the darkened room, in the dim glow of reflecting snow. She felt again the pressure of his mouth, a stranger’s kiss, and she wondered what had happened to him … what the rage had done. She tried to push him out of her mind but it was no good, he was with her now, the memory of him and his fear of his crazy roommate. …

My God, a tear squeezed from the corner of her eye, there was no epitaph, nothing left of him. Rage … rage had claimed him.

The night was tearing apart and she couldn’t stop it. Her psyche was a graveyard, it seemed, had become one since chance had placed her at the window and made her look. And now it was coming to life, the graves were opening, the night seethed with her own fears and the images she couldn’t wipe away. Murder. And blood. Alicia Quirk’s face disintegrating, poor Bradley dead of someone’s rage, and who would be next? It was a middle-of-the-night question and too easy to answer—