He kissed her and liked the way her lips felt and the way her jaw softened. He cupped her bottom with both palms and felt the smooth denim. His boozy head got hazy with desire and he pressed against her.
“The housekeeper came today. I’ve got clean sheets,” he whispered.
“You know how to romance a girl.” She wanted this to happen, he could tell.
He led her by a slippery hand to the bedroom, flopped on the bedspread and pulled her on top.
He was kissing her blood-warm neck, feeling under her blouse, when she said, “We’re going to regret this. It’s against all-”
He covered her lips with his mouth then pulled back to say, “Look, if you really don’t want to, we can roll the clock back a few minutes and finish the dishes.”
She kissed him, the first one that was hers to give. She said, “I hate doing dishes.”
When they left the bedroom, it was dark and the living room was eerily quiet, just the hum of the air conditioner and the low whoosh of distant traffic on the FDR Drive. He had given her a clean white dress shirt to put on, something he’d done before with new women. They seemed to like the feeling of starch against bare skin and all the iconic imagery of the ritual. She was no different. The shirt swallowed her up and covered her prudishly. She sat on the sofa and drew her knees up to her chest. The skin that showed was cool and mottled like alabaster.
“Want a drink?” he asked.
“I think I’ve had quite enough tonight.”
“You sorry?”
“Should be, but I’m not.” Her face was still tinged pink. He thought she looked prettier than he had ever seen her, but also older, more womanly. “I kind of thought this might happen,” she said.
“For how long?”
“The beginning.”
“Really! Why?”
“A combination of your reputation and mine.”
“I didn’t know you had one too.”
“It’s a different sort of reputation.” She sighed. “Good girl, safe choices, never rocking the boat. I think I’ve secretly wanted the boat to capsize, to see what it felt like.”
He smiled. “From wrecking ball to shipwreck. Spot the common theme?”
“You’re a bad boy, Will Piper. Good girls secretly like bad boys, didn’t you know?”
His head was clearer, almost flat sober. “We’re going to have to hide this, you know.”
“I know.”
“I mean, your career and my retirement.”
“I know, Will! I should go.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Thank you but I don’t think you really want a sleepover.” Before he could respond, she touched the cover of Laura’s script on the coffee table. “You going to read it?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Then, “Probably.”
“I think she wants you to.”
When he was alone, he poured a scotch, sat on the sofa and turned on the table lamp. The brightness of the bulb stung his eyes. He stared at his daughter’s screenplay, the image of the lightbulb scorching the cover. As the image receded it looked for all the world like a sinister smiley face staring back at him. It dared him to pick up the script. He took the dare and muttered, “Fucking wrecking ball.”
He’d never read a screenplay before. Its shiny brass brads reminded him of the last time he’d laid eyes on one, a month earlier at Mark Shackleton’s house. He turned the cover page and waded in-the format confused him with all the interior/exterior jazz.
After a few pages he had to start over, but then he got into the swing of it. Apparently, the character he inspired was named Jack, a man whose sparse description seemed to fit him to a tee: a brawny man in his forties, a sandy-haired product of the South with an easy manner and a hard edge.
Unsurprisingly, Jack was a high-functioning alcoholic and womanizer. He was in a new relationship with Marie, a sculptress who knew better than to let a man like him into her life but was powerless to resist him. Jack, it seemed, had left a trail of women in his wake, and-painfully to Will-one of them was a daughter, a young woman named Vicki. Jack was haunted by flashbacks of Amelia, an emotionally frail woman whom he had beaten to a metaphysical pulp before she set herself free with vodka and carbon monoxide. Amelia-a thinly veiled homage to Melanie, Will’s first wife and Laura’s mother-was a woman who found the waters of life too difficult and complicated to navigate. Throughout the script, she appeared to him, cherry red from the poison, rebuking him about his cruelty to Marie.
Midway through the script, Will found himself too sober to continue, so he poured a fresh three fingers. He waited for the drink to anesthetize him then carried on till the bitter end, to Marie’s suicide, witnessed by the sobbing presence of Amelia, and to Vicki’s redemptive decision to leave her own abusive relationship and choose a kinder, though less passionate man. And Jack? He moved on to Sarah, Marie’s cousin, who he met at her funeral, the wrecking ball still swinging away.
When he put the script down, he wondered why he wasn’t crying.
So this was how his daughter saw him. Was he that grotesque?
He thought about his ex-wives, multiple girlfriends, the conga line of one-nighters, and now Nancy. Most of them pretty nice gals. He thought about his daughter, a good egg tainted by the sulfurous bad-egg smell of her father. He thought about-
Suddenly, his introspection braked to a screeching halt. He grabbed at the script and opened it to a random page.
“Son of a bitch!”
The screenplay font.
It was Courier 12 point, the same as the Doomsday postcards.
He had forgotten his initial puzzlement at the postcard font, an old standby from the days of typewriters but a more uncommon choice in the computer/printer age. Times New Roman, Garamond, Arial, Helvetica-these were the new standards in the world of pull-down menus.
He jumped onto the Internet and had his answer. Courier 12 was the mandatory font for screenplays, completely de rigueur. If you submitted a script to a producer in another format you’d be laughed out of town. Another tidbit: it was also widely used by computer programmers to write source code.
A mental vision slammed into his thoughts. A couple of screenplays authored by “Peter Benedict” and a few black Pentel pens sat on a white desk near a bookcase filled with computer programming books. Mark Shackleton’s voice-over completed the imagery: “I don’t think you’re going to catch the guy.”
He spent a short while contemplating the associations, odd as they were, before dismissing as absurd the notion there might be a connection between the Doomsday case and his college roommate. Schackleton, the grown-up nerd, running around New York, stabbing, shooting, sowing mayhem! Please!
Still, the postcard font was an unplumbed clue-he strongly felt it now-and he knew that to ignore one of his hunches would be foolhardy, especially when otherwise they were at a complete dead end.
He grabbed his cell phone and excitedly texted Nancy: U and I are going to be reading scripts. Doomie may be a screenwriter.
JULY 28, 2009
S he felt the smooth, cool fourteen-carat links of the wrist-band and ran her fingertip over the rough border of diamonds around the narrow rectangular watch face.
“I like this one,” she murmured.
“Excellent choice, madame,” the jeweler said. “This Harry Winston is a popular choice. It’s called the ‘Avenue
