“Yes.” The one now listening on the bedroom extension had coached her in this earlier, right after his call to the Hotel Wilmington. Conscious of him listening, she repeated what he’d told her to say: “It isn’t a message, exactly, it’s a package. A Mr. Keegan came by and left it for you. He said you’d want to see it right away.”
“Mr. Keegan? What kind of package?”
“It’s a small suitcase. I didn’t open it. Can you come out tonight and pick it up?”
“Not tonight. I’m in Seattle right now, I won’t be back East until Thursday.”
“Well, Mr. Keegan said this was important. He said it had to do with the concert, and you should get it right away.”
“Well, I’m tied up here in Seattle right now.” He was silent, thinking, and she tried to buzz her thought to him across the wire: Get here now! “I could get there tomorrow night,” he said. “Around eleven. That’s the earliest I could make it.”
Down inside her closed eyes, she was wondering, Is be telling the truth? But he wouldn’t wait all that time, would he, knowing what the situation must be here now? He had to be just saying that, to lull the people he knew would be listening in. She said, “Well, if that’s the earliest—”
“Eleven tomorrow night.”
His voice is very dear to me, she thought, and was surprised at the tenderness she was feeling toward him. She usually considered both of them to be remote individuals, whose connection with one another was a convenience that fulfilled many needs, physical, emotional, psychic, but who were not sentimental about one another, any more than they were sentimental about themselves or anything else. And yet now she found herself reluctant to end the conversation with him, even though there was nothing more to be said, and it wasn’t only because his voice was a symbolic lifeline to safety, though that was part of it, too. But the the rest of it was tenderness, an outward flow of feeling toward him that the emotional onslaught of her situation had buffeted to the surface.
I have to bang up now, she thought. A secretary only, a passer-on of messages.
“Well, goodbye.”
“Tomorrow night,” he said. There was nothing in his voice, but that was all right. If she was doing things right, there was nothing in hers either.
“Yes, tomorrow night. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
She kept her eyes squeezed shut, she continued to hold the phone to her face with both hands, and she listened to the click as he hung up, and then the furry silence of an open line. A second smaller click told her the listener in the bedroom had hung up.
It was time to get her report card, to find out whether or not this deception had earned a passing grade.
She opened her eyes at last, wearily, to put the phone down, and a round fat sunlike childish face was inches from hers, smiling broadly at her, the eyes bright and demented.
She screamed, and leaped backward along the sofa, throwing the phone at him without thinking. It missed his head and fell over his shoulder, the cord getting tangled in his right arm. He had been squatting in front of the sofa, grinning into her face, and now, with a comically blank surprised expression, he fell backward and bumped to a sitting position on the floor. He sat there, legs bent awkwardly in front of him, hands resting on knees, and gave a surprised laugh as he looked at her.
Her first terror ended quickly, and Claire looked more closely at him. This was Manny, who had been lying on the bed the last two hours. His face looked both guileless and mindless, as though he were a very happy moron. Could that be true, would the other one be traveling with somebody retarded?
Now the other one came into the living room, and said, “What the hell’s going on?”
Manny was picking the phone cord away from his arm as though it were imaginary and he were suffering from the d.t.’s. His voice happy and surprisingly light, he said, “She threw the phone at me.”
“What was the scream about?”
“I’m sorry,” Claire said. The scream had rattled her, and she was very afraid again, as much so as when she’d first seen these two in her house. “I didn’t—I had my eyes closed, and I didn’t know he was there.”
Manny had finally freed the phone, and now, hanging it up, he said, “She looked just as nice. You wouldn’t believe it, Jessup, she looked lovely. Like she was dead and all laid out.”
“Christ, Manny,” Jessup said, “when do you come down?”
“Never, baby. I like it up here.” Manny grinned at Claire, and suddenly his expression became much more adult. Reaching out, he put the palm of one hand on the inside of her left knee, then slid his hand halfway up her thigh. “You gonna come up with me?”
Jessup had come closer, and now his mouth moved in an expression of distaste. He said, “Forget it, Manny. She’s off limits.”
Manny pouted, like a sulky child, and looked around and up at Jessup. His hand stayed where it was, between her thighs. He said, “How come? Where’s the fun in that?”
“You better get your hand out of there, or you’ll get clap of the fingernail.”
Manny frowned, like a stupid child laboriously learning multiplication tables, and looked again at Claire. “A pretty lady like this? I don’t believe it.”
“Go ahead, then.”
Claire waited, tensed, looking back at Manny, watching his mind deal with the problem. Jessup was intricate himself, the intricate could fool him. But Manny was direct.
And he asked her, directly, “You got something bad?”
