college athlete that was buried beneath the extra pounds of lard.
“You always use people?” she asked, but the tone lacked bite.
“Me? I suppose you don’t? What would you have done with me if I had introduced you to Julien right at the start? Would you have taken the time to let me down gently or would you have dumped me right away?”
“You hurt my arm,” she said finally.
He sighed. “You’re a lousy actress, Dee. Julien’s not going to thank me.”
She started to lash out at him, then, to get even. “You’re no youngster, you ever look at yourself? You’re fat, you wear a wig-you couldn’t keep a young girl.”
“I get what I pay for, Dee,” he said sourly. He changed the, subject then and became almost fatherly. “Look, why should this surprise you?
it had to end sometime. I had hoped it wouldn’t end too painfully.
If I hadn’t gotten tired of you, Deirdre, you would have gotten tired of me and found somebody else sooner or later. Come on, admit it.” He walked over to the wastebasket and plucked out the pearls and watch and dropped them on the coffee table in front of her. Then he went to the bar and came back with a wad of Kleenex. “Here, you’ll want to fix your make-up.”
Not even time to cry, she thought. She automatically, opened her purse and took out her compact and started retouching her skillfully constructed face. It would have had to end sometime, like he had said, she thought. And he hadn’t been ungenerous….
Ungenerous, hell, he was paying her off. Like buying up a contract. If she had any pride, she’d walk out; the pearls and the watch hardly meant that much. But then there was the matter of the check; it would be easy enough for him to stop payment on it. And there was Julien.
It was then she realized that Bigelow had completely disarmed her and she wondered if he knew it. She was never going to make that audition.
She had been kidding herself all her life and deep down she had known it.
There was an old saying that you should never take away a person’s song, she thought, but neither should you force him to sing. She had no talent, never had had any, but now she couldn’t even pretend. That in itself was reason enough to hate Bigelow. She stood up.
Bigelow was looking at her curiously. “You don’t have to leave.
I told my wife I’d be away for the weekend and I thought we could spend most of it right here.”
She flared. “You’ve got your goddamned gall! You say .it’s all over with and then you ask me to spend the night.
I don’t get you.”
‘Maybe it’s because I want the one piece of yourself that you never gave me before,” Bigelow said quietly. “I want you to stay because you want to, not because I want you to.”
She felt an unreasoning hunger for him then, composed of e-quai parts of humiliation, a secret admiration for his sudden and unexpected strength, and the realization that, in one sense, it would be a small victory for her. Regardless of how he phrased it, he wanted her, if only for the night. And staying would take some of the sting out of the rejection. Or had he figured all of that out, too?
She sat down. “I could use a drink,” she said, “And please Turn off the goddamned lights except for the Christmas tree.” She sat in the darkness for a few moments and in her mind’s eye watched a whole parade of Christmases go by. Her fingers strayed to the pearls. It could have been worse….
“I was going to get you a pair of Guccis for Christmas,” she said suddenly.
“Thanks for the thought.” He abruptly started to swear.
“Damned refrigerator is out of order. No ice.”
“It doesn’t matter I , I’ll take mine straight up.”
His voice was a snarl. “The hell you will; at the rent we pay, things should be working. I’ll call maintenance and have them send somebody up.”
Deirdre felt vaguely alarmed. “They’ll send up Krost.
He’s on the night shift.”
“What’s the matter? Can’t he fix a refrigerator?”
She shrugged. “He’s a snoop with a dirty mind.” She snuggled down into one arm of the couch and watched the lights on the Christmas tree mix with the lights of the city below. It could have been worse, she thought, sleepily.
It could have been a whole lot worse….
CHAPTER 6
It had started out as a bad night for Michael Krost ‘the moment he had come on duty. He was in the maintenance locker room changing into his uniform when Malcolm Donaldson, the night maintenance supervisor, stormed in, spotting his brown paper bag before he had had a chance to slip it under the bench or hide it in the locker itself.
, “What’s that you’ve got there, Krost-come on, let’s see it.”
Krost tried to slip it behind him but the short, burly Scotsman had bounded around the bench and grabbed it. “Open up the bag, Mike, or I’ll take it away from you and open it up myself!” Krost reluctantly revealed the contents of the bag and for a moment Donaldson was ominously quiet. “Four star. Your drinking taste is improving, Krost, or maybe you got a raise I didn’t know about-and which you damned well didn’t deserve!”
“I was taking it home to Daisy as a gift,” Krost had said sullenly.
The thin wreath of reddish white hair that encircled Donaldson’s thinning hair bristled as if it had become electrified. “A little gift for the little woman,” he said sarcastically. “You sure it wasn’t a gift for yourself, to be presented, say, sometime between ten o’clock and midnight? What do you take me for, man? Do I look that much the idiot? You better thank your blessed saints the seal isn’t broken or I would have your job and I’d have it now, be damned how friendly you are with Leroux!” He thrust the bottle back in the bag and handed it to Krost who clutched at it nervously. “It was going to be a gift, I swear it, Mr. Donaldson.” He licked his lips. “You know I wouldn’t “I know you wouldn’t what?” Donaldson roared. “Drink on the job? If there’s anything I know you would do, it’s that! Well, I’ll let you off easy.
Just get it out of the building. Give it to,some poor deserving soul on the street there must be a lot of them out there in this weather and I’ll forget I ever saw it. Otherwise, you go on report and this time I’ll make it stick if I have to put my own job on the line!”
Donaldson fumbled in his locker for his small brown bottle of ulcer medicine and Krost edged away, hastily buttoning his shirt.
Donaldson erupted again, misinterpreting the movement. “Don’t dump it now, you ninny!
Wait until I get through talking.” He took a swallow of thick liquid from the bottle and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
A few moments later he seemed calmer. “We’re shorthanded, in case you haven’t heard.
yet, so you’ll be working the floors from seventeen through twenty-five. You, ride herd on those women of yours and I don’t want to hear any more complaints from tenants about wastebaskets not being emptied or bottles left in the hall, like last weekend. How many of your young ladies showed up tonight?”
Krost smiled weakly, trying to please. “Pretty many all of them, Mr. Donaldson. I’ve got a pretty good crew, they don’t often miss, no sir.” He was already making up his mind where he would hide the bottle.
“‘Pretty many all of them, Mr. Donaldson,”’ Donaldson mimicked.
“How the hell many is ‘pretty many,’ Krost?”
“All but two,” Krost said, now surly. “We can get along.”
“Counting the other crews, that mean’s we’re down about 15 percent throughout the building,” Donaldson complained, more to himself than to Krost. “Christ, you can’t depend on anybody these days.” He took another gulp from the bottle and turned back to Krost. “I want your floors spotless when the tenants come back on Monday, you understand me? Last week everybody and their kid brother was on my tail and, so help me, if it happens this time, it’s not going to be my fault.”
He turned back to his locker to change and Krost watched him out of the corner of his eye. Donaldson was showing his age and with his guts acting up-well, he might have to go on the early retirement list.
