“It’s just something you might check out. . ”
“I intend to, Sergeant. Thank you”-Ransom’s voice was close to breaking-”and God bless you.”
As Rusty Boyle let himself into Joyce’s apartment, he was remembering the first time he had met her, five months ago when she had called the precinct to report a burglary. A ring with a sentimental value but very little else was missing. He had filed a report and forgotten about it. But he couldn’t forget Joyce Colby. She was slim and tall, in her late twenties, with a fair complexion that was in flawless complement to her fire-engine red hair. And she was honest and intelligent, and Rusty Boyle loved her so much that she could melt his heart with a laugh or a gesture.
She had been married at eighteen to a construction worker, who had been killed in a fall from the forty- second floor of a building being put up near Times Square. From that experience and from Rusty Boyle’s own occupational hazards, Joyce believed that brave men were always in danger, simply by virtue of their maleness and courage, and she considered it not only her privilege but her duty to reward such men with understanding intelligence and share with them the sexual excitements of her body.
When he closed the door, she called a hello to him from the kitchen.
She was wearing green velvet Levi’s and a white silk shirt buttoned only at the waist, and when he kissed her and took her in his arms, the lovely swell of her breasts charged his whole body with excitement.
When she turned away from him, however, he noted a touch of resignation in her manner.
“Anything wrong?”
She smiled and shook her head slowly.
He picked up a bottle of scotch and two glasses from the bar adjoining the sink, but she shook her head again and put a hand on his arm.
“There’s a steak, an avocado salad, and a bottle of good cold wine,”
she said. “But later.”
“Goddamn it to hell,” he said.
“That’s right. Tonnelli called.”
“Goddamn it,” he said again, but he was already on his way to the front door.
Chapter 10
It was late afternoon on October 15 that Barbara Boyd’s nerve failed her; she told the cabdriver to let her off at Sixty-fifth Street, several blocks from her apartment, and after giving the man a bill without even looking at its denomination, she walked swiftly along the sidewalk toward the Grosvenor Hotel, where she knew there was a small, intimate piano bar just off the lobby.
Luther would have listened to the tapes a dozen times by now, she thought, analyzing and weighing her every word, listening alertly for a revealing pause or stammer, a nervous laugh, or contradictions in what she knew he would think of as her “evidence.”
She sat at the end of the bar with her long legs crossed, twisting the stem of her martini glass with restless fingers, a flex of nervous energy. When she was at ease (which she wasn’t at present), there was a lithe and almost feline grace in her movements, a challenge in the directness of her eyes and in the clean planes of her face. She was wearing a bottle-green tweed suit and a blue scarf knotted loosely about her throat, and if it hadn’t been for the nervous tremor in her fingers, a casual observer would have taken her for an artist or designer or possibly an actress sipping a drink while waiting to keep a rendezvous with some fortunate man.
At this hour there were only a half dozen customers along the bar, and one of these, a large, florid man with cold eyes, was staring with frank and deliberate interest at Barbara’s elegantly slim legs. In the rear of the room the piano player was singing a medley of Noel Coward songs.
“. . I’ll see you again. . ”
His voice was sad and muted, the words as blue as the air in the smoke-filled little bar.
Her thoughts were sad and splintered with pain, like the music.
What was London, where she had first met and loved Luther Boyd, if it was not as she had once read, the mighty fleet of Wren, with top gallants and mainsails of stone?. .
And for some idiotic reason, maybe only because they had been so happy sitting in the lounge bar of the Dorchester, she had said to him, “Time held me green and dying, though I sang in my chains like the sea.”
And he had asked her, “Is that T. S. Eliot?”
“No, Dylan Thomas,” she had said, and he had made a note of the quotation and the name in his small leather appointments book, and she had liked him for that, had found it touching.
The martini did nothing to ease a bruise that seemed to be in the center of her heart.
Kate had been
The psychiatrist had asked her if she had any feelings of guilt about not having given Luther Boyd a son. She hadn’t been prepared for that question and hence had blurted out a quick and honest answer: “No, I’m glad I didn’t, Doctor.”
Why had she said that? It was simple enough, and one didn’t need diplomas on the wall from Harvard and Vienna to interpret it. She could not bear even the thought of losing another son.
She asked the bartender for a second martini, knowing she needed this additional crutch for her meeting with Luther, but as she did so, she experienced a revulsion for her own weakness and an active dislike for the person she seemed to be turning into, a neurotic female taking liquid courage under the insolent stares of the florid man at the other end of the bar, who, she knew quite well, would offer to pay for her third drink. .
Chapter 11
“God created man, and finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a female companion so that he might feel his loneliness more acutely.”
Luther Boyd closed the book he was reading with an irritable snap of his powerful hands and dropped it with a dismissing gesture on the table beside his deep leather chair.
“-feel his loneliness more acutely. . ”
A draining, weakening thought. . He had made an honest effort to involve himself in poetry and ballet and opera because these were art forms Barbara was passionately fond of. But how far could a man force himself? At what point did his simulated interest, his patient study of areas that bored him, wear into thin hypocrisy?
Since he tried to be honest with himself, he reluctantly conceded that it had once been a stimulating challenge to examine musical scores as if they were campaign maps, searching out the trivial or complex reasons behind the writings of plays and novels and operas.
He remembered an afternoon in a hotel in London (where had it been, the Connaught?), he could recall even now the look and texture of the warm sunlight on the backs of Barbara’s slim hands, and as he thought of her then, her eyes shining with grave amusement, quoting words from Dylan Thomas, Luther Boyd felt a stab of poignant pain at all the promises and pleasures they had lost in only these last brief years.
He stood and paced the study of his apartment above Central Park, choosing another book from his shelves, a military manual detailing General Grant’s strategy and tactics while driving his Army of the Tennessee against Forts Henry and Donelson on his battering course through Shiloh to Vicksburg.
There was a lesson in guerrilla warfare to be learned from the confusion of the rebel commanders facing Grant, the mismatched triumvirate of Generals Floyd, Pillow, and Buckner. They had allowed a massive victory to evaporate, to slip from their collective hands that night; faulty intelligence had been part of it, but more important, they had been deceived by chimerical phantoms which had convinced them that the Union forces were still in position, thus causing them to sound retreat against an enemy that had already withdrawn from the field.
But what they took for the enemy had been only the banked Union campfires, whipped into flames by gusting winds to create the illusion of a continuing hostile encirclement.
Boyd checked his watch as he heard, above Kate’s hi-fi, the musical chimes of the front door. This would be Barbara, he thought, as he rose and went into the living room. Injustice is relatively easy to bear, he had once read;
