Manhattan Noir - Lawrence Block [10]
When another fifteen minutes had passed and there was still no Harry and still no second Manhattan, Esther began to daydream. Ever since Harry left her, she had been concocting ways to bump him off. In the beginning, it was the only way she could fall asleep, and later on, Esther found it elevated her mood any time of day. Looking out into the night through the oversize windows, Esther thought that might be a pleasant way to spend the time while she waited for the pimply waiter and her bald, overweight, philandering, estranged husband to show up.
When Harry first told her about Cheryl, Cheryl who worked for Harry as she herself had done until recently, Cheryl his bimbo, his chippy, his fiancée and about to be his next wife as soon as Esther signed the papers Harry was bringing along, she would write a new story every night. Lying in bed in the apartment she once shared with Harry, the apartment where she now lived alone, staring at the ceiling unable to sleep, Esther began killing Harry. She stood behind him, unseen, and pushed him in front of the Ninth Avenue bus, off the balcony of their penthouse apartment after he’d come crawling back to her, begging her to forgive him, even off the High Line, the old tram tracks the city kept promising to turn into a public space one day. She watched him die slowly at the hospital of some terrible, painful, incurable, slow-acting disease, and she gained access to the penthouse he shared with Cheryl, that tramp—who names a kid Cheryl, anyway?—and killed him there, tossing Cheryl’s hair dryer into the bathtub, holding a pillow over his face, even shooting him the moment he came home from work, alone, for once, Cheryl doing some retail therapy or getting the liposuction she, Esther, had refused when Harry suggested it. She’d killed him in Washington Square Park, right near the famous arch that all the Japanese tourists came by the busload to see. She’d killed him on the refurbished Christopher Street pier, once a gay sunbathing and pickup site, now a park where you can walk with your aged mother or bring your kids; Esther finding a time when the place was deserted, a time when she could be there alone with Harry and end his life. That’s the thing about stories, Esther thought, unlike real life, you can make them turn out just the way you want them to. Fiction, she’d come to see, was preferable to fact, at least the facts of life as Esther knew them.
Struggling for the peace of mind that would let her sleep, Esther had killed Harry at The Strand, the world’s biggest bookstore, at The White Horse Tavern, one of many places where Dylan Thomas supposedly drank himself to death, at Pastis, the popular restaurant in the meat market where young people talked on their cell phones instead of to each other, and even at one of the few remaining wholesale markets where Harry ended up hanging on one of those nasty-looking meat hooks alongside some hapless cow. There probably wasn’t a place left in the Village that Esther hadn’t used as a venue for killing Harry—not a seedy bar, an after-hours club, a back cottage, a pocket park; not a street, an avenue, a lane, an alley, a square, a mews.
In her desire for sleep, Esther had devised more ways to kill Harry than you could shake a scimitar at, a new one every night for the first three months. But then she saw that it was even more delicious to repeat a favorite story—there were so many of them, all so scrumptiously detailed and satisfying. That’s when she began to name them, then tweak the names, amusing herself with each title change. God knows, she needed a few laughs in her life. A while after that—she had been a bookkeeper, after all—Esther