Manhattan Noir - Lawrence Block [13]
Esther checked her watch. Feeling a bit lightheaded, she regretted for the moment that she hadn’t eaten, the food on the plane would be so bad. But then she remembered that her ticket was first class. The food might not be so bad after all, and they’d be pouring champagne even before takeoff. She saw a cab a few blocks away and reached into her purse for the little pot of lip gloss and dropped it, along with the syringe of epinephrine she’d taken from Harry’s pocket when she’d hugged him, between the grates of the sewer, two more things she wouldn’t need again.
The cab pulled up and Esther settled herself in the backseat, telling the driver to take her to JFK. Everything was right on schedule. She had plenty of time to catch her flight, the bus wouldn’t be at the corner of Greenwich and Horatio Streets for another five or six minutes, and by that time Harry would be dead.
Nine, Esther said to herself, eyes closed, smiling, the one first called “Nut Allergy” and then “Nuts to You,” the one in which Esther adds peanut oil to her lip gloss and kills Harry with a kiss. It had always been her very favorite.
IF YOU CAN’T STAND THE HEAT
BY LAWRENCE BLOCK
Clinton
She felt his eyes on her just about the time the bartender placed a Beck’s coaster on the bar and set her dry Rob Roy on top of it. She wanted to turn and see who was eyeing her, but remained as she was, trying to analyze just what it was she felt. She couldn’t pin it down physically, couldn’t detect a specific prickling of the nerves in the back of her neck. She simply knew she was being watched, and that the watcher was a male.
It was, to be sure, a familiar sensation. Men had always looked at her. Since adolescence, since her body had begun the transformation from girl to woman? No, longer than that. Even in childhood, some men had looked at her, gazing with admiration and, often, with something beyond admiration.
In Hawley, Minnesota, thirty miles east of the North Dakota line, they’d looked at her like that. The glances followed her to Red Cloud and Minneapolis, and now she was in New York, and, no surprise, men still looked at her.
She lifted her glass, sipped, and a male voice said, “Excuse me, but is that a Rob Roy?”
He was standing to her left, a tall man, slender, well turned out in a navy blazer and gray trousers. His shirt was a button-down, his tie diagonally striped. His face, attractive but not handsome, was youthful at first glance, but she could see he’d lived some lines into it. And his dark hair was lightly infiltrated with gray.
“A dry Rob Roy,” she said. “Why?”
“In a world where everyone orders Cosmopolitans,” he said, “there’s something very pleasingly old-fashioned about a girl who drinks a Rob Roy. A woman, I should say.”
She lowered her eyes to see what he was drinking.
“I haven’t ordered yet,” he said. “Just got here. I’d have one of those, but old habits die hard.” And when the barman moved in front of him, he ordered Jameson on the rocks. “Irish whiskey,” he told her. “Of course, this neighborhood used to be mostly Irish. And tough. It was a pretty dangerous place a few years ago. A young woman like yourself wouldn’t feel comfortable walking into a bar unaccompanied, not in this part of town. Even accompanied, it was no place for a lady.”
“I guess it’s changed a lot,” she said.
“It’s even changed its name,” he said. His drink arrived, and he picked up his glass and held it to the light, admiring the amber color. “They call it Clinton now. That’s for DeWitt Clinton, not Bill. DeWitt was the governor awhile back, he dug the Erie Canal. Not personally, but he got it done. And there was George Clinton, he was the governor, too, for seven terms starting before the adoption of the Constitution. And then he had a term as vice president. But all that was before your time.”
“By