Manhattan Noir - Lawrence Block [66]
Now I was the pal she told her sad stories to.
With a ballet dancer’s grace Maureen leaned forward, and without touching the glass, delicately sipped a taste of her drink. Smiling, she undulated—that’s the only word that fits—to the music, doing that hands-down-her-breasts move and continuing clear to her thighs.
The door to the Bucking Bull opened, bringing in the dark, cold night air, and the real bucking bull Maureen had been dreaming of. Vitorio.
I had a cigarette in my mouth, but I didn’t light it.
Maureen stopped dancing. Her body tense, she stared at Vitorio. It wasn’t all lust. There was dread there, too. Maybe that added to the sexuality. What did I know?
Vitorio glided over to Maureen, pulled her to him, kissed her, then flung her, Apache-style, across the room. Very Rudolph Valentino. Corny but it worked. They danced, looking great together.
After a big finish they settled in at the bar. Vitorio chugged Maureen’s drink and ordered another round. What the hell. She would pay for them. Maureen talked to me a couple of times to support the fiction that she and I were there together.
Pretty soon I was the invisible man. That was fine for me.
But I worried about Maureen. With each new round Vitorio got meaner and louder. He started manhandling her, grabbing her bare arms and leaving welts.
“Take it easy, friend.”
“Fuck you where you breathe. You aren’t my friend and I’ll take it any way I want to.”
I stood. Not to fight, to get out of there. To give me time to think, I grabbed a handful of cashews and popped them in my mouth. “Maureen …” I chewed and swallowed. “I’m working the new Redford film tomorrow. Have to get up early. You want a ride home?”
This was a sham. I lived on Central Park West and Maureen was across town near Second Avenue.
“No, I’ll be fine.” She leaned close and whispered in my ear, “He’s okay. He’s just hot for my body.”
Yeah, I thought.
It must have been 3 in the morning when the phone rang. “Hello?”
I could hear her sobbing. “I’m downstairs. Outside the park. I need you.”
“Maureen! What’s wrong?”
“Come and get me. Please, Eddie.”
I threw my clothes on and hurried out through the side door on 83rd Street.
The night was misty, colder than September had any right to be. Foggy, too. Murky clouds raced overhead, alternately hiding and revealing the moon.
Across the street the large, imposing black boulders in Central Park, looking like monster sentinels, cast great shadows on the street.
The wind wailed across the park, shaking the trees. Me, too. I wanted to rush back to the sanctuary of my apartment.
For a strange instant all was blackness and silence. Next I spotted a glint, then a shadow lurking just beyond the glow of the streetlamp. I ran across to the park side. Maureen stepped out of the shadows, her face highlighted by a macabre halo of lamp light.
Her blue dress, sans cape, was torn and bloody. Clutched against her chest, her sequined purse, a cell phone, and an elegant Barbie doll in a sparkling white wedding gown also specked with blood.
A yellow cab pulled up. “Taxi, folks?”
Maureen was in such a rush to get the door open she dropped her cell.
“Wait a minute,” I said, peering at the shadowy ground.
“Forget about it!” Maureen shrieked. “Hurry.”
The driver headed downtown to come around.
“No!” Maureen cried. “East. We’ve got to go across the park.”
I patted her hand. “He knows.”
She pulled her hand away. “Nobody knows.”
After a few turns we entered the park at 86th and traveled the empty road east, past angry stone walls, moonlit hundred-year-old shuddering trees, and through their ground-bound silhouettes.
Above, clouds were scudding across angry sky while Maureen mumbled variations of, “Look for him by moonlight, watch for him by moonlight, he’ll come for you by moonlight, fear for him by moonlight, fear him by moonlight …”
As we stopped on Second Avenue, thunder crashed.
Then came the deluge.
Maureen paid