Strangled - Brian McGrory [94]
I thought of the call I had just received from Peter Martin, telling me that the publisher wasn’t yet ready to run the Phantom’s letter, and maybe never would be. He basically told me to be on high alert the next morning, in expectation that we or someone else would face the Phantom’s wrath.
I tell you, newspapers will break your heart just about every time.
I did one last set of leg lifts, then sprawled across a hard blue mat and felt the energy flow from my torso, down my limbs, and right out of my fingers and toes. After a few minutes of nothingness, I collected myself, wandered downstairs into the locker room, stripped down, and headed for the steam room.
The place was still empty, which was nice, because I could sprawl across the tile bench without the fear that one of the older members would toddle into the room, not see me through the steam, and park his flabby ass somewhere on top of me. Granted, it’s not a normal fear, but it’s there nonetheless.
With the whoosh of steam blowing into the room, I thought again of Maggie Kane, and one more time thought it a shame that something that starts so good inevitably has to end so bad. Or maybe this wasn’t really that bad. Maybe we rushed toward matrimony because of how it all looked on paper, when in real life we didn’t really know. Maybe the fact that both parties put a halt to it in the final hours made it obvious that it wasn’t meant to be — no marriage, no harm, no foul.
But here she was on the phone talking about being lonely and wanting to get together, and the only emotion that kept flowing over me was complete and total detachment, which may not be an emotion at all. If ever I should have missed Maggie Kane, it should have been now, when my professional world seemed to be falling in on me. And yet I barely felt a thing.
Elizabeth Riggs.
The steam kept blowing all around me, the temperature rising, and there she was, in my head, mostly because she never actually left it. She was beautiful that night in the waiting lounge of San Francisco International Airport — composed, elegant, sexy, relaxed — just as she was beautiful in Logan International Airport that day she left for California and I did nothing to stop her. She wanted me to yell out, to grab her shoulder, to block the door, to do something, anything, and instead I simply watched her leave, because I figured that’s what people do in life — they leave. And nobody, not even Maggie Kane, has yet to prove me wrong.
The power of hindsight is sometimes a heady thing. It’s showed me these last couple of years that Elizabeth didn’t so much leave of her own volition as she was guided to the door by yours truly and encouraged in every implicit way to go. Maybe I never outright told her to get out, but my aloofness, born of my own past, manifested in my hesitance to allow anyone else to get too close, and proved impossible to take. God knows, Elizabeth Riggs tried. She really did.
Outside the glass door, one of the locker-room attendants, either Mike or Angel, flung open a nearby supply closet, the sound jarring me out of my heat-and-exhaustion-induced reverie. I could hear him fiddling with some equipment. He knocked absently against the door, and he was off.
Inside, the steam started surging full bore again out of a pipe on the floor, and the room was approaching the point of being unbearable, which was just the way I liked my steam rooms, if not my women. The thermometer on the wall read 117 degrees, and I told myself I’d gut it out until this round of steam stopped and then I’d go take a cool shower.
Another minute passed, and the steam was still flowing with abandon. The thermometer read 119 degrees. I lifted myself up from a lying position and began counting to twenty, waiting for the steam to shut off. It didn’t.
So I started thinking like Ernest Hemingway might write, though I can’t explain why. The room was hot. The man was sweaty. He wanted a cool shower. He would get a cold glass of beer. The beef he’d have for dinner would be charred and juicy.
Another minute later, it