The Night and the Music - Lawrence Block [71]
Monica said she’d love to hear it sometime. Elaine said all she had to do was find the record and then find something to play it on. Monica said she still had a turntable for LPs.
Monica’s guy didn’t say anything, and I had the feeling he didn’t know who Lisa Kirk was, or why he had to go through all this just to get laid. His name was Doug Halley — like the comet, he’d said — and he did something in Wall Street. Whatever it was, he did well enough at it to keep his second wife and their kids in a house in Pound Ridge, in Westchester County, while he was putting the kids from his first marriage through college. He had a boy at Bowdoin, we’d learned, and a girl who’d just started at Colgate.
We got as much conversational mileage as we could out of Lisa Kirk, and the drinks came — Perrier for me, cranberry juice for Elaine and Monica, and a Stolichnaya martini for Halley. He’d hesitated for a beat before ordering it — Monica would surely have told him I was a sober alcoholic, and even if she hadn’t he’d have noted that he was the only one drinking — and I could almost hear him think it through and decide the hell with it. I was just as glad he’d ordered the drink. He looked as though he needed it, and when it came he drank deep.
It was about then that Monica mentioned the fellow who’d shot himself. It had happened the night before, too late to make the morning papers, and Monica had seen the coverage that afternoon on New York One. A man in Inwood, in the course of a social evening at his own home, with friends and family members present, had drawn a gun, ranted about his financial situation and everything that was wrong with the world, and then stuck the gun in his mouth and blown his brains out.
“What kind of a gun,” Monica said again. “It’s a guy thing, isn’t it? There’s not a woman in the world who would ask that question.”
“A woman would ask what he was wearing,” Halley said.
“No,” Elaine said. “Who cares what he was wearing? A woman would ask what his wife was wearing.”
“A look of horror would be my guess,” Monica said. “Can you imagine? You’re having a nice evening with friends and your husband shoots himself in front of everybody?”
“They didn’t show it, did they?”
“They didn’t interview her on camera, but they did talk with some man who was there and saw the whole thing.”
Halley said that it would have been a bigger story if they’d had the wife on camera, and we started talking about the media and how intrusive they’d become. And we stayed with that until they brought us our food.
When we got home Elaine said, “The man who shot himself. When you asked if they showed it, you didn’t mean an interview with the wife. You wanted to know if they showed him doing it.”
“These days,” I said, “somebody’s almost always got a camcorder running. But I didn’t really think anybody had the act on tape.”
“Because it would have been a bigger story.”
“That’s right. The play a story gets depends on what they’ve got to show you. It would have been a little bigger than it was if they’d managed to interview the wife, but it would have been everybody’s lead story all day long if they could have actually shown him doing it.”
“Still, you asked.”
“Idly,” I said. “Making conversation.”
“Yeah, right. And you want to know what kind of gun he used. Just being a guy, and talking guy talk. Because you liked Doug so much, and wanted to bond with him.”
“Oh, I was crazy about him. Where does she find them?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but I think she’s got radar. If there’s a jerk out there, and if he’s married, she homes in on him. What did you care what kind of gun it was?”
“What I was wondering,” I said, “was whether it was a revolver or an automatic.”
She thought about it. “And if they showed him doing it, you could look at the film and know what kind of a gun it was.