Page 122

“Come on, baby,” he said.

“I have a busy schedule tomorrow,” she said. “I begin the day at eight by looking at a severed head, and then at ten, I have to go to a funeral. It would have to be in the afternoon. Can you stay that long?”

/>

“I’ll stay as long as necessary,” he said. “We are going to have a very serious conversation, baby, you and I.”

“Can I drop you at your hotel, Mr. Wells?” Peter asked. “It’s on my way.”

“Come on, Peter,” Wells said. “Don’t ruin a fine first impression by being a hypocrite now. Anyway, there’s a limo waiting for me.”

He kissed Louise’s cheek, waved at Wohl, and walked out of the apartment.

SIXTEEN

Arthur J. Nelson did not like pills. There were several reasons for this, starting with a gut feeling that there was something basically wrong with chemically fooling around with the natural functions of the body, but primarily it was because he had seen what pills had done to his wife.

Sally was always bitching about his drinking, and maybe there was a little something to that; maybe every once in a while he did take a couple of belts that he really didn’t need; but the truth was that, so far as intoxication was concerned, she had been floating around on a chemical cloud for years.

It had been going on for years. Sally had been nervous when he married her, and once a month, before that time of the month, she had been like a coiled spring, just waiting for a small excuse to blow up. She’d started taking pills then, a little something to help her cope. That had worked, and when she’d gotten pregnant, the need for them had seemed to pass.

But even before she’d had Jerome, she’d started on pills again, to calm her down. Tranquilizers, they called them. Then, after Jerome was born, when he was still a baby, she’d kept taking them whenever, as she put it, things just “made her want to scream.”

She hadn’t taken them steadily then, just when there was some kind of stress. Over the years, it had just slipped up on her. There seemed to be more and more stress, which she coped with by popping a couple of whatever the latest miracle of medicine was.

In the last five years, it had really gotten worse. Jerome had had a lot to do with that. It had been bad when he was still living at home, and had grown worse when he’d moved out. It had gotten so bad that he’d finally put her in Menninger’s, where they put a name to it, “chemical dependency,” and had weaned her from what she was taking and put her on something else, which was supposed to be harmless.

Maybe it was, but Sally hadn’t given it a real try. The minute she got back to Philadelphia, she’d changed doctors again, finding a new one who would prescribe whatever she had been taking in the first place that helped her cope. The real result of her five months in Menninger’s was that she was now on two kinds of pills, instead of just one.

Now, probably, three kinds of pills. What she had been taking, plus a new bottle of tiny oblong blue ones provided by the doctors when she’d gone over the edge when he’d had to tell her what happened to Jerome.

They would, the doctor said, help her cope. And the doctor added, it would probably be a good idea if Arthur Nelson took a couple of them before going to bed. It would help him sleep.

No fucking way. He had no intention of turning himself into a zombie, walking around in a daze smiling at nothing. Not so long as there was liquor, specifically cognac. Booze might be bad for you, but all it left you with was a hangover in the morning. And he had read somewhere that cognac was different from say, scotch. They made scotch from grain, and cognac was made from wine. It was different chemically, and it understandably affected people differently than whiskey did.

Arthur J. Nelson had come to believe that if he didn’t make a pig of himself, if he didn’t gulp it down, if he just sipped slowly at a glass of cognac, or put half a shot in his coffee, it was possible to reach a sort of equilibrium. The right amount of cognac in his system served to deaden the pain, to keep him from painful thought, but not to make him drunk. He could still think clearly, was still very much aware of what was going on. The only thing he had to do, he believed, was exercise the necessary willpower, and resist the temptation to pour another glass before it was really safe to do so. And there was no question in his mind that he had, in the last twenty-four hours, been doing just that. A lesser man would have broken down and wept, or gotten falling-down drunk, or both, and he had done neither.

When Staff Inspector Peter Wohl had telephoned, Arthur J. Nelson had been a third of the way through a bottle of Hennessey V.S.O.P., one delicate sip at a time, except of course for the couple of hookers he had splashed into his coffee.

And he took a pretty good sip, draining the snifter, when he hung up after talking to Staff Inspector Peter Wohl, that miserable arrogant sonofabitch.

He poured the snifter a third full, and then, carrying it with him, walked upstairs from his den to his bedroom on the second floor. He quietly opened the door and walked in.

Sally was in the bed, flat on her back, asleep. She looked, he thought, old and tired and pale. Although he hated what the fucking pills had done to her, he was glad, for her sake, that she had them now. And then she snored. It was amazing, he thought, how noisily she snored. It sounded as if she were a 250-pound man, and he supposed she didn’t weigh 100 pounds, if that much.

He remembered the first time he had seen her naked, held her naked in his arms. She had been so small and delicate he had been afraid that he was going to break her. And he remembered when she was large with Jerome. That had been almost impossible to believe, even looking right at it.

A tear ran down his cheek, and he brushed at it, forgetting that that hand held the snifter. He spilled a couple of drops on his shirt, and swore, loud enough for it to get through to Sally, who sort of groaned.

He held himself motionless for a moment, until her regular, slow, heavy breathing pattern returned. Then he left the room as carefully and quietly as he entered it.

He stood at the top of the stairs. He was hungry. He hadn’t eaten. The house had been full of people, and although Mrs. Dawberg, the housekeeper, had seen to it that there had been a large buffet of cold cuts, he just hadn’t gotten around to eating.

And now all the help was in bed, and he hated to get them out of bed in any case; and especially now, when they would need all the rest they could get to get ready for tomorrow, when the house, all day, would be like goddamn Suburban Station at half past five.

He walked down the wide staircase, wondering if he really wanted to go into the kitchen and fix himself an egg sandwich or something. He went back in his den and drained what was left in the snifter after he—Jesus, what a dumb thing to do!!!—had spilled it on his shirt, and then poured a little more in.

To hell with going in the kitchen, he decided. What I’ll do is just get in a car and go find a fast-food joint.