13 The Last Best Hope by Ed McBain

Author:Ed McBain
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9781612189895
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 1998-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Donofrio’s landlady told Matthew that he went to the Strength ’N’ Stamina Fitness Club to work out three times a week. Matthew drove there at ten o’clock that Tuesday morning. The club was upstairs over a bank overlooking the Trail. The day was suffocatingly hot but the spacious room was mildly air-conditioned to accommodate the people who came here to get fit or to stay fit. The club’s director, a muscular individual who looked a bit like Bruce Willis, pointed Donofrio out to Matthew, and he thanked her politely and crossed the room to where Donofrio was climbing a set of moving stairs at the far end, near the windows. Everywhere around him were men and women in exercise clothes, exerting themselves. Matthew felt like a shmuck in his seersucker suit.

In all truth, he had never understood women who desired muscles. Nor men, for that matter. At least, not the kind of muscles you got from pitting yourself against machines that looked like they’d been beamed down from Darth Vader’s spaceship. Or from lifting weights, either, which he was always afraid would give him a hernia at the very least or else fall on his chest and crush it the way Giles Cory’s chest was crushed in Salem Village when he refused to confess he was a witch.

Nor had Matthew ever understood people who claimed to enjoy working out. He himself enjoyed playing tennis, but tennis was a game. Straining oneself lifting weights or climbing stairs or running on a treadmill was work, which may be why all those activities were collectively called “working out” and not “playing out.” Come to think of it, Matthew didn’t much like men’s locker rooms, either. They were smelly and sweaty and full of fat, hairy guys running around naked with their precious jewels bobbing and bouncing. The only human beings in whose presence he enjoyed getting undressed were women. Then again, he’d been cranky ever since the coma.

Peter Donofrio looked exactly as Warren and Guthrie had described him. Matthew thought he might even be wearing the same clothes he’d had on the day they visited him. Short and squat, with curly black hair plastered to his forehead and skull, thick black eyebrows beetling over dark brown eyes, tangled chest hair above the neck of his white tank top shirt, heavy, hairy thighs showing below the bottoms of his blue walking shorts, graying white socks showing above scuffed blue Reeboks, he struggled mightily to get to the hundred and second floor of the Empire State Building, climbing, climbing, climbing like King Kong, continuing to climb even after Matthew said, “Mr. Donofrio?”

He did not answer. Matthew had the feeling the man was silently counting inside his head, but he didn’t know that people counted while they were climbing moving stairs. Donofrio was sweating like a warthog. His shirt was wet, his hair was wet, his shorts were wet, his entire body was wet, even the stairs were wet. Matthew prayed he wouldn’t offer to shake hands with him.

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