The Scarlet Ruse by John D. MacDonald

Author:John D. MacDonald [MacDonald, John D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-82675-6
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-01-08T16:00:00+00:00

Thirteen

She was all combed and showered and lipsticked and dressed when she woke me up and said that she was leaving to go back to her place and change and then go to the store.

My mind felt like glue, and I wondered if I was duplicating Sergeant Goodbread’s habitual expression. “But Hirsh wouldn’t want business as usual, would he?”

“Of course he wouldn’t, silly man! But there’s always the mail, and the things I haven’t finished, and I want to see what Jane was doing that somebody else will have to finish. I won’t open the place up. I’ll print a sign and put it on the door. If there’s anything Hirsh has to decide, I’ll take it to his place and ask him. I hope there is. It will be the best thing in the world for him to start making decisions.”

“Say hello to him for me.”

“Get some more sleep, darling. I’d give odds you’re going to need it.”

She gave me a pat and went off to the door, springing along on those Olympic legs. She undid the chain and left, the latch clacking shut. I remembered how (only the day before yesterday) the webbed, interwoven muscles of her thighs had bulged when the full strain of the slalom cutback clenched her whole body. Visible at such times but never discernible to any loving touch, not on the shoulders or back, the arms, or legs. Firm, yes. But so sweetly sheathed by the resilient softness of the woman-padding of the little layer of subcutaneous fat. Grasp her more strongly, and the firm underlayer of muscle was then tangible, sliding and clenching and relaxing. And the tone and control of the athlete muscles was apparent whenever she moved, whenever she bent, flexed, twisted, lifted, and apparent in the tirelessness of her repetition of any stressing motion.

I bobbed across the surface of sleep, sinking and pulling myself away from it, and at last stood up and creaked a hundred muscles in gargantuan stretching, padded in and adjusted the four shower nozzles to soft thick spray for all the soaping and rinsing, and then to hard fine stinging spray for the cold that finally woke me up all the way. I brushed with the new brush, shaved with the new tools, put on my supermarket socks and shorts and slacks and shirt, my shoes from a previous life where I had lived aboard a houseboat somewhere, and went down to find a place in the hotel to have breakfast. The basement coffee shop had the windowless fluorescence of a bus station at midnight, so I went back up and was led across fifty feet of carpeting to a window table and handed a menu as big as a windshield—twice as big when opened. Three copywriters had swooned while trying to describe the taste of eggs scrambled with roe.

When I lowered the menu, Willy Nucci was sitting across from me. It gave me a start, so visible, he said, “I could wear a bell, like a leper.

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