The Villiers Touch by Brian Garfield

Author:Brian Garfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Head of Zeus Ltd
Published: 2014-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

17. Carol McCloud

Carol McCloud had two telephones, both in the living room of the suite. One was her listed number; the bell was disconnected, she never knew if it was ringing. An answering service took her calls on that line.

The unlisted telephone rang. She was lounging on the divan with a book; in her occupation, with most of the day to herself, she had a good deal of time for reading.

“Hello?”

“Carol?”

A man’s voice, calling her by her first name. She had the brief wild thought that there was only such a tiny handful of people in the whole world who would think of her when they spoke the name “Carol.”

She said, “Hello, Mason,” absenting all feeling from her tone.

“Have you got a date tonight?”

“How delicately you put it,” she said. “It’s Friday. What do you think?”

“Break it.”

“My clients don’t like that sort of thing.”

“Break it,” he said again. “Find somebody else to take your place.”

“If I could be replaced that easily at the last minute,” she said, “I wouldn’t be in my tax bracket.”

He laughed. Over the phone it was a hard, metallic sound. He said, “That’s my own line you’re using against me. Do you think that’s fair?”

“Since when have you ever worried about whether anything was fair?”

“Break your date,” he said. “I’ll be there at seven.”

Click.

She put the receiver down slowly and glanced at the Seth Thomas clock on the mantel—ten past five.

She had to make nine phone calls before she was able to find a suitable girl to cover for her. Afterward she went around the apartment doing meaningless busy things—adjusting ashtrays, moving a chair six inches, fiddling with air-conditioners. She was too angry to go back to her book.

In the bathroom mirror she inspected the fresh bruise on her right cheek and applied a new coat of makeup to cover it; the bruise had come on top of an old one that hadn’t quite healed, and her cheek stung with throbbing agony.

An East Side hotel manager had called yesterday—he had four tycoons from the Coast looking to have a party. She had rounded up three girls and shepherded them to the appointed suite. The four tycoons were in real estate, and there was an hour’s bragging about the millions they had made from Southern California land, after which they began to complain that the hotel manager had made them shell out the price of a small aircraft carrier and you girls God damn better be worth it.

The girls gave the johns a full-scale stag act. Three of the tycoons were high enough to loosen up and enjoy it. The fourth was beyond that stage into drunken surliness. He babbled something about his wife, something about Good Christian Women, something about Sin and Communists, and he belted her across the face. She laid his face open with her fingernails and kneed him in the groin and left him to his three companions, who shut him up.

It didn’t happen often; it had been a long time since she had accepted a john without references.

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