“You know where I live?”
“I pass you all the time. When you’re shoveling snow in your driveway.” Sam tried looking at the floor. “All I’m trying to say is, it is on my way, it wouldn’t be any trouble for me to give you a lift, and Mack’s Steak House is on the way, too, and it’s almost dinnertime—do you know what I really want to say?”
“No,” Glinda said, dazed. “I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“Well,” Sam Harrigan told her, staring her straight in the eye, “I’ll tell you. I think it’s a bloody damn shame when a man gets to my age without knowing how to keep his dignity when he’s asking a woman for a date.”
A date.
There was a chair pushed up against the check-out desk counter, a tall barstool sort of chair the assistants used on busy days. Glinda leaned against it, feeling weak.
As far as she was concerned, either Sam Harrigan had lost his mind, or she had.
[2]
It was fifteen minutes before eight o’clock, and Miriam Bailey was sitting at the vanity table in her private dressing room in the house on Huntington Avenue, getting dressed for dinner. She wasn’t getting dressed for any ordinary dinner. On the nights when she and Josh stayed home and played at domestic bliss—which was most nights—she wore flowing hostess caftans and wedge-heeled sandals. Even on the nights when she was having one or two people over from the bank, she stuck to good wool slacks and four-ply cashmere sweaters. Tonight she was wearing a high-necked Christian Dior cocktail dress that had belonged to her mother and her best pearls. Josh, who was sitting in the stylized ice cream parlor chair against the wall behind her, was wearing his custom dinner clothes from Brooks Brothers, the first thing she had bought him after she’d brought him back to the States. In her mirror, he looked not only young but perfect, physically flawless, untouched by time. He reminded her of the pictures she had seen, preserved in sepia in the Manhattanville College library, of college dance troupes of the 1900s, except that he was male.
Miriam Bailey had never been interested in disguising her age. She didn’t make up to conceal, but to acquiesce. It was easier to make an effort to look like everyone else than to fight the battles of eccentricity. To that end she applied a thin film of foundation and reached for the blusher. In her head, Miriam Bailey went on calling blusher “rouge.”
“What I want you to understand,” she told Josh, ignoring his mutinous cross-armed pose and concentrating on her own face in the mirror, “is that no matter how exciting or amusing it might seem to you, to just about anybody else it’s going to sound suspicious. Of course, I know you well enough to trust you.” She caught the reflection of his startled jerk and smiled to herself, biting her lip so it wouldn’t show. “You do have to realize,” she went on, “that to most of the people in this town you’re an unknown quantity, and they aren’t used to unknown quantities.”
“I don’t see what was so damn suspicious about it,” Josh said. “I was just walking down by the levy.”
“At eleven o’clock in the morning on the day of the flood.”
“Why not? Miriam, I think you’re crazy. People saw her all over town that day. What difference is one more going to make? And besides, she wasn’t killed down by the levy. She was killed in the library.”
“She also wasn’t seen alive after eleven o’clock.” Miriam put down the rouge. She wasn’t sure if what she’d just said was actually true. She didn’t know when the last time had been that anyone but her killer had seen Brigit Ann Reilly alive. Fortunately, she could be sure Josh didn’t know, either. She picked up her eyebrow pencil and bent over to look more closely into the glass. “I wish you’d give some consideration,” she said, “to the kind of trouble you get into when you go off half-cocked like this. I wish you’d learn to think. Remember all the fuss we had when you came tearing back from Colchester with your glove compartment full of crack—”
“It wasn’t crack, Miriam. It was first-class cocaine.”
“It was illegal, whatever it was. And I don’t mind your having it, I’ve told you that. I don’t really care what you do as long as you give me what I want.”
“I always give you what you want.”
“Let’s just say that’s another subject. Right now, what I want you to do is promise me you won’t mention this at dinner tonight. I don’t say you have to keep it a secret forever, but at least don’t mention it at dinner tonight.”