And One to Die On(6)

“They were sisters.”

“I don’t think it was a murder,” Richard said. “I think the coroner’s report was probably accurate. More accident than anything else.”

Katha lit another marijuana cigarette, held her breath, and stared dreamily at the ceiling. “I bet what’s-his-name doesn’t think so,” she said as she let the smoke out of her lungs. “You know, the guy that came here from Personality magazine last week. I bet he thinks it was a murder. I bet he wants to write about it, too.”

“He probably does.”

“I think you ought to get in there first,” Katha said. “Look at all the time and trouble and money you’ve put into Tasheba Kent. You’ve got moral rights in this case. Or squatter’s rights. Or something.”

“Right,” Richard said. “Don’t you think you’ve had enough of that stuff for today?”

“I never have enough of this stuff, Richard. It’s better than air.”

“Well, it’s got more of a kick.”

Richard was down to his two sweaters, the red V-necked one with the hole in the shoulder seam and the brown crew-necked one with the hole in the right elbow. Which to wear and which to take? The hole in the elbow was more embarrassing than the hole in the shoulder seam. Richard stuffed the brown sweater into his duffel bag and threw the red one onto the top of his bureau.

“That’ll do it,” he said. “Maybe I’ll get lucky this weekend. Maybe she’ll take to me, and sit me down and tell me all about her life.”

“Don’t be asinine,” Katha said scornfully. “She’s going to be a hundred years old. It probably takes all the brainpower she has left just to decide what she wants for breakfast.”

Aside from clothes, the only important thing Richard had to take to Maine with him was his laptop with its little collection of discs. That folded into a case the size of a briefcase and never really had to be packed at all.

Richard fastened the top of the duffel bag and put it on the floor against the wall. He put his laptop on the floor next to it, so he wouldn’t forget it when it was time to leave.

He wished he had good reason for believing that Katha’s predictions on the state of Tasheba Kent’s mind were wrong, but he didn’t. It was just the kind of thing about which Katha tended to be deadly accurate.

Richard went into the bathroom, shut the door, and sat down on the closed cover of the toilet seat. In the beginning, having Katha around felt like a good idea. She was an assistant in the shop and a companion the rest of the time. She was somebody to talk to on a regular basis, which was something Richard had never had before, except when he was living at home. Lately, having her around had begun to make him feel as if he were living at home. She nattered and pried and criticized, just like his mother. Her standards were different, but her methods of attack were precisely the same.

The worst of it was, of course, that he didn’t really like having sex with her. Sometimes he positively hated it. She was too thin and too angular. She smelled of marijuana. She cluttered up the bed. What he wanted was to be left alone with the great dark eyes on his ceiling, the parted bowed mouth, the hint of decadence in the rounded flesh of breast and arm.

Sometimes, waking up in the dark with Katha curled into a ball beside him, Richard got a sudden flash of a historical moment: Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh making love to each other on the moonlit beach at Cap d’Antibes.

The vision always made him feel as if his intestines were going down the garbage disposal.





4


MATHILDA FRAZIER’S OFFICE OVERLOOKED Madison Avenue, and whenever she got angry—really, impossibly, undeniably angry—she would stand at her windows and drop sunflower seeds onto the heads of pedestrians walking along the sidewalk three stories below. Mathilda had no idea what she would do if she got promoted. That would mean moving upstairs, literally. By the time she got to the fifth floor, she could drop all the sunflower seeds she wanted, nobody would notice. This did not mean that Mathilda Frazier did not want to be promoted. She wanted it desperately. If she hadn’t, she would never have put up with the kind of abuse she was getting from Martin Michaelson over the phone.

“Women weren’t brought up the way you were back in whenever-it-was,” Martin was saying. “They didn’t have the same assumptions. They were brought up to be women.”

“Right,” Mathilda said. She preferred to drop dry sunflower seeds in their seedpods. The dry-roasted kind were oily, and tended to get stains all over her suit.

“I don’t think you realize how profoundly alienating women like you can be to women with traditional values. I don’t think you realize what kind of antagonisms you create.”