“You really can’t discard me like waste paper,” she had told him the night before. “What is it that you think you’re dealing with?”
“The police are going to want to talk to you just as much as they want to talk to me,” Margaret Anson had said, also the night before.
Margaret had called. She never came to his house, and Peter never expected her to come. Deirdre had been on his living room couch, having one of her patented tirades.
“You’ve got a woman there with you,” Margaret had said. “How very sweet.”
“I have a friend here who’s a little upset. As you should be able to hear.”
“I hear more than you think I do. But you were Kayla’s lover, Peter. They’re going to want to talk to you. They’re going to be very interested in anything you-have to say.”
“I’m very easy to find, Margaret.”
“So am I,” Margaret said. “That may be my trouble.”
The television in the bar was full of the story of the death of Zara Anne Moss. The graphic behind Ann Nyberg’s head showed a folk Victorian farmhouse with the words Death, House stenciled over it. Margaret’s house was nothing like a folk Victorian, Peter thought irrelevantly. Then the screen went to a large picture of Zara Anne Moss’s head, except that she looked far younger than she was supposed to be. Peter supposed it was a high school graduation photograph. It had that kind of posed quality to it.
A waiter went by, and Peter snagged him. He pointed to his glass and the waiter nodded. This was one of the good things about the club. They kept tabs on what you were eating or drinking. You never had to give elaborate orders or worry that what you ordered would be translated by the staff into something you didn’t want.
Peter finished the rest of the whiskey in his glass in a single gulp. There wasn’t much of it, less than a quarter of what he’d started with, but it went down as a shock nonetheless. He watched the waiter come back to him with another glass on a tray and sat still and polite while it was delivered to him. Then he signed the check he was presented with. Everything at the club was on account. You could sign for anything, and the charges were simply piled on and on, until the end of the month, when the bill came. Peter had heard rumors that there were members who let their bills go from month to month, who ran up thousands of dollars in charges and never seemed to get around to paying it, but he had never felt secure enough to let a bill slip for even a single month. With his luck, he would be called into the bursar’s office and given a lecture the very first thing. You probably had to have a name like Ridenour to get away with something like that. Peter wondered if he’d feel differently about it, if he had serious money, like Bill Gates. Somehow, he thought he wouldn’t.
When the waiter had gone, Peter picked up his drink and made his way to the bar. The stools there were mostly empty, but Sally Martindale was sitting at one end, nursing what looked like an elaborate ladies’ drink. Pousse-café. Piña colada. Caté frappé. Peter couldn’t remember what they were all called. They were just silly drinks, with too much fluff and not enough alcohol in them.
Ordinarily, Peter would not have made an effort to talk to Sally Martindale. Since Sally’s divorce, she had had too much of the smell of failure about her, too much of an air of desperation. You could see it in what was happening to her body. She had always been thin. Now she was emaciated, and it was the wrong kind of emaciated. Her body looked hard and undernourished. Her arms and legs seemed to be made of interlocking strings. Her face was a mess. A few years ago, she had had a network of fine lines at the sides of her eyes. Now the skin there was a holocaust of folds and gashes, as if someone had come along and cut it with a razor, and it had only inadequately healed.
Peter put his whiskey down on the bar next to Sally’s stool and took a stool himself. He needed to talk to someone, and there was no one else to talk to. There was certainly no one who was safe. He had been revved up and in high gear all afternoon. There wasn’t anywhere to put his energy.
At the other end of the bar, the television news had turned to something less combative than the death of Kayla Anson. Peter thought it was a consumer report on baby car seats.
“Well,” Peter said.
Sally slid her eyes sideways to look at him, rather than turning right around. She sucked at her drink, which seemed to be all foam.
“Hello,” she said.
“Do you think Margaret Anson has gone on some kind of killing spree?” Peter asked. “Maybe she’s offing debutantes in her garage.”
Sally Martindale twisted on her stool. “I didn’t know this girl was a debutante. I thought she was some kind of hippie.”