In the Still of the Night (21 page)

“If you’re just saying that, I can find out some other way, you know.”

“I do know. I also know that with winter storms—”

“Okay, I believe you,” she interrupted. “More important—I have two seats for the Actors’ Benefit of
Candy
tomorrow night. Will you take me?”
Candy
was the hottest ticket in town.

“I’d love to, Kitty—”

“Good. Pick me up at seven.”

“—but I have a date,” Wilding finished his sentence.

“You can break it. It’s important for me to be there.” She let a second of silence hang and then said, “So I’ll see you tomorrow night.” When she put down the phone, her hand was trembling. She had thought he was going to turn her down. Now, she decided, she would give him his Christmas present early—after the theater. Actually, she had bought it for Mark—an old English print of a court scene during the Restoration. She was sure Wilding would appreciate its worth, and it might just raise her stock with him a point or two. She would rather court than tomahawk him, but she knew she would never win him, and she didn’t like herself for trying. From the day she had first trapped his eyes with hers, he had seen every black spot on her soul. He might even have seen some she did not know were there herself.

The masseuse inquired after Mark. She had met him once when she came to the apartment and thought him very attractive. Kitty wove a tale about his having gone to the north woods for a week of duck hunting. If he got his bag early, he intended to go farther north on a moose trek. There was great hilarity between the women on where to hang the moose head if he brought one home. Then Kitty admitted she was pulling her leg about the moose hunt. But she did promise her a wild duck for Christmas, thinking of the butcher shop on Madison Avenue that specialized in game.

She cabbed home greatly relaxed by the sauna and the probing hands of the masseuse. She admitted to herself that she might not know Mark as well as she had thought. He might very well come home in better shape than he had left. And, in truth, she looked forward to an evening or two with Tom Wilding. The one thing she wished she could do in Mark’s absence was get rid of Wilczynski. He had become a ridiculous intrusion in their lives, a snot-nosed kid. She wondered if it was safe—legally safe—to undertake dropping him herself. She proposed to speak to Wilding about it, to have him compose the letter.

When she opened the apartment door, she smelled cigarette smoke, and that frightened her. Then she saw the suitcase, its contents spilling over the floor, shirts, shorts, socks. With the parka dropped on top of them. She found him in his study slumped in the swivel desk chair facing her, his face gray, his eyes glassy. The bottle of Wild Turkey sat on the desk unopened.

“What happened? Were you in an accident?”

“No.”

“What then?”

“I couldn’t go. I just couldn’t go.”

Her rage was explosive. She flung her pocketbook at him, the only thing at hand. “You weak, impotent fool!”

The pocketbook contents scattered on the floor. When Mark stooped to gather them, Kitty saw the knives on the desk, both unsheathed. Her fury subsided. “Mark?” She pointed to the knives.

He straightened up and swiveled to where he could pick up the knife with the jagged edge. “This one is called a survival knife. I thought it meant something. Not a thing.” He threw it down and took up the other with the slick, long blade. He used it to break the seal on the whiskey bottle. “You know, it’s funny—I thought you’d be glad to see me.”

Kitty brought two glasses from the teacart, the portable bar. She took the bottle from his hand and poured them each a drink. Touching her glass to his, she said, “Welcome home,” and threw down the whiskey. She picked up the two knives and started from the room with them.

“Leave them,” Mark said.

“Where?”

He shrugged.

She put them in a manuscript box on a shelf near the door.

Mark gave her a sad little smile. “Whatever else is wrong with me, Kitty, I am not suicidal.”

A few days later, on Christmas Eve, Wilczynski called the office to see if Mark was back. An office party was in progress, so that the person answering Mark’s phone didn’t bother to inquire whether or not he wanted to take the call. “It’s for you, Mr. C.,” she called out, and Mark soon found himself explaining how, at the last moment, he’d not been able to get away after all.

“I don’t suppose there’s any word yet on my poems?”

“It’s too soon, and Kitty would have told me,” Mark said. “Do you need money?”

“That’s not why I called. I wanted to wish everybody a Merry Christmas.”

“Thank you, André. But
do
you need money? You don’t have to keep a stiff upper lip with me.”

“Just read my pages again and see if we can go to work.”

“I promise to do it over the holiday.”

“Mark, are you sure Kitty was serious about getting my poems to a publisher?”

“Absolutely,” Mark said, but even as he said it, he felt his heart drop down.

“I don’t mean to be ungrateful, but I’d like to have put them together myself. The order makes a difference, don’t you see? And not all of them should go in. Would you ask her? I’ve retyped and arranged them, and I’d be glad to bring them in on Monday.”

“Call me first thing Monday morning.” Mark had a terrible feeling, hanging up the phone, that Wilczynski was wiser in the ways of Kitty in this instance than he was. She had moved with impossible haste.

He kept waiting for the right moment to approach the subject. Kitty did it for him. They were home in pajamas and waiting for the delivery of barbecued spareribs, chips, and onion rings, when she said, “Did you tell André I was showing his things to Linden House?”

“I didn’t mention Linden House.”

“But you did tell him something?”

“I did, yes.”

“Well, now you can have the pleasure of telling him I’ve changed my mind.”

“You can’t do that to him, Kitty. I can’t do it. Didn’t you tell me you’d already sent them to Linden House? You did tell me that.”

“I told
you
that. I didn’t tell him. I wanted to see if it was really good news to you. And it was. Oh, yes, it really was.”

Mark was too upset to say anything.

“Don’t you see, this snot-nosed kid, this two-penny poet of yours is fucking up our lives?”

“They were pretty well fucked up before he came along. Oh, Christ.” He poured himself a double shot of gin and drank it straight.

“You do hate me, don’t you?” Kitty said.

“Sometimes it isn’t hard.”

“You can’t live with me and you can’t live without me, right?”

He sat down, his face in his hands, and tried to think how to deal with Wilczynski. All his poems retyped, all his hopes recharged.

Kitty twisted her fingers into his hair and pulled his head up. “Get rid of him, Mark. Or I will.”

He pulled away from her. “No. I’ve promised to work with him on a project and I don’t intend to let him down on that. But I agree; he’s better off out of the Mark Coleman Agency.”

Wilding read the draft letter, dated January 5, to Kitty over the phone. It was much along the lines of what he had proposed Mark say to Wilczynski in a phone call. “Mark should sign it, you know.”

“And if he won’t?”

Wilding thought back to the day he’d advised that Mark apologize and Kitty’s saying, No problem. “I thought you said he agreed to the severance. I’ll talk to him.”

“What I want is to sever the relationship entirely. This thing they’re working on it’s an excuse. That’s all. I see them out there in Central Park, walking up and down like a pair of lions in their natural habitat. Oblivious to traffic, to weather …”

“Kitty, get rid of the binoculars.”

“Don’t be such a smart-ass. There are a lot of hungry lawyers in this town.”

“God knows, I’d wish them bon appetit,” Wilding said.

Kitty ignored the remark. “He’s obsessed with this ridiculous person. And it’s not as though he has talent. He calls himself a poet, therefore he’s a poet. I couldn’t submit stuff like that if I’d wanted to. And I did want to. Sort of.”

“Did you read it?”

“My secretary read it.”

Mark had said she hadn’t, and she hadn’t. There were moments Wilding could almost feel sorry for her, but they were rare moments. “I’ll talk to Mark,” he said.

“If you can’t reach him just say your name’s Wilczynski.”

Mark and Wilczynski, huddled in their overcoats, sipped their tea in the drafty zoo cafeteria. Little tornadoes of dust and leaves were dancing outside the glass enclosure. André was saying that he thought he could now take the story, which he’d call
Till Death Do Us Part,
from there without Mark’s help. At least till he got to the locked-room situation. “You’ve taught me an awful lot, Mark.”

“It may turn out that
awful
is the precise word for it.” He leaned back and enjoyed the realization that working with André had been a great pleasure—the quick and probing mind, the eagerness to work, to rework.

“One thing you taught me,” André said, “Henry James wasn’t a mystery writer.”

Mark laughed and said, “Drink your tea and we’ll walk back to the apartment and run through the lock business on the scene.”

“Couldn’t we just work it out on paper? I don’t want to meet Kitty.”

“She’s at the office,” Mark said. “One member of the firm has to support A.T. and T.” He got up. “And if she were home—so what?”

André mimed cutting his throat.

They were skirting Tavern on the Green when André said, “Mark, did a publisher really reject my poems? You just said they were rejected. Was that Kitty?”

“Yes. She was wise enough to see that you aren’t ready yet and to withdraw them. There’s not a publisher in the city with whom your record isn’t entirely clean.”

“Good old loyal Mark,” Wilczynski said and gave him a hug.

Kitty had not intended to be home that afternoon, but something at lunch had disagreed with her. Or else she was coming down with a bug. In any case, she wanted an instant cure, having to carry most of the office burden alone these days. Once home, she certainly did not intend to go out on the terrace with binoculars. She had acquired them after Wilding’s wisecrack, a figure of speech on his part. But she did go out. It was cold and raw and windy, and she really did not care at the moment if she got pneumonia, for no sooner did she have the glasses in focus than she picked up the two men coming toward her. It was at the moment Wilczynski threw his arm across Mark’s shoulder.

When they got out of the elevator, Mark illustrated his usual procedure on arriving home. He rang the buzzer—two longs, two shorts. “If Kitty were home, she’d answer and probably let me in. And vice versa if it were I who was home …”

“What do you mean, probably? That’s not good enough.”

“Don’t be so fierce,” Mark said. “We’ll work it out. Let’s say I was in the habit of forgetting my keys sometimes. And say I phoned to tell her I was on my way home and had forgotten them. She’d be sore as hell at me, but when I buzzed my two longs and two shorts, she’d yank the door off the hinges to confront me. How’s that?”

“Mark, that’s exactly how I had it in my first version, the one I sent you. Transpose the sexes and it goes like this: She throws the door open to you, only it’s not you. It’s a burglar, a killer. He’d stolen your briefcase in the park with all the notes you’d made on this thriller you were going to write …”

“Who then does the real job for me,” Mark said. “And look …” He illustrated the two-lock system: “This is what’s called a warded lock. You have to turn the key in it to open it and, once in the apartment, you have to turn the key to lock it behind you. The tumbler lock is automatic. Now the fact is I’ve been known to go out in a hurry and simply let the door lock behind me on the tumbler lock. I sometimes forget the one I have to turn around and diddle with. Kitty’s right. I am careless.”

“Then it’s simple,” André cried. “Let’s say you’ve called her to say you forgot your keys. She tells you that she’s not surprised because you left the top lock off again. You say, mea culpa, hang up and start for home in your own good time. When you get there, you do the buzzer routine, two longs, two shorts. No answer. You hang in there, thinking she may have fallen asleep. You try again. Then, really panicky, you run down the stairs, get the super, and he comes up with his big ring of skeleton keys. Right? You keep urging him to find one that’s going to fit the top lock. He finds it, but—the shocker—he didn’t need it. The lock was off all the time. But Kitty never, never leaves it off. Which means she must have opened the door to someone, thinking it was you, someone who afterward let himself out, with the automatic lock falling into place when he closed the door. The same as when you forgot your keys. You and the super get the door open, and there she is, lying in a pool of blood.”

“Jesus,” Mark said.

“Cold blood,” Wilczynski said. “It’s all in the script. All we have to do now is work out a time schedule.”

“And write the book.”

“You do know you’re the major suspect till they pick up the guy who stole your briefcase?”

“I can live with it,” Mark said.

In his study Mark got out the manuscript and outline—or, as he had called it then, the proposal. While Wilczynski read it aloud with flourishes and flying spittle, Mark poured each of them a drink. They toasted
Till Death Do Us Part
and set to work on timing the mayhem schedule.

Kitty came almost to the door of Mark’s study in her stocking feet. She glimpsed both men, André at the desk. Mark leaning over him, his hand on Wilczynski’s shoulder. She saw him give André an affectionate little poke on the chin, with André leaning back and saying, “Hey, that’s where all this started!” Great laughter. She had almost forgotten what Mark’s laughter sounded like. She heard her name mentioned, and that was enough. She fled to the bedroom, undressed, and buried herself in bed. Time passed. Darkness and silence. When she got up and crept through the apartment, she saw that they had gone out again. She checked the door. Typical: Mark had forgotten to turn the lock. She got her own keys and locked it. Then she went into his study, lit the desk lamp, and opened the middle drawer. A creature of habit, Mark had cleared his desk and put the work in progress in the middle drawer. She read every word of it and saw herself instantly as the cross between Mephistopheles and Svengali. She left his study as she had found it, leaving the vestibule light on, and went back to bed.