“But you never thought it would be cool to write another one? I mean, if you just whipped one off and got it published on the first try, why not try it again? I mean, maybe you’re great at it and don’t even know it.”
Maybe I am.
The thought crept into his mind tentatively at first, and then, meeting no resistance, spoke louder in Ray’s mind. Maybe I am.
Aloud he said, “I told you, my life went in a different direction. I have a very demanding career, for one thing, and I’m married, I have responsibilities. After dinner this evening, for example, I have to spend several hours going over the dimensions of two hundred and six doors and windows and their accompanying hardware. Speaking of dinner, any plans for it afoot?”
Ingrid ran her fingers through her spiky hair and spoke to the ceiling. “Evelyn was cooking something, but she threw it out.”
Ray felt his good mood evaporate. He looked at the flowers he had bought. They would be useless now; anything he said would be useless if Evelyn had worked herself into a bout of self-punishment.
“What was it?” he asked.
“Soufflé, but it didn’t. Soufflé, that is—it flatteneéd instead.”
Soufflé, he thought, who makes soufflé? And then he remembered who—a month earlier, he and Evelyn had gone to the Yeagers’ house for dinner and Marseille had made an asparagus soufflé. Why could Evelyn not give it a rest? She was great at anything involving a barbecue: she could have made barbecued chicken and everyone would have been happy. And now she was at the store buying what? Another dozen eggs to try again? He wanted to ask Ingrid if Evelyn had been crying when she threw the soufflé out; instead he opened the freezer and found, near the back, a tray of pork chops. He filled a baking dish with water and set them to thaw.
“I mean, how hard could it be?” Ingrid said.
“Soufflé? Quite difficult, I imagine. You’re relying on egg whites to support—”
“No, not that,” she said impatiently. “I mean, how hard could it be to write another detective story?” Ingrid dropped her voice in what Ray supposed was an imitation of Humphrey Bogart and spoke from one side of her mouth:
“The dame in my office was dripping money and mink like a leaky faucet drips water. And lemme tell you, Mister, the basin was full.”
Ray smiled. “What’s that from?”
“Nothing, I just made it up.”
“Well, then, why don’t you write the detective story, if you’re so keen on the idea? You’d be good at it.”
Ingrid looked away, but not before he saw her smile.
“Sometimes when I have stuff to do,” she said tentatively, “you know, make my bed or something, I start thinking of it in my head in—well, in hard-boiled words. Like:
‘8:57 a.m. The blankets were as twisted as an old bookie’s smile and the pillows were flatter than flat broke
.’”
Ray laughed. “So try writing it down.”
Ingrid looked up at him. “Okay. Come on, let’s go up to the typewriter.”
“You go ahead. I’m making dinner.”
“After dinner, then?”
“As I said, I have to get started on a door and window schedule.”
“Come
on
, just help me get started for five minutes. Those chops have to defrost anyway. Please?”
She was so eager, Ray thought, that it would be unkind to refuse.
“All right, five minutes,” he said, and she was tearing up the stairs. He mixed another drink and followed her up. He wondered how much of a state Evelyn had worked herself into, and how he would deal with it on top of a full evening of work brought home.
“Come on,” Ingrid called.
He opened the door to the fainting room. Ingrid sat hunched over the Underwood, a pencil stuck in the corner of her mouth like a cigarette.
“Is this okay?” She rolled the paper out of the typewriter so he could read what she’d just typed.
She was a redhead, the dame who walked in, on a pair of icepicks pretending to be the heels of her shoes. When I looked up I saw why she needed the picks. A whole tray of ice clung to her neck, diamonds that would have made all the neon in Vegas look like a hand-painted sign advertising church bingo.
She took my cigarette away from me like it was never mine to begin with and used it to light her own. I’m supposed to be tough, but I started coughing when she exhaled.
“You just made this up now?” Ray asked.
“Yeah. Why are you laughing?” This said accusingly.
“I’m not laughing. You’ve got the voice down pat. Any better and it’d be—” Parody, he was on the verge of saying, but he remembered himself only a few years older than she was now, trying to step into exactly that same world, by way of the story, where being lonely was a virtue, where being tough with sentences meant being tough with the bad guys as well, meant being kissed by beautiful women. “—Almost too good,” he finished.
Ingrid’s mouth twitched, held still. But her eyes betrayed that she was pleased.
“What do I write now?” she asked.
He thought a moment. “You have to describe the detective’s office, explain what the client wants. You have to know in your head how it’s going to go, who the killer is, who the suspects are and so forth. You have to work it out ahead of time.”
“Okay, you do that part.”
“What part?”
She looked at him as if he were an idiot. “You tell me what to type and I’ll type it.”
Ray glanced uneasily at the piece of typing paper Ingrid had pulled out of the typewriter when she’d rolled in this one. The discarded sheet had been abandoned in the middle of a sentence that began,
Throughout the history of twentieth century architecture, the marriage of structural integrity and applied decoration has been a rocky one, yet these two disparate elements, when seen through the earlier lens of the Victorian penchant for both craftsmanship and ornamentation, achieve a mutual—
“Come on,” said Ingrid, following his eyes. “Which would you rather do?”
Ray felt something inside him flutter open as if a door had come unlatched, the breeze blown in. Something fresh, the smell of a different climate.
“Come on,” Ingrid said again. “Just for a little while.”
He watched her chew the pencil. Her eyes and nose looked too large for her other features, as if they’d been borrowed from another, more adult face; her mouth and cheeks were still full of the roundness of childhood. Again Ray thought of himself at Yale at twenty-one, and how fragile he had been beneath his armor; Ingrid’s was punk clothes and cigarettes, his had been a slavish devotion to academics. He’d been desperate to prove he was smart, having long since given up hope of being cool.
“All right,” he said. “For a little while, then.”
Ingrid took the pencil from between her teeth. There were flecks of Faber yellow at the corners of her mouth. “But I need a real cigarette,” she said, pulling a crushed pack from the back pocket of her cutoffs. “I can’t do this without a real cigarette. Don’t worry, I won’t light it.”
She stuck one in her mouth. “So what should I type now?”
Ray thought. “Have the lady with the diamonds say why she’s come, then have the detective ogle her.”
Ingrid bent over the typewriter again.
“I need to find a man,” the dame said huskily.
“I’m not good enough for you?”
It was a little early for cracking wise but it was also a little early for low cut black cerise, which was what she was wearing. It went nice with the mink and diamonds.
“My name is Emily Roseine.” She paused. “Does that mean anything to you?”
“Should it?”
She sighed. “No,” she said. I haven’t made a film in years.”
“Now what?” Ingrid asked.
“She has to get to the point—she’s there because she wants to hire him, have him find her husband or something. Have her flirt with him a little. Like, ‘Emily Roseine lowered her lashes. There were a lot of them to lower.’”
“Oh, excellent,” Ingrid said, typing the line. She took the unlit cigarette out of her mouth and looked up at him. “You’re pretty cool, you know.”
“I’m flattered,” Ray said, then realized he really was flattered, and looked away.
“I came about my husband,” the dame said. “This is a very sensitive situation.”
She looked up at me to see if I was watching. I was.
“I need someone who will play straight with me. My husband hasn’t come home in three days and I’m afraid something may have happened to him. I can’t go to the police. And I can’t go into the details now. Perhaps you could come to my house later. The cocktail hour—I think that would suit both of us.”
“Now she has to pay him a retainer,” Ray said. “And then, let’s see, she has to wobble her way out of his office, and then he has to reflect on the situation and decide something’s fishy about her.”
She pulled out a lavender envelope, which she offered me with a delicate flick of her wrist.
“Will this do as a retainer?”
I didn’t bother to open it. Fifty cents would have been enough of a retainer, coming from her.
“My address is on the back,” said Mrs. Roseine. “I’ll be waiting for you.” She adjusted her mink, touched her diamonds to be sure they hadn’t melted in all the heat she was generating, and wobbled her way out of my office.
I’ve been in this business long enough to know when something’s fishy. And something here positively stank. But it wasn’t her perfume.
“That’s good,” said Ray.
“You really think so?”
“I do.” He felt a twinge of jealousy and pretended to himself that he didn’t.
Ingrid grinned happily and leaned back in her chair, dragged on the unsmoked cigarette. “‘A. B. Shepard,’” she said after a moment. “What’s the A. B. stand for?”
“My real name. Arthur, after my father. And Ray is short for Braeburn.”
Ingrid fiddled with her cigarette. “I have a first name I never use, either,” she said.
“What is it?”
“I’ll only tell you if you promise not to say you think it’s pretty.”
“Even if I do think it’s pretty?”
“You shouldn’t.”
“Try me.”
She scowled. “Tiffany.”
Ray, despite himself, began to laugh. “You are not a Tiffany,” he said.
“I know it. Tiffany sounds like a waitress at a roller rink.”
“But you’re most definitely an Ingrid.”
“Yeah? Ingrid sounds like a German scholar with klunky intellectual jewelry.”
“You think?” He looked at her. “To me Ingrid sounds like a very bright and interesting sixteen-year-old who’s going to stunt her growth by smoking Chesterfields.”
“Yeah, whatever. Okay, I need a name for this detective. We’ll call him Arthur Slade, half my name, half yours, okay?”
“Not Arthur Tiffany?”
“Cut it out.” Ingrid stuck the cigarette back in her mouth and said in her Bogart voice, “Detective Arthur Slade, at your service, Mister.’”
“Good name.”
“Now give it to me straight. Any suspects?”
Ray tried to play along. “Let’s see, what’s my alibi for the night of the twenty first?”
“Oh, hey!” Ingrid interrupted in her normal voice. “I almost forgot. Mrs. Shepard—Evelyn—said somebody threw a rock through the window right before I moved in.”
Ray closed his eyes for a moment. For the last hour nothing had existed outside the fainting room save his own past and the dreams it had contained. Now he felt in his chest how Ingrid’s words had reattached this little room to the rest of the house: to the study with the broken window, to the cut on his temple that had healed to a thin pink line; to the kitchen in which there was a failed soufflé in the garbage disposal and half a dozen over-defrosted pork chops soaking in the sink; and to Evelyn, who would come home from the grocery store full of false and dangerous cheer, barely concealed self-recrimination. It was all too complicated.
“Don’t worry, I’m not scared,” Ingrid was saying. “Evelyn said the police thought it was a bunch of kids, but I thought maybe there’d be actual clues. You know, like, do you have any enemies? Were there fingerprints?”
Ray got up from the edge of the desk and looked out the window. His legs felt stiff. “ I’m sure the police were right,” he said. “Just kids making mischief.”
Ingrid scoffed. “Police always think kids are guilty. If there’s no evidence, they actually have no idea who it was, right?”
“I suppose so, if you put it like that.”
“Well, don’t you want to know who did it?”
Ray looked at her. “As long as it doesn’t happen again,” he said, “that’s enough for me.”