1 Breakfast at Madeline's (15 page)

20

About a minute later, I left Gretchen's house with The Penn's NYFA application in my hot little hands. Gretchen and I were
pretty sick of each other's com
pany by now, so I told her I'd read it at home and call her if I had any questions. "I'll certainly look forward to hearing from you," she said dryly.

As I set the application down next to me in the Camry, I realized I'd forgotten to ask for one of Gretchen's shoes, to check the size. I thought about going back, but decided I'd already harassed the poor woman enough for one night. I could always go back later.

So I drove off. The street was dangerously slick, but it wasn't raining anymore; we were having one of those quick weather changes you get sometimes in the Adirondack foothills. The wind had chased the clouds away, and a thin crescent moon shone through the windshield.

I started feeling melancholy. The adrenaline rush of interrogating someone just like a real Humphrey Bogart-type private eye was wearing off. The truth was, Gretchen was good people. Okay, I wasn't wild about her bribing the mayor, but it wasn't like she'd done something really horrible, like rooting for the Yankees. In a way, the fact Gretchen cared so much
about the Arts Center that she committed a crime in order to get it built made me like her even more.

My liking her, however, didn't make her innocent of murder, as I well knew. When I taught a screenwriting course in prison a couple
of years back, I took a partic
ular liking to an affable fellow named Marvin Melrose who, I later learned, had murdered three young women in cold blood while robbing a bridal gown shop.

Well, what the hell, maybe I'd get lucky and Gretchen's criminal activities had stopped short of murder. Maybe Penn's killer had actually been...

...
the mayor?

That idea flustered me so much I didn't see the red light until I was practically underneath it. A purple minivan whizzed past less than a foot in front of me while I screeched to a halt. The driver blared his horn at me and I backed up, feeling like an idiot. So now I was suspecting
the mayor
of killing Penn? Absurd. I shook my head, annoyed at myself. The heck with this Columbo nonsense, I'd never in a million years be able to solve The Penn's murder—if that's what it was. I should just throw that NYFA application out the car window and forget the whole thing, go back to being a hack movie writer. Mutant beetles, here I come.

But high above me, through the windshield, I could see what looked like thousands of tiny stars. Maybe The Penn was somewhere up there with them. The light changed and I drove on, so spaced out that when a long white Cadillac drove past me with a long white goatee hovering above t
he steering wheel, I didn't rec
ognize it at first. But then it hit me.
Ersatz Uncle Sam.
With another screech of my brakes, I pulled over to the side and craned my neck.

Ersatz's Caddie stopped at the red light. Nice car, I reflected—and paid for largely by that New Zealand
cash Gretchen hustled for him. Then the light turned green, and Ersatz took the left fo
rk up North Broad
way
...
toward Gretchen's house.

Hmm. So was this how Gretchen amused herself during her husband's long business trips? I grinned. I had to admit it—this private-eye stuff could be a lot of fun.

The clock above the Saratoga Trust Bank said 10:20 when I got out of the car and headed for Madeline's, carrying The Penn's grant application. I wasn't ready to go back home and do the whole husband-and
-
father routine; I wan
ted to read this application al
ready. Andrea had said that Dave would stay at the house until I got back, and they weren't expecting me until around 10:45, and I figured I could stretch that to 11:00. So I was footloose and fancy free... for forty minutes, anyway. Married life.

Madeline's was j
ammed, as it always was on week
end nights. Madel
ine and Rob were nowhere in evi
dence, but Marcie was working behind the counter along with three college kids. She was wearing a low
-
cut red dress, held up—barely—by two skinny little shoulder straps. Spaghetti straps, I think they're called. As usual, I forced my eyes modestly away from her. Or tried to.

While I waited to buy coffee I looked into the back room, which was packed with teenagers and twenty-somethings listening to a long-haired guitar plucker singing about how the answer was blowing in the wind.
I always found it reassuring to go in there at night and find that the 60s still ruled. Or at least, they still ruled in the back room of Madeline's on a Friday night.

The front room was fu
ll of folks of various ages dis
cussing whatever movie they'd just come back from,
The Postman
or
Sc
ream 2
or some other junk. Some
times it gave me a thrill that only eight months from now people would be sitting in this very room, and rooms much like it across the world, discussing
my
movie,
The Gas that Ate San Francisco;
but sometimes I didn't really give a hoot. I mean, I'll take the dough, thank you very much, but
Gas
is not exactly going to be a modern screen classic.

Jonas, a Skidmore sophomore whose passion was collecting memorabilia
from
local minor league sports teams, took my order. They hadn't made Ethiopian that night—I guess
no one expected me to show up—
and I was relieved. I was getting sick of the stuff. Give me good old-fashioned Colombian any time.

I looked around for an empty table but couldn't find any until someone got up from the corner table in the back room, by the basement stairs. Donald Penn's old spot again. Must be fate. I sat down just as the guitar plucker went on break and everyone applauded, chanting "Yo! Yo! Yo!" That chan
t is one of the few en
tertainment innovations of the past twenty years that I approve of.

I put The Penn's application on the table in front of me, took a deep breath, and eagerly started to read. "Spill it, Donny baby," I whispered. "Who did you think would kill you?"

Name: Donald Penn.

Category: Writer.

Amount Requested: $5000.
Whoa, five grand? A far cry from the $172.38 he'd asked for the last two years. Why so much all of a sudden?

"Hi, Jacob," breathed a silky voice right next to my ear.

I turned. I gulped. Lord, those teensy spaghetti straps would be so easy t
o lift off. "Hi, Marcie," I man
aged.

She was carrying a huge coffee sack, one of the 50-pound jobs. "Could you help me?" she asked. "I'm supposed to carry this downstairs, and it's so heavy."

"Sure," I stuttered. Forget about cooking; the best way to a man's heart is asking him to carry something heavy for you. (Asking him to open a jar also works well.)

I put Penn's application in my back pocket and watched Marcie's chest muscles tense up as she handed me the sack. "You sure it's not too heavy for you?" she asked.

"No problem," I a
nswered, trying not to groan au
dibly beneath the weight. Mr. Macho Man. She opened the gate to the stairs and stepped aside. I bumped into her right hip as I went by, and shock waves trembled through me.

I headed downstairs with Marcie and her smoky scent following. As we descended into the darkness, with the noises from the espresso bar fading away, her smell was almost overpowering. What was it about this girl that seemed to activate all my illicit fantasies at once? I tried to stop the growing tightness in my jeans by focusing on the task at hand. "So where do you want this bag?" I said gruffly.

"In the back. I'll show you." She pointed ahead of me to the end of a long dark aisle filled with coffee sacks and old coffee machines. I walked up the narrow aisle, with Marcie again right behind me, close enough to touch. If I stopped short, she would rub up against me. My body tingled with the thought.

"Don't you love the smell?" she said. I looked back at her, startled. Then I figured it out. She was talking about the smell of coffee, not the smell cascading from her body. I could barely even smell the first thing, I was so overwhelmed by the second.

I felt hot blood rushing to my face, and other parts
of me too. "Yeah, it smells good," I said lamely, and turned away.

The 50-pound sack, and Marcie's body, were leaving me breathless, but I made it to the end of the aisle without fainting and found an empty shelf at around chest level. "Up here?" I asked.

She nodded. "I'll help you."

"No, that's okay."

But she came up next to me anyway, and took hold of part of the sack. Our hands touched. As we strained to lift it, our arms brushed against each other, and then our legs. I gasped, an
d not just from the physical ef
fort.

As we hoisted the sack up onto the shelf, a corner of it brushed against one of her shoulder straps. The strap came right off, just like I'd pictured, leaving her shoulder bare and her dress barely hanging on. She wasn't wearing anything underneath it that I could see. And God knows I looked.

With one last push, we got the sack all the way onto the shelf. That push did something else too. It brought her left thigh into contact with a part of my anatomy that I had tried to keep politely pointed away from her. My face turned flaming red. Marcie gave me a look, her eyes shining. Her lips parted. I gasped again.

She took hold of my hand and brushed the other shoulder strap with it. The strap came down, she did a little snakelike move with her arms, and her dress fell completely off.

I was right. She was totally naked under it.
Oh, my God.

Then she slid her hand under my shirt and felt my chest. My heart felt like it would jump right out of my body. Her nipples rubbed my arm as she came closer. My goose bumps were about ten inches long. Or maybe that was something else.

No one will ever know. You'll never get another chance like this again in your life.

Marcie's fingers were circling my belly button.

This is something you'll smile about in your old age. You'll be sitting in a rocking chair with Andrea
...

She knelt down.

Oh God oh God... Three more seconds and it'll be too late...

Her hand reached down to undo my belt buckle. I moaned, anguish and ecstasy combined.

Two seconds
...

She unzipped my fly.

One second...

I bit my lip so hard I drew blood.

And jumped backward.

She looked up at me
in surprise, her blue eyes glit
tering in the darkness. I took one last longing look at her gorgeous perfect breasts, mumbled "I'm sorry," and escaped down the aisle, up the stairs, and out the front door.

Out on the sidewalk, I gasped for breath yet again. The crisp night air helped to evict Marcie's smoke from my nostrils, and I started to wake up from this whole wild dream. My hard-on began subsiding, and I shifted it around
under my jeans to get more com
fortable. But then a woman's voice behind me called out, "Jacob!"

I almost fell down, my legs got so weak. Great Scott, was Marcie going to follow me through the streets? I instantly started bursting out of my jeans again. I wanted to
run
away but I was glued to the sidewalk. Lord have mercy, how much more of this could I take without giving in?

Not much.

My heart pounding out some fast primitive melody,
I turned around. But it wasn't Marcie; it was Bonnie Engels. She must have come out of Madeline's right behind me, and now she was heading straight for me, arms wide, prepar
ing one of her patented boa con
strictor hugs. I cringed. I didn't want Bonnie hugging me close and getting
the idea that the little guy be
tween my legs was
meant for her. That was one com
plication I didn't need.

I put my arms up to stop her. But she was coming at me so fast, my hands banged up against her breasts. As it turned out, Bonnie wasn't wearing a bra either, which made her the second woman I'd felt up in the past two minutes. My lucky night.

I pulled my hands back, and Bonnie stepped back too, her eyes shooting
darts at me from out of her an
gular face. I reddened. "Sorry, didn't want you to catch my cold." I sniffed my nose to try and make it sound legit.

Bonnie didn't buy it for a second. "Jacob," she said, "I've noticed a certain tension between us lately."

I couldn't think of what to say, so I focused on a blue vein that was sticking out on Bonnie's right temple. This boxing regimen of hers was so
mething else; un
less it was my imagination, even her
face
was growing more muscular. And her neck was filled with more of those thick, pulsing blue veins; they stuck out of the ungainly looking muscles that poured out of her T
-
shirt. How was she getting so big so fast? Every time I saw her, she looked more and more like Mike Tyson. Was this really healthy, or would she soon start going around biting people's ears off and giving away large cars to total strangers?