Fly Paper (9 page)

So sex this afternoon was a real lucky break for him. Made him feel purged. Made him feel great, like a fucking kid.

“Don’t get the wrong idea,” she said, sitting up again, her breasts hanging loose now, sagging just a little, as though tuckered out.

“Wrong idea about you?” he said. “Or about stewardesses?”

She grinned; a good grin, the sort many pretty girls avoid. “Either one. Want a smoke?”

“No. Gave ’em up.”

“How come?”

“Not healthy. Man gets to be my age, he better watch his ass.”

“What do you mean ‘your age’? How old are you, anyway?”

“Forty-eight,” Nolan lied.

“That’s not so old. I’m thirty-five, which is kind of old for a flight attendant.”

At least thirty-five, Nolan thought, saying, “You look like twenty, kid.” He stroked a breast. Kissed her neck.

“Hey, give me a break . . . enough’s enough. For right now, anyway. So tell me, what is your racket? What are you doing in Detroit?”

“I manage a nightclub, Chicago area,” he said. (Which was semi-true, after all: the Tropical did use entertainment in their bar setup.) He told her that a friend of his, an old army buddy, had a little talent agency up here, and he’d promised to check out some of the guy’s new clients.

“Oh really? You done that already?”

“No. Tonight. Going out to his place tonight and see what he has to offer.”

“Sounds like fun. Care for some company?”

“Naw . . . it’ll be a drag. This guy’s agency is really small-time, I’m just looking at these acts out of friendship. Or pity. You’d fall asleep, the acts’ll be so bad.”

She made a face. “Well, looks like another rip-snorter of an evening for old coffee-tea-or-me,” she said, apparently feeling brushed off. “Suppose I’ll just catch another movie tonight, and if I’m lucky maybe get molested walking back to the hotel.”

“Don’t give me that,” he said. “I can’t picture you sitting home alone unless you wanted to.”

“I thought you said you didn’t believe what you read in paperbacks? My life isn’t any swinging party. This is the first time I’ve gotten any in weeks.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, really. I been a lousy
nun
lately. Ever since my marriage broke up, last year.”

“You were married? I thought a stewardess had to be single.”

“Haven’t you heard of Women’s Lib and equal rights and all? The airlines can’t pull much of that crap these days, though God knows they’d like to. And in my case, maybe I’d be better off, at least as far as the old anti-wedlock rule goes. The marriage, it just didn’t work out, with my being a flight attendant and gone days at a time. My husband was balling some secretary at his office, some mousy little twerp with boobs like ping pong balls.”

Nolan shrugged. “Then losing him should be no great loss. He’s obviously an idiot. But there’s plenty of other guys in the world.”

“Yeah, and plenty of other idiots, too. Like there’s this pilot who’s been chasing me, but he’s married, and he’s obnoxious as hell too, so I been ducking him. I have had a fling or two, tiny ones, with some interesting passengers I’ve met on longer flights. But those guys also are married, usually, and I come out of an afternoon like this one feeling like a whore or something. How about you?”

“I never feel like a whore.”

“I mean, are you married? Don’t be a prick.” She said “prick” in a nice way, with affection.

“Not married. Never have been. It’s an institution that holds little appeal to me.”

“After a two-year marriage that was just slightly less successful than the war in Vietnam, I tend to agree with you. Hey, you know something?”

“What?”

“I sort of like you. Your personality is a little on the sour side, but I like it. And your sexual enthusiasm, especially considering you think of yourself as an old man, has me somewhat winded, I’ll admit, but I like that too. Let me make you a proposition. Why don’t you come back tonight and see me, when you’re through hearing those auditions? Then we can resume our conversation . . . and whatever else you’d care to resume.”

“It could be late.”

“I’ll give you the spare key. Let yourself in and crawl under the covers with me. How does that sound to you?”

Nolan smiled. “That sounds fine.”

They chatted for a while longer, and she mentioned that she had a flight tomorrow, and he mentioned he’d be taking a flight tomorrow himself, and it turned out to be the same one. That was a happy coincidence, and Nolan felt unnaturally pleased that this afternoon’s encounter would be continued tonight and, in a way, on the plane tomorrow. In his younger days, he preferred light involvement with his women, in-and-out situations; but he found, as he grew older, that he liked-something more—not much more, maybe, but something.

He got dressed, and as he went to the door, he turned and said, “Hey! Your name. What the hell is it?”

“Hazel.”

“Like your eyes,” he said.

“Like the fat maid in the funnies,” she said, squinching her nose.

“Well, you’re in the right hotel for that”

“Yeah, I noticed. Comic book fans all over the place, kids in costumes, kids wearing T-shirts with cartoon characters on them. A kid with a T-shirt like that tried to pick me up in the bar, just before you showed, would you believe it?”

“Sure, woodwork’s full of ’em. Listen, I got to get going. I’ll see you tonight”

“Okay. Hey!”

“What?”

“Your name? What’s your name?”

He hesitated for a moment; he better not use the Logan name. He was registered as Ryan, but for some reason he wanted to give her the name he himself felt most comfortable with. So he said, “Nolan,” and to hell with it

“Is that a first name,” she asked, “or a last?”

“Whatever you want,” he said, and went out.

This time he had the elevator to himself, and damn glad of it.

Jon was in the coffee shop, working on a Coke.

Nolan joined him at the counter, said, “How much you blow on funny-books so far?”

The kid grinned. “Four hundred and thirty-five bucks and feeling no pain.”

Nolan had no criticism of that. It was a harmless enough indulgence. Besides, he remembered Jon showing him a copy of a comic book, two years ago when he first met the kid; the comic had cost Jon two hundred bucks, which had seemed insane to Nolan, but just recently he had seen an article about an eighteen-year-old kid who’d paid eighteen hundred dollars for that same comic. Nolan asked Jon about it at the time, and Jon had said, rather bitterly, “That stupid clod . . . with him shelling out all that dough, and with all the news coverage he got, shit, prices’ll inflate like crazy again. That comic wasn’t worth any eighteen hundred bucks. Why, it wasn’t worth a penny more than a grand.”

Considering the interest Jon had made on his two- hundred-buck investment, Nolan was impressed, and no longer ridiculed his young friend’s hobby. In fact, he counted himself a sucker, because he too had owned that comic book (bought it off the stands, when he was a kid) and after reading it had thrown his dime investment in the trash.

“How’d it go, Nolan?”

“We have wheels. No problem.”

“Good. Rest of the stuff, too?”

“Rest of the stuff, too.”

“What about the farmhouse?”

“Drove out there, had a look around. No, nobody saw me. I drew up a layout of the farm and all. We can go over it later, up in the room.”

“Fine.”

“Nervous?”

“Yes.”

“Thought the funny-books would distract you.”

“Me too. No soap. Tried to pick up a woman in the bar to see if
that
would distract me. But it fizzled too.”

Nolan glanced at Jon’s Wonder Warthog T-shirt, and wondered if—but no, that was ridiculous.

“Look, kid, there’s one thing I want you to do for me.”

“What’s that?”

“Go buy some hose.”

“Sure. Go buy some hose? Like rubber hose?”

“Like nylon hose. The kind women stick their legs in.”

“Stockings? What the hell for, Nolan?”

“I thought we’d pose as Avon ladies.”

“Oh. You mean masks. We’ll pull ’em over our heads, you mean.”

“Just buy them.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I don’t want to go in buying hose. What’re you, crazy?”

“Too embarrassing?” Jon smiled.

“Hell yes. Why don’t
you
want to?”

“Too embarrassing,” Jon admitted.

“Right, and I’m in charge, you’re my flunky, and when I say buy hose, goddammit, you buy hose.”

“Well, they’ll probably take me for some kind of pervert or something.”

“Probably.” Nolan grinned. He was in a good mood.

“What are you so happy about?”

“It’s going to be clockwork, kid. We’re going to fill our pockets with Sam Comfort’s ill-gotten gains, and he won’t be the wiser.”

Now Jon was grinning too. “You make me feel better. I don’t think I’m nervous, anymore. I don’t even mind buying the hose. If the salesgirl asks me what I want nylons for, I’ll just tell her I want ’em ’cause they’ll go so good with my black lace garter belt.”

“That’s the spirit, kid. Here, I’ll even pay for your damn Coke.”

8

IT WAS FRIDAY
evening, eight-fifteen. The country was calm and quiet tonight, the traffic along this gravel back road seemingly nonexistent. Across the way was a two-story gray frame farmhouse, beginning to sag, whose paint was peeling like an over-baked sunbather. It was a slovenly, ramshackle structure, a shack got out of hand; it sat in a big yard overgrown with big weeds, its location remote even for the country, the lights of neighboring farmhouses barely within view. The place was, in effect, isolated from civilization, which suited the people who lived there. And it suited Nolan and Jon’s purpose, as well.

Jon had been studying the hovel the Comfort clan called home. He shook his head. “Dogpatch,” he muttered.

“What?” Nolan said.

They were sitting in the dark blue, year-old Ford Nolan had leased from Bernie that afternoon. The motor was off, lights too; the car was parked in a cornfield across the road from the Comfort homestead. They were a good half-block down from the house, the nose of the car approaching but not edging onto the dirt access inlet that bridged ditch and gravel road. They had entered a similar access inlet to cross the corner of the field, having cut their lights as they drove down the road that eventually would have intersected the one running past the Comfort house. They’d rumbled slowly across the recently harvested ground, like some prehistoric beast lumbering after its prey at snail’s pace. The only sound had been that of corn husks cracking under the wheels, but the stillness of the night and the insecurity of the situation had magnified that husk-cracking in Jon’s perception, unsettling him. The moon seemed to Jon a huge searchlight illuminating the field, making him feel naked, exposed, unsettling him further. But nothing had happened, and now they sat in the car, in the cornfield, getting ready. They were dressed for their work, in black: Nolan in knit slacks and turtleneck sweater; Jon in jeans and sweatshirt (the latter worn inside-out because the other side bore a fluorescent Batman insignia). The clothes were heavy, warm, which was good, as the night was a cool, almost cold one. Both wore guns in holsters on their hips, police-style: .38 Colt revolvers with four-inch barrels, butts facing out. Between them on the seat were two olive-drab canisters, looking much like beer cans, but with military markings in place of brand names, and levers connecting to pin mechanisms. Also on the seat was a package of nylon stockings, unopened.