Waiting (28 page)

Read Waiting Online

Authors: Frank M. Robinson

BOOK: Waiting
6.45Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
There was nobody back
at the hotel and Artie waited half an hour, patching up his shoulder with supplies he’d bought from a nearby drugstore. The shears hadn’t gone very deep but the cut was bloody and hurt like hell. He cleaned it with alcohol and put heavy gauze and tape over it, then rinsed his bloody shirt in cold water and hung it over a towel rack in the john, turning on the ceiling heat lamp to help dry it. He watched the news on TV for a while, got bored, and ordered a ham sandwich and a chef’s salad from room service—Mitch could order something for himself later.
He didn’t want to start plowing through Charlie’s diaries until Mitch showed. Best thing to do would be to skim one and turn it over to Mitch when he finished. Maybe Levin would catch something he hadn’t.
By eight o’clock, Mitch still hadn’t showed up. Artie called Mitch’s office, but there was only a recorded message telling the caller to leave his or her name and number and Dr. Mitchell Levin would get back to them. It was the same at home. No Mitch. He called his own house; no messages on his answering machine. And no messages from Levin at KXAM.
Mitch should at least have called him if something had come up, Artie thought, and that was funny because he’d blamed Mark for not doing it either. But something could have happened to him; Mitch was as much a target as he was.
Or was he?
He trusted Mitch because … he trusted Mitch. They were good friends who went back forever, but then so had he and Mary. So had he and everybody else in the Club.
He finished half the salad but had no appetite for the sandwich. Eight-thirty—where the hell was Mitch?
It gradually occurred to him that Mitch wasn’t coming back and he remembered the phone call that morning. He’d had no idea what it was about except that it had concerned him.
And Levin had hardly been friendly afterward: “See you at the hotel tonight?” “Yeah, sure.” But Mitch had said it offhand; he hadn’t meant it.
By nine o’clock Artie had made up his mind, wondering if he wasn’t already too late. Only one person knew where he was, but that might be one person too many. He put on his still-damp-shirt and managed to slip into his coat, his shoulder protesting vigorously. He pocketed the automatic, picked up the bag of diaries, and took the elevator down to the lobby. He nodded at the desk clerk but didn’t bother checking out. As far as anybody was concerned, that was where he was going to spend the night.
It was misting again but it was late enough so there was no difficulty getting a cab. In case the doorman might overhear, he told the driver to take him to the Washington Square Bar and Grill. Once there, he got out, waited until the cab had disappeared from view, then caught another to Lombard Street.
There were dozens of cheap motels lining Lombard and he picked one at random. Checking in sans luggage was no problem; as long as your credit card cleared, you were golden.
The room was serviceable, the bed sheets on the gray side but clean, the towels worn but ditto. He took off his coat, set the gun on the other pillow, and lay down to watch the top of the late news. There was no story about the fight in the library, which was interesting. If somewhere Mitch were watching, he’d have no reason to believe that for ten minutes he and Charlie Allen had been intent on killing each other.
Unless, of course, Levin had been the prime mover all along, the Hound who had murdered Larry Shea a week ago and apparently had declared war against almost everybody in the Club.
Except …
He really didn’t believe that. Nor did he believe the Hound had finally caught up with Mitch. No, Mitch had abandoned him and the only reason Artie could think of was that it had something to do with him.
For a moment he felt like he was back in the library, dangling from a railing in the rotunda, five stories above the floor. The only one he was sure of now was Charlie Allen. He’d seen what had happened to Charlie, just like he’d seen what had happened to the old man ice-skating in the square. Both had been subject to … control.
He wondered if Charlie had managed to get away, then guessed that he had. There was no way that the guard and a platoon of cops could have been manipulated all at the same time.
Artie closed his eyes and tried to will himself back to the cave beside a meandering stream so many thousands of years ago, and when that failed tried to visualize himself at the breakfast table with Susan and Mark, wishing Susan well on her visit to her folks and bitching about almost everything Mark did that he thought was strange or uncalled for.
It had been so easy to forget that he was a teenager once. If he ever got the chance …
But he wouldn’t.
Susan was gone, and so was Mark.
He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling for a long moment, blanking his mind of everything, then spread the diaries out on the bed table and switched on the light.
He had a lot of reading to do.
 
Reading about yourself
twenty years before was bittersweet, Artie thought. Charlie had been something of a naive writer at the start, but he hadn’t missed much. He’d had a flair for characterization and description, even if his vocabulary had been that of a teenager, and he had been a meticulous chronicler of times and places. The later diaries were undoubtedly more sophisticated, but Artie couldn’t believe they’d be as interesting to read.
You forgot so much: the characters drifting in and out of the coffee shop, a lot of students and a thick scattering of hippies. The early members of the Club would sit around a little table in back, sipping coffee and picking out which of the younger patrons might be interested in joining and those whom they wanted to ask. Arch—was anybody still named Archibald?—had been a jock from State and laughed a lot when they asked him to join, thinking they were putting him on. When he was convinced they were serious, he said he thought it would be a hoot. He had been the first to reach the top of the north tower of the bridge.
Arch. Gone now, a boobytrap in ’Nam. Screamed his lungs out until they got him to an evac unit and then he slipped away from an overdose of morphine. What the hell, it was front-line medical and everybody was so scared they were pissing in their pants; you couldn’t blame them for occasional mistakes. Arch probably wouldn’t have made it anyway.
A friend of Arch’s had enlisted with him, and after being mustered out dropped in at the coffee shop to tell somebody, anybody, what had happened. How long had it been since he’d thought of Arch now? Ten years? Fifteen? If he ever wanted to feel guilty about something, he could always pick on that.
And the other members as they had drifted in. Mitchell Levin, toothy and nerdy and wearing John Lennon glasses even back then. Smart, the kind who bragged about it. His family had lived in the St. Francis Wood district and he’d gone to a private high school and bragged about that, too. But what you saw wasn’t what you got. He’d had a wicked sense of humor, had taken martial arts classes along with Shakespeare and the History of the Renaissance, was fond of camping trips, and even had a small gun collection back then, carefully hidden from his father, who was one of the city’s leading cardiologists.
Artie smiled to himself. Maybe it was because Mitch had been a fan of the Three Stooges that they’d gotten along so well. It had been strictly serendipity when they’d met up in ’Nam and he’d asked to be transferred to Mitch’s unit. Intelligence was better than front-line duty, but then, to Artie’s regret, the friendship had turned formal. It had been “Sergeant, I’d like you to do this” and “Yes, sir” unless things were really hairy and there was no time for bullshit. He’d been damned glad once the war was over and the friendship got back to normal. Or had it?
Larry Shea had been your typical average guy, so average they’d debated whether to ask him to join. He’d wanted to be a doctor even back then and had found a pigeon in Golden Gate Park with a busted wing, set it, and nursed the bird back to health. There was no debate after that; everybody wanted him in, even Mitch. Charlie Allen had been Larry’s buddy and Larry had campaigned hard for him. For his part, Charlie had a flair for making himself useful. And he bugged them, showing up on escapades whether he was asked or not, dogging their footsteps no matter where they went. Finally it had been easier to ask him in than to try to keep him out.
Lyle had won the women’s vote. He was somewhat surly, somewhat mysterious, and overwhelmingly sexy. A star of State’s wrestling team, a below-average student, probably because he was a pothead but nobody had really objected to that—if you wanted a lid, Lyle could always turn you on to one.
The women had been something else. Mary had a stocky build and was somewhat self-conscious about it. She had been a music buff even back then, though she had no favorite among the rock groups—she liked them all. Her idea of a good time was to hang out at a rock concert, any rock concert. Somebody had reported seeing her going to the opera one night, but the idea was so outrageous that nobody had believed it.
She also loved art, and that was when Artie had become interested. She not only liked it, she studied it, and when he went to the museum with her it was like having his own private docent to explain the artists and their paintings. Mary had been his opposite, Artie thought. She had been energetic and extroverted. He had been fairly quiet, a bookworm with the saving grace of cycling and playing handball so he wasn’t stoop-shouldered by age twenty.
It was Mary who had introduced him to sex, though he realized later that she had taken pity on him. He had tormented himself about masturbation; he hadn’t been willing to admit that he was hormonally driven and had instead blamed it on his lack of enough courage to approach a girl. Mary had figured out the cause behind his occasional moody silences and invited him over for dinner when her roommates were away for the weekend, suggesting they play cards afterwards.
It had been a strange way to spend the evening, but he’d shrugged and thought, Why not? Mary had teased him into strip poker—later insisting it was his idea, which was all part of her therapy—and when he was naked and could no longer hide his feelings, Mary had sex with him. His first impression was that she had more teeth than the shark in
Jaws.
It was more comfortable face-to-face, but it was all over impossibly soon. Mary went out of her way to compliment him and help build up his ego. For all of a day or two afterward he’d lorded it over the girls in the Club because he had a prick and they didn’t. Mary and he had slept together several more times after that until he figured out that for Mary it was more of a mercy fuck, and for himself it was because of loneliness. But they had been good friends ever since.
Until now.
After he had come back from ’Nam, it was Mary who had introduced him to Susan Albright, a widow with a two-year-old son. It had been love if not at first sight, then certainly by third. Ordinarily a little reserved and more thoughtful than adventurous, Susan was anything but that in bed. Mary had showed him how, but it was Susan who taught him to let go and enjoy the intricacies of lovemaking. One time when he’d held back—because, as Susan had told him afterward, of outdated “moral” reasons—she’d defiantly said, “It’s my body and I’ll do what I want with it,” then smiled and added boldly, “and so should you.”
But she soon became a lot more than a bed partner. When he walked into a room and she was there, he knew his eyes lit up and so did hers. He
liked
her, he finally decided. He liked the way she moved, her sense of self, how she thought and, of course, the fact that she liked him, that she seemed to like everything about him. When he realized she had become his best friend, he asked her to marry him. She had known he would all along; the only thing she had wondered about was when.
In his own mind—though not in Charlie’s diaries—the other women seemed to play a minor role. Jenny had been the quiet goddess, the good scout who went everyplace you did and did everything you did and somehow never got her hair out of place. He couldn’t remember her using much makeup but she was still a knockout. Quiet, too quiet, and she eventually gravitated to the company of Mary, who was brash and outspoken enough for both of them.
Franny had been the plump girl, too much aware that she was overweight, too anxious to please, too eager to do whatever the group wanted to do. She could be depended upon to show up with sandwiches and cookies for whatever trip they went on, sort of a self-nominated commissary. Charlie had caught her one day in a corner of the coffee shop crying to herself about her awkwardness when it came to the men in the Club. He had felt sorry for her, and they were a couple ever after. No regrets, Charlie had written enthusiastically. He’d found a diamond in the rough that all the others had overlooked. What he didn’t admit in the diary was that Franny had figured out the road to his heart was through his stomach and, in his case, it had been a freeway.
Cathy had been the strangest one of the group. A beautiful girl who worried about her figure, worried about her complexion, worried that even in ordinary conversations she might say the wrong thing. She was driven by her insecurities and finally found a way to triumph over them, if only for a short time. She liked sex—a lot—and she was very good at it. It was in bed that she felt the most secure. It was the one place where she didn’t have to worry about doing the wrong thing, because the “wrong” thing was usually the most exciting. And in bed, she had power over the boys.
According to Charlie’s diaries, she spent a lot of time there.
But Charlie had been curious and didn’t stop at merely reporting it. He had wanted to know why. As a fat little kid he had known what insecurity was all about—he’d had bouts of it himself—and wondered why a beautiful girl like Cathy should be insecure about anything. Her family was well off, the boys fell all over her, and she was certainly no dummy.
So, according to his diary, Charlie got himself invited over to the house for dinner and met the family. Her father had been a vice-president of Wells Fargo, her mother a socialite who went to every opera and play opening in town. She was very proud that she could call most of the singers and actors and actresses by their first names. There had been several members of the touring cast of
Jesus Christ, Superstar
at the house for dinner the night Charlie was there, and he had been properly impressed.
It was in Charlie’s third diary that Artie found what he was looking for.
Cathy’s great ambition in the world had been to be an actress.
But according to Charlie—Artie had no idea how he’d found out—her mother had discouraged her. Not that she disapproved of the profession, but compared to the professionals she’d met, her daughter had no talent and the mother didn’t want her disgracing the family.
The lack of approval had bled into all phases of Cathy’s life: she was no good at that, she was no good at anything.
But her mother’s disapproval hadn’t dampened her ambitions. She’d decided she needed a guru when it came to acting and she’d found one in the Club, one who’d played bit parts when touring companies filled out their casts with locals. One who had already made inroads in the suburban theater scene playing juveniles.
The laugh-a-minute cutup, everybody’s friend, one who knew by heart every play on Broadway since the Depression and could regale you for hours on end with anecdotes that he’d plucked out of actors’ biographies and tell-all books about Broadway and Hollywood.
One who even then was talking about starting his own theater company.
Dave Chandler.
But hardly anybody had known about Cathy’s secret desire. She had kept her ambitions under wraps until she was “ready,” and in Charlie’s estimation—he’d caught her in a minor role in a play Chandler had directed for summer stock—she was never going to be ready. A year later she finally bit the bullet, acknowledged her lack of talent, and married Larry Shea, the runner-up for her affections. Whatever else he was, Chandler wasn’t the marrying sort.
Had she ever gotten over Chandler, to whom she had undoubtedly given heart, body, and soul? Charlie Allen’s precise handwriting indicated that he didn’t think so and expressed sympathy for Larry.
Artie put the diary aside and walked over to the window, watching the first signs of sleet whirl around a street lamp outside. There wasn’t any doubt that Chandler had been Cathy’s first true love. And when she’d fled her home in the Oakland hills last week and wound up house-sitting for friends in the city, Chandler had to have been the one she’d called when the loneliness had gotten to be too much for her. She hadn’t been afraid of him; she had trusted him implicitly.
It never occurred to her that the man with whom she had carried on a love affair for years, and in whom she’d probably confided everything about her life—and Larry’s as well, including his latest project—was a Hound from Hell for another species. Somebody who regarded her with all the affection that a spectator regards a chimpanzee in the zoo.
Jesus.
It had been Dave all along, the one Artie would have voted least likely. Except that somebody had tried to dissolve Chandler’s face with acid. It didn’t make sense, but there was only one way to find out.
It was chilly in the room but he could feel the flop sweat start then. He and Mitch had been trying for days to find out who the Hound might be. Now he knew and he was the only one left who could go after it. Mitch had deserted him, and Charlie didn’t even know what was going on.
He took a deep breath, held it for a moment, then let it out slowly and pushed everything else out of his mind. It was like going on night patrol in ’Nam, and God knew he had gone on enough of those. You never knew what was out there, who was waiting, but he had always managed to make it back. Mitch had once said that maybe whoever was the Hound should be afraid of him.
Maybe he was overmatched. But, with a little luck, maybe he wasn’t.
And who was he kidding?
 
It was three in
the morning, the witching hour for the city. The theaters had let out hours before, the bars had long closed, the Marina was deserted except for the occasional 7-Eleven. Artie had the cab circle the block twice to check who was on the street, then got out around the corner. There was a small side entrance leading to a walkway between Chandler’s building and the one next door. It wasn’t difficult to break the small lock and walk to the back. No dogs, no alarms.

Other books

Ladies Who Launch by Milly Johnson
Hot Valley by Lear, James
Cure by Robin Cook
Cover of Night by Linda Howard
La última batalla by C.S. Lewis
Trail of Kisses by Merry Farmer