“WHAT I HAD TO do was tell Lee the truth, Betty. Which is what I’d already told Jim. I swear, I felt like a complete schmuck.” Moodrow was sitting at a small table in his Fourth Street apartment, toying with the remains of a thoroughly overcooked leg of lamb, a bowl of pearl onions in a muddy cream sauce, and a wrinkled baked potato the size of a boiled egg.
“How did he take it?” Betty, even as she asked the question, was trying to decide how she was taking it. She was scheduled to depart La Guardia Airport at ten the following morning, her destination Los Angeles and her cousin, Marilyn, badly injured in a freeway accident. What she needed, in her own estimation, was a farewell dinner with her lover of the last six years, quiet (or maybe not so quiet, depending on how many drinks they had before they got down to business) sex, and a decent night’s sleep. Marilyn was her only living relative; the trip would be painful, perhaps devastating.
“He let me finish without saying anything,” Moodrow responded. “Then he gave me a lecture, told me these weren’t the ‘good old days,’ that everybody’s got a gun and I was lucky to get slammed with a puny trash basket.”
“Lee’s a smart kid,” Betty observed. “You could have been killed.”
Moodrow began to clear the table. He and Betty had a firm rule: One cooked, the other did the dishes. As a result, they ate dinner out more often than not. “It wasn’t like I planned it.” The excuse sounded lame, even to him.
“How many bodies did you see in thirty-five years on the job? How many homicides because somebody had to be macho?”
“Dozens,” Moodrow called over his shoulder. Having retreated to the sink, he began to scrape the remains of their dinner into the garbage pail. “Maybe hundreds. But that doesn’t mean I’m gonna be afraid every time I step out of my apartment. I can’t live that way.”
“Why not, Stanley? I do. And so do several million other New Yorkers. What makes you special?”
Moodrow stacked the plates in the sink, turned on the hot water, then calmly walked to the table where Betty was standing. He retrieved the leg of the lamb, strode back to the sink, wrapped the meat in aluminum foil, and dropped the platter into the sink.
“Fear or no fear,” he finally said, “the reason I reacted the way I did this afternoon was because of something that happened at ten o’clock in the morning. That’s when Jean Ressler fired me.”
Betty leaned back against the refrigerator. Her sharp black eyes bored into the bandages covering the shaved area of Moodrow’s head. “You’re telling me this came as a surprise? It’s been three weeks with no hint of progress. How long did you expect her to fork over two hundred a day plus expenses?”
Moodrow shrugged. Four months ago, Jean Ressler’s husband, Paul, had emptied the bank accounts, redeemed the certificates of deposit, looted the mutual funds, then taken off for parts unknown. Though Jean Ressler had no wish to see her husband again, she did want a piece of the roughly three hundred thousand he’d snatched. Moodrow had put in the hours, talked to friends, relatives, coworkers, waiters, bartenders, barbers. The results had been less than negligible.
“Getting fired was exactly what I expected,” Moodrow admitted. “The surprise came two hours later when she called to say the new firm she hired, Landis Security, managed to find her old man in thirty minutes.”
Betty, instead of yielding to impulse and putting her arms around Moodrow’s waist (they wouldn’t reach around his chest), simply asked, “How?”
“They did it with a computer.” Moodrow turned to face his lover.
“According to Jean, they put his social security number into some program and a half hour later they had him. Seems he got tired of dragging a suitcase full of cash everywhere he went and opened a checking account at the Greater Bank of Birmingham. The bank ran his social security number through a credit agency and that’s where the computer found it. Along with his address and telephone number. Now, Jean wants a refund.”
“Are you going to give it to her?” Betty stepped up to the sink, took a wet dish from his hand, and put it in the drain basket. Then she began to unbutton his shirt.
“Never. Jean Ressler’s an accountant. She makes more money in a week than I do in a month.” He dried his hands on a towel, hung the towel on a hook, ran his fingers through his lover’s hair. “May I ask what you’re doing?”
“I want to lick your nipples.” She pulled his shirt open, let her tongue wander through the mat of hair on his chest. “You can talk about this depressing crap later. After I finish using you and fall asleep.”
Slowly, with extreme deliberation, she undressed him, following her progress with mouth and fingertips. After six years, she knew exactly what excited him. She also knew that Stanley Moodrow, when he was really hot, liked to draw the whole process out. To conserve his excitement like a miser hoarding a stack of shiny-bright Krugerrands.
They made love for the next forty minutes, worked their way from room to room, left a trail of clothing to mark their passage. Betty was on the bed, Moodrow kneeling on the floor beside her, when he finally hooked his fingers beneath the elastic band on her panties and began to slide them down. He caressed her exposed flesh with his lips and the tip of his tongue, didn’t relent until she called for him, until she half dragged him onto the bed, until their bodies were locked.
Then he lay still for a moment, supporting his bulk with his knees and elbows, content to feel the impossible hot-wet sensation of her flesh surrounding his. He lay there until she began to move under him, drawing him deeper and deeper. He wanted her to reach out for her own orgasm, to snatch the prize like a thief reaching into a jewelry display case.
Betty, who’d been through this before, let her fingers trail over his ribs, her tongue trail over his throat; she waited until he began to tire, then reached beneath her right thigh, took his testicles in her hand, and squeezed hard enough to flip him onto his back.
The games were over, the foreplay done; they’d been with each other long enough to know it. Sweat dripped from Betty’s breasts onto Moodrow’s chest as she began to move faster, as Moodrow, eager now, rose up to meet her plunging hips. Eventually, their breathing joined as tightly as their bodies, they found a space without separation, when thought itself had drawn down to a small knot of sensation, and they exploded together.
For the next several minutes, neither spoke; they simply lay beside each other, hands clasped, and allowed the sweat coating their bodies to evaporate while they waited for the practical realities to force them into action. Betty moved first. She turned onto her side, ran the backs of her fingers over Moodrow’s cheek, then headed off to the bathroom.
When Moodrow heard the water running in the shower, he leaned back and tried to relax. He was grateful for what they’d just done, happy that he’d been able to give her what the occasion demanded. Each of them knew this separation could last for weeks, even months. The cousins, Betty and Marilyn, had been very close as children, had actually lived together for a brief time. It didn’t take a computer genius to conclude that Betty wouldn’t return as long as Marilyn needed her.
Meanwhile, the intense, throbbing pain in the back of his skull kept reminding him that no matter how good the night, he’d had a very bad day. And the worst of it was that he could easily have done what Landis Security eventually did. There were several computer companies in New York that specialized in providing information to private detectives; he’d known about them, even had a rough idea of their capabilities. But he’d stuck to the paths he’d always walked, burnt that shoe leather, just like he’d been taught by the NYPD sergeant who’d broken him in. Forty years ago.
Maybe, he thought, I should stop taking cases from people who have money. People who disappear and then open bank accounts.
Bank accounts had never been a factor when the job had him chasing down Lower East Side mutts. The mutts didn’t use credit cards, either. At least, not their own credit cards. Street criminals left trails of blood, not paper. You ran them down by grabbing their friends, relatives, and coconspirators. By getting information any way you could. By pleading, by trading, or by outright extortion.
Moodrow sat up, let his feet drop over the side of the bed, tried to ignore a sudden burst of pain. Computers are just machines, he told himself, and if I don’t intend to retire, I have to get with the program. It probably won’t be that hard, won’t be like that VCR, which I still can’t program. Or the clock on the microwave, which I still can’t set.
But the problem, he knew, was more basic than his failure to adjust to household technology. He simple couldn’t imagine his six-foot-six-inch frame sitting behind a desk in some adult-education course. Couldn’t imagine himself, at age sixty, raising his hand to answer a question.
“Teacher, teacher, teacher.”
He shoved himself erect, put on a light robe, and headed for the bathroom. The water in the shower had stopped running. Betty would be combing out her hair, dusting herself with powder, squeezing a line of toothpaste onto a worn, red brush. He stopped for a moment, his hand on the doorknob, and let himself think about how much he was going to miss her. They’d been together long enough to know each other’s most obnoxious habits, yet neither—at least, he hoped neither—had become bored, much less turned off.
The door opened abruptly and Betty, wrapped in a towel, stood in front of him. He put his arms on her shoulders, looked into her eyes, wanted to tell her to come back soon, not to go at all. But there was no point to it, nothing to be gained. She had to go; it was what he’d do in her place. Besides, on some level he knew that he, with his last relative some fifteen years dead, was actually jealous.
“You get in trouble out there,” he finally said, “you let me know. I’ll be on the next plane.”
Her broad mouth widened into an impish grin. “You, Stanley? In Tinseltown?”
“Hey.” He put a finger to her lips. “The kid knows how to adjust. I’ll just grab a pair of Day-Glo, spandex bicycle shorts and be on my way.”
Moodrow was in the shower, trying to keep his bandaged head above the water, when Betty knocked on the door ten minutes later.
“You decent?” she called.
“Never!”
“Praise the Lord.” She pushed the door open, stepped inside. “Leonora called.”
Leonora Higgins, a former FBI agent who’d left the bureau to become an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, was an old friend of Moodrow’s. Not that he was in the habit of associating with FBI agents. Like most career cops, Moodrow both disliked and distrusted the Bureau. But he and Leonora Higgins had once shared a great adventure, an adventure that’d ended with her shooting him.
“She been elected mayor yet?” It was a standing joke among the three of them. Leonora had political ambitions and wasn’t afraid to admit it.
“She’s coming over, Stanley.”
“Now?” Moodrow stepped out of the shower, accepted a towel from Betty, began to dry himself. “I think we should spend the night by ourselves.”
Betty, after checking to make sure the lid was down, sat on the edge of the toilet. She liked to watch her lover perform small, mundane tasks, to observe the daily rituals. Except for a few brief weeks, they’d never lived together, but at the same time, they were rarely apart for more than a day. Neither of them could have explained the why of it; neither cared to. Both had been through enough failures to accept whatever worked.
“Leonora has a job for you.”
“A job that couldn’t wait until tomorrow afternoon?”
“What could I say, Stanley? You know the drill. She was in the neighborhood, she has to be in court all day tomorrow, it won’t take more than half an hour. I couldn’t refuse to give her thirty minutes. Besides, you need the money.”
“The money?” Moodrow snorted. “Betty, if this job isn’t pro bono, I’ll kiss your ass in Macy’s showroom window at high noon on Christmas Eve.”
Betty got up, checked her reflection in the mirror. “Damn, Stanley,” she said as she turned back to him, “for that kind of thrill, I’ll pay you myself.”