Sadie When She Died полностью

Kling asked her to dance in the hope that bodily contact, blood pulsing beneath flesh, hands touching, cheeks brushing, all that jazz might speed along the seduction he had so successfully launched during dinner. But she held him at bay, with a rigid right arm on his left shoulder, so that eventually he tired physically of trying to draw her close, being afflicted with bursitis, and tired mentally of all the adolescent fumbling and maneuvering. He decided to ply her with booze, having been raised in a generation that placed strong store in the seductive powers of alcohol. (He was, incidentally, a cop who had tried pot twice and enjoyed it. He had realized, however, that he could not very well go around offering grass to young ladies, or even lighting up himself, and had abandoned that pleasant pastime.) Nora drank one drink, count it, or to be more exact, half a drink, toying with the remainder of it while Kling consumed two more and asked politely, “Sure you don’t want to drink up and have another?” To which she politely shook her head with a wan little smile.

And then, despite her protestations, two days ago, that she did not want to talk about her grand amour, the band began playing the Beatles’ “Something” and her eyes misted over, and the next thing Kling knew he was being treated to a monologue about her lover. The man, she confessed, had until just recently been married, and there were still some complications, but she expected they would be cleared up within the next several months, at which time she hoped to become his wife. She did not say what the complications were, but Kling surmised she was talking about a divorce settlement or some such; at this point, he could not have cared less. He had been warned, true, but spending a Saturday night with someone who talked about another man was akin to taking one’s mother to a strip joint, maybe worse. He tried to change the subject, but the power of “Something” prevailed, and, as the band launched into a second chorus, Nora similarly launched into her second chorus, so that the music seemed to be accompanying her little tone poem.

“We met entirely by accident,” she said, “though we learned later that actually we could have met at any time during the past year.”

“Well, most people meet entirely by chance,” Kling said.

“Yes, of course, but this was just the most remarkable coincidence.”

“Mmm,” Kling said, and then launched into what he considered a provocative and perhaps completely original observation on The Beatles Phenomenon, remarking that their rise and fall had encompassed a mere five years or so, which seemed significant when one remembered that they were a product of the space age, where speed was of the essence and . . .

“He’s so far superior to me,” Nora said, “that sometimes I wonder what he sees in me at all.”

“What does he do for a living?” Kling asked, thinking Ho-hum.

Nora hesitated for only an instant. But because her face was such a meticulous recorder of anything she felt, he knew that what she said next would be a lie. He was suddenly terribly interested.

“He’s a doctor,” Nora said, and turned her eyes from his, and lifted her drink, and sipped at it, and then glanced toward the bandstand.

“Is he on staff any place?”

“Yes,” she said immediately, and again, he knew she was lying. “Isola General.”

“Over on Wilson Avenue?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

Kling nodded. Isola General was on Parsons and Lowell, bordering the River Dix.

“When do you expect to be married?” he asked.

“We haven’t set the date yet.”

“What’s his name?” Kling asked conversationally, and turned away from her, and lifted his own glass, and pretended to be completely absorbed in the band, which was now playing a medley of tunes from the forties, presumably for the Serutan members of their audience.

“Why do you want to know?” Nora asked.

“Just curious. I have a thing about names. I think certain names go together. If, for example, a woman named Freida did not eventually hook up with a man named Albert, I would be enormously surprised.”

“Who do you think a ‘Nora’ should hook up with?”

“A ‘Bert,’” he said immediately and automatically, and was immediately sorry.

“She’s already hooked up with someone whose name isn’t ‘Bert.’ ”

“What is his name?” Kling asked.

Nora shook her head. “No,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll tell you.”

It was twenty minutes to twelve.

True to his promise, Kling paid the check, hailed a taxicab, and took Nora home. She insisted that it wasn’t necessary for him to come up in the elevator with her, but he told her there’d been a woman killed here in this very building less than a week ago, and since he was a cop and all, armed to the teeth and all, he might just as well accompany her. Outside the door to her apartment, she shook hands with him and said, “Thank you, I had a very nice time.”

“Yes, me, too,” he answered, and nodded bleakly.

He got back to his apartment at 12:25, and the telephone rang some twenty minutes later. It was Steve Carella.