Best Friends Part 7

"Gee..." Her reluctance disappointed him. "As you can understand, I haven't put in a full day at the bank for some time now, and I've got a staggering backlog."

"All right," Roy said. "I will say it here and now, because the air has to be cleared. Last time I saw Sam he accused me of having an affair with you. I just walked out. That was too much for me."

He had never heard her laugh in this fashion, if in fact he had ever heard her properly laugh at all. Over the phone it sounded like splashing water. Finally she said, "That was his joke. You know how he is, you of all people."

"I never heard him joke about something like that, even when he was well."

"Then it's the medication. But I a.s.sure you he was joking. He told me about it-and thinks you leaving in a huff was part of the joke. You and he have been kidding each other like that since you were boys, haven't you? Trading fake insults?"

No, not that kind, never anything that was really personal, and Roy could not remember a girl or woman for whom they had ever competed. To begin with, their respective tastes in females were so different. Sam of course derided Roy's so-called lechery, but that was another matter altogether from accusing his best friend of an illicit connection with his wife. Such a charge had to do not with s.e.x but with betrayal, with dishonor, with a shame that Roy would have found unbearable.... For all that, he could admit, and in fact was eager to do so, that any wife, and especially one as sensitive as Kristin, would know her husband better, certainly in this area, than any male friend of however many years.

"You may be right."

"I know I am, Roy," Kristin said. "And after all, it reflected on me, too."

For a moment he did not understand this comment, but to maintain his pride he murmured an a.s.sent.

Kristin was proving she also knew him. "I mean, he would also have been accusing me."

"Oh, sure," Roy said hastily. "He wouldn't have given you a pa.s.sive role. I should have recognized the joke from that. I'm not myself these days. Self-pity may not be a good excuse, but it's the only one I can find."

Her voice suddenly became very tender, even in this means of transmission. "It's good enough for me."

He was moved by the statement, though it might represent no more than common courtesy. It was just as well they were speaking by telephone, so that she could not see the flush he felt heat his face.

"Sam can still have visitors?"

"Of course. He's expecting you."

"What should I bring?"

"Nothing. He's got too much stuff there already. The staff is complaining."

"Something I noticed but never got around to mentioning: There aren't any flowers in the room. Men don't usually send them to other men, but I was wondering-"

"He's allergic to flowers," said Sam's wife. "Didn't you know that? All of those at home are silk or paper or something."

Roy sighed. "Well, there you are. After twenty years I seem to be barely acquainted with the guy."

"He sneezes if he sees a picture of a rose," said Kristin. "Any kind of flower makes him tear up as if his heart is breaking."

Roy remembered Sam's copious tears at Roy's father's funeral. Fond as he had been of the man, Sam had perhaps wept overmuch, more even than Robin. Given the affection between them, Sam would have been a more appropriate son for Victor Courtright than Roy, who preferred the mother who had deserted him at a tender age. He always believed her more foolish than wicked. She was also beautiful.

"I've seen him cry at funerals," Roy told Kristin. "It never occurred to me it might be the flowers."

"I've got to go do some work, Roy."

"Oh, sure." He was about to make some polite closing comment when she briskly hung up. And why not? It was the rational thing to do. In these few short days he had begun to see, beyond the superficial attributes, what made her so attractive to Sam, though in fact that had never been in question. He still could not understand the reverse, though he might be getting closer. Sam needed taking care of. Could it be as simple as that? Many people had such a need. Lately he could include himself in their company, but that had not always been true. Normally he was self-reliant. Now that he was temporarily otherwise, Kristin seemed to like him as earlier she had apparently not. Did she simply have a preference for losers?...He shocked himself with this reflection. He had never before thought of his best friend with such stark candor...though now that he did, it was, if unfortunate, no surprise. Perhaps it had always existed as an a.s.sumption, too established to require conscious legitimizing.

"Hi there!" The window on the pa.s.senger's side was open, and a winsome young woman's smiling face was framed in it. She looked vaguely familiar to him, but he had no clue as to her name.

"Hi," said he. "It's good to see you." The emphasis was instinctive in such a situation, when he cautiously withheld any more enthusiastic greeting. She might after all be poised to ask of him something he could not gracefully provide, in this period that had suddenly become so disorderly.

He was relieved by her producing a slotted can into which he could stuff a bill for whatever cause. Apparently they had not previously met, and she was asking nothing else of him. But he had not folded the money carefully, and it went only halfway in before clogging the narrow aperture.

The young woman took over, leaning in, her unbra.s.siered b.r.e.a.s.t.s plumped and defined by the lower edge of the window frame. She plucked the money out and, in refolding it, saw the denomination.

"Fifty bucks? My G.o.d. Thank you. You must love animals." She had short glossy black hair, and her eyes looked somewhat Asiatic.

"I do, in fact. I also like you."

She quickly pushed the bill into the can, as if he might change his mind. But her smile was wider. "You don't know me."

"If I knew you better, I might find you obnoxious."

This statement made her laugh. "That's a new one."

Roy opened the glove compartment and took out a business card. He presented it to her.

She straightened up and read, "Incomparable Cars. You're Roy Courtright?"

He put the Jeep in drive. "Give me a call if you want to buy a pre-owned Rolls-Royce." He turned the steering wheel and took his foot from the brake. "Or just want to take a free test drive in one. Check me out with the Better Business Bureau."

In the rearview mirror he could see her staring at him as he drove away. This whole thing had been involuntary, a kind of reflex triggered by the appearance of a woman who was attractive to him. He felt somewhat foolish now, only a moment later. She was young enough to be a college student. As a rule he could not endure college girls, who made him feel old and who had no history, no current or ex-husbands by contrast to whom he seemed glamorous.

While he waited for the green light at the last traffic signal on Main, a police car going the other way crossed the intersection and abruptly stopped parallel with him.

The officer in its open window was Howie. "Mr. Courtright," he called over, "are you missing a sports car from your place this morning?"

"Nope. I just came from there."

"I was chasing one out Meadowbrook a while ago," Howie said. "I lost him. He was driving like he stole it." Traffic was backed up behind the cruiser, blocking the intersection in all directions. The cars in the rear, not able to identify the police vehicle, were leaning on their horns. "I thought it might be one of yours."

"Maybe it was one I sold somebody in the past." Had this been a real possibility, Roy would never have made a suggestion so disloyal to a client. "But not all sports cars are vintage models. Check with Porsche-Audi, or maybe it was a Miata from Logan Mazda, in Crawford."

"Whatever." Apparently Howie had not even recognized the marque. There were now probably two dozen cars in the bottleneck he was creating with the easy arrogance of a policeman. But at last he acknowledged the horns, winking at Roy. "Got to calm down these irate citizens," he said. "Seeya, Mr. Courtright." He put the car in motion, but as slowly as possible, freeing the blocked vehicles only to begin a crawl.

Roy's earlier pleasure in eluding the pursuit was compromised now that he put a face on the cop who chased him. Howie might not drive that well at speed and could have been killed taking one of those corners on Meadowbrook. Outrunning the police was adolescent behavior. Nevertheless, had he not been aware that it would be reported immediately to Kristin, he might have boasted of the escapade to Sam, whose disapproval of Roy's driving enhanced the pleasure his best friend derived from it, as did similar moralizing about his s.e.x life: a wimp sitting in judgment on virility. For an instant it occurred to him, awfully, that he despised Sam. He thrust the thought away as quickly as it had come. If he had contempt for his friend, then why want to impress him?

They had never been compet.i.tors. When they were teenagers Sam would gorge on candy bars and potato chips while watching Roy work out for an hour with a barbell. For his own part, Roy had never been envious of the gadgets Sam was addicted to even as a lad, the vest-pocket voice-activated tape recorders, the pen-sized Mace canister, the radio-sungla.s.ses, or for that matter the girls for whom in those days Sam seemed the greater attraction. Nowadays both of them found common amus.e.m.e.nt in remembering Roy's early lack of success with females. Sam's first score was at least a year and a half before his own, not to mention that when Roy's opportunity arrived at last, he failed to give an adequate performance. He was so embarra.s.sed he never dated the girl again, and it was another year before he even tried to have intercourse, except with prost.i.tutes, who are professionally indifferent to a client's humiliation, unless of course they have been paid to provide it.

Sam heard from a girlfriend that Roy was thought to be gay. "I told her you went to that Korean ma.s.sage parlor all the time. But you know how women are." But Roy had not so known, in that era. Nor, though in fact he did frequent them, did he know anything nonphysical about Asian ma.s.seuses, for they either did not speak English or were averse to speaking with him and communicated exclusively by hand signals.

Sam feared that paying for it was an aphrodisiac to Roy, but such proved not to be the case. "I know s.e.x is supposed to be largely mental, but with me the physical can control the mind."

Sam asked, "They say a stiff p.r.i.c.k doesn't have a conscience. Is that what you mean?"

Roy would not go so far, but he went on to reverse his initially poor reputation among the ladies, whose next complaint was of his promiscuity. "You really can't take seriously what women say to one another," he told Sam. "What matters is what they do."

"With men."

"With anybody. I don't mean just s.e.xually."

"You can say that about everyone."

Impulsively Roy asked, "But does what men do really matter that much?"

"Now you are talking about s.e.x, I hope. Otherwise it doesn't make any sense."

"You're right," Roy had said. "I guess I wasn't thinking." With your best friend you could say stuff that with anyone else, especially girls, would only earn you scorn. Old Sam had been listening good-humoredly to a lot of c.r.a.p from him in twenty years. He had to love the guy.

7.

Roy returned the Grand Cherokee to the lot behind the garage and went inside to reclaim the E-Type from the guys, but they had already elevated it on the lift and taken away the entire exhaust system: m.u.f.flers, tailpipe, and chrome-plated resonators. The late model Bentley that had previously occupied the lift had been lowered and temporarily abandoned, demonstrating the impracticality of the guys, for this car belonged to an independent client of theirs who paid them a king's ransom for routine servicing, whereas they would get no fee from Roy for labor. He might, however, be saddled with the cost of parts, which for marques long out of production could be hefty. This was annoying, for, as he had a.s.sured them, the car's performance on his run from Officer Howie had been faultless.

But he knew better than to protest while a project was underway, for Diego could turn sullen and Paul waspish, and how often in contemporary life did one get the opportunity to complain about anyone's taking too many pains with anything?

He went up via the interior stairway to the showroom, which was level with the sidewalk and street beyond the big front windows-a pair of which were hinged and could be swung open for the pa.s.sage of cla.s.sic automobiles to and from the floor. The office occupied a shallow s.p.a.ce at the rear, separated from the glistening wares by a thin part.i.tion that offered little privacy of conversation, but then Roy's was not a used-auto business in which salesmen connived with a manager to fleece the customers. Roy had n.o.body at the office with whom to conspire against a client-after working for him for several years, Mrs. Forsythe was still unable to distinguish one car from another.

It was his idea to address her as Mrs. Forsythe and hers to call him Roy, and in both cases the reason was, presumably, the difference in their ages, which took precedence over the orthodox employer-employee protocol. On the other hand, she herself preferred the old-fashioned, perhaps patronizing "secretary" to the "a.s.sistant" standard in contemporary use.

A plump-cheeked, purse-lipped woman in her early fifties, Mrs. F. was either a widow or a divorcee. She had never specified which, and Roy did not ask. She had herself filled out all the forms required by the various governmental agencies that oppressed the small-businessman, to do which was why Roy had hired her. He signed everything without carefully reading the details; he swore by Mrs. Forsythe. Of her personal life he knew only her home phone number and that she had a teenaged daughter who looked reasonably pretty in the desktop photograph. The girl had never appeared at the office during the years her mother worked for Roy, no doubt because of his reputation for lechery, of which Mrs. F. would have been aware, (owing to the phone calls from women who obviously had no interest in cla.s.sic cars), but to which she never alluded, denying him an opportunity to aver that he offered no threat to Juliette for a good five years, by which time he hoped to have settled down at last.

As he reminded himself occasionally, Roy really did want to find a good woman with whom he would fall in love, get married, and even have children. That these impeccable intentions had remained thus far in the abstract, as opposed to a promiscuity all too concrete, was an obsession of his sister's, to which Roy's answer was to ask whether Robin would prefer him not even to dream of an alternative to his stupid, irresponsible dead-end existence? That would stop her for a while. It was thoroughly hypocritical. Roy enjoyed his life. He loved the company of women even when they were being unpleasant to him. He had never had a close male friend other than Sam.

Before going to his desk, where he anyhow rarely stayed long, he tarried among the array of cars now on the floor. They were his babies, though of course he would not have used the term even with collectors, for whom it was not pa.s.sionate enough for such works of art, such expressions of virtue in the original sense of strength, courage, virility; such spiritualizing of the material, poetry in metal, or, in the case of the canary-yellow Lotus Elite, fibergla.s.s.

There was the handsome Alvis, admired by Kristin, and the oyster-white MGA fixed-head coupe that he had driven to the fateful episode at The Hedges, which already seemed remote though, if anything, more terrible. Nearer the show windows was a red Porsche Speedster; a '52 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith; a green Mercedes roadster, in mint condition but with an automatic transmission, power brakes, and removable hardtop, vulgarities to the cognoscenti of high-performance cars; and the current leader of his inventory, a silver Lamborghini Espada, twelve cylinders, six Weber carburetors, a 200-mph performer, with blue leather interior and fewer than 40,0008 miles on its odometer, for which he was asking about a dollar per mile. The others were priced at even less. Selling vintage cars, at least in his fashion, was not a route to riches. Manufacturing shipping containers, in his father's way, had produced extraordinary profits without which Roy would not have been able to indulge himself in a business his father had considered a joke.

For the first few weeks he had been open on Peregrine Street, a block off Main, the showroom was as accessible to the public as a Chevy dealership; and especially on weekends, when the village was thronged with antiquers, the collection had attracted many visitors. Roy had no objection to being included in the list of suggested Things to Do that accompanied the map for tourists distributed by the local chamber of commerce, offering, as in effect he did, a little free museum. But the policy proved unfortunate. Children pawed the coachwork, and adults climbed into the leather interiors and tried the horns and headlamps. After Roy posted please do not touch signs, not only at the entrance but also on a standard beside each automobile, a mother b.i.t.c.hed at him for shooing away an offspring of hers who dripped corrosive cola on the finish of a recently detailed Maserati 3500GT, and an elephantine man lowered his enormous larda.s.s onto the wing, i.e., fender, of a perfectly restored little MG-TC, imperiling its suspension. Politely asking him to rise provoked the threat of a lawsuit.

Subsequently he locked the door against the general public, but could do nothing to expunge his listing from the tourist brochure unless he wanted to pay for a new edition thereof, and visibly irritated persons occasionally slapped the gla.s.s of the show windows in indignant response to the posted notice, by appointment only.

Roy gathered the mail that had been pushed through the front-door slot to scatter and slide across a floor as highly polished as the cars. Not many potential buyers nowadays submitted bids by this means, so the postman usually delivered only bills. Those today included a statement from a company that insured vintage cars; the rates having gone up again, it was a whopper.

He deposited all the envelopes on Mrs. Forsythe's desktop, which was clean except for the computer and telephone, and took the periodicals to his own, which was littered, though with nothing current. In the big newspaper, he turned first to the cla.s.sified advertis.e.m.e.nts for imported and sports cars, where now and again you might find something of interest, though not today. Then he took up the local paper. The report of Francine's murder and her ex-husband's suicide was featured prominently. Sy Alt, though seemingly distracted by more demanding cases, had done a good job in keeping Roy's name out of the story.

When he was finished with the papers and magazines, Roy took them to the corner table, where Mrs. Forsythe still managed to keep the periodicals on hand neatly shingled, despite the now-limited room because of the espresso machine. The moss-green blanket in which he had wrapped the Stecchino for transport was in a neat fold atop a filing cabinet. He had better return it before Mrs. F. complained.

He returned to his desk and, biting his lip, dialed Sam Grandy's cell phone number.

"It's not too early?"

"I wake up at dawn in this place."

"Sorry the way I left there yesterday."

"I'm the one who should apologize. It hit me only after you left that something was really wrong, but I didn't actually get it till Kris kicked my a.s.s. I thought you knew I was kidding, I swear."

There was still something wrong here, but Roy had no stomach for pursuing the matter. "How in h.e.l.l are you today?"

"I guess this is hard to believe, but I feel fine. I still think these greedy doctor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds exaggerate the h.e.l.l out of the slightest gas pains-how else would they stay rich?...So where'd you go last night with Suzie Akins?"

Roy had not asked her to keep it from Sam; she had volunteered to do so. Why do women lie about their intentions? "You know about that?"

"I can see the parking lot from my window if I get up to use the toilet. I wouldn't p.i.s.s in a bedpan if I was dying. It was still light enough to see you two talking down there. The rest is just an informed guess."

"We had a drink," Roy told him, relieved to find that Suzanne had kept her word. "That was all." But now he worried that Sam might, in some j.a.pery with her, suggest that Roy had gone into detail about their "date."

Sam proceeded to justify the fear. "I'll wait till I hear her version."

"I'll be over later." Roy hung up and immediately called the hospital number.

It was not easy to reach Nurse Akins when she was on duty. He had to do some lying.

"Who's this?" she asked when found. "I don't have a brother, so he can't have gotten hurt." She was scarcely mollified when she heard Roy's explanation. "You bothered me for that?"

"I just didn't want you to be embarra.s.sed."

"You mean you, Roy. I think you always mean yourself."

Francine said something of the sort the last time he ever heard her speak, but she had been going to bed with him for months.

In the big bottom drawer of Mrs. Forsythe's desk he found a copy of the telephone directory and turned to the yellow-page list of florists. He dialed the number of a shop two villages away and asked the woman who answered to send flowers in memory of Francine Holbrook to the appropriate funeral home-and quickly, for according to the newspaper, the services were to be held before noon this very morning.

"Signed-?" asked the woman on the phone.

"Oh...I guess, 'A Friend.'" He gave her his real name, phone, and credit-card number.

Mrs. Forsythe appeared on the stroke of noon, as always. She carried a black purse large enough to hold the made-at-home sandwich she would eat at her desk and the plastic mug in which a teabag would be steeped.

"How do you feel today, Roy?" Below her curly brown-rinsed hair was the kind of sensible face that he had implicitly trusted on first seeing it. He had never since had reason to believe otherwise. Therefore he tended to humor her.

"I'm feeling better, Mrs. F., thank you. Touch of food poisoning, probably."

She unloaded her bag and took the mug into the little lavatory at the far end of the office, where she kept an electric hotpot in which to heat water for her tea.

When she emerged Roy said, "When I remember to bring coffee for it, I'll make you some espresso." He pointed toward the Stecchino.

Mrs. Forsythe's smile sometimes seemed tinged with mockery, though that could have been his imagination. "Thank you," said she, "but plain old Lipton's good enough for me." After quickly opening and scanning the bills that had come by envelope and a.s.sembling the faxes that had arrived overnight, she returned to the washroom and brought back the steaming mug with its little hanging tag. She sat down before the monitor, her now unwrapped sandwich to the left of the keyboard and the steeping tea to the right.