Impersonal Attractions Page 6

  “You’re really going to meet all fifty of those guys?”

  “I don’t think so. What do I know? I haven’t even opened all the letters yet.”

  “It just doesn’t sound like a very safe idea to me.”

  He sounded like herself talking to Sam. The shoe wasn’t so comfortable on the other foot.

  She bristled. “What’s the matter, Tom? You sound crabby. Did the Forty-niners lose you some money last week, or is Clara trying to garnishee your running shoes?” His ex-wife’s demands for more were legendary.

  “I’m sorry. I guess I’m letting this new Dynatrix project get to me. And Kim doesn’t understand why I don’t think it’s a neat idea for a nine-year-old to go on a shopping trip to New York with her next-door neighbors. There’s not going to be anything left for that kid to do by the time she’s eighteen if Clara has her way.”

  Annie laughed. Tom became very Italian when it came to his daughter.

  “Same old stuff,” he continued. “But nothing that dinner and a movie with you next week couldn’t straighten out.”

  “You got it. Thursday?”

  “Great. Let’s eat a duck at the Hunan and catch a western. And you can tell me about all those new men in your life.”

  Did she detect just a note of jealousy? What a nice man. How lucky she was to have him for a friend.

  ELEVEN

  Julia Child may define the tenderloin as the most tender and luxurious part of the animal, but many cities give the name to their centers of vice, naughtiness, and crime.

  San Francisco’s Tenderloin was downtown, bordered by Golden Gate Avenue, Larkin, O’Farrell, and Mason. Its residence hotels, middle-class apartments, and good Greek restaurants were obscured by sex shops with windows full of adult rubber novelties, barkers urging tourists into two-drink minimum, bump-and-grind shows, and theaters with names like the Pussycat.

  The theaters catered to every nuance of sexual taste, featuring black women, white women, Oriental women, women in rubber, women with whips, women in chains, and in a couple of theaters that one has to know about to find—women in extremis: snuff films.

  In a small theater a dozen or so men sat in the dark, scattered far apart. Cigarette and marijuana smoke climbed up through the projected light. There was the occasional pop of a beer can opening. This was not an atmosphere in which one had to bother with conventional rules. There was no talking, but that was because everyone’s attention was riveted to the action taking place on the screen.

  A Latina with large breasts was led into a room, blindfolded. Her frilly white blouse was cut low in the neck. Her short, black skirt was hiked well above her knees. There was a long run in her left stocking. Her hands were bound behind her with a leather thong.

  The two men who directed her with rough pushes and shoves were also Latin. They were both dressed in black, with tight-fitting pants and a multitude of gold chains glinting on their open-shirted chests.

  They tied the woman to a post in the room, furnished otherwise with only a bed. They beat her with short whips, then tortured her with wicked looking knives. Then they cut her down, raped her in a variety of sadistically imaginative ways, and finally garroted her with a length of barbed wire. It was a particularly hideous way to die.

  Unless, of course, one was a connoisseur in such matters, as the blond man in the last row seemed to be. In the reflected light from the screen, he grinned as the woman struggled for breath, and then his body contorted as he and the woman on screen reached a climax of death and blood lust together.

  He reached past the knife on his hip and tucked his soiled handkerchief and his $10 ticket stub into his back pocket as he left. He’d gotten his money’s worth.

  TWELVE

  Sam had waved her way past several friends and acquaintances at the bar in the front room of the Washington Square Bar & Grill and asked the maître d’ for a small table in the back. If the man in the white Porsche did show up, how could she introduce him? “I want you to meet a man who picked me up on the freeway.” She didn’t even know his name.

  The down-and-out blues piano from the front room fought to be heard over the hubbub of conversation from the early-evening crowd. Friends called to one another, moved chairs, squeezed one more into large groups at circular tables. The Square was a favorite hangout of journalists and literati in the city. At a table nearby, Sam spied the novelist Alice Adams, her silver head bent toward her companion’s, deep in conversation.

  Sam’s favorite waiter raised an eyebrow from across the room. Sam smiled and nodded, and within moments there was a large bottle of Perrier, a bucket of ice, and a small dish of limes in front of her. She glanced at her gold Cartier watch. She was right on time. Her date wasn’t, or perhaps he just hadn’t found her yet.

  Well, she couldn’t just twiddle her thumbs. She pulled out the black leather Filofax notebook that contained practically her entire life and thumbed to her notes on Sondra Weinberg. She had already filed her story, including the interview with the victim’s aunt and uncle. It had run on page one and the next day she had received a call from Judge Weinberg, thanking her for the piece.

  His call had brought tears to her eyes. Hardly anyone ever called to say positive things about the news and the circumstances of this story made it even more poignant. To think that the man could separate himself from his enormous grief to say thank you.

  Sometimes she wondered about this job of hers. What was it that made her so fascinated with violence?

  Was it her seemingly ever so safe upbringing, the elegant, spotlessly clean houses in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara that her parents and their decorator had filled with carefully chosen antiques? The years of her father at the head of the table, meticulously controlling and directing dinner conversation, with his three daughters and his wife nodding in the appropriate places, their hands folded in their laps? The pale, monochromatic platters of well-done beef, mashed potatoes, cauliflower served by a maid in white, antiseptically doling out the bland food as if she were a nurse? Everything so careful, so white.

  It was all so clean, so proper, so calm, except for those occasional awful times when her father had had a particularly bad day augmented by one too many before-dinner drinks. He would badger them with questions, testing to see if they would slip up with an inappropriate opinion, a mistake of taste or decorum. Their mother would murmur, “Dear, dear,” until he would turn and include her, too, in the verbal slaughter. Her face would grow paler, whiter. His would glow bright red as the booze and the blood would flush higher and higher.

  Occasionally his anger would fly him out of the dining room and into a bedroom upstairs, where he would drag a small, sobbing daughter and bend her over a bed, pull her dress up and her underpants down and batter her with his belt until his passion had subsided.

  Usually the daughter was Sam. She was the oldest. The prettiest. The smartest. And the most likely to talk back, coming to the defense of her opinions or of her younger sisters. She was the one of whom he was the fondest—and the most intolerant.

  Later, in the therapy that had saved her, Sam would discover that there were years of her childhood she simply didn’t remember. She had erased the rage that took her up those stairs and violated her bare bottom, just as if she were erasing notes from a tape.

  Her mother always pretended that it never happened. She would smile vacantly, as she always had when Sam tried to enlist her help years later in piecing together her childhood.

  “No, dear, I don’t know what you mean. We were always happy, all of us. Don’t you remember? The trips to the ranch to see Grandpa, the horses, the picnics. We always had such lovely times.”

  Her mother had smiled vacantly, too, when Sam had marched down the aisle on the arm of her beaming father to join in wedlock with Preston Mathews, the well-connected stockbroker. Her father thought he was a marvelous catch, one that would prove useful to the family. He had all the right qualities except kindness.

  Sam hadn’t noticed that until it was
too late. She had met him at a deb party, and during the brief romance through which he danced her, high on champagne, vodka, mescaline, and a whole rainbow of red, yellow, green, and black capsules, she hadn’t noticed anything about him, except that he was going to take her away from home.

  It wasn’t long, of course, before she discovered she had exchanged one fairy-tale castle with a rotten, secret room, clanking with chains and resounding with screams, for another.

  Preston had thought the marriage was a good one. He had thought that all her millions, married to his financial acumen, would lead to a very quick pot of gold. He hadn’t realized until too late that his rainbow girl’s fortune would grow and grow and grow not in his hands, but from one generation to another, most of it carefully locked up in trust.

  Then the sunshine in their house on the beach had faded. Preston had quickly grown cold and bitter, picking at the food she prepared for him, occasionally pillaging her body in a burst of savagery that always left her sore and unsatisfied. He railed against her slovenliness, demanding that she clean, on her hands and knees, the beach sand from the tracks of the sliding glass doors with Q-tips.

  Sam, conditioned by her father, bore it for a year. Then one day, during a conversation with her younger sister Crista, she had burst into tears, and it had all spilled out. Within an hour, she was packed and gone.

  She escaped northward, to Palo Alto and a favorite aunt, and then to Stanford, the law, the white-shoe law firm, the pressure, easily slipping into the bottle to hide from her past and a self she didn’t understand.

  When she’d made it out on the other side she had found once again her sunny self, the one that was kind, laughed easily, was generous with her time and money. (But not so quick with her trust, if you please. One must tread lightly, achieve that slowly.) She wrote voluminous journals and read incessantly. But not fiction. Hardly ever fiction. It was real life, what made people tick, that held her fascination. People like Judge Weinberg, his poor dead niece Sondra, and the twisted, cold mind that had ended her life.

  Sam looked down at her notebook and the page on Sondra. She had covered all the white space with doodles.

  Her ice was melting. What time was it? She glanced at her watch. She’d been there for half an hour. Looked like the freeway cruiser wasn’t going to show.

  Then she felt the waiter’s eyes on her. He hurried over with a menu.

  “I didn’t want to disturb you, Miss Samantha. You looked busy.”

  She brushed aside his apology as needless and began to scan the familiar list. Should she order? She hadn’t made any plans for dinner, had thought she would just meet this man and then go home and snuggle into an old movie from the video store. She was beginning to feel a bit hungry, but she hesitated. It wasn’t likely that he would appear if he were this late, but what if he did and she were committed to dinner. She didn’t want to have to spend that kind of time with him.

  She stared across the room blankly, considering the options, when she realized that her stare was being returned.

  She started. Was it him? Was it the White Knight? No, it was that tall, handsome detective she’d passed a few times in her rounds downtown. The one who had moved out from New York not too long ago. Irish. Dark red hair. A great smile. What was his name? Sean. Sean what? Sean O’Reilly.

  He obviously had no trouble remembering her name as he strode over to her table.

  “Hello, Samantha.” He smiled down at her. “Are you alone? I mean, are you going to be alone?”

  Sam hesitated. Well, was she or wasn’t she? She didn’t know.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude. I saw you and thought what a lucky coincidence it was for me. I’ve been wanting to have a chance to talk with you for quite some time.”

  How could she refuse that?

  “No, of course. I mean, you’re not intruding. I was supposed to meet someone, but obviously my friend has been held up somewhere. Please sit down.”

  Besides, she thought, if he does show up, the hell with him.

  “So,” he said as he settled in, arranging his long legs under the table, “could I interest you in some oysters and champagne to start?”

  Sam’s response was a look he couldn’t read.

  “I mean, if you’re interested in dining. If not, we could just have a drink and chat for a few minutes if you have somewhere else to be.”

  “No, that would be lovely. I’d like to. Dine, that is. The oysters would be grand.”

  “No champagne?”

  “No.”

  “Some white wine, perhaps?”

  “No.”

  He glanced at the bottle of Perrier and nodded in its direction.

  “Another?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “A dozen Belon, a dozen Apalachicola, another bottle of Perrier for the lady, and a glass of Chandon Brut for me,” he reeled off to the waiter, who smiled at Sam. She smiled back, amused. The staff at the Square never missed a trick, knew who was seeing whom, pulled for their unattached regulars. She knew the waiter couldn’t wait to get back to the service area to share the news that she had company. She wondered what they knew about Sean. Probably more than she did.

  “Do you come here often?” she wondered aloud.

  “More and more,” he said. “What’s your sign?”

  She stared at him, taken aback. Then as the smile crinkled into his dimples, she got it. He was teasing her about her stereotypical California question.

  “Burma Shave,” she said, “with an ascendant in Pepperoni. And yours?”

  “Staten Island Ferry. Very compatible.”

  “School?” she queried.

  “P.S. One-o-six. And you?”

  “Reform.”

  “Funny, I could have sworn you looked Orthodox. Hobbies?”

  “Horse.”

  “You mean heroin?”

  “No, my heroine is Superwoman.”

  “Hero?”

  “Sandwich.”

  “Dagwood.”

  “Blondie.”

  “The singer.”

  “As in sewing machine?”

  “As in jukebox.” Then they both lost it, dissolving into laughter just as the beaming waiter arrived with their oysters.

  “Gosh, we have so much in common,” Sean teased. He picked up a wedge of lemon and an oyster shell. “Help yourself,” he invited.

  Sam looked at the beautiful, frosty platter before them, the shells snuggled into a bed of ice. Could anyone ever eat an oyster in the presence of the opposite sex without thinking of that incredible, edible, slurpy, sexy scene in the movie Tom Jones?

  She lifted her fork and raised her eyes to see Sean, across the table, grinning at her as one of the salty, coppery morsels slid down his throat. She knew that he knew what she was thinking. Well, her mind certainly wasn’t going to be seduced that easily. All business, she lifted an oyster, hooked it out smartly, plopped it in her mouth, and chewed.

  “Excellent,” she said.

  His mouth still held a grin. She hadn’t fooled him for a second.

  “So the mysterious Ms. Storey approves?”

  “Indeed. But what’s so mysterious?”

  “You are. I’ve asked hundreds of questions about you and no one seems to know very much.”

  Sam didn’t know whether to be flattered or insulted.

  “What do you mean hundreds of questions?”

  “I’ve asked around. ‘Who is this beautiful woman? Where did she come from? Does she have a boyfriend? Where did she learn to be such a pro? Does she like cops?’”

  “Her name is Samantha NMI ex-Mathews Storey. From Los Angeles. No. In law school and on the job. Not unequivocally; each one has to stand on his or her own merits. I’m surprised you didn’t run me through the computer,” she continued.

  “I did,” he said. “It didn’t tell me what I wanted to know. Now, what would you like for dinner?”

  Sam didn’t know what struck her. This man was titillating in ways she wasn’t use
d to. And he made her feel feisty.

  “More oysters, please.”

  He raised an eyebrow. His eyes read and registered her challenge.

  “Then more oysters it will be.”

  He signaled to the waiter, ordered two dozen more, which they polished off without much conversation but with a large number of sideways glances. Then another two dozen before Sam cried uncle.

  “I give,” she said, putting down her fork. “You’re a better man than I.”

  “I should certainly hope so. Because I wouldn’t want to ask you to go for a bit of dancing otherwise.”

  “Oh, I…”

  “Couldn’t? Why?”

  Why indeed? Why should she deny herself this pleasure? She loved to dance. And it was so seldom she got the chance. Was she hesitating because she thought she was supposed to?

  Sean watched her face carefully, as if he could see the conversation in her mind printed across her forehead.

  “Good,” he said, dropping cash on the table and taking her hand and leading her out of the restaurant. “We can walk from here. It’s just up the street.”

  For someone who hadn’t been in town long, he knew its secret places well. Unerringly, he led her to the small, grubby Italian bar with a few tables and a hardwood floor where the late-night cognoscenti went for a nightcap and a little tripping of the light fantastic.

  He ordered a Martell cognac for himself and a Perrier with lime for Sam without even asking her. It was early.

  Only the barman and two other couples were in the place. Sean got quarters from the bar and loaded up the jukebox.

  He chose lots of Stones, some hot Ray Charles, Aretha, old stuff, all with a steady beat. He draped their jackets, bags, cases across a chair and bowed formally to her as “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” boomed through the room.