Part 2 (1/2)
Kristin frowned for a moment and then glowed with a smile. ”Let's not tell him you were caught! That would solve everybody's problem. That is, yours and his. I don't really have a role in this situation. I didn't hate that machine, as he seems to think. I just thought seven hundred dollars was an awful lot to pay for the use we'd get out of it.” Her fine nostrils flared and then contracted. ”You know how he is, once the novelty has worn off?...But you've been burdened enough and shouldn't have to hear about our budgetary squabbles.”
He could not have explained why he impulsively sold Sam out at this point. ”I seriously doubt the Stecchino costs as little as seven hundred bucks.”
Kristin closed her eyes and shook her lowered head. She was within an inch or so of his own height, and he had never before seen her fair crown, which for an instant seemed exquisitely vulnerable.
”Don't tell me.”
”I shouldn't have said that.” His regret was sincere.
”How much more?”
He chewed his lower lip. ”I don't know for sure.”
She recovered her aplomb with an attack on him. ”Then you shouldn't have said it.”
In a way he was flattered that she had turned personal, but he was also annoyed with what could be taken as an invidious response to his confession of error. ”All right,” he said defiantly, ”I'll find out and get back to you.”
She took a cell phone from her purse and, telling Roy, ”I know the number by heart,” she punched it in. She had the consideration to walk to and lean on her own car and not the Alvis while the call was in progress.
Roy sulkily strolled in the opposite direction. At the far end of the curving driveway could be found a garage that, like the pool house, was screened by trees. In this case it was a longish walk, but the man who had built the house liked to get automobiles out of the way when they were not in active use. Sam never garaged his Town Car, but the reason why Roy had not noticed Kristin's Corolla before must have been because she routinely put it away. On the other hand, she apparently was not quick to have it washed. The weather had been dry for a week. Noticing peculiarities about her made him uncomfortable, however. She was no business of his.
As he turned and trudged back, she was folding the telephone. When he was near enough, she said, in a dispa.s.sionate tone, ”Fourteen hundred sixty-five dollars. Part of that is tax, of course.”
It was probably odd that Roy did not feel vindicated. ”I'm sorry I brought it up. I hope he wasn't too upset.”
She winced at him. ”I didn't call Sam. I called American Express.”
Roy brought out his checkbook and probed himself further for a pen. Antic.i.p.ating an objection from her, he hastened to explain. ”It's a present for my brother-in-law. He's having tax trouble and could use some cheering up.”
”That's, uh, Robin's husband?”
”Yeah, Ross Gilpin.”
Kristin remained silent as he put a handkerchief on the Alvis's bonnet, then the checkbook on the handkerchief, and scribbled the check.
She thanked him, folded it without examination, and tucked it into her purse. ”I wanted to ask,” in his opinion smiling too warmly to be derisive, ”why you drive that car everywhere if you have to be so careful with it?”
”Good question. A car is kept in better condition with a little use than always sitting cold. I don't drive it much. In the last twenty-four hours I've been here twice and once to the hospital-”
Kristin gasped. ”I have to get going! I dropped by to get some stuff Sam wanted and run it over there.” Without another word she trotted to the back door, opened it with a key, and vanished within.
Reasonable as the explanation of her behavior was, Roy still felt hurt by the abruptness of her leave-taking-unless she expected to see him again on her reappearance with the things for Sam. But she would be in no less a hurry then than now. He decided to make the prompt departure he had been denied twenty minutes earlier.
He had had an unsatisfactory experience in every way, courtesy of his best friend, and not for the first time in his life. When they were teenagers, Sam delighted in doing such mischief as squeezing a girl's behind in a movie lobby. When she angrily whirled around, she would blame Roy, who looked her in the face while Sam stared in another direction. Sam was also then a head taller than his best friend.
3.
Roy was telling Sam that he had not been in love with Francine Holbrook for some weeks and had been trying to find a way to bring their intimacy to a close without destroying their friends.h.i.+p. Why this was so difficult to manage had to do with his conviction that Francine had never, at any time, been in love with him.
Sam looked none the worse for his ordeal in complexion or mood, but naturally he looked forward to leaving the hospital, where the doctors wanted to keep him one more day for observation. He said now, ”You're going to have to explain that.”
Roy had remained standing by preference-putting his weight on hospital furniture made him uneasy. ”n.o.body likes to be told they can't have something even when they don't want it.”
Sam's head looked larger on the pillow than when he was standing. ”You're saying that suppose I didn't like something-” his eyes abstractedly surveyed the ceiling. ”What? I don't know, a striped s.h.i.+rt or whatever, but was told I wasn't allowed to buy it, your contention is it would drive me wild until I got hold of it?”
”I was thinking in terms of personalities. I was really keen on her for a while.”
”Oh, come on,” Sam said. ”You've seldom mentioned her name.”
”I don't take you into my confidence on every matter that concerns me.” They had argued in this fas.h.i.+on, if it could be called that, all their lives.
Sam winked at him. ”Thank the Lord for small favors. You depress me enough as it is. But I ain't ever-incidentally, Kris hates me to say 'ain't' and 'he don't' and all-I haven't ever been able to picture you telling a woman you love her.”
”I didn't say I told her.” As to the bad grammar that Sam had wilfully used since their teen days when speaking with Roy, it was presumably intended as a he-man sort of idiom. Whether he noticed it or not, Roy had not joined him in the practice after they reached their twenties. ”Is it the word that matters?”
At this moment a nurse entered on fast-moving rubber-soled white shoes. She smirked at each of them in turn, after which she scanned the chart that hung at the foot of the bed, to give her free access to which Roy had moved aside.
”Suzanne Akins, meet the guy I was telling you about,” said Sam.
Undoubtedly she was the redhead he had mentioned to Roy, judging from the orange hair under the white cap and, when she glanced Roy's way, the turned-up nose and freckles. He would not have been attracted to her in street clothes; in a hospital uniform, with the power to administer injections and enemas, she impersonally repelled him.
”Hi,” said she, returning to the chart. Then she told Sam, ”Be a good boy,” and with a nod to his friend, made a brisk exit.
Sam sounded his cackling laugh once the door was shut. ”She came only to give you the once-over, kid. She didn't have no other business here.”
Again he had forgotten his wife's injunction against barbarisms, and Roy had been bored by soph.o.m.oric s.e.xual raillery for twenty years, but as usual he humored his best friend. ”I think it's you she's got the hots for. Flat on your back, you're at her mercy.”
”I'm not kidding. I told her all about you.”
”Thanks, pal.” Roy finally drew up the metal chair and sat down at the angle at which Sam could see him best. ”But as I'm trying to tell you, I have enough trouble with the women at hand.”
”There's more than Francine? I mean, I know there's always more, but I mean more causing trouble?”
”Figure of speech,” Roy said. ”You know I'm more or less a one-woman guy at any given time.”
”Which might mean as little as three dates.” Sam referred to Roy's practice of making no s.e.xual advances whatever before the third time he took a woman out-not even when he had good reason to believe she would welcome them. He knew he sometimes risked being thought gay, but it was more important to his sense of propriety, call it old-fas.h.i.+oned, not to be taken for a superficial lecher.
Roy changed the subject. ”I decided against my original idea of giving Ross and Robin the coffee machine and instead took it over to my place. I can offer clients a cup.”
Sam chuckled. ”Nothing like a free cappuccino to get some nut to part with half a mil for an old Bugatti.”
”Bugattis only turn up at auctions, and there'd never be a bid that low.”
”My plan worked,” said Sam. ”I knew if I got the Stecchino out of there, Kris would never mention the subject. That's the way she is. Above all, she hates confrontations.”
Roy looked carefully for signals of disingenuousness and was not amazed to find none. Sam himself abhorred serious wrangling with others. This had nothing to do with the good-natured needling he and Roy might exchange. ”Never noticed it was gone?”