Best Friends Read online

  He had intended to visit awhile longer with his friend, but Sam was anxious for him to get going, so as to reach the Grandy house while there was no chance of encountering Kristin, who would soon be leaving the bank and driving to the hospital before visiting hours expired.

  “I’ll make it up to you, kid,” said Sam, rolling his eyes as he thought of a suitable reward. “Next time I’ll set you up with my day nurse. She couldn’t be cuter: natural red hair, turned-up nose…”

  Sam’s idea of what attracted Roy was seldom Roy’s own. Cuteness, for example, seemed a kind of infantilism to Roy, who had never been drawn to those who demonstrated it, even when he was quite young. In school and college, Sam had dated some cheerleaders, more than one of whom returned his interest though he was not, despite his size, a football player or in fact any other kind of athlete. He was even engaged for a short time, early on, to a girl named Honey Fitzgibbon, whose retroussé nose (always a winner with Sam) was covered with freckles and who walked with a bounce even when barefoot on sand. Kristin was nothing like her predecessors.

  “You do what they tell you here,” Roy scolded. “Remember, you came to them for help, not vice versa.” The sermonizing was not like him. If he did more of it, Sam would likely jeer. “Okay, I’m on my way. Consider your problem solved.”

  Having accepted the mission, he carried it out with more care than Sam had asked. He took the stairs instead of the elevator on the way out, should Kristin understandably have left work early. Driving the car, he used the rear exit from the parking lot, which debouched on to a back street used mostly for deliveries. He was again driving the Alvis.

  The Grandys had bought an existing house with an agreeable stone façade that Sam considered not pulse-quickening enough by his standards; but as yet, so far as Roy knew, the idea of renovating the exterior had not come into play. Kristin might put up with her mate’s extravagances of everyday living, but there were limits. Perhaps with this espresso-machine incident, a general pullback might be instituted, which Sam hoped to forestall by getting rid of the device.

  The driveway was surfaced with gravel, more chic than blacktop but threatening to the paint on an automobile, vintage or otherwise. Sam saw this as a desirable check on those who might otherwise speed up it. So as not to offend Roy, who for his taste always drove too fast, he explained he meant the drunken or stoned teenagers who theoretically menaced prosperous neighborhoods, at least in old television movies. Despite what seemed a general naïveté, Sam regarded everything with a certain irony. Roy saw Sam as more complex than himself.

  Roy considered himself pretty much an open book, though women seldom failed to be amazed when they heard that. What he meant was he liked the understandable things: comfort, convenience, good manners, affection; they were easy to name.

  He continued along the stretch of driveway that led behind the house and, so as not to throw up a spatter of scarring pebbles, braked gently when he got there. The rear of the building was more glass than stone, with its big sunroom giving onto a tiled terrace, from which the pool, screened by a stand of poplars, was inconspicuous, though it was sizable when you swam there. Roy had occasionally done so, always alone, for Kristin apparently did not care for the sport, and though Sam did nothing to improve his figure, he was averse to revealing it.

  At the door to the kitchen Roy remembered that Sam’s directions had applied specifically to the coded buttons under the house-number panel near the front door. Naturally, no number was posted in back. Could that mean, for all the security out front, access to the rear was gained by a simple key? Unlikely with anyone else, but to be called possible if not probable in Sam’s case.

  Well, he could not find a key, either, though he suspected one was secreted someplace in the proximity of the door, perhaps in a fake plastic rock or another disguise. He ended up hiking around front and, using the prescribed method, which surprised him by functioning without a hitch, he entered the Grandy abode. From a blinking red light he became aware of another and more elaborate touchpad that flanked the front entrance on the inside. It was reasonable to assume that punching the code outdoors had disarmed the alarm system throughout the interior, but these gadgets were tyrannical by nature and usually required further pacification measures lest they exact raucous punishment.

  Sam, of course, had neglected to instruct him to do more than spring the lock, but Roy punched in the same reversed birth date, with evident success, for the red light stayed on but stopping winking.

  The house, unlike most others of his acquaintance, had no smell at all when entered. A restaurant-strength exhaust system disposed of culinary odors, which Roy thought was too bad, for Kristin’s were aromas. The greatest contrast would be offered by Robin’s residence when he delivered the coffee machine. Children, even though they personally did not stink except with loaded diapers, could cause a place to smell, sometimes by ricochet, so to speak: A grape-juice spill might be treated with a stain remover that left a chemical stench for hours.

  In the kitchen the Stecchino was not as prominent as he anticipated. Kristin, or perhaps the Dominican cleaning woman, had moved it into the farthest corner of the polished granite counter at the perimeter of the room, as opposed to where Sam surely had installed it on the center island overhung by the glistening copper hood that housed the exhaust fan. Tall and heavy, bristling with dials, spouts, buttons, and levers, it was even gaudier than promised. Knowing what gadgetry could cost, more from Sam’s experience than his own, he who preferred vintage stuff, he saw immediately that the “seven hundred something” of Kristin’s estimate would not even be in the same ballpark with the true price.

  He had forgotten the matter of padding. Sam was right that this machine should be handled with care—for the sake of the Alvis’s upholstery; it was much too big to fit in the boot, which was to say, trunk.

  His quest for the linen closet would probably take a while. Living only a few miles away, Roy had never stayed the night under this roof and had not visited the second floor since his initial tour of the place a week before the Grandys moved in. He felt uncomfortable as he mounted the central stairway and had to check an impulse to tiptoe through the upstairs hall as though he were an intruder. He hoped the search would not take him as far as their bedroom or bath.

  He was in luck. Having turned right at the top of the stair, he had gone along what turned out to look like the wing of guest bedrooms, on a closet shelf in the first of which he found a folded blanket of moss-green wool, trimmed in dark-green satin. The bedspread and curtains contained or represented complementary shades of the same color, which he now thought of as being Kristin’s though she had surely worn many others on the multitudinous occasions he had been in her company.

  Down in the kitchen, relieved to be on the last leg of the first phase of his mission, Roy swathed the coffee machine in the blanket and clasped the burden to his chest. Not heavy for someone whose lightest workout featured fifty-pound dumbbells, it was, however, extremely bulky and tall enough to obscure his line of sight, both ahead and down, and in exiting the house he was treading blindly on unfamiliar terrain, his cheek against the blanket, redolent of the natural fragrance of virgin wool.

  He had reached the open Alvis and deposited the wrapped machine onto the pilot’s pristine leather seat—the upholstery, desiccated by the years, was the only item of original equipment that had had to be replaced—when behind him he heard a demanding yet thin and uncertain voice. He turned and saw a policeman who displayed a drawn pistol. For an instant he thought the very young cop, smooth below the eyes and without sideburns below the blue cap, was merely demonstrating the use of the weapon in a hypothetical situation.

  “I said freeze, scumbag.”

  Roy elevated his tremulous hands. “I’m no burglar. I’m—”

  With his left hand the policeman switched on the little radio that clung to his right epaulet, but Roy’s abortive comment unnerved him further. He brought the hand back to join the other in a double Hollyw
ood grip on the pistol, and in his tenor, very near a scream, cried, “MOTHERFUCKER, I said freeze!”

  It was Roy who brought himself under control. “Go ahead,” he said firmly, even though he was now in more danger. “Call your dispatcher. I’m not resisting.”

  The officer did as suggested, spitting into the perforated black box in rapid code, of which all Roy could understand was “holding him at gun-point.”

  Roy asked respectfully whether he could say something, but he was first obliged to turn and spread ‘em, endure a frisk, and then submit to a small-of-the-back handcuffing. “Okay,” he said when this was done, “my best friend owns this house. He’s in the hospital, and he asked—”

  The young cop had holstered his gun, but left the strap loose so as to be able to draw at the first hint of funny business. He interrupted, sneering, “Sure he did. You just sit there on that fender.”

  “No,” Roy told him. “Nobody sits on the coachwork of a vintage car. This is the original paint.”

  The policeman was so new in authority as to be hypersensitive to what he identified as insubordination and might well have done something at this point that would have jeopardized his career at its outset, had not another patrol car roared around the corner of the house and skidded to a stop, spraying gravel—a fragment or two of which flew close enough to the Alvis as almost to give Roy the seizure he had not quite suffered at the point of a gun.

  Two more cops left the vehicle, one brandishing a shotgun. “Have you got ‘em all?” he asked the officer with Roy.

  “Mr. Courtright!” cried the taller policeman.

  “Hi, Hal,” Roy said drily. “Tell your associate who I am.”

  Hal addressed the young officer. “What’s going on here, Howie?”

  The thickset man clutching the shotgun asked, “Any more inside the house, Howie?”

  Howie frowned at Hal. “You know him?”

  “He’s Mr. Roy Courtright. He owns Incomparable Cars, you know, on Peregrine?” Hal prognathously smiled from one to the other, then noticed the Alvis. “Hey, what’s this one, Mr. Courtright? A Doozy?”

  “Can you get me out of these things, Hal?” Roy asked impatiently. “Mr. Grandy owns this house. He’s my closest friend, as you may know.” He explained about the coffee machine, even as Hal stepped forward and opened the cuffs with his own key.

  “Mr. Courtright,” Hal told the other two officers, “is also a friend of the chief’s. Isn’t that so, Mr. Courtright?”

  It was not much of a question. In a town this size most local business owners were on good terms with the police, who were of course dependent on them and homeowning taxpayers for their modest salaries. Not only was Roy, though a habitual exceeder of the speed limits, innocent of that dislike or even dread of the cops which some people found normal, he if anything felt sorry for them. This was another area in which he and Sam were not at one. Sam had a distaste for policemen that seemed more instinctive than generated by experience. But then he was also by nature an inattentive driver, failing to notice stop signs and posted limits for school zones, where going a few miles faster than permitted might be considered worse, near children, than driving 120 on a deserted late-night highway.

  Roy held no grudge against Howie, to whom he said, “You can verify it by giving Mrs. Grandy a call at First United Bank.” He rubbed his wrists. It was uncomfortable to wear manacles if your forearms were thickly muscled.

  Howie tried to look proud. “That won’t be necessary, sir. We got the call from that security service. I had to do my job.”

  It was Sam’s fault for not providing the inside disarm code. To the cops Roy made light of the matter, and they all soon turned with relief to the subject of the Alvis, the chunky officer, whose nametag read velikovsky, showing some technical interest.

  “What’s the horsepower on this baby, Mr. Courtright?” And when he got the answer, 115, asked further, “Would you happen to know the compression ratio?”

  “Eight point five to one.” Roy had to be prepared for such questions from clients.

  “Nice,” said Velikovsky.

  Howie nodded his capped head. “Damn nice.”

  “What’s something like that go for, Mr. Courtright?” asked Hal.

  Roy never answered such a question unless it was put by a potential buyer. So what he said now was, “I hope enough to pay for the reupholstery and the detailing.”

  The officers all had a knowing chuckle, and after a walk-around, they drove away in their respective Ford Crown Victorias.

  Roy prepared to leave the Grandy property at last, but got only as far as behind the steering wheel of the Alvis when a dirty beige Corolla rolled into view in his rear-view mirror. Who should get out of it but Kristin.

  Roy scrambled forth onto the crunching gravel. “You caught me red-handed.”

  Kristin’s car did not do her justice. He assumed it was an example of what Sam called her parsimoniousness. She wore an elegant pin-striped suit in banker’s gray.

  “Doing what?” She extended her hand, perhaps being still in the business mode, and he shook it for the first time ever, letting it go as quickly.

  Sam’s confidence had already been betrayed by events, so Roy did not hesitate to reveal all. He loyally concluded with, “I’m afraid I botched it. By his original plan, I would have been long gone by now.”

  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 dispassionate 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 h
imself further for a pen. Anticipating 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 friendship. 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.