9
Dan Crane knocked on the door of Chelsea’s house. Knocking on her door always struck him as a stupid formality, a bit of the past blocking his progress in the present. He was a believer in the present. He was busy, in a hurry much of the time, scrambling to get things done. When he’d already come off the highway and driven up a hundred-yard gravel driveway with his Range Rover kicking up dust to get here, then stepped up on the creaking wooden porch, she should know he was here and have the door open by now.
As he thought it, the door swung open. Chelsea stood behind the closed screen door and smiled. “Hi, Dan. I didn’t know you were coming. I look awful.”
Crane detected a hint of a complaint. She didn’t look awful. She looked amazing. She was suggesting that he should have called her ahead of time to ask her permission to come and see her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I happened to be driving past, so I thought I’d see how you were.” Crane swung his arm around his body from behind his back and held out the small bouquet of flowers. “I’d better leave these with you. I look like a sissy carrying them around.”
Her bright blue eyes widened, and her smile placed two dimples in the smooth white skin of her cheeks. “Are those for me?”
“I happened to be driving by a florist’s shop that was having a sale.”
“Really,” she said as she unhooked the hook-and-eye on the screen door to open it. “You happened to be in a florist’s shop and they fell into your hands. Then, when you drove off you happened to be going by here.”
He stepped inside and she kissed him on the cheek. It was only after that half second that he felt in retrospect the damp, pillowy lips on his cheek and a slight brush of her skin, but she had already withdrawn. His cheek was bereft, feeling where her lips had been.
She was moving away through the little dining room into the kitchen. He followed at a distance, watching the movement of her body in the shorts and the halter top, and hearing the whisper of her bare feet on the floor. She opened a kitchen cupboard, leaned forward over the counter, and stretched upward as far as she could to reach a vase on the top shelf, and he could see a few inches of bare back and the thin white elastic band at the top of the pink imitation silk of her panties. She snagged the vase, a blue-and-yellow glass vessel that nearly matched the small bunch of blue lilies and yellow daffodils. He retreated a few paces.
She came back into the living room, the smile still glowing. “This is just so thoughtful, Dan.”
“It’s nothing. Pretty flowers seem to need a pretty lady to make them complete.”
Chelsea looked up and studied him for the hundredth time. He was kind of handsome, if you were a little ways off or the light was dim. He was tall, with square shoulders and a slim waist, and she liked that. He had a grown-up haircut without any hair over his collar or greased and sticking up straight in bristles or anything like that. But up close, he seemed a little bit more ordinary. He was quite a bit older, at least forty, and you could see the difference in the texture of his skin. You could notice things, like when he said something he thought was clever there was a thing with his mouth that wasn’t quite right. It looked a little like a sneer. She wished, if only for his own sake, that he would stop that. She was ashamed of herself for having such shallow thoughts about a man who was always kind to her.
She overcompensated for what she’d been thinking about him. “Thanks so much, Dan. Since Nick died, you’ve been just great. You’ve turned out to be practically the only one of his friends who didn’t disappear as soon as the funeral was over.”
“Nick was a good guy,” Crane said. “But he’s gone now. We’ve lost him forever. The person who deserves the attention is you.”
He watched her closely. Her eyes lowered, and she seemed to blush. He had never believed that women actually did that. In his life he had never seen any evidence that women were any more delicate or sensitive than, say, dogs or cows. But here it was. She was a princess who wore cutoff shorts and bare feet.
Chelsea set the vase on the table in the dining room, then frowned and moved it to the mantel, where the mirror doubled the colorful petals of the flowers. “Do you like it better there?”
He started to answer, but only got in “Sure” before she spoke over him. “I do too. The mantel is a good place to see them when you come in. It’s sort of the center of the house—at least visually.”
Crane said, “I was just thinking. It’s eleven thirty. Maybe you and I could go to an early lunch, and get in somewhere before everybody else shows up and there’s a big wait.”
She held her hands out from her sides in a gesture that seemed to say, “Can’t you see the way I’m dressed?” What she said aloud was, “That’s so sweet. But I’ve got so many chores to do that I really don’t have time for anything today.”
She saw his face go dead, as though something living behind the face had been injured and contracted. “Okay,” he said. “Another time.” His voice was hollow and emotionless. He took two steps toward the door.
“Dan,” she said carefully. “It’s only been a short time. A few weeks. And it isn’t as though he had some long disease so I had time to get used to the idea. Or even that he died in some accident, the kind that happens all the time. A guy stood out there in front of this house and shot him right here. When I came out of the bedroom he was lying just about where you’re standing now, and his head looked like it had exploded. I’m just not ready yet to do things for fun.”
Crane became solicitous. “I understand. Believe me. It was just a thought. When you feel ready, you should start going out again and seeing people. When you do, if you want company I’ll be here.”
“I know you will,” Chelsea said. She took another step in his direction and then stopped. She had wanted to herd him out the door by occupying the space as he gave it up, so he couldn’t come back into the center of the room. But she also didn’t want him to think that she was coming closer to hug him.
He waited.
“Well,” she said. “I’d better get back to work.”
He relented. “Me too. I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Bye.” She sensed that she had said it too soon. It would have been more graceful if she had waited until he was out the door, and then she could have said it and shut the door. This way she had to stand in silence while he left.
He opened the door, went out to the porch, and closed the screen door gently so its spring wouldn’t snap it back and slam it, the way they always did—the way they were supposed to. Slamming shut kept out the flies. As he went down the porch steps, she thought it was just like him. He had to control everything, including things that were none of his business and took care of themselves.
Chelsea stepped backward to stand far back in the living room where he couldn’t see her to watch him climb into his Range Rover, back it up a couple of times to turn it around, and lumber down the gravel driveway to the highway. That car was a mistake too. It was a big, fat boxy thing. She had looked the model up on the computer and seen that it had cost him more than a hundred thousand dollars. For a lot less money he could have bought something a woman could enjoy riding up to a restaurant or a fancy party in—a normal car she could get into without climbing steps in heels, or having them catch on something and make her fall flat. He acted as though he was thoughtful, but he just wasn’t. When he turned onto the highway and sped away toward the west, she felt the tension go out of her neck and shoulders.
DANIEL CRANE DROVE ALONG THE flat, straight highway past a sign that said BUFFALO 20 MILES. All along here the older homes were set far back from the road at the ends of long gravel driveways like Chelsea’s. They had been farms a generation ago, with crops between the road and the house. Usually there were vegetables planted there because they were easier to hoe, weed, watch, and pick if they were close to the house. A lot of these houses had even had rough, heavy wooden tables that stayed at the ends of their driveways all year, some with roofs over them so they could be used as roadside vegetable stands. But the big tractor--cultivated cash crops and the dairy pastures were all on the back hundred acres. Most of those back hundreds had been sold off long ago and turned into suburban tracts, with new streets running through them.
He had grown up going past those places and thinking what relics they were. What prosperous people around here had been doing for some time was to buy a place like that, drive a bulldozer through the old farmhouse, and build a much bigger house surrounded by the tall, old hardwood trees that had once shaded the farmhouse. They paved the gravel drive, put a rail fence or a stone wall or a hedge along the highway, and they had themselves a nice two- or three-acre estate. That was what he had done. Or the last owner before him had anyway, and it was the same thing. Now he lived in a neighborhood full of doctors and lawyers, all of their houses secluded on woodsy lots. Sometimes as he passed, he saw the kids walking the hundred yards or so down those long driveways to get to the end so the school bus could pick them up. They looked pretty cold sometimes in the winter, but it was worth a little discomfort to live in a house like that.
As Crane drove around Western New York, he looked for neighborhoods with plenty of big, new houses set far apart. Behind them they had pools and tennis courts, and the best of them had horses grazing on pastures that were relics of the farming days. Lately whenever he went through an area with old farmhouses like Chelsea’s, he knew that the next time he passed through, the developers would have begun their transformation, tearing them down to build houses for the upwardly mobile. He would have made a good land developer himself, but what he did produced more money.
The center of his empire was a storage facility he had built not far from here. The land was a twenty-acre remnant of one of those old farms. He had taken out a loan against it, poured a long, narrow slab of concrete, and then erected what amounted to a connected series of ten-by-fifteen-foot enclosures made of cinderblock with a roof of corrugated steel and an aluminum garage door on each one. A year later he’d poured the next long, narrow slab of concrete and built the next set of storage bays. Two years later, he’d built three more rows. Now he always had a new set of bays under construction, barely able to build them fast enough. He was rich.
As he drove on, he still could hardly get over the sting of this morning’s conversation with Chelsea. She was putting him off, keeping him at a distance.
Chelsea couldn’t be actually unkind to him. He had been far too generous and steadfast for that. But she wasn’t responding the way he had hoped and expected. He wondered for a moment. Had her boyfriend Nick told her something about him? He followed the question up and down all avenues in rapid succession.
Nick had been stupid and he had been overconfident. His fight in a bar with that Indian had been just like him—a man revealing his whole nature in one performance, like a character in an opera. But Nick had not been na?ve enough to let Chelsea know that the work he did for Crane was not just renting storage space to people who had bought so much crap that they couldn’t keep it all in their houses. Most of the money Nick brought home had come from the other parts of Crane’s business. Chelsea had liked Nick, but if Nick had told her he was a thief she would have thrown him out. Nick couldn’t have told her anything about Dan Crane. Was there any other way she could have found out? Had Nick inadvertently left something lying around that she could have interpreted as evidence that Crane was paying him to commit break-ins? No again. She would have left. And she certainly wouldn’t have let Crane inside her house.
Chelsea could only believe that Crane was what she could see—a nice guy a few years older who had been her boyfriend’s boss and patron. Nick had been dead almost two months. By now it must have crossed Chelsea’s mind that she no longer had a boyfriend, and that she would have to find another one. Crane was rich, fairly good-looking, and successful. Nick had been what? A big lout. A dolt. A man who had probably been manipulated and used by everyone he met. Nick had been so greedy, and so lazy, that it was impossible not to know what inducements would beguile him. Crane had turned him into a thief by simply offering to include him on a crew he was sending to clear out one of those newly built houses set back from the road. Being a burglar had sounded easy, so Nick had jumped on the truck.
It occurred to Crane that almost the same crew was out right now doing another break-in. He searched his mind to see if he could detect any regret at not having Nick alive to work this trip. No, he felt no regret. The men who were left would just have to work a little faster and lift a little more weight into the truck. He wasn’t sorry he had shot Nick. He had done it because he had wanted Chelsea, but there had been many other good reasons to get rid of him. Having a stupid man know his secrets was too risky.
Crane pushed Nick to the back of his mind for a moment, and went over the details of today’s trip. They would probably be loading up the truck right now. They would haul the merchandise to the storage facility, and put it all into J-17. He had already rented that bay to a fictitious customer who had paid in cash for the first six months. The guys would close the bay, slide the bolt into the receptacle, put the standard padlock on the bolt, and leave. The rental agreement was on the books already, and the rental money was in the safe. Anybody looking for stolen items today would have 164 identical bays to search, and 106 empty ones with padlocks on them. He looked at his watch again. He would check with his spies after five. He always sent two, and made sure neither knew about the other. He asked enough questions to pick it up if someone were diverting merchandise instead of turning it all in to him.
After he killed Nick he had considered starting a rumor that the reason Nick was gone was that he had pocketed a valuable ring from a burglary. After thinking more about it, Crane had decided that he would benefit more from taking revenge on Nick’s killer, that Indian who had decked Nick in the bar fight. Scaring his employees would have been good, but risky. He had to believe that building their loyalty would be better.
He ran through other topics to keep his mind from returning to Chelsea Schnell. Did he need anything at the supermarket? Had he let any bills go too long without paying them? Did he have clothes ready at the cleaners’? He knew that thinking about Chelsea was a waste of time. Thinking about her was not going to solve any problems, but he couldn’t get her out of his mind. As he drove, he relived the short visit he had made to her house.
He had knocked on her door, and there she was, behind the screen door. Her image had been slightly unclear, because the screen was like a veil between her and him. What, exactly, had her expression been? Had she been pleased to see him, or only surprised, but not really pleased? Teeth. He clearly recalled seeing the row of small, perfect white teeth as she’d appeared behind the screen door.
A smile. She had been glad. That moment was the one that mattered most, he decided. His appearing at her door unexpectedly had made her smile. She hadn’t had time to overcome some other reaction, hide it, and paste a fake smile on her face. The smile had been genuine, a sincere reflexive impulse from nervous system to facial muscle, without delay or disguise. She had been pleased to see him.