The Fire Night Ball Read online

  “It could be the lover.”

  “Naw. He's got a weak chin. Anyway, her lover’s the lord of this cockamamie castle. If it was him who walked in here, that barmaid with the cleavage would already have her nose up his ass.”

  Sally looked at Shirley, who was lounging and chatting with the back bar runner.

  “You’re right,” said Sally. “It’s the husband.”

  “Look, he’s pulling a wad of papers from his pocket. He's waving them in her face. I bet she don’t like that too much.”

  Marlena was thinking she didn’t like the wild look in Coddie’s eyes; she couldn’t remember ever seeing her stolid ex-husband appear so frantic before.

  “Calm down. Don’t make a spectacle, please. Remember I work here.”

  “This isn't our first rodeo! How about the time you cried all over your meatloaf while I was trying to pitch Boeing?"

  She blushed. During a hiatus in her affair with Harry, a song had come on the jukebox, "When Will I See You Again," and she'd lost it.

  “Do you know what I’ve got right here?”

  “Those are the papers I sent back to you.”

  “Bingo! And do you know what I intend to do with these papers?”

  His agitation was infectious. Her temper flared responsively.

  “You can stick them up your ass, Coddie, for all I care.”

  He glared at her wordlessly. She glared right back.

  “I intend to tear them into a million pieces, and then maybe, just maybe, I’ll consider taking you back as well.”

  His voice was low, but he spit as he said the words, so belligerently were they uttered.

  Marlena wiped the spittle from her face. She was unpleasantly reminded of Letty Brown-Hawker’s assault.

  Try to think what he's feeling, Marlena. While he made a show of belligerence, perhaps inside he was crying and saying something very different: “My pride is hurt, and I need you back. Don’t you see that?”

  She felt terrible about his pain, but she also saw clearly it was too late and even too dangerous for Coddie if she went back to him.

  “Are you unhappy with our agreement? If so, why did you send the finalizing papers to me? I don’t get it. Am I missing something here?”

  He waggled a finger in her face. “Marlena, I don’t have to take any crap from you. I made you what you are. Everything you know, the way you look, the way you design a house all comes from me.”

  “Oh, so you're Pygmalion and I’m Galatea now. Is that it?”

  It was almost comical how each man in her life assumed she was his creature.

  “Ha! Yes, that’s it exactly. You're my creature.”

  She wasn’t surprised when Coddie echoed the word that had crossed her mind. It often happened to someone she was focused on.

  She hardened her heart, though it hurt her to do so. To protect him from the curse, she had to push him away.

  Coldly she said, “Then you're mistaken. And drunk, worse than I’ve ever seen you. You must have quite a bar tally going up in your room.”

  “Cleaned out the f-f-fridge,” he said, slurring as though he had marbles in his mouth, but Marlena believed he was only pretending to be drunk.

  She drawled, “Well, the management appreciates the business, but it’s not terribly becoming. Coddie, I’d love to continue this scintillating conversation, but I’ve got a prospective client I really need to get back to. We’re about to close on a deal.”

  "For PAD?"

  "For me."

  As she started to get up, he reached out and shoved her back into the booth. The motion was large enough to be spotted by her friends across the room.

  “Whaddya suppose is going on over there?” said Sally.

  “I don’t like to see any dame get pushed around, even that screwball.” Stretch made a fist and punched it into the palm of her other hand; she was ready for action.

  “Oh, pipe down,” drawled Sally. “Let's see how Bellum handles herself.”

  “Look! Bellum’s getting up and leaving. He’s just sitting there, crying. What a dick,” said Stretch.

  Sally yawned. “Hetero fights are so boring.”

  “He didn’t even slap her. I’m sure she deserves that much.”

  Chapter Twenty Five

  After downing the last bottle of Courvoisier from the stocked refrigerator in his suite, Coddie was pacing the floor. His weak chin was trembling with repressed rage, and he felt like bursting into tears.

  All his wife had to do to get back into his good graces was to apologize and come to him as a woman. But so far, Marlena hadn't made a move in his direction. It wasn't working the way he'd planned.

  Too late now; he was here and the final battle was on.

  Maybe it was her pride that wouldn’t let her approach him and abjectly apologize--the same damned pride that had led her grandmother to cut off her nose to spite her face and lose out on millions of dollars worth of property that might have come her way.

  He hadn’t told Marlena about that visit from the guy who wanted to sell a gold mine to her at a low price. He wanted Marlena with him in San Francisco, not fighting a development war in fucking Wyoming.

  Then she’d dropped the bombshell, blurting the news she was pregnant.

  Checking out his own equipment would never, in other circumstances, have crossed his mind. But he had to know if there was even the slightest possibility the child might be his.

  At Thanksgiving, after a late supper at Solid Hollow Lane and several bottles of wine, they’d done the deed. He was sure Marlena wasn't even aware they had done it, she was so drunk.

  Now he wished he'd never gone to the doctor. It would’ve been better not to know he was shooting blanks.

  The young urologist at the clinic said there was no chance he might have fathered a child during a single encounter. “A low sperm count isn’t the end of the world,” the doctor commented. “There’s always a sperm bank.”

  Foreign sperm had already landed on his domain, and it was all his own doing.

  That incident he'd referred to earlier, when Marlena had wept inconsolably over her blue plate special before a client, was the first signal that something had gone terribly wrong with the marriage.

  It turned out he was very late in realizing it by 1974.

  With the construction project wrapped up and the hotel established as a big success, Marlena was then back in San Francisco full time, but he rarely saw anything of her. She'd taken up with a coterie of gay friends in the Castro. They stayed out half the night drinking and disco dancing, gyrating under a silver disco ball. One night he went out with them.

  Staring at her in action, a stranger whispered to Coddie, “Is she a professional dancer?”

  In her platform heels and three-piece baby-blue polyester disco suit, the plunging neckline contrasting oddly with a lace handkerchief tucked in a chest pocket, Marlena appeared to her husband to be deranged.

  "Just high spirited," he said glumly. Marlena was surrounded by a circle of pretty boys. She was shaking her opulent breasts and writhing like a bobcat in a burlap sack.

  However, for a time he remained ignorant of the cause of his wife's true malady, which was the delusion she must have Harry Drake back in her life or she would die.

  Coddie racked his brain for ways to remedy what appeared to be a lapse of propriety in his formerly circumspect partner. On the practical side, her wild behavior might be bad for their reputation in a very competitive profession. Personally, he couldn’t stand much more Soul Train and disco nights.

  One night, after she and her friends had closed all the bars in the Castro, he waited up for her, said they needed to talk.

  He said he could see she was dreadfully unhappy. Was there anything he could do?

  She shrugged tipsily, evading his gaze. Then she slumped forward, her head hanging low.

  Finally she muttered, oh yes, there was one thing he could do that would help. He could see about drumming up more work for her in Wyoming. Perhaps sh
e could find herself again in the mountains.

  "Or,” she said, dramatically widening her eyes and drilling them into his, “you could contact the Neptune Society and help arrange a final exit. I wouldn't blame you if you wanted me out of your hair.”

  Alarmed, her husband pondered what she had said for days on end. Could there be someone else? She had always been so passive about sex, so disinterested, that it seemed impossible.

  One day Harry Drake phoned him at the office and in the course of the conversation, for no apparent reason, casually asked about Marlena.

  Afterward, a light bulb went on. Coddie suddenly recalled that in a moment of drunken camaraderie, he had suggested over a pool game at the Alta Hotel that Drake might want to fuck his wife.

  Harry was singing Marlena's praises, saying what an asset she was.

  Coddie observed, "She's smart as a tack, but inexperienced in bed. I can see she's attracted to you. Go for it, old man. Everyone's doing it. I don't care. I'm not the possessive sort."

  He had gone even further, gone so far as to imply that as a modern, freethinking man, he owed his friend this favor, that he himself was dallying outside the marriage (which was a lie). He had merely been boasting, convinced of his wife's frigidity, if not her loyalty. Afterward, he had forgotten all about it.

  Evidently, his pal had taken him up on his offer. Powerful Harry Drake had done his meek friend the ultimate favor of screwing his wife. So did that mean that he was obliged to extend the privilege, now his wife was hooked on Harry?

  It was crystal clear what was going on. Marlena was going through the stages of grief over a lost affair.

  Should that be his problem?

  It didn't make it any easier for this pilgrim slogging through the Slough of Despond that his sole companion on the journey was a wolfhound named Sexual Jealousy. He recovered from shock and went into a period of bitterness. He was damned if he would put up with this nonsense any longer. His wife was now more of a liability than an asset. Shouldn't that burden rightfully be shifted onto the responsible party’s shoulders? Out of spite, if nothing else? in her deranged state of mind, Harry would soon tire of her, and that would be that.

  Drake, I'm sending Marlena and the disco ball over to your side of the net. Let's see if you can field them with your usual finesse!

  So his next move had been fatal. He had literally thrown his wife to the wolves. Sometime later, in a short business conversation, there had arisen an opportunity for a broad hint and he had taken it.

  In passing, Drake mentioned a mountain of unanswered mail accumulating in his office, all directed at Mrs. Dimmer, many wondering when she was coming back.

  "I know just what you mean," Coddie quickly echoed. "At the office, there's a huge pile of invitations to Marlena for events at your hotel. It's her call, of course, but I'd be glad to encourage an arrangement with PAD for some of her time."

  How could I have been so blind and stupid?

  Now knowing he was infertile made it all worse, too much to bear at a distance. He was fit to be tied, off his rocker, and out of patience. He must go to her and make one last desperate attempt to get her back.

  Five years ago, the marital ship was steaming along so well, and then along came the iceberg, Harry Drake and his overpowering ego, and the ship was sunk.

  Harry already had so much; why did he have to make Marlena fall in love with him?

  And yet, all Marlena had to do was come back. He was even willing to suck it up and raise the bastard as his own. It was the only easy way out for her--surely she could see that. But when he’d seen her in the field, the towering rage pent up for so long had overcome him, making him speechless as to his true feelings. Like the lame cuckold he was.

  Of course, she could elect to have an abortion, but Marlena wasn't one to miss a beat. If that’s what she really wanted, she would already have done it. In some hidden part of her infuriating, genius brain, he thought, Marlena wanted this child.

  They weren’t as yet finally divorced. If she rejected his overtures for reconciliation and persisted in forging ahead with Harry, he would make them both pay dearly. He would sue his wife’s lover for alienation of affection and make it stick. Harry hated bad publicity, even more than he despised cheap cigars. That would fix Harry’s wagon, but good!

  It would also spell the end of Coddie’s relationships, personal and business, with Marlena.

  Groaning, he threw himself onto the king-sized bed.

  Still, he thought, he was only beginning to fight. There was always the possibility of a covert attack on the third leg of the love triangle.

  He bolted upright. Why hadn’t he thought of that before? Seek Harry out, man to man, and make his feelings known!

  Harry was an Ivy League guy, and he had many other women at his disposal. If the demand was put the right way to him, he would surely give her up, and then Marlena would have no choice but to come home to her husband once again.

  Coddie got up from the bed, clicked his fingers twice, and began to stride back and forth across the room. Yes, that was the ticket. A ghastly smile came over his face as a new stratagem unfolded in his feverish brain.

  He would face off with the cad. He’d remind Drake of a certain moment, early in the game, when the rules had been set up while they'd smoked Drake’s Cuban cigars, drunk as lords, and sparred on Drake's damned red pool table:

  After broaching his spurious offer, Coddie had placed his left hand on the scarlet cloth. With the other he pointed a finger at Drake to underline his magnanimous proposal. He believed he had just masterminded a pre-emptive strike.

  “Drake, as I said, I can shee there's an attraction between you and my wife. I have a stake in this game, so there are two r-rules I'm putting down on this table. Don’t fall in love with her, my friend, and don’t get her pregnant. Two rules only. Promish, on your word of honor as a genulman, you won’t do either of those two things.”

  Harry bent over the table and aimed his handcrafted pool stick at the eight ball, the cigar jutting out from between his teeth.

  “On my honor, I will not.”

  Aha! The bastard had violated both rules, reneged on his promise as a gentleman! All Coddie had to do was call him out on it.

  He ground his teeth. He shouted out words, not caring who heard them.

  “I’ll get her back, even if I have to kill them both!”

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Marlena was pulling on her gloves, waiting for her car to be pulled up. She was feeling a myriad of emotions, not least among them remorse for having treated her sweet, longsuffering Coddie so coldly.

  But honestly, she felt it was what she needed to do to protect him from the curse. It was also what he deserved for behaving like a lunatic. Was everyone going crazy this Christmas? Dear Santa, please bring me sanity and a clear path out of this mess.

  The field was vastly changed and much disturbed. She felt a renewed respect for her husband, for his taking a stand on behalf of their marriage, even if he hadn't articulated it well.

  On the other hand, now he’d earned her respect, there was another reason to reject him: he was too good for her! There was a lie she could live with for awhile.

  She must dally no longer, waiting for Harry to divine her distress and come riding to her rescue. Harry must be told of her pregnancy, pronto. Together, they would decide what to do.

  Carlotta had said Harry wasn’t coming in today, that he was working from home while Lila was out of town.

  "Sugar, have you seen how the workmen have performed a minor miracle in restoring B. L. Zebub's to a useable condition over night? Carlotta had looked at her. "How are you holding up, Sugar?"

  Marlena was thinking about how the police had told her the investigation was bogged down as Letty Brown-Hawker's many followers were interviewed.

  "I don't even let myself think about it," Marlena murmured.

  What must be thought of was getting herself in a room with Harry.

  Well, if Drake's Roost
was where Harry was to be found today, there she must go.

  Energized by the proactive decision, she said goodbye to Carlotta and hurried to her rented BMW.

  Drake Village was an area of current development between the Alta Hotel and Drake’s Roost. A few model homes, a shopping center, and a nondescript corner-bar had all sprung up in the past year.

  Marlena hated Drake Village, but as the bar came into view, she decided to stop for a drink. She needed time to consider how to excuse an uninvited appearance at her employer’s home.

  While she was gulping down a Bloody Mary, plotting her strategy, Harry Drake was emerging from his black Mercedes at the rear of the Alta Hotel.

  He unlocked the back service door and let himself into the hotel, ascending the service elevator to the seventh floor.

  Last night, he and Lila had engaged in fairly routine sex, so he'd been unpleasantly surprised this morning when she volunteered to stay home, rather than jetting off to a Palm Springs spa as she'd planned.

  She’d also reminded him of their agreement to “go on the wagon” and “see where they were with the relationship.”

  They both knew what that meant: no more straying from the marital bed, for either of them, until after the holidays were over.

  This was a tall order for a man of libidinous inclination, and the thought of going cold turkey in regard to Marlena made his lust for her spontaneously ignite.

  Perversely, his promise to Lila had the exact effect of pushing Harry into the arms of his mistress. Using the excuse of papers left at the office, he'd raced toward the hotel in his black Mercedes.

  The only thing on his mind was a raging desire to fuck Marlena, whom he had no doubt was still hanging around, despite being dismissed.

  The first place he'd check for her was in his own suite.

  She would be lying in wait for him, stark naked on the massive sleigh bed.