Red, Red Robin

by Stephen Gallagher

Genres: Occult & Supernatural; Horror; Noir

Synopsis

When Ruth Lasseter hires an escort to cover for a workplace affair, she lets a deeply disturbed young man into her life. Though she survives the consequence, she's left with the lingering suspicion that he hasn't simply disappeared. He's still out there, taking out his problems on other woman just like her. There was a moment when Ruth had her chance to stop him for good. But she didn't take it. Now she sees that closure-for both of them-lies on the other side of that line.

Release date: April 16, 2019

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 386

Sample

“TAKE ALL the time you need,” the woman said from over by the window. “There’s no hurry.” She looked out at the mid-morning traffic that was starting to move down in Chestnut Street and added, “We do close the office at six.”

Ruth turned the pages of the brochure. Again. For what felt like the hundredth time in the past half-hour. She hadn’t supposed that this was going to be easy, but even so … her thoughts raced in a circle, full of purpose and getting nowhere like a dog trying to bite out a tick on its own behind. She was embarrassed.

She said, “I’m usually very decisive. This isn’t like me at all.”

Another page, another face. Another passably handsome middle-aged man with a perfect haircut and a lively spark in his eyes. They did that with lighting, she knew. It was nothing to go on.

She turned to another.

The woman said, “If I had to guess, I’d say you were in business.”

“I suppose I am,” Ruth said.

“So many of our clients are. What line?”

“Publishing. Magazine publishing.”

“Would that be nationwide, or just Philadelphia?”

“Probably nothing you’d have seen. I sell advertising space in trade journals. Are they all this old?”

It didn’t sound quite so blunt until it came out, and then it sounded positively crude. The woman, Mrs. Eloise Carroll, looked over toward her with one drawn-in eyebrow raised.

“We don’t call our gentlemen old, Ms. Lasseter,” she said. “We call them mature.”

“Only,” Ruth persisted, “I don’t want to turn up at this dance looking as if I came with my father.”

“You want to create an impression.”

“Yes, and not a desperate one. That’s not the reason why I’m here.”

Eloise Carroll moved from the window, returning to her desk. She said, “Ladies have all kinds of reasons for needing an escort service, Ms. Lasseter. Believe me. Desperation is the least of them.” She leaned across the desk and flipped over a couple of the pages in the album that Ruth was holding. Another face looked up. Another God-almighty grandfather. “What about our Mister Chapman? He’s from England, too.”

“I’m not in England now,” Ruth said. “I want a native.”

Eloise Carroll, still leaning across, lowered her voice a little and said, “May I suggest something?”

“What?”

“Being tense will only affect your judgment. There’s no need for it. Anything that’s said in this room is said in complete confidence. The more you can tell me, the more help I can be.”

“I need an escort for one social occasion. That’s all.”

“But an escort’s just an escort. You seem to be looking for someone who’ll fit a part. Am I right?”

She was right. After a fashion, anyway, and part of Ruth’s problem was that it irritated her to acknowledge it. None of it was this woman’s fault. Ruth was aware that she was being less than civil. She made an effort.

She said, “It’s for a trade event, like a society ball or a prom. My company’s sponsoring it and we all have to go. One of the department heads has been my lover for nearly two years. He’ll be there with his wife. He thinks she suspects. If I don’t turn up with someone, then she’ll know.”

Eloise Carroll lowered herself into the big padded swivel chair on the other side of the desk. The desktop carried a phone and a blotter and nothing else. Eloise Carroll would probably once have been described as a handsome woman. Handsome rather than pretty, and a lukewarm compliment in its time. But pretty wouldn’t have lasted the way that handsome had.

She said, “Well, you’re not the first one to tell me this story.”

Ruth was surprised. “You’ve had the situation before?”

“It happens all the time. What about our Mister Cooper? He’s a professional actor. He won’t let you down.”

“He’s too old.”

“He’s forty-five.”

“Well, he thinks too old. Haven’t you anyone who didn’t pose in a blue rinse and a yachting blazer?”

“We’ve gentlemen of all ages up to sixty-five. But it’s the older men who get the work. That’s just the way it is.”

Ruth turned another page, and then another. The pages were actually see-through plastic pockets, photographs to one side with their printed details opposite. She was almost at the end of the book once again, and once again she was no closer to making any decision.

The last two faces in the book were boy pictures. Boys in tuxedo jackets, but they seemed completely out of place.

“How old’s he?” she said, tilting the book for Eloise Carroll to see.

“That’s our Mister Hagan. He’s twenty-three. Turn up with him and you’ll make an impression, all right.”

Ruth gazed at the page, and sighed. There was no lust in it, just wistfulness, and it wasn’t particularly directed at the unlined face before her. “God,” she said, “to be twenty-three again. I wouldn’t have had this problem then. The world was wall-to-wall with single males.”

“Time passes,” Eloise Carroll said. “Things change. That’s just life.”

Ruth knew what kind of choice she ought to be making. A man four or five years older than herself, distinguished-looking, good at small talk; someone pleasant who’d support her and stand by her through the evening but who’d stick in no one’s mind, her own included. It should have been straightforward enough, the album was full of them. But she couldn’t make the leap. It had nothing to do with years, and everything to do with self-image.

She said, “I really don’t know. Whatever I say now’s going to be wrong. Do you have something I could take away with me?”

“We can send to your office, but I don’t suppose that would be appropriate in a case like this.”

“God, no.”

“Then I can give you copies,” Eloise Carroll said, rising.

A secretary in the outer office organized the paperwork while the two of them waited. If the woman was annoyed by Ruth’s lack of decisiveness, she didn’t show it. Maybe she was used to this kind of uncertainty; one of the more common factors involved in the job.

She said to Ruth, “How long have you lived here?”

“Ever since I was twenty-five,” Ruth said. “I was working for one of the big insurance companies and they sent me over on a three-year rotation. At the end of it I left the job rather than go back.”

“Why?”

“I thought I was in love with somebody.”

Strange, how it didn’t hurt to say it now.

Eloise Carroll said, “Was that in Philadelphia?”

“That was in New York. I moved to Philadelphia in ’eighty-four.”

“Do you ever go home?”

Without really intending to, Ruth looked toward the window. A couple of miles to the west, the chiseled glass towers of the city’s business district now stood clear of the morning’s earlier haze.

“This is home,” she said.

SHE WALKED along two city squares to where she’d left her car. It was on a lot where a ballroom had once stood and which had been fenced for contract parking. The air in the street was cool, but the inside of the car was hot and stuffy from the sun on the glass. She threw the folder onto the passenger seat, opened all the windows, and set off across town to her place of work.

Ruth drove a Pontiac 6000, her second American car in ten years. As soon as the stale air had blown through, she closed up the windows and turned on the air conditioning. Then she switched on the radio. The crosstown traffic was slow but steady. Ruth was supposed to be at a meeting by eleven-thirty. She was cutting it close, but she could see no reason why she wouldn’t make it.

She kept glancing down at the cardboard folder. This was ridiculous. Pick one and let’s go, Ruth, she told herself. Just pick one and let’s go. Any one of them is as good as any other.

But it was as if, every time, her mind turned aside just before the moment of decision.

About twenty minutes later she was stuck in a long line of traffic on Race Street, for reasons that were too far ahead of her to make out. A few people leaned on their horns, but their hearts weren’t in it. About a half-dozen cars further on, two beggars in white shirts were working the lanes. Ruth checked the door locks and then picked up the envelope. She pulled out the Xerox sheets and started to look through. They’d been reduced, two pages into one. The copies weren’t good, but they’d be good enough.

One of the beggars tapped on her window. She could see his paper cup out of the corner of her eye. She shook her head fractionally, but she didn’t look up. After a few moments, he went on to the car behind.

As always, she felt guilty. She knew that she shouldn’t, but she always did. Tough, but not tough enough. That was Ruth Lasseter’s lonely secret.

Then she had an idea.

She dug out a bill from the parking change in the glove box, and dropped the window. Holding the money up where it could be seen, she leaned out of the car and whistled.

It was loud. Ruth whistled with two fingers of one hand, like a boy, and she could hit a note that would scare a flock of birds out of a field of corn. The young black man with the paper cup flinched and then, looking a little uncertain, he started back up the line toward her.

“Hi,” Ruth said pleasantly, and reached out to stuff the money in his cup.

“Thank you. God bless you,” the young man said, with an intent politeness that seemed completely sincere.

“Can I ask your opinion on something?”

“I guess so.”

“Which of these men do you think I should take on a date?”

She held up the sheets like a set of flash cards, and started to give him a two-second burst of each. He was around twenty-five years old, well-built and good-looking. His footwear was all shot and filthy but his white shirt was spotless. He looked utterly bewildered.

“Why you asking me?” he said.

“I can’t choose,” she said. “They’re all the same to me.”

“Well, they’re all the same to me, too. Pick the one with most money.”

“It’s not that kind of a date. You pay these guys.”

“For why?”

“They’re escorts.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not.” Ruth glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that the man in the car behind was watching the exchange with his mouth wide open. He shook his head in disbelief and then appeared to start expressing himself loudly in the solitude of his coupe. Up ahead, some of the vehicles were beginning to move.

The young man said, “No woman like you should pay to get a guy,” he said. “Not on any planet I ever lived on.”

“Thank you,” Ruth said. “It’s not that I’ve got no one to ask. I’ve got plenty of old boyfriends I could call on, but my new boyfriend won’t have that. This is just to make him happy. He’s very jealous.”

The young man said. “If you got a boyfriend, what for do you need a date anyway?”

“Are you going to help me choose or not?”

“Uh-uh,” he said, backing off. “Spin a bottle or stick a pin. Cause when it all goes bad, what you want to do is look back and say how somebody steered you wrong.”

“Okay,” Ruth said, shifting into Drive. “Thanks anyway.”

“Hey,” he said. “Take me. I’ll do it for free.”

“I told you he’s jealous,” Ruth said. “That would just about kill him.”

GRAYBIRD PUBLISHING had space in the Somerville Building just a few blocks from Logan Circle, in a narrowing north west corner of the city center between the Schuylkill River and Fairmount Park. It was all wide streets and no pedestrians in this area, unlike those parts of town that reminded her of home—her original home, not the one that she’d made for herself here. The streets that reminded her of home had brick sidewalks and trees and neat row houses set back from the trees. The English north-country suburb where she’d grown up had featured none of these, which only helped to convince Ruth that nothing ever made too much sense if you insisted on looking at it too closely.

She left the car in the parking basement and took the elevator up to the lobby. Graybird had two floors in the building, the fourth and most of the fifth. The place was deceptive. On the outside it looked like a big old bank or a treasury building, fronted by immense classical columns and the kind of steps where gangsters always get shot in movies. Inside, it had been gutted and revamped to provide office space around an atrium big enough to launch a balloon in. All the fine old marble had been restored and polished and extended all the way up to the daylight in the roof. There was greenery and an indoor fountain, and ever-watchful security to make sure that these public spaces didn’t attract the wrong kind of public. Mostly, the public stayed out and the spaces stayed empty.

Ruth crossed the floor and passed before the security counter on her way to the main elevator bank. Someone in a uniform was sitting behind the desk.

“Good morning, Ms. Lasseter,” the uniform said as she went by.

She read off his badge without even a glance at the face above it.

“Morning, Aidan,” she said.

She’d missed the meeting. It was hard to be sorry. When she stepped out on the fifth she went over and ran her ID card through the reader, which let her through the glass doors and into company territory. Visitors had to press the buzzer and wait.

Once at her desk she threw her coat onto the back of the chair, switched on her terminal, and scooped all the internal mail from her ‘in’ tray and slid it straight into a drawer. Rosemary looked over the partition from the adjoining carrel and said, “Hello, Ruth. Jake’s been looking for you.”

“Any idea what for?”

“Nothing important, he said. I didn’t know what to tell him.”

“You could have said I had an appointment to get my tattoo finished.”

“A tattoo?” Rosemary said. “You? Where?”

“I don’t want to say. Just don’t expect me to sit much today.”

“Is that true?”

Ruth hadn’t the heart.

“No, Rosemary,” she said, “it’s only a joke. I had some car trouble again.”

Rosemary made a sign of understanding, and dropped down out of sight. She wasn’t tall. She had to sit on a cushion to type. Most people had fallen into the habit of referring to her as ‘Little Rosemary’ until the one memorable day when she’d exploded and it had taken more than an hour of diplomatic to-ing and fro-ing to entice her out of the women’s room.

The little red light on Ruth’s phone was blinking to indicate a backup of switchboard messages for her. She jiggled the receiver to kill it, set out the soda can that she’d forgotten to empty the day before, and then checked the overall effect. Woman at Work, it said to her. And if it said that to her, it would say the same to anyone.

So then she picked up a piece of scrap paper and walked off down the row toward the elevators. She saw the head of her section, who spotted her across the dividers and called her by name, but she waved the paper and said, “Got to deal with this urgently, Jake, I’ll be right back,” and then carried right on.

On through the beehive. That was how Graybird looked to her, with everybody in their little private spaces that had no privacy. The carpet was deep and the colors were cool and all the lighting had almost the exact feel and texture of daylight, but it was a beehive all the same. It was never a good idea to step back too far and see your own place in it all. The plants you tended, the cards you pinned up. Exactly the same as everyone else. At a distance, you were no one.

Group Services had real offices. Ruth walked past Gordon Parry’s open door, and made for the snack machine at the end of the passageway.

She needed to do no more. They were lovers, they had radar. He would feel her presence like the passage of a magnetic field, making his heart race and raising the hairs on the back of his neck. She knew, because it was what his proximity could do to her.

He was approaching.

He stood behind her while she sorted out change for the machine, as if politely waiting his turn.

She heard him say, “How did it go?”

“I’m going to need help,” she said. “I can’t make a choice.”

“What’s the problem?”

“There’s no problem. I just can’t make a choice.”

“This is the craziest thing I’ve ever done.”

“Me too.” They were conversing in low voices and avoiding looking at each other, like prisoners in a yard under the eyes of the guards. She said, “Can you come to the apartment?”

“Maybe Thursday. I’ll try.”

She dropped some of the money. They bent together to pick it up, and their hands touched for a moment. Her heart was hammering as she walked back toward her desk.

She hadn’t even looked at him.

Oh, Ruth, she thought to herself. The games we all play.

The chances we take.

THERE WERE a number of shops and services down in the windowless passageways off the atrium. Along with the barber shop and the florist and the copy shop and the Fed Ex desk, they included two gourmet cafes and a deli. Business tended to ebb and flow between them, depending on who’d placed the most attractive offer in this week’s copy of the Somerville Building’s internal newsletter. Rossini’s cafe was offering free espresso and a dollar off with coupon, Moriarty’s was two-for-one on sandwiches. So the four women of the Graybird ad sales department went down to lunch together at Spinks’, which was offering nothing at all but was the only place with a table free.

Four of them sat around the table. Ruth, Rosemary, Jennie and Alicia. Because all the lighting was artificial, it could have been any hour in some below-ground bunker. It was too bright, and everything gleamed. Tiles, tabletops, silverware, everything. It was like a dining room designed by an orthodontist. They talked about the morning’s meeting, and the proposed measures for scaling down some of the less profitable parts of the company, and who was likely to stay and who would most probably be invited to go. Ruth, who hadn’t been there, didn’t have much to say on the subject. And much as she tried to take an interest, her mind would stray to a certain other matter.

“Hey,” Jennie cut in, leaning forward and lowering her voice. “Look who’s here.”

Ruth glanced around, and saw nobody. One of the building security people was passing with a tray, that was all. Big and slow-moving and mostly invisible, a blue shirt and a bunch of keys; but then she realized, it was the guard whom Jennie was eyeing. But she couldn’t turn and look again. Not right away.

Rosemary said, with a pained expression, “Please don’t drool. I’m trying to eat.”

“Do you think anyone would notice if I hid him in the trunk of my car and took him home?”

“Bill might.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it. If I lay face-down on the table with a banana up my ass, he’d ask me where I put the fruit bowl.”

“Jennie!” Rosemary said, with a gasp of shock that wasn’t entirely feigned.

“I don’t care,” Jennie said. “Somebody call him over. I’ve worked hard all my life, I deserve it.”

Now Ruth let her gaze drift and half-turned in her seat, hoping that the move didn’t look fake and knowing that it did. But it made no difference. He wasn’t looking her way. He’d settled at a table on his own, and he was reading a newspaper; leaning over the table and turned slightly away from the room, as if to create a little private space in the middle of his day. It was, she realized, the one who’d been manning the desk when she’d arrived that morning. He’d known her by name, but she’d had to check for his. Aidan. Aidan Kincannon.

Aidan Kincannon, unlikely object of desire.

“I’ll call him for you,” she offered, and started to raise a hand.

“Don’t you dare!” Jennie said quickly.

Ruth became aware then that Alicia wasn’t joining in. Hadn’t taken her eyes off her for more than a minute, it seemed.

She said to Ruth, “What about you? What’s going to happen to you if the job disappears?”

“Same as everybody else,” Ruth said. “I’m out on the street.”

“Won’t you lose your right of residence?”

“I haven’t thought about that.” It was true, she hadn’t.

“You must have,” Alicia insisted. And Ruth felt herself being forced into an edgy smile.

“It sounds like I’d better start,” she said.

And Alicia said, “What do you know that we don’t?”

“What are you talking about?” Ruth said.

“Come on, Ruth. Let us in on the secret. Who do you have to fuck around here to be certain of secure employment? Then we can all form a line.”

Ruth looked at her levelly. She didn’t flinch.

“Where did this come from?” she said.

Alicia shrugged.

“I don’t have to sit here and listen to this,” Ruth said.

“Wait a minute,” Jennie said. “Don’t fly off the handle.”

“No,” Rosemary said. “It was just a bad joke, wasn’t it, Alicia?”

Alicia took a beat before she answered.

“That’s what it was,” she said.

Ruth stood up, and pushed her chair back. It dry-scraped on the floor. She hadn’t finished, but she was no longer hungry. She felt like someone cold to the touch around a white-hot core. She looked down at Alicia, who in spite of her supposed backdown remained defiant.

“I don’t know what your real problem is, Alicia,” Ruth said, “but deal with that. Don’t try to take it out on me.”

She walked out of the coffee shop and back toward the elevators. She felt light-headed and, although she didn’t falter, she also felt unsteady. It was as if she floated, and couldn’t fall. Did Alicia know about her and Gordon? Did anyone actually know? Ahead of her in the passageway were two day assistants from the childcare center in the basement, pulling along a wagon with about eight pre-schoolers sitting on it and two more helping to push. For once she didn’t smile as she passed them.

The office was mostly empty when she got back. She went into her enclosure and sat down before her terminal.

There she took in the view of her domain, such as it was. A faded picture of her parents, one of her sister, one of her sister’s children that was probably way out of date by now. A few similarly out-of-date gallery invitations, an old champagne cork still in its wire. A palm in a pot, its leaves steadily shriveling. Ruth didn’t have much of a way with plants; somebody would buy one for her, it would die slowly, she’d throw it out and then someone would give her another.

“Ruth?” she heard. “Are you busy?”

She looked up. It was Rosemary. Ruth made a gesture that could have meant anything, and Rosemary took it as permission to stay. She pulled her chair around from the other side of the partition and sat down.

She said, “I don’t know what got into Alicia. Nobody agrees with what she said. I don’t think she believes it herself.”

“Rosemary,” Ruth said, “I really couldn’t give a damn what she believes.”

“Please forgive her, Ruth.”

Ruth sighed. What could you say to a plea like that?

She said, “Ever the peacemaker, aren’t you, Rosemary? If Alicia’s got some kind of a complex, then it’s not my problem.”

“You need to understand something,” Rosemary said. “Some of the others envy you. I envy you myself, sometimes.”

“For what?”

“Oh, come on. You’re a grown-up single woman. You’re the choice we didn’t make, and you’re looking pretty good on it. Whenever life gets rocky, we’re bound to wonder if we chose wrong. When I was nine, I had dreams about being a bride. When I was nineteen, I married Prince Charming. Now he makes the kids laugh by getting them to pull on his finger just as he lets go with a fart. I still love him. But it’s not the dream I had.”

“I can’t handle that, Rosemary,” Ruth said. “You can’t ask me to take responsibility for it.”

“I’m not. I’m just telling you how it is.”

Alicia called by her desk after lunch, and apologized. Ruth told her it was okay. Jennie brought coffee for everyone, including Jake, who was then suspicious of them all for the rest of the afternoon.

The phones rang, the work got done. Some men brought a printer cabinet that nobody had asked for and then took it away again.

Ruth hardly thought ahead to Thursday at all.

RUTH’S APARTMENT was in a rehabilitated dry-goods warehouse alongside the access ramp to the Ben Franklin Bridge. The ramp was a massive arch outside her window, the space beneath it a dark cathedral in blue steel. As the traffic rolled over, it seemed to set every bass pipe on the organ singing. This was an old part of town that had been hauled from near-dereliction to upward mobility until recession had put on the brakes and left most of the rehabs with only part-occupancy. Five years ago she couldn’t have afforded the area, but now most of them were offering deals. Ruth’s was a simple studio, a big sitting room with an open sleeping area overlooking it and a crawlspace under. On her lease agreement they called it a loft, although by New York standards it wasn’t.

She kicked off her shoes and switched on the lights, low so that they’d gradually take over as the sun went down. She made herself some herbal tea in the kitchen, and carried it across to the couch. She didn’t feel like eating anything, even though she’d left her lunch half-finished. Disinclined though she was to admit it, Alicia’s attack was still churning her up inside. It was like a slap out of nowhere, something to make her head ring. They’d never been friends, exactly, but … my God, she thought, I never realized that the woman actively despised me.

It could only be envy. Envy or insecurity over a single woman, loose in a world of wives and mothers. Rosemary was probably right; Ruth’s continuing existence must have seemed like a challenge to all of them. They’d see the way that some of their husbands twitched into life like dead meat when introduced into her company. God forbid that she should actually be happy as well.

She looked through the escort agency samples again, and tried to cut the numbers down to a few possibles. The one with the hint of a squint, out. One who looked like an actor she didn’t like, out. Another that she didn’t like the look of for no reason at all, out.

She slumped back on the couch, threw her head back, and groaned.

It hadn’t been easy, even to pick up the phone. Gordon had passed her the number. He’d said that he’d checked it out and it was one of the legitimate places and not just a hotel handjob outfit, but how could she be sure? The very concept of a genuine agency seemed so archaic, a hangover of more innocent days. But there it was, the understanding social resource for the mature woman. Ouch. Companions for formal occasions, concerts, gallery visits, even shopping and city tours. The men on the books were mostly retired and doing it for pin money and their own enjoyment. And according to Eloise Carroll the clientele were mostly widows, middle-class and up, who called for a man because there was a man-sized space alongside them that they felt a need to have occupied. Nothing closer than that.

Well, if there was so much envy out there, this would be a way to defuse it as well as settling any suspicions that Mimi Parry might be having about her husband’s late nights and New York stopovers. But that, Ruth was now beginning to realize, was the sticking point. The practical usefulness was undeniable. The hard part was that it made her feel just a little bit like a beaten dog, rolling over onto its back and showing its belly to end a fight. Life might be quieter afterwards, but at what price? It could be described as a form of appeasement.

But it could equally feel like a form of abasement.

Don’t think, she told herself. Just choose.

But then, not thinking had never been as easy for Ruth as it seemed to be for some.

Midway through the evening, she picked up the phone and called the agency’s answering machine. She said, “Hello, Mrs Carroll. This is Ruth Lasseter, I came to your office this morning and took away a copy of your brochure. I’ve got it down to a couple of names; I’ll call you in a day or so to check on their availability.”

She’d make a firm decision before the evening was out.

Or tomorrow. Tomorrow would be just as good.

HER NAME was Frances Everline. She was forty-eight years old, twice-divorced, no children, and she was dying.

She hauled herself up off the bed, which was soiled with her vomit, and took a step toward the bedroom door. But she didn’t get far. Her legs went from underneath her, and her face hit the carpet. It happened so fast that she wasn’t even aware of falling.

For a while, she didn’t move. She felt strangely comfortable here. It hurt, but it was like an arm’s-length hurt. That this was dangerous, she knew. Slip far enough out of herself like this, and before she could stop she’d have slid too far ever to return.

The phone was in the next room. She knew that she’d have to get to that and dial 911 if she was going to have any hope at all. Lying here, she’d just get weaker. So she summoned what little strength she had left, and she started to crawl across the floor.

Her vision was distorted, like in a cartoon. The distance from here to the door seemed as vast as the view down a football field. From beyond the door to the phone would be like a desert still to cross.

But she’d try.

As she crawled, there was a clear part of her mind that berated itself and disparaged the person that she’d become in the past few weeks. She’d turned into someone that she could hardly recognize any more. From co