Read Online Crazybone by Bill Pronzini - Free Book Online Page B

a small-group circumstance and I relate well enough; I’m able to think on my feet and hold my own in a conversation. But plunk me down in the midst of a cocktail party where social interaction with strangers is required, and I curl up inside like a worm in a bottle. I’m no good at small talk. And not much of a drinker; too much alcohol in a party atmosphere has the opposite effect on me than it does on most people, making me withdraw even more. The bigger the crowd, the worse I feel. Crush of bodies, too-loud voices, the constant strain... I start out edgy and if I’m trapped long enough I tend to become claustrophobic. Not enough space or air to breathe.
    So I knew going in to the party at Bates and Carpenter that it would be a two-hour ordeal. And the agitated mood I was in would only make it worse. But I’d promised Kerry, and if I got through the cocktail party, the dinner afterward would be a piece of cake by comparison. So on the way over to the ad agency I played a little self-psyching game, blocking out the Hunter case and reminding myself that this evening was a small price to pay for all that Kerry had done for me and promising myself rewards for being a good boy and making the best of what, after all, was only a couple of hours out of the rest of my life. The trick seemed to work at first: I was calmly resigned and wearing a half-hearty facade when I met Kerry in her office. She seemed relieved, as if she’d expected me to come in looking like a man attending his own funeral. She even commented on my “upbeat mood” as we went upstairs — Bates and Carpenter had two floors in an old building on lower Geary downtown — to the big conference room where the party was being held.
    The psych job, though, began to develop cracks once we arrived. Twenty-five or so people were already there, most of them clustered around a full-service bar and a table of hors d’oeuvres at one end, chattering and laughing noisily. On a quick scan I saw several of Kerry’s co-workers, Jim Carpenter prominent among them, naturally, and two other faces I recognized: Kerry’s crazy friend Paula Hanley, who owned an interior design company and was a B&C client, and her tubby chiropractor husband, Andrew. Terrific. Paula was a magnet for every screwball fad that came along, had a passion for “improving” other people’s lives through prosleytism, and managed to set my teeth on edge in the best of circumstances. In a party atmosphere she might well be lethal.
    Carpenter came over first, towing his latest conquest, a sloe-eyed blonde half his age. Handsome bastard, with his silver mane and dark (probably dyed) mustache. He shook my hand and asked how I was in his vaguely condescending fashion. He’d had a thing for Kerry once and his attitude toward her was still irritatingly proprietary; he kissed her — on the mouth, no less — as if he hadn’t seen her in weeks and let his hand linger on her arm. I stood by and watched this and smiled and thought about what his neck would feel like in a circle of my fingers.
    Then came Mr. and Mrs. Anthony DiGrazia of DiGrazia’s Old-Fashioned Italian Sausages. They were both in their mid-sixties, both short and very round and very red-faced; the only physical difference between them, in fact, seemed to be that he was bald and she had a pile of expensively coiffed blue hair. Their personalities, however, were total opposites, like a photograph and its negative. He was smiling, outgoing, voluable, and prone to punctuating his words with hand and arm gestures in the classic Italian manner. She was silent, stiff, and wore an expression that said her shoes pinched her feet, her girdle was too tight, her stomach was upset, and she didn’t approve of occasions like this one or much of anything except maybe the diamonds and rubies on her fingers and at her throat. Dragon lady. And ruler of the DiGrazia roost, I had no doubt.
    Mr. DiGrazia pumped my hand in an iron grip and asked in Italian after