Read Online Ghost Music by Graham Masterton - Free Book Online

brocade, and even the walls were dark red, with gilt-framed oil paintings of sailing boats and racehorses and early explorers in the West Virginia wilderness.
    I tried to imagine Kate in here, but somehow I couldn’t. She was so feminine, and yet this room had no woman’s touches at all. The only flowers were dried red chrysanthemums, under a glass dome on the mantelpiece, and there was no smell of perfume in the air or potpourri or even room freshener.
    â€œYou must make a pretty good living, then, writing these jingle things?” asked Jack. “Apartments like this, you don’t get them for peanuts.”
    â€œI struck it lucky, I guess.”
    â€œLike Victor here? Victor struck it real lucky, didn’t you, Victor?”
    Victor was opening a bottle of Stag’s Leap chardonnay with one of those carbon dioxide gadgets. He stopped long enough to point his index finger at Jack, almost as if he were aiming a pistol at him, and the look on his face was so malevolent that I thought at first that he wasn’t joking.
    But Jack let out a hoarse, unconvincing laugh, and changed the subject straightaway. “Do you play the horses?” he asked me. “There’s a great nag running at Belmont Park this afternoon. Move the Cat, in the three twenty, fifteen to one.”
    I shook my head. “I’ve only bet on the horses three times in the whole of my life. The first one threw its jockey, the second one ran around the wrong way, and the third one broke its leg and had to be put down, right there on the track.”
    â€œMove the Cat,” Jack repeated, as if he hadn’t been listening.
    Victor handed me a large cut-crystal wine goblet with too much wine in it. Then he took hold of my elbow and said, “Come and take the tour. You should see what I’ve done in the bedroom.”
    He ushered me out of the living room and along the corridor. On either side there were framed photographs of Victor with various singers and TV stars. Victor shaking hands with the Fonz. Victor with his arm around a stooped, gray-haired man in glasses who looked suspiciously like Perry Como. Victor standing next to Mickey Rooney, trying to look as if he were an old friend of his.
    He opened the door to the main bedroom. It had been decorated as ornately as the living room, with a massive four-poster bed with twisty pillars, and heavy drapes in chocolate-colored velvet, and a large oil painting of a fat nude woman inexplicably milking a goat.
    â€œThis is what I always wanted,” said Victor. “Classic, you know? Ornate. I don’t have any time for that minimalist stuff. I had enough of minimalist when I was a kid. One couch, one broken chair. Three of us boys in one bed.”
    He sniffed loudly, and looked around. “Opulence, you know? That’s what I go for.
Luxury
. A feeling of
pomp
.”
    â€œIt’s pompous,” I agreed. “I have to give you that.”
    Victor put his arm around my shoulders and gripped me tight. I was looking around for photographs of Kate, but I couldn’t see a single one, which was strange, since there were so many photographs of Victor.
    Victor said, “When I started out in real estate, I used to visit all of these uptown apartments, you know, and some of them, they were so luxurious, you only had to walk inside and your suit felt cheap and your shoes felt cheap and
you
felt cheap. I remember standing in this entrance hall on the Upper East Side, waiting for my client to show. It had brown marble floors and brown marble pillars, and I remember looking at this marble table and thinking, my whole year’s salary wouldn’t buy me that table. That
one
fucking table. And here was this apartment, this entire apartment, with a view over Central Park, and it was
crammed
with tables. Not only tables, but chairs and couches and bookcases and beds and paintings and statues and Christ alone knew what else.”
    â€œWell, I know the