Read Online Necessity by Brian Garfield - Free Book Online

mean the house. No, ma’am. It’s just rented for July and August.”
    â€œI guess this is going to sound like a strange question,” she said, “but what does your boss do for a living?”
    She caught Quirini’s eye in the mirror. He had a hard face—jowls, a round heavy jaw, tough dark eyes, hair getting thin and grey. He seemed amused. “You heard of AJL Construction, ma’am? That’s us.”
    She’d seen the big signs all over New York on building sites.
    Pushing things she said, “I suppose he’s married.”
    A sharp look in the mirror; then a brief smile. “No. He was married once I guess. Before I came to work. I think it was annulled.”
    He brought her back to the manor where Bert handed her a wine spritzer and studied her best low-cut designer job. “You pass inspection,” he said drily.
    The Sertics were there; they went on to one of the restaurants—she doesn’t remember now if it was Shippy’s or Balzarini’s or the Palm; whichever, Bert knew the maitre d’ and there was no trouble about a table even though they hadn’t had a reservation.
    She remembers the relaxed savor of the evening: the way they included her, now and then going out of their way to explain a private point of reference, generally seeming to take it for granted she was grown up and sophisticated.
    Not like what she was used to: a world that appeared to believe she couldn’t possibly have more than two brain cells to rub together.
    It was the curse of the smooth skin and big eyes and the Goddamned bone structure that earned success for her as a model: often she’d be taken for twenty or twenty-one.
    She’d learned there wasn’t much to the men who went for girls barely out of their teens. One of them, suntanned and Nautilus-muscled and trying his best to look like a high-school jock, had propositioned her just two days earlier—in that same disco where she’d met Bert—and she’d been so bored with it all that she’d just looked the jock in the eye and said in her deepest go-to-hell baritone, “What do you think we’d have to talk about after the first four minutes?”
    â€œFour minutes?” The jock feigned indignation. “I’m good for at least an hour and a half.” He might as well have been flexing his muscles. “Come on. What do you want to talk about. Name it.”
    â€œHow about Kierkegaard?”
    He’d edged away from her.
    Not that she was out for the presidency of U.S. Steel. She made good money modeling and spent it on rent and clothes and amusements; there was nothing ambitious or far-seeing about her life. She had no plans beyond the date she’d made to spend the Labor Day weekend with the parents of a girlfriend from the agency up in a cabin on one of the Finger Lakes.
    This one now, this Bert—she couldn’t fathom him. She’d catch him looking her up and down with a quick frank smile of appreciation but he didn’t stare down at her boobs or shove a figurative elbow into her ribs with clumsy fatuous attempts to be sly and lascivious. He’d spent the whole day with her but every minute seemed to have been carefully chaperoned: they hadn’t been alone at all. That did not seem to be an accident. Was he afraid of something?
    He liked talking to her. He watched her face while they spoke. He laughed at the right points; he listened.
    She watched his profile beside her at the dinner table as he talked with forceful confidence and made lavish gestures with his big hands. He caught her looking at him; he stopped in midsentence and smiled. It illuminated his face: it was an overflowing smile that demanded a response in kind.
    She can remember vividly the startling beauty of his smile—especially now because of the irony it engenders. She remembers the life to which he introduced her: hard young capitalists on the make, a jet-propelled world