Read Online Necessity by Brian Garfield - Free Book Online Page A

of expensive toys, midnight conference calls, ringside seats, luxury condominiums, show-business evenings, sudden trips cushioned by limousines and hotel penthouses and VIP lounges.
    By then they were married. She remembers the way he phrased his proposal. At the time she wasn’t sufficiently sensitive to its subtext. What he said was, “I want you to be the mother of my children.”

19 The weather cools a bit. Finally on August 1 the California license arrives and she spends two days going from bank to bank in Long Beach and Inglewood and Culver City, breaking one or two of the thousand-dollar bills at each stop.
    Then she returns to the Valley and opens a checking account with eight hundred dollars in cash—not enough to draw attention—and applies for a credit card, listing herself as a divorcee with a monthly alimony income of $2,500. On the application she attests to numerous lies. As her residence she lists the dummy apartment. For a reference she gives the name of a fictitious company president at the address of the Las Vegas mail-forwarding service. For a second reference she gives Doyle Stevens.
    At various post offices she mails $500 money orders to herself; when these arrive she uses them to open an account in a savings-and-loan where they give you a year’s free rent on a safety-deposit box for opening a new account. She puts the diamonds and most of the rest of the cash in the box.
    Examining the driver’s license for the ’steenth time she studies the color photograph of herself: slightly blurred (she must have moved her head a bit), unsmiling. Points of reflected light on the lenses of the glasses obscure the color of her eyes.
    The cropped hair and glasses serve to harden her appearance: in the picture she looks—what’s the best word? Efficient.
    Actually she has always been efficient; it is only that until recently she hasn’t had very much need to prove it.
    She showers away a day’s grit and wipes the towel across the bathroom mirror so she can scrutinize herself.
    The body isn’t bad for an old broad of thirty-one. Too bony if your taste runs toward Rubens nudes but she could still pose in a bikini if she wanted to and nothing sags perceptibly; the stretch marks aren’t pronounced.
    The face, absent the phony glasses and with the wet hair matted down, looks fragile and vulnerable—all eyes and bones and angles as if she’d posed for one of those child-girls on black velvet. Ironic that she looks so young: she is thinking, I don’t feel a day over ninety-three.
    There is a hint of haggard gauntness in that image. With a detachment that feels almost academic she wonders how long you can go on living on your nerve endings before you begin to disintegrate.
    In the mirror the unmade-up lips are definitely too thin and wide; no rosebud here. She’s always had trouble with the look of her mouth; it took years of experiment to find a proper way to paint it for modeling. It is a big mouth made for smiling; it doesn’t take naturally to the expression that photographers seem to want: distant chill with a contradictory hint of seductiveness. That is one of the reasons (there are others, God knows) why she never became a top model—she only came as near as perhaps the upper section of the second class.
    She studies herself with dispassion. What else wants changing?
    There’s the gap between the two upper front teeth. He said it was sexy, didn’t he. He didn’t want you to fix it.
    Tomorrow she’ll find a dentist and have them bonded to fill in the space.
    She leans forward with belligerent challenge and speaks aloud:
    â€œAll right. Now who are you?”

20 The young woman in the phone company store has frizzy red hair and brown eyebrows, plump cheeks and a Spanish accent.
    â€œYou never had a telephone before?”
    â€œIt was in my ex-husband’s name.”
    â€œBut if your ex-husband still has a