Read Online Requiem for a Realtor by Ralph McInerny - Free Book Online Page B

looking up beseechingly. It was disconcerting that whenever he tried to kiss her, she opened her mouth. She might still be his patient. He kissed around its rims, missing the pressure of lips on lips.
    â€œI do not want to make another mistake.”
    â€œYou shall have children,” he promised.
    â€œYes, that too. But first of all I want compatibility.” She nibbled on his chin, standing on tiptoe to do it. She was such a little thing. He lifted her from the floor, and she squealed in delight. His eyes blurred at the thought of what lay before them at the hotel.
    The first annoyance had been with the rental car. They would not take cash. It had to be a credit card. It was company policy. It was the policy of all the rental car companies except maybe Rent-a-Wreck. He turned over a credit card. That was no great problem. The point of the car was to protect their identity at the hotel.
    Why the Frosinone? Phyllis had been surprised when he told her where they were going. Well, they couldn’t saunter into the Hilton or the Radisson and count on not meeting someone they knew or, worse, being seen by but not seeing someone who knew them. He had heard of the Frosinone when he was in dental school as a place that accommodated couples when hotels were still snooty about whether a man and woman who showed up at the registration desk were married. Now, whenever David traveled, he was routinely asked how many keys to the room he wanted, as if he might make a trail of them like the colored beans in the story, and have a bevy of compliant females beating on his door. It was unlikely in the extreme that anyone at the Frosinone would recognize them.
    â€œI think this is one of the hotels Stanley took his women to.”
    Phyllis said this when the rental car was parked in the hotel garage and they were ascending to the lobby in an elevator that seemed unsure whether it wanted to go up or sideways or maybe just straight down again. The mention of Stanley and his women was a blight on what they were doing, establishing a moral equivalence between Stanley Collins and David Jameson. For the first time Jameson fully realized what they had booked the room to do.
    The arrangement had been made over time, little promissory notes from Phyllis when he had kissed around her open mouth while she emitted great sighs, made coy withdrawals followed by alarming advances, telling him that of course they could do nothing there in the house where she had lived with Stanley. Perhaps they should take a page from his book and just go off to a hotel. It had seemed so improbable at first that David had fallen in with the imaginary plan. Only, over time, as such talk became familiar, they seemed to have decided to do it. And now they had decided, and in the elevator she had said that this was a hotel where her husband had misbehaved. Suddenly, David was terrified at what lay ahead.
    The swarthy little man at the desk looked at David as if he recognized him and he felt an impulse to take Phyllis’s hand and dash back to the rented car.
    â€œI can give you a suite.” He made it sound like an indecent proposal. The name on his lapel was Primo Verdi.
    Phyllis piped up, “Does it have a Jacuzzi?”
    David was assailed by stories he had heard of hot sheet motels with mirrored ceilings and tubs for two.
    â€œJust a shower.”
    David printed a false name on the form Verdi had slid toward him. “I’ll need your credit card.”
    â€œI’ll pay cash.”
    â€œThe card is just in case of incidental expenses. Phone calls, room service…”
    With the sense that all the precautions he had taken were rendered useless he handed the manager a credit card. A moment later, the data having been recorded, the card was handed back. It was like receiving evidence.
    He fought the impulse to flee and call it quits because he had all the usual instincts of the male; he had known moments of lustful desire, even if he had