Read Online Stud Rites by Susan Conant - Free Book Online Page A

murderers who revisit the scenes of their crimes. Do they, too, get some kind of incomprehensible satisfaction from making sure that their scent is fresh?
     

 
     
    AS WE RETURNED to the hotel, Leah remarked that she was thirsty. ”There’s a Coke machine right near our room. And an ice machine. Room service would be a lot more fun,” I acknowledged, ”but even as it is—”
    ”This is costing you a fortune because you’re paying for me.”
    ”You’re handling Kimi for me. You’re working for expenses. I’m lucky you don’t charge me.”
    Unexpectedly, she asked, ”Have you ever thought about writing your memoirs? You could probably make a fortune.”
    ”My what!”
    ”Memoirs. Romantic memoirs. You could call it Women Who Run with Vets.”
    ”Leah, I do not ’run with’ vets!” I thought the matter over. ”As far as I can remember, Steve is the first one.”
    ”You could just make up the others. Or pretend that they were vets even though they weren’t.”
    ”Sure,” I said, ”just tack D.V.M. onto their names, and-”
    ”Not all of them,” said Leah, as if there had been thousands. ”And at least one ought to be an M.R.C.V.S., like Mr. Herriot.” Ascending the hotel stairs inspired Leah to literary heights. ”I know! Look, you have to change their real names anyway, so they wouldn’t be embarrassed or sue you or whatever. So as long as you’re doing that anyway, you call him James. So your readers would naturally assume—”
    I halted at the top of the stairs. Rowdy sat. ”That what? That I’d had an affair with James Herriot? Leah—”
    ”It’s important to let readers draw their own conclusions. Why should you do all the work? You wouldn’t say Herriot. You’d just say James,” Leah pronounced emphatically.
    As if in answer to a summons, an elderly man stuck a lizardlike head out of the open archway to the room that housed the vending machines. His head and, as I soon observed, his body as well weren’t lizardlike in some vague, generic sense. Rather, he bore an astonishing resemblance to a pet horny toad—a horned lizard— that a childhood friend of mine had bought in Arizona as a living souvenir and had brought home to Maine. There the little reptile entered a permanent state of dormancy and spent year after year in suspended animation on a bed of dry sand in a glass aquarium. Oddly devoted to the creature, my friend provided food and water that the animal never touched. Every day or so, she gently lifted the spiny body out of the artificial desert to make sure that the lizard was still alive. Well, yes, as Dorothy Parker asked when told that Calvin Coolidge had died, How could they tell ? My friend blew lovingly in the horny toad’s face. Maybe Coolidge didn’t blink anymore.
    Without bothering with the preliminaries, our human lizard loudly announced that the ice machine, like half the other damned things in this world, was not working.
    ”It was working okay last night,” I informed him. ”Have you tried kicking it?”
    After unlocking the door to our room to admit Leah, Rowdy, and Kimi, I got the change purse from my shoulder bag and the ice bucket from the bathroom. When I returned to the corridor, the man stood in the open archway in a cloud of what proved to be tobacco smoke and not, as I first feared, the vapor emitted by a broken ice machine. A hand with thickened joints, splayed fingers, and scaly skin clutched an unfiltered cigarette.
    Dripping ash on the lapels of a navy blazer, the man lurched, stumbled forward, and bumped into the ice machine. He was short, wide, and flat, with turned-out feet, a mottled complexion, and no hair. I tried to remember whether the horny toad had had lips. The man’s were like thin purple strips of raw liver. He raised the hand that wasn’t depositing ash on the carpet. Pinched between two fingers was a quarter. In a wheezy voice, he said, ”Can’t for the life of me get this thing in! All it does is fall back on the