completely in the clear then.â
âYou havenât been cleared officially, but I wouldnât worry. Richard Bigger wonât officially clear you until theyâve arrested someone else. You know how he hates you, Robin.â
âWho was this neighbor? Was it the bodybuilder?â I asked, and described him. âHe seems to spend a lot of time in the hallway.â
âHe told us he didnât know anything. The neighbor who saw you was a man named Cleves, a tourist from San Diego. Didnât see the actual crime, didnât see anything else and was flying back west today. Robin, Iâm beginning to believe you really do have a curse on your head,â she said, with her tony, uptown, Dalton School accent. June Fairchild of the NYPD was once known as âThe Debutante Detectiveâ because of her flawless social pedigree. I knew her from a previous unfortunate incident.
âWhat about the frizzy-haired brunette, Maggie Mason?â
âThe police werenât able to interview her until this morning, but, she apparently has an alibi. She was on AOL in a comic-book chat at the time of the murder. Iâll try to keep you informed, as much as I can, Robin, but Iâm taking a few days off to look after my daughter. Sheâs having her tonsils pulled. I have to go, Robin. Iâll talk to you later.â
What a serene vacation it had been so far, I thoughtâan apartment building burns down and a dead man falls into my face. I was having dinner with Phil, from my old building, that evening. Philâs philosophy was not to complain about bad things that happen, they might just prevent something worse. Iâd have to ask him what horrible event could possibly be prevented by these disasters to make them somehow justifiable in the cosmic scheme of things. It would have to be a pretty bad event, like a sarin gas attack on the subway or a Pat Buchanan presidency.
chapter five
âThe fire, itâs a shame, luv, but who knows? If it hadnât happened, a week from now a gas pipe might have ruptured, blown up the building, and killed us all,â said Phil, lifting his big Thai beer in a salute to our good luck. We were sitting at a corner table at Regional Thai Taste, a restaurant on Seventh Avenue and Twenty-second Street.
âExcept you. Somehow, youâd survive,â I said.
Phil has survived an extraordinary number of disasters in his lifetime. This all began during World War Two, when Phil was a young British soldier in North Africa and the only survivor of an attack by Rommel. Since then, heâd pulled widows and babies out of fires, crawled out of the wreckage of plane crashes and ferry sinkings, and eluded a cobra that came up a Calcutta toilet. The stories he told about these things were really unbelievableâI thought he was completely full of crap until he showed me his scrapbook of news clippings about his various adventures. He didnât show it to me to be boastful, although he had a healthy ego and was not a falsely modest saint kind of guy. He showed it to me to prove he wasnât full of crap and to get me to buy into his wacky philosophical tricks.
Tricks like: When something inconvenient happens to you, something beyond your control, you have to try to look at it as maybe preventing something worse. This kind of washes out when facing famine, war, or epidemic disease, but it can really help with day-to-day coping. In my life, there seems to be no completely reliable law but Murphyâsâwhatever can go wrong willâand the idea that what goes wrong might in fact prevent something far more terrible is more reassuring than that old morose âthings could be worseâ digestive.
The first time Phil told me this little trick, he had just fixed my front door, which had jammed, locking me inside and making me late for a very important business meeting. âRobin, if youâd been able to get out sooner, you might have
Kaye Blue
Maree Anderson
Debbie Macomber
Debra Salonen
William Horwood
Corrine Shroud
Petra Durst-Benning
Kitty Berry
Ann Lethbridge
Roderick Gordon