Читать книгу Getting Off On Frank Sinatra - Megan Edwards - Страница 7

My life in Las Vegas improved dramatically when I started getting off on Frank Sinatra. That’s what I tell people. Then, while they’re still trying to figure out how to react, I continue.

“I’d like to get off on Dean Martin, too, but I just can’t. And in case you’re interested, Mel Tormé is too short, Hugh Hefner’s a dead end, and I can never remember whether Jerry Lewis goes both ways.”

The truth is, I can never even remember where Jerry Lewis is exactly, but I know there’s a street named after him somewhere on the west side. Hugh Hefner is really just a driveway next to the Palms casino, and Mel Tormé can claim only one block near the Fashion Show Mall. Frank Sinatra, on the other hand, really takes a girl places. When I-15 is jammed, I leave the red lights to the tourists and slip off to join the taxis and locals zipping unimpeded up the back side of the Strip. Dean Martin serves almost the same purpose on the other side of the freeway, but he didn’t rate an exit. So Ol’ Blue Eyes is my man. When life in the fast lane slows to a crawl, I know I can count on Frank for relief.

In fact, getting off on Frank Sinatra saved my life the time a crazed maniac in a jacked-up Ram pickup tried to push me off the freeway. If Frank hadn’t been right there offering a quick getaway, bits of my DNA might still be clinging to the embankment just north of Russell Road.

Now that I think of it, Frank Sinatra also helped me out the day I found my first dead body. It was the hottest day of the millennium, and I had not only discovered the bloody corpse of a local philanthropist, but I’d spent more than three highly stressful hours with a homicide detective who was trying to decide whether I was capable of mutilating a woman’s face and strangling her with a drapery cord. A traffic jam on the way home might well have turned me into a genuine psycho killer, but there was good ol’ Frank waiting to fly me to the moon. Or at least get me up to Flamingo without committing a felony.

I should never have found that body, let alone recognize that it belonged to Marilyn Weaver. Yes, that Marilyn Weaver, the founder of the most prestigious school in Las Vegas and the city’s best-loved altruist. I had met her only the day before, and I had met her son just that afternoon. How I ended up snooping in her bedroom, looking inside her closet, and entangling myself in a high-profile murder investigation is a perfect example of that plentiful Las Vegas commodity: bad luck. I’m going to call it bad luck, at least. Because if I don’t call it bad luck, I’ll be stuck agreeing with what I know my family and friends think: It was David’s fault.

Before my rendezvous with murder, David Nussbaum and I were as perfect a pair as Barbie and Ken. Like them, we were designed to complement each other. I’m blonde, and he’s dark. He’s Jewish, and I’m a WASP. We do have some things in common, of course. We both come from commuter towns north of Manhattan, and we both went to Princeton. I still think it’s ironic that we met in Las Vegas instead of on the East Coast, and until everything flipped upside down, it was my favorite coincidence. The day I hooked up with David was the day I smelled the roses, saw the birds, and heard the music. The morning he turned twenty-eight, I still lived in paradise. By midnight, I’d moved to hell.

David’s birthday evening started out happily enough. We hooked up after work and went to a concert at Mandalay Bay.

“Really, I thought she’d be good,” David said as we walked out to the parking garage afterward.

“She was practically over the hill when you were still in diapers. Why are you such a fan?”

“Copper, don’t be such an age snob. Youth isn’t everything.”

“She didn’t suck because she’s old. She just sucked. I thought you had higher standards.”

I looked at David. He does have higher standards. I was shocked that a concert he had carefully selected to celebrate his twenty-eighth birthday had turned out to be such a dud. If the tickets hadn’t set him back over three hundred bucks, I would’ve suggested we duck out at the break.

“Well, Chris Farr said he’d get me comp tickets for Tori Beaulieu at Caesars Palace next week,” I said. “Maybe she’ll make up for it.”

That’s one of the benefits of working for the arts and entertainment editor at The Las Vegas Light. So many free tickets come my way that I could pass them out to the entire population of my hometown in Connecticut and still have enough left over to treat my whole family. I haven’t even worked at The Light for a whole year yet, but I’ve seen every production show on the Strip, most of the “just passing through” ones, and a whole slew at venues scattered all over the rest of town. If the word didn’t already mean something else, I’d call myself a showgirl.

David usually came along. As a staff reporter, he was higher ranking than me, but free tickets came his way only occasionally. Since “Copper Black, Assistant Editor” found them stuffed in her mailbox daily, our dating ritual revolved around what shows looked the most appealing.

Unfortunately, I didn’t score any tickets for Jamie Hixson, the slightly passé, surgically remodeled diva in platform boots whose voice gave David goose bumps. He also likes old Clint Eastwood movies, so maybe he just came of age a couple of decades too late. On the other hand, I’ve become a rabid Rat Pack fan since I’ve lived in Las Vegas, and I’m four years younger than he is. Age snob, my ass.

“So where do you want to eat?” David asked.

“We have reservations at Ciliano,” I said.

“Wow!”

“Your birthday deserves it. Surprise!”

Ciliano is my favorite Las Vegas restaurant. It’s at the top of the Monaco, and it has an eagle’s-eye view of the whole valley. With luck, we’d even rank a table next to the windows overlooking the Strip. I don’t have a lot of “juice” in this town yet, but I’ve learned how to drop my connection with the newspaper where it makes the loudest clang. I don’t really like doing it, but David’s birthday was an occasion that deserved a bit of chutzpah. He always has plenty, and I never seem to have enough. It is a quality, I reminded myself before reciting my résumé to the maître d’, that I need to cultivate. Updating show times and writing blurbs about hypnotists and lounge singers is okay for the moment, but it’s getting to be time to insist on a promotion.

“Damn, this is impressive,” David said after the hostess seated us at the best table in the room. Champagne arrived automatically, just as the maître d’ had promised. “This is really sweet, Copper. I love you!”

“I love you, too, David. Happy birthday.”

If only that had been the end of the evening. When you start off with a bad concert, does it have to mean you’re stuck with a bad finale? At least David waited until after the chocolate soufflé.

In fact, he waited until we got back to his place.

“We’ve got to talk, Copper,” he said after we’d walked into his kitchen from the garage.

My heart took a swan dive to the floor. Guys never say “We’ve got to talk” unless they’ve signed on with al-Qaeda, gotten indicted for income tax evasion, or they’re about to dump you.

“Haven’t we been talking?” I said. “Isn’t this the part where we take off all our clothes?”

“I mean it. Let’s go into the living room.”

Getting cozy on David’s sofa held undeniable appeal, but first I needed to know just a little more about what was going to hit me.

“Got something to drink?” I said, and we ended up sitting across from each other at the kitchen table over a couple of glasses of ruby port.

“My mother’s weakness,” David said as he recorked the bottle and set it between us. “I never know when my parents might show up, so I always keep some on hand.”

I took a sip. Not bad. I took another. I waited for the blade to fall.

“Rebecca called today,” David said at last.

Damn! I was expecting a Boy Scout hatchet, but this was a double-sided Paul Bunyan axe. Rebecca is David’s not-quite-ex-wife, the person who made me the one thing I have always scorned: an “other woman.”

At least I am not a home wrecker. Rebecca had gone back to New York more than six months earlier, back when David was a coworker I barely knew. He swore their marriage had been dead for a year, and their divorce was “only a formality.” I shouldn’t have bought that line, but it just proves that love really does conquer all. I fell in love, and my so-called principles fell to the wayside.

“We’ve been through this before,” I said. “I thought you only talked to her lawyer.”

David was silent far too long.

“Copper,” he said at last, “I love you.”

Damn, again! I love “I love you,” but don’t expect me to be thrilled when it occurs in the sequence I just reported.

“Remember when I went to visit my parents?”

“Memorial Day.”

David nodded as my stomach knotted.

I didn’t like thinking back to the last week in May, and until now, I thought I’d never have to. David and I had one of our worst fights ever while I was driving him to the airport.

“I’m going to be seeing Rebecca,” he said while we were stopped at a light on Eastern.

My pulse quickened. “Why?”

“She wants to talk. She thinks we can work things out better face to face. She might be right. The lawyers have created a lot of tension.”

“You told me you were done talking to her. You swore.” We were rolling again, my hands gripping the wheel, my heart pounding.

“Copper,” David said. “It’s no big deal. I’m only telling you because I don’t want secrets between us.”

I don’t want Rebecca between us. She’s supposed to be ancient history. Only a technicality.

“Where are you seeing her?”

“Her new place in Scarsdale. She invited me for dinner.”

Fortunately, we were stopped at another red light when he said that. I clutched the wheel and stared straight ahead as a candlelit dining room materialized in my mind’s eye. Along with music and wine and Rebecca, dressed to ensnare …

“Don’t go,” I said.

“Copper, I—”

“I mean it. Don’t go.”

He didn’t speak again until we were pulling up in front of the terminal.

“I’m not sure whether I’ll go or not,” David said. “But it’s my decision.”

A line in the sand.

I stopped at the curb and shifted into park. Two could play that game.

“If you go, we’re done.”

That was the last thing I said to him. We didn’t kiss, and I didn’t reply when David thanked me for the ride. He waited, shrugged, turned, and walked into the terminal.

And there began the longest weekend of my life. Pride, anger, and righteous indignation kept me from calling David, but I couldn’t help longing for his number to appear on my cell phone’s screen. The only thing that did appear was a text message Saturday night informing me that I didn’t need to pick him up at the airport on Monday. It was all I needed to know.

We were done.

And we might have stayed done if I hadn’t woken up Monday morning in a cold sweat. Dreaming about life without David was horrible enough. I couldn’t bear the thought of actually living without him. I grabbed my phone.

“I’m sorry,” I said when he answered. “I never should have—”

“I’m sorry, too,” he said. “I never should have, either.”

I picked him up at the airport later that day. By the time we got to his house in Green Valley, I’d forgiven him for seeing Rebecca, and he had forgiven me for trying to stop him.

As though there had been no hiccup, life resumed.

Until now.

I watched as David took a huge swallow of ruby port. He took another, set his glass down, reached across the table, and took my hands in his.

“Copper, I love you.”

I didn’t say anything. If he was going to tell me he was calling off the divorce, I wasn’t going to help him.

“Rebecca called today. She’s pregnant.”