A day in June: blue skies, puffy clouds, zephyrs?the whole bit.
Gillette stepped out his front door onto the stoop of his brownstone and, just like that, there was a taxi, a Checker no less, lots of legroom, you hardly saw them anymore, pulling up in front of the row houses across the street to let out a fare, as if his fairy godmother had conjured it up. And the driver looked as though English was his first and maybe even only language.
Gillette skipped across and opened the door for a tall thin woman with a Sinéad O'Connor haircut in a white leather cocktail dress with rhinestone straps. Her legs were so long it took fifteen or twenty minutes for her to get them all the way out of the back seat and onto the curb, but Gillette was in no hurry, he wasn't going to die anytime soon, he was enjoying his new career as coachman to the Princess of the Night. A thousand years in the newspaper business was enough already.
"Morning," Gillette said.
"Good morning," the woman said, with just a hint of an accent?a soupçon, ein bißchen, maybe un poquito, he couldn't tell for sure.
"Nice dress," Gillette added.
The woman gave Gillette a smile that was equal parts cocaine and curiosity, and kissed him on the cheek. She had to bend a little to do it, and Gillette was no shrimp. Her lips felt like cool smooth stones. He wished he had the nerve to ask her if he could rub her head.
That was the kind of day it was: those starting out the day and those for whom the day was a wrap?everyone was glad to be alive.
The traffic lights were still set on their overnight sequence and the cab fairly streaked uptown. Sitting on the big wide back seat, looking out the big wide high windows, was like watching a fast-forward version of the ordinary routine slow trek northward. And the driver was a native; with gold-rimmed glasses and a sensitive pout, he looked like an unpublished novelist, hacking until he got his big break. The best thing about him?the best thing?was that he didn't try to peddle his sorry story.
Gillette was at his desk at seven, even earlier than usual on days when he had a column deadline and nothing to write about. By ten, he'd read all the papers, drunk six cups of coffee, and still had no subject. No problem, not to worry, S.O.P. In the old days, when he'd smoked, he would have already gone through two-thirds of a pack of Luckies. Five years, three months, two weeks, but who was counting?
Gillette roamed around the city room, chitchatting with the Metro reporters who were starting to drift in. But they were mostly kids, happy to be in the big time, willing to work as general assignment types, reporters who filled in, plugged holes, went where they were needed at the last minute. Utility infielders. The beat reporters, the men and women who knew the interesting stuff, who wouldn't mind lending Gillette a tidbit, or who owed him one, were out cultivating their sources, developing leads, sleeping off hangovers. They'd be in in early afternoon.
Gillette headed back toward Features, daring to take the shortcut through the Picture Department; past the clannish photographers who squinted at him myopically, needing their cameras in front of their eyes to really be sure that what they were seeing was what they were seeing; past the desks of the caption writers, geniuses at telling in a few words the stories that the pictures, notwithstanding the cliché about their being worth a thousand words, rarely told all by their lonesomes; past the darkrooms with their rosy warning lights, the lab attendants, pale as cave fauna, wearing rubber aprons and rubber gloves, reeking of developers and fixers. Gillette kept his hands close to his sides, so he couldn't be blamed with somehow exposing a frame of film that had been sure to win a Pulitzer.
Gillette had to hold his breath to squeeze through to his desk in the little hiccough of space between the movie critics and the obit writers. The Sunday Department was being painted and the Sunday staff were crammed into Features for a week. Spread out on the Sunday makeup editor's worktable was the next week's fashion layout: a blonde with a bowl haircut in a short black dress walking barefoot on a beach, her arm around a barefoot brunette with wild curls in the same dress in white. Not quite the same dress: the straps were thinner and the neckline was a slight sweetheart, not a scoop.
"Turn you on?" Janet Lane, the Features editor, called from her office. She worked at a standup desk that faced the door and gave her an angle on her staff, and on Gillette's snooping. One of the last of the unrepentant smokers, she had a smoldering unfiltered Camel in her mouth, and didn't even have to blink away the smoke, so inured was she to it. "That girl-girl stuff."
"Women don't know this about men, Lois." Many would-be wits tried to call her that, but Gillette had been the first and only he got away with it. He propped himself in her doorway. "Or maybe they do, and they just can't admit it, because it would be probably be very hard to live if it were so."
"My, my. This is going to be heavy." Lane lighted a new cigarette from her old without missing a puff.
"Men hate women," Gillette said. "And the reason they hate them is that advertising and movies and television and popular fiction and MTV and fashion spreads and lingerie catalogues?"
"Let me see," Lane said, dragging on her cigarette and putting a fingertip cutely to her cheekbone, "have you left anything out?" A not-so-recent facelift, which had left her with features that looked like Dick Tracy's, had begun to go blunt. She looked like a figure in a wax museum on a hot day, the air conditioning on the blink.
"They all portray women," Gillette said, "who are extraordinarily willing."
"'Willing'?"
"Willing."
"To do what?"
"Anything at all, anywhere, any time, wearing whatever, or nothing."
"Whereas real women...."
"Are somewhat less willing. Considerably less. They're willing in moderation, within reason, where nobody gets hurt, nobody gets humiliated."
"In your experience," Lane offered him as qualification.
"In my experience," Gillette agreed. "That there's that...disparity...makes men very very angry."
Gillette shoved himself upright and backed out of Lane's door. "As you were, private. See you around the quad."
"Can I ask you something, Tom?" Lane called after him. She had her cigarette back in her mouth and the ash dangled precipitously.
Gillette turned, hands in pockets, eyebrows raised, waiting, but knowing the question.
"Working in close quarters like this, I've caught up on a lot of Sunday Department gossip. I hear you're back in Sunday makeup every Tuesday morning, like clockwork, like the swallows at Capistrano, ch?"
"Like the bulls at Pamplona?" Gillette slipped in.
Lane glared at him for trying to trip her up. "?checking out the fashion double-truck."
"You asking me why that is?"
"Yeah. Why is that?"
Gillette shrugged. "I'm a cross-dresser."
Janet Lane put her head back laughed. Ash, dislodged from her cigarette, drifted down onto her lapels like the snows of yesteryear.
Gillette worked the phones for a while, but his usual sources were either out or empty, so he took another walk, dropping in at Sports to read the Tour de France night lead on the AP wire.
The names?foreign names; Americans were faring badly this year?meant nothing to him. But the accounts of rigor and accomplishment absorbed him as always. They were climbing Alpe d'Huez, which was always fun to say even though Gillette wasn't quite sure how to pronounce it.
You say dwee-ay
And I say dwee-ehz.
You say oy-ay
And I say oyez.
It all depends on?
"Interested in bike racing?" Ryan O'Sullivan, one of the news clerks, was putting a new roll of paper in a nearby teletype machine, and craned to see what Gillette was reading. "Not many Americans are. I race in the park on Saturday mornings."
"I ride for fitness," Gillette said, sucking his stomach in, trying to look fit. "Twenty miles, between sixteen and eighteen miles an hour, depending on the wind and the terrain."
"Eighteen miles an hour is a challenge," Ryan began generously. Then he added, "By yourself, in a head wind." Meaning: You slow old fart.
Gillette smiled. "By yourself, in a head wind, crossing Sixth Avenue is a challenge."
The young man flushed. "I just meant?"
"I know what you meant," Gillette said. "We should go riding some weekend. I ride alone, usually, but I like to ride with someone; it makes me ride better."
"What do you ride?" Ryan asked.
"A Trek. You?"
"A Masi."
Gillette winced. "Maybe I'll just come watch you race. I don't want to slow you down. What time Saturday?"
"Pretty early. Six-thirty."
"Umm. Pretty early."
Ryan O'Sullivan straightened the paper, set the bail, closed the top of the machine. Then he faced Gillette, jaw set. "Mister Gillette?"
"Yes, Ryan?"
"I just wanted to say I, uh, appreciated the piece you wrote the other day."
He could only mean the only recent controversial piece, about a man, middle-aged, respectable, successful, "a bachelor," a closet homosexual and then some, so terrified of his homosexuality that his only gay experiences had taken place in his imagination.
Fearing he had contracted pneumonia, the man?Gillette had called him by a pseudonym, Gavin Byrne, an elaborate pun, which no one would have understood even if Gillette had explained it, on his real name?went to a hospital emergency room, where he was asked, among other things, and routinely, his sexual orientation. He said what he had never been able to say to anyone, that he was homosexual, and he was put in the AIDS unit for testing. He was HIV-negative and had merely a bad cold.
Having completely recovered, Gavin Byrne had begun going for the first time in his life to go to gay bars. He was still frightened?with good reason, certainly?of losing his virginity by taking up oral and/or anal intercourse and he would tell would-be pickups that he had been hospitalized for the virus, and as a result had taken a vow of celibacy. Gavin Byrne's psychoanalyst, who had been Gillette's source for the story, told Gillette that his patient was "the last virgin and the only beneficiary of AIDS."
So here was young Ryan O'Sullivan trying to tell Gillette by implication that he was gay and wondering was Gillette too, to have written such a piece, and what should he do about it if he were, if they were. Things had not been so complicated when Gillette came to the paper as a cub reporter on the Metro desk, back in the Stone Age. Then, all the women who ought to wear them, and a few who ought not to, wore miniskirts and minidresses, and all the men (who wore bell-bottoms) had devoted much of their free time to trying to get into a position where they could see up those skirts and dresses. The men and the woman agreed, whether they agreed or not, with the assistant metro editor who spiked a story on the first-ever gay parade, saying the marchers were "just a bunch of fags."
The P.A. system crackled and the copy boy on switchboard duty intoned Gillette's name. There was a call for him.
"Glad you liked the piece, Ryan," Gillette said. "Good luck with your racing. I'll see you around."
"See you around," Ryan said.
Gillette picked up a phone in sports and called the editorial switchboard. The call was from inside and it was just a message: Don Reynolds, the managing editor, wanted to see him.
Gillette retraced his steps, passed the library and the wire room, then cut through Financial on his way to Reynolds's office, which was right smack in the middle of things.
"Hi, sailor."
Sally Holt blocked his way, scooting her chair out from behind her desk and putting a leg out across the aisle, a foot on the desk opposite. The action bared her leg to mid-thigh. It was a strong leg, shapely, a little on the short side, but well-proportioned.
"Hi, Sal."
Holt took her tortoiseshell glasses off and parked them in her hair. Her fist was full of wire service copy, her desk was somewhere down there under drifts of annual reports, quarterly statements, J. Crew and Tweeds catalogues, a squash racquet, an American Heritage dictionary open to bumblebee buoy buoyancy burgrave.
Her stretch to get in his way made demands on her surplice top that it had not been designed for; her bra was an elaborate floral print.
She saw that Gillette looked down her dress and she clutched the bodice shut. "Think of that as a sneak preview. We can schedule a private screening at your convenience."
"I like your haircut," Gillette said.
Her hair, shoulder-length a week ago, had been cut short and perky, like the rest of her. He did like it, but he also wanted to talk about something that would make him stop wondering about what else he'd seen?the bright red scratch marks on Sally Holt's chest.
She wanted to run a hand through her hair, to primp it, but her hands were occupied. "Thanks," was all she could think to say. She was off-balance now, unable to rejoin, flatfooted, wordless.
Gillette bent from the waist to read from the dictionary. A burgrave was 1. the appointed governor of a town or military fortress. 2. the hereditary lord of a town and its surroundings. [German Burggraf]
"Are you wearing stockings?" Gillette stood up straight. "Or are those panty hose?"
Holt blushed, hoist with her own petard. She took her leg down and rolled back behind her desk, smoothing the skirt of her dress, her rowdy leg all of a sudden demure. "Stockings," she said, suspicious but literal. She was a financial writer, after all.
"Are you wearing a garter belt?"
"....They're garterless," she said as evenly as humanly possible.
"And what do you call that color?"
Holt giggled nervously. "God, Tom. You're scary sometimes."
"No, really. I'm interested."
She flicked her glasses down and lifted her hem an inch. Just an inch, no more. "I call it gray. The manufacturer probably calls it pewter, or some goddamn thing."
"Thunder," Gillette said. "I saw a catalogue that called a color 'thunder.' 'Thunder' and 'Venus.'"
"Interested, why?" Holt said.
"I'm...writing a book."
"About what? Stockings?"
"Just about life, but stockings are part of life."
"You scare me," Holt said. "You really do scare me."
Gillette backed away. "Excuse me, please, Sally. I've been paged."
Holt slammed the wire copy down on her desk, setting off a number of avalanches. She ignored them. "I'm getting tired of this. Don't say 'Of what?' Of chasing you, that's what. Are you ever going to call me, Tom?"
Gillette resisted making a joke about calling her Tom.
"Are you?
"I'll call you," he said. He gave her a Fred Astaire salute and quickstepped away, feet flashing.
)
First U.S. Publication of this prize winning crime novel. Jerry Oster is celebrated for creating memorable, vulnerable, quirky protagonists like Jake Neuman (Sweet Justice) and Joe Cullen (Internal Affairs). Now meet his most engaging, off-beat, reluctant hero yet, reporter Tom Gillette, in Oster's newest book, Nightfall, already a prize winner in Germany for best International Crime Novel of the Year. When a local business man takes a tumble from a roof, the question of "did he fall or was he pushed?" becomes all consuming for Gillette, a movie buff with a nose for news, an eye for beautiful women, and an unerring instinct for trouble. Gillette's search for the truth entangles him with Sharon Douglas, whose apartment the business man was visiting at the time of the fatal fall, influential attorney and former D.A. Pete Costello, Sally Holt, an ambitious financial journalist on the way up, a homeless man named John Doe, the comely police sergeant Lee Monday, and a host of other intriguing, well-drawn characters. But, as Gillette untangles the motive behind the businessman's death and gets closer and closer to the killer's identity, what he discovers makes him wonder if he really wants to know the truth after all. Find out why The Chicago Sun-Times hails Oster for his "colorful characters," Kirkus for "Hip--evocative--bravura dialogue," Women's Wear Daily for "urbane, witty updates on the 'hard-boiled' detective novel," and Rex Reed for " force, maturity--wisdom--and fresh insights."
