The burnt orange sunrise bam-4 Read online

  The burnt orange sunrise

  ( Berger and Mitry - 4 )

  David Handler

  The burnt orange sunrise

  David Handler

  PROLOGUE

  “I am only going to tell you this one more time,” she said to him in a quiet, determined voice. “That mean old woman just has to die. You know it, I know it, we both know it. Do you get what I’m telling you?”

  “I get it,” he responded irritably. “I’ve gotten it every single time you’ve said it, and this is, like, the third time.”

  She watched him carefully as they idled there in the Old Say-brook train station parking lot, hearing the icy pellets go tappity-tap-tap on the roof of the car. “Well, what do you say? That’s what I want to know.”

  What he said was, “We should get back before the roads get any worse.” Though he made no move to put the car in gear. Just sat there behind the wheel, his gloved hands gripping it loosely. “We’ll be missed.”

  “Not until we talk this out,” she insisted, staring out at the floodlit rail platform, which gave off a ghostly yellow glow in the frigid night.

  The dashboard clock said it was only a few minutes past nine. It might as well have been three in the morning. Absolutely no one else was out. It was a weeknight. The wind was blowing. A steady frozen rain was falling, and it was supposed to turn to snow overnight. There were only a half dozen cars in the parking lot, left behind by Amtrak passengers who would be real unhappy when they returned in a day or so to find them encased in an impenetrable shell of ice. The station was a tiny one, situated almost exactly midway between New York and Boston on the Northeast Corridor. The much-hyped high-speed Acela did not even stop here. Only the occasional local train, none this time of night. The station office was shuttered. Old Saybrook was a shoreline town popular with summer people. During the warm, sun-drenched months, this parking lot was a joyous, bustling place, a place for animated helios and rushed, giggty good-byes.

  Tonight, it was a cold, dark place to talk about murder.

  A few businesses were clustered around the parking lot. A dry cleaner, newsstand, a health club. And the Chinese restaurant where they had just eaten. They had been the only customers in the place. She’d had beef with broccoli. He’d had moo shu pork. Also two beers. She could smell the beer on his breath as they sat there with the engine running, the car’s interior growing warm as the heater took hold.

  He had been maddeningly quiet all through dinner. She was the one who did all of the talking. And all of the thinking. This was not something new.

  “More than anything, I hate what she does to you,” she said, trying a new approach.

  “Me? What does she do to me?”

  “It’s what she doesn’t do. She doesn’t appreciate you. Doesn’t listen to you. Doesn’t know you. She just takes you for granted, like you’re her loyal hound.”

  He stuck out his lower lip like a hurt little boy. Sometimes he seemed so very young to her. Except, God knew, he wasn’t anymore. Neither of them was. “That’s something I’m used to. Doesn’t bother me. I don’t expect her to respect me.”

  “Well, you should. And you shouldn’t have to put up with her. Neither of us should.” Her eyes studied him expectantly. Still no reaction. Nothing. “Look, I’m just being honest, okay? Once the old lady’s gone, we’ll have everything we’ve ever wanted. And that’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

  “True enough,” he allowed, following her lead at long last.

  Always, it was up to her to take the lead. Always, it had been this way when it came to men. And she was fine with it. Really, she was. Way back when she was a schoolgirl, she’d been utterly floored when her class had read Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. What an impression that awful book had made on her. Those five sisters sitting there all pure and dewy-eyed and silly in their white frocks, tender young breasts heaving as they read their sonnets and waited and waited for some kind, handsome young lord to ride up on his horse and sweep them away, one by one. Not going to happen to me, she remembered saying to herself as she whipped through the pages, shaking her head in disbelief. Never, ever going to happen to me. Whatever I am going to get in this life I will get because I go out and get it myself.

  Especially men. Men didn’t decide things. Women did. This was something she had known since she was very young, and saw how they would respond to her. How she could get anything she wanted if she simply smiled at them a certain way. Men were easy. Men were slow. She’d made the first move with virtually every one of them she had been with in her whole life. If she’d waited for them to make the move, she’d still be waiting, book of sonnets in hand. And she had zero tolerance for those women who complained that they couldn’t “find” a man. Bull. Any woman who really, truly wanted a man just had to go and get him. So what if he wasn’t, strictly speaking, available at the time? If there was one thing she’d learned in life, it was this: No man who is genuinely worth having is ever actually out there on the open market. He always belongs to someone else when you first meet him. You just have to take him away from her, that’s all. He isn’t going to be handed to you.

  Life isn’t going to be handed to you.

  Which was what brought her to here and now-this car, this night, this move. Because time was running out for her. She wasn’t getting any younger. She still hadn’t gotten everything she deserved, and it wasn’t fair. No, it wasn’t. Especially when she thought about how many opportunities she’d let slide on by because she was waiting for something better, someone better. Especially when she looked at what all of her friends had. Compared to them, her life still constituted a total failure. And the window of opportunity was sliding shut faster and faster. And when she allowed herself to think about it, she felt an overwhelming sense of desperation that bordered on outright panic.

  She needed this. This was her chance. Maybe her very last. And she was not about to let it pass her by. Trouble was, she couldn’t do it alone. She needed him on board. Him thinking it was going to be about the two of them.

  “Once the old lady’s gone,” she repeated slowly, “we’ll have everything we’ve ever wanted.”

  “I don’t disagree.” After a brief silence, he added, “As long as there’s a we.”

  So that was it. He sensed something.

  “Why wouldn’t there be?”

  He looked over at her, swallowing. He did not have an intelligent face. He did have a gentle one. He was really very sweet. Not many people knew this. “You tell me.”

  “What’s bothering you?”

  “Money changes everything, that’s what.”

  “Well, it won’t change us. We’re together in this. We’ll always be together.”

  “How do I know that?”

  “Because I just said so, that’s how. Have I ever once lied to you?”

  “No, you’ve never lied to me.”

  Meaning he thought she had lied to other people. Okay, maybe she had. But never him. Or herself. She was always honest with herself, and that was crucially important. Because the people who lied to themselves were the ones who did the real damage in this world and ought to be punished. As long as you were straight with yourself, you could look right in the mirror and say, This is not wrong.

  “What about him?” he wondered, gazing at her accusingly.

  “Not to worry, I can handle him. That poor man thinks he’s in love.”

  “And you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Do you love him?”

  “God, we’ve been over this a million times,” she said, her voice rising with exasperation. “I don’t even like him-you know that. He’s just a means to an end.”

  “How do I know that’s n
ot what I am?” he demanded. “How do I know you don’t say the exact same things about me when you two are in bed together? How do I know that?”

  “Everything I do, I do for us,” she responded patiently. “You know this.”

  “Do I?”

  She reached for his gloved hand and squeezed it. “There’s only one man in my life, and that man is you. This won’t change us, I swear. We’re for keeps.”

  “So what’ll you do about him?”

  “I can manage him.”

  “How?”

  She saw a glow now coming from the west, growing brighter and still brighter. And then a sleek, low-slung silver Acela rocketed past on its way to Boston. As it shot by, she could make out snapshot glimpses of figures seated at the windows, snug and warm. People who were going somewhere while she idled here in this car, going nowhere. And then the train had gone by and there was only the silence and the darkness and them.

  “That’s no concern of yours,” she said, chewing fretfully on her lower lip, terrified that he was getting cold feet. He had to feel right about this. Since he was a man, that meant he had to feel it had all been up to him to decide. Only then would he get behind it.

  “Well, what if they catch us?”

  “They won’t. Why would they? She’s old and sick.”

  “They won’t do tests or anything?”

  “You mean like an autopsy? They only do those if there’s something fishy about how a person dies, which there won’t be. Trust me. Or if the family requests it, which they obviously won’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because everyone’s waiting for her to die, silly.”

  “So why don’t we just wait?”

  “Because we can’t.”

  “Why not?” he persisted.

  “Because she can’t get away with what she’s doing to us.”

  He sat there in silence for a long moment. “Well, no one lives forever,” he finally conceded, his voice hollow. “We’re all going to die soon enough. Each and every one of us. We’ll just be kind of easing her along. I guess that’s one way you can look at it.”

  “Please don’t get all gloomy on me. You know it makes me crazy.”

  “I’m not, I’m just… We’re talking about taking another human life.”

  “Not human. Her”

  “Will she feel any pain?”

  “Not one bit. She’ll never even know what hit her.”

  He ran a gloved hand over his face, distraught. “I don’t know, it feels so wrong.”

  “There’s no such thing as wrong. There’s bold and there’s frightened.” She studied him carefully in the dimly lit car. “Which are your

  “Right now, I’d say you have balls enough for both of us.”

  She let out a soft laugh. She had a delicious laugh. She had been told this by any number of men. “It’s the right move. We need to do this.”

  He gazed at her pleadingly. “How do I know for sure that you love me?”

  So that was it. She relaxed now, knowing what he wanted, knowing that everything was going to be okay. Turning in her seat, she reached over and gently unzipped his pants, searching for him with her deft sure fingers, caressing him, squeezing him, feeling him grow under her touch.

  “There, there…” she whispered lovingly.

  He drew his breath in but remained stone-still, as if he were afraid she’d stop if he so much as moved a muscle.

  “There, there…”

  She wriggled sideways and knelt before him, taking him deep into her mouth, teasing him with her lips and tongue. Slowly, she moved her head up and down on him, up and down. Steadily, his breathing grew more rapid.

  It bothered some women, performing this particular task on a man. A couple of her friends disliked it so intensely they flat-out refused to do it, even for their own husbands. Her it had never bothered. In fact, she found an open-mouthed kiss to be infinitely more off-putting. Some guy jamming his tongue into her mouth, forcing his spit and his gastric juices down her throat. That was supposed to be romantic? No, for her this was nothing. Besides, when she had a man’s zipper down, she was in charge of him. And she was always happiest when she was. She knew this about herself.

  He climaxed in no time, his hands gripping her head tightly, feet kicking out at the floorboards, that strange gurgling noise of his coming from his throat. Then she zipped him back up, gave him an affectionate pat and sat back in her seat.

  He stared straight ahead, waiting for his breathing to return to normal. “I love you,” he said, his voice painfully earnest. “You do know that, don’t you?”

  “I do,” she said. “And I love you back.”

  He put the car in gear and eased it out into the darkness of the parking lot, away from the floodlit platform.

  “So what do you say?” she asked, gazing at him.

  “I say the mean old woman’s in our way,” he replied solemnly. “And she has to die. She just has to.”

  Delighted, she leaned over and kissed his cheek and said, “So she’ll die.”

  NEXT MORNING

  CHAPTER 1

  It was Mitch’s first stay on the Connecticut Gold Coast in February-the official off-season. As in a lot of Dorset, locals shut off their water, bled their pipes and headed somewhere-anywhere-else. Mitch was discovering that there was a very good reason for this. Those refreshing summer sea breezes off of Long Island Sound were now howling thirty-five-miles-per-hour arctic blasts that never let up. Especially out on Big Sister Island, where Mitch’s quaint little antique post-and-beam carriage house offered very little in the way of insulation. Make that none. His big bay windows, with their breathtaking water views in three different directions, offered so little wind resistance that they might as well have been thrown open wide. It was very difficult to keep the temperature inside his house above a gusty fifty-five degrees, even with the furnace running nonstop and the fireplace stoked with hickory logs.

  And then there were the storms.

  Like the wicked Nor’easter that blew in on the last day of January, flooding his kitchen and crawl space, ripping half of the roof from his barn and, for good measure, washing away a section of the quarter-mile wooden causeway that connected the forty-acre island to the mainland, rendering it unsafe for vehicular traffic. The only way Mitch could cross it now was on foot.

  All of this plus it happened to be the snowiest winter anyone under the age of ninety could remember. It seemed as if every three days another six inches fell. Mitch had personally measured seventy-eight inches since the first flakes appeared back on Thanksgiving Day. The banks of plowed snow that edged the town roads had to be ten feet high.

  In spite of these rigors, Mitch Berger, lead film critic for the most prestigious, and therefore the lowest-paying, of New York’s three daily newspapers, stayed on. This was his off-season, after all. The season when the studios released only what was officially known in the movie trade as “Post-Holiday Crap.” Nothing was due out until Memorial Day that didn’t star either Martin Lawrence or David Spade. Or, God forbid, Martin Lawrence and David Spade. Besides, Mitch was finding the beach a surprisingly beautiful place to be in the winter. He had never seen a full moon shine so brightly as it did on a cover of pure white snow. He had never seen sunsets such as these; the crystal-clear winter sky offered up such awe-inspiring pink-and-red light shows that he’d taken to photographing them many afternoons. Honestly, he couldn’t understand why anyone would want to leave such a winter wonderland.

  So he stayed. He also had his responsibilities, after all. He’d promised the other islanders, all of whom had migrated south to the Peck family compound in Hobe Sound, that he’d keep an eye on their houses for them. Plus three of Dorset’s elderly shut-ins were counting on him to deliver their groceries. This, Mitch had learned, was part of the social contract when you lived in a small town. Those who were able-bodied looked out for those who were not.

  And Mitch was not exactly idle professionally. He was busy making notes for Noth
ing But Happy Endings, a book he wanted to write about the pernicious influence of Hollywood escapism on contemporary American politics. Washington and Hollywood were one and the same, Mitch felt. The nation’s halls of power nothing more than sound stages, its politicians merely actors mouthing carefully scripted, substance-free dialogue, its journalists nothing more than compliant pitchmen eager to peddle that day’s feel-good story line. Every policy issue, no matter how knotty and complex, was now being reduced to a simplistic, highly commercial morality tale. Even war itself was nothing more than just another cable entertainment choice, complete with blood-free battles, awesome computer-generated graphics and soaring background music. As Mitch had watched Hollywood’s escapist mind-set steadily engulf and devour the nation’s public discourse, he’d found himself growing more and more alarmed, because if there was one thing he knew, it was this:

  Life is not a movie.

  And so he wanted to write about it. At age thirty-two, Mitch had written three books so far, all of them lively film encyclopedias that were popular with armchair video and DVD fans. But he had never written a serious book, a book that required a lot of long walks on the beach and solitary evenings spent before the fire, searching his soul while he squeezed out notes on his beloved sky-blue Fender Stratocaster. It was something he needed to do. Mitch wanted his career to be about something more than a mountain of film trivia. Sure, he could readily provide the answer to a question like, say, “Who is Sonny Bupp?” (Sonny Bupp was the child performer who played Orson Welles’s son in Citizen Kane.) But so what? Mitch was a critic, not a game-show contestant. Partly, his desire to write Nothing But Happy Endings was fueled by the new, socially involved life he was leading in Dorset. Partly it was the influence of Dorset’s tall, gifted and babe-a-licious resident trooper, Desiree Mitry, whose commitment to her art and her work was boundless.

  The only problem was that he really couldn’t seem to get started on it. Oh, he had lots of ideas. Just no coherent structure or vehicle for them. No outline. No plan. No, well, book. Possibly, he didn’t have it in him. Possibly, he was out of his league. Such thoughts had occurred to him. But he would not give in to them. Just kept on walking the beach and making more notes, believing that his breakthrough would soon come.