"Mitchell Smith - Daydreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Mitchell)

old boiler room, and burned.

The divorce had been painful for Ellie, who had thought herself in love
with her handsome, clever husband. They had been together for six
years, Klein almost always humorous, joking with her over thousands of
small matters, but grimly and pleasantly serious in bed. He had
occasionally taken advantage of her long legs to have her parade before
him in high-heeled shoes, garter belt, and wide-brim straw hat, kicking
and prancing like a horse, which motions made her small breasts shake,
her pale buttocks, already slightly slack, tremble whitely in the
shadowed light of their bedroom lamp. Or he would ask her to march
through the whole of their neat apartment-to no music but her soft
panting, her faint gasps of effort as she danced.

After such performances, he had the habit of taking her strongly. Twice,
he'd anointed her between the buttocks and entered her there, pleasing
himself and hurting her, then pleasing them both.

The divorce had come, for Ellie, from a nearly cloudless sky-hazed only
a little by their not having had children. A decision-to
postpone-they'd both agreed to, Ellie then as ambitious as her husband,
though less fitted for it. "I like you, El . . ." he'd said. "I
probably still love you-but you simply don't interest me anymore." He'd
said that as merrily as he'd joked and jibed with her for many years.
He'd smiled.

Ellie thought of killing herself with her service revolver; then, in a
day or two, thought of killing him-but did neither. to her. In the
Klein moved out, leaving the apartment.

In the years that followed, Ellie saw him eleven times--twice in the
street (by accident), once on divorce business, and a number of times by
waiting under a dry cleaner's marquee across from his firm's offices off
Wall Street. She didn't try to speak to him on those occasions of
observation, didn't let him see her-and finally, on the last of these,
saw him walk from the building with a small, beautiful, dark-haired
woman in a handsome charcoal silk suit.

On the day the tenement burned, a summer day and blazing, Ellie had left
the Juvenile Authority office-had been there for an hour and a half
talking with Elena Munoz about a boy named Elacio, who'd molested
another, younger child-left the office, and was walking west on 109th
when she'd heard a dying siren, saw in the next block a small gray-black
plume of smoke, and went to the scene.

The Fire Department had been there almost an hour, the men hustling over
a flooded street among pythons of hose, hurrying in and out through the
building's main doorway-and at the corner, by short extension ladder
through a smashed-in second-story window-all of them clanking with tanks
and tools. Four patrol cars from the precinct were now at the scene as