"Night Warriors - 02 - Death Dream" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

'Is he all right?' she whispered. СI wondered where you were.'
'He's okay.' John tiptoed back out of the bedroom and closed the door. He kissed Jennifer on the forehead; he still loved the freshness of their marriage, the excitement of loving somebody new. The little tyke just scratched the wallpaper. Did you see it? I'm going to flay him alive tomorrow. Forty-five dollars a roll, and he's torn it.'
He led her back along the corridor and showed her the scratches.
Jennifer frowned at them. 'Did Lenny do those?'
Jennifer reached up and touched them. They look awfully high up for Lenny to have done them. And he must have used a terrific amount of strength, to dig in that deep.'
'Who do you think you are - Sherlock Holmes?'
Jennifer smiled, and gave him a quick kiss. 'Don't be angry with him, John. I'm sure he didn't mean to do it.'
'He didn't mean to dig half a dozen darn great grooves in the wall? It probably took him most of the evening!'
They went down the curving, white-banistered staircase. The corridor and the stairs were carpeted in pale apricot, and the walls were covered in green-and-apricot flowers.
'It couldn't have taken him any time at all,' Jennifer remarked. 'He was playing Trivial Pursuit with me for most of the evening. Then he had his bath, came down for his milk and cookies, and went straight to bed.'
'Well, maybe he did it yesterday evening and I just didn't notice it before,' John grumbled. 'Do you want a drink?'
Jennifer went through to the sitting room and sat down. 'I'll have a martini if you're having one.'
John went across to the drinks table. A chilled glass jug was waiting on the tray. That was the only domestic service that Jennifer ever did for him: mix him a jug of martinis so that it would be ready when he came home from the office.
'You have a spare roll of that wallpaper, don't you?' Jennifer asked. СI could get Mr.. Kahn to come around to fix it tomorrow.'
John poured drinks. 'Ah ... I don't know. It's not the actual damage so much. It's the fact that Lenny felt like doing it.'
'Maybe he didn't do it.'
'It sure as hell wasn't you, and it sure as hell wasn't me. So who else is there?'
'Come on, don't get upset,' Jennifer said. 'He's only a boy, after all.'
John swallowed ice-cold gin and shrugged, then sat on the sofa beside her and kissed her. 'Did I tell you that Arnie Walters is thinking of buying himself a Jeep?' he told her. 'He says he wants to drive around the country, answering the call of the wild.'
'Arnie? In a Jeep? I can't imagine it.'
'Bill Chapman said Arnie can't even answer a straight-forward question, let alone the call of the wild.' He reached behind him and picked up the paper from the table in back of the couch. 'It looks like they're going to go ahead with that rebuilding at the Annenberg Center.'
Jennifer smiled and watched him as he took his half-glasses out of his shirt pocket. She didn't mind the small rituals of his arrival home from work; in fact, she found them reassuring. He wasn't the kind of man who allowed himself to live in a rut. He frequently took her out for unexpected dinners-for-two, or drove them out to the Brandywine Valley or the Poconos on the spur of the moment, so she quite happily allowed him the nightly procedure of pouring a martini, opening the paper that he spent all day producing but never had the time to look at, taking out his glasses, and sitting silently for a quarter of an hour, reading.
Although they had met only nine months ago, John and Jennifer were as comfortable and at peace with each other as if they had been rubbing along together for years. This was partly because they were both accustomed to living with somebody else: Jennifer had been divorced four years ago from her alcoholic husband, Pete. But they were well matched, too. Both were forty, both young-looking for their age, both interested in music and theater and food and art. When they were first going out together, they had practically lived in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
John was dark-haired and stockily built, with a largish nose and deeply cleft chin. He looked more like a carpenter or a tobacco farmer than a newspaper executive. There was a photograph on the bureau of him wearing a plaid shirt and a denim cap, and anybody could have been forgiven for mistaking him for the narrow-eyed man in the Camel advertisement who lights his cigarette with a burning twig.
Jennifer was ash-blond, very lean, with wide gray-green eyes and a mouth that - in John's words -always looked as if it were kissing or gasping, or both. She had been working as a secretary at the Philadelphia News when John had first arrived there; now she ran a small perfumery store next to the Head House Inn on Society Hill.
She was smart in appearance, smart in behavior. It was she who had decorated the house in whites and peaches, filled it with antique furniture in figured walnut and palest oak. It always mystified John that she had stayed married for so long to a ranting, blustering loser like Pete Marcowicz. Well - not so much mystified him as made him jealous, although he wouldn't have cared to admit it.
But they lived together now in this freshly remodeled three-storey colonial house on Third Street, feeling at last as if life had rewarded them with what they deserved. All that John admitted pining for now was a BMW 5-Series and a Corum wristwatch.
As the wall-clock in hall chimed eight, Jennifer finished her martini and said, 'How about some dinner? It's tuna salad, that's all.'
'Are you watching my waistline again?'
I'm thinking about your alimentary canal.'
'If I eat any more tuna, my alimentary canal is going to start looking like a rerun of Flipper.'
Jennifer lifted his reading glasses off his nose. 'Flipper was a dolphin, not a tuna.'
They sat down to supper in the Dutch-tiled kitchen. John opened a bottle of Chablis, and poured out two generous glassfuls.
Jennifer said, СI'm going to be selling products for men starting next month. It's a new range, natural skin-care for the gentleman in your life.'
'You're looking at me as if you think I need natural skin-care,' John protested.
'Every man does,Т Jennifer said, smiling. 'You wax your car, you polish your shoes, you creosote your fence - why don't you lavish even a tenth of that kind of attention on your face?'
СI just think I'd look kind of stupid with a creosoted face, that's all.'
'I'll bring you some samples,' Jennifer persisted. "There's cucumber wrinkle cream; partridge-pea moisturizer; and some really fabulous preshave lotion made from evening lychnis.'
John was reaching across the table for the chopped onions when the ceiling was shaken by a thunderous banging, followed by the sound of smashing glass. The banging was so loud that he thought for one terrifying moment that the whole house was going to collapse on top of them.
'What the hell was that?' he shouted.
'My God,' said Jennifer, white-faced. 'It sounds like the roof's fallen in.'
John ran across the hallway and bounded up the stairs. When they'd remodeled the house, they had taken out three upstairs walls in order to create a home gym and an en-suite bathroom. He was convinced that he was going to find that the steel joists had given way, and that their bedroom complex was filled with rubble and open to the sky.
He pushed open the bedroom door, with Jennifer close behind him, then stopped and stared at the bedroom in total shock and bewilderment. He couldn't even think of anything to say. He stepped over broken lamps and torn cushions and tipped-out drawers, and he found it almost impossible to believe what he was looking at.
The ceiling hadn't collapsed. There was no structural damage. But this recently pristine, freshly decorated bedroom now looked as if it had been attacked by a gang of berserk hooligans. The white duck-down bedcover had been slashed open, again and again; the pillows had been ripped apart; every mirror had been smashed. Every picture had been torn out of its frame and crumpled up. The wallpaper had been torn down in long strips; the plaster was gouged.
Inside the closets, every single article of clothing -every dress, every shirt, every coat, every shoe - had been slashed or wrenched to pieces. John picked up a handkerchief. Even that had been ripped. He let it drop to the floor, and looked numbly around the rest of the room. In the broken mirror behind the bed, his reflection looked pale and peculiarly distorted, as if he were a hunchback.
'I just don't understand it,' Jennifer whispered. They must have been tearing this whole place apart while you and I were - downstairs, just drinking.'
Mechanically, John said, 'I don't know how they could have done it. How the hell did they get in, without us even noticing? And what the hell have they done it for?'
'You don't think they're still here?' said Jennifer, shaking. 'You don't think Ц Lenny!' she shouted. 'Lenny!Т
John said, 'Stay here!' He went to the bedside table, and fumblingly unlocked it with fingers that refused to do what he wanted them to do. Thank God the vandals hadn't broken into this one drawer. He lifted up the copies of Reader's Digest and took out his .38 revolver, the one that he'd bought after they had been burgled in Jersey, three days after Virginia's death, and all her jewelry had been taken.
'John, for goodness' sake,' Jennifer begged.