Closet Case (Robert Rodi Essentials) Read Online Free PDF Page A

them in her office, to be discovered by Elsa, the office manager (who was certainly the type to go and look). But didn’t all art directors steal supplies all the time?
    Then he considered that he might plant cocaine in her desk. But hell, half of the management team would just offer to buy it from her.
    Or, he could spread a rumor that she was mentally unstable and had been fired from her last job for irrational behavior; but that came pretty close to describing the work history of about half the creatives in the advertising business.
    By the time he caught himself considering ways he might slip cyanide into her morning Diet Coke, he decided he’d better stop this deranged panicking and just face the problem like a man. If he couldn’t bring himself to trust Donna, he’d just have to talk to her, tell her flat out that he’d appreciate her keeping mum about his unorthodox sexuality. It was his private business, after all. Wasn’t it?
    Well, wasn’t it?

3
    Lionel pulled up in front of the Victorian six-flat he called home. It was only nine-thirty but it felt like four in the morning. As he let himself in the front door and began his lonely trek up the stairs, he tried not to think about Tracy anymore, and certainly not about Donna. All he wanted was to settle into bed, dial a 1-900 number, and ask if they had any hot priests he could talk to. Would they think he was kinky? Might they laugh at him? Well, he’d risk it. As disturbed as he was about having been caught at The Hague by Donna, he didn’t actually regret having been there, not with Father Todd still gyrating seductively in his head.
    “Forgive me, Father, for I haven’t sinned,” he muttered to himself as he rounded the second-floor landing and continued the ascent to his apartment. “At least, not nearly enough for someone my age.”
    He sighed mournfully as he put his key in the lock. To his surprise, the door swung open without his having raised the latch. He furrowed his brow, took a step inside, and set his briefcase on the floor of the hallway. The lights in the apartment were already lit. “Hello?” he called out, shutting the door behind him.
    “Oh, Lionel, hello,” came a voice from the far end of the railroad apartment. Then Yolanda Reynoso darted out of the kitchen, dressed to kill. “I am sorry for being here so late,” she said breathily, her stiletto heels clacking against the hardwood floors as she scurried down the hall to greet him. “I heard Spencer just screaming and screaming, so I came up to see if something was the matter with him.” Spencer was Lionel’s pet cockatoo; since Yolanda lived in the apartment directly below his, she couldn’t help hearing the bird’s blood-curdling shrieks.
    Lionel undid his Dan Quayle tie and let it hang like a stole around his neck. “You don’t have to apologize,” he said. “I appreciate you coming up to look after him.” Yolanda worked most nights as a cashier in a science-fiction bookstore, so Lionel had given her a set of keys to his apartment and invited her to come up during the day and visit his bird. “I mean, if it weren’t for you, he’d get no companionship at all.”
    She smiled brilliantly, then leaned over, kissed him on the cheek, and headed back to the kitchen. Lionel followed her, appreciating — in a purely aesthetic way — the gorgeous roundness of what Toné would call her derriére, which tonight was being hugged by an exquisitely clingy rose cocktail dress. She had also donned dangly-jangly earrings and teased her hair into the kind of wild, Medusa-tendril state that drove straight men into a condition of sexual frenzy. I wish someone from the office could’ve been here, he thought, to see me greeted with a kiss by a woman who looks like this!
    “You look sensational,” he said, doffing his jacket and slipping it over the back of one of the cane chairs in his sparsely furnished kitchen. “Going out?”
    “Yes, I am having a late dinner with Bob.”