Sweet Women Lie Read Online Free PDF

hooted and applauded. That ten-dollar cover will do it every time.
    I wasn’t swept away. As loud as the music got, I kept hearing the climate-controlled silence of a private room at St. John’s, interrupted irregularly by the apologetic bleep of the heart monitor. As bright as the lights got, I saw only the forced twilight of a room with the blinds drawn and a pale sunken figure, whiter than the sheets it lay on, with tubes in its potato-shaped nose and wires plugged to its narrow hairless chest and bony left arm and the slow flutter of the chest like a parked butterfly pulsing its wings in the final moments of its seventy-two-hour lifespan. The chest, like the wings, would continue to rise and fall tenuously, quiveringly, rise and fall and rise until — no one could predict when, even within a beat — it would rise and fall the same as it had been doing for hours, days, months; rise and fall and then not rise. The monitor would go to a flat whine and there would be some fevered activity for a while involving oxygen and a crash cart, and then someone would roll back the cobwebby eyelids and a head would shake and the monitor would be switched off and the tubes removed. The body would be wheeled out, the sheets changed, and after fourteen months (or sixteen or eighteen or two years or however long it took) someone else would occupy the bed within hours and it would be as if he had never been there at all.
    Sam Lucy. He had ridden in a bulletproof Cadillac and dated a Hollywood movie queen and threatened people with blowtorches and made good on the threats. J. Edgar Hoover had called him a cancer, he had had his picture taken with Truman Capote and Castro. What dreams do you dream in a coma? Are they in color, and do they resemble the floor show at the Club Canaveral?
    The show ended finally. The lights came up a little and the band, a six-piece mix of aging rockers in clean denims and tie-dyes and young barracudas in Italian sport coats, took over the stage. A few couples got up to dance. A waitress dressed like a carhop came over and took my empty glass and asked if I wanted seconds. I said yes. I couldn’t remember what I’d ordered the first time.
    It was a whiskey sour, and it came just as Gail Hope joined me in full kit. Sitting down in the dress required some engineering, but she managed it without alerting the vice squad and ordered a tonic water. “Bum a butt?” she asked, when the waitress clattered off. “These things don’t come with pockets.”
    I tossed her the pack. She plucked one out and leaned forward for me to light it, giving me a slant down the front of her dress. She’d aged nicely. She sat back and blew smoke over her left shoulder. “You should’ve told me you were coming. I’d have gotten you a better table.”
    “This one’s swell.”
    “So what did you think of the show?”
    “Beethoven would’ve flipped over it. He was deaf already.”
    “I like quiet places myself. But people don’t come here to talk.” She looked around, her cigarette pointed at the ceiling. “Half of this crowd wasn’t born when the sixties ended. They watch Easy Rider and The Graduate on their VCRS and get the hippies all mixed up with the antiwar activists and think everyone listened to this music all the time. If I served it up the way it was they’d walk out. Why not? Reality they can get at home.”
    “That’s why I’m paid in advance.”
    The waitress brought the tonic water and left. Gail sipped at it, put it down. “Needs rye. I didn’t expect to see you so soon. What did Sam say when you gave him the money?”
    “He doesn’t talk much.”
    “He can talk your ear off when you get to know him, about everything but his work. He can avoid talking about that in two languages.”
    “Cut.”
    “I’m sorry?”
    “I said, ‘Cut.’ It’s a wrap. Take five. Whatever they say when the cameras stop turning. You’re not on a soundstage. Bubble-headed chatter’s out of character.” I took the