The Eye: A Novel of Suspense Read Online Free PDF

BUTLER
    As always on Friday afternoons, Bloomingdale’s was jammed with shoppers. In most sections of the store, harried salespeople were faced with long lines and short tempers; they were too busy to pay much attention to individuals who seemed more interested in browsing than buying.
    Michele had been standing at the Fine Watches and Jewelry counter for the past five minutes, pretending to be just another browser. She felt very nervous, much more nervous than she had at the audition this morning. She had given a good reading—the play was an off-Broadway revival of Elmer Rice’s Street Scene and she’d read for the role of Anna Maurrant—but she hadn’t got the part. It should have gone to her, she had delivered her lines more professionally than the woman the director finally picked; she had broken down and cried in the dressing room afterward. No part. No other prospects, either. And that was why she had come here to Bloomingdale’s.
    The heavyset woman on her left kept studying a velvet-lined tray full of twenty-four-carat gold rings, all of them with expensive jeweled settings. The saleswoman behind the counter was trying not to look impatient; her attention was on the heavyset woman. Michele feigned interest in a modest cameo locket, but what she was really looking at was the pigeon’s-blood ruby ring in the nearest corner of the tray. The ruby had been cut cabochon—in convex form and not faceted—and in its deep purplish-red depths she could see a six-rayed star. It was a valuable stone. It made her palms moist just to look at it.
    Other customers milled about in the area, some of them beginning to besiege the saleswoman with demands for attention. Finally, in self-defense, the saleswoman let some of her impatience show through.
    “Madam,” she said, “will you please make up your mind? I have other people waiting.”
    “That is precisely what I’m trying to do,” the heavy set woman said in a snappish voice. “I am not an impulse buyer.”
    “That’s for sure,” an irritable-looking man on her left said. “You’re a selfish buyer, lady. A counter hog.”
    The woman glared at him. “Why don’t you mind your own business?”
    “Why don’t you go fall down the elevator shaft?”
    An indignant squawking sound came out of the woman; she turned her glare on the saleswoman. “I won’t stand for this!” she said. “He has no right to talk to me that way!”
    “I’m sorry, madam—”
    “Well, you ought to be!”
    “Oh, lady, shut up,” the irritable-looking man said.
    “How dare you!”
    None of them was looking at Michele or at the tray. And none of them saw her pluck the ring out, palm it, turn from the counter, and drop the ring into her purse as she started away.
    Without looking back, she hurried through the crowded aisles toward the Lexington Avenue exit. Her heart stammered; there was a fluttery feeling in her legs, as if they might give out at any second. But no one tried to stop her. After what seemed like an hour her legs carried her out through the doors, into the stream of pedestrian traffic on the sidewalk.
    At Forty-ninth Street she stopped and leaned against the wall of a building to catch her breath and collect herself. She could almost feel the presence of the ring in her purse, as though it were generating palpable heat. Hot ring. Stolen ring—
    Thief .
    The word echoed in her mind: an accusation, a brand. But it was not new to her. She had called herself that and worse the first time she’d been forced to shoplift a piece of expensive jewelry, each of the other two times as well. She accepted it now. She was a thief.
    But it wasn’t her fault; she was not immoral, she was not compulsive, she only did it as a means of survival. She had been driven to theft—by life in the city, by a hundred broken promises, by insensitive producers and nasty-minded directors who cared more about raw sex than raw talent; by her unfulfilled dreams.
    I’m not guilty , she thought. I’m