been hit during a raid on a crack house in the Bienville neighborhood, one of the highest crime areas in the city. He’d been wearing a bulletproof vest, thank God, but the direct hit had still managed to propel him backward ten or fifteen feet, through a window and out onto the sidewalk. His name was still being withheld from the press, and Melanie had found the whole incident so disturbing that she’d avoided all the memos that referenced it. Even now, having asked, “What about him?” she really didn’t want to know.
“Guess who it was?” Peg asked.
From the way the woman’s eyebrows climbed halfway up her forehead and her mouth kind of oozed to the side, Melanie didn’t have to guess. But before she could prevent the answer she didn’t want to hear, Peg exclaimed, “Your ex!”
“Oh.” While the fault line inside her slipped another tiny notch, she struggled to come up with some sort of appropriate comment. “Well, I’m glad he wasn’t hurt.”
“Me, too. Sonny hasn’t stopped by city hall in quite a while now, has he? Two or three months at least.”
Melanie nodded. It had been two months and two weeks, to be exact, and she didn’t even have to consult her calendar to remember. Her ex-husband’s entrances and exits were always indelible.
“Maybe he finally knows the meaning of the word divorce,” Melanie said. She could have said maybe he’d finally taken her threat of a restraining order seriously. And somewhere in a far corner of her heart she wondered if it was because he didn’t care anymore.
Peg sighed a little cloud of cigarette smoke. “I always enjoyed seeing him, even if you didn’t. I used to keep lollipops in my desk for him when he was trying to quit smoking. Red ones.”
“I remember.” She also remembered how those damned red lollipops increased the sensuality of Sonny’s already way-too-sexy mouth and how many times she’d wanted to kiss him, just to see if he still tasted as good as he looked.
All of a sudden she noticed that Peg was standing there silent and staring at her as if waiting for a reply to a question Melanie hadn’t even heard.
“I’m sorry. Did you say something?”
“Just that it’s a shame to be having artificial insemination when the genuine article is…”
“I’d better get going, Peg, before the traffic gets too bad.” Melanie stabbed her key in the car lock, opened the door, and tossed her handbag inside. “Thanks again for the wonderful party. Hold down the fort while I’m gone, huh? And don’t let Cleo do anything too bizarre to my office, okay?”
“Oh, sure. Good luck, Melanie. But I still think…”
“’Bye, Peg.”
The genuine article.
Peg’s words kept sneaking into Melanie’s thoughts no matter how she tried to dismiss them. It was a good thing she could have made the drive from city hall to Channing Square with her eyes closed because images of Sonny kept distracting her from the worse-than-usual Friday rush-hour traffic inching south on Grant Parkway.
The genuine article.
The first time she’d ever seen him, Solomon Stephen “Sonny” Randle had looked like a genuine bum and smelled as if he’d just climbed out of a Dumpster.
Two years ago, during one of Mayor Venneman’s forays to New York to do the morning talk shows, Melanie had presided in his absence at an awards ceremony for the police department. Always a nervous wreck at such occasions, she’d been even worse that afternoon, sitting up front with the chief of police and various dignitaries, trying to keep her trembling knees together in the way-too-short skirt of her gray gabardine suit.
After she’d made an equally short, rather gray-gabardine speech, she had handed out a score of letters of commendation to fresh-faced young patrolmen in dress blue uniforms with gleaming buttons, and presented half a dozen certificates of valor to older, but no less natty, officers. Then she called the name on the final certificate—Lieutenant Solomon S. Randle—and watched in horror as a bearded derelict shambled from the back of the auditorium to the podium where she stood.
Only the fact that the audience had cheered wildly—including the brass behind her on the stage—kept Melanie from screaming “Somebody stop him!” She’d presented the certificate with one hand while using the other to discretely wave away the garbage stench emanating from the awardee.
Afterward, at the reception that followed, he had come up to her like an ill wind, but one carrying two glasses of champagne.
“Here. Hold these a second,” he’d said in a voice that ranged somewhere between rough gravel and harsh cigarette smoke.
Melanie held the wet glasses, then watched in awe as the derelict cop proceeded to divest himself of one greasy beard, two straggly eyebrows, a terrible scar, and several gold front teeth, to emerge—Oh, Lord, had he emerged!—as the most gorgeous man Melanie had ever seen in her life.
He’d still smelled to high heaven in his undercover garments, but by then she almost hadn’t cared.
The three weeks that followed had been not just a whirlwind, but a complete sensual blur unlike anything she had ever experienced until she’d woken up married in Sonny’s disheveled downtown loft.
She now woke up at the wheel of her Miata on Grant Parkway to realize she had missed her turn onto Channing Avenue. Melanie cursed her ex-husband for derailing her again, then circled around in the terrible traffic and finally made the turn onto Channing only to find herself behind a moving van that seemed intent on going three miles per hour and hitting its brakes every few hundred feet.
Anyplace else and she might have given the truck an irritated beep of her horn to speed it up, but since it appeared that somebody was moving in, Melanie was patient. Heaven knows Channing Square needed all the residents it could get. Besides, she didn’t mind driving slowly because it gave her a chance to look around and to savor the late-afternoon spring in Channing Park, one of the oldest and most beautiful in the city.
Although she’d only lived here a year, as the recording secretary and official historian for the Channing Square Residents Association, Melanie knew this little corner of the city inside out. The park’s thirty acres had been dedicated in 1845, but the grand residences that surrounded it hadn’t started going up until after the Civil War. In the 1870s they had risen with a Victorian vengeance, one graceful Second Empire town house after another, and then the staunch redbrick Federals and the somber Romanesque Revivals. For a few glorious decades Channing Square had been the most prestigious address in the city.
Then, as happened in so many cities, the rich folks had moved on to bigger and better homes, leaving the mansions in Channing Square behind to suffer the consequences of the coming years. And suffer they did, especially during the Depression when most had been cut up into small apartments. By the 1980s the once-great neighborhood had become a slum with half of its homes’ windows boarded up and crack dealers holding sway on every corner. The beautiful park had been overgrown with trash trees and weeds, its lovely Victorian bandstand, which had once played host to the John Philip Sousa Band, becoming a place to turn quick tricks or to stash dead bodies in the dark of the night.
All of that changed in the mid-eighties when a few brave souls moved back from the suburbs. A few more followed, and a few more, until finally the reclamation was in full swing. At last count, a hundred twenty of the square’s two hundred houses were occupied and undergoing some form of rehab, all the way from the early, gritty stages of demolition to the delicate finishing touches of paint on the cornices.
Melanie had loved every minute of the year she’d lived here. Her own Victorian painted lady was on Kassing Avenue, just to the west of the park. After she’d moved out of Sonny’s loft, she’d bought the small limestone-fronted Second Empire town house from Dieter Weist, the architect who was rehabbing it on spec. He’d finished the first floor and two second-floor bedrooms for her in record time. All that remained to be done now was the nursery and the playroom that would take up the entire third floor.