On Off by Colleen McCullough Page B

Disappointment? Excitement? Remorse? I wish I knew, but I don’t.
    When he went into Malvolio’s to eat dinner he sat in his usual booth aware that he wasn’t hungry, even if he knew he had to eat. Early days; he had to keep his strength up for this one.
    The waitress was a new girl, so he had to let her write it down, from the Yankee pot roast to the rice pudding. A beautiful girl, but not his killer’s type; the way she eyed Carmine up and down was a blatant invitation that he ignored. Sorry, baby, he said silently, those days are over. Though she did remind him a little of Sandra: a looker marking time for some better job like acting or modeling. New York City was just down the road.
    How many things had happened in 1950! He was a brand-new detective; the Hug was built; the Holloman Hospital was built; and Sandra Tolley had come to wait on table at Malvolio’s. She had knocked him off his feet at first glance. Tall, stacked like Jane Russell, legs six feet long, a mass of gold hair and wide, myopic eyes in a gorgeous face. Full of herself and the career she knew she was going to have as a model; she’d put her portfolio in to all the New York agencies, but couldn’t afford to live there. So she had moved a two-hour train ride into Connecticut, where she could rent for less than thirty dollars a month and eat for free if she was a waitress.
    And then all her ambitions went west because the sight of Carmine Delmonico had knocked her off her feet too. Not that he was handsome or more than acceptably tall at five-eleven, but he had the kind of beat-up face that women adored, and a body bulging with natural muscle. They met at New Year’s; they were married within the month; and she was pregnant within three. Sophia, their daughter, was born right at the end of 1950. In those days he’d rented a nice house in East Holloman, which was the Italian quarter of town, thinking that if he surrounded Sandra with hordes of his relatives and friends she wouldn’t feel so alone when his job kept him working long hours. But she was from Montana ranching stock, and neither understood nor liked the way of life that East Holloman practiced. When Carmine’s mother called in to see her, Sandra thought that Mom was checking up on her, and by extension she saw all the kind visits and invitations from his family circle and his friends as evidence that they didn’t trust her to behave.
    There was never a genuine quarrel, or even much discontent. The baby was the image of her mother, which pleased everyone; no one knows better than the Italians that they paint the angels fair.
    As a matter of course Carmine was in line for free tickets whenever a play on tryout for Broadway had its final airing at the Schumann Theater; at the end of 1951, when Sophia was a year old, his turn for free tickets came. The attraction was an important play that had already received rave reviews from tryouts in Boston and Philadelphia, so everyone from New York City would be there. Sandra was ecstatic, dug out her most glamorous strapless dress, cyclamen satin that fitted like a second skin and then flared at the knees, a white mink stole to keep her warm against what was a cold winter. She pressed Carmine’s dinner suit, frilled shirt and cummerbund and bought him a gardenia for his buttonhole. Oh, how excited she had been! Like a kid going to Disneyland.
    A case intruded and he couldn’t go. Looking back on it, he was glad now that he hadn’t seen her face when she found out; he had called her on the phone. Sorry, honey, I have to work tonight. But she went to the play anyway, all on her own in the cyclamen satin strapless dress and the white mink wrap. When she told him later that night, he hadn’t minded a bit. But what she didn’t tell him was that she had met Myron Mendel Mandelbaum the movie producer in the Schumann’s foyer, and that Mandelbaum had usurped Carmine’s seat, though his own was in a box much nearer to the stage.
    A week later