Free Loving Time by Leslie Glass

fallen off the bridge, Bobbie had felt very calm. The pieces of his shattered life were coming together again. He didn’t like messes, knew exactly how to kill so no one suspected a thing. Accidents were his speciality. He’d gotten a bonus he hadn’t expected with the bum, and the next two were scheduled. He checked his watch. One-twenty-five. Time to go to work.

thirteen
     
    A t one-thirty P.M ., in gray sweatpants and a gray sweatshirt with no slogan on it, Jason Frank jogged down the five flights of open stairways from his office and apartment to the main floor. The stairs, like those in an old first-class European hotel, had been a major attraction for him when he moved there eight years ago. The twenties-era building was unique. It had two ways of getting up and down: the large, old-fashioned, see-into cage elevator and the open stairs. Wide landings went all the way around the building, forming an elegant square from the marbled lobby to the fifteenth floor. The wrought-iron railings were painted black, decorated with insets of brass leaves and elaborate vines.
    Once grand, it was all getting pretty shabby now. The diamond designs on the bottom half of the walls, formed from black and white half-inch tiles, were no longer perfect. Many of the tiles were chipped or broken. A few were missing altogether. The well-worn marble stairs were cracked and hadn’t been polished to a high shine in decades. The ceilings, decorated with moldings and golden rosettes, were in need of a paint job and some new gilding.
    The building was a co-op. Recently the board had taken a poll to see how many owners wanted to spend the hundred-thousand-plus dollars it would take to make the necessary repairs, but the outcome hadn’t been revealed yet. As Jason hit the main floor, the doorman glanced at his watch.
    Emilio was twenty-five and watched everybody’s comings and goings with an avidity that was unusual even for the chummy Upper West Side. He had seen the doctor’s last patient come down and was pretty sure the man was gay. It made Emilio worry about the doc. If the doc had gay patients, did that mean he was gay himself? It was the kind of thing youjust had to ask yourself. And now, ten minutes later, Dr. Frank was in a sweatsuit heading for the door.
    “Going for a run, Doc?” Emilio asked.
    Jason smiled. No, he was going to rob a bank. “Morning, Emilio.”
    “Not for over an hour and a half. It’s afternoon now.” Emilio opened the heavy glass-and-wrought-iron door.
    Dr. Frank walked out. He didn’t look gay. He was about six feet tall, taller than Emilio’s five ten. He was also a lot thinner than Emilio. The doc had a lean runner’s body, medium-brown hair, cut pretty short. He looked kind of like a Kennedy, one of those privileged kind of people. Well-built, good-looking, with a good background and all his shit together. Except he had a beard now. More than three weeks’ worth of beard, and he was still scratching at it. Emilio studied the doc as he went out the door. Was he gay or not?
    “Watch out for those raindrops now. It’s going to rain.”
    Jason didn’t answer. He was very careful not to say much to Emilio. The young doorman had some problems with his identity. For a while the young man had been telling all the people coming to see Jason that he and Jason were colleagues because Emilio was studying psychology at the community college he attended at night. He said he could tell things about them just by the way they walked.
    That kind of thing amused colleagues but made Jason’s patients extremely uneasy. Jason had to tell Emilio to keep his speculations to himself and not do a single thing more than open the door. That was his job and his limit, to open the door. He had considered knocking the young man’s teeth out but decided that was an overly aggressive and unproductive approach to the problem.
    Outside, he sniffed the moist chilly air and shivered. He hated the cold, considered it a personal enemy