Free The Eye: A Novel of Suspense by Bill Pronzini, John Lutz Page B

fighting with her gave him a measure of release.
    The kitchen was cluttered with dirty dishes, overflowing garbage bags, food remnants all over the table and the floor. The front room, with its worn furniture and piles of movie magazines, was in similar disarray. Cindy was something of a slob, but it didn’t bother Singer half as much as Marian’s tendencies in the same direction. Everything about Marian bothered him, including the fact that she was intelligent. Cindy, on the other hand, wasn’t much in the brains department, and he liked that just fine. He liked having a woman who was his intellectual inferior, a woman he could manipulate, a woman who listened to what he said and thought he was somebody important.
    She put coffee water on to boil. Sitting at the table, she brushed crumbs off onto the floor and then ran spread fingers through her hair and yawned. “God,” she said, “I can’t seem to wake up.”
    “Why couldn’t you sleep last night?”
    “You know why. The shootings …”
    “Stop worrying about that. Nothing’s going to happen to you or me.”
    “But don’t they make you afraid?”
    “No,” he lied. The shootings did worry him, did make him a little afraid, but he wasn’t going to tell her that. Or Marian or anybody else. The way he felt was nobody’s business but his own. “The police will find out who’s doing it. They’ll get him.”
    “You really think so?”
    “I really think so.”
    She yawned again. “I took a cab home last night,” she said. “I can’t afford it, you know, but I just couldn’t come on the subway.”
    Cindy worked as a waitress at a restaurant on Columbus Avenue near Lincoln Center, from four to eleven, five days a week. That was where Singer had first met her; he’d gone there with Marian one night for dinner, and Cindy had smiled at him in a more than impersonal way, as if she liked what she saw. He liked what he saw too, and he’d gone back a few days later, alone. She’d been impressed when he told her he was an artist; creative people fascinated her, she said. Then they’d found out they were neighbors—one of those crazy coincidences that happen sometimes in a city like New York. She’d been living across the street from him for almost a year and yet they’d never run into each other before, they’d had to meet by chance at a restaurant.
    He’d asked her to go to a movie with him and she’d accepted. After that it was walks in Riverside Park, drinks in a couple of bars on Broadway. And after that, just ten days after he’d gone back to the restaurant, it was afternoons in her bed any time he could get away. Cindy was divorced and she lived alone, so there was no problem there. The only hassle was that her ex-husband was trying to convince her to let him move back in and he kept showing up unannounced. Once he’d almost caught them together. That had been a bad time for Singer; the ex-husband was a truck driver, a big bastard, and mean from what Cindy told him. Singer didn’t consider himself a coward, but neither did he go looking for trouble. He was careful now never to see Cindy on Sundays or Mondays, the two days her ex-husband was off work.
    He said, “You going to take a cab home every night?”
    “Until they catch that maniac, I am.”
    “Do you really feel safer that way?”
    “I do. Much safer, even if I can’t afford it.”
    “I’d help you out if I could,” Singer lied, “but you know how things are with me.”
    “Oh, I don’t want any money from you, Wally, you know that. I’d feel … well, I’d feel cheap if I took money from you.”
    “One of these days my work will start to sell,” he said. “Then it’ll be different. For both of us.”
    “I know it will, Wally. You’re a good artist, you really are.”
    “That’s true.”
    “Every time I look at the painting you gave me, I can feel your talent. I mean, I can actually feel it.”
    Singer suppressed a wry smile. The painting he’d given her was a small