Death Before Bedtime (Peter Cutler Sargeant II, Band 2) - Softcover

Vidal, Gore

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0307741435 ISBN 13: 9780307741431

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

In Death Before Bedtime, dashing P.R. man Peter Sargent is invited to the home of a venerable senator to help strategize his imminent run for president.  On the night before he’s to announce, though, the senator is murdered in his bed.  No longer needed as a political publicist, Sargent finds himself helping the police find the killer.  He deftly navigates an eccentric cast of characters, all of whom are suspects: the rebellious daughter; the sycophantic aide; the grieving widow; and the power-hungry governor with his eye on the senator’s job.  Somehow, between charming the senator’s daughter and glad-handing Washington’s elite, Sargent still manages to methodically put the pieces into place and sees that politics truly is a cut-throat business.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gore Vidal is the author of twenty-three novels, five plays, two memoirs, numerous screenplays and short stories, and well over two hundred essays. His United States: Essays, 1952–1992 received the National Book Award.

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Chapter 1

1

"You know, I've never gone to bed with a man on a train before," she said, taking off her blouse.

"Neither have I," I said, and I made sure that the door to the compartment was securely locked.

"What innocents we are," she sighed, then: "I wish I had a drink."

"I think you're an alcoholic." I was very severe because Ellen Rhodes is an alcoholic, or at least well on her way to becoming one: but of course her habits are no concern of mine; we are just playmates of the most casual sort.

"I wish you'd call the porter . . . he could get us something from the club car."

"And have him see us like this? a young man and a young woman enjoying an intimacy without the sanction of either church or state. You're out of your mind."

Ellen sighed as she unsnapped her brassiere. "There are times, Peter, when I suspect you of becoming a solemn bore."

I enjoyed, with my usual misgivings, the sight of her slim nude body. She was a lovely girl, not yet twenty-five, with only one marriage (annulled at seventeen) to her credit. Her hair was a dirty blond, worn long, and her eyebrows and eyelashes were black, naturally black, and the brows arched. Her skin was like ivory, to worry a cliché and her breasts were small and jiggled pleasantly from the vibration of the train as she arranged her clothes in the closet of our compartment. I watched her back with some pleasure. I like backs ... only aesthetically: I mean I don't make a thing of it, being old-fashioned; yet I must say there is nothing that gives me quite such a charge as a female back, especially the double dimple at the base of the spine, the center of balance a dancer friend of mine once assured me; although in her case the center was a trifle off since she was usually horizontal when not dancing.

"Darling, will you get my bag out from under the bed? the small one. I seem to recall having hidden the better part of a fifth in there just before we left Boston."

"Very provident," I said, disapprovingly, but I got the bottle for her and we both had a drink, sitting side by side on the bunk, my bare leg touching hers.

"I feel better," she said, after gulping a shot. And indeed she even looked better . . . her eyes shining now, and her face wonderfully rosy. "I love blondes," she said, looking at me with embarrassing intensity. "I wish I were a real one like you ... a strawberry blond exactly...." But then we rolled back onto the bunk. From far away a conductor shouted: "New Haven!"


"Ellen."

She moaned softly, her face entirely covered by hair.

"We're almost there. The train's just leaving Baltimore."

"Oh." She sat up and pushed the hair out of her eyes and blinked sleepily at me.

"I hate men," she said simply.

"Why?"

"I just do." She frowned. "I feel awful. I hate the morning."

"'Morning in the bowl of night has flung the stone which put the stars to flightS¹ I quoted sonorously as we dressed.

"Is that poetry?"

"Indeed it is," I said, pushing up the shade and letting in the cold white light of a December morning. "Picturesque Baltimore," I remarked, as the train passed slowly through that city of small shabby houses with white doorsteps.

"Coffee," said Ellen, sitting down with a thump; she is a miraculously fast dresser for a woman . . . a quality I find both rare and admirable in the opposite sex.

If the waiter thought anything amiss when he served us breakfast in the compartment, he did not betray it; not that I minded particularly, nor for that manner did Ellen . . . rather, I had a job at stake and I didn't want to be caught in a compromising position with the daughter of my new client, the incomparable, the reactionary Senator Leander Rhodes, the only adult American male to be called Rhodes without the inevitable nickname Dusty.

"Now I feel better," said Ellen, after she'd finished two cups of black coffee, the alcoholic fumes of the night before dispelled.

In the year that I had known her she was either just coming out from under a hangover or else going into one, with a moment or two, I suppose, of utter delight when she was in between, when she was high. In spite of the drinking, however, I liked her. For several years she had been living in New York, traveling with a very fast set of post-debutantes and pre-alcoholics, a group I occasionally saw at night clubs or the theater but nowhere else.

I am a hard-working public relations man with very little time for that kind of living. I would never have met Ellen if she hadn't been engaged for eight weeks last year to a classmate of mine from Harvard. When the eight blissful weeks of engagement to this youth were up, she was engaged to me for nearly a month; I was succeeded then, variously, by a sleek creature from the Argentine, by a middle-aged novelist, and by a platoon of college boys to each of whom she was affianced at one time or another and, occasionally, in several instances, at the same time. Not that she is a nymph. Far from it. She just likes a good time and numerous engagements seem to her the surest way of having one.

"Won't Father be surprised to see us together !" she said at last.

"Yes." I was a little worried. I had never met Senator Rhodes. I had been hired by his secretary who had, I was quite sure, known nothing about my acquaintance with Ellen. My contract with the Senator was to run three months with an option in March and then another after that ... by which time, if I were still on the job, the National Convention would be meeting and the Midwest's favorite son Lee Rhodes would go before the convention as the people's choice for President of the United States, or so I figured it, or rather so I figured Senator Rhodes figured it. Well, it was a wonderful break for the public relations firm of Peter Cutler Sargeant II, which is me.

Ellen had been more cynical about it when I told her the news in Cambridge where we had been attending a Harvard function. In spite of her cynicism, however, we had both decided, late at night, that it would be a wonderful idea if we went straight to Washington from Boston, together, and surprised the Senator. It had all seemed like a marvelous idea after eight Martinis but now, in the cold light of a Maryland morning, I was doubtful. For all I knew the Senator loathed his daughter, paid her liberally to keep out of Washington ... nervously, I recalled some of Ellen's exploits: the time last spring when she undressed beneath a full moon and went swimming in the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel in New York, shouting, "I'm coming, Scottie Zelda's coming!" in imitation of that season's revival Scott Fitzgerald ... imposing on the decorous 1950's the studied madness of the 1920's. Fortunately, two sober youths got her out of there before the police or the reporters discovered her.

"What do you think your father's up to?" I asked, resigned to my fate: it was too late now to worry about the Senator's reaction to this combination.

"Darling, you know I hate politics," she said, straightening one eyebrow in the window as frame houses and evergreens flashed by.

"Well, he must be planning something. I mean, why hire a press agent like me?"

"I suppose he's going to run for the Senate again."

"He was re-elected last year."

"I suppose he was. Do let's send George and Alice a wire, something funny . . . they'll die laughing when they hear we're on a train together."

"You know I think it's quite wonderful your father's done as well as he has considering the handicap a daughter like you must be to him."

Ellen chuckled. "Now that's unkind. As a matter of fact he simply adores me. I even campaigned for him when I was fifteen years old. Made speeches to the Girl Scouts from one end of the state to the other.... I even spoke to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0307741435
• ISBN 13: 9780307741431
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland