A Cast of Killers by Katy Munger Page A

they said and had not displayed the slightest emotion.
Obviously, he and Auntie Lil did not even begin to approach in
strangeness the weirdos this guy was used to transporting.
    "Why, that's brilliant!" Auntie Lil
exclaimed, leaning forward to tap the seat divider with approval.
"You're wasted driving a cab," she declared.
    "Yes, back home in my country I was very,
very good at tracking down people," the driver answered
cryptically. "No one ever got away from me," he added, leaving T.S.
to imagine himself at the mercy of some sort of escaped death-squad
leader.
    "Where do they take the bodies?" Auntie Lil
asked. She did not really want an answer from the driver. She was
merely, as usual, thinking out loud. "The medical examiner's
office, that's where. Am I right?"
    "Yes, ma'am," the driver assured her. "I saw
it on a 'Kojak' rerun."
    "How could we get in there?" Her voice
trailed off and she stared back over the spires of the Upper East
Side with intense concentration. They were passing over the
Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge and Manhattan lay behind them, its newer
buildings shining with bright metallic splendor beneath the
sparkling skies of the sunny autumn day. What a shame to die on a
day like this, T.S. thought. Even the New York air smelled clean,
for a change.
    Auntie Lil was silent, searching for a
solution. Since T.S. and Auntie Lil had been soul mates for all of
his life, he knew what she was thinking at exactly the same time
the idea came to her.
    "No," he said firmly. "I won't ask her."
    "Oh, Theodore." She turned to him and
clutched his sleeve, beseeching him for help. He rather enjoyed
seeing her beg.
    "Lilah knows everyone," Auntie Lil cooed.
"And you know how fond of you she is. She's probably been dying for
you to telephone her."
    "How do you know I haven't been taking her
dancing every single night of the week?" he asked grumpily, annoyed
at her accurate inference.
    Auntie Lil did not bother to answer. They
both knew where the truth lay.
    T.S. stared out his window and watched a
subway train cross the Manhattan Bridge in the distance. Lilah. She
moved in a different world, a world of money and meaningless titles
and men who owned businesses and women who always looked at least
twenty years younger than their age.
    He had always been a confident, prepared man
in control. But around Lilah, T.S. often felt inexplicably inferior
and clumsy. As much as his dreams secretly centered on Lilah, she
made his present reality strange and unsettling. He did not like
being out of control of his heart, his head or his tongue. So, no,
of course he had not been taking Lilah out dancing every night of
the week. In fact, he had not seen her at all in months. And Auntie
Lil knew it.
    Auntie Lil always said that he needed to
learn how to live, but just saying so wasn't enough for T.S.
Sometimes, he longed for someone to show him how to live. And
sometimes he longed for the courage to be different from the stiff
and inflexible but capable man that he had been for so many
years.
    "I could call her," Auntie Lil offered with
as much humbleness as she could muster. Even she knew that she was
treading on some very thin ice. She liked Lilah almost as much as
T.S. liked Lilah, but she had no desire to hurt her beloved
nephew.
    "No, I'm a big boy. I can certainly call
her." There. He'd said it. Now he'd just have to follow
through.
    "Tonight?" she demanded. Boy, she never knew
when to stop pushing her luck. That was probably why she was so
damn lucky.
    "Okay. Okay. Tonight." He shifted his legs
uncomfortably and sighed. Already his palms were starting to
sweat.
     

CHAPTER THREE
     
    T.S. spent the early part of the evening
devising ways to put off the phone call to Lilah Cheswick. It was
amazing how inventive he could be when desperation drove him to it.
He began by retracing the steps of his cleaning lady earlier that
day, but since she took perverse pleasure in being even cleaner
than him (a near impossibility) there was not a single