See How They Run Read Free Page A

as ‘fatherless,’ David.”) baby on the twenty-second floor, to the more conventional problems of Pap smears, pelvic examinations, yeast infections, menopause, and Premarin dispensation.
    Heather, an ear, nose, and throat specialist, preferred working out of Mount Sinai on 100th and Madison, but she, too, loved their apartment in the Beresford.
    That night, Heather had worn a formal Yves St. Laurent dress from Saks. She’d also had her long blond hair tipped and sensor-permed at Suga. Heather was looking very spiffy, David was thinking, as the two of them sped along.
    “Tell me something, David,” Heather kept saying as the Gray Ghost got closer and closer to Scarsdale. “Are the rest of the Strausses ever going to like me? At least to put up with me? Seriously, David?”
    Which was a funny question in a way, because Heather was one of the most
likable
people David had ever met.
    Everyone liked Heather Strauss
.
    Patients, even the most irascible bastards; New York City cabdrivers; the monsignori-venerable doormen and elevator operators at the Beresford.
    But.
    Were the Strausses ever going to like Heather? Well, David thought, even he was puzzled over the answer to that one.
    All for three, simpleminded, medieval, and pretty stupid reasons: (a) on Sunday mornings, maybe twelve times a year, Heather attended services at St. John the Evangelist Church; (b) she ate Oscar Mayer and Nathan’s Famous hot dogs; (c) she identified with characters out of
Captains and the Kings
and John Updike, instead of
Seventh Avenue
and Chaim Potok.
    In other words, Heather Duff Strauss was a blond-haired, sparkly blue-eyed, wonderfully human and lovable
shiksa
.
    David’s wife, his best friend, “the top,” as the old Cole Porter song had so nicely put it.

CHAPTER 4
    The Housewife was just finishing her fourth surveillance walk past the mesmerizing lights of the Strauss mansion in Scarsdale.
    She strolled past the rolling front lawns of the moon-flooded estate and down alongside a long stone wall trailing geranium vines. She approached a copse of maple trees loitering at the end of the block, like a shadowy street gang.
    In front of her on a taut chain leash, a perky young Irish setter—bought earlier that evening in White Plains—excitedly sniffed its first bed of pachysandra and relieved itself on the leafy plants.
    With her pretty dog, her navy riding jacket, her gypsy kerchief, the Housewife blended neatly into the suburban night scene.
    The chic-looking woman estimated that there were now sixty to seventy people attending the large Strauss affair.
    Quiet Upper North Avenue was an impressive parking lot for Lincolns, Cadillac Sevilles, Mercedes 280 Es, Jaguar XJs, and other expensive automobiles.
    “We almost have a full house,” the Housewife whispered into a transmitter clipped onto her riding jacket.
    As she passed a side view of the house, the woman fingered round, bumpy objects in a special pouch pocket sewn into her sports jacket.
    The bumpy objects were white phosphorus grenades, the kind that had been used to raze entire villages in Vietnam and Cambodia.
    At the corner of Post Road, the Housewife bent and patted the young setter’s soft smooth head.
    She whispered into the pup’s perked right ear. “Yes, yes, yes. That’s a good girl.” Then the woman clipped off the chain leash and released the small dog. Someone would care for it, she knew.
    I have killed before
, the Housewife said to herself,
but never quite like this
. She looked at the pretty house—cozy North Avenue. It made her shiver to think of the rest.

CHAPTER 5
    It looked like something out of an illustrated children’s book. High above the Strauss mansion’s steep, four-gabled roof a moon raced through a high ceiling of poplar and oak leaves.
    The estate grounds were a beautiful, smoky-gray painting that night. Close up, every object was finely etched in black.
    The skeleton of an old hickory tree.
    A horned owl perched on a garage.
    The strange,