the elevator bank, it lighted up in obeisance. Presently the doors opened and disgorged a crowd, and he got into the cage and watched lighted numbers move along the row, while Muzak whispered hideously and the elevator climbed so smoothly that he had the sensation it wasn’t going to stop, it would break dreamily through the roof and carry him into space…
Diane kept him waiting. The receptionist asked him to be seated, but he stood, moving from painting to painting, making a circle of the room, pretending to study the oils and watercolors and gouaches. He was thinking of long ago, a vision of the young Diane stepping off a train with an art magazine in one hand and her tennis racket strapped to the outside of her suitcase. Memories crowded in, rushed together. Days of Russ-and Diane-one word, one entity. Days of increasing obsessive fervor, her evening salons at home for arty friends, the internecine gossip that crowded him out, the faces like living waxworks, until he got to feeling like just another object in the apartment-something she and her friends tried to avoid bumping into.
She kept him waiting almost ten minutes, then came out past the receptionist and gave him her cool hand. In the bright artificial light he saw the little scar traces of time on her throat and face. “You look lovely,” he told her, feeling tense and awkward. Her skirt was three inches above the knees-a little nothing dress that had probably cost as much as a round-trip ticket to Rome. He said, “I thought we’d try the Homestead. I booked a table.”
“Good. Isn’t the heat ghastly?” She was ready to go, carrying her bag, putting on oversized dark glasses; she gave him a jerky smile and hurried ahead toward the elevator, and for the first time it occurred to him she was as nervous as he was.
They rode down in discomfited silence and walked toward the corner. He said with forced gaiety, “Look at all the damned cars. I once calculated the land occupied by a parked car in midtown Manhattan is worth something like a hundred thousand dollars.”
They turned the corner. Diane said, “You’ve got sunburn on the nose. You must have found a girl who likes the beach.”
“You know better than that.”
“Better than to think you’ve got a girl?”
“Better than to think I’d let anybody drag me near a beach.” He tried to smile, and held the restaurant door.
They climbed a flight of stairs to a corner table-chip-proof, burn-proof, stain-proof. Over drinks they exchanged furtive looks and kept starting to say things and subsiding, until he said, “You’ve been well?”
“I’m fine,” she said. She had a strangely incomplete smile, one which began but didn’t become whole. “I haven’t had one headache since the divorce.”
“Ouch.”
“Oh, dear, now you’re angry.” She turned to the waiter: “Another old-fashioned, please. No sugar.”
He said, “You really are looking more gorgeous than ever.”
Unaccountably, she blanched. “Stop looking at me.” She dropped her eyes and withdrew, with a brooding, inward expression. “You didn’t call this meeting to throw roses at my feet, did you? Will you please stop looking at me?”
“Why?”
“You’re making overtures. Don’t be adventurous-stop acting as though you still want me.”
“I suppose I do, when you come down to it-the way a reformed alcoholic wants whiskey. But don’t read anything into it; the truth is, you’re the one thing above all else I’ve wanted to forget.”
“By inviting me to lunch with you?”
“It’s not a social visit.”
“So you said on the phone. You were damned mysterious.”
“I apologize. I thought it would persuade you to come.”
“All right. It worked, didn’t it?” She had composed herself, putting on her arch face. She took out a compact to inspect her lipstick. Hastings tried to fight off the feeling of intimidation-as if he were a former enlisted man confronted suddenly by a lieutenant general: a subservient reaction ingrained in moments of crisis, but which would disintegrate if given time for logical assessment.
He tried to lighten the tone. “You’re still blushing. I remember how hot your face looked the first time I asked you for a date.”
“Let’s not resurrect our turbulent affairs, Russ. It’s so tiresome. I’ve still got tread marks where you ran over me-I’m in no mood for nostalgia.”
Overcome by an odd sense of defeat, he shifted his chair, feeling dismally that this cold space between them was a place where love once had been; it hardly seemed possible.
When a waiter brought menus, he accepted the interruption gratefully. They made selections, the waiter wrote orders and went, and Diane said, “Do you suppose we could get down to cases, Russ? I’m going to have to make it a quick meal-a thousand things to do this afternoon.”
“All right,” he said. Gladly. “Several things. First, I spent the weekend in Arizona with your father. I mention it only so you won’t later find out and suspect me of doing something behind your back. It was purely business-you know where I work.”
Her thin shoulders stirred; her mouth twisted. “All right. You’ve made it clear you didn’t go to him to ask him to intercede with me.”
“To persuade you to come back to me? You’re flattering one of us.”
“Am I?”
“Clutch it to your breast, if it warms you. I hope this is the last time we’ll have to see each other.”
Her look, not directed at him, was icy with scorn. Hastings looked down and said in a different voice, “Why do we always have to bicker? I’m sorry, it’s my fault. I’d like to keep it civilized. I came to see you because I want you to give me some facts which I think you wouldn’t give out to a stranger.”
“Facts about what?”
“You’ve gone public.”
“That’s hardly a secret.”
“I need to know how deeply Mason Villiers is involved.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “You need to know? Whatever for?”
“I work for the government, remember? Villiers is a crook, I’m a cop. It’s as simple as that.”
“I see. Either you’re indignant because he’s a crook, or you think I’ve been seeing him, and that makes you angry.”
“Jealousy? Maybe-it’s possible. But I don’t like seeing you involve yourself with a barracuda like Villiers. Underneath his brainy front, there’s the claim-jumping personality of a mining-camp swindler. All the professionals know enough to give him wide berth.”
Diane began to eat hungrily. “I gather you’ve met him?”
“Villiers? No.”
“You’re a bit green around the edges. Look, Russ, if it gives you comfort, you can assume if I had any dealings with him I’d have him watched by the best battery of attorneys I could hire. I’m no innocent child of the woods.”
“Maybe. But if you go swimming with sharks you need sharp teeth. I’ve got reason to suspect he’s using you as part of a scheme against your father’s corporation.”
She gave that odd half-smile again. “Don’t let your imagination run away with you, Russ. He may be tough, but he’s hardly as tough as my father. There isn’t a man alive who could whip my father in a corporate fight.”
He was taken aback. He covered his fast rearrangement of thoughts by addressing himself to his meal. Clearly she knew nothing of her father’s illness; equally clearly, Judd had deliberately withheld it from her. It was like him-Judd was curiously sentimental, but he had no patience with sentimentality when it was directed at himself. He would want his daughter’s love, but never her tears.
There was a clear choice; he made the decision painfully. He felt a strong duty to Judd’s implied wishes. He told her nothing of her father’s illness.
He carried on about Villiers, but she was having none of it, she seemed to feel personally assaulted, her judgment questioned. She gathered her sunglasses and handbag and said, “I really must run,” and he let it end lamely, inconclusively.
He sat over the detectives’ preliminary reports in his bathrobe, hearing the night traffic hoot along below his
