He can tell by the look on her face that she’s decided some thing just then, decided that he’s not entitled to know every goddamned thing about her.
“Look, we don’t have a lot of time,” she says abruptly, set ting the bottle of scotch on the floor next to the telephone. “So why don’t you tell me what it is you want, why you’re here.” She glides across the floor in Jay’s direction. “If you wanted to rat me out to the cops, you’da done it by now. So there must be some thing else you want.” She takes another step closer to him, close enough that he can smell a musky sweetness coming off her skin. Remembering her one-time profession, her often enterprising way with men, Jay gets the very strong sensation that she is mak ing him an offer. She has her face tilted up to his suggestively . . . waiting. He might be insulted by the gesture if the whole thing weren’t so profoundly sad. “I want you to call him off,” he says, pushing her away from him. “I want you to tell him to stay the hell away from my family.”
Elise stares at Jay, her eyebrows pinched together. “I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.”
“The guy in the Ford . . . the money,” he says. “You made your point.”
“Is that what this is about? Money?” She actually sounds relieved. “You want money?” She makes a move toward the Louis Vuitton bag.
Jay grabs her by the arm, holding on like a kid who’s caught a cat by the tail.
He catches a flash of fire in her eyes, a signal, a warning, even.
“I don’t want a goddamned thing from you,” he says. “I’ll give it back, okay? The money? I’ll give it all back. Just call your guy off.”
She looks utterly confused. “What are you talking about? What guy?”
Jay doesn’t understand where she’s going with this, why she would deny it here, now, the two of them alone. He can’t follow the game she’s playing.
“You telling me you didn’t send a guy after me, to pay me off?”
“I don’t even know who you are,” she says.
“What about the old man on the boat? The captain?”
“What about him?”
“He’s dead.”
“What are you talking about?” she asks, her voice rising in fear.
“You telling me you don’t know anything about it?”
“You’re hurting me!”
Jay looks down and realizes he’s still holding on to her arm, his fingers digging into her flesh. He feels himself losing control. The pain behind his eyes spikes. The light in the room seems unnecessarily bright. “Where is it?” he asks.
“Where is what?”
“My gun.”
Elise shakes her head slowly, as if she’s not sure he will understand such a simple gesture. She seems to regard him now as she might a small, highly imaginative child. “I don’t know what you think is happening here,” she says. “But I’m not trying to get you in any trouble. If anything, I owe you. I know that. You saved my life, and I don’t even know your name.”
The words have an airy lilt of a question, an invitation maybe. A suggestion that under different circumstances they might have been friends. Her manner seems purposely dis arming, almost ingratiating. And it infuriates him as much as it frightens him. The power of it, the pull. Her convincing denial.
It’s a trick, he tells himself.
“How do I know you’re not going to turn it over to the cops?”
“Turn what over to the cops?”
“My gun,” he says, watching her eyes for a flicker, a tell.
“Listen to me, the cops don’t know a thing about you. And frankly, I’d like to keep it that way. I was never at the scene. You understand?” she says, wanting to wrestle some cooperation out of him. “The cops don’t know a thing.”
“Somebody knows,” Jay says, raising his voice into a ball of thunder. “He went after the old man on the boat, and now he’s coming after me and my wife!”
There’s a sudden knock at the front door.
Jay turns and sees the doorknob twisting back and forth, someone trying to get in from the outside. Jay curses him self for coming in here unarmed. He wishes he’d worked out some kind of signal with Rolly, a backup plan in case shit got rough. Elise starts for the front door. Jay tightens his grip on her arm.
“It’s the neighborhood security guard,” she explains. “He knows I’m out here alone. He comes by every hour or so to check on me. I asked him to.”
Jay is slow to let her go.
“It’ll be worse if I don’t answer,” she says.
When she finally opens the front door, there’s a short, stocky man in a red-and-black uniform on the other side. He’s wear ing riding boots and a pistol on his belt. Elise glances back at Jay. She seems to want him to see that she was telling the truth. The security guard eyes Jay closely, a black man loose on the plantation. “Everything all right?” he asks Elise. “He a reporter or something?”
“He was just leaving,” she says, looking at Jay. She seems thankful for the interruption, which, Jay now realizes, she knew was coming. She holds the front door open for him and, in a show of Southern hospitality, steps
