“That Nazi maid of yours told me where you were.”
“Her name is Gus.” Gus must have told her the place I’d least likely be and accidentally gotten it right.
“This separation isn’t working out,” Wanda said.
“Does that mean you want to come home?”
Her laugh dripped with derision. “I need some of our money. Paul says his needs are not being met.”
Paul? “You left me for a kid named Manny.”
“Okay, Manny, then. Have it your way. I don’t want to argue, I just want cash. I held your sensitive little psyche together for a full year. Believe me, I earned my half.”
I wondered if Shirley was listening in. “Nobody’s disputing that you earned your half, Wanda. I only want you to come home. I love you.”
Her sigh winged across the telephone lines. “I know you do, Sam. Don’t grovel.”
“I didn’t mean to grovel.”
“I must face the fact that I don’t love you and I never loved you. Can’t you understand how humiliating this is for me. I gave my marriage everything and now I must admit defeat.”
“You don’t sound humiliated.”
“I am truly devastated by your failure as a husband, Sam.”
I stood up behind my desk. “I’m not the one who humped the pool man.”
“How dare you throw that in my face. Your neediness made me hump the pool man and all the others. I didn’t want to cheapen myself but you forced me to and I will never forgive you.”
All the others? The conversation led where it had to from the start. “I’m sorry, Wanda.”
“Just send me the money. Twenty thousand for the first payment.” Wanda gave me an address in High Point. She ended with, “You should prepare yourself. Paul and I are thinking of moving back into the house.”
“But it’s my house.”
“I have as much right to live there as you.”
I chose to flush the manuscript down the toilet, but anyone who has faced an open commode with sixty-four pages in hand knows the futility of that idea. No symbolic act should require a plumber. Instead, I closed both lids and removed the top of the tank. Then I slid Bucky and Sam into the tank water and carefully set the top back into position.
Katrina Prescott’s health club had once been an office building for upscale orthodontists and Realtors and such, but the owners went Chapter Eleven and the new people kicked the young professionals out, tore down most of the internal walls, and hired a bunch of personal trainers from California. I’d been offered a piece of the club, but investments have never been my thing. I’m loyal to golf carts.
The extremely healthy-looking surfer at the front desk seemed to know who I was. She said, “You’re late.”
“I’m not supposed to be here.”
“Mrs. Prescott is waiting in the private sauna. Just follow the hall to the end and turn left.”
I found Katrina Prescott sitting on a wooden bench in a very hot room. She had one towel wrapped around her head and another towel around her body.
She said, “You’re late.”
“Couldn’t we go somewhere where it’s not so hot?”
“Take off your clothes, darlin’, you’ll be fine.”
“I’d rather not do that, Mrs. Prescott.” I looked for a place to sit, but the only choice was a wooden bench lower than the one Katrina sat on, which would afford me an uncluttered view up her towel. Better to remain standing.
Katrina’s skin sparkled from a film of perspiration. She said, “You really stuck a bee in Skip’s jockey shorts.”
“Can’t we go somewhere else? I don’t enjoy hot, confining spaces.”
Katrina lowered her body towel. “Do you like my breasts?”
I was afraid this would happen. “The nipples are cantaloupe colored.”
“They cost Skip six grand apiece. How about my stomach. Do you like my stomach?”
“Don’t go any lower.”
Katrina unwrapped her head towel and handed it to me. She shook out her hair while I blotted my wet face and wondered what she used to hold the false eyelashes in place. Leaning to one side, she regarded me as an object of curiosity.
“Skip learned a lot about you last night, and there’s more coming in today.”
“The hairs in my nose are scorched.”
“Mostly money matters which bore me to death, but some of the information was interesting.”
Sweat dripped off my earlobes. That had never happened before.
“You’re thirty-three but you have a daughter who is nineteen,” Katrina said.
“Leave my daughter out of this.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Your wife of eleven months left you recently. Before her you had a checkered personal life of short-term relationships—including one former marriage—going back about twelve years. Before that you couldn’t get a woman with a stick.”
“Who did this detective talk to?”
“How many women have you slept with?”
I couldn’t see a breast enhancement line, but maybe it was hidden in the fold.
“That depends on your definition of ‘slept with.’”
“Had sex with.”
“I’m not clear on that definition either.”
Katrina made a sound of impatience. “How many women have you stuck your pistol in?”
“Not that many. I generally keep my pistol out of sex.”
She frowned. “A hundred.”
“I don’t think so, I’m not that kind of boy.”
“If you got laid every other month for a dozen years, you’d have had seventy women.”
“Gentlemen don’t keep score, Mrs. Prescott. And I object to the word
“You prefer
“I prefer we talk about what you asked me to come here and talk about—my mother’s rape.”
Katrina continued to study me. Sweat trickled down my rib cage and the inside of my thighs. I wanted to take off my shirt but felt she might misinterpret my actions.
“How does my body compare to the average woman?”
Her legs beneath the towel were quite tight, for an older, short woman, and her stomach muscles were good. The shoulders rode higher on the neck than I generally liked. “You have a very compact body, but there’s no such thing as an average woman.”
“I want you to make love to me now.”
Okay, perverts, I admit it. The thought had crossed my mind. “The temperature’s a hundred and fifty degrees in here, Mrs. Prescott. We can’t make love.”
She threw aside her body towel. “Skip is afraid of you. I can’t begin to say how excited that makes me.”
“Would you like me if Skip didn’t hate me?”
“Of course not, you dress like domestic help.”
“Then it’s not me you want, but a way to hurt Skip.”
Katrina stood up. “What’s wrong with that, darlin’, do you want me or not?” Drops of sweat clung to the ends of her pubic hair. From deep in the forest, a clitoris called my name.
