Down Here

She climbed into her car, got behind the wheel, looked up at me. “I’ll call you,” she said. “Count on it.”

^“All right, Schoolboy. You got a look, but did you set the hook?”

“Tried like hell, Prof. But I can’t know unless I feel a tug on the line.”

“Yeah,” he said, unconvinced. “Your girl, she’s holding the case ace, right?”

“Wolfe? If I’m right about Wychek already recanting, sure. But we can’t know if—”

“And we got the boss hoss for a shyster, too, right?” the Prof pressed.

“Davidson’s as good as there is,” I agreed.

“But you still got my boy and the T-man working those computers like they trying to find the cure for cancer,” the little man said. “And you, you got no doubt, but you still out and about.”

“Am I missing something here?” I said.

“Not you, bro. It’s me that don’t see.”

“Why I’m still working?”

“Don’t play dumb, son. Every one of us know what you got in this. And when it looked dicey, dealing us in, that was fine. But now . . . ?”

“What, Prof?”

“Tell me there’s some green in the scene,” the little man pleaded. “Tell me you a man with a plan. A scheme beats a dream, every time.”

“It’s not a—”

“Don’t have to be no sure score, honeyboy. But there’s a longshot that we got money on somewhere in all this, true as blue?”

“True as blue,” I promised.

^“He wants to meet you, again.” Pepper’s voice, over my cellular.

“Did he say why?”

“Another file, is all he said.”

“Couldn’t he just leave it with—?”

“I got the impression he couldn’t even copy it.”

“Tell him—”

“I did,” she cut me off. “Tomorrow night, Yonkers Raceway. In the outdoor grandstand at the top of the stretch. It’s a Thursday; he’ll find you easy enough, he said.”

I moved the first two fingers of each hand across the tabletop, miming a trotting horse. Not a pacer, a trotter—Max knew the difference. Then I turned an imaginary steering wheel, spread my hands to ask a question I already knew the answer to.

^“You know how I like it, honey,” Michelle insisted.

“Word for word,” I acknowledged. Then I started again, from the beginning.

Michelle made a moue of annoyance when I told her I didn’t recall whether Laura Reinhardt had worn any perfume, never mind what it might have smelled like. But mostly she stayed patient, her long red fingernails resting on the tablecloth.

“Maybe it’s just her . . . habit,” Michelle said, when I was finished. “There’s no way to tell unless we could talk to someone else she met for the first time.”

“What habit?”

“Playing.”

“Just what she said about flirting?”

“No, stupid. Talking about her . . . When a woman mentions a body part, she either wants reassurance about it, or she wants you to pay attention to it.”

“I don’t—”

“Yes, I know,” she cut me off. “Look, I’m not talking about asking. That’s more . . . intimate. You don’t ask a man if he thinks a certain dress makes you look fat unless you have something going with him.”

“She didn’t ask me—”

“She didn’t ask you anything, sweetheart. She told you all about ‘secretarial spread,’ though, didn’t she?”

“I . . . Yeah, she mentioned it, anyway.”

“But you couldn’t see what she was talking about, right?”

“Not with her sitting—”

“Exactly. Now, sometimes, if something bothers a woman, they can’t keep themselves from picking at it. The way magazines are today, I’m surprised more young girls don’t starve themselves to death or run around getting plastic surgery. So—a woman says to you, ‘I know I have a big nose,’ you’re supposed to say, ‘What?,’ as if it never occurred to you. But she tells you she has a big butt, what are you supposed to say then?”

“I don’t know.”

“For once, that was just as well,” she said, grinning. “There is no right answer to that one, not in the situation you were in. You can’t deny it, because you haven’t seen it. And you can’t say you like big butts, because this wasn’t supposed to be a date.”

“So what you said about habit . . . ?”

“Either it’s something that really bothers her, and she can’t keep herself from referring to it—there’re women who are compulsive like that, God knows—or it’s her way of getting sex into your mind.”

“She didn’t do any of the . . . other stuff.”

“Like bump her hip into you by accident when you’re walking together? Or licking her lips after she has some ice cream?”

“I . . . I’m not sure,” I said, trying to remember. “But she . . . It was more than that. More than not that, I mean.”

“Well, the way you left it, the next move is all hers, anyway.”

“What are you saying?”

“That she can’t tell, either.”

“Huh?”

“Burke, sometimes you are the thickest-skulled . . . Look, baby, let’s say the girl was interested in you. Not in this book you’re supposedly writing, or in doing something for her brother, or whatever. Just in you, okay? So she shows you a couple of little things, sees what you do. But you, being you, don’t do anything.

“Now she’s confused. Maybe you missed her signals. Maybe you weren’t interested. Or maybe you were interested as all hell, but you’re trying to be a professional—the book and all—and you didn’t want to blow it. See?”

“I can’t read her, honey. All I can tell you is, she’s not from down here.”

“‘Down here’ is not an address, baby,” she reminded me.

I moved my head. Not so much a nod as a bow, to the truth, letting my little sister’s core sadness reach out to hold hands with my hate, like the first time we met. “So you’re saying, even if she blows off the book, I could maybe—?”

“What could you possibly lose?” Michelle said. “You know what the Prof always says: When you’re looking to score, a window works as good as a door . . . ?”

“And a nun lies as good as a whore,” I finished for her.

^“You got an e-mail!” Terry, on the phone.

“Me?”

“Hauser. It came to the e-mail address on his site, and bounced right over to us. Just like the Dragon Lady said.”

“Read it to me.”

“It just says, ‘I knew I shouldn’t have had that torta.’ The word ‘knew’ is in italics, well, not really italics—but if you put asterisks around a word it means—”

“Just read the whole thing to me, kid, okay? Then you can fill in whatever I don’t understand.”

“Right. Okay, it says, ‘I knew I shouldn’t have had that torta. It’s back to the gym now for sure. I enjoyed our