yellow cat. Both of them wore expressions suggesting they were dreaming of mice.
XXVII
Wise men purport to see a universality in all experience, a kind of connective tissue that exists throughout the universe so that no occurrence is independent of any other; there is, so they say, a reason for everything, and if one scrutinizes carefully enough, it is the same reason. These are wise men. Nudger was the kind of guy who was always trying mentally to recreate the day so he could figure out where he'd misplaced his car key, only to walk where he needed to go and then later find the key still in the ignition, where he'd forgotten it the night before. He often reflected that he wasn't cut out for his profession. But then how many people other than jockeys and bearded ladies were suited to their jobs?
And here he was, searching for the single connective reason in this universe of grits and graft that he'd stumbled into so willingly in order to pay next month's rent. To be able to find out what he didn't know, he needed to find out why he didn't know it. And the easiest way to do that was to get someone to tell him.
He had phoned Sandra Reckoner at several places, and finally located her where he should have looked to begin with, at her home number. She was just like ignition keys.
She agreed to meet him for lunch at The Instrumental, in the same block as her husband's flagship antique shop, the lounge where they had talked about sex and ill-kept secrets.
Though the place was crowded, she'd been able to get the table they'd sat at before. The same husky waitress was gliding like a Roller Derby queen among the tables; the same musical instruments were suspended from the ceiling and mounted on the walls. The thing that was different was that there was a piano player now, and a young blond girl sitting on the piano with a drink and cigarette balanced in the same hand, singing Helen Morgan style. She wasn't bad, Nudger decided, but she needed her own act. That could be said of so many people.
Sandra looked cool and faintly amused. Her makeup and the dim light took ten years off her elongated face, robbing it of character rather than improving her looks. She had on slacks and a brilliantly striped, loose-fitting silky blouse with black half-dollar-size buttons; only a tall woman could wear that outfit.
'Did you decide you owe me lunch?' she asked Nudger, as he sat down across the table from her. The glass before her was empty except for half-melted ice. She'd been there awhile waiting for him.
'I owe you more than that,' he told her. 'Or maybe we're more even than I'd thought.' The girl on the piano moaned softly about lost love.
Sandra didn't ask him what he meant by that; she was a great believer in letting time do its work. Nudger would get around to what he wanted to say, and she'd still be there to listen.
The waitress suddenly hovered over their table, pencil poised. She was wearing perfume that smelled overpower- ingly of lilacs. Avon screaming.
'Can I getcha anything?' she asked.
'Anything? Probably not,' Nudger told her. 'Just food or drink.'
Her bored-waitress expression didn't change. Wrong wavelength, wrong planet. More evidence that the universe was made up of random, disparate parts.
'I'm not hungry,' Sandra said. 'I'll just have another Scotch and water.' She looked at Nudger. 'Go ahead and order some lunch; I won't think you're impolite.'
'What's good here?' Nudger asked the waitress.
'Roast-beef sandwiches.'
'What else do you serve?'
She shook her head. 'Just roast-beef sandwiches.'
'Good,' Nudger said. A painless and easy choice was refreshing. 'I'll have one with ketchup, salt and pepper, no onions.'
'They only come one way,' the waitress said.
No choice at all was necessary. 'Great!' He wasn't being sarcastic; he was obviously really pleased about the sandwiches' lack of variety.
She looked at him oddly and made a darting squiggle of some sort in her order pad. She made similar marks to represent the drink orders, then moved away busily to deliver her message so that someone who read waitressese could interpret and cook and pour.
'The roast-beef sandwiches here are delicious,' Sandra assured him. 'Now that your mind's at ease about that, what else is worrying you?'
'Do I look worried?'
She nodded her long head. 'And puzzled. About what?'
'Why were you waiting for me in my hotel room night before last?' he asked her.
She smiled. 'I like you and I like lust.'
'I don't doubt the last part,' Nudger told her.
She seemed more amused than offended. 'There's nothing wrong with lust; it's so much purer and less complicated than love. But why do you doubt the first part of what I said? I do like you.'
'But you must know that David Collins doesn't share your affection for me. So why did you give him the letters?'
'David Collins? Letters?'
'Collins is the guy who sent you to search my room and my mind.'
'And the letters?'
'The stack of blue envelopes you took from my room and gave him.'
As he watched her face, Nudger's stomach began to bother him, a vague stirring of pain and regret. He was wrong about this woman, his stomach was telling him. A presage of guilt twisted its claws into him. It had to be her, and yet it wasn't. He knew it in that instant. He was hurting someone who cared for him, who had trusted him more than he'd trusted her. Yet he had no choice; he had to find out about this for sure, and then probe deeper.
'Is this the big-shot David Collins who gets his name in the papers now and then for charity and chicanery?'
Nudger nodded.
'Never met the man. These his letters that are missing from your room?'
'Not his letters, but they were written by someone he knows.'
'And you think I went to you so I could pick your brain and rummage through your room, that I used sex as an excuse to get in and stay awhile.' She seemed, more than anything else, disappointed in him. 'You believe I stole from you.'
'I don't know that for sure. That's why I wanted to talk with you.' Too late for moderation; he had lost her.
She stood up from her chair, looking down frowning and slowly shaking her head at him, as if he were vintage wine that had suddenly gone to vinegar. He had let her down in a way not so dissimilar.
'In the grand scheme of things,' she told him calmly, 'we didn't have much between us, Nudger, but what we did have, you've broken.'
'I didn't have any choice. I had to know.'
'And do you know?'
He did know; he was certain. It hadn't made sense from the beginning. 'You didn't take the letters,' he told her. 'Sit back down, Sandra. Please.'
She gave him a distant, pitying smile, turned, and walked with her long-legged stride through the crowd of drinkers and diners toward the exit. A one-chance woman walking from his life. Afternoon brilliance and traffic noise erupted around her briefly, as if she had magically summoned it all simply by touching the doorknob; then she disappeared into the brightness and sound even before the door swung closed.
Nudger felt suddenly as if the chain-smoking, chain- drinking, moaning girl on the piano were singing just for him. He sat morosely, thinking that the conversation hadn't turned out at all as he'd planned. In fact, a number of incidents had gone wrong for him lately. It was dispiriting; he felt dejected and small. Maybe he'd commit suicide by
