“I only have two kinds of gentlemen callers.
Those who bring me booze and those I want to sleep with. You don’t have any booze and you look like you’re about fifteen.”
She knew how to stroke a guy’s ego.
“So we just stand here?”
“So we just stand here.”
She wore a black blouse and jeans. Bare feet. She looked sexy in the same sleepy, voluptuous way she usually did. Probably not a great wife but a hell of a mistress. She rattled ice cubes in her glass.
“I thought you were out of Chablis.”
“Chablis, yes. I didn’t say anything about Scotch.”
“Ah.”
“You and your ahs. And just what the hell is this anyway?” She held up the plastic bag I’d handed her.
“You broke out a taillight Friday night at Keys’s around nine-thirty, when you were trying to get away.”
You always hope they’ll break down in tears and confess, the way they do on those Tv courtroom dramas. She got defiant. “You prick.”
“You hated her and were jealous of her and you killed her.”
“I’d think it’d be the other way around.”
“What?”
“First, I’d be jealous of her and then I’d hate her and then I’d kill her.”
“Thanks for the English lesson.”
“I didn’t kill her, McCain.”
“Then can you explain what you were doing there?”
She sucked some ice into her mouth and talked around it.
“Maybe I need a lawyer.”
“Maybe you do.”
“Too bad David is dead. I could’ve called him.”
“I can see you’re terribly bereaved.”
“The bastard dumped me. Why should I be bereaved?”
I guess she had a point, though with two children between them, I’d think she’d want to put on a show for the girls.
“But you admit you went to Keys’s?”
“Sure I admit it.”
“Why?”
“To tell that bitch to have David pay me the alimony he owes me. Nearly five thousand dollars now. I’m supposed to go to Mexico on vacation next month. I need the money. He’s also behind in child support. I never wanted kids anyway. We were young. I wanted to have fun. But he was always thinking of his political career. Election Pr photographs. You know, the candidate with his two darling little daughters?
We’re both shitty parents. Neither of us actually wanted the girls. To be perfectly honest, I mean.”
A house of love. The way kids pick up on things, I’m sure they’d long ago sensed the attitude she was describing.
“She was alive when you got there?”
“V. She was hanging balloons in the showroom.”
“And you had words?”
“She played the na@if as always. I guess men find that attractive. “Behind in his payments?
My David? I don’t see how that could be.”
That sort of bullshit. I started screaming at her.”
“Did you strike her?”
“No.”
“How did it end?”
“I just stormed out. That’s one of the things I do well, storm out. I’m told there are a couple of other things I do well too.”
“Want me to guess what they are?”
“I just wish you didn’t look so damned young, McCain. I’d get arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”
“You make them show Id’s at the door?”
She smiled that slow, sexy smile. “There are different kinds of Id, kiddo. If you catch my drift.”
I wondered if she kept a photo of Mae West in her wallet.
“He was broke.”
This seemed to surprise her. “Nobody was supposed to know that. The bank was floating him for a while.”
“When was the last time you talked to him?”
“A few days ago. And I didn’t talk.
I screamed.”
“The money?”
“Of course. I’m over him by now. All I want-want-. ed-f him was good old Yankee greenbacks.”
“Be sure and mention that in your eulogy.”
She laughed. She had a big bawdy laugh. I liked it. A Rubens body and a Rabelaisian laugh.
“I’ll have to tell Cliffie about this.”
“About me being at the dealership?”
“Yeah.”
“I won’t be alone with that creep.”
“Why?”
“Why? He was out here the other day and copped about a hundred and fifty cheap feels off me while he was “questioning” me. God, imagine if I’d actually cared that the little bitch was dead, and here’s some retard feeling me up. It was like being back in ninth grade. I was the first girl who had breasts and all the boys zoomed in on me.”
Behind her, I saw a sleepy little girl in pajamas come into the living room, rubbing her eyes. “Mommy, I had another accident.”
She leaned close and said, “Wets her bed all the time.”
To her daughter: “Get in your sister’s bed, then, till I’m done talking with the man here.”
“But I’m wet too, Mommy. Cindy won’t want me in her bed if I’m wet.”
Again the whisper to me: “See what I mean about having kids? It’s always something.”
A few moments later, I was back in my ragtop.
I took the ten-mile blacktop back to town. Two-lane. Less than a year old.
Smooth and wrinkle-free. Just made for an Indian summer night and a car like mine. Elvis way way up singing “Mystery Train” and me with a fresh Lucky in my mouth and a sudden crazed optimism about Mary. We . were going to find her and she. was going to be all right and-I saw her in the rearview.
She first appeared as headlights. Coming fast.
She was still some distance behind me, so I didn’t think about it much. Lots of cars went fast. The Lord and the county supervisors had blessed us with our own drag strip-perfectly flat, a moon-silvered river running along one side, shaggy pines on the other-one of the few safe places to drag in the entire state.
Then she was less than three car lengths in back of me. Not slowing at all.
The Ford propeller-style grille. Her beautifully shaped head framed inside the driver’s half of the window. Blond hair, black scarf, and dark Audrey
Hepburn shades. Even at night.
All I could do was floor it. Otherwise the mystery woman would run right into me.
Then she stunned me.
She pulled out around me going eighty or eighty-five miles an hour. And man it was scary and exhilarating and wonderful and terrible all at once.
