harder to find Sid, because all she knew about him was his first name, and that might well have been improvised for the occasion. And she’d met him in Philadelphia, but he was already registered at a hotel, so that meant he was probably from someplace other than Philadelphia, and that meant the only place she knew to look was the one place where she could be fairly certain he didn’t live.
She knew the first and last names of the two other men on her list. Graham Weider was a Chicagoan she’d met in New York; he’d taken her to lunch and to bed, then jumped up and hurried her out of there, claiming an urgent appointment and arranging to meet her later. But he’d never turned up, and the desk at his hotel told her he’d checked out.
So he was lucky, and Alvin Kirkaby was lucky in another way. He was an infantry corporal on leave before they shipped him off to Iraq, and if she’d realized that she wouldn’t have picked him up in the first place, and she wasn’t sure what kept her from doing to him as she did to the other men who entered her life. Pity? Patriotism? Both seemed unlikely, and when she thought about it later she decided it was simply because he was a soldier. That gave them something in common, because weren’t they both military types? Wasn’t she her father’s little soldier?
Maybe he’d been killed over there. She supposed she could find out. And then she could decide what she wanted to do about it.
Graham Weider, though, couldn’t claim combatant status, unless you considered him a corporate warrior. And while his name might not be unique, neither was it by any means common. And it was almost certainly his real name, too, because they’d known it at the front desk. Graham Weider, from Chicago. It would be easy enough to find him, when she got around to it.
Of them all, Sid would be the real challenge. She sat there going over what little she knew about him and how she might go about playing detective. Then she treated herself to another half-glass of Brown Palace water and flavored it with a miniature of Johnny Walker from the minibar. She sat down with the drink and shook her head, amused by her own behavior. She was dawdling, postponing her shower, as if she couldn’t bear to wash away the traces of Doug’s lovemaking.
But she was tired, and she certainly didn’t want to wake up the next morning with his smell still on her. She undressed and stood for a long time in the shower, and when she got out of it she stood for a moment alongside the tub and watched the water go down the drain.
Four, she thought. Why, before you knew it, she’d be a virgin all over again.
EIGHT
Four.
Four men who’d been with her. Four men, each of whom could see her walking down the street, nudge a friend, and say, “You see that one? Nice, huh? Well, I had her once.”
There’d been others, of course, who could have made that claim. You couldn’t say there’d been too many to count, but it was true that she could no longer count them, because they weren’t there to be counted. They no longer existed. They were dead, and their successes with her — if you wanted to call them that — had been expunged from the record books.
Her pattern for a few years now had been simple enough. She found a man, or was found by one; she went to his bed or took him to hers; she left, and left him dead. If he had money, she took it with her. It let her live with a degree of comfort and paid her way from one hunting ground to the next. She’d take a job now and then, but she worked only when she wanted to.
And the jobs never lasted. Because sooner or later she’d hook up with one of nature’s noblemen, and she’d give him what he wanted, and then take it all back with interest. And then, of course, it would be time to get out of Dodge. Or Philadelphia, or Toledo, or Louisville, or Kansas City, or — well, wherever. The places all tended to merge in her memory. So did the men. And why make an effort to bring their images into focus? They were gone, and once they were gone it was as if they had never existed.
In Toledo she’d erased a man from her past, and even as his body was approaching room temperature she was on her way to Denver. She stayed a few days at the Brown Palace, where she flirted with a few suits — a corporate lawyer, a real estate guy, a venture capitalist — but didn’t let any of them get any further than a little conversational double entendre.
She flew from Denver to Phoenix, checked into a Courtyard by Marriott, and was walking down a street near the hotel when a sign in a diner window caught her eye. WAITRESS WANTED. The place was unprepossessing, and none of the handful of customers struck her as a potential big tipper. Could she even take home enough to cover her hotel room?
Still, it might be interesting, slinging hash at the Last Chance Cafe, or whatever it called itself. And what did it call itself? She looked up above the window, where a sign read STAVRO’S DINER.
She went in, unfastened the Scotch tape that held the WAITRESS WANTED sign in place, took it down and carried it to the counter, where a stocky man with a moustache raised his abundant eyebrows and watched her from beneath them. “You must be Stavro,” she said. “You can put this away. I’m your new waitress.”
“Just like that? How you know I wanna hire you?”
“What do you want, references from Delmonico’s? A letter of recommendation from Wolfgang Puck? You need a waitress and I need a job. So?”
He gave her a look, and then a look-over. His eyes were a sort of muddy brown, and she could feel them on her breasts. Their expression said it was his place and his eyes could go where they wanted. And so could his hands.
“Steve,” he said.
“Steve?”
“My name was Stavros,” he said. “Not Stavro. Idiot who made the sign, thinks if you put an S you gotta put an apostrophe in front of it.”
“Couldn’t you make him do it over?”
“ ‘I ain’t payin’ you,’ I told him. He said he’d do it over. ‘I still ain’t payin’ you,’ I said, and that’s where we left it. Stavros, Stavro, what’s the difference? Everybody calls me Steve anyway. You can call me Steve.”
“Okay.”
“What do I call you?”
What indeed? She hadn’t bothered to figure out that part, and didn’t want to use the same name she’d written on the registration card at the hotel.
“Carol,” she said.
“Like a Christmas Carol? You probably hear that all the time.”
“You’re the first.”
“Yeah, I bet. You wanna start now? There’s an apron on the peg. It’ll fit you. Last girl worked here, she was about your size, but I gotta say she didn’t have your shape. You got a real nice shape to you.”
She’d drawn a few cups of coffee, served a couple of Blue Plate Specials, and had Steve brush up against her a few times, with an apology each time, always with an inflection to belie the words. And the next time she passed through the kitchen he dropped the accidentally-on-purpose pretense and ran a hand appraisingly over her bottom.
“Very nice,” he said.
Well, she’d thought she might stay a while in Phoenix, and that didn’t seem likely now, did it? Oh, she could deflect his pass and make it clear she wasn’t willing to play, but she didn’t get the impression Steve would take no for an answer. She sensed that making herself available to him was part of the job description, which might explain why the vacancy had existed.
She could quit, of course. Take off the apron, throw it in his face, and tell him to save it for the next girl with a nice shape to come along.
But the son of a bitch got her motor running. He was crude and crass, and you couldn’t call him good- looking, but there was a sexual magnetism about him that she couldn’t deny. Even the rank smell of him, all musk
