something almost mystical might simply be the result of years of armouring. Perhaps O’Hara was so thoroughly shielded that he just seemed mystical.
She sighed and said, I can’t get used to the fact that we may have caused Lavander’s death.’
‘No, didn’t cause it. We didn’t save him. There’s a big difference.’
‘But can’t we do something? I’d recognize the car. And it was a rental, so he’ll have to turn it in and—’
‘A good hunter knows when the hunt is over.’
‘There you go. Mr Kimura talks like that all the time. “The smart man doesn’t wear wet socks.” How’s that?’
‘Actually, it would be, “The wise man does not put on his sock until the sun blesses it.”
‘Oh, bullshit.’ She paused for a second. ‘I’d just like to get another look at that creep, anyway. I’ve never seen a real live assassin before.’
‘You really have a taste for this, don’t you?’
‘For what?’
‘Chasing the big story. How did you get into this business, anyway? Hell, you’ve read my K-file, you know everything about me right down to my underwear size. I don’t know anything about you.’
How did she get into the business? Well, it had started because she was chubby.
When Eliza Gunn was growing up in Nebraska she was plump. Well, perhaps ‘plump’ is being generous. Actually she was somewhere between plump and fat. Chipmunk-cheeks- and-dimpled-legs chubby is what she was.
She lived in Ozone. Once you got a chuckle out of the name, it was all downhill. Dull. Dull. Dull. The only statue in town was of Calvin Coolidge, who once waved at Ozone from the rear of a passing train. So much for Ozone, Nebraska.
Her father owned the local drugstore and was a kind, patient, Christian man. Reserved, the kind that thinks a pat on the head is as good as a hug. Alwyn Gunn died thinking that only perverts read Playboy and that Quaaludes were tranquilizers. And that was in 1977.
Her mother died when she was three in a car wreck driving back from a shopping trip to Omaha. The drive was so dull that she fell asleep at the wheel. Alwyn hired a housekeeper, a German widow whose husband died in a fall off a tractor, and went about business as usual. He never remarried. Too much effort.
Chubby kids are cute. Until they get to be about six. A fat twelve-year-old is not cute. Eliza didn’t enter puberty, she stomped into it.
One of the reasons Lizzie Gunn was chubby is that if you lived in Ozone, there was no reason to be skinny. Actually there wasn’t much reason to do anything but eat, read books and get pregnant. A lot of Eliza’s friends got pregnant. Eliza read books and ate. Among his many ‘virtues, Alwyn Gunn was a lover of books. When she was just beginning to read, Alwyn would bring home half a dozen kids’ books to her from the library. By the time she was ten she was into the adult section.
She also realized, at about age ten, that she was different from everyone else. Not because she was chubby/fat, but because she didn’t want to be like everybody else. She had no desire to be one of the gang. If she couldn’t win, she would rather have come in ten minutes after everybody else. Anything to avoid being part of the herd. Fat or thin, the thought of being common repelled her. It was mental, not physical.
She also had a passion to find out, to be the first to know. To have a secret nobody else shared
The more she read, the more her fantasies blossomed.
No, they exploded.
She rode to Valhalla with Kipling; stormed the gates of Moscow with Tolstoy; conned her ,ay to New Orleans with Twain. She learned class from Shaw, grace from Galsworthy, elegance from Henry James. She was Anna Karenina, Sarah Bernhardt and Holly Golightly. She made up stories in school, told them to her toothbrush in the bathroom, to her dog, her cat, to anyone who would listen. And when old movies started appearing on television, she was Rosalind Russell, James Cagney and Pat O’Brien all wrapped in one, in hot pursuit of the big story. The scoop.
She was editor of the school paper, a job usually relegated to chubby girls who wore glasses, since it was assumed that they were more serious than pretty girls with tits and ass, or to boys, who were too horny to do an anything right. She wore her father’s old fedora with a press pass in the brim, barked orders and drove everybody crazy. The paper won the Sigma Chi award as the best high school newspaper in the state. She got a personal award for best editorial. It was about the passing of the town’s last blacksmith. That was when she was sixteen, her junior year.
And then she became seventeen. That year something happened to Lizzy. She got skinny. Skinny the way girls dream of being skinny.
It happened suddenly. Like a cocoon bursting open, the fat just fell away and suddenly there was Lizzie Gunn, five feet tail, ninety-four pounds, with the best tits and ass in Ozone High School. The Hair-breath Harrys of the school went crazy. Her phone rang constantly, now she was cute.
She was also independent, somewhat eccentric, a daydreamer and a loner. Slimmed down, she had boundless energy.
Ozone to Missouri U. to Lincoln to Chicago to Boston. Life had been upbeat ever since. After Ozone, nothing would ever be dull again. Dull dissolved into the six o’clock nightly news and a constant what she called ‘twiddle’ in her stomach. Her stomach had been in a ‘twiddle’ ever since. And now, sitting with Frank O’Hara chasing a chimera named Chameleon, all her fantasies, daydreams, aspirations, everything! had come true.
She kept the story short. Sunk down in the comfortable chair, he kept looking at her over his kneecaps as though he were sighting a gun. This time she stared back, and when she was finished she went right back to the subject at hand.
‘I can’t believe a man is probably getting killed at this very moment and we’re just sitting here helplessly.’
O’Hara got up and walked to the bed, and taking her hands, guided her to her feet. He put his arms around her
