'Did you make any progress this evening?'
'No. I wasn't working.'
'Oh.'
'I was at a meeting.'
'A meeting?'
'An AA meeting.'
'Oh,' she said, and she was going to say something else, but the waitress, with a great sense of timing, showed up to take our drink orders. I said I'd have a Perrier. Willa thought for a moment and ordered a Coke with a piece of lemon.
'You could have something stronger,' I said.
'I know. I already had more to drink than I usually do, and I was a little headachey when I woke up. I don't think you mentioned earlier that you were in AA.'
'I don't generally tell people.'
'Why? You can't think it's something to be ashamed of.'
'Hardly that. But the idea of anonymity is sort of bound up in the whole program. It's considered bad form to break somebody else's anonymity, to tell people that the person in question is in AA. As far as breaking your own anonymity is concerned, that's more of an individual matter. I suppose you could say that I keep it on a need-to- know basis.'
'And I need to know?'
'Well, I wouldn't keep it a secret from someone I was involved with emotionally. That would be pretty silly.'
'I guess it would. Are we?'
'Are we what?'
'Emotionally involved.'
'I'd say we're on the verge.'
'On the verge,' she said. 'I like that.'
The food was pretty good considering that the place was named after a lethal substance. We had Jarlsberg cheeseburgers, cottage fries, and salad. The burgers were supposedly grilled over mesquite, but if there was a difference between that and ordinary charcoal, it was too subtle for me. The potatoes were hand-cut and fried crisp and brown.
The salad contained sunflower seeds and radish sprouts and broccoli florets, along with two kinds of lettuce, neither of them iceberg.
We talked a lot during the meal. She liked football, and preferred the college game to the pros. Liked baseball but wasn't following it this year. Liked country music, especially the old-time twangy stuff. Used to be addicted to science fiction and read shelves of it, but now when she read at all it was mostly English murder mysteries, the country house with the body in the library and butlers who had or hadn't done it. 'I don't really give a damn who did it,' she said. 'I just like to slip into a world where everybody's polite and well-spoken and even the violence is neat and almost gentle. And everything works out in the end.'
'Like life itself.'
'Especially on West Fifty-first Street.'
I talked a little about the search for Paula Hoeldtke and about my work in general. I said it wasn't much like her genteel English mysteries.
The people weren't that polite, and everything wasn't always resolved at the end. Sometimes it wasn't even clear where the end was.
'I like it because I get to use some of my skills, though I might be hard put to tell you exactly what they are. I like to dig and pick at things until you begin to see some sort of pattern in the clutter.'
'You get to be a righter of wrongs. A slayer of dragons.'
'Most of the wrongs never get righted. And it's hard to get close enough to the dragons to slay them.'
'Because they breathe fire?'
'Because they're the ones in the castles,' I said. 'With moats around them, and the drawbridge raised.'
Over coffee she asked me if I'd become friendly with Eddie Dunphy in AA. Then she put her hand to her mouth. 'Never mind,' she said. 'You already told me it was against the rules to break another member's whatchamacallit.'
'Anonymity, but it doesn't matter now. Being dead means never having to remain anonymous. Eddie started coming to meetings about a year ago. He'd stayed completely sober for the past seven months.'
'How about you?'
'Three years, two months, and eleven days.'
'You keep track to the day?'
'No, of course not. But I know my anniversary date, and it's not hard to figure the rest out.'
'And people celebrate anniversaries?'
