“What’s it about?”
“It’s about a bagful of money, sweetheart, and I’ll tell ya what, if I don’t get to give it to him pretty damn quick, I’m out of here. Slater can fly to Jacksonville and pick it up himself.”
“I don’t know anything about this.”
“That’s how you want to keep it, hon. Let’s just say Slater did a little job for me and this is the bonus I promised him.”
“Well, damn.”
“Oh, let’s not agonize over it. If you don’t wanna tell me where the man is, it’s no skin off my nose.”
She was breathing in my ear. “Is it…”
I waited.
“…is it a
I couldn’t help laughing: I had played her just right. “Let’s say there’s a good reason he wanted it in cash.”
“Wait a minute, I’ll give ya a number.”
I could hear her fumbling around. “Call him at area code two oh six. It’s six two four, oh five hundred. Ask for seventeen twelve.”
I sat staring at the phone. Slowly I straightened up and looked at the far wall.
Slater was in the room next door.
And I knew I might as well have him in my lap.
Eleanor came out of the bathroom in a swirl of steam. She sat at the mirror sipping her drink and combing out her incredible hair. I thought she was lovely, alive with the sparkle of youth in spite of her trouble. She wanted to talk. Our short mutual history was the topic of the moment, to which was added her general assessment that we were a damned exceptional book-hunting team. “Today was special,” she said, “a real toot.” I looked at the far wall, where Slater was, and told her the pleasure was all mine. To her way of thinking, it was the perfect day, one she’d remember: “This is how I’d live my life, every day of the year, if I had my way. A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, some good books…”
She looked at me with open affection in the glass. “And you.”
She tugged at a place where her hair had knotted up. “We wouldn’t even need much money,” she said. “Money just takes the edge off. You need to be a little hungry to get that rush that comes with finding a really good one.”
Again she amazed me, this kid barely out of her teens.
“It’s not-having money that keeps you on your toes,” she said, meeting my eyes in the mirror.
I told her we were probably the most on-our-toes pair since Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, and she laughed. “Why couldn’t I’ve found you a year ago,” she mused. “Why-o-why-o-why?”
“It wouldn’t‘ve done much good,” I said absently, “since we’ve already got it well established that I’m old enough to be your father.”
She scoffed at this. “Yeah, if you’d started hiking up skirts when you were thirteen, maybe.” She looked at me in the mirror and said, blushing fiercely, “You’re probably not up to a little seduction right now, I’ll bet.”
I thought long and hard about how to respond, the words to use. The ones I picked were clumsy and inadequate. “Under the circumstances, you know, this is not the best idea you’ve had all day.”
“Well, it was just a thought.”
I told her it was a lovely thought, I was flattered. In another time, maybe…in another place…
“In another life,” she said, closing the book on it.
I decided to hang out here until just before our flight left. The certainty of Slater’s listening in on us I accepted as the lesser of two evils: here I could keep my back to the wall until the last possible moment. I looked at the wall but it told me nothing. I knew what I needed to know. Detectives today can punch a hole the size of a pin through a concrete wall, run a wire into bed with a cheating housewife, record her ecstasy with the other guy in eight-track stereo, and add a Michael Jackson sound track for the entertainment of the office staff. I told Eleanor none of this: no sense waving a red flag just yet. I called out and ordered a pizza delivered. She kept up a running chatter while we ate—her way, I guessed, of relieving her own building tension. She talked about all the great books she had found that had been screwed up by one anal-obsessive chucklehead or another. I laughed as only a fellow traveler can: I too knew that peculiar heartache. You find a grand copy of an old Ross Macdonald and open it to see that some fool has written all over it, destroying half its value and all of its factory-fresh desirability. Why is a book the only gift that the giver feels free and often compelled to deface before giving? Who would give a shirt or a blouse and write, in ink,
