Thin Air

'How is Luis's English? He speak with an accent?'

'He speaks very well, only a slight hint of an accent, really.'

The yellow cat rolled over and onto his feet and padded away from me to a plaid upholstered rocker across the room and jumped up in it and curled up and went to sleep.

'Thanks,' I said.

I took a card out of my pocket and gave it to her.

'If you hear anything or think of anything, please call me.'

'You don't think anything bad has happened, do you?'

'I don't know what has happened,' I said.

'What are you going to do now?'

'I'm going to go find Luis Deleon,' I said.

Typhanie's eyes widened.

'Because of what I told you?'

'Because of what a couple people have told me,' I said.

'Don't tell him I said anything.'

'Okay.'

'Luis is, ah, kind of scary,' Typhanie said.

'Scary how?' I said.

'He's so passionate, so… quick. I wouldn't want to make him mad.'

'Me either,' I said. 'But you never know.'

He had not touched her yet. She didn't know if he would. He had her. He could force her. Why would he not? What he felt for her wasn't love. She knew that. But maybe there was love in it. Maybe it kept him from forcing her. Yet, of course, he was forcing her. Forcing her to be here. Forcing her to wear his stupid outfits and live in this cartoon set of a room. Still he had not forced her sexually. And he had not physically hurt her. The air-conditioning hummed, the monitors played. The sound track was on and she heard herself again and again giggling at the beach, struggling in the back of the truck. There was no way for her to tell time. No light, no dark except as he turned the lights on and off, no television except the mocking images of her own bondage, no radio, no clocks. She saw only him, and now and then the young-faced serving woman who never spoke. The food offered her no clues; what she ate was not specific to any meal, and she wondered if it were deliberate on his part, a kind of brainwashing. It underscored how captive she was. She could not choose to eat. She had to wait to be fed. Or was it simply a part of how she knew he was enveloped in make-believe, creating still another artificial environment, pretending to be a bandit prince, pretending to be her lover. She felt the shame of her situation, how she had so freely taken up with this man, so carelessly put aside what she had learned so painfully in California, knowing as she felt the shame that it was not a matter of shame, that she had been drawn to him by needs she hadn't yet mastered, as she had drunk with him, before she mastered that once more as well. And she would master this. He would not pull her back down. She had been too far down. She had struggled too painfully up. She had lapsed again and escaped again and she would escape this. She wouldn't go back. She would be Lisa St. Claire. She was Lisa St. Claire, and because she was, she was also Mrs. Frank Belson. Frank would find her.

Chapter 11

I started at Proctor Police Headquarters. It was a gray granite building, near the gray granite City Hall. It had been built in the British Imperial style of the nineteenth century when a lot of American public buildings were being erected by people filled with swagger and destiny. It had been shiny and new once, when the WASPs ran the city, and the mills pumped money into everyone's pockets. But now it was hunched and crumbled like the city, buckling beneath the weight of impoverishment. There was graffiti on most of the walls, and litter washed up against the gray stone foundation. The windows were covered with wire mesh, and one of the glass panels in the front door had been broken and replaced with unpainted plywood. It looked like it wasn't exterior plywood either, because it had already begun to blister in the damp spring air, and the ends were starting to separate.

There was a sign on the duty officer's desk in the high lobby. It said Officer McDonogh. Behind the sign, seated at the desk, reading a newspaper, was a fat cop with his tie down and the neck of his uniform blouse unbuttoned. He seemed to be sweating a lot even though it wasn't hot, and he had a white handkerchief tied around his neck. A cigarette sent a small blue twist of smoke up from the edge of the desk, where it rested among the burn marks.

I said, 'You McDonogh?'

He looked up from his paper, as if the question were a hard one, stared at me for a minute, and shook his head.

'Naw. Sign's been there since the war. What do you want?'

'Billy Kiley still Chief of Detectives?' I said.

'Naw, Kiley retired three, four years ago. Delaney's Chief now. You know Kiley?'

He picked up the cigarette, spilled some ash on his belly, and took a drag.

'I used to,' I said, 'when I was working for the Middlesex DA.'

'Well, he's gone. You want to see Delaney?'

'Yes.'

The fat cop jerked his head down the corridor behind him. 'Last door,' he said and picked up the phone as I walked away.

The corridor had once been marble, and some of it still showed above the green-painted Sheetrock that had