As she always did she checked out the room. And as she usually did she knew somebody.
'Norma,' she said to a slender, good-looking woman who was following the maitre d' to her table. The woman turned, gave a small shriek, and came over to our table. Her husband came with her.
'We haven't seen you since Florida,' she said.
Rachel Wallace introduced me. I stood.
'Norma Stilson,' she said, 'and Roger Sanders.'
We shook hands.
'We're coming to see you tomorrow night,' Norma said. 'We've got tickets.'
'I plan to offend a good many people,' Rachel Wallace said.
'We wouldn't miss it,' Sanders said. 'Maybe a drink afterwards.'
'Of course,' Rachel Wallace said.
They both said they were pleased to meet me and moved on to their table.
'Some people go willingly to hear me,' Rachel Wallace said.
'But I'm buying you dinner,' I said.
'A transparent attempt to excuse your classic masculine fear of feminism.'
'And I did save your life once,' I said.
'And you did save my life once,' she said. 'What are you working on at the moment?'
'I don't think I know.'
'What does that mean?'
'It means I can't figure out what the case is about exactly, and the more I look, the more I can't figure it out.'
'Tell me,' she said.
The waiter brought her a second martini. I was still on my first beer. She wasn't beautiful, but her face had in it such intelligence and decency that it may as well have been beautiful.
'Well, it starts with Susan's ex-husband,' I said. 'He's a promoter…'
'Susan's ex-husband,' Rachel Wallace said.
It wasn't a question.
'Yeah.'
'Isn't that somewhat, ah, hazardous?' she said.
'It appears to be,' I said.
'Susan know you're involved with him?'
'She asked me to do it,' I said.
Rachel Wallace drank some martini. She held a swallow in her mouth for a moment.
'How do you feel about it?'
'I think it's somewhat hazardous,' I said.
'Jealousy?'
'No, I'm all right with it.'
'I doubt that,' she said. 'But I know your capacity for self-control, and I think you can probably do this. On the other hand, I'm not a perfect judge. I think you can probably do anything.'
'Me too,' I said.
She smiled.
'I know,' she said. 'Let me speculate for a moment. Let me guess that Susan is having trouble with it.'
'She wants me to do it and doesn't want me to do it,' I said. 'She wants to know what's going on and doesn't want to talk about it. She wants to know what I think of him and isn't interested in my opinion of him.'
'She keep his name?' Rachel Wallace said.
'Yes. But, nice touch, he changed it. To Sterling.'
Rachel Wallace smiled. 'Lucky his name wasn't Goldman,' she said. 'What do you think of him?'
'He's kind of a goofball,' I said. 'Goofy in that way that wealthy old Yankees are sometimes goofy. It's a little hard to describe.'
'But of course he's not a wealthy old Yankee,' Rachel Wallace said.
'Just pretending,' I said. 'He's accused of sexual harassment, and he seems to have no interest in it. Susan says he's desperate, broke, facing dissolution. He says he's doing dandy. He ran a big fund-raiser at the Fleet Center last year and nobody got any funds.'
