'You'll cooperate with Spenser?'
'Yes.'
'You have any problems with Jon?' Penny said to me.
'Not me,' I said. 'Your way or the doorway.'
Penny took her feet off the desktop and let the chair come forward and smiled.
'Excellent,' she said. 'Either of you want a Coca-Cola?'
EIGHT
MY ROOM WAS on the second floor of one wing of the motel, and opened onto a wing-length balcony with stairs at either end. It was late afternoon when SueSue Potter knocked on my door.
'Welcome Wagon,' she said when I opened it.
'Oh good,' I said. 'I was afraid your husband had sent you ahead to soften me up.'
She was wearing a big hat and carrying a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket and a big straw handbag. There was some sort of look in her eyes, but it wasn't the unpleasant glint I'd seen when Pud threatened me.
'Oh, Pud is a poop,' she said.
'Alliteration,' I said. 'Very nice.'
She put the champagne down on top of the television set and circled the room. She was as perky as a grasshopper and much better-looking in a pink linen dress with a square neck and matching shoes.
'You mean you have to live here all by yourself all the time you're here?' she said.
'Depends on how lucky I get hanging out at the bowling alley late.'
'You big silly, I bet you don't even bowl.'
'Wow,' I said, 'you see right through a guy.'
'You have any glasses for this champagne?'
'Couple of nice plastic ones,' I said, 'in the bathroom.'
'Well, get them out here, it's nearly cocktail time and I don't like to enter it sober.'
I went to the bathroom and got the two little cups and peeled off the plastic-wrap sealers and brought the cups out and set them festively on top of the television beside the champagne bucket.
'I'm afraid that champagne corks are just too strong for me. Could you very kindly do the honors?'
I opened the champagne and poured some into each of the plastic cups. I handed one to her and picked up the other one. She put her glass up toward mine.
'Chink, chink,' she said.
I touched her glass with mine.
'I think plastic sounds more like 'Scrape, scrape,' ' I said.
'Not if you listen with a romantic ear,' she said.
'Which you do,' I said.
'To everything, darlin'.'
I smiled. She smiled. She drank her champagne. I took another small nibble at mine. She gazed dreamily around the room. I waited. She looked at my gun, lying in its holster on the bedside table.
'Oh,' she said. 'A gun.'
'Why, so it is.'
'Can I look at it?'
'Sure.'
'Can I pick it up?'
'No.'
She put her glass out. I refilled it.
'Did you have that with you the other night when Pud was being dreadful?'
'Yes.'
'So you could have shot him if you wanted.'
'Seems a little extreme,' I said.
'You handled him like he was a bad little boy,' SueSue said.
She drank some more champagne, looking at me while she drank, her eyes big and blue and full of energy. It was too soon for the champagne to kick in. It was some other kind of energy.
'Just doing my job, ma'am.'
