She frowned at him, trying to work him out.
‘Lesley,’ he said, ‘where’s your car?’
‘Over there,’ she said, and pointed generally toward the hotel.
‘I’ll meet you at your office,’ he said, and walked around to the driver’s side of the Jag.
She hadn’t moved. She went on standing there, in the V of the open door, her beige suit bouncing the light, her face in semi-darkness as she frowned at him over the top of the car.
‘Shut the door, Lesley,’ he said. ‘I’ll meet you at your office.’
He got into the Jag, and she leaned down to look in at him. ‘Daniel Parmitt is not your real name,’ she said, and straightened, and shut the door at last, and walked away across the parking lot.
He left the Jag in the other long block of Worth Avenue, among the very few cars parked there, and walked to the office, where she was waiting for him on the sidewalk. ‘You could have parked here,’ she said.
‘I like to walk.’
She shook her head, turned away, and unlocked the office door. ‘We’ll use Linda’s office in the back,’ she said. ‘It’s more comfortable, and we won’t have to leave a lot of lights on in front.’
‘Fine.’
An illuminated clock on the sidewalk, gift of an insurance company, served as the office night-light. In its glow, he followed her through the desks to a doorway at the back. She stepped through, hit a switch, and overhead fluorescents came stuttering on.
He said. ‘Aren’t there better lights?’
‘Hold on.’
The office was wider than deep, with a large desk on the right, filing cabinets across the back, and shelves and cabinets on the left. A dark brown vinyl sofa, with a coffee table, stood out from the cabinets, facing the desk across the way.
While he stood in the doorway, she turned on a brass desk lamp, a tulip-globed floor lamp in the corner behind the desk like something in a funeral parlor, and a group of muted strip lights under the shelves. ‘You can turn the overheads off right there,’ she told him, pointing to the switch beside the door.
Now the room was comfortable, illuminated in pools of amber. Crossing to sit on the right side of the sofa, he said, ‘Tell me what you think you’ve got so far.’
‘You’re a wooden nickel, that’s all I know right now,’ she said. ‘Linda usually keeps white wine in the refrigerator here. Want some?’
She herself did, of course: keeping the tension held down below the surface was hard work. He said, ‘If you do.’
She smiled. ‘At last, a human response.’
The refrigerator, a low one, was in a cabinet behind the sofa. Real estate magazines and old news magazines were on the black Formica coffee table. She brought a bottle of California chardonnay and two water glasses and shoved magazines out of the way to put them down. The bottle was already open, cork stuck back in, not much gone. She pulled the cork and poured for them both. ‘To truth,’ she said, toasting him.
He shrugged, and they both drank, and she sat at the other end of the sofa, knees together, holding the glass in her left hand, body angled toward him. ‘You’re new at your bank,’ she said, ‘you’re new at your house. One thing you get good at in this business is credit checks, and your credit doesn’t exist. You never owned or leased a car before the one you have now, never had a credit card, never had a mortgage, never had a bank account until the one you just started in San Antonio.’
‘I’m an American citizen,’ he told her, ‘but I was born in Ecuador. I don’t know if you saw my birth certificate.’
‘That isn’t one of the things I can get at.’
‘Well, you’ll see I was born in Quito of American parents. I’ve still got family down there, I’ve lived most of my life down there. The family’s in oil.’
‘Banana oil,’ she said. ‘Who is Roderick to you?’
‘Nobody.’
‘That’s why you were looking for his house? That’s why you walked to his house in the middle of the night?’
‘Who says I walked to his house?’
‘I do.’
He glanced at her shoes, which were medium-heel pumps, not much use on sand. ‘I just went for a walk,’ he said.
‘Coincidence, you headed straight for Roderick’s house.’
‘Coincidence,’ he agreed. ‘You say you’ve got problems with this Roderick, too.’
‘Well, I didn’t have, until I started thinking about you and looking into who you really are. That led me to run the same thing on Roderick and he’s another guy out of a science-fiction movie, suddenly dropped onto the planet from the mother ship five or six months ago.’
‘Why don’t you ask him about himself?’
‘I don’t know the man, I didn’t handle the sale. We carried the house, but it was a different broker made the deal.’ She sipped wine, put her glass down, leaned toward him. ‘Let me tell you what I know about Mr Roderick,’ she said.
