“Are you kidding?”
“Not at all. You’ll never know.”
“Maybe I’d like to.”
“Why… why don’t we just, uh… leave it at thank you.”
“Up to you.”
“And I want you to know there’s no obligation. You don’t have to see me again, while you’re in town, Jack. Understand? If you don’t want me to come here to swim tomorrow morning, or if you just don’t want to show up yourself or something, fine, fine.”
“You know what?”
“What?”
“It’s hard to take a speech like that seriously, coming from somebody who doesn’t have any pants on.”
She looked down into the water, where her silky white-blond pubic hair was waving like provocative seaweed, and she laughed again. “I see what you mean,” she said, and touched me.
“You know something else?” I said.
“What?”
“I haven’t eaten yet.”
“In the water, you mean?”
I splashed her. “Supper.”
“Oh. Neither have I.”
“Want some? I hear there’s a good restaurant downstairs.”
“Oh… I can’t.”
“Well. Up to you.”
“No, it’s not that… I just can’t go down there, my hair, all wet.”
“We could always go up to my room and call room service.”
“We could do that.”
We did.
First, I had to go deep-diving to retrieve my trunks and her bikini bottoms from the bottom of the pool, where they’d sunk like soggy stones; and then she got her robe, which she’d folded up and laid behind a deck chair, and stopped across the hall at the ladies’ dressing room for her clothes, but went down in the elevator wearing her robe over her swimsuit, like I did.
When we got to the room, I called room service and was told it was too late for anything but drinks. She got on the phone and told them her name and they took her order: chateaubriand for two and a bottle of red wine, which had an elaborate name and a date and all, and to someone like me who knows little or nothing about such things, that’s pretty impressive. So was the service she was getting, at the drop of her name.
We turned on the TV and crawled onto the bed and fooled around awhile, and just when it was getting interesting, supper came. The nine-millimeter was still wrapped in the towel, and I stuck it under my arm as I answered the door, but supper was all it was, so I tipped the guy five and he went away and we ate. We didn’t talk much at all, except to comment now and then on the television show we were pretending to watch. I did learn that she was a widow, a fairly recent one, and that this was a coming-out party of sorts for her.
I’d had a tingle about her all night, and not just sexual. She was real. She was not some whore sent around to set me up. In the first place, nobody knew I was in town, that I knew of, so nobody was likely to be setting me up. In the second place, the action she got on the phone, getting that after-hours room service, proved she was important in a way even the fanciest hooker can never hope to be. And that fast fuck in the pool had been real. Some sort of emotional purging for her. She was real. Nobody could be that good an actress.
But I had this goddamn tingle about her, and after she fell asleep, after we’d screwed a few times, I went through her purse, and found a picture in her wallet, a picture that I knew was of her late husband, knew it in my head and my gut simultaneously.
The picture was of someone I knew. Used to know.
The woman in my bed was the Broker’s widow.
14
She was gone when I woke up.
For one groggy moment, I wondered where she’d gone, then remembered I’d heard her leaving, last night, around midnight. She’d got up, got her clothes on, got her things together, stopping momentarily to brush my face with her lips before she left. She was barely out of there when I was sitting up in bed, in the dark, pointing the nine-millimeter at the door. But the door didn’t do anything, so after a few minutes I got out of bed, fastened the night latch, laid the gun on the nightstand, and slept through till nine the next morning.
This morning.
On the bureau I found a note she’d left, saying, “Think I’ll pass on the morning swim. Call me this afternoon, if you want another evening one.” Knowing her, that ambiguous use of the word “one” was on purpose. The note was signed, “Carrie,” with phone number beneath.
I decided to pass on the morning swim, myself, and not just because she wasn’t going to be there. Until now, I’d been reasonably convinced no one knew I was in town; but I couldn’t be so sure, now that my easy poolside pickup of the evening before had turned out to be Broker’s widow. I mean, I could hardly afford to just shrug and say, “Oh, so that’s who she is. Isn’t that an interesting coincidence.” Not that coincidences don’t happen, but in my position, chalking things up casually to coincidence could coincidentally lead to things going suddenly black… perhaps at the same time water in a swimming pool was taking on a reddish tone.
Cold needles of water struck my face, and I let them, wanted the water cold, showering and waking up at the same time, still thinking about Carrie and who she was. And the more I did, the less this seemed like a coincidence, or, anyway, the less it seemed a wildly, suspiciously improbable one. After all, I used to meet the Broker at the Concort, and knew that he had money in the place; well, now his wife had inherited his interest, and was it so unusual for her to come around and make occasional use of the pool?
This was, keep in mind, a young woman who evidently had been a showpiece-you should excuse the expression-for a husband twice her age, a bright, probably well-educated girl from a wealthy, sheltered background, no doubt, who would likely know little or nothing about her late husband’s illicit business activities. The fact that Broker died a violent death, which had led to a partial public surfacing of the dark side of his business life, could explain her extended period of mourning, which had apparently ended last night, in the pool, in bed.
I thought about all that, going down in the elevator, and by the time I’d had breakfast, had made my mind up about something.
So far, these several days I’d been in town, I’d kept a low profile, and that had its advantages; but it gets boring in the shadows, after a while, and I never did enjoy doing stakeout work. Besides, after my run-in with Broker’s wife, I was feeling confused, even paranoid, and enough of that. Time to come out.
Time to go see an old friend and say hello.
Time to see Ash.
15
It was almost warm. People were going around without coats. Occasional patches of snow remained, but that was about all. The ground was soft, the streets were slushy, but it was a nice day, for a change.
Then the sun slid under a cloud, the wind got some of its bite back, and I spotted Curtis Brooks going in the Holiday Inn.
I was just getting out of the Buick and was on my way to see Ash, when I saw the lawyer going in ahead of me. I laid back. Yesterday I had seen Brooks coming out of the motel and assumed he’d been to see Ash, and now today I’d be able to confirm or dispel that assumption. Only I was already convinced Brooks had called on Ash
