least I thought it was meant to be a sarcastic comment. With Ruthy, who could say?
I knocked.
It didn’t take her long to answer.
She was wearing a red terry cloth robe, but the terry cloth was-brushed or cut some way that made it look like velvet. It was long and flowing, but it clung to her, was belted around her middle and the neckline plunged. Of course.
She touched her hair, which was piled up on top of her head recklessly, and she said, “You really don’t believe in giving a girl much notice, do you? Come on in.”
She led me through, a small living room that looked like a prop room, odd pieces of secondhand furnishings scattered around with no apparent plan, and ranging from a possibly antique love seat to a cigar-store Indian with his cigars broken off. From the living room we passed through a small kitchenette area, just large enough for a table and chairs, refrigerator, stove and sink, and a lot of dirty dishes. Then we were in a tiny hall, about the size of a broom closet, off of which was a surprisingly large bath room on the one side, and her bedroom on the other, the latter being where we finally ended up.
There were only three things in the room: her round bed, with pink sheets and a fuzzy white something spread, unmade; a huge wardrobe trunk, standing open, like a mouth going sideways, with various clothes hanging and drawers that her other things were apparently stored in; and an imposing dressing-room-style dresser with big square mirror surrounded by glowing dwarf light bulbs. The top of the dresser was cluttered with various sorts of make-up, and on the walls around the mirror, and elsewhere in the room but not as concentrated as here, were pictures of her, both glossy posed photos with the crest of a studio photographer, and large color blow-ups of snapshots taken during various performances of plays she’d been in.
She sat in front of the mirror and started taking some pins out of her hair.
“Make yourself comfortable,” she said. “You want something to eat? I can fix us something. You rather wait till afterwards, for that?”
“Is that why you think I’m here?” I said, sitting on the round bed. “To fuck you?”
She shook her head, not in any response to me, but to make her blond hair tumble to her shoulders, which it did, as if in slow motion. Her smile in the mirror was as smug as it was sexual.
“Why else?” she said. “You knew it was here if you wanted it. And I knew you’d come and get it, sooner or later.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because this is exciting to you. You’re shacked up with my best friend… who’d scratch my eyes out if she knew, and yours too, probably. And I’m seeing your new boss… who happens to be the type who frowns on somebody messing with his property. I think all of that’s kind of exciting, don’t you?”
“I get chills.”
She dropped her robe to her waist. Cupped her big, small-pointed breasts and looked at them appraisingly in the mirror. Then she took some lipstick and touched it against each nipple, rubbed the dark red rouge into each nipple with the forefinger of either hand, then licked each finger.
I’d had this wrong, from the first day, and there was no excuse for it. I’d made an assumption I shouldn’t have and I was an asshole for it. I had assumed that simply because she was a woman, Lu would naturally play the stakeout role, the passive part.
But I knew now I was wrong.
Lu played the same role I used to play, when I was in the business: she killed people.
And her back-up man had almost as big a tits as she did.
“You’ve traveled around a lot, haven’t you, Ruthy? Played a lot of dinner theaters, all over the country?”
“Sure,” she said. She was using some kind of tiny black pencil or crayon or something to draw a star-shaped beauty mark to the right of the nipple of her left breast.
“And when you appear in a play, you might stay in a town as long as six weeks, or two months maybe?”
“That’s right,” she said, idly.
“Plenty long enough to strike up a relationship with a gentleman friend.”
She gave me that schoolgirl smile of hers, but it dissipated into a smirk as she said, “I’ve been known to know a man now and again.”
“You could get to know a man pretty well in that space of time. Know just about his every habit, whole pattern of his life.”
She shrugged, stood, and let the robe drop to the floor. She had a great ass. Her thighs in back looked smooth, slippery, but firm; her calves were muscular, tapering. She turned and rubbed her breasts, smearing the lipstick but leaving the little black star intact and then kind of scratched at her snatch and said, “I’m gonna have a bath,” and hip-swayed out of the room.
I heard the bath water drawing.
I walked across the nothing hall and into the large bathroom. She was leaning over testing the water as it came out of the faucet. She poured in some milky bubble bath.
There was a counter-top sink, with more make-up and feminine things and another big mirror. There was also a small portable television on the edge of the counter, for her to watch as she bathed.
“Know what a black widow is?” I asked her.
“Sure,” she said, getting in, water still flowing, bubble bath bubbling up, “it’s a female spider that eats her mate. Why? You want eaten?”
“Don’t get me wrong, now,” I said, putting down the lid on the stool and sitting, “I’m not comparing you to a black widow. You don’t kill your men. You just set them up for it.”
A hardening around and in her eyes, very slight, told me she had caught on, for the first time, to what this conversation was about. Till now, she thought it was all some kind of coy sexual ritual, some verbal foreplay thing I was engaging in.
But she didn’t change her style.
“When I get done in this tub,” she said, taking some soap and soaping between her legs, “I can love you to death, if you want, honey.”
“I don’t want. But there’s something I do want.”
“Oh?”
“I want to know whether you picked up your money yet.”
“Huh?” She turned off the water. She slid down under the surface so that bubbles covered-her, except for her lipstick-painted breasts, which bobbled surrealistically on the water.
“I said I want to know whether you picked up the money. “
“What money?” she said.
“If you picked up the money, I want to know where and when. If you haven’t yet, well, have you?”
“Jack, I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Standard operating procedure, back when I was working with the Broker, was for the middle man to accept twenty-five percent down, from whoever was buying the contract. The balance was picked up by the back-up man, the passive half of the team, just a day or so prior to the actual hit; and that was the only contact (and an indirect contact at that, since it amounted to going to a drop point and picking up the cash) the hitmen had with whoever hired them.
Ruthy knew this, and I knew she did.
I turned on the portable TV.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“Turning on the TV,” I said. “What does it look like I’m doing? Say, Ruthy, tell me… you’re in show biz. Which soap opera is that that’s on? I can’t tell them apart. Is it One Life to Live, or Another World or what?”
“Jack…”
“You know it’s dangerous having something electrical like this in bathroom. It could fall off into the tub. Oh, but I see you have the cord knotted up, so if that happens the set would unplug itself. That’s smart thinking, Ruthy. Here. I’ll just unplug it for a minute and unwind this cord and, hey it’s nice and long isn’t it? Just plug it in again and there’s your soap opera back. You don’t mind if I keep the volume down while we talk?”
“Jack, I’m getting out.”
“No,” I said. “You just stay put.”
