snatch handsome Eddie.'
'Right, Dudley.'
He squeezed my hand until I rewarded him with a wince, then he winked and left me to contemplate madness and salvation.
I had over four hours to kill before my date with Lorna. I drove home and wrote out a detailed report on my involvement in the Margaret Cadwallader case. I put it in a large manila envelope and sealed it shut. I fed Night Train, changed clothes, and shaved again.
On my way downtown I stopped at a florist's shop, where I bought Lorna a dozen long-stemmed red roses. Somehow they made me think of the dead girl whose eternal sleep Dudley Smith had so viciously interrupted. I started to get a little scared, but the thought of Lorna kiboshed my fear and turned it into some strange symbiosis of hope and the odd amenities of justice.
I waited impatiently, red roses in hand, outside the Spring Street entrance to city hall until six-thirty.
Lorna was standing me up. I jogged over to the parking lot on Temple. Her car was in its space. Angry, I walked back to city hall and entered. I checked out the directory in the vestibule: the office of the district attorney occupied two whole floors. Nervously, I took the elevator, although I wanted to run the nine flights of stairs. I walked down the deserted ninth floor corridors, poking my head in open doorways, checking empty conference rooms. I even ducked my head into the ladies' can. Nothing.
I heard the clack-clacking of a typewriter in the distance. I walked down the hallway to a glass door with 'Grand Jury Investigations' lettered on it in flat black paint. I knocked softly.
'Who is it?' Lorna's voice called testily.
I disguised my voice: 'Telegram, ma'am.'
'Shit,' I heard her mutter. 'It's open.'
I pushed in the door. Lorna looked up from her typewriter, noticed me and jumped toward the door in an attempt to block my entrance. I sidestepped her, and she crashed to the floor.
'Shit. Oh, shit. Oh, God!' she said, pushing herself up into a sitting position against the wall. 'What the hell are you doing with me?'
'Stalking your heart,' I said, tossing the roses onto her desk. 'Here, let me help you up.'
I squatted down and grabbed Lorna under her arms and gently lifted her to her feet. She made feeble motions toward pushing me away, but her heart wasn't in it. I embraced her tightly and she didn't resist.
'We had a date, remember?' I whispered into her soft brown hair.
'I remember.'
'Are you ready to go?'
'I don't think so.'
'I told you last night, don't think.'
Lorna disengaged herself. 'Don't patronize me, Underhill,' she hissed. 'I don't know what you want, but I know you underestimate me. I've been around. I'm thirty-one years old. I've tried promiscuity and I've tried true love, and they're like my dead leg: they don't work. I don't need a charity lover. I don't need a deformity-lover. I don't need compassion—and above all, I don't need a cop.'
'But you need me.'
'No, I don't!' She raised her hand to slap me.
'Do it, counselor,' I said. 'Then I'll file on you for a 647-F, assault on a police officer. You'll have to investigate it yourself and then be in the incongruous position of being defendant, investigator, and defense attorney all at once. So go ahead.'
Lorna lowered her hand and started to laugh.
'Good,' I said. 'I drop all charges and grant parole.'
'In whose custody?'
'In mine.'
'Under what conditions?'
'For starters, that you accept my flowers and have dinner with me tonight.'
'And then?'
'That will depend on your probation reports.'
Lorna laughed again. 'Will I get time off for good behavior?'
'No,' I said, 'I think it's going to be a life sentence.'
'You're out of your bailiwick, Officer, as you once said to me.'
'I'm above the law, counselor, as you once said to me.'
'Touche, Freddy.'
'A standstill, Lorna. Dinner?'
'All right. The flowers are lovely. Let me put them in water, then we can go.'
We headed for the beach and the Malibu Rendezvous, a classy seaside eatery I had catalogued in my mind since the 'old days' when I dreamed of the 'ultimate' woman. Now, years later, I was driving there, an adult, a policeman, with a crippled Jewish attorney sitting beside me blowing smoke rings and casting furtive glances at me as I drove.
'What are you thinking?' I asked.
'You told me not to think, remember?'
'I retract it.'
'All right. I was thinking that you're too good looking. It's disarming and it probably makes people underestimate you. There's a side to you that could take advantage of that underestimation very easily.'
'That's very perceptive. What else were you thinking?'
'That you're too good to be a cop. No—don't interrupt, I didn't mean it quite that way; I'm glad you're a cop. Eddie Engels would be free to kill with impunity if you weren't. It's just that you could be anything you want, literally. I was also thinking that I don't want to be fawned over in a fancy restaurant; I don't want to go clumping through there getting a lot of pitying looks.'
'Then why don't we eat on the beach? I'll have the restaurant fix us up with a picnic basket and a bottle of wine.'
Lorna smiled and blew a smoke ring at me, then tossed her cigarette out the window. 'That's a good idea,' she said.
I parked in the blacktopped area adjoining the restaurant, about a hundred yards away from the beach. Lorna waited in the car while I went to fetch our feast. I ordered three orders of cracked crab and a bottle of chablis. The waiter was hesitant about boxing an order 'to go,' but changed his tune when I whipped a five-spot on him, even popping the cork on the wine bottle and throwing in two glasses.
Lorna was standing outside the car, smoking, when I returned. When she saw me she stared up at the warm summer sky and pointed her cane heavenward. I looked up, too, and committed the twilight sky and a low-hanging cloud formation to memory.
There was a flight of rickety wooden steps leading down to the sand. I carried our picnic and Lorna limped by my side. The stairs were barely wide enough for the two of us, so I threw an arm around Lorna and she huddled into my chest and hopped on her good leg all the way down, laughing, out of breath when we reached the bottom.
We found a nice spot to sit on a rise. The sun was a departing orange ball, and it lovingly caught strands of Lorna's light brown hair and burnished them into gold.
We sat on the sand, and I laid out our food on top of the brown paper bag it had come in. Not standing on ceremony, we polished off all three crustaceans in short order without saying a word. The sun had gone down while we ate, but the light from the big picture window of the restaurant cast an amber glow that allowed us a muted view of each other.
Lorna lit a cigarette as I poured us each a glass of wine. 'To September 2, 1951,' I said.
'And to beginnings.' Lorna smiled and we clinked glasses. I didn't quite know what to say. Lorna did. 'Who are you?' she asked.
I gulped my wine and felt it go to my head almost immediately. 'I'm Frederick Upton Underhill,' I said. 'I'm twenty-seven years old, I'm an orphan, a college graduate and a cop. I know that. And I know that you've caught
