key in her hand. The exhaustion rolled up like waves and beat against the wall of her determination. Why do this? She knew she could make it home. Hawkin knew she could. So what was the point?
She handed him the keys.
'You drive for a while, please, Al.'
Where some men might have shown triumph, Hawkin's eyes held only approval and warmth. He nodded, took the keys, and drove with easy concentration towards the freeway.
20
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Kate drowsed as the white lights sailed past and the red ones blurred and swam into each other. The car was warm and smelled of coffee and, not unpleasantly, of tobacco. She punched up the pillow and settled her head back into it.
'You awake?' said Hawkin softly, without taking his eyes from the road.
'Yes.'
'Can I ask you something?'
'You can try,' she said, rousing herself slightly.
'Are you a lesbian?'
Kate examined her reaction to the question. Nothing. Mild surprise perhaps, which was very interesting. 'Are you asking as a cop, as a man, or as a friend?' she wondered.
'Mmm. Let's say, as a friend.'
'Al, as a friend, I hope you won't be offended if I say that I don't think we know each other well enough for you to ask me that question. Try it again in a couple of months.' She settled back and closed her eyes.
'And as a man?'
'You didn't ask me as a man.'
'And if I had?'
'If you had, my answer would have been somewhat different.'
Neither of them mentioned the third possibility.
'A couple of months, huh?'
'Maybe more. Maybe less if we have another case like this.'
'God forbid!'
'Not offended?'
'Of course not.'
Hawkin drove in silence for several miles, thinking. He was not all that concerned with her answer to his question and had asked it only because he thought it might be necessary to provide an opening for her to talk about herself. She had not chosen to take the opening, but it hardly mattered. The initial move away from the strictly professional had been made, and that was what he had been after.
The road cleared at a well-lit junction of sweeping concrete roadways, and he looked over at his partner. She was asleep, her full lips curled in some secret amusement. The precise nature of the joke, if joke it was, he could not know, but it made her look very young and wise, and made his own mouth curl into a smile as well. Kate slept for an hour and took the wheel to drive across the lighted bridge into the city. She waited in the car while Hawkin went up to get the DMV photo from the office, and when he came out onto the street she could see from his face that it was even worse than she had anticipated.
'The picture's bad?' she asked as he climbed in.
'In a very good light you can see that he has two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and brownish hair. Do you know where Susan Chin lives?'
'Our artist? No.'
He gave her an address.
Susan came to the door of her small apartment. She had obviously been in bed when Hawkin called and did not invite them in. She squinted at the photograph and looked at him dubiously.
'You did say it wasn't very good, but this is ridiculous.'
'Can you do it?'
'You want me to use this to make a series of sketches, one of which might remind somebody on that Road of one of their neighbors? To extrapolate out from it, intuitively?'
'Exactly. Can you do it?'
'Haven't the faintest,' she said cheerfully. 'Well, it's an interesting problem. Makes a change from computer-generated IdentiKit drawings.'
'Good luck.'
They left the young artist standing in her doorway peering at the photo in the light of the bulb over her door. Kate dropped Hawkin off at his house and drove home.
The garage door rattled down behind her. She leaned forward and turned off the ignition, and felt the strength that had kept her moving throughout the long day ebb away into the silent garage. She sat at the wheel and thought about the motions of moving her right arm down to push the button and disengage her seat belt and moving her left arm down to pull the door handle and drawing first her left foot and then her right out and onto the concrete floor and standing up, but somehow sitting and breathing were about all she could manage at the moment.
The sound of a door opening, feet on a wooden staircase, slight scuffs on the slab floor, the click and pull of the car door coming open, Lee's voice, dark and restful.
'Sweet Kate, you look all done in.'
'Hello, love. God, it's nice to sit still.'
'I started a hot bath when I heard you come in, and the oil's warming for a massage.'
'You will kill me with pleasure.'
'I do hope not.'
A light finger brushed the back of Kate's neck, and then the scuffs and steps retreated upstairs. In a minute Kate followed.
There was a bath that was almost too hot for comfort, and a large mug of something that tasted of chicken and celery, and thick warm towels, and then strong fingers probing at locked muscles and easing the tension from neck and back and legs until Kate lay groaning with the sweet agony of it, and when she was totally limp and the hands had moved on to wide, firm, integrating sweeps, she spoke, halfway to sleep.
'Hawkin asked me tonight if I was a lesbian.'
The sweeping hands checked only slightly.
'And what did you say?'
Odd, thought Kate muzzily, how hands can be amused when a voice isn't.
'I told him to ask me again when we knew each other better.'
This time Lee laughed outright, and then the towel began to wipe the last of the oil from Kate's skin.
'How utterly un-Californian of you, Kate.'
'Wasn't it?'
The hands finished and soft sheets and warm blankets were pulled up to Kate's neck.
'I have some work to do. Give me a shout if you need anything. Now, go to sleep.'
'I'll work at it.'
Kate's breathing slowed and thickened, and a few minutes later the bed shifted and then the room clicked into darkness. Lee's soft curls formed a halo against the hall light, and she closed the door gently and went downstairs, an expression of fond exasperation on her face.
Several miles away Alonzo Hawkin lay on the sofa in his living room, a glass balanced on his stomach, his eyes on the large, delicate fish that performed their glides and pirouettes for his amusement, his mind on the events and the texture of the day. He was, for once, satisfied.
It was almost magical the way one day's work could on occasion, on very rare occasion, transform a case entirely and bring its whole setting and landscape into focus. That morning—yesterday morning, now—he had walked down the stairs with a huge sheaf of unrelated papers and more questions than he could begin to even ask, and Andrew C. Lewis was just one name in a hundred others. Sixteen hours later he had trudged back up those
