“Thanks,” he said. He got up and walked to his suitcase to find some clothes. “Now that I’m cured, we can get to what was on your mind. Did you bring something for Stillman, or what?”
She smiled mischievously and looked at him over the tops of her lenses. “I came to pick you up so we could go out cruising for chicks together, like we said.” She reached into her jeans and held up a small package of condoms. “I picked these up for you in the shop downstairs.”
Walker gaped at her in amazement. “That . . . that was very thoughtful.”
She shrugged. “But it’s already so late that the only chick I could find on the way over was me.”
“Oh well,” said Walker. “Some nights are like that, I guess.”
She shrugged again. “So we’ll have to make do with what we’ve got.” She grasped her sweater and pulled it up over her head, then tossed it aside. Her skin was almost as white as her bra, so she seemed to Walker more than naturally naked. She unbuckled her belt and unzipped her jeans, then paused, looking at him again. “Unless you don’t want to?”
Walker’s arms seemed to move to her waist without his volition. As she snuggled against his chest, her face lifted and they were kissing. They moved to the bed without seeming to have gone there. A few minutes later, or maybe much later, she whispered in his ear, “I lied about being a nurse,” and he whispered, “You look much better without the uniform.” And some time after that, she said in a breathless gasp, “I’m not really a lesbian either.” He managed to say, “Evidently.”
For the rest of the night when he heard her voice it was not meant to be broken into words. They communicated by touch. Later, there were periods of lazy quiescence, when they lay together with eyes closed and barely touching, sometimes only the edge of a hand held gently beside a thigh as though to maintain an electrical contact.
But then, through the contact came a silent message, at first only a faint stirring, maybe only a pulse that very gradually quickened, answered by a slight rise in the temperature of the skin that could have been a blush. They turned to each other and the warmth became heat and motion again.
Walker caught sight of the hotel’s clock radio on the stand beside the bed, and it made no sense. It seemed to say 4:30. He sat up to face it, then lay back down.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“It seems to be four-thirty.”
“Kiss me.”
He turned and they kissed, holding each other tightly and lying so they could touch their foreheads together, their chests, bellies, thighs, feet. They stayed that way for a long time, and then she wriggled away and stood up.
“Now look at me.”
He raised himself on one elbow and looked. She slowly turned her back, looking over her shoulder at him, and kept going until she faced him again. “You’re beautiful,” he said.
She nodded. “I want to be sure you remember.”
He gave a puzzled smile. “I’m not likely to forget.”
She made no move, no effort to cover herself or to avoid his gaze. “My name is Mary Catherine Casey. Do you like it?”
“It’s a good name. Mine is still John Walker.”
“Very pleased to meet you.” She looked into his eyes for a moment, searching until she found something that satisfied her. Then she sat down on the bed beside him and looked around, picking up pieces of clothing. “When you’re through with Stillman, you can get in touch.”
“I don’t have to go with Stillman,” he said. “What are you doing tonight?”
She shook her head. “Finish with Stillman first.”
“I told you I don’t need . . . Do you know what Stillman and I are up to?”
She looked at him as though she were disappointed with his intelligence. “I did your trace.” She put on her panties. “If she’s yours, get her out of your system. If she’s your enemy, you can’t let her get away with it. If she’s in trouble and you abandon her without trying, you’re no use to anybody.” She looked at him closely. “Figure out which it is, and get it over with.” She stood up to fasten her jeans and walked around the room looking for something. The sudden transformation into a composed, businesslike person was so dramatic that he felt a sense of loss.
She slipped the big sweater over her head, then stared around her again. She focused her eyes on the floor. “Oh, here they are.” She picked up her glasses and put them on. She threw her coat over her shoulder and walked to the door. “Bye.”
She was out the door and gone.
12
While Walker was in the shower, letting the hot water wake him up and soothe his sore muscles, he thought about Mary Catherine Casey. He directed his mind to the question of what was in her mind. He knew that the term “charming eccentric” was an oxymoron. Whenever he had met girls who had said and done things for effect, he had instinctively known that they were trouble. Some lobe of their brains had been pinched by forceps during birth, or had been atrophied by a chemical put in women’s food as a substitute for fat or sugar. He had imagined that one night he would wake up in bed and hear the sound of one of these women firing up a power drill to run it into his forehead and let the demons out. Mary Catherine Casey had not made him uneasy: she just seemed to have decided that she liked him and wanted to play with him. Serena made him very uneasy.
He turned off the shower, dried himself off, and walked to the bedroom. There was a man standing there, looking down at his bed. The man turned: Stillman. “I knocked, but apparently you didn’t hear me, so I let myself in. You alone in there?”
“Of course I’m alone in here.”
Stillman glanced at the wildly disarranged bed again, then back at Walker. “Better get a move on if you’re going to make it back to San Francisco before they start storing golf clubs in your cubicle.”
“I’ll take the chance,” said Walker. “I’m not going back.”
“If you’re going with me, you’d still better get a move on. We just have a different flight to catch.”
Walker dressed quickly in a suit like Stillman’s and began to collect his belongings. He noticed the condom wrappers on the floor, hastily torn apart and flung there. As he picked them up, he looked at Stillman, who was staring intently out the window at the parking lot. Finally, Walker latched his suitcase. “Let’s get out of here.”
When he was sitting in the car beside Stillman, he squinted out the window at the glaring world. Los Angeles had always struck his Ohio eyes as shades of tan and light gray, with a few sickly pastels, but this morning it was patches of deep green grass and towering eucalyptus and palms, with scarlet roses and tangles of bougainvillea vines with impossible magenta flowers, and jacaranda trees that snowed purple petals on the ground. The sky was a blue so clear that it had never occurred to him that it was a condition that ever happened: it was a theoretical sky, without the hint of a cloud. “I see the fog lifted,” he said.
“Yep,” said Stillman. “I guess you didn’t have a chance to watch the weather on TV, but they said the clouds were ‘low night and early morning.’ When that high pressure kicks in around here, it’ll dry your eyeballs.”
“Okay, so you know about her.”
“It wasn’t my toughest case,” Stillman admitted. “I’ve never seen her find anybody tolerable before.”
“What about Gochay?”
“They live on different planets,” said Stillman. “No, the field is a wasteland. She leaves nothing alive within pistol range . . . until now, anyway.” He looked at Walker contemplatively. “I’d be willing to pass on some wisdom if you’re in the mood to listen.”
“Why not?”
“You might think twice before you get too involved with a woman with her technical skills. She can hunt you down like a mad dog without leaving her computer. It would take her a minute or two to destroy your credit, delete your driver’s license, and transfer somebody else’s arrest warrant to your name.”
“I wouldn’t have done it if I’d planned to piss her off.”
Stillman smiled wistfully. “We never plan to piss them off. It just happens. In my short and uneventful life,
