collecting the data for the dossier. But like Ellen had said, a new broom had come in and swept everything out including months and miles of legwork.
Ellen had to speak twice before I heard her. 'Does it... solve anything?'
I threw them on the coffee table in disgust. 'Fallon. It solves him. He's still dead and so is Toady. Goddamn it anyway.'
'I'm sorry. I thought it would help.'
'You tried, kid. That was enough. You can throw these things away now. What the D.A. never saw he won't miss.' I picked up my cigarettes from the table and stuffed them in my pocket. She still watched me blankly. 'I'd better be going,' I told her.
She didn't make any motion to see me out. I started to pass her and stopped. 'Texas... what the hell goes on? Tell me that at least, will you? It wasn't so long ago that you were doing all the passing and I thought you were a woman who knew what was going on. All right, I asked you to do me a favor and I put you in a spot. It wasn't so bad that I couldn't get you off it.'
'That's not it, Mike.' She still wouldn't look at me.
'So you're a Texas gal who likes guys that look like Texas men. Maybe I should learn to ride a horse.'
She finally looked up at me from the depths of the couch. Her eyes were blue again and not clouded. They were blue and hurt and angry all at once. 'You're a Texas man, Mike. You're the kind I dreamed of and the kind I want and the kind I'll never have, because your kind are never around long enough. They have to go out and play with guns and hurt people and get themselves killed.
'I was wrong in wanting what I did. I read too many stories and listened to too many old men telling big tales. I dreamed too hard, I guess. It isn't so nice to wake up suddenly and know somebody you're all gone over is coming closer to dying every day because he likes it that way.
'No, Mike. You're exactly what I want. You're big and strong and exciting. While you're alive you're fun to be with but you won't be any fun dead. You're trouble and you'll always be that way until somebody comes along who can make bigger trouble than you.
'I'm afraid of a Texas man now. I'm going to forget all about you and stop looking for a dream. I'll wait until somebody nice and safe comes along, somebody peaceful and quiet and shy, and I'll get all those foolish romanticisms out of my head and live a bored and relatively normal life.'
I planted my feet apart and looked down at her with a laugh that came up from my chest. 'And you'll always wonder what a Texas man would have been like,' I said.
The change stole over her face slowly, wiping out the bitterness. Her eyes half closed and the blue of her irises was gray again. The smile and the frown blended together like a pleasant hurt. She leaned back with a fluid animal motion, her head resting languidly against the couch. The pink tip of her tongue touched her lips that were parted in a ghost of a smile making them glisten in the light of the single lamp. Then she stretched back slowly and reached out her arms to me, and in reaching the entire front of the robe came open and she made no move to close it.
'No,' she said, 'I'll find out about that first.'
We said good-by in the dim light of morning. She said goodby, Texas man, and I said so-long, Texas gal, and I left without looking back because everything she had said was right and I didn't want to hear it again by looking back at her eyes. I got in the car, drove over to Central Park West and cruised along until I found a parking place. It was right near an entrance so I left it there and walked off the pavements to the grass and sat on a hill where I could see the sun coming up over the tops of the buildings in the background.
The ground still held the night dampness, letting it go slowly in a thin film of haze that was suspended in mid- air, rising higher as the sun warmed it. The whole park had a chilled eerie appearance of something make-believe. An early stroller went by on the walk, only the top half of him visible, the leash in his hand disappearing into the fog yet making all the frantic motions of having some unseen creature on its end.
When the wind blew it raised the gray curtain and separated it into angry segments that towered momentarily before filtering back into the gaps. There were other people too, half-shapes wandering through a dream world, players who didn't know they had an audience. Players buried in their own thoughts and acts on the other side of a transparent wall that shut off all sound.
I sat there scowling at it until I remembered that it was just like my dream even to the colors and the synthetic silence. It made me so uncomfortable that I turned around expecting to see the woman in black who had no face.
She was there.
She wasn't in black and she had a face, but she stopped when she saw me and turned away hurriedly just like the other one did. This one seemed a little annoyed because I blocked her favorite path.
And I knew who the woman was in the compound with me that night. She had a name and a face I hadn't seen yet. She was there in the compound trying to tell me something I should have thought of myself.
I waited until the sun had burned off the mist and made it a real world again. I went back to the daylight and searched through it looking for a little guy with big ears and a brace of dyed blondes on his arms. The sun made an arc through the sky and was on its way down without me finding him.
At three-thirty I made a call. It went through three private secretaries and a guy who rumbled when he talked. He was the last man in front of Harry Bailen, the columnist, and about as high as I was going to get.
I said, 'This is a friend of Cookie Harkin's. I got something for him that won't keep and I can't find the guy. I want his address if you have it.'
He had it, but he wasn't giving it out. 'I'm sorry, but that's private information around here.'
'So is what I got. Cookie can have it for your boss free or I can sell it to somebody else. Take your pick.'
'If you have anything newsworthy I'll be glad to pass it on to Mr. Bailen for you.'
'I bet you would, feller, only it happens that Cookie's a friend of mine and either he gets it or the boss'll get scooped and he isn't gonna like that a bit.'
The phone dimmed out a second as he covered up the mouthpiece. The rumble of his voice still came through
