place.'
'Let's drive around a while. It'll give us a chance to get to know each other. Wouldn't you agree we should talk?'
“If you think so.' I braced myself.
'Oh, I do, definitely.' He smiled at me again, his eyes dancing. 'There's something I'd like to show you. We can get there in about twenty minutes.'
'What is it?'
“I don't want to spoil the surprise. Can you spare the time?'
'As long as you're not going to march me into a field and show me a gun.'
Five green lights and a nearly empty road had appeared before us. Hatch twinkled at me. 'Watch this.' He touched the accelerator, and the car concentrated upon itself for a tenth of a second before rocketing ahead. I watched the speedometer glide past sixty before we sped through the first light. It kept climbing as we blasted toward the second. The breeze whipping past our heads shifted the line of Hatch's hair about an eighth of an inch backward. He kept the car at a steady eighty miles per hour through the fourth light, and brought it smoothly down to thirty only in time to make it past the fifth and swerve right onto Commercial Avenue. His hair sprang perfectly back into place.
'You can get this baby up to a hundred and ten before you actually feel like you're speeding.'
'Now that we're together like this, Stewart,' I said, 'can I ask you a couple of questions?'
'Anything.'
'Between you and me, is Rowley your inside guy at Police Headquarters?'
'Lieutenant Rowley works for the city of Edgerton. The man is a dedicated public servant. His passion for justice may sometimes get the better of him, but that comes with the job.'
'And you didn't tell him to order me out of town.'
'Of course not.'
'And you realize I had nothing to do with what happened at your building.'
“I'm relieved, as a matter of fact. Now I don't have to figure out how you broke in. We have the most sophisticated security system you can imagine. Nobody not on the inside could get around the pressure sensors and the electronic beams and disarm the contact points, so it must have been an employee of the security company. We'll get him, but that still leaves me with the computer damage.' Hatch gave me an inquiring look. 'Aren't you an expert in that area?'
“I wouldn't go that far,' I said.
'Would you like to make ten thousand dollars a week? It looks like about half the files are missing from our hard disks, and I need to recover them. All I'd ask is that you sign a confidentiality agreement. The work might not even take as long as a week. You get me set up and running in a day or two, the money's the same. Sound interesting?'
“It sounds great,' I said, 'but the answer is no.'
'Can I ask why?'
'No offense intended, but I'd rather not be on the Hatch payroll.'
'Too bad. It was a long shot, but too bad.'
We cut through the southern end of the business district, turned west, and drove into a part of town I had never seen before. Uptilting blocks lined with peeling frame houses dropped away toward an overgrown baseball diamond and rotting bleachers. Beyond the next rise, a few women trudged along dusty paths in a trailer park. A bare-chested kid aimed a BB gun at us from beneath a limp Confederate flag.
'You liked this car, didn't you?' Hatch asked.
“It handles beautifully.'
'And what about my wife?' He grinned. This time, the light in his eyes was still humorous, but not at all comfortable. 'Would you say she handles beautifully? Accelerates smoothly? Did you find her well engineered?'
'Forget it, Stewart,' I said. 'Your marriage has nothing to do with me.'
'You would admit, wouldn't you, that my wife is an extremely good-looking woman? Even a beautiful woman? What you might call an attractive bit of horseflesh?'
'She's attractive, yes,' I said. 'But if you're having someone follow her around with a camera, I feel sorry for you.'
'Bear with me,' he said. “I bet you wondered why a woman like that would marry me. After all, I'm rich, but not superrich, I'm twelve years older than she is, and I live in a nowhere Midwestern town. Am I right?'
“I wondered about some of that,' I said.
'Sure you did. If you hadn't, she would have done it for you. Now, between us, she isn't so great in bed, is she? When it comes to performance, this car is a lot more satisfying. My wife is too selfish to be a good lay.'
'Stop it. You're embarrassing yourself.'
'You ought to know who you're dealing with. Laurie is nothing like what you think she is. For her, you're only a convenient way to make more trouble for me. She's a soulless bitch.'
“If she's that terrible, divorce her.'
'Jesus, I don't care about her personality.' He laughed at me. 'This isn't the fucking Boy Scouts. I just want her to do what I say.'
'You should be wearing a loincloth and carrying a club.'
'Good Lord,' he said. 'A feminist. Did my dear wife tell you anything about the trust?'
'What trust?'
'Let's find out what she said about herself. Did she tell you about her background, her family, anything like that?'
'A little,' I said.
'Wonderful story, isn't it? I'm crazy about it.'
An empty, brown hillside sloped down to the right side of the road. Far away on our left, little ranch houses stood on quarter-acre lots. Every other one looked unoccupied. Stewart pulled to the side of the road and switched off the engine. He drew up one knee and twisted on his seat to face me.
“I take it you heard about Yves D'Lency, the poet and art dealer who ran away from his noble family and palled around with artists and so forth before he came to America. The poor guy's plane went down outside Santa Barbara, right?'
'What's your point?' I said.
'Laurie's father's real name was Evan Delaney, a product of Trenton, New Jersey. He was a part-time bricklayer with a big appetite for booze. When he couldn't get work in Trenton anymore, he packed up the family and drove to Los Angeles, where he branched out into the stickup business. One day a tough old bird who owned a liquor store blew him away. Bye-bye, Dad. Mom traded her ass for favors from her boyfriends until she married a cameraman at Warner Brothers. This is the guy my wife refers to as a movie producer.'
'You want me to believe this,' I said.
'Believe it, don't believe it, but this information cost me more money than I just gave Earl Sawyer. Mom married the cameraman. Guess what? He's another drunk. After the studio fired him, he took out his frustrations by beating up his wife and stepdaughter. Laurie dropped out of high school and did so many drugs she wound up in a mental hospital. When she was straight enough to figure out how to act, she got acquainted with a nice old doctor named Deering. Deering thought she was a poor, misguided orphan who deserved a break. He and his wife took her in. They bought her good clothes and sent her to private school, which is where she learned about table manners and grammar. After she graduated from the private school, she ran away to San Francisco. Pretty soon, she was living with Teddy Wainwright. Remember him?'
I knew that Teddy Wainwright had played the leading man's best friend in a lot of romantic comedies made in the fifties. Later on, he had starred in two television series.
What I had not known was that in the early seventies, no longer able to find roles in Hollywood but grown rich from real estate investments, Wainwright had decked himself in beads and Nehru jackets and moved to San Francisco to enjoy a second youth. Laurie Delancy had moved in with him when he was seventy-one, she twenty- one. Through multiple infidelities and other tempests on her part, including the refusal to marry him, they stayed together until his death four years later. Wainwright had rewritten his will to give her two paintings from his
