some papers, of which there seemed to be a good many. 'They want you to sign those, too.'
Rollie endorsed the checks. There were four.
'Another time,' the instructor said unpleasantly, 'try not to cause other people so much trouble.'
'Go screw yourself, fatso,' Rollie Knight said, and yawned.
Neither Rollie nor his visitor was aware that while their exchange was taking place, an expensive, late- model car was parked across the street from the rooming house. The car's sole occupant was a tall, distinguished-appearing, grayhaired Negro who had watched with interest while the training course instructor went inside. Now, as the beefy, florid-faced man left the building and drove his own car away, the other car followed, unobserved, at a discreet distance, as it had through most of the afternoon.
Chapter 10
'C'mon baby, leave the goddamn drink. I gotta bottle in the room.'
Ollie, the machinery salesman, peered impatiently at Erica Trenton in the semidarkness, across the small black table separating them.
It was early afternoon. They were in the bar of the Queensway Inn, not far from Bloomfield Hills, Erica dawdling over her second drink which she had asked for as a delaying device, even though recognizing that delay was pointless because either they were or weren't going through with what they had come here for, and if they were they might as well get on with it.
Erica touched her glass. 'Let me finish this. I need it.'
She thought: He wasn't a bad-looking man, in a raffish kind of way. He was trimly built and his body was obviously better than his speech and manners, probably because he worked on it - she remembered him telling her with pride that he went to a gym somewhere for regular workouts. She supposed she could do worse, though wished she had done better.
The occasion when he had told her about workouts in the gym had been at their first meeting, here in this same bar. Erica had come for a drink one afternoon, the way other lonely wives did sometimes, in the hope that something interesting might happen, and Ollie had struck up a conversation - Ollie, cynical, experienced, who knew this bar and why some women came to it. After that, their next meeting had been by arrangement, when he had taken a room in the residential section of the inn, and assumed she would go to it with him. But Erica, torn between a simple physical need and nagging conscience, had insisted on staying at the bar all afternoon, and in the end left for home, to Ollie's anger and disgust. He had written her off, it seemed, until she telephoned him several weeks ago.
Even since then, they had had to delay their arrangement because Ollie had not come back from Cleveland as expected, and instead went on to two other cities - Erica had forgotten where. But they were here now, and Ollie was becoming impatient.
He asked, 'How about it, baby?'
Suddenly she remembered, with a mixture of wryness and sadness, a maxim on Adam's office wall: Do it TODAY!
'All right,' Erica said. She pushed back her chair and stood up.
Walking beside Ollie, down the inn's attractive, picture-hung corridors - where many others had walked before her on the same kind of assignation - she felt her heart beat faster, and tried not to hurry.
Several hours later, thinking about it calmly, Erica decided the experience was neither as good as she had hoped for, nor as bad as she had feared. In a basic, here-and-now way, she had found sensual satisfaction; in another way, which was harder to define, she hadn't.
She was sure, though, of two things. First, such satisfaction as she had known was not lasting, as it had been in the old days when Adam was an aggressive lover and the effect of their love-making stayed with her, sometimes for days. Second, she would not repeat the experience - at least, with Ollie.
In such a mood, from the Queensway Inn in late afternoon, Erica went shopping in Birmingham. She bought a few things she needed, and some others she didn't, but most of her pleasure came from what proved to be an exciting, challenging game - removing items from stores without payment. She did so three times, with increasing confidence, acquiring an ornamental clothes hanger, a tube of shampoo, and - especial triumph! - an expensive fountain pen.
Erica's earlier experience, when she had purloined the ounce of Norell, had showed that successful shoplifting was not difficult. The requirements, she decided now, were intelligence, quickness, and cool nerve. She felt proud of herself for demonstrating that she possessed all three.
Chapter 11
On a dismal, grimy, wet November day, six weeks after the meeting with Adam Trenton at the proving ground, Brett DeLosanto was in downtown Detroit - in a gray, bleak mood which matched the weather.
His mood was uncharacteristic. Normally, whatever pressures, worries and - more recently - doubts assailed the young car designer, he remained cheerful and good-natured. But on a day like today, he thought, to a native Californian like himself, Detroit in winter was just too much, too awful.
He had reached his car, moments earlier, on a parking lot near Congress and Shelby, having battled his way to it on foot, through wind and rain and traffic, the last seeming to flow interminably the instant he sought to cross any intersection, so that he was left standing impatiently on curbs, already miserably sodden, and getting wetter still.
As for the inner city around him . . . ugh! Always dirty, preponderantly ugly and depressing at any time, today's leaden skies and rain - as Brett's imagination saw it - were like spreading soot on a charnel house.
Only one worse time of year existed: in March and April, when winter's heavy snows, frozen and turned black, began to melt. Even then, he supposed, there were people who became used to the city's hideousness eventually. So far, he hadn't.
Inside his car, Brett started the motor and got the heater and windshield wipers going. He was glad to be sheltered at last; outside, the rain was still beating down heavily. The parking lot was crowded, and he was boxed in, and would have to wait while two cars ahead of him were moved to let him out. But he had signaled an attendant as he came into the lot, and could see the man now, several rows of cars away.
Waiting, Brett remembered it was on such a day as this that he had first come to Detroit himself, to live and work.
The ranks of auto company designers were heavy with expatriate Californians whose route to Detroit, like his own, had been through the Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles, which operated on a trimester system. For those who graduated in winter and came to Detroit to work, the shock of seeing the city at its seasonal worst was so depressing that a few promptly returned West and sought some other design field as a livelihood. But most, though jolted badly, stayed on as Brett had done, and later the city revealed compensations. Detroit was an outstanding cultural center, notably in art, music, and drama, while beyond the city, the State of Michigan was a superb sports-vacation arena, winter and summer, boasting some of the lovelier unspoiled lakes and country in the world.
Where in hell, Brett wondered, was the parking-lot guy to move those other cars?
It was this kind of frustration - nothing major - which had induced his present bad temper. He had had a
