To check time broke in a disorder'd string
'Whyn't you turn it upside down again, Richard?' Parker suggested.
'Whyn't you go fuck yourself?' Genero said. 'Excuse me, Eileen.'
'Whyn't you guys stop tiptoeing around me?' Eileen said. 'I'm a big girl now.'
'I'll say,' Parker said, and shot a glance at her chest.
Willis shot him a warning look.
Kling caught this.
He was positive now.
But why should he care?
Like a professor prodding a particularly dull class, Meyer asked, 'So what's he telling us this time?'
Like an ass-kissing A-student (or so Kling thought) Willis said, 'Well, time would seem to be the central theme, wouldn't you say?'
'Broken time,' Meyer agreed.
At the computer, Carella said, 'Richard II again, Act Five, Scene Five.'
'Starting to repeat himself.'
'He's jerking us off again,' Parker said.
'No, he's going to tell us when,' Hawes said.
'I'll bet,' Eileen said.
'The exact time.'
'But backwards.'
'Time in a disorder'd string.'
'And signs himself,' Parker said.
'Huh?' Genero said.
'Daintiness of ear, Richard.'
'WHERE WERE YOU, Melissa?'he asked.
It was only five o'clock, she didn't know why he sounded so pissed.
'The cops are looking for me,' she said.
That got to him, all right. Eyebrows going up, eyes opening wide.
'How do you know that?'
'Friend of mine told me. Remember the girl I was with the night you picked me up . . .'
'Or vice versa,' he said.
'Whatever,' she said. 'Do you remember Wanda?'
'I remember her. She of the thong panties.'
'How do you know that?'
'She showed me. When you went to the ladies room.'
'So why'd you pick me instead?'
'Ah, but you picked me, little Lissie. You've got it backwards. The punto reverso!'
'The what?
'Exact quote! Perfect, Benvolio!'
'I don't know what you're talking about.'
'Romeo and Juliet, Act Two, Scene Four. The brittle exchange between Benvolio and Mercutio. 'The what?' says Benvolio. 'The pox of such antic, lisping, affecting fantasticoes,' replies Mercutio. 'These new tuners of accents!''
'That explains it, all right,' Melissa said.
'What'd she say? This Wanda person?'
'A fat cop was around asking about me. She had to tell him about Wednesday night.'
'Had to tell him? Nobody has to do anything, Lissie.'
'He was about to bust her!'
'So she told him what, exactly?'
'That the three of us were at the Olympia last Wednesday night, and I went home with you.'
'Is that all?'
'She described you.'
'Did she tell him my name?'
'She didn't know your name. Neither did I, at the time.' She hesitated, and then said, 'I still don't know it.'
'Adam Fen,' he said.
'Sure.'
'And this cop? Does he have a name?'
'Ollie Weeks. He's a detective up the Eight-Eight. They call him Fat Ollie Weeks, most people.'
'Is he going to cause us trouble?'
'He's looking for me,' Melissa said. 'I suppose that could be trouble. If he finds me.'
'If he finds you, he finds me,' the Deaf Man said.
'Is what I meant.'
'So make sure he doesn't find you.'
'I got no desire to meet him, believe me.'
'You still haven't told me where you were.'
'Uptown. Lining up tomorrow's Junkie Parade. Talking to Wanda.'
'I was worried you might have run out on me.'
'And miss the big payoff?' she said. 'Whenever that may be.'
'Soon,' he said.
'Whatever it may be,' she said.
You'll find out.'
'Promises, promises.'
'Meanwhile, there's something else I'd like you to do for me. Tonight.'
'My place or yours?' she said, and tried a smile. 'There's a man I want you to meet,' he said. So what else is new? she thought.
10.
THE WAY MELISSA understood this, there was this Greek violinist named Konstantinos Sallas, who was staying here at the Intercontinental Hotel with his wife, his violin, and his bodyguard. It was the bodyguard who interested Adam, the bodyguard who had information Adam needed, the bodyguard Adam wanted her to sleep with, if she had to, in order to gather this information.
Melissa had never slept with a bodyguard before.
Neither had she ever clasped anyone to her bosom, so to speak, with the express purpose of getting information from him. She felt a little bit like Mata Hari, especially wearing the black shoulder-length wig. Adding to this femme fatale image was a strappy little slinky little black silk shift Adam had bought for her that afternoon, on the assumption that she'd be coming back to the apartment, which of course she had.
It was now three minutes past midnight on the ninth day of June.
According to Adam, it was the bodyguard's habit to stop into the hotel bar for a glass or two of ouzo after he'd tucked in the violinist each night. Adam did not know the bodyguard's name — he had only observed him from a distance, here at the hotel and on his accompanying walks to the concert hall. But he gave Melissa a fairly good description of him, and she knew to expect a burly, bearded man some six feet four inches tall, barrel-chested and dressed entirely in black, including the black shirts and ties he wore with his black silk suits. He sounded
less like a Greek bodyguard than one of the Hollywood agents she'd known on the Coast before she got busted that one time when she was but a mere slip of a girl just learning the trade, before Ambrose Carter taught her what it was really all about, girlfriend. She did not particularly enjoy sex with big hirsute men. But in anticipation of her share of the seven-figure payday, whenever that might come, if it ever came, she would have gone to bed with a gorilla.
So where the hell was he?
OLLIE'S REASONING W R S that if he couldn't find the john she'd picked up last Wednesday night, then he
