“So I’ve been told. It was a requirement of my former job.”
“Out.”
“No problem.” I opened the door, then looked back, “You might want to try to find Sparky,” I told her. “It looks like he might’ve gone out the window.”
“As near as we’ve been able to determine, Sparky died in 1923, Mr. Angel. When Edna was seven years old. We don’t anticipate that he’ll be coming back.”
“Oh.”
“Good-bye.”
I went outside. Before the door closed behind me, I said, “You might consider giving Winter a good spanking.”
“Might I?”
All I could see was one of Victoria’s eyes, staring at me through a two-inch gap, then the door snicked shut.
I strode down the walk to the street. At the sidewalk I looked back at the house, half expecting to see Winter standing naked at a window, peering out, wanting whatever she wanted. Other than faint yellow light emanating from Edna’s window, the house was dark.
I headed home on foot again, wondering when I could safely retrieve the Toyota and start driving again.
Jonathan, Victoria had called him. No one called Jonnie that. It didn’t sound right, like saying Jonathan Wayne or Robert Hope. You just don’t do that.
* * *
I loosened the fence boards and slipped through, stood in my backyard gazing at the house.
All dark, all quiet.
News vans were still camped on the street in front. Persistent as mosquitoes, the sons of bitches, but there were only three of them, so maybe things were starting to cool off.
I unlocked the back door and went in, left the lights off while I toured the house to assure myself that I was alone, then took a quick shower and got dressed again in clean clothes. I made a sandwich in the dark and ate it in the backyard sitting in a lawn chair with a view of casino lights through trees to my left. I washed the sandwich down with two beers while looking up at the stars. I was dog tired, but knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep for a while. I thought K might show up, but she didn’t. Finally I opened a window in the bedroom for air and went to bed, caught the eleven o’clock news and, later, Leno on The Tonight Show.
Channel 4 ran a recap of the Sjorgen-Milliken-Rudd-Angel circus, but they had nothing new to add. I watched one last clip of Mortimer Angel’s infamous morning jog and the blonde’s encounter with the Citifare bus, which I enjoyed very much. No mention of Dallas or me by Leno, so I went to sleep thinking maybe our moment in the limelight was over. With luck, this whole thing might blow itself out, except for the lingering dregs of an unfinished investigation. Once they caught the perpetrator things would flare up again, but by then Dallas and I would be out on the furthest reaches of it, barely a footnote. We were done.
Innocent babes dream the deepest, and I was innocent enough, or dumb enough, to sink into the Valkyrian mists of a very deep dream indeed.
And, I was tired right down to the bone.
* * *
Which explains why I didn’t wake up when K crawled into my bed, sometime during the night.
Fact is, I didn’t wake up at all, didn’t feel a thing. But when I got up at three in the morning to pee, I damn near jumped out of my skin when I encountered a warm body. I yelped, scrambled out of bed taking the sheets and the blanket with me, and ended up on the floor against the closet, crushing a lampshade.
For a moment I wondered where my gun was. I wasn’t operating at anything like full capacity. Panic is like that.
“Mort?” K’s voice came at me in the dark. It brought me back to reality just as I’d remembered where my gun was. Lucky her.
“K?”
She groped around and turned on the other bedside light, the one I hadn’t destroyed. She sat on the newly stripped bed, naked except for panties. Christ, she looked good. A little peeved, too, though it wasn’t easy to tell while looking at her tits. She crossed her arms across her chest and stared at me with the lamp back-lighting her hair.
“Why’d you do that?” she said.
“Do what?”
“Tear the sheets and everything off me. I mean, if you wanted to look or anything you could’ve just asked.”
It was a comment I would have to digest at my leisure, especially the “or anything.”
“It wasn’t intentional,” I said, wired to the gills on adrenaline, heart hammering away. “I didn’t know you were here. I never heard you come in. I was headed for the bathroom, and there you were. I mean, I thought I was alone.”
“You flip out pretty easily.” K hugged a pillow and sat with her legs crossed. A strip of blue French-cut cotton was visible at her hips. The rest was behind the pillow.
“Hell, woman, you should’ve nudged me or something when you came in.” I stood up with the blanket in front of myself and took a deep breath, willing my heart to slow.
“I made plenty of noise. And I bounced around a little too, on purpose, but you never moved, so I figured, okay, you need your sleep. I could relate to that.”
“You didn’t bounce enough.”
“I would’ve hit you with a chair if I’d known you’d act like this. You were out, Mort.”
“There, see.”
“See what?”
“Hell, I don’t know.” I rubbed the back of my neck, trying to think, making it look like something I don’t do all that often.
She pressed her lips together. Her hair was mussed, eyes big but puffed with sleep, which made me wonder how long she’d been lying there alongside Mr. Oblivious.
I backed toward the door still holding the blanket. Sleeping in the buff had become risky of late. “Don’t go anywhere,” I said.
“Where on earth would I go?”
“Excellent question. God only knows, but it happens a lot with you. And kill the light before it attracts national attention.”
The light
