“What’cha got there?”
“A five-watt bulb and a yard of red silk.”
“Oh, jeez.”
“Here.” She dropped the bag on the bed. “See if you can figure what to do with this.”
She left. After a minute the water came on. I unscrewed the bulb in the lamp that we hadn’t destroyed the night before and put her bulb in, draped the silk over the shade. I could imagine her in there, soapy and wet. I could go in. I was invited. It would be fun. I turned on the lamp and the room glowed crimson. I lay back. The shower ended. I heard the sound of a toothbrush churning away.
She came into the room wearing a towel, hair damp and tousled. She yawned, then smiled. “Hey, you figured it out. Just look at this place.”
“Yeah, look at it.”
She unwound the towel and draped it over the back of a chair. For an instant I had a vision of Dallas in the shower—and Winter, slinky in her unhooked bra and lace thong panties.
“Every time I turn around,” I said, “someone’s either naked or darn near.”
Kayla tilted her head at me. “Is that a fact?”
“Recently, yes.”
“Is it becoming a problem?”
“Not so far. I think it’s a PI thing.”
She smiled. “A private dick thing?”
I peered at her through one eye. “Private investigator, yeah. I’ve been thinking it might have something to do with that.”
She stared at the bed. “Which side’s mine? Same as last night?”
“Take your pick.”
She crawled in, lifted my right arm and put it over her shoulders, snuggled up next to me. For a while we lay like that, comfortable, neither one of us moving, then her face turned toward mine. Her eyes had what I misinterpreted as a sultry look. She said, “I’ve…uh, got a tiny request. If you can stand it.”
“Lucky you, this is request night. And during happy hour, drinks are half price.”
“You’re going to absolutely strangle me.”
“I doubt it. With the IRS it’s blunt trauma or nothing.”
She touched the tip of my nose with her finger. “Could we…do whatever we’re going to do later, like in the morning? I’m pretty tired. It’d be a lot better then.”
“Sure.” Not sultry, Great Gumshoe, sleepy. She walked twenty miles, for chrissake.
“You don’t mind?”
“No.”
She got up on one elbow and gazed into my eyes. “Mean it?”
“Know what happens if you can’t shake the money out of your piggy bank, so you bust it open to get at the loot?”
“I think I see where this is going.”
“You get your dollar eighty-five, and a busted piggy bank. One you can never use again.”
“How ineffably wise you are, sir.”
“You are lovely, Kayla.”
“Wise, perceptive, and, well, extremely…something.”
“I mean it. You are incredible.”
“Maybe sneaky,” she said. “I’ll have to keep that in mind.” She sank back down and rested her head on my shoulder. Her hands toyed with the hair on my chest for half a minute, then went slack. A minute later she was sound asleep.
I was tired, too. I tried to sleep, but things began to putter around in my head.
Events, numbers. One number in particular. Forty. Forty years ago, according to Clair, Jonnie attempted to force sex with Sarah Jean Humbolt. Call it rape. He might have tried to get her drunk in order to accomplish it. A year after that, thirty-nine years ago—enough of a coincidence to at least give a gumshoe pause—Wendell Sjorgen had in effect turned over his house to Edna Woolley and moved out.
But why? Why would he do that?
Did he have a thing going with Edna back then? Hard to say. She would have been nearing sixty. He would have been forty-five, fifty tops. It wasn’t likely. Then Edna had gotten the house, and Jane, Wendell’s wife, had divorced him soon thereafter.
The answers, whatever they might be, felt as much a dead end as the merry-go-round I’d been on with Jeri all day. What did it matter?
Kayla stirred, murmured something and put a cool hand on my groin, then promptly fell asleep again, leaving my body to undergo a pleasant but not particularly useful transformation.
I didn’t love Kayla, but I liked her. A lot. She was bright and sunny and warm, playful. Maybe I could love her. Probably could, and easily. I could get over Dallas, or maybe love them both. And maybe this was just one of those wonderful but temporary things. Kayla would go back to New York, Ithaca, and that would be that. There was something of the whirlwind in her being there, one of those things you have to catch up to. A woman in your bed isn’t something you understand overnight, or even in a month. Sometimes, after a lifetime, you find you still don’t know the why of it. It’s another kind of white magic.
I turned off the lamp and closed my eyes.
I was half asleep when another thought came tiptoeing through. Fairchild’s words, which had also replayed in Jonnie’s office at Sjorgen & Howard Title Company: The most likely person to commit murder is a family member of the victim.
The people who know you best.
Kayla was Jonnie’s closest living relative. But, hell, no goddamn way…it couldn’t be her, not this lovely creature beside me. I put it out of my mind.
* * *
I woke up at 7:25. Kayla was still out cold. I lay there for half an hour, thinking alternately of the number forty and Kayla’s body, then got up quietly and dressed out in the living room when Kayla’s body started to win. I was in the kitchen watching a Mr. Coffee slowly drip caffeine into a pot clouded to opacity with various minerals when she came in, barefoot, wearing only a shirt. One of my shirts, in fact, with the top three buttons undone, making it something of a negligee. It reached to mid-thigh. Two of her could have fit inside with room to spare.
“You escaped,” she said.
“I was awake, you weren’t.”
“About last night, I’m sorry.”
I offered her my arms. She came into them and gave me
