“So he wasn’t a risk-taker,” I said.
There was a brief hesitation before she replied.
“Not in that sense, no.”
“Not in that sense,” I repeated.
She was quiet for a minute.
“Jeremy, I have a lot of work to do, and, frankly, there are some things I don’t feel comfortable discussing in the office. I’m going to be here until about six o’clock tonight, and then I’m going to grab a light supper at Station Square. Would you care to join me?”
“I’d love to,” I said.
She gave me the name of the restaurant where I could meet her at six-thirty, and then she walked me to her office door and shook my hand again.
As I waited for the elevator in the reception area, I looked at Melanie and said, “When you think of me, and you will, all I ask is that you remember the good times.”
The elevator arrived, and as I stepped inside, Melanie said, “Jeremy?”
I held the doors open and looked at her.
“My boyfriend’s a pretty good guy, and I don’t expect this to happen, but if he ever does anything stupid, well, I’ll keep you in mind.”
As the elevator doors closed, I gave her the full-power smile. She would just have to hope that nobody wandered by and saw her sans clothes.
Chapter 15
It was just a little after ten when I walked out of the building housing the offices of Chaney and Cox. I needed to think, and doing it while walking around the downtown area was as appealing to me as anything else I could think of at the moment. Although I enjoy being out in the country, I’m a city boy at heart. No one knows better than I that the future is, at best, a picture waiting to be developed, but one of the few things that I do believe with a strong degree of certainty is that I will always reside in or near a fairly large urban area. I love visiting small towns in New England and vacationing on exotic islands and communing with nature deep in the forest primeval, but always in short bursts, never more than several days or, at most, a week at a time. Then I have to get back to civilization, back to someplace that feels more alive to me. I know Pittsburgh hardly qualifies as a world-class city, not when the downtown area pretty much shuts down after nine or so most weeknights, but it works for me. We have good college and pro sports franchises, excellent live theater, great museums, tons of ethnic neighborhoods, each with a flourishing number of dining establishments, a civic commitment to maintaining a balance between urban sprawl and local greenery, and, most important, the city is large enough that it provides room for several hours of walking, but not so huge that it simply overwhelms you.
As I wandered past the storefronts and theaters and restaurants on Penn Avenue, I thought about my meeting with Chaney and Cox. On the surface, they’d been cooperative and forthcoming, yet when you got right down to it, they really hadn’t told me much. The main thing I’d learned from the session was that, according to them, there had been no partnership on the immediate horizon for Terry Pendleton. If that was so, then what to make of his wife’s assertion that Terry had said he was expecting to be made a partner, and soon. I couldn’t think of a reason why Rachel Pendleton would have made that story up, nor could I think of a reason why her husband would have lied to her about it. I mean, if he had been lying, it would have become pretty obvious once the partnership didn’t materialize. So if Rachel wasn’t lying, and Terry hadn’t lied, I was left with Elias and William. Why would they lie to me? For that matter, why would anyone lie to me? You’d think that my smile alone would encourage total honesty from all who encountered it. Sadly, such was not the case. There was something else, too. Too many of the responses I’d gotten from Chaney and Cox had been preceded by a quick glance from one to the other, as though they were agreeing on an answer. That bothered me.
Around noon, I grabbed a hot dog and a Coke from a hole-in-the-wall joint near the city-county building, then walked back to the garage where I’d left the 4Runner, paid the king’s ransom demanded of me to rescue my vehicle, and drove home. Along the way, my thoughts turned to Melanie and Sandra. My initial reaction to both of them had been to notice their physical appearance. Did that make me a chauvinist? If so, I was probably one for life, because I doubted the time would ever come when I wasn’t instantly aware of a beautiful woman in my presence. I deplore discrimination in any form, but if I believe that a woman should have the same opportunity as a man to be, say, the CEO of a large corporation, is that belief mutually exclusive of my also noticing that that same woman has a nice figure as she chairs the annual stockholders’ meeting? I’m just not sure what I think about this issue, or even if I know what I should think about it. I asked Angie once if noticing pretty women made me a sexist, and she said no, it made me a man. Then she added that she always notices good-looking guys, so she figured whatever label applied to me, it probably covered her as well.
I pulled into my garage without having resolved the problem, and so I decided to put it aside for a while. Maybe tomorrow, I’d buy
