I turned back to Dee-Dee.
“You got a relative or a friend you can stay with for a few days, until this thing is settled?”
“Yeah, a friend of mine lives up near Erie. Sheryl would put me up for a while. She owes me a favor.”
“Okay,” I said. “Marko and I will drive back to your place with you, so you can get some things together for your trip. Then Marko can drive you to your friend’s place.”
Marko nodded his agreement.
We left, and I followed Marko and Dee-Dee back to her apartment. Within an hour, they were on their way north. I told Dee-Dee to call me in a few days, so I could let her know if it was okay to come back.
On my way home, I thought about whether we should have called the cops about the attack. There didn’t seem to be much reason to, since we had no idea who Dee-Dee’s attacker was, and there was no hard evidence connecting him to Manny or Elias, although I was certain that the two of them were behind this.
So I was back to waiting for Irv to get inside the disc.
Meanwhile, I had to get ready to party-hearty.
Chapter 42
At precisely seven o’clock that evening, I buzzed Laura Fleming’s apartment from the lobby of her building. Her voice drifted down to me along the electronic pathways.
“I like a punctual partygoer,” she said, as she buzzed me in.
I had chosen to wear navy casual slacks and a long-sleeved white shirt with a button-down collar, along with Rockport soft leather walking shoes in a neutral shade. When Laura opened her door, I suddenly felt very underdressed. At first glance, she appeared to be wearing the same outfit she’d worn to the Frick the previous Saturday.
“Geez, I’m sorry, Laura,” I said. “I thought this was a casual affair.”
“It is,” she said, “and you look great. C’mon in.”
She stepped back to allow me to enter. As I walked into her apartment, I saw that the only lights came from a number of candles spaced around the living room, and I heard soft piano music coming from her CD unit.
“Why don’t you have a seat on the sofa, Jeremy?” she said, so I did.
She stood in front of me. It was the same tan outfit she’d worn to the Frick. The short skirt and fitted jacket, the matching high-heeled pumps. Tonight, though, she didn’t seem to be wearing the ivory shell under the jacket, although she did have the thin strand of pearls around her neck.
“Last Saturday night didn’t end exactly the way it should have,” she said, “so I thought we’d sort of recreate the situation and see if we could do a little better. Are you, uh, up for that?”
There was a sexy lilt to her voice, and there was something about her eyes, too, a kind of merriment, as though she knew something the rest of us hadn’t quite figured out yet.
“I’ve always been big on revisionist history,” I told her.
“Good,” she said. “Would you like some champagne?”
I said I would, and she turned and walked over to her dining room table, where I saw she had a bottle of champagne chilling in an ice bucket. I enjoyed watching her walk around, and I was pretty sure that was her intent. She expertly opened the bottle, poured two glasses, and then sashayed back over to me. She stood right in front of me again, this time a little closer, so that only a few inches separated us. She handed me some champagne and said, “Let’s see now, the last time you saw me in this outfit, I believe I took off the jacket. Why don’t we begin our revising by changing that routine just a bit.”
She handed me her glass to hold and then unzipped her skirt and let it drop to the floor. She bent over and picked up the skirt and tossed it aside. Then she straightened up again and put her hands on her hips. The sight of her in the short, fitted jacket, high heels, and sheer pantyhose had quite an effect on me.
“How am I doing so far?” she asked.
I tried to say something like “Great,” but the sound that came out of my mouth was more akin to some sort of croaking noise.
Laura laughed and said, “I’ll take that to be an indication of approval.”
“Definitely,” I said. “Absolutely, positively, definitely.”
“Well,” she said, “since I’ve taken off the skirt, I might as well . . .” And she unbuttoned the jacket and took it off and tossed it on top of the skirt. She stood there with the pearls falling down around her breasts, which were being held in place, barely, by a very lacy-looking flowered bra. Then she leaned forward, with her hands on the sofa on either side of me, her hair, which wasn’t swept back tonight, cascading down around my face. I could smell her perfume, the same fragrance she’d had on last Saturday night. It was a good scent for her.
“Last Saturday,” she said, “I think I was sitting next to you, so perhaps that’s the next thing we should revise.” She leaned all the way forward and straddled me, one leg on either side. Her face was almost touching mine now.
“Is this better?” she asked.
“Absolutely, positively, definitely,” I said.
“You know what?” she whispered.
“What?”
“Perhaps we can hold off on the champagne until a little later. What do you think?” And here her tongue flicked out and grazed my lips. Then she moved even closer to me, so that there was no space between our bodies at all. Her tongue flicked again, this time into my right ear.
“If you’d do something with these glasses,” I told her, “I could get into the game, as it were.”
She laughed again, sat up just a little, and took the glasses from my hands. Then she twisted around slightly and placed them on the end table next to the sofa.
