Across the room, Madeleine blinked across a pile of nine-year-olds' science notebooks. Thirty-seven drawings of a paramecium, all of which made it look like a hairy shoe.
'All right,' she said.
'Yes, I could. I'll just have to finish these first.' Already she was making calculations, dates and figures flying around her head, wondering if 41 maybe it was worth checking her temperature with the bathroom thermometer.
Chipper, Millington had put on the dressing gown his mother-in-law had bought him the Christmas before last and gone downstairs to make a pot of tea. Never mind Divine and all his bragging, Millington was prepared to wager it didn't get much better than that.
Madeleine, for whom it had actually been almost as satisfying a ten minutes as her husband had concluded, sat, propped up by a brace of pillows, searching for her place in Lives of the Christian Martyrs and still envincing a slight glow.
Millington brought the tea back up on a tray; best cups and saucers, green padded cosy, a small plateful of rich butter shortbread and custard creams. He remembered to stop whistling
'Don't Sleep in the Subway' out on the landing, not wanting to irritate her nerves.
'Graham,' Madeleine said, all smiling reproach, 'we'll get crumbs in the bed. '
'Not to worry,' he winked.
'Be changing the sheets tomorrow anyway.'
Biting her tongue rather than telling him not to be smutty, Madeleine reached for a shortbread biscuit instead. Millington settled the tray between them, poured milk and tea, set his cup on the bedside table and reached for the book that Resnick had handed him.
Madeleine's only immediate reaction was to shift a little on to one side, leaning her weight towards the light.
If anyone had told me. Annie Jones, you'll end up spending your seventh wedding anniversary alone in the front seat of a rented Chevrolet, outside of Jake's at the Lake in Tahoe City, I'd have told them to go jump right in it. The lake, that is. But then if that same anyone. 'Graham,' Madeleine said, rolling towards him, 'what- ever's got into you? '
'How'd you mean?'
'First, you know, and now this.'
This? '
'You're reading in bed.'
'So?'
'You never read; not anywhere, never mind in bed.'
'I read that what's his name? – John Grisham.'
'You bought the book when we were on our way back from Devon, read the first two pages, put it in the bag for Christian Aid and saw the film.'
'Two pages is about all I'll read of this as well, if you don't let me get on with it. Try engaging you in conversation once you're stuck into one of these door stops of yours and I get a look fierce enough to excommunicate the Pope.'
'All right, Graham,' Madeleine said, giving it just a touch of the long-suffering.
'I'm sorry. I won't interrupt you again.'
'S'okay, love,' Millington said, fidgeting his backside against her hip.
'Not as if it's anything serious, not like yours. No one's going to set me an exam on it when I've finished.' He opened the paperback wide and cracked the spine a little, rendering it easier to handle.
But then if that same anyone had told me, the day I appeared, fresh out of law school, ready to start work at the offices of Reigler and Reigler, bright and full of promise in my newly acquired dove-grey two-piece with a charcoal stripe, skirt a businesslike three inches below the knee, that I would swap what was clearly destined to be a famous legal career for that of 43 a lowly private eye, I would gleefully have signed committal forms, assigning them to the nearest asylum, and tossed away the key.
'You know, Annie,' my mother had said, the time I plucked up courage to explain, 'you can't really be a private eye, they only have them in the movies. And books. And besides, they're always men. '
My mom. God bless her, always seemed to have a vested interest in remaining firmly behind the times.
'Sure, Mom,' I said, 'you're right. ' And inched back the business card I had proudly given her, stuffing it back down into my wallet.
There'd be another time.
Madeleine turned with a start as Annie Q. Jones hit the floor with a small bump. Millington's eyes were closed and pretty soon, she knew, he would begin to snore. Leaning across him carefully, Madeleine lightly touched her cheek to his and then switched out the lamp.
The kids outside the amusement arcade at the end of Fletcher Gate stared back at Resnick with flat, hostile eyes. Fifteen, sixteen, younger: high-top trainers, T-shirts, jeans; cans of Coke and cigarettes and something in a polystyrene box from Burger King. Maybe they knew he was a policeman, maybe not; what they saw was someone older than their fathers, another version of their teachers, probation officers, social workers, another heavily built man in a shapeless suit.
A common incongruity, the windows in front of which they lounged or sat displayed pottery objects no one ever bought shire horses, vases, bug-eyed dogs all steadily gathering dust.
Resnick turned right towards Goose Gate, pausing for some moments outside Culture Vulture, looking with quiet delight at the display of extravagantly designed shirts he would never wear, black brothel-creeper shoes of the kind he had surreptitiously changed into almost thirty years before, ready to go out and about with his mates.
Blown-up reproductions of Blue Note record covers hung as a backdrop: Big John Patton, John Coltrane; trumpeter Lee Morgan in his three-buttoned Italian jacket, neat shirt and knit tie; Dexter Gordon, leaning back from the curve of his saxophone and laughing on A Swingin' Affair. Inside Resnick's head a Hammond organ surged and Jimmy Smith set out on
'Groovin' at Small's', a blues solo Resnick had long savoured, even though the album itself had disappeared from his shelves without trace or reason years before, the way favourite albums were sadly wont to do.
Crossing into Broad Street, the sound played on against a counterpoint of car horns and discordant voices, underscored by the insistent rap beat that came through the open doors of other hip, expensive clothing stores; only when he stopped outside Broadway's offices and pressed the buzzer did the music disappear.
'Charlie Resnick,' he said, head bent awkwardly towards the intercom.
'Here to see Miss Hansen.'
Too late, he thought Ms would have been more appropriate, awkward to pronounce as he always found it.
The door to Mollie's office was open, but Resnick hesitated long enough to catch her eye before walking in.
The scarlet had been replaced by a plaid shirt which almost matched the one on k. d. lang in the Even Cowgirls Get the Blues poster that was tacked up behind Mollie's desk. The desk itself held neatly labelled files, a stack of bright red plastic trays close to overflowing, several movie books, a battered A-Z map of the city, three purple mugs, each holding a residue of coffee and, at me centre, a desk- size Filofax with annotations in three colours.
'You found it all right, then?' Mollie said brightly, gesturing for him to sit down.
Resnick moved two telephone directories and eased himself down into the chair.
'Coffee? I can send out for cappuccino. You know the new deli at the end of the street?'
'If it's no trouble.'
Mollie called past him towards the open door.
'Larry, I don't suppose you've got a minute…'
He had.
Mollie drew a sheet of paper from one of the files and slid it towards Resnick. Her desk, he thought, lively and organised as it was, lacked the merest trace of anything 46 purely personal a photograph, a fading birthday card, a Post-it note reminding her to buy more flour, a pint of milk. He wondered where she kept her life and what it was like or if this were all there was.
