with lotion. I would have bet that she had taken pride in her skin once; maybe she was astute enough to still appreciate its appeal. Her body was lean, but she had curves overlaying the muscles in the right places, a variation between hard and soft that seemed to match her personality. She was a few years older than me, having already closed on forty, but her hands, wrinkled in the palms, were the only part of her that showed her age. They looked soft and forgiving, more fragile than the rest of her.
I glanced around, mostly to stop examining her.
On the sole overhead TV not tuned to ESPN1, 2, or 12, Johnny Ordean appeared, rerun in his usual role, Detective Aiden O'Shannon. A stage-named Jew from Brooklyn playing an Irish Chicago cop on the backlot at Fox. Welcome to Hollywood.
Johnny and I had one of those 310 friendships I pretended to flutter around his flame, and he kept me programmed into his cell phone in case I accidentally wrote something else that his agents could package.
Detective O'Shannon crouched over a mangled corpse, eating a get this hot dog and holding up an ejected bullet casing with a bent paper clip. The closed-captioning read, with appropriate humorlessness,
HUSTLE THIS TO FORENSICS THE CASING NOT THE HOT DOG.
Caroline followed my gaze. 'Isn't that the guy who played whatever they turned Derek Chainer into for that crappy film?'
'You've read my stuff?' I was thrilled.
'Of course I've read you. Why do you think I watched the trial?'
'Perverse curiosity?'
'That's why I read you, too.' When she smiled, the scars straightened, and the indentations carved through her lips aligned. The damage hardly disappeared, but it grew significantly less pronounced. The wounds had been inflicted when she was scowling, or weeping, or screaming, and somehow a smile simulated those conditions enough to bring back the original lines of the blade. 'You never played into the trial. You didn't turn into a trained seal. I bet it was difficult not to.'
'It was a learning experience all the way around.'
'What'd you take away from it all?'
'I can smell auras.'
'Really?'
'My Spidey-senses are tingling right now, in fact. And your aura smells a little like' I leaned over the table, sniffed her delightful head 'wet dog.'
'Wet dog?' She wasn't smiling.
'Yeah. Pekingese, maybe.'
She backhanded my shoulder.
'I thought you liked me for my sense of humor.'
'I don't like you. But if I did, it would be for your vast infamy.'
'It'll fade. Time heals all wounds.'
'No,' she said. 'It doesn't.' She studied the tips of her hair.
'Uh-oh.'
'What?'
'You're Engaging in Private Grooming Habits. If I'm to believe Men's Health, that means you've lost interest in this conversation.'
'Men's Health?'
'Yeah. Sorry 'bout that.'
'Despite prevailing scientific wisdom, it doesn't mean I've lost interest. It means I'm uncomfortable.'
'Because…'
'I work now. I don't go to dinner with men I don't know.'
Laughter over by the pool table drew our attention. At one of the bar tables, a musclehead with twinning ear pierces nuzzled his spectacular girlfriend. Blond hair, blue eyes she was a recessive-gene showcase. They looked young, likely in on fake IDs.
'What I'd give to have a tape of me in college,' Caroline said. 'The past always seems so glamorous, once you pass it. Yet here we are, stuck in the ever-unglamorous present.' She watched the young couple kissing. 'Remember that age? Everything you felt, it was the first time anyone had ever felt it. Like you'd discovered emotion.' The longing in her voice was palpable. 'You can't burn that way your whole life or you'll burn out, but it's still a loss when it fades away.'
The guy stood up. His T-shirt read it ain't gonna suck itseLf.
'Ah, yes,' I said. 'Young romance.'
Caroline laughed, and the guy stopped and gave us his best glare.
'Right,' I said, 'you wear that shirt and you don't want people to look at you.'
Scowling, he continued outside, tapping down a pack of smokes. The waitress came over, and I tried to pay, but Caroline insisted, a bit too firmly, on splitting the bill.
After our change arrived, Caroline said, 'When I first started at Hope House, we realized we weren't getting traction with certain kids because we didn't understand some of their reactions, their hardwiring. So I implemented home visits for the counselors. To see where these kids came from. It gave us a better understanding of how to deal with them in other contexts.' She paused to finish her beer, leaving me unsure where she was going. 'You knew Genevieve, but all you have of Kasey Broach is a body in a photograph. If you want to figure out how to fit her in, you need to see where she lived, meet her family.'
'And say what? 'I'm a suspect in your daughter's murder and I'd like to ask a few questions'?'
She shrugged. 'You're creative. Presumably.' Her eyes darted over to the pool table. 'Wanna play?'
'You hustling me?'
Again with the beautiful smile. 'I'm not very good.'
Two and a half minutes later, I watched as she leaned over to draw a bead on the fifteen, her second-to-last ball on the table. I had six solids remaining and little of my barroom dignity. I'd discovered that Caroline Raine had a whole vocabulary of laughter the victorious whoop, the confident chuckle, the under-the-breath snicker.
'Is the fifteen feeling skinny? I think it's feeling skinny.' Off her shot she threaded it, impossibly, through the one and the five and lined up for the nine. 'The jeweler is in,' she pronounced before cutting it to the side pocket on a backward vector I'd seen only in Paul Newman movies.
She circled the table, chalking her stick. Witty T-Shirt was still tied up on the pay phone, but his girlfriend's chair blocked Caroline's angle.
Caroline asked, 'Would you mind letting me take this shot?'
'We were here first,' the girl said. 'And I already moved once. I'm not gonna keep dancing around the table.'
'It puts you out that much to scoot four inches to your left?'
The girl flashed a fake smile onto her unreasonably pretty face. 'Likes: water sports, long walks on the beach, kittens. Dislikes: pushy chicks with fucked-up faces.'
Caroline colored everywhere except her scars; the contrast was severe. She set down the pool cue and turned to me. 'Let's go.' She took a few steps toward the door, then stopped and looked back at me intolerantly.
I paused next to the girl. On the table beside her Smirnoff Ice were photo proofs of her in various cutesy poses. She or her boyfriend had circled several with a red grease pencil, selecting prospective head shots.
'I know you,' I said quietly. 'You lucked into a decent set of genes, and you think that constitutes a contribution to the world. You don't really want to act you're just lazy, and you want to be looked at and get your rent paid doing it. You booked a mouthwash commercial and a print campaign for TJ Maxx, and your agent thinks you're the next big thing. In a few years, you'll give up on leading lady and convince yourself you'll get cast as the wry best friend or the sitcom wife. Another excuse to do more nothing for another decade. In the long meantime, maybe you should reflect on what entitles you to be cruel and smug besides high cheekbones and the word of people paid to flatter you.'
I didn't see her boyfriend coming until the fist loomed over my right side. I jerked away, and the blow glanced off my jaw, and then I heard a thud and a barstool toppling, and I finished reeling to see Caroline standing over the guy, holding one twisted arm captive, foot at his jawline, applying pressure to drive his face farther into the worn
