roof over their heads. With a marginally motivated and often drunk husband, it was the best Iona Dade Cooper could hope for. Max kept both the job and the house for years-far longer than anyone expected-but only because Iona carried more than her share of the load. Max owned the official title of garbageman. Iona did most of the work-his and hers both.
As a child Diana hadn't been blessed with many friends. The few she did have usually found dozens of excuses to explain why they could never come play at her house. For years Diana had searched for ways to make her house more acceptable, more welcoming.
Once when she was ten or so, she had sat at the kitchen table after dinner, poring through the exotic pages of one of the several Sears and Roebuck catalogs that came to the house each year with her mother's name on them.
'Look at these,' Diana had said, pointing to a set of sheer, frilly pink curtains. The curtains could be purchased as part of a set along with a matching bedspread. 'Wouldn't those look nice in my bedroom?'
Diana's question had been intended for her mother's ears, but at that precise moment, Iona had stepped across the kitchen to the pantry where she was just taking off her apron. Before she could finish hanging up her apron and return to the table, Max Cooper had banged down his beer bottle and then leaned toward Diana. He peered over her shoulder, glowering at the page in the catalog.
'Won't matter none,' he announced morosely. With a quick jab, he grabbed the catalog out of Diana's hand and dropped it into Iona's box of kitchen firewood. 'Curtains or no, you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. And all those hoity-toity girls from school still won't have nothin' to do with you. You know what they say,' he added with a leer. 'Once a garbageman's daughter, always a garbageman's daughter.'
He had leaned back on his chair then, watching to see if she would try to rescue the catalog from the trash heap which, of course, she did not. Even at that age, she already knew better than to give Max Cooper's meanness the kind of satisfaction he wanted.
In the books Diana had devoured every day-fictional stories peopled by the likes of Nancy Drew and Judy Bolton and the Dana girls-the heroines had slick rooms, speedy little roadsters, loving parents, and enough money to do whatever they liked. If they wanted something, they bought it themselves or some nice relative gave it to them. Diana Cooper's life wasn't like that. She never had a matching set of curtains, sheets, and pillowcases until after she had been married and widowed and was living alone in the little rock house in Gates Pass.
She had left the catalog where her father threw it, but she had never forgotten what he had done. And she had never forgiven him either.
Now, driving toward her interview with Monty Lazarus, Diana Ladd Walker was struck once more by how far she had come from those bad old days. It was a long way from the garbageman's house in Joseph, Oregon, to the lobby of the La Paloma in Tucson, Arizona. A damned long way.
When she pulled into the covered driveway in front of the hotel, a valet-parking attendant stepped forward to open the door and claim her car. 'Are you checking in?' he asked, helping her out of the seat.
'No,' she said. 'I'm here for a meeting.'
'Very good,' he said, handing her a claim ticket.
She stood for a moment watching as he took the Suburban and drove it out of sight. The miracle was that she didn't feel as though she were out of her league or that she had somehow overreached herself. No, she was here at a first-class hotel, and she felt totally at ease.
Smiling, Diana smoothed her dress and started inside, nodding a thank-you to the attendant who opened the door.
Not only was it a long way from Joseph to here, she thought, but every single step had been worth it.
As she entered the room a tall, gaunt-looking man with a headful of bushy red hair, slightly stooped shoulders, and an engaging grin rose and came toward her. 'Mrs. Walker?' he asked.
Diana nodded and held out her hand. 'Mr. Lazarus?' she asked.
'That's right,' he said with a courtly bow. 'Monty Lazarus at your service.' He led her toward a low, comfortable-looking couch. 'I've managed to corral this little seating area for just the two of us. I thought it might be nicer for talking than the restaurant would be. Would you care for a drink?'
'A glass of wine might be nice. A drink sometimes helps take the edge off.'
'In other words, you're not looking forward to this.'
She smiled and shook her head. 'About as much as I look forward to having a root canal,' she told him.
For some strange reason, that answer seemed to tickle his funny bone. Monty Lazarus laughed aloud.
'The lobby bar isn't open yet,' he said. 'You hang on right here. If you'll excuse me for a few seconds, I'll go get you that glass of wine, then I'll do my best to make this as painless an interview as possible.'
Diana sat back, closed her eyes, and waited, forcing herself to relax, to forget how nervous being on the subjective side of an interview always made her feel.
'Have you ever been to a bullfight?' Andy had asked Mitch once.
'A long time ago,' Mitch answered. 'Down in Nogales back in the early seventies. Lori and I went together. I wasn't especially impressed.'
'The Nogales ring wasn't noted for the quality of its fights,' Andy replied. 'It's like small-town sports everywhere. The bush leagues. You get the young guys who aren't quite good enough to make it in the majors and a few major-league has-beens that aren't tough enough to cut the mustard anymore. But bullfighting, if it's done right, is a thing of beauty.
'The bullfighter has to be able to kill. That goes without saying, but the art of it is all in the capework, in the bullfighter controlling the drama with his cape. The whole point is to bring the bull's horns so close that physical injury or even death are less than a fraction of an inch away and yet, when the fight is over the bull is always dead, and usually, the bullfighter walks away unscathed. It's fascinating to watch.'
Mitch Johnson remembered every word of that conversation, and he had taken them all to heart. This was his capework, then. He had set up the interview and the whole Monty Lazarus fabrication just to prove to himself that he could do it, that he could take the girl, do whatever he wanted with her, and still talk to her mother with complete impunity. There was power in that.
Mitch stood at the bar waiting for the bartender to finish dealing with some kind of inventory issue. Even that slight suspension in the action was annoying. Now that the interview was about to begin, his whole body was alive with anticipation. The moment when Diana Ladd Walker had come across the room toward him was already one of the high points of his life. He would never forget the cordial smile on her face as he rose to meet her or the way she had held out her hand in greeting. The touch of her fingers had been absolutely electrifying because, like the poor, unfortunate bull, Diana Ladd Walker didn't suspect a thing.
She had no idea that her precious daughter belonged to the man whose hand she was shaking. She didn't have a glimmer that he had spent almost the entire morning with Lani Walker spread out before him as a visual feast for his sole enjoyment. The girl was his, both physically and artistically. Lani was a prisoner of his charcoal and paper as surely as her hands and feet were secured to the trundle bed's sturdy little corner posts. Diana Ladd Walker had no idea that her interviewer had spent several delightful morning hours being alternately tortured and exhilarated by the process of re-creating that delectably innocent body on paper; that, by controlling his aching to take Lani-because it would have been so easy to do so-he had reveled in the rational victory of denying that physical craving, that fundamental bodily urge. So far Mitch's violation of Lani Walker had been mainly intellectual, but that wouldn't last forever.
'Sorry about the delay, sir,' the bartender said. 'Can I help you now?'
'A glass of chardonnay for the lady,' Mitch Johnson said. 'And a glass of tonic with lime for me.'
For the first half hour of the Monty Lazarus interview, the questions followed such a well-worn track that Diana could have given the answers in her sleep.
'How long have you been writing?' he asked.
'Twenty-five years, give or take.'
'You must have studied writing in school, right?'
Diana shook her head. 'No,' she said. 'I applied for the creative writing program here at the university, but I wasn't admitted. I became a teacher instead.'
'That's right,' Monty said. 'I remember something about that from the book. Your husband was admitted using material you had actually written while you weren't allowed in, and Andrew Carlisle turned out to be the instructor.'
