"And did you do this?"
"That's where Arnie outsmarted himself," I said. "See, he wanted a backup man but he didn't want a partner. He wanted it all for himself. Maybe he'd give me a grand for my troubles. So he kept me in the dark to protect himself from me, and in the meantime he forgot to protect himself from his buyer, because he got knifed to death in an alley in Hell's Kitchen."
"How sad for him."
"Well, these things happen. You know what they say, sometimes it's a dog-eat-dog world and the rest of the time it's the other way around. Soon as I heard what happened I went over to his apartment, flashed some tin at the super and had a look around. I didn't expect to find much because the cops had already been there, and I don't think they were the first ones in, either, because Arnie's keys were missing when they found his corpse. So I don't think I even got sloppy seconds, if you'll pardon the sexual innuendo, Mrs. Stettner."
She looked at me.
"The thing is," I said, "I knew Arnie kept a copy of the tape, because he already told me as much. So I gathered up every cassette in his place. There must have been forty of them, all these old movies that you'd turn off if they were on television. He ate that stuff up. What I did, I sat in front of my set and cranked up my VCR and went through the lot of them. And surprise, one of 'em wasn't what it was supposed to be. I was zooming through it with the Fast Forward, same as all the others, when all of a sudden the regular picture's gone and we're in a room with a teenage boy all hooked up to a metal frame like something out of the Spanish Inquisition, and there's a beautiful woman in leather pants and gloves and high heels and nothing else. I notice you're wearing leather pants again today but I don't suppose they're the same ones, because the ones on the tape were crotchless."
"Tell me about the film."
I recounted enough of it to make it clear I'd seen it. "It wasn't much on plot," I said, "but the ending was a pip, and there was this symbolic last shot of blood flowing across the floor and down the drain. That was Arnie at his most creative, you have to give him that, and the black-and-white checkerboard floor was the same as the basement of the arena in Maspeth, and isn't that a hell of a coincidence?"
She pursed her lips and blew out a stream of air in a soundless whistle. She had half a glass of wine left but she didn't touch it, reaching instead for my glass of Perrier. She took a sip and put the glass back where she'd found it. The act managed to be curiously intimate.
"You mentioned Richard Thurman," she said.
"Well, that's the thing," I said. "See, I had Arnie's tape, but what was I going to do with it? The devious bastard never got to the point of saying who the people were. Here I got a tape the principals would be happy to get back, and it would be very much worth my while to perform them the valuable service of recovering it, but how do I find them? I went around with my eyes and ears open, but short of bumping into a man walking down the street in a rubber suit with his dick hanging out, how was I going to get anywhere?"
I picked up my Perrier and turned the glass so that I was sipping from where her lips had touched the glass. A kiss by proxy, you could call it.
"Then Thurman turns up," I said. "With a dead wife, and public opinion pretty much divided as to whether or not he had anything to do with it. I run into him in a ginmill and because he's in television we get on the subject of Arnie, who worked for one of the nets before I ever knew him. And strangely enough your name came up."
"My name?"
"You and your husband. Very distinctive names, easy to remember even after a long night in a saloon. Thurman put away more booze than I did, but he got very cute, lots of hints, lots of innuendo. I figured we'd talk more, but the next thing you knew he was dead. They say he killed himself."
"It's very sad."
"And tragic, like you said over the phone. The same day he got killed I was out in Maspeth. I was going to meet him at the fights and he was going to point out your husband. Thurman didn't make it, I guess he was already dead by then, but I didn't need him to point out your husband, because I recognized the two of you. Then I went downstairs and recognized the floor. I couldn't find the room where you made the movie, but maybe it was one of the locked ones. Or maybe you redecorated since the taping session." I shrugged. "Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter what Thurman was getting at, either, and it doesn't matter what kind of help he might have had going out the window. What matters is I'm in the fortunate position of being able to do something useful for someone in a position to make it all worth my while."
"What do you want?"
"What do I want? That's easy. I want basically the same thing Arnie wanted. Isn't that pretty much what everybody wants?" Her hand was on the table, inches from mine. I extended a finger and reached to touch the back of her hand. "But I don't want to get what he got," I said. "That's all."
FOR a long moment she sat looking down at our hands on the tabletop. Then she covered my hand with hers and fastened her eyes on mine. I could see the blue of her eyes now, and the intensity of her gaze held me.
"Matthew," she said, testing my name on her tongue. "No, I think I will just call you Scudder."
"Whatever you like."
She stood up. I thought for a second she was going to leave, but instead she came around the table and motioned for me to inch over to my left. She sat down beside me on the banquette and again put her hand on top of mine.
"Now we're on the same side," she said.
She was wearing a lot of perfume. It was musky, which was no great surprise. I hadn't figured her to go around smelling like a pine tree.
"It was hard to talk," she said. "You know what I mean, Scudder?" I don't know that she had an accent, but there was the slightest European inflection to her speech. "How can I say anything? You could be tricking me, all wired up so that anything I say would be recorded."
"I'm not wearing a wire."
"How do I know this?" She turned toward me and put her hand on my necktie just below the knot. She ran her hand the length of my tie, slipping it inside the front of my suit jacket. She stroked my shirtfront thoroughly.
"I told you," I said.
"Yes, you told me," she murmured. Her mouth was close to my ear and her breath was warm on the side of my face. Her hand dropped to my leg and swept upward along the inside of my thigh. "Did you bring the tape?"
"It's in a bank vault."
"That's a pity. We could go upstairs and watch it. How did it make you feel when you saw it?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know? What kind of an answer is that? Of course you know. It made you hot, didn't it?"
"I suppose so."
"You suppose so. You're hot now, Scudder. You're hard. I could make you come right now, just by touching you. How would you like that?"
I didn't say anything.
"I'm all hot and wet," she said. "I have no underpants on. It's wonderful to wear tight leather pants and no underwear and get all wet inside the leather. Do you want to come upstairs with me? I could fuck you stupid. You remember what I did to that boy?"
"You killed him."
"You think he had it so bad?" She moved closer, took the lobe of my ear between her teeth. "For three days we fucked his brains out, Bergen and I. We fucked him and sucked him and let him have whatever drugs he wanted. He had a lifetime of pleasure."
"He didn't like the ending much."
"So he had pain. So what?" Her hand stroked me in rhythm with her words. "So he didn't live a hundred years, he didn't get to be an old man. Who wants to be an old man?"