Before the Palm Springs turnoff, he suggested they stop at an Indian bingo palace for cold drinks and a couple of games. Somehow, while she was distracted watching how the place operated, his hand kept finding its way into the back of her spandex tank top.
The feel of him so close, his suggestive leers, the smell of him, the smoky smell of the place, made her clammy all over. But she kept up a good front, didn’t retch when her stomach churned. She had practice; for five years she had kept up a good front, and survived because of it. Come ten o’clock, she encouraged herself, there would be a whole new order of things.
After bingo, it was an hour of front-seat wrestling, straight down the highway to a Motel 6—all rooms $29.95, cable TV and a phone in every room. He told her what he wanted; she asked him to take a shower first.
In Riverside, he’d said his name was Jack. But the name on the Louisiana driver’s license she found in his wallet said Henry LeBeau.
He was in the shower, singing, when she made this discovery. Lise practiced writing the name a couple of times on motel stationery while she placed a call on the room phone. Mrs. Henry LeBeau, Lise LeBeau…she wrote it until the call was answered.
“I’m out,” Lise said.
“You’re lying.”
“Not me,” she said. “Penalty for lying’s too high.”
“I left my best man at the house with you. He would have called me.”
“If he could. Maybe your best man isn’t as good as you thought he was. Maybe I’m better.”
Waiting for more response from the other end, she wrote LeBeau’s name a few more times, wrote it until it felt natural to her hand.
Finally, she got more than heavy breathing from the phone.
“Where are you, Lise?”
“I’m a long way into somewhere else. Don’t bother to go looking, because this time you won’t find me.”
“Of course I will.”
She hung up.
Jack/Henry turned off the shower. Before he was out of the bathroom, fresh and clean and looking for love, Lise was out of the motel and down the road. With his wallet in her bag.
The heat outside was like a frontal assault after the cool dim room; hundred and ten degrees, zero percent humidity according to a sign.
Afternoon sun slanted directly into Lise’s eyes and the air smelled like truck fuel and hot pavement, but it was better than the two-day sweat that had filled the big-rig cab and had followed them into the motel. She needed a dozen hot breaths to get his stench out of her.
The motel wasn’t in a place, nothing but a graded spot at the end of a freeway off-ramp halfway between L.A. and Phoenix: a couple of service stations and a minimart, a hundred miles of scrubby cactus and sharp rocks for neighbors. Shielding her eyes, Lise quick-walked toward the freeway, looking for possibilities even before she crossed the road to the Texaco station.
The meeting she needed to attend would be held in Palm Springs, and she had to find a way to get there. She knew for a dead certainly she didn’t want to get into another truck, and she couldn’t stay in the open.
Heat blazed down from the sky, bounced up off the pavement, and caught her both ways. Lise began to panic. Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, under the sun and she knew she would be fried. But it wasn’t the heat that made her run for the shelter of the covered service station. After being confined for so long, she was sometimes frightened by open space.
The Texaco and its minimart were busy with a transient olio show: cranky families in vans, chubby truckers, city smoothies in desert vacation togs and too much shiny jewelry, everyone in a hurry to fill up, scrape the bugs off the windshield, and get back on the road with the air-conditioning buffering them from the relentless heat.
As she walked past the pumps, waiting for opportunity to present itself, an old white-haired guy in a big new Cadillac slid past her, pulled up next to the minimart. He was a very clean-looking man, the sort, she thought, who doesn’t like to get hot and mussed.
Like her father. When he got out of his car to go into the minimart, the cream puff left his engine running and his air conditioner blowing to keep the car’s interior cool.
Lise saw the man inside the store, spinning a rack of road maps, as she got into his car and drove away.
When she hit the on-ramp, backtracking west, she saw Mr. Henry LeBeau, half dressed and sweating like a comeback wrestler, standing out in front of the motel, looking upset, peering around like he’d lost something.
“Goodbye, Mr. LeBeau.” Lise smiled at his tiny figure as it receded in her rearview mirror. “Thanks for the ride.” Then she looked all around, half expecting to spot a tail, to find a fleet of long, shiny black cars deployed to find her, surround her, take her back home; escape couldn’t be this easy. But the only shine she saw came from mirages, like silver puddles splashed across the freeway. She relaxed some, settled against the leather upholstery, aimed the air vents on her face and changed the Caddy’s radio station from a hundred violins to Chopin.
Her transformation from truck-stop dolly to mall matron took less than five minutes. She wiped off the heavy makeup she had acquired in Riverside, covered the skimpy tank top with a blouse from her bag, rolled down the cuffs of her denim shorts to cover three more inches of her muscular thighs, traded the hand-tooled boots for graceful leather sandals, and tied her windblown hair into a neat ponytail at the back of her neck. When she checked her face in the mirror, she saw any lady in a checkout line looking back at her.
Lise took the Bob Hope Drive off-ramp, sighed happily as the scorched and barren virgin desert gave way to deep-green golf courses, piles of chichi condos, palm trees, fountains, and posh restaurants whose parking lots were garnished with Jags, Caddies, and Benzes.
She pulled into one of those lots and, with the motor running, took some time to really look over what she had to work with.
American Express card signed H. G. LeBeau. MasterCard signed Henry LeBeau. Four hundred in cash. The wallet also had some gas company cards, two old condoms, a picture of an ugly wife, and a slip of paper with a four-digit number. Bless his heart, she thought, smiling; Henry had given her a PIN number, contributed to her range of possibilities.
Lise committed the four digits to memory, put the credit cards and cash into her pocket, then got out into the blasting heat to stuff the wallet into a trash can before she drove on to the Palm Desert Mall.
Like a good scout, Lise left the Caddy in the mall parking lot just as she had found it, motor running, doors unlocked, keys inside.
Without a backward glance, she headed straight for I. Magnin.
Wardrobe essentials and a beautiful leather-and-brocade suitcase to carry it consumed little more than an hour. She signed for purchases alternately as Mrs. Henry LeBeau or H. G. LeBeau as she alternated the credit cards. She felt safe doing it; in Magnin’s, no one ever dared ask for ID.
Time was a problem, and so was cash enough to carry through the next few days, until she could safely use other resources.
As soon as Henry got himself pulled together, she knew he would report his cards lost. She also knew he wouldn’t have the balls to confess the circumstances under which the cards got away from him, so she wasn’t worried about the police. But once the cards were reported, they would be useless. How much longer would it take him? she wondered.
From a teller machine, she pulled the two-hundred-dollar cash advance limit off the MasterCard, then used the card a last time to place another call.
“You’re worried,” she said into the receiver. “You have that meeting tonight, and I have distracted you. You have a problem, because if I’m not around to sign the final papers, everything falls apart. Now you’re caught in a bind: you can’t stand up the congressman and you can’t let me get away, and you sure as hell can’t be in two places at once. What are you going to do?”