She looked away, into the clutter of the kitchen. I came up behind her, close enough to touch. But she was not a woman you did that to until you were very sure.
She sensed me there behind her, took a half-step back, and pressed herself lightly against me.
I put an arm around her, then the other. She leaned her head back and I hugged her a little tighter.
“Something’s certainly happening,” she said. “I know that s not my imagination.”
“In Rome they had a term for it.”
“ Lustus profundus ,” she said, stealing it.
“The next best thing to a chariot race.”
She laughed and pulled herself away, moving across the room. “God, I don’t know what to do with you. I wish I knew.”
“Whatever you want. It’s not that complicated. I don’t come with a Japanese instructional booklet.”
She took a long breath. “I’ve been celibate almost two years.”
“I can’t imagine why. It can only be by choice.”
“I got hurt. I mean really burned. I swore off men. And meant it, too, until…”
She blushed. Her skin looked hot.
“I don’t know what I want to do,” she said.
“But, see, you don’t have to know. You can figure it out in your own good time. Nobody’s pushing you.”
“Now that I’m over here,” she said, and we both laughed.
She asked where the Grayson stuff was and I led her back to the stairs and up to the loft. I crawled up into the room and reached back for her. We clasped hands and I helped her up. It was all as I’d left it, the two remaining rows separated by a three-foot gap and draped by a sheet of clear polyethylene. I walked out on the plastic and held up my hands like Moses going through the Red Sea.
Behind me, she said, “Who the hell am I kidding?”
When I turned, she had pulled her blouse out of her skirt and had taken loose the top buttons.
“So what do you think?” she said brightly. “Is that plastic cold?”
50
I’ve always hated plastic, the symbol of everything phony in the world.
Not anymore.
It was hot and quick, intense. We were both long overdue.
I buried my face in her hair, loving her, and she clawed the plastic down and sealed us inside it. We slipped around like a pair of peeled avocados twisted together in Saran Wrap.
Then we lay on top and cooled off, and in a while, when she was ready, she told me about Pruitt. They had parked him in the Pierce County Jail on a hold order from Seattle. Quintana would be sending someone down, maybe as early as tonight, to pick him up. Trish was vague on the possible charges. What Quintana wanted now was to talk to him and see how his story compared with the version they had gotten out of the kid, Bobby John Dalton. “I had a long talk with Quintana on the telephone. He actually talked to me. I must be living right.“
“Cops tend to do that when they think you know more than they do.”
“He seemed almost human. I got some great background out of him, off the record.”
“What did he tell you?”
“Off the record. That means you tell no one without my permission, under penalty of death.”
Sure, I said: I could play her reporter game.
“Bobby’s version of that night remained constant through two days of questioning. You broke his jaw, by the way—the cops had to take his statement through clenched teeth. He’s eating through a straw, which is hard work for a meat eater.”
“I’ll send him a get-well card.”
“Bobby and Carmichael took the Rigby girl to Carmichael’s house. That’s just off Aurora Avenue, not far from downtown. By the time Pruitt got there Rigby had been trussed up, gagged, and stashed in a room off the kitchen. There was an argument over what to do with her. Carmichael was worried about Pruitt—he had this sudden fear that Pruitt might go too far and hurt her if she didn’t come up with the book. I take it Pruitt doesn’t always know when to stop once he gets started.”
I thought of Slater’s battered face and told her Carmichael had good reason to worry. “Where was Bobby in all of this?”
“By then he was hurting so bad he wasn’t worrying about anybody but himself. Carmichael was the one sweating it. If Rigby was going to come to any real harm, Carmichael didn’t want to know about it—and he sure didn’t want it happening there in his house. But he couldn’t stand up to Pruitt. At one point Pruitt lost his temper and knocked Carmichael back into the kitchen table and broke off one of the legs. Pruitt yelled at him and said he was worse than Slater. If it hadn’t been for Slater, he’d have taken the girl last week and they’d have the book by now.”
“Which is probably true.”
“Pruitt went into the room with Rigby alone. There wasn’t a sound, to hear Bobby tell it. He said it was spooky, the two of them standing in the dead silence looking at each other and not knowing what was happening in the other room. Then Pruitt came out and said he was going to get the book.”
“He scared it out of her. He was her bogeyman, Slater said. I don’t know why.”
“Maybe why’s not important. It was in the bus station, in a locker. She had put it there the first day she got to town.”
I gave a little laugh and shook my head.
“That’s about it. Pruitt told Carmichael to take Rigby on up to his house, he’d be along himself as soon as he could get downtown and get the book. Then he’d settle up with them and they could both go to hell. Bobby took off for the nearest emergency room, and that’s the last he saw or heard of them till he read about Carmichael in the newspaper.”
“We can finish the story ourselves from there. Carmichael took Eleanor on to Pruitt’s alone. Olga was already dead in the house and the killer was still inside waiting. The only thing about it that I can’t believe is that Quintana would tell it all to you.”
“He wants you to come in.”
“He’s moved on in his thinking. He’s past Pruitt now, same as I am. He knows it’s not Pruitt and he knows it’s not me. He told you this stuff to send me a message. This goddamn man is one pretty good cop.”
“Go see him, Cliff. Do this for me, please, do it now, before it gets any worse. Who knows when the moon will turn and Quintana will start drinking blood again.”
“I’ll make you a deal. If I don’t wrap this mother up by tomorrow, Quintana can have me. Solemn word of honor.”
She lay there weighing it, clearly unhappy.
“I’ve got to follow this one out, Trish. If I’m wrong, Quintana can have everything I’ve got and you can come visit me every third Tuesday of the month in the crowbar hotel.”
“You’re chasing a ghost.”
“I’m betting all those deaths were set off by something in those books. Something that humiliated him beyond any imaginable reason. It attacked him in his guts, in his heart, where he lived: it made his life unbearable to imagine them out there for someone else to see. It threatened to destroy the one thing that made life worth living. The Grayson mystique.”
“But you’re hanging all this on the blind woman.”