Paine gave her the folded contract from his inside jacket pocket. He saw that her glass was empty. She rose from the barstool, steadily, and began to walk to the doorway.
"Find out whatever you want," she said.
"You told me he killed himself."
"I said that's what I wanted to think," she said. "We all want a lot of things, Mr. Paine."
"I'll need-"
"I'll think about it. I'm tired. I'm going to bathe."
She left the room. She turned out the amber light, and Paine was left in semidarkness. Though it was dark and cool in the room he could sense the heat outside; the thin slats of light that fell into the room were bright against the leather chairs they settled on. He put the envelope back into his pocket and made his way to the door.
As he stepped out, there were voices in the hallway. Approaching him was a fuller, healthier, slightly older version of Dolores Grumbach. She wore tennis shorts, and her hair was cut boyishly short. Paine saw a man, shorthaired, healthy-looking, dressed also in tennis whites, mounting the marble steps at the end of the hallway.
"You must be Mr. Paine?" the woman said. She held out a long slim hand. "I'm Dolores's sister, Rebecca Meyer."
Paine took her hand; she curled her fingers around his, holding them an instant too long.
"I hope you didn't find my sister too full of ennui," she said, smiling slightly. "Part of it's an act."
"Part?" Paine said.
She kept her eyes on him, and then they suddenly wrinkled up at the corners and she asked, smiling, "Would you like a drink?"
"I was already offered one, thanks," he said. He took out the envelope again, removing the three photographs. "Would you mind telling me if you know any of these people?"
She took the photographs from him and concentrated on each one. She shook her head. "I'm sorry, no." She handed them back. "Won't you please have that drink?"
She put a hand on his arm and Paine felt a tingle where her fingers rested.
Paine put the photos away.
"I really have to go."
"Maybe next time, then."
"Maybe next time."
He went to the front door and the maid was there, holding it open. Then suddenly he was outside, in the bright sun, feeling the gardener's eyes keeping him on the flagstone walk until he got to his car.
THREE
Jimmy Carnaseca was building something on his desk. "What the hell is that?" Paine asked.
Jimmy kept his eyes on the thing on his desk, but his mouth turned up into a delighted grin. "Something I picked up on the way in." He was fitting tiny sticks together, little bigger than toothpicks, perfectly slotted on each end so that they fit together without falling apart. It crowded out half the desktop; the telephone had been moved and there were papers restacked on one side, in a rough pile away from the construction.
"Looks like a bridge," Paine said, sitting down in the desk chair and swiveling it away from Jimmy.
"Something like that. You'll see when it's done."
"Barker in?"
Jimmy frowned. "Not yet."
"Good."
"You'd better watch out," Jimmy said. "He'll chew your ass off, spit it out the window."
"He wouldn't know where to chew."
Jimmy continued with his tinkering, until Paine asked, "Coffee boy been by yet?"
"That's good, too."
"What's eating you?" Jimmy said, stopping his work. He stood as straight as his small, bent frame would let him. He stared unblinking at Paine, a tiny wooden girder held delicately in his fingers.
"You should have been a surgeon, Jimmy," Paine said.
Jimmy said, "I asked you what's eating you."
"Nothing much. Coffee boy been by yet?"
Jimmy stared at him.
"Sorry, Jimmy," Paine said.
Carnaseca regarded him dispassionately for a moment. "What is it, Jack?"
Paine said nothing. Then he said, "Lots of things, Jimmy."
"Love trouble?"
Paine looked at him. "I suppose that's part of it."
"You should do like I do," Carnaseca said. He began to work again, humming to himself.
"And what do you do?" Paine found himself smiling. Jimmy kept humming. He shook his head, a grin splitting his face.
"I ought to knock this thing down. ." Paine threatened, holding his fist playfully over Carnaseca's model.
"Bastard," Jimmy said.
There was a banging out in the hallway. Paine cursed. "Speaking of bastards," he said.
He wheeled the chair away from the doorway as someone large walked past. There came a loud noise at the other end of the hall, a door opening and then slamming shut. They heard papers being scattered about, and then another figure, a thin, pretty woman, hurried by with a stack of papers in her hands. She moved with an odd limp. A moment later they heard the door at the end of the hall squeaking open and then shutting again.
A voice roared, words not discernible.
"Shitbag," Paine said.
"I think I heard the coffee boy," Jimmy said, laying the sticks of wood in his hand down and putting all the strays into a box which he carefully closed, hiding the cover under a stack of papers. He pointed to the wooden construction. "Don't mess that up, you louse. Want anything?"
"No," Paine said.
Paine got up and went to his own office. He didn't want to open the door; he wanted to go back to Jimmy's chair and sit where there was light and books on the walls and a little sun coming through. Jimmy even had a personal file; it was in the middle drawer of his file cabinet in a blue hanging folder. "Anything ever happens to me," Jimmy had told him once, grinning, "it's all there. You can read it if you want." Paine had no personal file in his office. It was all in his head, and he didn't want anyone to read it. He didn't want to read it himself. He felt a cold draft through the darkened glass pane of the door that didn't have his name stenciled on it.
He turned the knob and went in.
The light went on, but it was as dark in the room as it had been in Morris Grumbach's study. A tomb, Paine thought. He almost felt a touch on his hand as he released the light switch but it was only a movement of cold air over his knuckles, from the ventilator duct overhead.
The telephone was a black glossy shape on a gray-topped, empty desk that didn't even have a blotter on it. The chair was tilted back at an unnatural angle, the padding torn through, part of it pulled out. Jimmy had told him that Barker had deliberately taken that chair out of storage and put it in his room so that he would have to sit on it.
He sat on the edge of the desk, taking in the stacks of files on top of overstuffed cabinets; the venetian blinds jammed in a closed position, a quarter inch of dust settled like dirty snow across the strips of white aluminum; the fan overhead that didn't work; the cracks in the ceiling, some of which led down the walls to hit the floor in a spread of tributaries.
Nice life you've got here, Paine thought.
A tomb.
His hand dangled over the phone, fell on it, turned the receiver aside and started to dial a number. His hand stopped, put the receiver down and then picked it up again, with more determination.
"Jack?" someone asked quietly from the door, knocking politely and then opening it.
The phone fell back into the cradle.
"What is it, Margie?" Paine asked.
"He wants to see you."
She wore her perpetual hurt look. Paine had noticed her limp before, but now he saw that she wore a baggy kind of dress that fell nearly to the floor. Jimmy had told him what her legs looked like under that dress, how smooth and white one of them was, how twisted and mangled the other was.