She drank coffee, checking her watch again as she did. She hadn’t meant to tell him all this. She had been going to keep it light and full of laughs and ease her way back into his confidence, and suddenly she was into true confessions. And the hell of it was that she wanted to tell him all of it — or almost all.
“I finally realized that I was being a whore in a different way. And I wanted OUT — but they couldn’t understand I just wanted to walk away, not turn snitch, not claim a reward, just... hike. And of course by then I knew a whole lot more about a whole lot more things and people than I wanted to. Than was safe to...” She looked over at him with sudden stunning realization. “Just like you. I wanted out from under and—”
“And you couldn’t get out from under. We keep bouncing off one another, don’t we?”
“But at least you have a choice. You can turn the diamonds over to Moyers and try to duck the others, or give them to the others and try to duck Moyers...”
“No,” said Runyan. “I haven’t recovered them yet.” Before she could speak, he added, “How did you get out of it in Vegas?”
“A man. How else? He was there for a convention first, then kept coming back because he had gotten hooked on me...” She shrugged. “He was able to square it with those people — money or favors or maybe just convincing them that I didn’t want to blow any whistles, I never knew which. He wanted me to go with him, so I did. He set me up in a place.”
She made a rueful face, and finished her coffee.
“A kept woman, a first for me — I sort of liked it. I’d slept with a lot of men, but I’d never had a real relationship with any of them. I guess I was naive. When things got tight financially for him, he wouldn’t let me work to bring in some money. He just got nasty about what I cost to keep. Then, when I wanted to leave, he wouldn’t let me do that, either...”
“Tell me how he kept you,” said Runyan with a grin. “I sure haven’t figured it out.”
“That’s easy — guilt. If it had just been force, I could have handled that. I’ve had a lot of practice. But it was — moral. He told me he was in real trouble, and that it was because of me. He said he needed to make a really big score to get even, and that I had to help him. He said I owed him.”
“Did you?”
“I thought I did.”
“What was the big score?”
She met his eyes with a steady gaze. “You.”
“Make contact, get next to me, stick until I got the diamonds, then...”
She nodded. He turned his empty wine glass with his fingers for a long moment, then let out a long breath, nodded almost sadly, looked up and caught her gaze and held it.
“Only I didn’t go get them when you thought I was going to, and you were gone when I got back.” He paused for another long moment. “So why are you back now?”
Louise met his gaze levelly. “I’m on my own this time. For as long as you want me here.” She stood up. “I’ll be right back, darling.”
Runyan watched her go out to the hallway where the restrooms and pay phone were located. He had a half-smile on his face. It slowly faded.
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice — shame on me,” he muttered to himself. He went quickly and quietly across the restaurant to lean against the pay phone partition.
“I don’t have much time,” Louise’s voice was saying in low, urgent tones. “I’m back in, but he doesn’t trust me yet. You won’t be hearing anything from me for a while...”
Runyan, blank-faced, moved away as silently as he had come.
Chapter 19
Runyan woke with Louise’s hair in his face; he was lying spoon-fashion against her back in his narrow bed, both of them nude under the covers. He could smell a lingering trace of her perfume. Why couldn’t they just lie here the rest of the day, waking, dozing, loving... Memories of the overheard phone conversation the night before tried to crowd in, but he pushed them away. Just let him be unwary here, just for this time. Just...
He realized that for several moments her hips had been shifting against him, slyly, so he hadn’t been consciously aware of being brought erect. He began gently rolling her left nipple between his fingers. She gave a sigh of contentment, reached down between her legs, and guided him into her waiting nest.
After almost a minute, her vaginal muscles began a rhythmic contraction around his rigid shaft; a few minutes later they climaxed exactly together, gently, lovingly, without a word having been spoken between them.
Louise turned right on Gough, running past the cold soaring spire of St. Mary’s cathedral with the morning traffic’s lemming rush for downtown. “Why do you have to see your parole officer? I thought you gave him your change of address.”
“I did. But I have to leave the jurisdiction overnight to get the diamonds. I want permission ahead of time so they can’t violate my parole.”
Louise checked the rear-view mirror to get into the right lane so they wouldn’t get sucked into the vortex of traffic funneling into the freeway entrance on Turk. She exclaimed, “Moyers is following us!”
“Moyers? How the hell did he...” Runyan interrupted himself, “Sharples! My parole officer! The son of a bitch sold Moyers my new address!”
“Why would your parole officer—”
“For the money.” Runyan chuckled. “We’ll just have to be creatively evasive when the time comes.”
But when they pulled up in front of the regional parole office on South Van Ness, Runyan glanced across the sidewalk to the newspaper coin boxes. He took his hand quickly off the door handle. Looking across him, Louise could see the morning Chronicle headline:
“If that headline’s about who I think it is,” said Runyan, “it changes everything. We’re going to have to get out of town quicker than I thought, and we’re going to need Moyers on our tail. Make sure he follows you, then don’t lose him.” He started out of the car. “I’ll see you back at your hotel later.”
He went across the sidewalk and into the building without a backward glance.
Sharples waited until Runyan had left the office, then put on his porkpie hat and went out. His secretary looked up angrily. She was always angry; knowing what about was a matter of nuance. He read this expression as one of angry surprise.
“You have another client in ten minutes,” she snapped.
“I’ll be back before then.”
“If anyone calls, where have you gone?”
Though his mother had been dead for nearly four years, he was never going to get away from her; every woman in his life became her eventually. He left without replying. His secretary took a spiral notebook from her purse and made a notation; she was gathering evidence for a letter informing the Civil Service Commission that Mr. Sharples was not a good civil servant.
Sharples went out the back door to the pay phone in the adjacent gas station. Runyan could not see him from the bus stop; also, his secretary could not see him from her window. He knew all about her notations in her little spiral notebook; for the past six weeks, he had been keeping a similar record of her lapses, indulgences, and excesses.
Hi-Tech Electronics was on Larkin between Eddy and Ellis, a small, cramped, littered place much frequented by law enforcement people, both federal and state, from the government office buildings a couple of blocks away. Evidence obtained from illegal wire taps and room bugs, while not admissible in court, supplied a great many leads for evidence that was admissible.