Dallie stood leaning against the door frame wearing a sky blue windbreaker beaded with rainwater and bleached-out jeans that had a frayed hole at the side of one knee. His hair was damp and curled up at the ends. Dishwater blond, she thought disparagingly, not true blond. And he needed a really good cut. He also needed a new wardrobe. His shoulders pulled at the seams of his jacket; his jeans would have disgraced a Calcutta beggar.
It was no use. No matter how clearly she saw his flaws, no matter how much she needed to reduce him to the ordinary in her own eyes, he was still the most impossibly gorgeous man she had ever seen.
He leaned one hand against the door frame and looked down at her. "Francie, ever since last night, I've been trying to make it obvious to you in as many ways as I could that I don't want to hear your story, but since you're hell-bent on telling it and since I'm getting pretty close to desperate to get rid of you, let's do it right now." With that, he walked into her room, slumped down in a straight-backed chair, and put his boots up on the edge of the desk. "You owe me someplace in the neighborhood of two hundred bucks."
"Two hundred-"
"You pretty well trashed that room last night." He leaned back in the chair until only the rear legs were on the floor. "A television, two lamps, a few craters in the Sheetrock, a five-by-four picture window. The total came to five hundred sixty dollars, and that was only because I promised the manager I'd play eighteen holes with him the next time I come through. There only seemed to be a little over three hundred in your wallet-not enough to take care of all that."
"My wallet?" She tore at the latches of her case. "You got into my wallet! How could you do something like that? That's my property. You should never have-" By the time she'd pulled her wallet from her purse, the palms of her hands were as clammy as her jeans. She opened it and gazed inside. When she could finally speak, her voice was barely a whisper, "It's empty. You've taken all my money."
"Bills like that have to be settled real quick unless you want to catch the attention of the local gendarmes."
She sagged down on the end of the bed, her sense of loss so overwhelming that her body seemed to have gone numb. She had hit bottom. Right at this moment. Right now. Everything was gone-cosmetics, clothes, the last of her money. She had nothing left. The disaster that had been picking up speed like a runaway train ever since Chloe's death had finally jumped the track.
Dallie tapped a motel pen on the top of the desk. "Francie, I couldn't help but notice that you didn't have any credit cards tucked away in that purse of yours… or any plane ticket either. Now, I want to hear you tell me real quick that you've got that ticket to London put away somewhere inside Mr. Vee-tawn, and that Mr. Vee-tawn is closed up in one of those twenty-five-cent lockers at the airport."
She hugged her chest and stared at the wall. "I don't know what to do," she choked out.
"You're a big girl, and you'd better come up with something real fast."
"I need help." She turned to him, pleading for understanding. "I can't handle this by myself."
The front legs of his chair banged to the floor. "Oh, no you don't! This is your problem, lady, and you're not going to push it off on me." His voice sounded hard and rough, not like the laughing Dallie who'd picked her up at the side of the road, or the knight in shining armor who'd saved her from certain death
at the Blue Choctaw.
"If you didn't want to help me," she cried out, "you shouldn't have offered me that ride. You should have left me, like everyone else."
"Maybe you better start thinking about why everybody wants to get rid of you so bad."
"It's not my fault, don't you see? It's circumstances." She began to tell him all of it, beginning with Chloe's death, stumbling over her words in her haste to get them out before he walked away. She told him how she'd sold everything to pay for her ticket home only to realize that even if she did have a ticket, she couldn't possibly go back to London without money, without clothes, with the news of her humiliation in that terrible movie on everyone's lips so that they were all laughing at her. She realized right then that she had to stay where she was, where no one knew her, until Nicky got back from his sordid fling with the blond mathematician and she had a chance to talk to him over the telephone. That's why she'd set out to find Dallie at the Blue Choctaw. "Don't you see? I can't go back to London until I know Nicky will be right there at the airport waiting for me."
"I thought you told me he was your fiance?"
"He is."
"Then why is he having a fling with a blond mathematician?"
"He's sulking."
"Jesus, Francie-"
She rushed over to kneel down beside his chair and looked up at him with her heart-stopping eyes. "It's not my fault, Dallie. Really. The last time I saw him, we had this awful quarrel just because I turned down his marriage proposal." A great stillness came over Dallie's face and she realized he had misinterpreted what she'd said. "No, it's not what you're thinking! He'll marry me! We've quarreled hundreds of times and he always proposes again. It's just a matter of getting hold of him on the telephone and telling him I forgive him."
Dallie shook his head. "Poor son of a bitch," he muttered.
She tried to glare at him, but her eyes were too teary, so she stood and turned her back, struggling for control. "What I need, Dallie, is some way to endure the next few weeks until I can talk to Nicky. I thought you could help me, but last night you wouldn't talk to me, and you made me so angry, and now you've taken my money." She spun on him, her voice catching on a sob. "Don't you see, Dallie? If you'd just been reasonable, none of this would have happened."
"I'll be goddamned." Dallie's boots hit the floor. "You're getting ready to blame all this on me, aren't you? Jesus, I hate people like you. No matter what happens, you manage to shift the blame to somebody else."
She jumped up. "I don't have to listen to this! All I wanted was some help."
"And a small bit of cash to go with it."
"I can return every penny in a few weeks."
"If Nicky takes you back." He stretched out his legs again, crossing them at the ankles. "Francie, you don't seem to realize that I'm a stranger with no obligation to you. I don't do all that good a job of taking care of myself, and I'm sure as hell not going to take you on, even for a few weeks. To tell you the truth, I don't even like you."
She looked at him, bewilderment imprinted on her face. "You don't like me?"
"I really don't, Francie." His burst of anger had faded, and he spoke calmly and with such obvious conviction that she knew he was telling the truth. "Look, honey, you're a real traffic stopper with that face of yours, and even though you're a little on the puny side, you kiss great. I can't deny that I had a few wayward thoughts about what the two of us might have been able to accomplish underneath the covers, and if you had a different personality I could even see myself losing my head over you for a few weeks. But the thing of it is, you don't have a different personality, and the way you are is pretty much a composite of all the bad qualities of every man and woman I ever met, with none of the good qualities thrown in to even things out."