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“Do you even know her?”

“I’ve seen her. Followed her.” Suddenly he couldn’t meet her eyes any longer. He lay back and looked at the ceiling. “For thirty-six hours straight I followed her. I’m a detective.”

“I see.” Her voice was very soft, almost humble. “So when a hook-nosed substitute dragged you off to bed—”

Oh Christ, thought Ballard. “Come here,” he said in an emotion-roughened voice. He didn’t know what else to do for her.

“No.”

It was strictly verbal, demand and rejection. Neither of them had moved. They lay a yard apart in the king-sized bed, covered from the waists down by a flowered yellow sheet.

“She’s... made out of plastic,” said Ballard.

Bridget’s eyes suddenly filled. She dipped her head. “Thank you,” her muffled voice said against the pillow.

Then she, too, lay back to stare at the ceiling, her hands clasped behind her head. Ballard wanted to put his mouth against her breast, but didn’t move. He just lay there, thinking what a goddam fool her husband was.

“You’re the first one since I kicked Hiram out,” she said. “Almost eight months. I’ve been drinking too much... So lonely, so damned lonely, just me and Kathy. He sends me money each month from San Francisco, enough so I know that he’s just barely getting by, living in a residence club...”

“He’s miserable there and you’re miserable here. You should take him back.”

“I walked in on them, Hiram and Wendy. He was screwing her on the couch.” She said the harsh word harshly, deliberately cutting herself on its sharp edges. “I threw him out. If I’d thrown her out, then, she’d have gone back into Juvenile Authority custody.”

“Couldn’t your folks...”

“Dad died four years ago. Right after Wendy got her nose bobbed.” She laughed bitterly. “That’s how I measure time, how’s that for sick? Mom remarried a year later and moved back East. I was married to Hiram by then, and Wendy was running wild over in Berkeley. Pot and crash pads and those terrible underground films.”

“And then she got busted,” he supplied.

She nodded. “She left Hiram alone until this year. Then she... went to work on him. I found them on the couch in March, just two months before her probation was finished. She moved out in May. Two months, she couldn’t leave him alone. She had to... to prove to me that she could take him away from me. Two lousy little months...”

Her voice was rising. Ballard laid a palm over her mouth to calm her. She kissed his hand. It made him feel like a hunk of shit. “Have you seen her since?”

“Four times. Each time, she wanted the house to meet some other man.” The bitterness was in her voice again. “They used my bed. I always changed the sheets afterward.”

“You remember the dates? Ever see the guy?”

“No, I took Kathy to the movies. The dates...” She looked over at him and laughed softly. “Suddenly you’re working again, aren’t you?”

He shrugged. “It’s what I do.”

“I might be able to figure the dates out.” She hesitated. “Wendy’s in... real trouble, isn’t she?”

“Not so far. We have a theory...” He paused. “If it would turn out to be right, I still don’t know how deeply she...”

Bridget shook her head. “Funny, isn’t it? I seduced you because I thought she’d had you. Trying to hurt her — as if it would. And yet I’ve always looked after her, and here I am worrying about her again.”

“Bridget,” he said suddenly. “Take your husband back. She isn’t worth destroying your marriage over.”

“I know.” Her fingers closed convulsively in his hair to drag him down on her waiting body. “Once more, Larry. Oh God...”

It was twice more. It was early afternoon when he left. On the narrow walk he turned and looked back. The front drapes were open, but there was no silhouette at the window to wave goodbye.

In his imagination, the sound of sobbing drowned out her broken little cries of completion. He shivered. He didn’t know if he had used or been used. He didn’t think he liked himself very much just then. And he didn’t really even know why.

“What did you say?” demanded Dan Kearny.

“That you certainly know how to make a girl feel elegant.”

“Not you.” He pointed to Heslip. “You. Just before that.”

“Ah faidg gkat...”

Heslip quit trying to talk around half a hot dog and gulped it down, dropping a quarter-size dollop of mustard on his purple print shirt in the process. Giselle was using a plastic spoon to stir ersatz cream into bad coffee in a styrofoam cup. Her hot dog in the paper boat-shaped affair that took the place of even a paper plate was stone-cold.

“Elegant,” she said again. “Simply elegant.”

“I said that Wendy-baby has found a new dance studio.”

“That’s what I thought you said.”

Kearny had been watching without really watching a red-haired girl in a tight plaid wool suit when Heslip had spoken the first time, using “Wendy” and “dance studio” just when Kearny had been thinking the red-haired girl moved like a dancer, and that had done it.

“Let’s move.” He was already off the tiny stool, leaving an empty crumpled cigarette pack on the little round formica table. “Let’s go to Chandra’s and I’ll show you how she got the blackmail material.”

Twenty-three

Detectives are not interested in ultimate truths. They are interested in facts. Because theirs is an antagonist’s profession, these facts usually tend to nail some bastard’s hide to the wall, but the detective doesn’t care whether the subject is a sociopath, or wants his mama, or claims that social deprivation made him burn down that ghetto, baby. The detective is only concerned with proving, say, that on a certain night at a certain hour this man pointed this gun and made it go bang bang bang.

The odd thing about facts is that they grow geometrically as the investigation progresses. They interrelate, take on a life of their own, breed like rabbits. Facts can blow your mind.

Ballard’s mind already was blown by a fact: after three years of knocking on thousands of doors and talking to hundreds of eligible women, he had gotten laid on the job. It had never happened before. Maybe it could have, maybe scores of these women had writhed around on the living-room rug in frustrated passion as soon as he was gone. But he hadn’t known about it.

So Bridget Shapiro, that wonderful sad unhappy sister of corrupt vicious little Wendy Austin, had blown Ballard’s mind. As a result he was doing a lousy job of interviewing Mrs. Mallory Rickerts. His mind wasn’t on it, his heart wasn’t in it, and it was a waste of time anyway.

So he almost blew it. He almost just left when she said her husband was at work. But training prevailed.

“Any idea when he might be home, ma’am?”

“Well, that depends...”

A handsome woman in her forties, an air about her like a general’s daughter married to a bird colonel who’d get his star before retirement or she’d know the reason why.

“Perhaps I could get your husband at the office?”

She laughed. “I’m afraid he isn’t in one.”

That was all that kept him there. Too nice a house for a blue-collar worker, this big rambling home on curving Wellington Drive in San Carlos. Forty easy, maybe fifty thousand at today’s prices. Sure as hell, some sort of professional man.

“On the job, then? If I could contact him there...”

“Well, if he isn’t off on a charter he probably is flying a stool at the airport coffee shop.”

That old spurt of adrenalin. Charter pilot! Mallory Rickerts, who had rented a Hertz U-drive at the Santa Barbara airport on May 29 with a hundred-dollar bill, was a charter pilot! And where might Mr. Rickerts do his charter piloting from, ma’am?