We talked over the drinks, over dinner, over the coffee afterward-nice, easy, relaxed talking, as if we were two people who had known each other for two years instead of two days. Yet at this point or that one, there were small silences, and each time she seemed to study me with those frank green eyes, and each time it made me aware of the way I looked, my posture, the difference in our ages. There had only been a few women in my life I had felt quite as comfortable with-and none who made me feel so damned awkward and self-conscious. And she knew it, too. It seemed to amuse her, but not in a perverse or unkind way; as if it was part of whatever appeal I held for her.
She was thirty-eight, she told me, and she had been divorced for four years and married for eleven before that to a schmuck named Ray Dunston, who was a Los Angeles criminal lawyer. Those were her words: “a schmuck named Ray Dunston.” She was candid about the marriage; it had started out good, begun to slide gradually year by year, and finally become a thing of cold convenience. She suspected that he had been seeing other women almost from the first, which made him a schmuck in my book, all right. As soon as she found out for sure, she left him, filed for divorce, applied to Bates and Carpenter for a job- she had worked for a Los Angeles ad agency for five years-and here she was. No children, although she would have had kids if the schmuck had been willing; no involvements and no obligations. Enjoying San Francisco, enjoying her freedom, enjoying life again. And what about me? What was my life story?
So I told her about growing up with the pulps, wanting to emulate the detectives I spent so many vicarious hours with. About my tour of duty as a military policeman in the South Pacific and how I had taken my civil service exam and gone through the Police Academy after the war. About all the years on the San Francisco cops and the brutal ax murder in the Sunset District that had given me the excuse I needed to quit the force and open up my own agency. I told her about Erika Coates, and about another woman named Cheryl Rosmond that I had loved-or thought I’d loved-for a while. I told her about the lesion on my lung, the struggle I had gone through to come to terms with the spectre of cancer.
Things seemed to be getting a little grim at that point, and I switched the subject to the convention. But that wasn’t much better. So then, by tacit agreement, we did the rest of our talking about neutral topics-books, movies, sports-until the time came to pay the check.
Outside I said, “It’s a nice night. Why don’t we walk back?”
“Fine.”
“We can stop somewhere for a nightcap if you like.”
“How about your place?”
I did a small double take. “Are you serious?”
“Sure. I’m curious about your pulps.”
“Not my etchings, huh?”
She laughed. “I’ll bet you don’t have sixty-five hundred of those.”
“Nope. Uh, what I do have, though, is a pretty messy flat. I’d better tell you that now, in case you’re easily shocked.”
“I’m not. Besides, I expected you to have a messy flat.”
“How come?”
“The way you dress,“she said, and gave me one of her smiles. “Okay, come on-take me to your pulps.”
We walked back to the hotel, picked up my car, and I took her to my pulps. Her eyes widened a little when I opened the door and put on the lights and the dustballs winked at her from under the furniture; but she took it pretty well. She said, “You could apply for disaster relief, you know?” and made straight for the bookshelves flanking the bay window, where I keep the pulps in chronological order by title.
While she was making impressed noises, I opened the curtains over the window. Pacific Heights is an expensive neighborhood primarily because of the view, and on a night like this, you had it alclass="underline" the Golden Gate Bridge, the lights of Marin, the revolving beacon on Alcatraz, the luminous pinpoints strung across the East Bay. Romantic stuff-but maybe I shouldn’t be thinking about romance. Except that I was. Ivan Wade could have popped me on the nose for what I was thinking right then, and I wouldn’t have blamed him much.
I found some brandy in the kitchen, poured a snifter for her and a companionable dollop for me, and we sat on the couch and talked about pulps and looked at the view. Then we stopped talking and finished the brandy. Then we just sat there and looked at each other.
“Well? “she said.
“Well what?”
“Aren’t you going to tear my clothes off?”
“Do what?”
“Tear my clothes off. Isn’t that what private eyes do when they get a woman alone in their flat?”
“Not this private eye.”
“No? What do you do, then?”
“Conventional things, that’s all.”
“Not too conventional, I hope.”
“Well…”
“Well,” she said. “Do something conventional.”
So I kissed her. “Mmm, you taste good,” she said, and I said, — “You too” and kissed her again-a good long hot kiss this time. It was starting to get even hotter when she ended it and leaned back to look at me.
“Well?” she said.
“Well what?”
“Oh for God’s sake. Ask me if I want to go to bed.”
“Do you want to go to bed?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” she said, and took the hand of the tough private dick, the last lone wolf, the suave seducer of beautiful women, and led him like a kid into his own bedroom.
NINE
I woke up a little past seven in the morning, and there she was beside me, lying on her back with her hip thrust over against mine-all smooth and soft-looking with that coppery hair sleep-touseled around her face. I lay looking at her for a time. There was a good warm feeling inside me, and a kind of tenderness, and a kind of wonder, too, that my bed should be full of so much woman.
Pretty soon I rolled toward her and kissed her and did a couple of other things. She opened one eye and said sleepily, “Mm.”
“Morning,” I said.
“Morning yourself.”
“You feel good, you know that?”
“Mm.”
“I’m not used to waking up with a lady in my bed.”
She yawned and opened the other eye. “So I gathered.”
“I guess I was pretty eager, huh?”
“Pretty eager.”
“Well, it’s been a while, I admit it.”
“For me, too,” she said.
“Really?”
“Really.”
“How long?”
“A while. Months.”
“So why me, then?”
“Why not you?”
“Any old port in a storm, right?”
“No, not right,” she said seriously.
“Then why me?”
“What’s wrong with you!” “Plenty. I’ve got a beer belly-”
“I don’t mind that.”
“-and the general appearance of a bear-”
“I like bears.”
“-and I’m an old man. Getting there, anyway.”
“Sure you are. Hah.”
“So what do you see in me?”
“God, you’re persistent. All right-a nice man, that’s what I see in you. A nice, gentle, pussycat private eye. Okay?”
“Pussycat,” I said and laughed.
“Pussycat. You attract me; I can’t tell you exactly why, but you do. Every time I looked at you the past two days, I found myself wondering what it would be like to go to bed with you. Haven’t you ever looked at somebody and just wanted to go straight to bed?”
“Lots of times. You, for instance.”
“Mm-hmm. And you know something?”
“What?”
“I wouldn’t mind doing it again right now.”
“Mutual,” I said. “But I guess we can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t think I’m up to it.”
“You will be,” she said. “Oh, you will be.”
She was right: I was.
What with one thing and another, it was almost noon before we got down to the Hotel Continental.