“Alive?”
“Alive as anyone can be in Pasadena.” He pulled the shirt off over my head and bent forward to kiss the lace covering my left breast.
“Wait,” I said, pushing against his shoulders.
“No.” He grinned. “Prepayment required.”
I stripped off my pants and handed them to him. “Payment in full. Now, talk to me.”
“Maggie.” He pulled me down onto the floor on top of him. On the way, he undid my bra. “Do you really want to talk now?”
“No,” I whispered into his ear. He was hard against me. I wanted him so badly that the room around us disintegrated into a vague, warm blur and he was the only solid reality. He helped me slip off the bra.
“What I really want,” I said, “is to make mad, passionate love to you. Right here. Right now.”
“Bidding opens at one kiss.”
I paid. He delivered.
Gathering clouds obscured the moon. The canyon below Guido’s house was a velvet abyss that opened beyond the gravel shoulder of the road and swallowed Mike’s high beams.
“It’s quiet up here,” Mike said.
“If I were ever to live in L.A., it would have to be somewhere like this. Somewhere away from the city.”
In the green light from the dash, I saw the strangest look cross his face; pain, glee – I couldn’t read it.
“What did I say?” I asked, touching his hand on the wheel.
“It’s good to know you’ve given some thought to moving down.”
“Just making conversation. I said ‘If.’ “
“There are a lot of canyons around L.A. We could probably find you one a helluva lot better than this.”
I felt another sort of canyon open up under me.
“Guido’s driveway is right there on the left,” I said. “It’s easy to miss. Go slow.”
“Can’t go any slower, Maggie.” He turned up into the steep drive. “If we go any slower, we’ll stop dead.”
“I work long hours,” I said. “Sometimes I’m away from home for a couple of months at a time.”
“Guido seems happy with his nine-to-five. Casey would be real pleased to have you home more.”
“We’re fine with things as they are.”
“Land somewhere, Maggie.” He stopped in front of the garage and turned off the lights. “Casey will only be with you four more years before she goes away to college. Make the best of it.”
“What are you saying? I neglect her?”
“No. You’ve done a great job with her. What I want to say is, I retire in three years. It isn’t so long. Come, you and Casey, stay here with me for three years. Then I’ll go anywhere you say. I’ll live with you in a tent in the middle of the Sahara, if that’s what you want.”
I turned around in my seat to face him. “Are you proposing?”
“Don’t make it sound like a threat,” he said, laughing softly. “The last six months have been the worst years of my life. Maggie, I don’t ever want to lose you again. I know marriage scares you. As long as we’re together, I don’t care whether we’re married or not.”
“I would drive you crazy, Mike.”
He laughed. “You already do.”
“There are so many complications.” I opened my car door, misjudged how far down the ground was, and stumbled a little. “So much to think about.”
He shut his door after him. “If you want something bad enough, you can overcome the complications.”
I saw Guido spying on us from the window in his front door. When I waved, he came out onto the porch.
“Hello, children,” he said. “What’s new?”
“This and that.” Mike squeezed my hand. “What’s new with you, Guido?”
“My friend the computer nerd generated an interesting picture for us.” He led us inside. “Until I saw it, I hadn’t realized the political implications of the case.”
Guido was grinning. I knew we had to let him play his joke to the end before we could move forward. He winked at me.
“You look good, Maggie,” he said. “Even better than yesterday. You been running or something?”
“Why?”
“Well, your hair’s a little damp in the back there. Thought maybe you ran all the way over.”
“I just got out of the shower, Guido,” I said, glaring a little. “So did Mike. You want a play-by-play?”
He winked again. “Why should I care?”
“Indeed,” I said. “Can we see the picture now?”
“On the table.”
Mike lifted a file folder from the coffee table and opened it. He looked, grimaced, and passed it to me.
I looked. I sighed. “Very funny, Guido. Richard Nixon was driving the red Corvette I taped?”
“Sorts.” He bounced up next to me and peered over my shoulder. With his thumbnail, he outlined the face. “See this furriness along the jaw, around the eye sockets, and around the hairline? The computer couldn’t read it. My nerd and I speculate that your man – or your woman – was wearing a mask.”
Mike put on his glasses to look closer. “Son of a bitch.”
“Surely someone would have noticed,” I said.
“I didn’t. You didn’t.” Guido shrugged. “Anyway, this is L.A. If you saw some guy wearing a mask, you wouldn’t think a lot about it. Especially a guy trolling for poontang in a car like that ‘vette. Looking for a little anonymity.”
“What do I owe your nerd?” I asked.
Guido shook his head. “Nada. He assigned this as a class project. They got a big yuk out of it. Helped his image a lot. If he gets a date with a student, I think he should owe you.”
“Good, because I have something else you might pass along to him.” I handed him the two rolls of exposed film I had in my bag. “I shot one of these rolls of the slasher this afternoon. The other one is Mike. I didn’t mark them, so I don’t know which is which. Would you develop them all for me?”
He frowned. “Okay. But there’s a one-hour processor down on Cahuenga. Wouldn’t that be faster?”
“Here’s the problem,” I said. “I never got the subject’s full face.”
“Mike’s or the slasher’s?” Guido grinned.
“I got all of Mike, Guido. Buck naked, in the moment of ecstasy.”
“Maggie!” Mike blushed. “You did not.”
I turned to him. “I was simply offering Guido some incentive. Next time, though, I am taking the camera to bed with us.”
He laughed. “When was the last time we made it all the way to the bed?”
Guido was comically round-eyed.
“So, Guido,” I said, “the program is this: I want you to go through every shot and isolate the face parts. Then I want you to reassemble them and make a whole face for me.”
“Like a jigsaw puzzle?”
“Something like that. Can you do it?”
“We can do something, my computer nerd and I. Something beyond cut-and-paste.” He looked down at the film in his hand, and I knew the film was talking back to him. Guido sometimes seems really hyper. He isn’t, exactly. It’s just that when his mind is working on overdrive, the excess electricity he generates makes him bounce. All the springs in his taut body cannot be stilled. He could never play poker.
I grabbed his hard forearm, anchoring him like the string on a helium balloon.
“It’s interesting, isn’t it, Guido?” I said.
“Interesting? God, there’s an understatement.”
Mike frowned. “I don’t get it. I mean, it’s pretty damned amazing Maggie might have this guy’s face on film. But that isn’t what you mean, is it?”
“What do you see, Guido?” I asked.
“Same as you. A collage. Fragments cut and pasted together. In the end, when you sort it all out, what will you have? The truth? Or another mask?”
“Or another sort of mask?” I said. “I believe the only naked truth lies under those blurry edges your computer nerd couldn’t read. When you stitch me together a new face from this film, are you going to show me what’s under the blur, or just more obfuscation? What’ll it be, truth or a new lie?”
“Just don’t mess up the negatives,” Mike said. “They’re evidence.”