"Don't go to that damn council meeting," she said, and pouted.
It made him laugh; she was the kind of strong woman who only pouted for effect, and when she did, it was ridiculous.
"We'll see."
"I've got a roast in the oven."
"You did believe me, when I said I'd come home."
"Hope springs eternal. Skip the council meeting."
"Why, is that what you want for your birthday?"
She grinned; she showed an expanse of pink gum when she did that-not very glamorous, he supposed, but appealing as hell.
"You remembered," she said.
He hadn't mentioned, this morning, that her birthday was why he planned to come home before the meeting.
"Let's go down downstairs, doll-you fix us some drinks. I'll start a fire."
"You already have, big boy."
He had called her "doll" almost from the beginning, which she found "corny," though she responded to it in kind.
They moved down the narrow stairway together, bumping shoulders and hips, and she went to the liquor cart and made Scotch on the rocks for him and a small pitcher of martinis for herself, while he got the fire going. He took off his tie and pitched it into the darkness; she unpinned her hair, let it tumble to her shoulders. They sat and drank and watched the glow of the fire and felt the glow of the fire and said very little, kissing frequently.
"Shouldn't we have supper?" she asked, glancing toward the kitchen.
"Dessert first," he said, nuzzling her neck.
They had dessert on the couch and after they'd got dressed again, he helped her in the kitchen. She had a mussed look that made him want dessert again, but he set the table for supper, anyway.
They ate in the kitchen. Nothing fancy. His tastes in food were simple-strictly meat and potatoes-and she catered to it. But they often ate in restaurants, particularly if she was working in the studio at Higbee's as opposed to at home. After the meal, she served him apple pie a la mode.
"Two desserts," he said, savoring a bite. "I'll get fat."
"If you want a third dessert, we can go back in front of the fireplace."
" You might get fat."
She smiled warmly. "I might like that."
He touched her hand. "I'd love it. I want children with you."
She gave him an arch look. "Are you proposing?"
They'd never really talked about it, directly.
He shrugged, smiled enigmatically, and finished his pie. Then he rose, walked to the closet by the front door and got the small package out of his topcoat pocket.
She was still finishing her slice of pie. She looked up at him, as she licked an ice-cream mustache away, and her eyes got wide as she saw the small pink-wrapped, silver-ribboned package and knew at once what it was.
She opened the little package greedily and looked at the less-than-breathtaking diamond ring as if it were more than breathtaking. She slipped the ring on and held her hand out and looked at it.
"Eliot-it's lovely! Lovely. How could you afford…?"
"It's not exactly the Hope diamond, doll."
In truth, the manager of a jewelry store he'd helped out last year in the labor extortion inquiry had given him a hell of a price break.
She stood and hugged him and kissed him, a cold ice-cream kiss, but ice-cream sweet, too. He slipped his arm around her and they walked back into the living room and sat on the couch before the smoldering fire, feet up on a divan.
"Eliot… do we dare do this?"
"Sure-but we ought to keep it to ourselves."
"Like, I shouldn't wear this ring?"
"Well, not to Higbee's… it'd just get in the way, wouldn't it? You work with your hands, after all…"
"Your reporter pals are going to know."
"They won't say anything."
"When can we… go public?"
"After the mayoral election. I owe that to Mayor Burton."
"That's November… almost a year…"
"I know. I'm sorry."
She sighed, but nodded; she looked at her ring wistfully. "You owe that much to Burton."
"This'll be his last mayoral campaign."
"Oh?"
"Keep it under your hat, but greater political prospects are around the corner for him."
"Governor? Senator? What?"
"Something like that."
She intertwined her legs with his. "This town'll be needing a mayor, you know."
"I suppose that's true."
"Nobody could beat you."
"Me? I'm no goddamn politician."
"Well. Nobody could beat you."
"Don't be silly."
"Think about it."
"I hate politics like poison."
"Then prove it. Skip the council meeting tonight."
"I shouldn't."
"You owe me, buster. You invite me to move in with you, turn this stone castle into our little love nest, and then you stay out all night all the time,"
He had, in fact, been out all night several nights a week for over two months now.
He shrugged. "It's the nature of this current case."
"How do I know you're not shacking up with some floozy at the Hollenden?"
She was well aware that he had set up a second, temporary office in a suite at the Hollenden Hotel, where he was interviewing witnesses for the numbers racket investigation, often at night.
He shrugged good-naturedly. "Why don't you hire a detective to follow me?"
"What, some private eye like your friend Heller, back in Chicago? I wouldn't trust him with change for a dollar."
"Then I guess you'll just have to trust me."
"What the hell kind of questioning are you doing in the middle of the night?"
"Well… I really can't say."
"Oh for Christsake, Eliot-who am I going to tell? You trust me, and I'll trust you, okay?"
He smiled. "Okay. We have to protect the identity of our witnesses. So we pick them up in the middle of the night-if anyone's around, we pretend to be arresting 'em."
"These are all Negroes? Numbers racketeers?"
"For the most part. In some cases, we do arrest them, when we have somebody who we think would make a good witness, but who needs some convincing."
"What kind of convincing? Third-degree convincing, you mean?"
"No. That's not my style. We explain our strategy, which is to get such a large number of witnesses that no single individual can be blamed by the bad guys for any indictments that come down. We preach safety in numbers."
"So you escort these witnesses to a room in the Hollenden."
"Yes-alley entrance, up the service elevator. We spend a lot of time giving them reassurances that they'll have protection from reprisals."
"And this works?"
"We have going on fifty witnesses, at this point."
She whistled. "That's not bad-safety in numbers, all right."
There was a knock at the door. An insistent knock.
He looked over his shoulder toward the sound, suspiciously. He didn't get many people knocking at his door out here-anybody who didn't live in the subdivision would have to get by the guard at the gate, and the guard would've called ahead in such a case.
"Probably a neighbor," she said, sensing the questions he was asking himself. "Somebody needs a cup of sugar or something."
The knocking continued, obnoxiously.
"I don't think so," he said. He got up, tucked in his pants, and got a gun from the top drawer of a small desk near the front window, where he took a moment to gently part the curtains and peek out.
"It's a man," Ness said, almost whispering, "but from this angle, in the dark, can't make him out."
She was still on the couch. She said, softly but audibly, "Is that gun really necessary?"
"I hope not."
He went to the front door and stood to one side of it and called out, "Who is it?"
"Answer the goddamn door, Eliot!"
Sam Wild.
He opened the goddamn door. The cold hit him like a bucket of water. The reporter, his tan gabardine trenchcoat belted tight, his snap brim felt hat pulled down over his eyes, hands in fur-lined leather gloves, nonetheless looked colder than hell. His breath was fog.