“Peaches, I’ll delight in making love with you and I hope we do it soon but right now neither of us could be sure it isn’t just putting the signatures on a business deal. I don’t mind doing it out of sheer adrenaline. I don’t even mind a gratitude fuck. But I don’t like screwing for business. Big bad Charlie may be a pretty loose fellow but he ain’t yet standing in doorways.”
As it happened he was standing in the doorway when he said that. It made them both laugh a bit.
Then he said, “I don’t know where you’re coming from. I’ve been around you a month or so and I still haven’t figured out whether you used to be a librarian or a high-priced call girl. Now just on the off chance it’s the former, I don’t want to feel guilty if you wake up in the morning hating yourself, you should pardon the expression. So let’s take a rain-check.”
She kissed him on the lips—she can still taste it—and when she drove away she saw him in the mirror standing under the street light, not waving, just watching her go.
She likes Charlie. It’s easy to become fond of such a man. But when there may be an enemy lurking around every corner you learn to distrust the unexpected and those who purvey it.
Charlie may not have been a wise choise. There’s too much captain in him and not enough crew. And the sexual attraction doesn’t make things any easier.
But there’s not much she can do about it now.
She’s going to have to be very careful in deciding how much of the truth she can reveal to him about Albert. If she tells him too little he may not take the dangers seriously enough; if she tells him too much it may discourage him.
She’s thinking: I can handle it. I can handle him. You know I think it’s going to work. I honestly think this ridiculous scheme is going to work. You hear me, Ellen? Don’t give up. Momma’s coming, darling.
30 A beige Datsun sports coupe is parked in her numbered slot behind the building. She finds another space.
The Santa Anas are starting to blow. Dust whips along the alleyway. Straight overhead she can see stars quite clearly: the Santa Ana is an ill wind that brings dry heat and pollen off the desert, stirs up dust and spores, carries misery to allergics and fans brushfires in the canyons—but it clears off the smog.
Alongside the oleander hedge she unlocks the mailbox. The skirt flaps around her knees. A gust nearly rips the mail from her grasp. She goes around the corner in the lee of the building and sorts through the sheaf.
Amid the mail order catalogs she discovers an envelope containing her new bank credit card.
Jennifer C. Hartman. She rubs the embossed letters with the pad of her thumb; gets out a pen and signs the back of the card and slips it into the transparent window of her wallet opposite the California driver’s license.
They look so preposterously real. It’s an eerie thrill—this feeling that Jennifer Corfu Hartman is actually beginning to exist.
She glances up the outside stair and along the railed balcony. A light glows through the lowered blind of the furnished room. The lamp is on a timer; it will switch off at eleven-thirty.
It has been more than a week since she’s had a look inside; may as well dump the junk mail in a wastebasket, make a bit of noise for the neighbors’ benefit and move a few things around—just in case the superintendent or some repairman has had occasion to let himself in. No point encouraging them to believe the premises have been deserted. How ironic it would be if the well-intentioned concern of neighbor or janitor led the police to issue a missing-persons report on Ms. Hartman.
The wooden stair clings tentatively to the building; it gives when she puts her weight on it.
When she goes along the upstairs balcony the footing is uneven and she walks slowly in the bad light.
The television in the next-door apartment casts blue illumination against the slitted Venetian blinds and she can hear the laugh track of a situation comedy as she fits the key into the door and enters and catches a man in the act of pawing through the clothes that hang in her closet.
31 He’s heard the door; he’s looking over his shoulder. His expression is a comic exaggeration, like that of an animated cartoon character taken by surprise.
She recognizes him immediately and realizes now that the Datsun 280Z out back is a car she’s seen before, parked near the bookshop.
The reporter.
Graeme Goldsmith.
32 Indignation—rage—terror: for a moment her reactions trample one another and she only stares.
Then a swift instinct takes charge. You’ve got to behave like a real person.
Indignation, then.
“What on earth are you doing here? How did you get in?”
“Well.” A furtive smile; he withdraws his hand from the closet and faces her. “I didn’t think you were going to turn up.”
“Obviously.” She says it with bite.
Then she steadies her voice: “You’ve got about five seconds to explain this before I call the police.”
He’s trying to regain his composure: straightening up, rearing back on his dignity. “I don’t think you want to do that.”
“Why shouldn’t I? You’re breaking and entering. What in the hell is the meaning of this?”
She’s glaring at him with unfeigned animosity and she’s thinking:
You’ve got to play this all the way through. Stay innocent. Don’t let the son of a bitch rattle you. Find out what he wants—find out what he knows—but don’t give away a thing.
He lets the silence go on a beat too long. She says, “All right, Graeme, I’m calling a cop,” and turns as if to go.
“Don’t do that, Miss Jennifer nonexistent Hartman.”
Anticipating the effect of the statement he attempts a smile. It is too sickly to achieve the swaggering effect he intends.
He says, “I’ve come by here four nights running. You don’t live here. Nobody lives here.”
He waits for her response. She gives him none—only a hooded anger.
“It’s a front—it’s a blind.” His voice is rising. “I want to know what for.”
She watches him bleakly. If you’ve ever thought fast in your life, do it now.
She says, “You make a habit of burglarizing people’s apartments, do you?”
“I haven’t stolen anything. I thought I’d find out something. And I did.” He gestures toward the open closet. “Those things don’t even fit you. You must’ve bought them so fast you didn’t bother to see what size they were.”
“For a reporter you’re not very observant.”
“No? Very well—then just for fun let’s see you walk around the room in any of the shoes in there. Go ahead. Show me.”
Her heart is skipping beats; she’s faint now. She covers it by crossing to the island of the kitchenette and resting her weight on an elbow on the pretext of poking into the fridge; she takes out a can of vegetable juice and pops the ring top off it and slams the fridge door and drinks.
When her head stops swimming she says, “I don’t owe you anything—least of all explanations—but I’m tired and I want you out of here. All right. I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you there may be some significance in the fact that they’re all the same size, even if it’s not my size?”