There was something off about the sign painted on the side of the truck. It read WINDOM’S FLOWERS, TANROW.
Tanrow was a small town maybe forty miles from here. In this age when florists wired their flowers, why would a truck drive forty miles for a delivery? The guy got in his truck and pulled away. I started after him, yelling.
He must have had his radio up full blast. Didn’t hear me. He went down the block with me running after. I could see all the people in their living-room windows, looking at me. Probably they’d soon be calling the cops. It was a good time to get out of there.
I was too distracted by too many things to do much of a job watching shoplifters that night.
I tried, of course. I spent a full hour trailing two teenage girls who came awfully close to getting a hair dryer out the door — but they finally figured out who I was and gave up. A pro came in, a three-piece-suit type of pro, and we thrusted and parried for the better part of two hours. When he decided to call it quits he stood near the entrance door and offered me a smile and a salute. I sort of saluted back.
Without knowing why, I kept thinking about the flower truck from the town of Tanrow. Damn long drive. Of course, I had other things to think about — such as Jane Branigan in the hospital waiting to regain her full faculties so the police could arrest her. And Donna Harris lying abed, as the poets say, with Chad the charmer.
Then the call came. There couldn’t have been any call in the world that would have surprised me more than that one.
24
“Anyway,” Donna Harris said, angling her Chevrolet into a parking place outside the Hilton located along the river, “I figured it would be a good excuse to see you. Plus we can check out all the suspects.”
Earlier tonight I’d had Donna, in my mind, ready to remarry her ex-husband. All she’d tell me was, “Maybe I’ll tell you later.” She’d said that while she’d waited for me in my living room as I changed from work clothes to a suit and tie. We were going, at her expense, to the Addy Awards, the local ad club’s annual bash.
Now that we were there, I realized that I was likely to irritate more than a few people tonight, among them Carla Travers, David and Lucy Baxter, and probably even Bryce Hammond. Private detectives had a way of spoiling festivities.
The wind chewed at us as we entered along a wall of glass that revealed a poolside party. Perhaps as many as two hundred people in tuxes and evening gowns stood by the water, holding champagne glasses and making like windup toys with little bursts of laughter. Were they really having as good a time as they seemed?
She took my hand.
“You mind?” she asked.
“Not at all.”
“Good.”
Her words made me feel ridiculously happy. Her perfume did the rest of the job, seducing me despite the chilly, starless night.
Only a few people seemed interested in us as we descended the steps. The combo in the corner kept right on playing what seemed to be a disco version of “My Funny Valentine” (I do not lie).
“Hey,” several people said to her.
Donna smiled and said “Hey” right back. (“What the hell is ‘hey’ supposed to mean?” she asked. “I think they pick that stuff up in places like Atlantic City and Vegas,” I explained. “Yeah, along with crabs.”) We found drinks — bourbon for me, scotch for her, though she admitted this would be her one and only hard liquor drink for the night — and then we danced two or three times in the deepest shadows we could find. I held her tighter than I should have for public view and she held me back just as tight. I lost myself in the clean smell of her red hair and the tang of her neck as I kissed it.
Then she said “God!” as if she’d discovered oil and I realized then that she’d touched the goose egg on the back of my head. “What happened to you?”
So I told her about the punks at Malley’s bar. I tried not to sound too much like Clint Eastwood saying it was nothing, but I’d honestly forgotten about my head until she mentioned it.
Then I told her about the threatening phone call afterward.
“Well, that clears Jane Branigan, doesn’t it?”
“It does for me, anyway.”
“Well, won’t the police agree with you?”
I shrugged. “Not necessarily. A good cop would just say that the mugging and the phone call were a coincidence. That they were talking about some other case.”
“What other case?”
“It wouldn’t matter. Since the punks didn’t mention Jane, the police would still insist it was all a coincidence — or at least that I needed a lot more proof for them to pay any serious attention.”
She frowned. We had gone back to dancing, but now we held each other at arm’s length so we could talk. “My first issue’s got to be finished a week from today. I talked to the printer. I haven’t been doing a very good job, I’m afraid.”
“A wonderful job.”
She stared at my eyes. “You’re getting dippy, Dwyer.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m serious. Don’t placate me. I’m doing a lousy job. I haven’t even found out about who the older woman was in Stephen Elliot’s life.”
I told her about the penthouse and the phone number and Mrs. Helen Dodson and the flower truck from Tanrow.
“Jeez, I really appreciate being clued in like this,” she said.
“You upset?”
“A little bit, yes.”
I couldn’t resist. “Well, maybe you’d find these things out sooner if you spent a little more time with me instead of your ex-husband—”
“Up yours, Dwyer.”
She sulked for the rest of the dance — kind of a swing version of “The Impossible Dream” — but by the time the combo did their fox-trot rendition of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” she held me tight again.
The lights had dimmed. The din had dulled. I was struck by how much this reminded me of a high-school prom for chaperones. We were all a little long in the tooth, but we had the same approaching-midnight needs — the ache for fleshly solace, the easing of daily terror, the soothing grace of whispers. I pulled her tighter and then she said, “I’ll tell you about it, if you want.”
Actually, I’d been trying not to think about it. Not with a lot of success.
“It’s none of my business.”
“You really don’t want to know? I mean, I’m in kind of a bind here. If I don’t tell you what happened between Chad and me after dinner last night, I’ll feel as if I’m mistreating you — that you aren’t important enough to level with. But on the other hand if I tell you—”
“Maybe you’d better not.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.” I had an image of her in his arms. I wanted to lose that image.
“Nothing happened.”
“Bullshit.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“You wouldn’t tell me if something had happened between you.”
“Sure I would. That’s the whole point of bringing it up, Dwyer. So that we’ll get used to telling each other the truth.”
“Nothing happened? Really?”
“Really.”
I smiled and we went on dancing.
A few minutes later she interrupted my bliss again by saying, “Now that I’ve told you about Chad, how are you feeling about Jane Branigan these days?”
“I want to help her get free of this murder rap.”
“Besides that, I mean.”
“I like her.”
“How about love her? You still think you love her?”
“That’s the weird thing. I don’t think I do anymore.”
This time she pulled me tighter and we stayed that way for a long, long time.
Half an hour later we opened the doors leading to the main ballroom, which was presently all got-up in a nightclub motif. Tiny lamps on tiny tables gave the room a European air while on the long stage a master of ceremonies was handing an award to somebody. The three or four hundred people in the ballroom applauded. It was nearly eleven. They had been applauding for almost three hours.