“Finally, I made up my mind,” Pohl said, “and now she’s gone.”
Shimura nodded. “Sit down, Burt.”
“So it was Burnett who was with her the night I showed up and she wasn’t alone,” Pohl said. “Well, just tell me one thing. Do I have to put up with it?”
“He hasn’t seen her in more than a week.”
Shimura reached for a thermos of black tea. He poured a cup and offered it to Pohl.
“I made the identification for you,” he said. “It was Burnett, but now he’s out of the picture. Leave it alone, Burt — for your own good.”
Pohl didn’t see the cup of tea because his eyes were staring out the window at the skyline. His mind was racing but he wasn’t in gear. And then, his voice low, the words coming slowly, he said: “All right, that’s one thing. And the other is what’s happened to her.”
The phone rang. Shimura put the cup of tea down and picked up the receiver. He listened without saying anything. Pohl fingered another cigarette but didn’t light it. Shimura cradled the receiver, poured himself a cup of tea, sipped it, kept on listening. Pohl’s complete attention was on Shimura.
Shimura’s tone was technical as he said: “Did you do what I asked you to do?” He paused. “Okay. That’s right. Go on home.”
He hung up, took another sip of tea, put the cup down. He leaned back in the chair, pushed it away from the desk, crossed his legs and folded his arms.
[ 29 ]
Violet got out of the taxi and went straight for the doors of the hotel bar on upper Jackson Street. There were people walking in both directions on the sidewalk past the entrance through the glow of streetlights, and some of them turned their heads to look at her. She walked that better-than-average walk swinging her narrow hips enough to make her skirt ripple like water in a breeze. The door swung shut behind her. Just after the checkroom she stopped and looked around the bar as the waiters and barmen smiled and nodded at her.
She went over to an empty, burgundy leather armchair at a low, round table and sat down facing the bar. She was going to wash away her Burnett troubles with a lot of alcohol. She crossed her legs slowly, deliberately, and the skirt slid up her thigh. A waiter brought her a lemon vodka and ice.
There were seven low, round tables in the room, a lucky number for the house, and five barstools at the bar. Four tables were occupied, three barstools had customers sitting on them. Seven, again. She shut her eyes while she took a sip. Lemon vodka and ice felt cool moving down her throat. She opened her eyes. The walls and ceiling and furniture were mahogany. The room was softly lit by wall sconces that pointed their warm flamelike bulbs at the ceiling.
The dining room adjacent to the bar was half-filled, a jazz trio played out of a corner to the clatter of knives and forks on porcelain. A waiter carried a tray of drinks from the bar to the dining room. Violet sipped her vodka, fingered the hem of her skirt. Her head was down but her eyes looked furtively at the customers at the bar.
Her upward gaze caught the back of a man’s head just above his neatly shaved neck. That was a start, the shaved neck was clean, there was plenty of messy blonde hair above it, and she liked the shape of his head. The sting of her gaze made him turn around. He looked at the woman whose eyes bored into him.
Violet saw the soft gray eyes in the soft light because there was some kind of glow behind them that shone at her. His shoulders were broad but he wasn’t a wide man. He wore a gray suit with a vertical suggestion of violet, a white shirt with an open collar. He pushed his hand through his hair, turned his back to her.
A cigarette burned in the ashtray in front of him. He put it between his lips and took a drag, crushed it out. His glass was empty, he ordered another drink from the bartender, who poured a whisky with ice and set it down on the bar in front of the man. He stared blankly at the cracked ice floating in the whisky, raised the glass and took a mouthful of it. Then he felt the heat again at the back of his neck from a pair of eyes across the room. He swung around on the barstool and his mouth was curved in a smile and his gray eyes were very hot and intent. He met the gaze of the woman staring at him.
He extracted a cigarette from the pack on the bar and lit it. He inhaled deeply, blew a cone of smoke at the mahogany ceiling. He climbed off the barstool with the drink in his hand and went to the table where the woman sat looking up at him. Half her face was in shadow, but the half he saw told him he’d like how all of it would look in full light. And there was the way she was eyeing him.
Violet uncrossed her legs, scratched the skin under the hem of her skirt, and inched the skirt further up her thighs. She kept her eyes fixed on the man standing in front of her. She liked how he looked at her. And so that was it. She nodded emphatically. He sat across from her at the low, round table. It was just as clear and simple as that.
[ 30 ]
Pohl left the building with Shimura. At the exit they said goodnight. Shimura turned to the right and headed for his car. Pohl stood still, listening. He heard Shimura start his car in the vacant lot alongside the building. He frowned, thinking of Angela. His bladder felt like it was going to burst from all the black tea he’d drunk with Shimura.
The headlights of Shimura’s car swept out into the street on the downtown emptiness of night. Pohl wanted to pull the mild night calm down deeply to his lungs but his worrying got in the way, and he turned left and walked gloomily down the sidewalk through evenly spaced circles of light cast by streetlamps. There was a bus stop a few blocks away. He walked slowly, hesitantly toward it, but he really didn’t feel like going home and he wanted the walk to last as long as possible.
He came to a karaoke bar and went in, walking the length of it to the back where there was a toilet and a public phone. He let out a sigh while he emptied his bladder, then in front of the mirror he looked at himself. He put his fingers gently against the healing bruises on the left side of his face where the big man’s fist had crashed into him. The beating had taken his mind off Angela for about an hour, and by the time he’d taken the ice pack out of the freezer at home he was at it again, worrying.
There weren’t many people at the bar. The bartender was dozing standing up. Pohl didn’t order a drink. No one even looked at him as he moved past them to the door and walked out. He went on past the bus stop. The street was almost empty. His mood was a mixture of sadness and anger. He didn’t believe that Burnett was out of it no matter what Shimura had said. He couldn’t stop all the questions swimming around in his head. He was fed up with himself. He shut his eyes, trying to erase some of it from his mind. He opened them, winced and stiffened. He crossed the intersection, went on walking. Then he thought of Violet.
He didn’t know her, but he’d learned enough from Shimura to know that she was an irresistible force that made things difficult for anyone who got in her way, and he began to wonder whether or not Angela had been an obstacle and if Violet was somehow involved in the fact that he didn’t have word from Angela for days, and he wondered if Violet thought Burnett was serious about Angela.
Maybe Angela was serious about Burnett. He hadn’t thought of that. Pohl shook his head, his stomach was tied up in knots. But his mind took it further than competition between two women for a man and finished with an ugly picture of Violet taking Angela out of this world. Now he really wasn’t feeling very good with the taste of death in his mouth. Violet might have killed her. He was chasing after some kind of logic and what he’d come up with didn’t make any sense to him.