By the time he’d taken the elevator to Angela’s apartment she had put on a tie wrap satin robe. She stood at the open door, raised her arm and pointed at the living room. Burnett let her go ahead of him. Her unselfconscious stride stirred the knee-length hem, and her narrow hips swayed under the emerald-colored fabric. Spots of water made small, dark blemishes on the back and shoulders of the robe. Her hair was wet.
Angela sat in an armchair with her legs crossed opposite Burnett, the open folds of the robe revealed the muscles of her legs to her upper thighs. It was unbearable. When she uncrossed her legs it was worse. Drops of water glistened just below her knees. Burnett wanted to lick them up, but she caught him staring at her legs and she crossed them again. He asked for a whisky.
She left the room swinging her hips and returned with two glasses of whisky and ice. She put down one of the glasses, then held the robe closed as she leaned forward to hand him his drink. She crossed the room and switched on the CD player with a recording of Orlando Lopez.
She turned to face him. “Well?” she asked.
“I have part of what you want done.”
She pulled up a zabuton cushion and sat down at the low table. Burnett sat opposite her in an upholstered straight chair. She looked up at him. The only thing Burnett saw was her bare legs. She straightened the robe, covering her knees with satin.
“Okay, let’s see what you’ve got,” she said slowly.
She looked at him. Burnett grinned, thinking of his cock and the rosy flush spreading over the lips of her pussy perfectly out of reach. She ignored the grin. He frowned.
“I know what you want,” he said with a businesslike tone of voice.
“Then show me.”
He pulled sheets of paper and a street map out of his inside jacket pocket. He spread the map out on the low table, smoothed it flat. He handed her the sheets of paper that the real estate consultant had sent him. In the upper right hand corner of the sheets of paper with addresses Burnett thought she might be interested in, he’d made a red X with a permanent marking pen. A separate sheet of paper had the name Fitch and a phone number written on it. Angela leaned forward, concentrating, softly biting her lower lip. He watched her.
She went on concentrating for a few minutes, giving particular attention to the pages marked with a red X. The red ink gave them weight, although she knew she’d make her own decision and didn’t count on his judgment. But he’d made a good job of what she’d asked him to do. She’d hooked him just like that. Angela lifted her eyes and smiled at him. She let the robe fall open offering him a view, then thought better of it and covered her knees.
Burnett got up and went to the kitchen to refill his glass. When he got back to the living room, Angela was bent over the map. He stood behind her, looking over her shoulder. She made a tracing with her finger along a street on the Southside. The fabric of her robe was completely dry. He looked at her shoulders, the part of her neck that was exposed. He walked around her and sat down in the straight chair. Her eyes went from the map to the sheets of paper spread out on her knees. She took a very deep breath, held it. She wore a faint smile.
“Take your time,” Burnett said. His tone was strangely detached. He knew that he wasn’t going to get anywhere with her today. “Check them out. I’ve gone over them with a fine-tooth comb. Now it’s up to you.”
Angela didn’t reply. Not even a look. She exhaled, then reached for her glass and downed the whisky in a gulp. She looked up at Burnett. He gave her a half-smile.
She didn’t really see him because she was staring at a point just beyond his head, as though to unfocus her eyes. She saw the blinds drawn in front of the windows. A world existed beyond the firm guard of those blinds, and the map in front of her represented in two dimensions the limitless world she wanted to explore in herself. She put the tip of her index finger in her mouth and rolled her tongue around it.
Her pose was a kind of provocation. Burnett wanted to say something. A throbbing urge blasted at him from the whisky in his stomach and the bare legs and lithe hips of the woman in front of him. He could smell what he couldn’t see between her legs. She blushed slightly. He put his drink down, the ice clinked against the glass. She seemed to know what he was thinking and shook her head. It wasn’t an invitation.
So Burnett left the apartment frustrated, walking with a slavish posture. He moved slowly along the sidewalk to Birch Street, and then kept on going to Second. The branches of trees reached out above his head and pressed down on him. He grew shorter and shorter until he was only a couple of inches tall. He lit a cigarette, turned around, walked back to Birch. The color of the satin robe came flaring up in his eyes and he winced and bit hard at his lip. The cigarette tasted bitter. He threw it away. That was when he unlocked the car door and got in.
[ 13 ]
Shimura took off his glasses and set them down on his desk at the Kawamura Agency. His eyes were tired. He gathered the papers in front of him and arranged them in a folder and put the folder in the open file drawer of the cabinet behind him to his left. He swiveled his chair and looked at the clutter on his desk. Shimura scratched absently at his chin. He didn’t want the cigarette he was thinking about right now. There wasn’t anything to motivate him to straighten up his desk. He was waiting for eight o’clock. There was an hour to kill.
He got up from his desk, left the office, and walked down the hallway past several empty offices until he got to the room that he liked most at the agency, a storage room with a futon and a refrigerator. He heard Kawamura’s personal secretary, Asami, at her desk in front of Kawamura’s office. Shimura turned the handle of the storage room door and went in. He switched on the overhead light.
It was a small, six-tatami-mat room crowded with filing cabinets and individual heavy-duty cardboard boxes holding alphabetically arranged files and photographs. Metal Venetian blinds covered the two windows. The futon was in a corner of the room. He dragged it out and put it down on the floor in the remaining, empty space, found a linen sheet and threw it over the futon and stretched out on it, lying on his back with his hands clasped behind his head. He stared at the ceiling, then drifted off to sleep.
He woke up a half-hour later grateful to have had some rest. He looked at his watch. It was almost time to go. He put the futon back in the corner and folded the linen sheet. In his office he put his reading glasses on and picked up a spiral-bound notebook. He opened the notebook to the page where he’d written down a car registration number. He copied the number on a separate piece of paper. The car belonged to someone involved in one of Shimura’s investigations.
Asami wasn’t only Kawamura’s personal secretary, she did the research for all the investigators at the Kawamura Agency. She looked up from her desk when Shimura came in wearing his lightweight jacket and a serious expression on his face. She liked Shimura in a friendly way, but she wasn’t on anything but working terms with the rest of the investigators at the Kawamura Agency except Kawamura himself, a man on the order of something special because she was in love with him.
Shimura handed her the piece of paper with the registration number on it, grinning with only one side of his mouth. He didn’t say anything.
She gave it a once-over, then frowned and gave it back to him. “I can’t read it,” she said. “Your handwriting’s a mess.”
“I’ll write it again.”
He bent over the desk and carefully wrote the number on a sheet of paper lying next to a road atlas and a three-ring binder three inches thick. He stood up straight, drew a long, brave breath. Asami looked down at the registration number.