“I don’t really think past tomorrow. I only live in the moment. Spontaneous.”
He shook his head and finished his drink. “I don’t think I believe that.”
“Believe what you will or won’t. But let me give you an example.” She set her drink down, stood, and slipped off her jacket, revealing her dress straps and bare shoulders. She pulled down the straps, reached around to the back of her neck, undid a clasp there, pulled down the zipper, and commenced to wiggle herself free from the dress’s constraints while Archer could only watch with rapt attention. Finally, the fabric hit the floor. She stepped out of the pile of dress and stood there with not much on except her stockings, garter belt, and underwear.
Archer found he could not look away, not even if a regiment of Nazis were bearing down on him with Hitler leading the pack. He had seen naked or nearly naked women before, in four different countries. He had never seen one that stirred his heart like this woman. Her body was icy pale and soft in every place that mattered to a man. Her mouth was infinitely kissable. And her contrasting Veronica Lake dark peekaboo had never seemed more in reach for a man like him.
She put an exclamation point on this by twirling around for him.
“Are my intentions now made clear?” she said, coming to face him. “Because I’m not sure what else I can do, quite honestly.”
“I think I get the point.”
“I’m truly relieved.”
“And Hank?”
“He’s not here now, is he?”
“Do I have a say in this?”
Her face fell. “I think that’s a given, but if you’re not interested?”
She bent down to pick up her dress, but he gripped her by the shoulders, pulling her straight up.
“You’re taller without my shoes on,” she said, looking up at him.
“I suppose I am.”
“You have a nice mug, Archer. Good bones. Not too handsome and not too scary.”
“Moderation is a good thing.”
“But not all of the time.”
He looked down at her and noticed the bruises on her arms, upper thighs, and obliques.
His features darkening, he said, “What the hell happened there? You fall?”
She didn’t even look at where he was staring. “Nothing important, Archer. Nothing at all.”
“You sure? I mean, if Pittleman did—”
She put a hand over his mouth.
“Focus. I need you to focus. The night’s not getting any younger and neither are we.”
She stood on her tippy-toes and put her lips against his.
A moment later, they toppled, as one, onto the bed.
Chapter 13
When he woke early the next morning, she was gone, and Archer wasn’t surprised. She seemed like a cat to him. Affectionate when she wanted to be, and off again when she had gotten her fill.
A loud noise from somewhere out in the hall had catapulted him groggily from his slumbers. He rolled out of bed and saw it. She’d left her flask behind, perched on the dresser. He hefted it and heard the slosh of contents inside. Maybe she’d left it here because she intended to come back and retrieve it at some point. That was a thought to both spur and trouble a man.
He washed up in the toilet down the hall, put on his new clothes, and stepped out of his room. Pittleman’s room was just down there. Archer wondered if that was where Jackie had gone for the duration of the night. The thought that she had left his bed to inhabit Pittleman’s gave him a pang of jealousy that within the span of two strides he decided he had no right to feel.
Still.
He walked briskly down the hall to Number 615 and was surprised to see the door slightly ajar. He gripped the knob and opened it just a crack, so he could see inside. With the light streaming in from the windows, he gazed around the room and saw Pittleman still stretched out on the bed. He smiled when he thought about the hangover the man was going to wake up to. But despite his earlier thoughts, there was no sign of Jackie. He was about to leave when he saw it. The towel on the floor. And next to it, something that glinted in the creeping glow of sunlight, but that he couldn’t make out precisely.
He gave a searching look up and down the hall. No one was about yet, for it was still early. He swung the door all the way in, stepped inside, and closed it behind him. The last thing he wanted was to disturb the sleeping man, but he thought of a ready explanation if Pittleman woke up and saw him.
He scurried over to the towel and squatted down. The object next to it was a switchblade, like the one he had seen Pittleman use at the bar to spear the twenties and not so subtly threaten him. The blade was open. Archer looked at the towel and knife more closely and then became rigid. They were both coated with blood. He stood, walked over to the bed, and looked down at Pittleman.
The man wasn’t asleep. Nor was he awake. He was just dead.
The slit under his throat was wide and deep. The person wielding the knife had driven the blade in to its full length, and then worked it jaggedly from side to side, like opening a can of soup. This wasn’t necessary to kill the man. It was done to mutilate, and that thought sickened Archer. The dead man, his clothes, and the bedcovers under him were soaked in dried blood. It must have been a gusher when the blade had hit the big arteries. He knew this for certain.
Archer had killed a German near Salerno in hand-to-hand fighting. He’d been lucky to get the advantage, and the German had been unlucky to lose his grip in what might have been the coldest winter Italy had ever seen. Though he hadn’t been nearly as vicious as the person who had dispatched Pittleman to the hereafter, Archer had slit the German’s throat from basically ear to ear, just as he’d been taught. That way you didn’t have to worry about your opponent’s having a second opportunity to take your life. Archer had been covered in the German’s blood when twin geysers had erupted from the severed arteries feeding his brain. He thought whoever had killed Pittleman would have the same foul coating.
His next thought was one of self-interest. He rummaged in the man’s pocket and pulled out the thick wad of cash, which seemed about as hefty as the last time Archer had seen it. Well, it didn’t look like robbery had been the reason to kill the man. And yet for Archer now to peel a few twenties off would not diminish it a jot. The man’s widow would have plenty left over. And Archer might have indeed done so, for he was no better than most when it came to levels of selfishness, but he made the mistake of looking at the man’s eyes.
They were wide open and seemed to be staring intensely up at him, carrying with them a look not of disapproval, but of betrayal. If a dead man’s eyes could really convey that emotion, they had just done so to Aloysius Archer.
He slowly put the wad back, with not a single twenty plucked from its hide, and then used his fingers to close the man’s flat, glassy eyes. Archer had done this very thing on battlefields more times than he ever cared to remember. It had been gospel among American soldiers that a dead comrade with open eyes could still see the violent carnage of his own death and would therefore never have a restful afterlife. Archer wasn’t particularly fond of Pittleman — he really didn’t know the man — and what he had learned about him was not especially heartwarming. Yet he could see no reason to deprive him an element of peace in death.
But then something occurred to him. He looked in the other pocket and pulled out the promissory note papers given by one Lucas Tuttle to, now, a dead man. He slipped these in his jacket pocket. They might come in handy down the road.
A moment later, and after fully realizing the peril of his current situation, Archer stepped away from the bed, backed to the door, and left the room of the murdered man, after giving another look up and down the hall.