"Sometimes I think I'm standing still too. It's never been like this before."
Her hand found mine and pulled it down to her cheek. I thought I felt her lips brush my fingers, but I wasn't sure. "Do you have the boy yet?"
"Yeah, he's in good hands. Tomorrow or maybe the next day they'll come for him. He'll be all right."
"I wish there was something I could do. Are you sure there isn't? Could I keep him for you?"
"He'd be too much for you. Hell, he's only a little over a year old. I have a nurse for him. She's old, but reliable."
"Then let me take him out for a walk or something. I really do want to help, Mike, honest."
I ran my fingers through the sheen of her hair and across the soft lines of her face. This time I knew it when her lips parted in a kiss on my palm.
"I wish you could, Marsha. I need help. I need something. This whole thing is getting away from me."
"Would it help to tell me about it?"
"Maybe."
"Then tell me."
So I told her. I sat there staring at the ceiling with Marsha on the floor and her head on my knees and I told her about it. I lined up everything from beginning to end and tried to put them together in the right order.
When you strung them out like that it didn't take long to tell. They made a nice neat pile of facts, one on top of the other, but there was nothing there to hold them together. One little push scattered them all over the place. Before I finished my jaws ached from holding my teeth together so tightly.
"Being so mad won't help you think," Marsha said.
"I gotta be mad. Goddamn, you can't go at a thing like this unless you are mad. I never knew much about kids, but when I held the Decker boy in my hands I could see why a guy would give his insides to keep his kid alive. Right there is the thing that screws everything up. Decker knew he was going to die and didn't try to do a single thing about it. Three days before, he knew it was going to happen too. He got all, his affairs put right and waited. God knows what he thought about in those three days."
"It couldn't have been nice."
"Oh, I don't know. I don't get it at all." I rubbed my face disgustedly. "Decker and Hooker tie in with Toady Link and he ties in with Grindle and Teen and it was one of Grindle's boys who shot Decker. There's a connection there if you want to look for one."
"I'm sorry, Mike."
"You don't have to be."
"But I am. In a way it started with me. I keep thinking of the boy."
"It would have been the same if Decker had broken into the other apartment. The guy knew he was going to die... but why? Whether or not he got what he was after he was still planning to die!"
Marsha lifted her face and turned around "Couldn't it have been... a precaution? Perhaps he was planning to run out with the money. In that case he would know there was a possibility that they, might catch up with him. As it was, it turned out to be the same thing. He knew they'd never believe his story about the wrong apartment so he ran anyway, bringing about the same results.".
My eyes felt hot and heavy. "It's crazy as hell. It's a mess no matter how I look at it, but someplace there's an answer and it's lost in my head. I keep trying to work it loose and it won't come. Every time I stop to think about it I can feel it sitting here and if the damn thing was human it would laugh at me. Now I can't even think any more."
"Tired, darling?"
"Yeah."
I looked at her and she looked at me and we were both thinking the same thing. Then her head dropped slowly and her smile had a touch of sadness in it.
"I'm a fool, aren't I?" she said.
"You're no fool, Marsha."
"Mike... have you ever been in love?"
I didn't know how to answer that so I just nodded.
"Was it nice?"
"I thought so." I was hoping she wouldn't ask me any more. Even after five years it hurt to think about it.
"Are you... now?" Her voice was low, almost inaudible. I caught the brief flicker of her eyes as she glanced at my face.
I shrugged. I didn't know what to tell her.
She smiled at her hands and I smiled with her. "That's good," she laughed. Her eyes went bright and happy and she tossed her head so that her hair fell in a glittering dark halo around her shoulders. "I had tonight all planned. I was going to be a fool anyway and make you want me so that you'd keep wanting me."
"It's been like that."
She came up off the floor slowly, gracefully, reaching for my hand to pull me out of the chair. Her mouth was warmer than it should have been. Her body was supple and lovely, like a fluid filling in the gaps between us. I ran my fingers through her hair, pulling her face away while still wanting to keep her crushed against me.
"Why, Marsha?" I asked. "Why me? You know what I'm like. I'm not fancy and I'm not famous and I work for my dough. I'm not in your class at all."
She looked up at me with an expression you don't try to describe. A sleepy expression that wasn't a bit tired. Her hands slid up my back and tightened as she leaned against me. "Let me be a woman, Mike. I don't want those things you say you're not. I've had them. I want all the things you are. You're big and not so handsome, but there's a devil inside you that makes you exciting and tough, yet enough of an angel to make you tender when you have to be."
My hands wanted to squeeze right through her waist until they met and I had to let her go or she would have felt the way they were shaking. I turned around and reached for the bottle and glass on the table and while I was pouring one there was a click and the light dimmed to a pale glow.
Behind me I heard her say softly, "Mike... you never told me whether I was... just pretty or beautiful."
I turned around and was going to tell her that she was the most lovely thing I had ever seen, but her hands did something to her belt and the fold of the dress that came up over one shoulder dropped away leaving her standing there with one hand on the lamp like a half-nude vision and the words got stuck in my throat.
Then the light disappeared altogether and I could only drink the drink quickly, because although the vision was gone it was walking toward me across the night and somewhere on the path there was another whisper of fabric and she was there in my hands without anything to keep her from being a woman now, an invisible, naked dream throwing a mantle of desire around us both that had too great a strength to break and must be burned through by a fire that leaped and danced and towered in a blazing crescendo that could only be dampened and never extinguished.
And when the mantle was thrown back I left the dream there in the dark, warm and soft, breathing quickly to tell me that it was a dream that would come back on other nights too, disturbing and at the same time satisfying.
She was beautiful. She was pretty, too.
She was in my mind all the way home.
Chapter Six
At a quarter past ten I got up, dressed and made myself some breakfast. Right in the middle of it the phone rang and when I answered it the operator told me to hold on for a call from Miami. Velda's husky voice was a pleasure to hear again. She said, "Mike?"
And I said, "Hello, sweetheart. How's everything?"
"Fine. At least it's partly fine. Our boy got out on a plane, but he left all the stuff behind. The insurance investigator is here making an inventory of the stuff now."
"Great, great. Try to promote yourself a bonus if you can."
"That wouldn't be hard," she laughed. "He's already made a pass. Mike, miss me?"
I felt like a heel, but I wasn't lying when I said, "Hell yes, I miss you."
"I don't mean as a business partner."
"Neither do I, kitten."
"You won't have to miss me long. I'm taking the afternoon train out."
My fingers started batting out dots and dashes on the table. I wanted her back but not too soon. I didn't want anybody else climbing all over me. "You stay there," I told her. "Stay on that guy's tail. You're still on salary from the company and if you can get a line on him now they'll cut us in for more business later. They're as interested in him as they are in recovering the stuff."