“Why do you come on so hard?”
“You’re part of the system. What’s Governor Holland ever done for us?”
“I’m told you and Wilde are very close friends.”
“Get out of my room.”
She pointed to the door dramatically. “And don’t come back!”
“All right, Miss Gale.”
She slammed the door after him.
Tall Prissy appeared from nowhere, sailing.
“Leaving?”
“Kicked out.”
“You poor man.” She laughed, preceding him downstairs. At the front door she touched his arm. “Veronica showed her pretty molars?”
“Very uncooperative, Prissy.”
“Damon put her up to it. Dig?”
“If that’s the truth, thanks.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I feel sorry for you. Because not all of us are... never mind. You’d better go.” Her stunning eyes were full on his.
He went. Prissy had salvaged the morning.
He drove to a freshly painted clapboard three-story with a broad porch, the address of Patricia Reed, Dennis Sullivan’s girl. The house was painted pink and green, each a poisonous shade.
He checked the mailboxes, located the Reed girl’s room number, and tried the door. It gave to his nudge and he went into a dark hall that smelled faintly of pine deodorizer.
McCall went upstairs to the second floor, down a short dark hall, and knocked at a door.
“Just a minute.”
The door opened a crack; a long-lashed topaz eye peered out at him. The eye blinked down at his shoes, then traveled slowly up his body until it reached his face again.
“Oh, wow. Who are you?”
“My name’s McCall, Micah McCall. May I come in?”
The door swung slowly — he thought reluctantly — open.
She was a magazine illustration beauty of the Phoebe Zeitgeist class, tall, slim, big-breasted, with mathematically regular features that curiously made no impression. She was dressed entirely in black leather down to her high boots. Her hair was as black as her outfit; it hung glistening to well below her square shoulders, advertising its hundred brushings that morning. Huge onyx hoops dangled from her ears. Her lips were painted a pearly tone; her eyes were heavily made up. All she lacked was a bullwhip.
“You’re Pat Reed, I take it,” McCall said.
“And you’re the famous McCall.” She shut the door. “Sorry about the condition of this room. I wasn’t expecting company.” It was, surprisingly, just a room, as featureless and unmemorable as her face. “You’re here about the Laura Thornton thing and Dean Gunther, right?”
“Right.”
“Sit down. Just throw those things on the bed.”
He tossed an armful of lingerie to the bed and sat down in a captain’s chair covered with gouged-out initials.
“And you’re here because somebody told you Dennis Sullivan and I have a thing going, right?”
There was an undertone of coarseness in her speech that grated on him. McCall smiled. “Keep talking, Miss Reed.”
“There’s nothing to say.”
“With a start like that,” McCall said, still smiling, “that’s something of an anticlimax.”
The girl shrugged. “Really. I’m not bracing you. I don’t know Laura awfully well. Some. Maybe as well as any girl in ’Squanto. But that’s little enough. I’m sorry about what happened to her. It must have been awful for her. I keep thinking about it. But that’s not going to do you much good, Mr. McCall, is it? Have you a line to who might have done it?”
Over the bookcase hung an abstract whose composition was oddly regular and forgettable. Like Patricia Reed herself. He glanced around. The few other pictures and photographs were also nondescript. Yet even against such a background it was her clothes and makeup that stood out, not she.
“No,” McCall said. “I thought you might be able to help me. Yes, I’ve heard you’re close to Dennis Sullivan. I understand he knows Laura quite well—”
“Yes, he does.” There was nothing to be read on her face or distilled from her voice.
“But if you and he are a twosome—”
“I don’t put clamps on my men,” Pat Reed said. “Dennis is all I’ve got. I mean, I don’t want anyone else. It was a passing thing, his interest in Laura. He told me it wasn’t serious. I believe him.”
“I see.”
He watched her. She gave forth a powerful effluvium of truth. She seemed to hold nothing back. It was appealing. Was it genuine or a technique?
“And me, Miss Reed? What do you think of my being here?”
“Some people are a bit wigged. I’m not one of them. For one thing it’s your job. For another, I like Governor Holland being interested in and concerned about what’s going on. The trouble is that people don’t try to understand other points of view. That goes for both sides.”
She came toward him, moving with a slow hip flow that was almost, not quite, an undulation. There was something powerfully enticing about the performance. She stopped rather close to him. He felt an all but physical assault on his masculinity.
“I sympathize with what you’re doing,” Pat Reed murmured.
Was she trying to make him? But he couldn’t tell. Behind that bland magazine exterior beat an obviously complex personality. It would take a long time to know Miss Reed. He began to understand how she held onto young Dennis Sullivan even in his restlessness.
She sat down near him.
“I’m darned glad to hear that,” McCall said. “It makes me feel that ’Squanto isn’t entirely the camp of the enemy. By the way, I wonder if you’ve ever heard anyone threaten Dean Gunther.”
Her lashes swept her cheek. “So you think I’m a fink because I gave you a kind word.”
“No—”
“Yes. Well, Mr. McCall, I testify against no one unless I’m in a position to nail him to the cross. All I’ll tell you is this: Floyd Gunther was pretty much disliked by the students. He was a hard, sometimes a nasty, man, and he was an administration brown-nose from the ground up. Right?”
“I’m listening, Miss Reed.”
“That’s all. It’s happened, it’s over, and when a thing is over I don’t give it much thought. I mean, I think about the leftover living, not the dead.”
She leaned toward him. He could feel her heat. Her eyes lidded again. Could he be wrong? Was he imagining all this? Or was she leading him on?
He suddenly wondered if he had walked into a trap. This could be dangerous. There was the unmade bed...
The next moment she knocked his suspicions galley-west.
“I’d like to continue this conversation, Mr. McCall,” she said, jumping up, “but I’m afraid I’m going to have to split. I’m due at the music building in two minutes. Singing lesson.”
She went over to the bookcase and took down a black binder tied with ribbon. Sheet music projected from it. She smiled at McCall, waiting.
McCall rose. “Maybe we could talk again?”
“Any time, Mr. McCall.” She stood there, hip thrusting.
“Thank you, Miss Reed, for being so frank with me.”
She hadn’t been afraid to talk, she had talked with every timbre of honesty, and what had she said? Nothing.
As McCall drove off he reflected that perhaps he had misjudged the Tisquanto police.
No wonder they hadn’t come up with anything.
Driving onto the campus he noticed that the area before the administration building was again seething with students. Some were picketing the entrance, waving placards. Others marched in a phalanx as if to cut off a rear exit. He could smell trouble in the air.
A student in snaky jeans darted across the road in his path. McCall leaned on his horn, and the boy turned to grin. His hair brushed his shoulders, and McCall spotted the single gold earring. The student suddenly recognized him and started away.