“What you do for a living, sugar?”
“I... I’m sort of between jobs.”
“What’s your trade?”
“Sort of — investments.”
“And the investment was three kings against a lousy little full house. That’s how it goes, sugar.”
“Uh — Bonny Lee?”
“Yay?”
“You — uh, you said it was — pretty fine?”
“You were there, weren’t you, brother? You weren’t all that much sound asleep, and that’s for sure. You want a medal of honor or something? I swear to God, some day I hope to meet a man doesn’t want to be told he’s the best there is. What is it with men anyhow? A girl, she just wants to be lovin’ and wanted, and a damn man, every time, it’s like he wonders if he can make the Olympics. You all scared you haven’t got it? Y’all go round provin’ it often enough, then swaggering around like you’d done something special, like as if it was something any mink couldn’t do quicker and oftener. Big deal. I give you a passing grade. Okay?”
“Sorry I mentioned it.”
“So am I, sugar. So am I. There’s one thing bores me damn near to death, it’s talking about it. Folks get hungry and have a fine steak, they sit over the bones and talk about it? They get thirsty and have a big cold drink, they sit around peerin’ down into the glass a-wonderin’ what temperature it was, for Gawd’s sweet sake. The way I figure—”
“I said I’m sorry I brought it up!”
“Shees marie, you don’t have to beller at me, sugar! You know, you got a temper onto you?”
“I’m a very mild guy! I always have been! I never lose my temper! Get off my back, will you?”
“Kirk, sugar, you’re real edgy. There anything to eat?”
“Some cold ham. Rye bread.”
“I’ll just whomp up sanwiches, make us both feel better. You know it’s three in the morning?”
She went into the kitchen corner and turned on the bright overhead fluorescence. He propped himself on the pillows so he could watch her. Her long legs were so tanned they looked carved out of redwood, shaped lovingly, sanded to sleekness, polished. As she bent and moved and worked, he admired the smooth clench and slither of the young muscles of haunch and back and shoulders. And he felt the vast contentment of what he knew could be no more than a momentary ownership, and he wanted to find a heavy stone and chunk himself in the head with it for having deprived himself for so long of this kind of fatuous, arrogant smugness he had not realized existed.
She began to hum and then to sing. Her singing voice was an octave deeper than her speaking voice. Both the song and the phrasing were tantalizingly familiar.
“Billie!” he said suddenly.
She turned and grinned at him. “God rest her soul. Played all them records til nothing left but a scratchy hiss, then boughten some more and played those out too. Withouten Lady Day, I’d have hardly no career at all, sugar. There any one of hers you like special?”
“God Bless the Chile.”
She clapped her hands with delight. “Damn all, Kirk honey, that there is my song. Seven thousand times I sung that, all alone and for the people, and not one time it wasn’t like my heart turning over slow. I can cry to that song, thinking of that poor lost broad and how the world broke her down. After this here ham, I’ll sing it to you good, and you shuten your eyes, you’ll think she’s come on back for sure. Say, here is some of that burgundy red wine all fizzed like a sof’drink, like I had here one time before. You want some tall with ice?”
“I’d like that, Bonny Lee.”
She brought the wine in tall glasses, and thick sandwiches on white napkins, all on a teak tray. Nothing had ever tasted better to him. “I’m night people,” she said, chewing busily. “Three o’clock, four o’clock, I could gnaw the ears off a gallopin’ horse.”
“But you get out in the sun.”
“Set my alarm for noon, usually. Swim fifty lengths, five at a time, bake myself in between. Keeps me tightened up nice, you think so?”
“Very nice, Bonny Lee.”
She took the tray out and brought back more wine. When it was gone she put the glasses aside and said, “Now close your eyes and hear Billie.”
She did it beautifully, her tone smoky, gentle. Midway he opened his eyes. She was singing with her eyes closed, swaying slightly. “—rich relations give crust of bread and such. You can h’ep youself, but doan take too much....”
After the last note was gone into the silence of the room, she opened her eyes and they were shiny.
“You liking that, Kirk sugar, knowing about Billie and all, asking for that one — it’s somehow something starting out all dead wrong and swinging around right. You feel that?”
“Yes, Bonny Lee.”
“And it could set that first time all the way right if I was to know it was you, maybe. But I don’t want you thinking wrong, this being the first time in my whole life knowing a gentleman friend such a short little time. But time got messed up kind of for us.”
“I wouldn’t think wrong.”
She went over and turned out the light and came back. In a little while she said, “Kirk sugar, what for you shaking so?” In another little while she said, “You know, your hands are like ice!” And in another little while she said, “Sugar, is it really meanin’ all this much to you, honest?” And when she knew it did, she whispered, “Then it’s meaning ten times as much to me too. Which I am now to let you know. Shees marie, here I am tumblin’ into love again, and a damn tow-head, cold-hand, evil-temper yankee, a gamblin’ out-a-work man, and so gentle-sweet I can start crying any minute, and nobody does any more talking from here on in.”
Chapter Eight
There was a hornet big as a sea gull perched on something right in front of his face. It had a wide nasty little face, gray-green eyes, long heavy milky hair, a puffy mouth heavily lipsticked. It smacked its evil little mouth and swung its stinger back and forth. It had big veined wings which looked as rigid as plate glass. At intervals the wings would vibrate for several seconds, becoming almost invisible, making a harsh resonant burring sound.
The hornet was gone. A phone was ringing. He sat up, lost in space and time, still half wary of the hornet. He was in a huge vague bed in a shadowy room, with a dawn slant of sun coming in from the breakfast porch. As an orderly part of his mind picked up the count on the ringing of the phone, he turned and saw a tousle of curls sunk into a pillow at the far edge of the bed, four feet away, and a brown nape of tender neck, a silky V of white hair against it, and a deep brown shoulder, and a pale blue sheet, draped, molding the long girl-shape of the rest of her — incredible ornamentation to an unknown morning. Memory was suddenly an avalanche, pouring into the dry arroyo of the stunned and empty mind. He felt a stab of delight so unexpected it was more like pain than joy. He felt as if somebody had suddenly thrust a hollow needle into his heart and pumped it full of spiced molasses.
... thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and the phone went on and on. By the simplest deduction, it had to be Betsy Alden. Anybody else would have given up. By letting it ring and ring, she was letting him know who it was.
... nineteen, twenty, twenty-one...
He found the phone on the shelf to the left of the headboard.
“Yes?”
“Good morning, Kirby,” Joseph said, the rich voice almost gelatinous in its baritone flexibility. “Uh — how—”
“You’ve really been very tiresome lately, Kirby. But all will be forgiven if you can give us a little co-operation now. You are really in all kinds of trouble now, you know. The vicious assault on that poor waiter was a stupid mistake. But you seem to be reasonably ingenious, so we think you can probably devise some way of getting from that apartment to the Glorianna without incident. Listen carefully, my boy. She is tied up at the Biscayne Marina, E Dock. Please be aboard by ten at the latest.”