Instinct is a wonderful thing. I didn't have a stitch on, but my hand was up instantly, reaching for the butt of the Smith & Wesson—in its shoulder holster in the next room with my clothes. "Like what kind of questions is he asking?"
"Where you came from. What you're doing here. Where you lived before. How much talking you do about yourself." Hazel's voice was quiet. "I don't want you to think I'm prying, Chet. I just thought you ought to know."
"Don't think I don't appreciate it, baby."
1 thought about Blaze Franklin. He wasn't asking those particular questions because of anything that had happened between Lucille and me. Things were getting warm. I had no damn business on the bed here playing with Hazel's ass when the wash was out on the line and a storm coming up. "Any reaction from the questioned?" I asked.
"Even Jed was saying it was odd how little we really knew about you." There was no emphasis in Hazel's remark. She was reporting a fact. Her hand settled on my arm. I'm going to say one more thing, and then I'm going to shut up. And that's if you think of anything I can do to help, let me know. I'm not even fussy what I'll be helping with." She rolled over and sat up on the edge of the bed. "I've got to open up the bar in the morning."
It was a fact the life had gone out of the party. We dressed, locked up, and went out to the Ford. On the way back to town I thought about Hazel's last remark. It was just short of putting it in writing that she was on the team. More, she didn't care which name was on the uniform. I've run into few blanket endorsements in my life. The big woman was all gold and a yard wide.
I appreciated her help, as I'd told her, but I was damn well going to put a stop to the necessity for it. She could only get hurt. It was two-thirty when I turned into the Dixie Pig's crushed stone driveway. Our good-nights were an anticlimax.
I drove to the Lazy Susan. There was only one reason Franklin was asking those questions about me. He'd watched me tramp the sawgrass swamps and savanna intermingled with pineland, salt meadows, and mangrove thickets on the-cast side of town. Blaze Franklin had just about stamped the brand on himself. Franklin was the reason I'd come to Hudson.
It left unanswered questions. How had a mulehead like Franklin out-maneuvered Bunny, who could break Franklin up with his bare hands? And why was Franklin nosing around me at all, when by all rights he should have been keeping i low profile and hoping no one was looking in his direction?
I didn't know.
There was no question now about my accepting Lucille Grimes' dinner invitation.
That would be the first step in supplying a few answers.
The dinner was quite an affair.
We sat at opposite ends of a six-foot table, and we were served by a girl in a maid's uniform. Lucille sat at her end of the table with an expression like a medieval landowner's among his serfs. All I could think of was Lady Bountiful among the poor.
It was plain enough that I was a stink in the nostrils with the lady seated at the head of the table. It was interesting that, feeling as she did about me, Franklin could force her to issue this invitation. It made Hazel a hundred-percent correct about who was wearing the pants in the corporation.
It had to be that Franklin was pushing her to set up the deadfall again. She wouldn't have told him exactly what happened that night; she wouldn't like to admit it even to herself. Blaze would assume I had made out with Lucille after suckering him into the wrong cabin, and this would leave him grinding his teeth. But he would also assume I was slavering for another go-round and would eagerly snatch up any invitation from the blonde. Lucille knew, better, but she had to go along with Franklin's idea.
It gave me an idea of my own.
"I'm glad to see you finally wised up to Franklin," I said to her when the little maid disappeared after serving dessert.
Her mind had been a long way off. Probably gloating over an image of me staked out naked over an anthill. She came back to earth. "Wised up?"
"Sure. I'll never know what you saw in a jerk like him. Just a big bag of wind." It was no trouble to make that sound convincing. "Having me to dinner like this shows you're a smart girl. You should have cut Franklin loose a
long time ago. You and me, now—we could really play
chopsticks together on the same piano."
She didn't swallow it hook, line, and sinker. Not at first. She was suspicious as I oiled up both sides of my tongue and greased her liberally. She couldn't believe at first I was too stupid to know her reaction to me, but her suspicion gradually died. She was used to such a masculine response for one thing. By the end of the meal she had come as alive as if someone had just reported my painful demise. She was tossing them back to me as fast as I batted them at her.
Lucille was no fool. I was giving her an out on a problem through which she hadn't been able to see daylight. This was the way it should go as far as Franklin was concerned. If she could report progress to him, it was a load off her back. If she could set me up as a foil against Franklin in the infinitesmally possible event he couldn't handle me—why, how lovely. She had nothing to lose.
She didn't overplay her hand much, either. "I was very angry with you the other night," she said gravely. "I thought you were a gentleman."
Even the boob I was supposed to be couldn't let her get away with that. "My grandmother raised me to be a gentleman everywhere except in bed," I informed her. "Besides, you'd just set me up to get cut off at the knees, sweet heart. You're lucky I didn't really get mad at you."
"But I wasn't going to do anything! I was just—" Her protest died away when I forced her gaze to meet mine.
"You were just going to sit there and cheer, that's all. You got what was coming to you, sugar. Just like Franklin's going to one of these days." I threw that in as an afterthought, she was really getting restless under the Franklin thumb—
She didn't appear to notice the opening. Honest curiosity shone for an instant through her genteel facade. "I admire clever men, Chet. Whatever led you to take rooms in two different names?"
"Self preservation. I inherited large quantities of it. Look, maybe I leaned on you a little hard, but that's water over the dam. I don't see why we can't get along. You're a smart girl. You and I make a much better team than you and Franklin. Just don't try any more cute tricks. And I don't like bossy women. Do as you're told and we'll be all right."
I expected to hear her grinding her teeth at the end of that little speech. Instead, she smiled sweetly. She was a cinch to bring along a sawed-off baseball bat to our next motel room assignation. Without her realizing, it oozed from every pore that she couldn't wait to bring the loudmouthed abusive animal into the dust. "I'm not used to such a—such a forceful man," she said demurely. "Shall we have our coffee on the patio?"
We had our coffee on the patio. I buttered her up some more. She buttered me up some more. Instead of the silver fingerbowls placed on our trays, twin showers would have been more appropriate.
She finally cut across the radius of the circle. "What are you really doing in this area?" she asked directly. "I never have believed your black maple story."
"A man can make a quick dollar if he stumbles onto the right patch of second growth out in that timber," I argued.
She was beyond the point of letting me get away with it. "You don't seem to me like the type of man interested in making just a few dollars."
I set down my coffee cup and rose to my feet. Lucille rose, too, surprised. "You talk too much, sweet heart," I told her. I walked around the little marble patio table and took her by the arms, below the sleeves of her short-sleeved dress, harder than necessary. "You're going to have to break that habit." Her face whitened at the pressure of my hands on her arms. "I'll give you a chance tomorrow night to start breaking it. I'll pick you up for dinner at five."