"Threats, always the threats," I said. I looked down at her and asked bluntly, "Did Mike Green ever get a similar invitation, and what was his response?"
She sat very still, crosslegged on the bed. There was a brief pause before she answered. "Mr. Green liked dames with looks and class," she said then, in a flat voice. "He wasn't about to lay any pockmarked monkeys when there was better stuff to be had, end of quote. Well, at least he was honest. He didn't say he was tired." She grimaced. "Goodbye, Mr. Clevenger. I hope you have a good night's rest. I'll expect you in Brandon with lots of information."
I said, "You're cute when you're mad, but you're prettier when you laugh."
She looked up. After a long pause she said warily, "You can skip the romantic approach. And don't do the little girl any great big favors."
I said, "It's hell what a man will do to avoid having to sleep in a leaky tent in the rain, isn't it?"
She smiled slowly. Her smile was as good as her laugh, kind of pert and young and impudent. "And it's hell what a girl will do to keep from having to sleep alone, isn't it?"
V
WHEN I came out of the bathroom, dressed, she was standing at the gray window looking at the street four stories below. She made a rather intriguing picture there, in the pale dawn light, since she was wearing only the white silk shirt that, somehow, we'd never got around to taking off her. It had been an impromptu come-as-you-are kind of performance, as love scenes go. I couldn't help noting, as I crossed the room, that the improvised nightshirt wasn't quite as long as it would have been, had it been designed for a sleeping garment in the first place.
"Well, I'll get in touch with you in Brandon," I said, businesslike. I wasn't quite sure what our relationship was supposed to be now.
Elaine turned from the window to face me. After a moment she drew the rumpled shirt together in front and started to button it, more from a sense of tidiness, I gathered, than from any real feeling of modesty. There was, after all, no further reason for us to be modest with each other. She gave me a funny, wry smile.
"I suppose you think I'm a cheap little tramp," she said.
I said, "A man can't win around here. If he doesn't sleep with you, he's taking a slap at your appearance and if he does, he's maligning your character."
I half expected her to be angry, but she just grinned. Then she stopped grinning and said, "It's a lousy business, darling. I suppose you know what I'll do the minute you're out of the room. I'll take the glass you drank out of and send it in to have the fingerprints checked."
I laughed. "Well, I'm glad you said that. I was just trying to work up a plausible excuse for walking off with that bottle of Scotch you were pouring out of, so I could see what I could develop on it with my do-it-yourself detective kit. My boss has a few Washington connections that might be able to run down your prints for us."
"Not unless I wanted them run down," she said, smiling. "But help yourself. I think Mike Green already got a set, much more subtly, but I don't mind if you take one, too. Just don't let the liquor go to waste. That would be a crime." She watched me as I found a narrow paper bag in the nearby wastebasket, smoothed it out, and slipped the bottle inside. "Dave."
"Yes."
She was serious again. "What happens in bed never makes any difference. Not in my line of work. I hope you understand that."
"What are you trying to say?"
"Whether I like you or not has nothing to do with anything. If you're not a private detective from Denver, darling, please get in your little car and start driving very fast, any direction. Otherwise there'll be nothing but a small wet spot on the pavement, marked Clevenger."
I said, "It isn't nice of you to keep trying to scare me to death."
She shook her head quickly. "No, don't joke about it. This is big, darling, very big. If you're playing any tricks, you'll be squashed, and I'll help squash you. That's what I'm trying to say. And even if you are a private detective from Denver, and even if you have a very respectable principle and an excellent reason for hanging around, I'd still advise you to go home and work on some nice lucrative divorce case. Because if you get in the way we'll run over you like a steamroller. This woman has got hold of something that… well, it's terribly important. We have to get it back before it's compromised further. There's really no room for any private interests here."
She was very grave and, with her tousled black hair and abbreviated shirt, very cute. I said, "You sound practically subversive, doll. Big government has taken over, and there's no room for the lousy little private dick to make a few lousy little private bucks. Hell, that's dictatorship, that's communism. I'll speak to my senator." I reached out and tipped her face up and bent over to kiss her lightly on the mouth, saying: "See you in Brandon."
It was meant to be just a debonair parting gesture from a somewhat older man to a somewhat younger girl-let's not go into the exact age difference involved-but it went wrong. I don't mean that it developed into a passionate, clinging clinch, with breathless declarations of undying love. We weren't the breathless, clinging type. Watching us, you probably wouldn't have known anything had happened at all. And maybe it didn't happen then; maybe it had already happened while we made love and slept for a couple hours close together in the big hotel bed. Maybe we were just becoming aware of it now. But there was no mistaking it.
As a kiss, however, it lasted only a fraction of a second longer than the easy goodbye peck it had been intended to be. Separating, we looked at each other for a moment. I reached up and touched her mop of black hair.
"Elaine the fair," I said. "Elaine the lily maid of Astolat. Tennyson?"
"I think so," she said. "It isn't nice to make fun of me."
"You were kind of casual about letting me in here," I said. "Better start being careful with doors, lily maid, like Mike wasn't."
She grinned. "What can acid do to me that hasn't already been done?"
"At least you've still got a face, repulsive though it may be," I said. "We know a guy who hasn't."
Elaine drew a long breath, and said, "The Moosehead Lodge. Room 14."
"Sure," I said and went out without looking back.
Walking down the hail to the elevator, I wanted to sock the wall with my fist-or with my head, to knock some sense into it. It was such an unnecessary damn complication. I mean, the girl wasn't even particularly goodlooking.
Anyway, there was no place here, I told myself sternly, for emotional evolvement. I'd lied to her already, several times, and I was under orders to lie again and keep on lying-Mae had been quite specific on the point that other agencies could not be informed. And I wasn't even sure that Elaine hadn't lied to me, in return, or at least withheld part of the truth-a rather unpleasant part of the truth, that I was bound to investigate if I was going to do my job right. Everything would have been much simpler if I could have maintained an objective viewpoint. Well, that's what I got for going to bed with people for the wrong reasons.
Outside, it was a bleak morning with low, gray clouds. Sitting in the Volkswagen, I glanced through the newspaper I'd picked up in the hotel lobby, to bring myself up to date and also, I guess, to settle my thoughts before I got on the phone and made official conversation.
Newswise, it had been a frantic twenty-four hours, I gathered, that I'd spent on the road and in bed. South of the border, in the U.S.A., a jet airliner had blown up in midair, the Air Force had misplaced a bomber on a training mission, the Navy had announced an atomic sub missing and presumed lost, and two ships had collided in some harbor. Still farther south, in Mexico, a bus had fallen off a mountain. The international political scene was as loused-up as ever. I couldn't see that any of this was related to my mission, but it was a little early to tell, since I still didn't know exactly what my mission was.