"No reason not to," Nudger said. "If that's as far as your interest in her goes."
Reckoner leaned back and smiled, this time sagely and tolerantly. It made Nudger want to punch him. "Are you moralizing, Mr. Nudger?"
"Not at all. Only speculating. A pretty young girl, an older married man…"
"You're miles out of line, Nudger."
"I apologize if I've offended you. My work mostly takes me out of line. Sometimes I go weeks without even seeing the line."
"What would prompt you to suspect some sort of romantic involvement between Ineida and me?"
"At the risk of offending you again," Nudger said, "you must be aware that you have something of a reputation as a philanderer."
Reckoner stiffened, managed to look as indignant as a gray-bearded schnauzer whose food dish had suddenly been snatched away. "Ineida's virtually a child, Nudger. I don't molest children."
"She's a beautiful young woman," Nudger said. "I'll admit that she's naive in some areas, but a twenty-two- year-old girl is no longer a child in the view of a lot of people. Sometimes the wrong kind of people."
"I'm not one of the wrong kind," Reckoner said coldly. He stood up, letting his knuckles rest lightly on the desktop. It seemed the conversation was over.
Nudger also stood and buttoned his sport jacket. "You haven't told me what you think about Ineida seeing Willy Hollister."
"I see no evidence that Hollister is one of the wrong kind of people, either. Ineida's relationship with him is none of my business. Or yours."
Nudger idly picked up a cream-colored glass vase from a corner of the desk.
"Don't drop that," Reckoner said calmly but testily. "It's worth more than you might imagine."
"Looks ordinary enough," Nudger said.
"It's Bristol glass. It looks like ordinary milk glass, but hold it up to the light and you'll see a reddish glow in it."
Nudger held the vase up and tilted it toward the window; the milky glass did take on a transparency and glow a fiery red.
"Only the light shining through it will reveal the fire," Reckoner said.
"Very often," Nudger said, "that's true of people, too."
Reckoner shook his head almost sadly. "I was afraid you'd make that strained analogy."
He sat back down and busied himself with a stack of irregular-sized papers that looked like shipping invoices. His manner suggested that Nudger's presence was no longer important enough to acknowledge; enough time had been wasted on things trivial.
Nudger turned and saw that Norman was standing on the red carpet, holding the door open for him. Not a sound had been made; it was as if he'd been there in the office all the time and just now decided to become visible. He could sure move quietly on those tasseled moccasins. Some spooky guy.
Without speaking, he ushered Nudger through the shop to the street door and back out into the sunlight, noise, exhaust fumes, and heat of the twentieth century.
The sidewalk was heavily peopled by shoppers now; commerce was picking up along the block of small shops and restaurants. As Nudger stepped aside to avoid a determined-looking obese mother lugging a sour-faced infant, he saw that a woman was leaning against his parked car with her arms folded. She was lounging comfortably in a patient, waiting sort of way; if she'd been in uniform, Nudger would have assumed she was a cop waiting to greet him with an official smile, a lecture, and a parking ticket.
He didn't break stride. When he got closer he recognized her. Sandra Reckoner. Max's wife.
Her smile was warmer than a cop's official grimace as she straightened her long body and turned slightly to face him. She was built tall and rangy, like her husband, and was wearing dark slacks with tight cuffs and a crazily printed colorful blouse that had enough material under the arms to make her appear to have folded wings; if she ran fast enough into the wind, she might be able to fly.
She said, "I'm Sandra Reckoner, Mr. Nudger. We have things to talk about."
He shook hands with her lightly, sensing the strength in her long, lean fingers. She was wearing pink nail polish, a bulky antique ring, and a dull-gold bracelet that twined around her wrist like an affectionate snake.
"You've been talking with my husband," she told him. She had coarse, shoulder-length black hair flecked with gray, framing a narrow, bigboned face that should have been horsey-looking but wasn't. Her eyes, greenish-blue and amused, looked out with a candid directness, almost a sensuous dare, above her high cheekbones. This was an attractive woman living at ease with her forty-odd years, and her almost luminous health lent her a sexual vitality that hummed.
Nudger nodded, a bit awkwardly, still gauging the pull of her magnetism, testing the air for trouble. Certain women affected him that way initially. "I just left the antique shop," he confirmed.
"Now it's our turn to chat," Sandra Reckoner said. "I know a place where we can do that."
That sounded interesting to Nudger. He leaned to open the car door for her.
"We can walk," she told him.
He swallowed, nodded again, and followed her. Gee, those long legs moved lazily and smoothly beneath the silky material of her slacks. Rhythm, rhythm. He found it difficult to look away from them.
She paused for a moment at the corner, waiting for traffic to stop for a red light, then forged on ahead.
He almost got run over trying to keep up with her as they crossed the street.
XIII
Sandra Reckoner's long legs were still striding in Nudger's imagination as he sat across from her in a booth near the back of The Instrumental, a lounge they'd entered at the end of the block. It was in a rehabbed and converted two-story frame row house. She acted as though she was familiar with the place, a narrow, dim room decorated with musical instruments mounted on the walls and suspended by thin wires from the ceiling. A carpeted spiral staircase led up to another room where there were more tables. Nudger could see the shoes and pants legs of diners near where the stairway wound into the second floor.
A husky blond barmaid without a waist, wearing a floor- length print skirt and a melancholy expression, came out from behind the long bar and took their orders. Nudger asked for Seven-Up over ice; Sandra Reckoner nodded to the barmaid as if she knew her and asked for Scotch on the rocks. The barmaid went back behind the bar and did something that caused soft sax music to drift out from speakers hidden around the place; considerate of her, since the morning was young and they were the only downstairs customers.
"Kind of early for me to be drinking high-proof stuff," Nudger said, when their drinks were placed before them on cork coasters featuring superimposed photos of well-known jazz musicians. He sipped his Seven-Up and set the glass down smack on the grinning face of poor Pete Fountain.
"The hour makes no difference to me," Sandra said. "People pay too much attention to clocks. I drink when I need a drink, which is often." Nudger doubted that she was telling him she was an alcoholic. She showed no signs of the disease; she glowed with that disturbingly good health that upsets male libidos. "Oh, I get drunk now and then," she said suddenly. "I enjoy it. Getting a little goosed once in a while makes my life more acceptable to me."
"What in your life do you find hard to accept?" Nudger asked, knowing the answer.
"What you were talking to my husband about: Ineida Mann. And so many others like her." She took a pull of Scotch. "Hell, they all look alike. Ever noticed how young girls nowadays seem sort of mass-produced?"