He went through the story tersely – the ugly death of a pretty young woman, and the waves that had risen in its wake.
"Baird suggested, with his usual tact, that I'm getting old," he finished. He took another long drink. "Maybe he's right."
"That's ridiculous. You know it and so does he. He's just upset."
"He sure doesn't want any dust settling on Welles D'Anton's halo."
"I used to hear that name a lot," she said. "When I was working for those big-shot executives. Their wives were crazy about D'Anton. It was a status thing, like driving a Rolls. They'd pay a fortune for a Botox injection."
Monks recalled Larrabee's question about how a struggling actress like Eden Hale had been able to afford the surgeon to the rich and famous.
"He's got his own style, that's for sure," Monks said. "That clinic had the feel of a French whorehouse."
"Really?" she said archly. "You know that from experience?"
Only once, Monks thought, and it was true, the place hadn't been anything like D'Anton's clinic. He decided not to elaborate.
"Just a figure of speech," he said.
"He's supposed to have a magic touch," Martine said. "Fountain of youth, you know? But from what I could tell, his results were pretty much the same as any other decent plastic surgeon's. I think he's just managed to develop that mystique."
Monks drank again. "Why'd she have to get her breasts done anyway?" he growled, suddenly, unreasonably, angry about it. "They looked fine."
Martine shot a glance at him, swift and cool.
"You must have watched those movies very closely."
"Sorry," he said. "I mean – you know what I mean."
"Women are all wrapped up about beauty, Carroll. All the time and money we spend on hair, skin care, clothes. Look through a Victoria's Secret catalog some time. That's a zillion-dollar market, and those aren't even things that most other people see. It has everything to do with how we think of ourselves. Like me. After my accident, I knew I'd never be beautiful."
He slipped his arm around her waist, pulling her close. "You're a vision," he said.
"Not like what you think is beautiful when you're ten. Baywatch babes in bikinis, bouncing down the beach. It was something about myself I never trusted. I never believed any man would really want me." She shrugged. "Of course, women who are beautiful probably figure that's the only reason men want them."
Monks had never thought of it quite like that. Women were damned either way.
"There's an endless supply of pretty girls," he said. "They're being born every minute. Delectable fruit on the great tree of life. But youth and beauty fade away and pass on, even as the morning dew evaporateth in the sunlight."
She smiled wryly. "Sounds like you didn't get any sleep."
"What I'm trying to tell you is, you're not just a knockout. There's a lot more to you."
"I know a line when I hear one. You must be wiped out."
"Pretty much," he admitted.
"Did you eat, at least?"
"Coffee."
"Idiot. I bought steaks. Start the grill when you're ready."
He nodded, but went into the kitchen first and refilled his glass with vodka. He knew he had to be careful. Tomorrow was going to be bad enough in many ways, without the crippling burden of a hangover. One or two drinks would not hurt.
The problem was that one or two had never done him any good.
He got the grill going and the thick steaks cooking. He fed choice bits to the three cats who prowled like thugs demanding tribute – Felicity, the neurotic calico; Cesare Borgia, black, scarred, and streetwise; and Omar, the eighteen-pound blue Persian.
Cats were like creatures in dreams, operating with a logic that seemed to make perfect sense to them, although it was mostly impenetrable to humans. Monks was convinced that the real reason cats had become domesticated – or more probably, deigned to start hanging out with people – had nothing to do with anything so mundane as food or safety. It was because they had discovered the pleasures of hand and lap. The two males would stalk him, trying to trip him into sitting, then leap on him and pin him down by assuming a gravity of several times their actual weight. The calico would shamelessly offer her belly to be petted, then clasp his hand with her forepaws, licking it and drooling. He speculated that instinct told her it was the butting heads of the kittens she had never had.
He had brought several women to the house over the years since his divorce. The cats had treated them with a mixture of jealousy and contempt – with Felicity going so far as to burrow between the two humans in bed, trying to literally kick the intruding female out – and had outlasted them all. But they had loved Martine immediately. Now Monks was the one who felt their cold stares, particularly after he had been gone working for a night. He remembered that the first emotion he had felt about her was an urge to protect. Maybe it was the same with the cats.
Three or four drinks would be okay, he decided. But not five or six.
By the time the steaks were done, the knots in his brain were dissolving. He went into the kitchen to fill his glass one last time. Martine was putting together linguine with Parmesan and garlic.
'Tell me the truth," Monks said. "Are you getting bored with me?"
She looked surprised. "Don't be silly." Then she glanced at his glass. "How many of those have you had?"
This irritated Monks. "I'm doing fine," he said, careful to enunciate the words precisely.
"On an empty stomach, with no sleep?"
"If you want to play nurse, why don't you put on a uniform?"
She turned away stiffly. He had meant it as a joke, or at least he thought he had. He had been told that sometimes there was an edge to his voice that he himself did not hear. The edge tended to sharpen, and his hearing to dim, with alcohol.
"What makes you think I'm getting bored?" she said.
"The way you've been talking about getting back into practice."
"What's the matter with that? I spend half my life becoming a doctor, and I'm not supposed to practice?"
"Of course you are," he said. "I'm just wondering, you know, where. When. All that."
She turned to face him full on, holding a long wooden spoon like a fencing sword. "Why's this coming up now?"
"Well, it has to sooner or later. Don't you think I deserve to know?"
"Know what? I haven't decided anything yet."
"Know what you haven't decided, then."
"You're a little drunk, Carroll. This isn't funny."
"'Drunk' is a relative term, Martine. Strictly speaking, you have never seen me drunk. Drunk is a fifth or two of liquor in a day, and that's really only the beginning of drunk, because it can be sustained indefinitely."
"Do you turn into a different person?" In his brain flared a dizzy, fragmented memory of a night when he had looped a black silk scarf around the slender neck of Alison Chapley – a sexual game, one that she had initiated – and barely caught himself before she had stopped breathing for good.
"In vino, Veritas" he said.
"My lowbrow education didn't include Latin."
"There is truth in wine.' Are you moving out?"
There was a longish hesitation before she answered. "I never really moved in."
Monks nodded. "It's been seeming more and more like that."
He walked back outside and leaned his forearms on the deck railing. The creek at the bottom of his sloping property was silent now, the last sluggish rivulets from the winter rains dried into a few scattered pools. They would be gone, too, soon. Evening came early up here in the woods, and jays flitted through the thick madrone foliage on their last errands, big birds that crashed around like vandals, flashes of iridescent blue that appeared with jarring swiftness at the corners of your vision and left again by the time you turned your head. They usually woke him at first light, seeming to take malicious pleasure in perching outside his window and screeching until he hauled himself to his feet. Martine Rostanov had been with him for more than a year – since the two of them had nearly been killed together. She had uncovered the fact that a giant software corporation, getting into the business of genetic manipulation, was using fetuses that were deliberately aborted for the purpose. Monks had gotten caught up with her in exposing this. When it was over, on a foggy March dawn, they had stumbled back to this house, singed, shocked, and exhausted, and made love right here on the deck.