Did seem to be, Tal agreed silently. And it got even more solid when LaTour found the boarding pass and ticket receipt in her purse.
Tal’s phone began ringing and he was happy for the chance to escape from Sandra’s searing fury. He heard Shellee speak from the receiver. “Hey, Boss, ‘s’me.”
“What’s up?”
“Crime Scene called. They went through all the ash in the Whitleys’ fireplace, looking for a letter or something about changing the will. They didn’t find anything about that at all. Something had been burned but it was all just a bunch of information on companies — computer and biotech companies. The Crime Scene guy was thinking Mr. Whitley might’ve just used some old junk mail or something to start the fire.”
Once again: Oh.
Then: Damn.
“Thanks.”
He nodded LaTour aside and told him what Crime Scene had reported.
“Shit on the street,” he whispered. “Jumped a little fast here... Okay, let’s go kiss some ass. Brother.”
The groveling time was quite limited — Sandra was adamant about catching her plane. She sped out of the driveway, leaving behind a blue cloud of tire smoke.
“Aw, she’ll forget about it,” LaTour said.
“You think?” Tal asked.
A pause. “Nope. We’re way fucked.” He added, “We still gotta find the mysterious babe in the sunglasses and hat.” They climbed into the car and LaTour pulled into traffic.
Tal wondered if Mac McCaffrey might’ve seen someone like that around the Whitleys’ place. Besides, it’d be a good excuse to see her again. Tal said, “I’ll look into that one.”
“You?” LaTour laughed.
“Yeah. Me. What’s so funny about that?”
“I don’t know. Just you never investigated a case before.”
“So? You think I can’t interview witnesses on my own? You think I should just go back home and hump my calculator?”
Silence. Tal hadn’t meant to say it.
“You heard that?” LaTour finally asked, no longer laughing.
“I heard.”
“Hey, I didn’t mean it, you know.”
“Didn’t mean it?” Tal asked, giving an exaggerated squint. “As in you didn’t mean for me to hear you? Or as in you don’t actually believe I have sex with adding machines?”
“I’m sorry, okay?... I bust people’s chops sometimes. It’s the way I am. I do it to everybody. Fuck, people do it to me. They call me Bear ’causa my gut. They call you Einstein ‘cause you’re smart.”
“Not to my face.”
LaTour hesitated. “You’re right. Not to your face... You know, you’re too polite, Tal. You can give me a lot more shit. I wouldn’t mind. You’re too uptight. Loosen up.”
“So it’s my fault that I’m pissed ‘cause you dump on me?”
“It was...” He began defensively but then he stopped. “Okay, I’m sorry. I am... Hey, I don’t apologize a lot, you know. I’m not very good at it.”
“That’s an apology?”
“I’m doing the best I can... Whatta you want?”
Silence.
“All right,” Tal said finally.
LaTour sped the car around a corner and wove frighteningly through the heavy traffic. Finally he said, “It’s okay, though, you know.”
“What’s okay?”
“If you want to.”
“Want to what?” Tal asked.
“You know, you and your calculator... Lot safer than some of the weird shit you see nowadays.”
“LaTour,” Tal said, “you can—”
“You just seemed defensive about it, you know. Figure I probably hit close to home, you know what I’m saying?”
“You can go fuck yourself.”
The huge cop was laughing hard. “Shit, don’tcha feel like we’re finally breaking the ice here? I think we are. Now, I’ll drop you off back at your car, Einstein, and you can go on this secret mission all by your lonesome.”
His stated purpose was to ask her if she’d ever seen the mysterious woman in the baseball cap and sunglasses, driving a small car, at the Whitleys’ house.
Lame, Tal thought.
Lame and transparent — since he could’ve asked her that on the phone. He was sure the true mission here was so obvious that it was laughable: To get a feel for what would happen if he asked Mac McCaffrey out to dinner. Not to actually invite her out at this point, of course; she was, after all, a potential witness. No, he just wanted to test the waters.
Tal parked along Elm Street and climbed out of the car, enjoying the complicated smells of the April air, the skin-temperature breeze, the golden snowflakes of fallen forsythia petals covering the lawn.
Walking toward the park where he’d arranged to meet her, Tal reflected on his recent romantic life.
Fine, he concluded. It was fine.
He dated 2.66 women a month. The median age of his dates in the past 12 months was approximately 31 (a number skewed somewhat by the embarrassing — but highly memorable — outlier of a Columbia University senior). And the mean IQ of the women was around 140 or up — and that latter statistic was a very sharp bell curve with a very narrow standard deviation; Talbot Simms went for intellect before anything else.
It was this latter criteria, though, he’d come to believe lately, that led to the tepid adjective “fine.”
Yes, he’d had many interesting evenings with his 2 % dates every month. He’d discussed with them Cartesian hyperbolic doubt. He’d argue about the validity of analyzing objects in terms of their primary qualities (“No way! I’m suspicious of secondary qualities too... I mean, how ‘bout that? We have a lot in common!”) They’d draft mathematical formulae in crayon on the paper table coverings at the Crab House. They’d discuss Fermat’s Last Theorem until 2:00 or 3:00 A.M. (These were not wholly academic encounters, of course; Tal Simms happened to have a full-size chalkboard in his bedroom).
He was intellectually stimulated by most of these women. He even learned things from them.
But he didn’t really have a lot of fun.
Mac McCaffrey, he believed, would be fun.
She’d sounded surprised when he’d called. Cautious too at first. But after a minute or two she’d relaxed and had seemed almost pleased at the idea that he wanted to meet with her.
He now spotted her in the park next to the Knickerbocker Home, which appeared to be a nursing facility, where she suggested they get together.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hi there. Hope you don’t mind meeting outside. I hate to be cooped up.”
He recalled the Sierra Club posters in her office. “No, it’s beautiful here.”
Her sharp green eyes, set in her freckled face, looked away and took in the sights of the park. Tal sat down and they made small talk for five minutes or so. Finally she asked, “You started to tell me that you’re, what, a mathematician?”
“That’s right.”
She smiled. There was crookedness to her mouth, an asymmetry, which he found charming. “That’s pretty cool. You could be on a TV series. Like CSL or Law and Order, you know. Call it Math Cop.”
They laughed. He glanced down at her shoes, old black Reeboks, and saw they were nearly worn out. He noticed too a bare spot on the knee of her jeans. It’d been rewoven. He thought of cardiologist Anthony Sheldon’s designer wardrobe and huge office, and reflected that Mac worked in an entirely different part of the health care universe.