The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes

by Lawrence Block

  “All the same,” he said, “you’re hot.”

  “You didn’t hit on me.”

  “I thought about it,” he said. He hadn’t, but it was something to say, and he’d no sooner said it than he felt her hand on his crotch, copping a quick feel.

  “Okay,” she said softly, letting go of him and moving to the side. “The guest bathroom’s off the kitchen. Lock the door and wait.”

  She kept him waiting just long enough to suspect she’d probably thought better of it, and then there was a quiet knock on the door. “It’s me,” she said, and he opened the door. She slipped in, turned the lock, and got up on her tiptoes for a kiss. She’d been drinking something sweet and her mouth tasted of it, and when he put his tongue in her mouth she sucked on it, and he thought, Jesus, is this happening? In a fucking bathroom?

  Then her hand was on his crotch, only this time she was lowering his zipper and taking what she wanted.

  She said, “Oh, good. You’re circumcised.”

  “I didn’t know you were Jewish.”

  “I’m not,” she said. “I’m just particular about what I put in my mouth.”

  Phyllis, skinny little thing, no tits, no ass, and none of that mattered.

  “Choke me, will you? Come on, how tricky is that? Use both hands, put ’em around my throat, and choke me a little. Not too hard. Oh, that’s nice. A little harder, just a little bit. Oh, yeah.”

  Weird, that part. He’d have to tell Lisa, wondered what she would make of it.

  He finished the beer, thought about getting another, found it easier to stay where he was, looking out at the water. Found it too easy to stay there, he knew, and he couldn’t stay there much longer, because with the sun down the bugs would be coming around soon. So many of the little bastards with nothing better to do than fly around looking for somebody to bite.

  Time to shut off the flow of memories. Time to get off his ass and do something.

  George and Lisa Otterbein lived in a three-story house built of quarried stone and located exactly a mile and a half north of the Belle Vista town line. The house was at the top of a rise, a feature less common in Florida than elsewhere, and a white rail fence girdled the eight-acre property. The house could have been plucked from one of those sleepy villages along the Delaware, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, say, or New Jersey’s Hunterdon County. And the rail fence put you in mind of horse farms in Kentucky, and a mint julep in a frosty glass.

  There was a good-sized pond, too, and trees, live oak and sweetgum, dripping with Spanish moss.

  He didn’t stop, but slowed down as he drove past the place. Place? The Otterbein Estate, that’s what it was, and yes, he was impressed. Who wouldn’t be?

  George had lived here with Jo, had raised his kids here, and moved Lisa into the house when he married her. Doak had heard tell of second wives who bridled at the idea of moving into another woman’s house, but he figured it might depend on the house. A three-bedroom cube in Levittown was one thing, a stone mansion was a whole ’nother story.

  She must have felt like a queen here. Or a princess, given the age difference. A princess living in a palace, that’s how she would have felt.

  Until she didn’t.

  A princess in a tower, and instead of letting down her long black hair she’d cut it off and gone back to work. And one night she’d picked out a man with a raffish reputation and asked him to hook her up with a murderer.

  And so on.

  A hell of a way for a girl to meet her soul mate, her other half. He pointed the Monte Carlo away from Chez Otterbein, drove without paying much attention to the route he was taking. Jesus, the damn fantasy, two lovers sufficiently besotted with each other to walk away from everything they had. Easy for him to spin that yarn, because what did he ever have that it would pain him to walk away from? A low-rent house he never cared about, a low-rent life that was no pleasure to live. And a wife he couldn’t stand—and, it had turned out, who couldn’t stand him, either.

  Who could expect a woman like Lisa to walk away from that big pile of stone? Who in his right mind would ask her to head out for the territories in his broken-down Chevy? Never mind that she drove a Lexus. He’d be willing to bet there were at least five other vehicles garaged at the Otterbein estate, and even the riding mower had to be worth more than the piece of shit he was driving.

  Go ahead, try to picture her in the house on Osprey Drive. Once, maybe, before George Otterbein, before the stone house, before all the money. If the timing had been different, if their paths had crossed before she ever met the old man, before she got used to a life he’d never be able to afford. Maybe the same chemistry that worked for them now would have been there in that alternate universe, and they could work side by side at the kitchen table. She could keep the books and send out invoices, and he could teach her the handful of skills and street knowledge you needed in his business. Hell, she’d be a natural at undercover work, and she’d enjoy it, learn to make a game of it. Miller & Yarrow, Confidential Investigations . . .

  Yeah, right.

  It was hard enough to bring the image into focus, and that was before you reminded yourself it could never have happened because the timing could never have been right. It had taken every bit of his past and every bit of hers to bring them here now at the same time, at what was probably the only moment of their mutual lives when they were ready for each other.

  And consider this. If that was what she’d wanted, a love match that partnered her with a guy who had to work for a living, she’d have found it a lot sooner in her hopscotch pilgrimage from Minnesota to Florida.

  With her looks, her manner, she’d never have been involuntarily alone. She’d have had men around her all the time. She wouldn’t have had any trouble finding one to marry her.

  The one she found was George Otterbein. And he might be twice her age, but that didn’t mean he’d snatched her from the cradle. She’d lived more than a handful of years, a grown woman on her own, before Otterbein came into the picture.

  Picture Lisa Yarrow on Osprey Drive?

  No, I don’t think so. But what if you flip the negative.

  Could you picture Doak Miller leaning back in a recliner on a couple of acres of lawn? With a big stone house behind him, and a pond, and a rail fence?

  How would that strike the eye?

  Things to do.

  Sixteen

  * * *

  He stopped at an ATM, got some cash. Drove south and east for half an hour, slowed down, and passed four motels before he found one that looked right.

  He pulled up in front of the office. He saw a security camera positioned above the entrance, but they were everywhere these days, and he’d be a long time finding a motel without one. He reached into the backseat for a ball cap, wore it low over his eyes.

  The woman behind the counter was chewing gum. If it was to keep her awake, well, that was a lot to expect from a strip of Juicy Fruit. She was long and lean and wasted, with bad skin and bad tattoos, a played-out tweaker who could only have been hired by an incurable optimist. Or a relative, hoping Florrie Mae could just put in her hours without giving the store away or burning it down.

  He was looking for a room for a week, he said. Something in the back, something quiet.

  She said they did, and quoted him a day rate. He reminded her he’d want it by the week. Be seven times the day rate, she said, and he pointed out that the sign out front offered weekly rates. She frowned and picked up the phone, relaying the inquiry to someone in another part of the unit, then bounced the answer back to him.

  “You’d have to pay in advance. Pay for six days, get one for free. Sixty a night times six . . .”

  “That’s three-sixty,” he said.

  “Plus the tax.”

  “Make it three-fifty even,” he said, “and forget the tax, and I’ll give you seven hundred now for the next two weeks.”

  He figured anybody would say yes to that, and he’d have paid cash anyway, but this gave him a dollars-and-
cents reason to pay cash, and gave the owner a reason to keep the whole thing off the books. She checked with whoever was on the other end of the phone, and nodded as she replaced the receiver.

  “Be fine,” she said, and put a key on the counter. “So that’s seven hundred dollars plus—no, sorry, not plus anything. Just seven hundred dollars.”

  There was a registration card to fill out. He’d already decided to be Martin Williams from Brunswick, Georgia. There was a place for the car’s tag number, and he used his own tag with a couple of numbers reversed, and indicated it was a Georgia license.

  She could have asked to see a driver’s license. He had a reasonable assortment of fake ID, some of it pretty convincing, but none of it with Martin Williams’s name on it, none of it licensing its possessor to operate a motor vehicle in the state of Georgia. So if she asked for ID he’d have had to feign indignation and march on out of there, repeating his act at the next suitable motel down the road.

  But why would she ask to see his license? It’s not as if he’d asked to borrow her car. And she spent all her working hours checking in people unlikely to give their real names, let alone carry ID to back them up.

  “I got a few weeks work in the area,” he told her, “and the schedule’s crazy, so I’ll be keeping odd hours. I wouldn’t want the maid coming in while I’m sleeping.”

  “You put out the doughnut,” she said, “and won’t nobody disturb you unless the building’s on fire.”

  “The doughnut?”

  She rolled her eyes. “The sign, Do Not Disturb. You hang it on the doorknob. Don’t y’all call that a doughnut?”

  “Never used to,” he said, “but I guess I will from now on.”

  The room was about what you’d expect. The TV was small, and fifteen or twenty years old, and mounted so high on the wall you’d get a stiff neck watching it, but he hadn’t booked the place so they could watch Vanna White earn big bucks turning letters. The walls sported fake wood-grain paneling, and the toilet had a strip fastened around the seat, announcing that it had been sanitized for his protection. He’d have found that more reassuring if it had also been flushed, but someone had missed that particular step. He flushed it, and determined that it was at least in working order. That was something.

  The dresser bore several scars from unattended cigarettes, and the drapes held the smell of cigarette smoke. He’d never thought to ask for a non-smoking room, and then he saw the sign: this was a non-smoking room. That explained the absence of ashtrays, which in turn explained the burns on the dresser—and, he noted, on the bedside tables as well.

  The bed was all right. There was decent water pressure in the shower. For the next two weeks the room was theirs, and they could come and go as they pleased without showing themselves at the front desk.

  Quite a contrast, though, with Chez Otterbein. Except a French word like chez didn’t really go with a Teutonic name like Otterbein. Haus was the German word for house, or at least it ought to be, but Haus Otterbein didn’t really cut the moutarde.

  The doughnut was reversible, Do Not Disturb on one side, with a cartoon drawing of a man sleeping; Please Make Up This Room on the other, with a drawing of a chambermaid fluffing a pillow. It was hard to imagine anybody fluffing a pillow in this room.

  He hung the doughnut on the knob, pulled the door shut, checked that the lock had engaged, and got in his car and left.

  Ten miles north on 19, he stopped at a Waffle House for eggs and hash browns and coffee. He checked the new phone, the Lisa phone. No messages, so he called and left one: Call me when you can.

  When he got home he took a shower. He checked his phone, but she hadn’t called back. He set it so that it would ring if she did, and put it down on the table next to the computer.

  Checked his email, checked the news headlines, checked a few websites he kept up with.

  Went to Google Translate. Ah, gotcha. Schloss.

  Schloss Otterbein. Meaning castle, palace, chateau, manor house, or stately home. Perfect, he thought, and the phone rang, the Lisa phone.

  “Schloss Otterbein,” he said.

  And heard nothing but silence. Oh, Jesus, he thought. What did he get, a wrong number? Or worse, if someone had picked up her phone and tried to see what it was programmed to call.

  Then, tentatively, she said, “Now what.”

  “It’s me.”

  “I figured that out, but it gave me a turn. What was that word you said before my name?”

  “Schloss,” he said, and explained its meaning. “It was no way to answer the phone, and I apologize, but I was sitting here congratulating myself for finding the right word, and right at that minute the phone rang, and, well . . .”

  “I was expecting voicemail, and instead I heard my name. It was so unexpected it didn’t register that it was your voice. You’re home?”

  “At the computer, looking up the name of your house. My name for it, that is. Does it have a name? Like The Breakers or, I don’t know—”

  “Dunrovin? Always a popular favorite. No, it doesn’t have a name. That’s the one thing about George’s rock pile that’s not pretentious.”

  “I guess you wouldn’t mistake it for a Fleetwood DoubleWide.”

  “You’ve seen it?”

  “From the street, at twenty miles an hour. A few hours ago.”

  “Was that—”

  “Safe? I didn’t ring the doorbell. I didn’t even hit the brakes. I was just doing a little light reconnaissance. Then I set out on an important mission.”

  “Oh?”

  “I rented us a love nest.”

  “Seriously?”

  “It’ll remind you of Tourist Court, with a little less in the way of rustic charm. But we’re paid in advance for the next two weeks, with nobody near us to see us or hear us.”

  “Where is it?”

  “You know where Cross City is?”

  “I think I’ve driven through it.”

  “If you drove south on 19 you’d hit it, and you’d probably drive through it, because there’s no reason to stop. Or at least there wasn’t until now.”

  “Right. That’s from a song, isn’t it? Nobody near us.”

  “To see us or hear us. ‘Tea for Two’.”

  “I wasn’t paying attention, but it must have stuck in my mind and I was hearing the music. Honey, I can’t go there now. Another late night’s not gonna work for me.”

  “I wasn’t about to suggest it.”

  “Oh, that’s good, because right now all I want to do is go home.”

  “Understood.”

  “I mean, that’s not what I want to do, but it’s what I’d really better do.”

  “I was thinking daytime,” he said. “Late morning or early afternoon, when you’d naturally be out shopping or doing wifey-type things.”

  “Wifey-type things.”

  “Maybe not the best way to put it, but—”

  “No, I was just thinking how day after day of wifey-type things made my old job look real good to me. Wifey-type things got me back to work.”

  “And made you cut your hair.”

  She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “You know my hair used to be long.”

  “Radburn mentioned it. And Google Images has pictures of you with long hair.”

  “Really? On the internet?”

  “You and George at a benefit for some disease I never heard of.”

  “Oh, I know the one you mean, and I can’t think of the name of it. Very rare, but this couple had a kid that died of it, so that became their cause. And everybody supports everybody else’s cause, so that everybody’ll have something to do on a Saturday night. Of course I had to buy a dress for the occasion. You always do, and then you’re sort of committed to donate at least as much as you spent on the dress.”

  “You were wearing your hair down.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And now it’s short, and I’m going to tell you why I cut it, but not now.”

  “Okay.”

  �
�I want very much to tell you, darling, but not over the phone. Because I might need your arms around me, either while I’m telling you or afterward.”

  “Both, if you want.”

  “Both arms? Oh, both as in both during and after. I’m a little brain dead, I want to get my body under a shower and then into bed. My head on a pillow, and if I’m lucky I’ll dream about you. Will you dream about me?”

  “It’ll be wasted if I do. I never remember my dreams.”

  “Never? I’d be glad to miss some of my dreams, but the good ones are sweet. I’ll have a sweet dream about you and tomorrow—oh, shit.”

  “Tomorrow’s a problem?”

  “Tomorrow’s what, Friday? It’s not a problem, it’s just purely impossible. But Saturday’s good. The whole morning’s free and half of the afternoon, until my shift starts at the restaurant. Can we wait until then?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll call you Saturday morning. What I won’t do is call you tomorrow, unless there’s a major problem. And don’t call me, either. Tomorrow your assignment is to get into some mischief with one of your girlfriends, the pregnant one or the married one. Except the pregnant one is married, too, isn’t she?”

  “And so are you.”

  “I was just about to say that. What is it with Doak and married ladies? The one who’s not pregnant, she’s the one who sold you your house, right? Am I remembering correctly?”

  “You are.”

  “On Osprey Drive. I don’t care which one you fuck tomorrow, just so you show up at our little love nest with a story to tell me.”

  “And you’ll tell me about the haircut.”

  “Oh, I will,” she said. “That may not be quite as much fun, but I’ll tell you.”

  Seventeen

  * * *

  In the morning he called Bob Newhouser and caught him at his desk. “I’m putting my report in the mail,” he said. “If there’s anything wrong with Raymond Fred Gartner, it flew under my radar. He comes up lily-white on all my databases, and the neighbor lady gives him a clean bill of health.”