In the kitchen, finishing up, she said, "I've got something in mind."
"That's a good sign."
"Yeah. It is. I'm thinking about layin' up in the Jacuzzi with a bottle of wine and something nifty on the stereo. And I'm interested in company. Not generic company, either. I was thinking of you." And gave me a big girl look.
Cindy's a big girl in every sense but the literal. Or, to be specific, the vertical. She's just a few inches over five feet. I met her nearly two years ago when she drove in to check out the work we were doing on the place. She's a flight attendant, for United, and, planning to relocate her base from San Francisco to Honolulu, had heard about my piece of paradise through one of those hearsay linkages that makes you glad it's not admissible in court.
She moved in while the work was going on around her, just as I had.
One day back then she strolled up to me as I was struggling with something in the yard, maybe the wrought iron sections of the back fence that protect my flower beds. I was stripped to the waist and drenched in sweat. She was wearing shorts and a skimpy tank top that stopped way short of her belly button. She carried a pitcher of lemonade and two plastic glasses.
She said, "Damn, you look good. Take a break." And sat down on the lawn in the lotus position and poured the lemonade. I joined her. I looked at her crotch, I couldn't help it, and then the rest of her. Light brown hair streaked with blond and worn to her shoulders. Green eyes full of mischief. And a mouth that's always just coming off a sensual little smile or working up to one. And I thought how good it was to be alive.
She took a big drink and said, "A little business?" It was a question. I nodded. "Here's the thing, Harry. I've got the strongest sex drive any girl was ever born with. No kiddin'. I'm a walking orgasm. If there was anything to that bullshit about nymphomania, I'd be the poster girl. Okay? Take my word for it. In fact, you're gonna have to take my word for it. That's what we're talking about. I want you to know I've been wondering if I oughtta come out here and tell you I'm not gonna live here, I'm gonna live someplace else, just so I can fuck your ears off every time I take a notion. Because, dumb as I can be sometimes, I'm not gonna be dumb enough to live here in this lovely place and carry on with you at the same time. That would be world-class stupid. So, I've been thinking I'd come out here and tell you I'm clearing out, moving on, so, what the hell, let's go to the nearest soft place and get it on."
She paused and took another drink, holding her hand up, palm out, to let me know she had more to say and it wasn't yet my turn to talk. She lowered the glass, wiggled her butt into the lawn, and said, "And I think it would be the heroin of sex. Addictive. I do. I really do. Ohhh, I tremble just thinkin' about it. But I've come to my senses. I keep looking around at what you're doing here, what this place is going to look like when you're finished, and I keep noticing what kind of a fine guy you are, a really good guy, and I think, Cindy, this place can be your home if you'll just let this hunk here be a damn good friend and nothing else. So that's what I've decided. And I thought you ought to be the first, the second counting me, the second person to know. Harry Pines, you are off limits for me and I'm off limits for you. Until and unless one of us takes up residence someplace else. Understood?"
I wiped sweat from my face and said, "Cindy, you're evicted."
She dumped her lemonade in my lap.
***
In the kitchen, wiping the counters clean, I considered her Jacuzzi proposition. I figured it was innocent, devoid of any carnal agenda, but I thought, what the hell, she's good company and a great friend, and decided to go along with it anyway. I said, "Okay. But first I'm going to take a long walk on the beach with a Dominican Cohiba."
"Won't bother me if you smoke it in the Jacuzzi," she said.
"I've tried that. It gets soggy."
A while later, when I came in from the beach I saw low lights spilling from the Great Room onto the back lanai and heard Diana Krall singing "I Love You Just The Way You Are" and got jealous of Elvis Costello all over again. I crossed the yard and took the three steps up to the lanai and heard Cindy, off to my left, say, in a low, throaty voice, "Hey, Batman."
She was in the Jacuzzi, leaning against the back side of it, her arms spread along the ledge, a wine glass by one hand, a wine bottle by the other, and her glorious breasts floating unadorned in warm bubbles below a smile that said I bet you never saw anything much better than this your whole life long.
I took a slow admiring look and ended up on her eyes. I said, "Can you keep a secret?"
"Sure."
"I'm only human."
"Good. Can you keep one?"
"Sure."
"Then no one'll ever know."
"What about that heroin thing?"
"You'll have to sweat it out."
"No, I'm worried about you."
She giggled. She slid her hands into the water and wiggled and came up with the bottom of the missing top, tossed it aside. "See what's there on the table?" It was an empty wine glass. She raised the bottle. I unbuttoned my shirt and let it fall, loosened the drawstring on my shorts and dropped them at my feet, and got rid of my Ralphs and my shoes. I took the glass, stepped into the water and waded across to the bottle. She filled my glass. She put the bottle down, dipped her finger in her wine, and touched it to the end of my pecker which, having a mind of its own, didn't need the encouragement.
She raised her glass to mine, said, "To a long overdue indulgence." I drank mine empty in one long swallow. She laughed and did the same. I lowered into the water. She took my glass from me and put it, and hers, on the ledge. She reached her hands behind my head, took my neck in two strong palms, and pulled my face to hers. With her mouth an inch from mine, she said, "Here's the deal, Harry. I love you and you love me. Friends don't get better than us. But we're never going to couple up. Never. Trust me on that. Women know that kind of thing. This might happen again and it might not. I think maybe eighty-twenty against, probably more like ninety-ten. But either way it's not going to interfere with anything more important for either of us. Anything. Can you handle it?"
"Shut up," I explained.
With our faces still close, I ran my thumbs along the soft inside of her thighs to the crease where they met her torso and played there. After a minute, I worked my thumbs gently on her vagina, spread it open and dawdled some more. Then I slid just slightly inside her. She sighed and brought her lips even closer to mine, still not touching, and said, "I want to get fucked without getting kissed."
We scarcely moved our bodies for longer than I would have thought possible, brought each other to climax with grips and grasps and muscle stunts, stared in each other's eyes and didn't kiss. When she came, she shuddered over and over and drool appeared at the side of her mouth and I lapped it up it with my tongue and then her chin fell to her chest and I kissed the top of her head.
She expelled me with a little squeeze, took a deep breath and stood up. She gathered her suit and the wine bottle in one hand, said, "Bring the glasses," and grabbed a good hold of the hair on the top of my head and pulled me up. We went up the back stairs to my balcony and to my bedroom.
We slept now and then, I'm sure, because I remember dreaming. But not for long. Seems to me a little twice-thinking's a good idea before going to the mattress but, once there, I'm big on reckless abandon. So was Cindy.
When the sun crept in, she said, "I'm ruined, Harry. I need to sleep now. And you've got a flight to catch."
She rolled over and fell asleep and I got up. In the shower I thought about consequences and then decided I'd let Cindy be the exception that proves the prime oxymoron.
Two
Sunday, December 7
A loft in Chicago
When we made altitude, I opened my PowerBook to read the files Muhammad had asked Francis to prepare and pass on.
I can get pretty feisty about my civil liberties, especially my privacy. Neither you nor any pretense of a well-intentioned government has the right to know my business. Th
at's what we said when we defied George III at Yorktown and that's what I said to George II, no matter how many terrorist attacks we endure. The trouble with trading privacy for security is you can't get delivery on the back end. Our government can't make us safe from terrorists, not the way they operate. No government can. Besides, fear never killed anybody. Ignoring it's what kills you.
But the issue is, as the legal scholars would say, moot. Our privacy is long gone.
We have filled out too many forms, answered too many questions, and used too much plastic as we've gone about our business. Then we developed the digitized electronic community called the Internet and it became the depository for all that information. Thousands of people have the skills to peer in, peel back the curtains, and extract it. I have but to pay the piper and you stand naked before me. Metaphorically.
Francis Beauchamp is my piper, and I use him without a second thought whenever I'm working. Long ago I stopped pondering the morality of what I do and how I get it done. I know I have no right to invade the privacy of the people arrayed before me. But I also know that I can, and so I do. I use what I learn to beat up the bad ones and protect the good ones. And who gets to decide who's good and who's bad? Me. I'm Solomon. Spare me the scolding.
The subject of my most recent invasion at Francis's hands is dead, so the debate is all the more pointless. Her name was Erica Rose Conway, known in her modeling years as Erica Rose. She grew up an only child in Springfield, the Illinois capitol city, attended Lanphier High School where she was Homecoming Queen and voted Most Likely to Become a Movie Star. She spent three years at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, reprising her role as Homecoming Queen. Not much of a student apparently, but strong in other areas.
At 21, she got a modeling contract that took her to Chicago where she made a lot of local and regional covers and did runway work and advertising layouts. Modeling at that level is long on glamour but short on money. It provides a living somewhere between meager and modest, and it's heavily burdened with the cost of keeping up appearances.
After six years of that, which was interrupted by a year in Los Angeles that didn't make her a movie star, Erica took a real job, but probably one that continued to play to her strength of stopping men dead in their tracks. She was hired as Special Promotions Director by a company called StarChains. The company signed contracts with rising stars in sports and entertainment and, when their trajectory was just right, opened themed restaurants playing off their status. It wasn't clear, according to Francis, precisely what Erica's corporate duties were, but I'm sure it had something to do with drawing a crowd.
The StarChains founder, I knew apart from Francis, was Illinois Governor Michael Stratton. I remembered that Stratton sold his stake in StarChains for something like $300 million before he got into politics. I was still working in Chicago at Serena's back then, a year or two before I hit the Del Mar Pick Six that I used to buy my share of paradise on Kailua Bay. As I read this at 38,000 feet over the Pacific, Stratton was three years into his term as governor and talked about as a possible presidential contender. He had the essentials: money, ambition, good looks, and no inconvenient scruples. What else matters?
Erica Conway left StarChains when the sale went through and walked away with what Francis discovered was a $400,000 lump sum payment; kind of a big parachute, I thought, for her length of service and title, but I don't know much about that kind of thing. Maybe she'd made powerful friends. And, with no evidence of a job, she continued to deposit $10,000 on the first of every month for the next two-plus years. It dropped to $7,500 six months before she died. The last deposit was October 1st. None was made in November. She died on the 3rd of November, a Monday, in her million dollar condo on Chicago's Gold Coast.
The accused, Jack Netherland, had been promoted from Sun-Times sports reporter to sports columnist since I was there. Columnist is the kind of job that brings opportunities for exposure, and income, on the many sports talk shows that cable television and radio consume. He had also found the time to write a book called "Rich Men and Their Sweat-Soaked Toys," a profile of twelve owners of major sports franchises. It sold about 30,000 copies, according to Francis, which added to Jack's stature as well as to his bank balance.
Jack had written about sports beginning in high school at Winnetka's New Trier and through college at Notre Dame. After Notre Dame, the Sun-Times hired him and he'd been there ever since. He married Rita Norman fifteen years ago and they have a 14-year-old son named John Norman. Jack Netherland lived the American Dream until, at the age of 39, he ended up in bed with dead Erica Rose Conway behind doors and windows locked from the inside.
I closed the laptop and closed my eyes. I wondered what would go through the mind of a woman in her early thirties for whom great beauty, and whatever personality she had as an accessory, had been the sustaining attribute of her life. It would be scary. She'd notice the next set coming along behind her, the girls she had been ten years before, and she would have to know that unless she could change the fundamental structure of her life, her hand was a loser. Maybe not now, maybe, if she were clever, not for years to come, but inevitably she would begin to lose and, ultimately, never win again.
It would get her attention. It might even get her killed.
***
The flight was full of Chicagoans returning from vacation and as we disembarked at O'Hare a waiting throng met us with cameras and happy faces. I even got my picture taken by a pretty blond woman who smiled at me like she thought I was cute. Ah, affirmation.
That night, at Muhammad and Serena's big brownstone in Old Town, after I unpacked, we sat around a roaring fire getting caught up. Serena insisted that Jack Netherland was innocent.
"Don't think of me as an emotional woman protecting a good friend when I say this, Harry," she said. "Think of me as in harmony with the cosmos. Jack is innocent. Convict him of adultery and stupidity and put him in one of those public stockades where we can all walk past and spit in his eye and slap his silly face. But he's no killer.
"He was drunk and, they say, you know what alcohol does to a person. Well, yes, I do know. Alcohol doesn't make a good man into a bad man, no matter the fable of Jekyll and Hyde. Alcohol doesn't change you. It releases you. It exaggerates your reality. If Jack had been full of pain and hate and violence, then getting drunk could have made him a murderer. But he was not! He was a happy man. He just got one of those things you idiots get when a woman tells you lies. You are putty in our hands, Harry. If any one of us wants to take any one of you to bed, you're there, mister. We know that! We all know that. That's why we check up on you so much. You're stupid little boys 'til the day you die and we're your grownups.
"Jack was probably slobbering all over himself climbing into bed with that woman, but the last thing on God's earth he would have done is kill her. If she'd passed out, he'd have walked her around the room for hours with only one thought in mind. Getting her back in bed!"
I think it's fair to call that insisting.
***
Monday, December 8
On Sunday, in nearly nine hours in an aluminum tube, I crossed too many time zones, inhaled too much synthetic air, and got too little exercise. Drank some, too. And slept too little the night before. And when you fly a long way from left to right, jet lag is ten times worse than right to left. I'm sure there's a perfectly good explanation for that, but Monday morning, feeling like a bar rag, I was in no mood to think about it.
Besides, it was cold.
Serena served croissants with honey and Red Eye coffee. Rita Netherland came over to talk about the case. The effect of the coffee and the force field of Rita brought me out of it. I started to come around.
A woman standing tall for her man compels respect. And more, it made Rita seriously appealing. Her black hair, cobalt eyes, and great facial bones were part of it, plus she's comfortable with the way her girl's body has matured into a woman's.
But there's more to sex appeal than that. I'm as shallow as the
next guy, although I may be a little more inclined to grade on the curve. I like women who look good, smell good, and sound good. When they sound good--and I'm talking about content as much as tone--there's a better chance whatever might happen will be almost as much fun standing up as lying down. But none of it works for me unless she has an attitude that says I enjoy being ornamental, but if you want to push it, I can go long. And deep. Rita had that quality. Valerie has it in spades. Serena, too. Women don't have to be young to be a turn-on. It's probably easier if they're not. Maybe attitude's the wrong word. Maybe it's wisdom.
"Do you want to know anything about me?" I asked Rita. "Since you've only previously known me as a waiter and a busboy."
"No. Muhammad's word is good enough for me. I would like to hear that you won't be divided."
"Divided? Where does that come from?"
"I think Ben Brill may be divided. Awfully busy, for one. Self-protective, for another. Of his reputation, I mean. His batting average."
"How did you happen to hire him?"
"Jack's publisher recommended him. They've set up a defense fund at the paper to help with the cost."
"So, you weren't really in a position to turn down the lawyer he suggested."
"No, I wasn't. But he has a good reputation."
"Does he know you've hired me?"
"Not you specifically. But I met with him last week and told him I was thinking about hiring someone to investigate this...more aggressively. It didn't go down well. He said if I wanted a private eye, he'd hire one. I told him to think of me as someone who'd just had a diagnosis of terminal cancer and thought why not get a second opinion. An independent opinion. He was not happy about it."
"I guess not. Well, I'm not divided. And I won't be deterred. I'll make waves, cause trouble, piss people off. But for only one purpose. Finding out what really happened. If I conclude that Jack really did it just as they say, I'll tell you that. But this woman lived her life in rare air. Almost certainly there were other people much more likely to be threats to her safety and her life than Jack. I'll start by finding those people. And Serena makes a pretty convincing case for his innocence based on what she knows about human nature. The male version."
Exit Blood (Barefield Book 2) Page 30