I tried to check for breasts. The caftan wasn't giving anything away. Neither were the hands, which are usually a dead giveaway. The fingers were slender with rosy, perfectly manicured nails. One of them pointed questioningly toward the bench across from me. I nodded and unslouched.
What do you say to a person of indeterminate sex? I tried "Hello" and got the same back. The voice was light and breathy and no help at all.
The snappy waitress plunked coffee and pie down in front of me. "Would you like a soda or something?" I asked my guest.
"No, thank you." The lashes fluttered. "May I have some pie?"
The waitress had walked away. I pushed the plate across the table and drank my coffee while I studied the exquisite child eating my pie.
The face was even better up close, lightly, flawlessly made-up with a bit of emphasis on the eyes. The lashes were long, the lids painted a faint tint of the blue in the caftan. The caftan looked expensive and was backed up by jangling bracelets and dangling earrings that looked as good as Allison's jewelry.
"What's your name?" I asked.
A tiny pointed tongue licked cherry juice off the back of the fork. "Nikki, N, I, K, K, I, darling."
The spelling didn't help. Neither did the endearment.
"Is that short for something?"
"Just Nikki." The smile was impish. "I haven't seen you around here before."
"I'm from out of town."
"What are you doing here?"
I smiled, choosing my words carefully. "I'm looking for a young girl."
The lovely, androgynous face fell with disappointment. Whatever Nikki was now, he had started life as his mother's bouncing baby boy. I felt on firmer ground. "Actually, I'm looking for a specific girl." I gave him a flier from the binder.
"Oh, perfect," he said. "A private detective. What's your name?"
"Zachariah Smith."
"Zachariah is nice."
"Zachariah is downright Biblical."
A tiny line appeared between Nikki's brows. "I don't remember who he was. In the Bible, I mean."
I wondered how much time a boy in make-up and dance slippers spent reading the Bible. Maybe a lot; he seemed genuinely distressed over his failure to place the name.
"The father of John the Baptist," I said. "A bit part."
"Oh, yes. The Book of Luke. An angel told him he would have a son who would be great before the Lord. Do you believe in angels?"
"No, but if there are any, they should look just like you."
Nikki's laugh was light and tinkly, like a wind chime made of thin glass. He looked at Jessica's picture again.
"I don't think I've ever seen her. I don't really pay much attention to the girls. I'll keep this. I have some friends… Would she be hooking?"
"Maybe."
"I don't. I have a friend." Nikki touched the golden bracelets on his wrist.
"Do you have parents?" I asked.
"Well, I did." The impish smile flashed. "I don't think an angel warned them about me. I would have been aborted."
"That would have been a shame."
"Sometimes," Nikki said, "I have more than one friend."
I shook my head. "Not that kind of friend anyway. I need to get going. You want to come with me? I'm going to check out the park."
Nikki couldn't think of anything he would rather do. We left the cafe amidst a flurry of lewd comments from the fluttery bunch at the first booth. "They're just jealous," Nikki said.
The top of his head came to about the middle of my upper arm. He took two or three steps to every one of mine. We walked through the north end of Waterfront Park, disturbing several sleepers, none of them Jessica. Nikki kept up a running patter about people he knew.
On the way out of the park I was shaken down by a cop who examined my identification at length but didn’t ask a single question of the child by my side, who was in flagrant violation of the state curfew laws. As he was leaving, the cop said, “It’s getting late” to the air above Nikki’s head.
Nikki made a call from a pay phone and within five minutes a long silver-gray limo with tinted windows slid up to the curb. Nikki blew me a kiss before disappearing into the back seat of luxury. A friend indeed.
It was almost three in the morning. I decided to call it quits. I called the answering service first. No one wanted me. Good
Chapter Sixteen
Allison was asleep, her hair glimmering in the light coming through the half-open bathroom door. I took a quick shower. I didn’t have any reason to think the sound of a man taking a shower ten feet away would wake her, so I just wrapped a towel around my waist before I left the bathroom, leaving the light on and pulling the door mostly closed behind me.
I turned toward my bed, took one step and stopped, doing a pretty good imitation of a man walking into a glass wall.
Allison was standing just in front of me.
She was wearing the white slip I had last seen dripping dry over the shower door. It was silky and wonderfully clingy against the bare skin beneath it. Her eyes were downcast.
I felt my heartbeat quicken and my breathing deepen. I had time for one completely rational thought—This isn’t a good idea—and one semi-rational thought—I should have shaved—before my brain shut down all areas relegated to reason.
She raised her eyes to mine. I took a step toward her. She didn’t scream or faint or run away so I took another step. She tilted her head up and I bent to kiss her, a nice long kiss that gave me plenty of time to get my arms around her and pull her close. Nothing feels as good as bare skin under silky fabric. Except bare skin under nothing. A thought that was sufficiently motivating to make me pick her up and carry her to my bed. I adroitly lost the towel en route.
For several minutes I was aware of nothing but the feeling of Allison’s mouth against mine, the pressure of her body against mine. It was after I trailed kisses down her throat and found the swell of breast below that I began to get an uneasy what’s-the-matter-with-this-picture kind of feeling.
She had seemed to enjoy the kisses but now she was very still, flat on her back, hands at her sides, legs straight. I was being forcefully reminded of the time April read something about necrophilia and decided it would be fun to play dead. It hadn’t worked out. Corpses aren’t supposed to giggle.
Allison wasn’t giggling. Allison was trembling. Passion, I assured myself. I found the hem of her slip and raised her slightly to slide the slip up above her breasts. She neither resisted nor assisted the maneuver. I circled a nipple with my tongue. She put a hand briefly on my shoulder. It wasn’t a caress. There was too much pressure, almost as if she wanted to push me away but decided against it.
All right, not passion. She was nervous. We hardly knew each other, after all. So help her relax, I told myself. Talk to her. I would have been hard-pressed to yell “fire” if the bed burst into flames so I talked to myself instead. She’s young, she’s not very experienced. She’s been with guys her own age. Nineteen-year-old boys aren’t known for finesse and tend to think foreplay has something to do with tennis doubles. Living in a small town, I constantly run into women who were once the recipients of my adolescent ardor. I always have to squelch an urge to tell them I’ve improved since then.
She’s nervous, I assured myself again. Well, she’d relax soon enough. Onward and downward. I kissed my way to her bellybutton.
Sounding very distant, Allison said, “Mr. Smith?”
I pressed my mouth hard against her abdomen, trying not to laugh and laughing anyway. I spluttered loudly against her skin, which she must have found either ticklish or disgusting as hell because she suddenly pushed herself backward and upward to a sitting position. Wondrous body parts slid past my face, then her knee connected with my chin, clacking together a lot of very expensive dental work.
With a body-arching wriggle any sane man would have died to see, Allison tugged her slip back down where it belonged. I felt like a little kid watching his ice cream roll off the cone and plop in the dirt.
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“I’m sorry I laughed. ‘Mr. Smith’ sounded a little formal, under the circumstances. It’s Zachariah, okay?”
She was intent on the wall beside the bathroom door. “I changed my mind.”
“Does it work better now?” I couldn’t help it. I was suddenly under a lot of stress. I always react to stress with grade school humor.
She turned to look at me, her face blank. Then her eyes widened and she pressed her lips tightly together. And then she whooped, screeched, howled with laughter. I tried to shush her but started laughing myself. When I could, I gasped, “Shh! They’re going to kick us out of here.”
She reached over her head for a pillow and covered her mouth with it. I sobered up considerably watching her body shake with laughter under the thin slip. Eventually she got it under control and got rid of the pillow.
“Where have you been all your life?” I asked. “That joke’s at least twice as old as I am.”
“I never heard it before.” She raised up on one elbow, facing me. She was still breathing raggedly, gasping back giggles, but when she glanced down the length of my body, her face because very serious. She lay down quickly and stared upward.
I twirled a long strand of honey hair around my finger. “Why did you change your mind? You didn’t like what I was doing?”
“It was all right,” she told the ceiling.
All right sounded fairly uninspired. I’d been hoping for rave reviews. I didn’t know what to say so I waited for her to think of something. She thought of the very last thing I expected to hear.
“I’m a virgin.”
“You’re a what?”
“A virgin?”
I shook her hair loose from my finger. I sat up. I stood up. “A virgin! A virgin!” If they didn’t hear me back in Mackie, they weren’t listening very hard. Allison slid over to the far edge of the bed, pulling all the covers up around her for protection against the maniac bellowing at her. “Are you crazy? Are you completely out of your mind? What kind of stupid stunt is this? Are you nuts? Virgins don’t waylay strange men outside bathroom doors. You could get hurt. You could get pregnant.” I worked several variations on the theme until I finally had to stop to breathe. When I did, I felt very naked—which I was—and made a grab for the sheet. Allison wasn’t about to relinquish it and when I tugged, she resisted and toppled backward off the bed in a tangle of blankets. She hit a chair and it toppled too, striking the wall hard enough to make the window glass rattle.
The telephone rang.
In the spaces between the first three rings there was dead silence in the room. Allison was on her feet across the bed from me, wrapped in a sheet, a blanket, and a blue fleur-de-lis bedspread. I ripped the bedspread off her bed and wrapped it around myself before picking up the phone on the fourth ring.
I assured the night manager that, no, there was no problem and, yes, we would keep it down and, of course, I realized it was four in the morning and, certainly, I understood that some of the guests were trying to sleep and, no, it wouldn’t happen again. I replaced the receiver very gently.
Allison and I, in matching bedspreads, faced each other across the stripped bed. “We will discuss this in the morning,” I whispered.
I unwrapped my makeshift toga and slid between the sheets of what had been her bed. Still in all her wrappings, she flopped face down on what had been my bed. I gritted my teeth for a while, listening to her trying to be quiet. When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I pulled some jeans on and tugged her loose from her cocoon. I straightened the blankets out a bit and lay down beside her, pulling her close. “Stop crying. You should be spanked.” Mindful of the neighbors, I whispered.
She wiped her wet face across my chest a few times and drew some sobbing breaths. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Well, you should be.” I stroked her hair until she quieted down. She used my chest for a hanky several more times, the only use I’ve ever found for chest hair.
“Don’t try that again, Allison. Some men are in a big hurry. You could have stopped being a virgin before you ever got around to mentioning it. What did you think you were doing anyway?”
“It’s just… I need you to help me and I thought if you liked me…”
“I like you just fine. And I’ve offered to help. Several times.”
“I know. But what I really need is money.”
I sighed. “The going rate wouldn’t get you very far.”
She shoved hard against my chest with both hands. I didn’t move but she did, sliding away from me and sitting up. She forgot to whisper. “Every time I think you’re going to be nice, you say something absolutely disgusting. I hate you. Get out of my bed.”
“Quiet down. I don’t want to be kicked out of here. You can hate me all you want but the way you’re going, you’re going to end up hating yourself and that makes for a very unhappy life. Why don’t you tell me why you’re on the run and I’ll see what I can do.”
“I can’t.”
“Fine. Go to sleep.”
I returned to the other bed. The light from the bathroom was right in my eyes. When I asked if she minded if I turned it off, she said. “I don’t care. I’m not afraid of the dark.” There was just the slightest emphasis on the last word, making it sound as if there were a whole lot of other things she was afraid of.
It was a long time before I fell asleep but I never once thought of April.
Chapter Seventeen
An awkward morning after didn’t seem fair somehow. We sidestepped around each other while I was getting ready to go out. When I suggested breakfast, or an early lunch since it was almost eleven, Allison said she had eaten some of the fruit before I woke up and didn’t want anything else. She never quite met my eyes.
I had the feeling her discomfort had little to do with her aborted seduction attempt and a lot to do with the fact that she was trapped in a small room with a man who had seen her naked. What we needed was an icebreaker. I didn’t have any liquor or candy. Which left sex. Always in plentiful supply.
She was sitting at the bureau. I took away the brush she had just pulled through her hair for about the thousandth time and put my hands on her shoulders. After a moment she raised her eyes to mine in the mirror.
“Last night, did I get around to mentioning that you’re beautiful?” She shook her head, looking just a bit skeptical. “I thought it,” I said. “I was rendered speechless. Happens to me a lot.”
Her mouth twitched. “I hadn’t noticed that.”
“Yeah, well, I’m great at reading people the riot act, not so great at other things.”
She stood up, turning to face me. Since she was so close anyway, I kissed her, intending it to be a nice semi-brotherly, just-friends kiss. It started out all right, got muddled up in a hurry, and was becoming downright torrid when Allison slid her hand inside my jacket and ran right into my gun.
“That’s a gun,” she said, pulling her hand away quickly.
I pulled my jacket aside to check. “Well, I’ll be damned, how did that get there?”
She was not amused. “You said you aren’t a policeman anymore.”
“I’m not.” I unzipped my binder and handed her a Jessica Finney flyer. “That’s me, Arrow Investigations. I wanted to change the name to Cat’s-Paw, Incorporated but my sister said no one would get it.”
Carrie was probably right. Allison obviously didn’t get it.
“It’s from an old fable about a cat and a monkey. The cat was sleeping by a fire where the monkey was roasting some chestnuts. When the nuts were done, the monkey used the cat’s paw to pull them out of the fire so he wouldn’t burn his own fingers. People hire me to pull their chestnuts out of the fire.”
Allison frowned at Jessica’s picture. “You never really answered me the other day,” she said.
“About what?”
“About if your wife died.”
I had spent too much time in the company of women to wonder how she made the mental leap from a cat and a monkey to a
wife. “She didn’t die. We’re divorced.”
“Why did you get a divorce?”
“Irreconcilable differences are the only grounds you need.”
She nodded. “What was the problem.”
Persistence, thy name is Allison. I bit back my anger. My divorce had no more immediacy to her than a story in a book. She didn’t realize she was picking at scabs over deep wounds.
“Desertion. The ultimate irreconcilable difference.”
She looked faintly shocked. “You deserted your wife?”
Now there was a sex-role stereotype if I’d ever heard one. “The other way around,” I said.
She looked definitely shocked. “Your wife deserted you? Why would she do that?”
It was the question I went to bed with every night and woke up with every morning. I gave her the only answer I had ever come up with. “I don’t know.”
“You mean she just left without saying anything?”
“That’s what I mean. That’s what desertion is. We didn’t discuss it in advance. I came home from work one day and she was gone. I haven’t seen or heard from her since.”
“But—”
“Allison. I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”
“I just wondered how you could divorce her.”
After a moment, I said, “I waited two years. That’s a long time to be married to someone who isn’t there.”
“I meant, I thought you had to wait seven years or something if someone disappears.”
“Oh. No, you just have to prove desertion. It wasn’t hard. She took her clothes and the money from our savings account and left her wedding ring on the kitchen counter. Later on, I found out she cashed in a life insurance policy two weeks before she left. It obviously wasn’t a spur of the moment decision.”
“Did you try to find her?”
I had spent two years driving myself and everyone else crazy with my attempts to find April. “I looked for her myself and I hired a detective. Neither of us ever came up with anything. She doesn’t want to be found. She hasn’t used her Social Security number or filed a tax return since she left. She’s either using phony identification or she’s out of the country or someone else is supporting her.” Or she was dead, which sometimes, late at night, was the choice that seemed least painful to me.
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