by Jack Lynch
“It’s an upper on the south wing,” he told me.
I joined Lorna. She ran up the outer concrete stairs ahead of me. She was standing, shivering at the room door when I reached it.
“You’re such a slowpoke,” she told me.
I unlocked the door. Lorna had her moves down. She stepped inside the room, turned on an overhead light, crossed to the wall thermostat, and turned up the heat. She carried the bag of goods she’d bought at the market into the bathroom. She came back out with a pair of fat candles inside red glass globes and placed them in front of the dresser mirror. She took a book of motel matches out of an ashtray on the dresser and, after a couple of false starts, managed to get the candles lighted.
A couple of strands of her auburn hair had worked loose from the clips she was wearing. She turned, blowing at the hair from the corner of her mouth. She crossed back to the door and turned off the light switch, leaving just the flickering glow of the candles in front of the mirror to light things. She headed back toward the bathroom and gave me a wink.
“Get out of your duds, Bragg.” That was accompanied by an expression I took to be a leer.
I wasn’t really as ready for all this as Lorna was. I crossed to the closet alcove and hung up my jacket. I hesitated a minute longer. I felt as if I should have been other places, doing different things. I took off my shoes and socks and hung up my shirt and trousers. I went over to the bed and pulled out the pillows from beneath an orange spread nearly the color of Lorna’s silk blouse and lipstick. I plumped them up against the headboard, then sat on the bed and leaned up against one of the pillows. I looked across the room and briefly considered turning on the evening news, but figured Lorna probably would kill me if I pulled a stunt like that. I sat there wondering if Marietta Narcoff, who looked to be a veteran trouper, and the younger man now calling himself Buddy Kirby had ever done something like this on the spur of the moment. Probably many times over, I decided.
Lorna had partially disrobed in the bathroom. More than partially. She’d taken off her shoes and hosiery, along with the forest-green suit jacket and skirt and the orange blouse and cameo brooch. Beneath all that fine and proper office workaday garb she was wearing some not so workaday underwear. Skimpy, colorful and frilly it was, the same umber-orange color as her blouse and lipstick. She carried two glasses of champagne in front of her like an offering. Instead of using the plastic cups the motel provided, she’d bought a couple of champagne glasses at the market next door. She got onto the bed and walked across it on her knees, carefully, so she wouldn’t spill the champagne. It fizzled up from the bottom of the hollow glass stems. She stopped beside me with a little gleam in her eye.
“Are you ready for this, Bragg?”
“If I’m not now, I probably will be in the next couple of seconds.” Her bare tummy was right in front of my face. I turned my head and kissed her there.
Lorna giggled, then leaned back to sit on her heels and handed me one of the glasses. “To a rainy evening,” she told me.
We touched glasses and drank. “You never used to wear that sort of underwear,” I told her.
“You never used to take any notice of what sort of underwear I wore.”
“No, I suppose I didn’t.”
“But this you notice.”
“It’s got my full attention.”
“That won’t do,” she told me, sipping the champagne. “You have to save some of that attention for the thingamajigs underneath.”
She made quick little back and forth movements that set the thingamajigs in motion, then tilted her head to one side. “I notice there’s been no fashion revolution in the things that you wear next to your own skin.”
I was wearing a pair of white boxer-style shorts.
“You look as if you were still in the navy,” she told me.
“I didn’t think you’d want me in lace.”
“I don’t mean that. They have some pretty sexy men’s briefs these days.”
“And there are plenty of guys around San Francisco who wear them,” I conceded. “There are others of us who wouldn’t be caught dead in them.”
“That’s old-fashioned thinking,” she told me. “That’s the kind of thinking you’d expect to find more in Seattle than in San Francisco.”
“Yeah well, there’s still a lot of Seattle left in me, I guess. Maybe that’s one of the reasons this has been such a hard trip.”
“Has it?”
“Yes. Things seem awkward and out of place a lot of the time.”
“Not the other night at my place?”
I drained the glass of champagne and looked across at the candles. “No, not the other night at your place.”
She gazed steadily at me for several moments. “That’s nice to know,” she said finally.
She got off the bed and padded back to the bathroom, walking the way she walked when she knew somebody was watching. She came back out with the champagne bottle and refilled our glasses, then got back up on the bed beside me on her knees again. She took a sip of the champagne, then reached across to put down her glass on the nightstand beside me. She took my own glass from me and put it beside the other. Then she leaned over me with fists planted on either side of me and lowered her face until our lips met. She hadn’t swallowed the champagne. While we kissed softly, she let a little of it trickle into my mouth.
That led to some kiss. I turned up my palms and lightly cupped her breasts. She leaned down on them hard.
“Take it off for me,” she murmured.
I did as she asked. And the rain beat down outside and the candles flickered in front of the mirror and Lorna and I spent a little time out of mind.
NINETEEN
Sometime during the next hour or so I changed my mind. I decided I didn’t need to be other places, doing something else. I decided I was just fine right where I was. The two of us probably could have spent the rest of the night there in sound sleep if something as basic as hunger hadn’t forced us back out into the rain and the dark. We considered having something delivered to the motel, but none of the junk food we could have gotten that way seemed fitting. I was ready for a steak, I told Lorna. Preferably New York–cut sirloin. Large.
“T-bone,” Lorna had said.
“What?”
“Whenever someone’s stolen my breath half away, I like to eat a T-bone.”
We ate at a restaurant that had T-bone and New York–cut sirloin steaks in addition to an extensive seafood menu. The restaurant was built on pilings, with windows looking out over the Ballard Bridge and Seattle’s fishing terminal on Salmon Bay. Trawlers from there ranged from chill Alaskan waters to down off the coasts of Oregon and California. We supped by candlelight at our table, as we’d done other things by candlelight back at the See Fair Motel. Lorna and I found ourselves staring at the candles, then at each other, with little smiles. Her face was still a little flushed-looking as she lifted a napkin to touch the lips repainted the same color as the silk blouse that was fastened chastely at her throat with the cameo brooch.
“I’ve always felt comparisons among various lovers weren’t fair,” she said quietly. “But I thought tonight was rather fabulous. Tonight was rockets and shellfire. I mean tonight, Mr. Bragg, you showed your ex-old lady about as fine a time as she’s ever known.”
“You weren’t bad yourself. I had the feeling I was in bed with the chief pagan.”
We continued eating in silence until Lorna looked up sharply. “Come home with me tonight.”
“I doubt if I’d be much more good to you, lady…”
“I don’t mean anything about sex. I just—I don’t know. I just want to be more intimate with you, in a whole lot of ways. I want to spend more time with you. I want us to be close. Doesn’t that sound right for us?”
I took a breath and exhaled slowly. “I don’t know, Lorna. I’m still a little mixed up about all of this. If I really wanted to think about it, I’d probably decide something just the opposite. That maybe we ought to quit while
we’re ahead. Who knows? Things might all of a sudden turn on us. Old memories or old habit patterns might come around the corner and mess it all up. It could all turn stale and molder on us.”
“You’re a stinker,” was all she said for the remainder of the meal.
When we left the table, Lorna went to the rest room to freshen up. My mind drifted back to business, and I decided to phone Marietta Narcoff. She told me she’d been in touch with the friend who’d introduced her to the man calling himself Buddy Kirby.
“My friend doesn’t know him nearly as well as I’d been led to believe,” she told me. “I think I’m going to have a few questions for Buddy when he phones in the morning.”
“I have a few of my own,” I told her. “That’s why I called. I’d like to speak to him myself. You can tell him what I do for a living and say I’m working on a case here in Seattle and his name came up in the course of it. Tell him I think he might have some information that could help me. That’s all true enough. And tell him you owe me a favor from the past, so you’d like him to talk to me. I’ll meet him anywhere, anytime.”
She agreed to it and I told her I’d call her around nine-thirty in the morning.
Lorna gave me directions to the Potlatch Bay site, on the north side of the ship canal, between the Ballard business district and the locks that raise and lower ship traffic between the tide levels of Puget Sound and the high freshwater lakes inland. It was too wet and mucky for us to get out of the car. The headlights showed a large tract of muddy ground with a perimeter cyclone fence. Off in the distance was a long trailer they probably used for their construction office. Some lumber was stacked off to one side and a brightly lighted billboard proclaimed the site as home of Potlatch Bay, “Seattle’s Premier Retail-Entertainment Center.”
“What’s the entertainment part of it?” I asked.
“They’re building a theater complex,” she told me. “One of those multi-room showhouses with a central projection booth to screen several movies at the same time. There’ll be an adjoining showhouse for live productions. They’re hoping to get one of the downtown companies to move its operation out here. And there’s been some talk of putting in a small amusement park and arcade, with a huge rollaway roof for year-around operation. A mini-Tivoli Gardens, they’re calling it.”
I continued to stare out into the dark. “Sort of a bleak-looking place.”
“Wait until after Monday,” Lorna told me. “Let’s go find some brandy.”
I drove on down toward the locks and pulled into a parking lot beside an ancient frame building that housed a small bar and lunch counter. The place had wooden floors, a cheery collection of locals yucking it up at the bar and country western music on the jukebox.
“I came in here once about a million years ago,” I told Lorna. “Good enough for you?”
“Just so they have brandy. Has it changed much?”
“Not a bit. I think the same people were sitting drinking at the bar, even.”
We sat in a corner booth and the bartender came out from behind the bar and crossed to us. He had a half-apron around his middle, a mop up rag in his hand and a toothpick in his mouth. He didn’t carry any cognacs, he told me, but he had Korbel brandy, and I ordered a couple of snifters of it. Back at the bar he poured hot water into the snifters, let them sit a moment, then emptied the water and poured the brandy. When he brought them over, I paid and gave him a pretty good tip.
“Preheat the glasses and everything, huh?” I asked him.
“Hey,” he said, grinning. “This is a class operation, pal.”
When he went back to the bar, it seemed Lorna and I had run out of things to gab about. She sat staring at the table and thinking her own thoughts. I thought she was just savoring the past two or three hours we’d spent together. I was wrong.
“You know, Peter,” she said, swirling the brandy, “I’m going to say something you might not like.”
I glanced at her. The tone of her voice had taken on a raw little edge I noticed got into it when she was talking to the help down at Scandia Farms.
“If it’s something I might not like, then why say it? If you want us to stay friends, that is.”
“Oh, I do. It’s just, well, it’s for your own good, really.”
I thought I’d heard her say that to me for the last time a dozen years earlier. I couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t angry about it, really. More like morbidly fascinated. And wary. “Okay, so it’s for my own good. What is it?”
“I think that despite all the years that have gone by, your new line of work, the scars and lines around your face, I think there’s still a little bit of the timid boy in you.”
I made a sound partway between a snuff and a snort. It was a brief laugh at the heart of it, and I settled back in my chair, a little more relaxed.
“No, you don’t, Lorna, not this time. I’m sure I have my faults. And sometimes in my work I can get into situations that raise the hair on the back of my neck. But timid? No, I just don’t think that’s true. I don’t think you could find anybody who’d agree with you on that one.”
“Then why won’t you come stay with me?”
“Maybe because I figure we’d have more conversations like this one. Not that it would bother me as much as it used to in the past, when you’d open up like this. But what’s the use? Who needs it? Why go out of our way to spoil the fun we seem to be having together this time around?”
“Fun? A frantic little roll in the hay and a candlelight dinner? Is that what you like about me these days?”
“Lorna, don’t do this. You know that isn’t what I mean.”
“You could certainly get plenty of both hanging around my place.”
“Plus maybe plenty of this sort of thing.”
“What’s wrong with a little constructive criticism?”
“Nothing’s wrong with a little constructive criticism, with the emphasis on constructive. No, wait a minute, I take that back. As long as I conduct myself properly, don’t embarrass you in front of your friends and maintain reasonable standards of cleanliness, why do we need any criticism at all? Either one of us?”
“What are you going to do, just live out of a suitcase in the trunk of your car for the rest of the time you’re up here?”
“No, I’ll find another place. I’ve just been a little busy lately, is all.”
“Didn’t you like my performance back at the motel?”
“Is that what it was, a performance? That makes it sound cheap enough. I thought what we were doing was a mutual expression of past love and a newly found closeness.”
Somewhere through all that, Lorna’s eyes sparked fire and her lips flattened out in a thin, tight line.
“Cheap? Is that what you’re calling me now, Peter?”
“No, I just meant…”
“You just said that what we did back at the motel was cheap.”
“I did not!”
I found my voice rising loud enough to attract the attention of a couple of the gang at the bar. Lorna’s voice was getting a little shrill as well.
“How will you talk about me when you go back to your friends in San Francisco?” she demanded. “Tell them you ran into your ex-wife up there in Seattle? Lorna Bragg, the whore?”
I sat back, slightly flabbergasted. “I don’t believe this. Lorna, what I meant—what I was trying to suggest…” But I’d lost the thread of the conversation. I couldn’t remember what the hell I’d been trying to say. Certainly not whatever Lorna thought.
“I knew it,” Lorna said, boring in. “Well let me tell you something, Peter. I’m not a slut. Or a one-night stand. I think you’d better call me a cab.”
“You don’t need a cab, Lorna. I’ll give you…”
She cut me off, her tone icy. She enunciated her words slowly and distinctly. “Get me a cab, please.”
I rolled my shoulders in a shrug and went over to ask the bartender to phone a taxi. He had a direct line to a local cab stand. I went back to the booth an
d we drank our brandy without exchanging another word. The cabby appeared in the doorway about four minutes later. Lorna got up without another glance in my direction and left.
I just sat there a couple of minutes trying to reconstruct the conversation we’d just had, but it was hopeless. I shook my head and carried the brandy snifters back to the bar. I settled on an end stool and asked for more brandy. The conversation at the bar quieted down some.
An older fellow wearing a hard hat was sitting two stools down from me. A pair of stout, middle-aged women wearing yellow rain slickers sat just beyond him, talking quietly. Around a corner of the bar was a younger fellow in a navy peacoat and wearing a yachting cap, talking to the bartender. They all avoided my eyes in the back-bar mirror. The man in the hard hat had a case of hiccups. He kept making a quiet erk sound. He finally turned toward me in a neighborly gesture.
“You’ll pardon my saying so, sir, but it sounds to me like you’ve gotten yourself into some deep shit. Let me erk buy you a drink.”
“No thanks, friend. And I don’t know that I’ve gotten into it so much as maybe I’ve just started to climb out of it.”
“Good to hear erk. Good to hear.”
They gently welcomed me into their little conversational family then, the way the regular customers of small bars will if you behave in a civilized manner. Not that I began talking a blue streak with them. We just exchanged tidbits of information.
It’s funny, the things you can learn chatting with strangers in a bar that way. It turned out the hard hat man was working on a big apartment project out in the north end of town, not too far from where Benny Bartlett lived. The two women in slickers lived just up the street. They were neighbors, and it was bowling night for their husbands. The younger fellow in the peacoat, who turned out to be nearly totally bald when he removed his yachting cap to scratch his dome, owned a forty-foot cabin cruiser that he kept berthed about a mile away at the Port of Seattle boat moorage behind the breakwater they’d built on Shilshole Bay. He made a living with his girlfriend, chartering the boat for sports fishing and sightseeing on Puget Sound. And the innkeeper, well, he was afraid he was going to lose his lease when it came up for renewal the following year. He figured that with the new Potlatch Bay project going in just down the road, somebody would offer his landlord a lot more money for the site, planning to put in something a lot more foxy than a little bar and lunch counter. But my neighbor in the hard hat didn’t agree. He told the innkeeper he felt his fears were groundless. He said that in his considered opinion—thirty years in the construction business erk—somebody was in the process of pulling somebody else’s leg. A good hard yank, was the way he put it. He said he’d bet everything he had that the Potlatch Bay project would never be built, that nobody had ever intended for it to be in the first place.