HER BEDROOM LOOKED DIFFERENT by daylight. The bay window was very bright and the colors in the room were cheerful and a stuffed rag doll with yarn for hair sat on a chair next to the bureau staring at me with the unblinking fixity of someone’s brat watching someone else eat in a restaurant. It was the only thing little girl-like about Karen and I didn’t like it. But the bed was comfortable and the eggs I was cleaning off the tray balanced on my lap had been laid in heaven.
Karen occupied a chair beside the bed with her elbow propped on her knee and her chin in her hand. She had taken out the curlers and changed into a scarlet blouse and black skirt. Without make-up she looked sixteen.
“But why didn’t you tell the FBI about the cross?” she asked.
I put down my fork and studied her. “I guess someone’s been talking in his sleep.”
“I couldn’t help overhearing with you lying on top of me like a load of bricks in the doorway. I won’t ask about the carnival.”
“Don’t. The cross had nothing to do with why they want Rynearson. It would have led to questions my client doesn’t want answered. You have to know where to stop when you’re talking to cops.”
“To me too, apparently. I don’t know anything about this cross other than that you’re looking for it. Is it full of diamonds or what?”
“I was told it wasn’t worth a lot. Not enough to do what Rynearson did to me to try to find out where it is. It isn’t even why I was there. That was a different case. I thought.” I sipped coffee and reached unconsciously for a cigarette before I remembered I wasn’t wearing a shirt.
“Here.” She tossed my wrinkled pack onto the tray.
“I’m okay,” I said. “Just habit. Who helped you drag me in here?”
“Not you, that’s for sure. You were looking for the cross when you found that man dead in Hamtramck, weren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s it mean that it has something to do with this other case too?”
“Beats me. I’ll have to throw everything I know about both of them into a bucket and shake it and see what comes out. What’d you use, a block and tackle?”
“For what? Oh, that. You keep changing the subject. I’ve helped bigger men than you into hospital bathrooms. I thought you were drunk until I got your shirt off —”
“Sex fiend.”
“—and saw those marks on your wrist. I still think I should make an appointment for you with our toxicologist.”
“Thanks, I’ve seen enough white coats for this lifetime. Speaking of which, when does the old lady get sprung?”
“Tomorrow, why?”
“I don’t want to waste a trip when I go to visit her.”
“I didn’t know you’d hit it off that well.”
“Little old ladies love me. It’s my honest face.”
She studied me. A question fluttered around the corners of her mouth. She shooed it away. She reached out and stroked my cheek. “It can use a shave.”
“I’d cut off an ear trying to scrape my chin.”
“Just stay put.” She got up and went out. I finished my coffee. She came back carrying a razor and a shaving cup and brush. I said, “I hope you borrowed that from a neighbor.”
She pasted my mouth shut with lather.
Later she brought in my clothes on a hanger and hung it on the back of the chair she’d been sitting in. “I pressed the suit and rinsed your shirt. Don’t expect that kind of service on a regular basis. Your gun’s in the living room. What are you doing?”
I had peeled back the blanket and swung my feet to the floor. “It’s called getting out of bed. I’m starting to be pretty good at it. Next week I plan to try walking.”
She stood between me and the clothes. “You’ve had only six hours’ rest. You’ll run out of gas before you get outside.”
“Lady, I’ve been running on fumes since I got away from Rynearson’s.” I tickled her. When she squealed and jumped I got my pants off the hanger.
“Don’t call me lady, you lunk. It makes you sound like a taxi driver.”
“I’ve driven taxis.” I put on the pants. “You don’t see many ladies through that little window. It’s not a word I throw around.”
“Are you paying me a compliment? I can’t ever tell with you.”
I scooped her up. We kissed. She said, “I guess you are.”
I brushed her cheek with my fingertips. “I’d stay, but the meter’s running.”
“I’d ask you,” she said. “But Tim’s coming by in a little while.”
“Is there a Tim?”
“There’s a Tim.” She paused. “Last night he asked me to marry him.”
I could see my reflection in her brown eyes. “What’d you say?”
“I wasn’t very original. I said I had to think.”
“Are you thinking?”
She looked at the floor to the right of me and nodded jerkily. It was a way she had. I took her chin and turned her face toward mine. We brushed lips and she said, “I’ve been asked before.”
“I don’t believe it. An ugly thing like you.”
She didn’t smile. “I couldn’t picture myself married those times. I can now. Maybe not married, exactly, but part of some kind of commitment.”
“With Tim?”
“With someone, not him necessarily. I’m sick of Saturday night movies and restaurant dinners you don’t taste because you’re busy wondering if you’re going to ask him in afterwards. I’d like to try a different rut. Sometimes I think I’ll scream if I don’t.”
“Don’t tell me about ruts. I wrote my dissertation on them.”
“Is everything funny to you?”
“No.”
“I think you’re wonderful,” she said. “I also think you’re a man of many secrets, mostly other people’s. I don’t mind that I don’t really know you. But people who make a habit of keeping confidences have a hard way about them. Their eyes look bleak and when they smile or frown it’s just their faces moving. It’s like they’ve drawn a black confessional curtain between themselves and the world. When they talk you can see them turning over every phrase first to make sure something important isn’t stuck to it.”
“I’m like that.”
“You try not to be, or not to show it. You try to park your secrets on sidings, but the ends stick out and you have to step carefully around them. Talking to you is like tiptoeing through a minefield.”
“Three different metaphors in a row,” I said. “Or are they similes? I can never get that straight.”
She passed it. “At first I liked that. It made you mysterious. But it’s a side of you I could grow not to like a lot. I don’t want there to be anything about you I couldn’t like.”
“Are we saying good-bye?”
“You could change.”
“No one has since Lot’s wife.”
“It doesn’t have to be good-bye good-bye,” she said. “Secrets don’t harm a friendship the way they do, well, love.”
“It doesn’t work like that. It’s not something you can go back from.”
She said, “I’m sorry you feel that way.”
“It’s not the way I feel.”
I finished dressing and she walked me through the living room to the door, holding hands. The way you hold on to something you’ve borrowed for a while and it’s time to give back. As if it might break before you return it. I stopped to snap on the gun in its holster. On the threshold we faced each other again.
“Thanks for taking care of me,” I said.
“I was about to tell you the same thing.”
“You don’t need taking care of.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s a bitch.”
Her eyes glistened on the edge of something. An edge of something I will never be in a position to push someone over. We kissed again, and it tasted the same as always. Everything was the same except one thing.
She said, “We’re always kissing in doorways.”
“I’m always going through them. Mostly out.”
I let go of her hand very slowly and went through one more.
The weather looked warm, but I couldn’t tell. I felt anesthetized. I could stub my toe and not feel it till Christmas. I caught a cab to the office. The driver, who had looked at me without speaking as I got into the back, adjusted the mirror to keep me in it. I glimpsed my reflection as he did so. I couldn’t blame him. I climbed stairs again, resting on the landings, and let myself in through the waiting room. No one was waiting in it, but that was okay, it was Sunday. I didn’t have any mail. I counted the money again and locked it in the safe. Crumpling the pack with two stale cigarettes in it, I bonged it into the wastebasket, got a fresh one out of the carton in the top drawer of the desk and sat down and propping my feet up on one corner I laid the hot-radiator smell of tobacco smoke over the mustiness in the air. After five puffs I put out the weed and hauled the telephone over by its cord, hand over hand like a swabby weighing anchor. There was no answer in either Louise Starr’s room or Fedor Alanov’s suite. Out hustling Great Literature.
I looked at the blonde in the mini-misdemeanor bikini on the advertising calendar. She was standing in the classic S-curve, bending forward a little to rub suntan oil on one slick brown thigh so that a soft V of petal-white showed just above the brass ring that held her top together in front. I had stood in every corner of the office and had not been able to see down any farther under the bright material. Her smile was glistening white against the deep, deep tan of her skin.
The walls were bellying in. They had been doing that in every room I had been in since coming awake in Rynearson’s bed. I stood up slowly with my head sloshing around like a water balloon balanced on my neck. I walked carefully up to the calendar and just as carefully tore off the page and doubled it over and balled it up and chucked it across the room into the basket. There was a redhead in an even skimpier outfit underneath, and six more girls under that