“I shouldn’t have done it,” I said.
“Sssh.”
“You don’t deserve me inflicting myself—”
“Please, Dwyer. Don’t talk, all right?”
We sat in Donna Harris’s living room and watched rain slide down the front window. A streetlight gave the sight a silver beauty.
I had come here after leaving Davies’s. After seeing the picture of Jane, after the death of the prostitute, I felt unclean in some way I didn’t know I’d ever recover from.
Like a homing pigeon, I had a sense that Donna could help me with her kind of neurotic strength.
I told her everything, and she listened patiently, and afterward she turned out the light and we sat on the sofa, where we were now, watching the rain.
“It’s all getting crazy,” I said. “None of it makes sense.”
“Sssh.”
She held me for a long time and after a while a kind of rocking motion set in between us and through the depression I felt myself responding to her again. This time she let me put my hands on her breasts and her tongue found mine.
When she stopped me I understood.
“We should wait for a better time.”
I couldn’t disagree.
In the silence, in the darkness, she lit two cigarettes and dispensed them.
“I found out one thing about the older woman,” she said.
“What?”
“She and the Baxter woman you told me about got into a violent argument in the Conquistador one night.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“From the parking-lot attendant. Apparently the older woman was waiting by Elliot’s car. The Baxter woman pulled in and they got into an argument.”
But right now that information didn’t interest me half as much as holding Donna did.
This time it was my turn to help her. She started to cry; I wasn’t sure why, though she talked about her husband a bit and how life seems to let you down sometimes, so I put her on my lap and she curled against my chest and finally went to sleep.
I got a blanket from the bedroom and put it over her there on the couch and left.