And Sometimes I Wonder About You

21

The Chambre du Roi was a big round room with tables set out in an off-center spiral. I got there at 8:12. Monique, the hostess, installed me at a booth that was in the outermost circle. I needn’t have worried about Marella waiting for me. She didn’t get there for another twenty-two minutes.

She stopped at my side of the stall before I had the chance to stand, and leaned over gracefully giving me a wet kiss on the lips. She was wearing a red dress that was close-fitting on the torso but flouncy below the waist.

“You look delicious,” she said.

“You took the words right out of my head.”

Depositing herself in the seat across from me, she smiled prettily and cocked her head to the side.

“I asked them to bring a Beaujolais when you got here,” I said.

“Thoughtful and sexy,” she replied.

I usually feel a lump in my throat when a woman riles me but with Marella the bulge was in my chest. I think she could see the impact she was having because she pursed her lips and let her lovely dark head loll a little farther, bringing her right shoulder up like the back end of an oil derrick.

The wine came along with menus.

“You order for me, Lee,” she said. I couldn’t remember anyone ever calling me Lee; some encounters are just unique.

“I may have to answer my phone from time to time,” I apologized. “My son works for me and he’s in a little trouble.”

“I guess I’ll have to punish you for that.”

“Okay.”

“What kind of trouble is he in?”

“He’s in the company of killers and thieves but they haven’t recognized him for what he is... yet.”

“That shouldn’t be any problem for a strong man like you.”

There had been many times in my life that I’d come across just the right woman at the wrong time, but it was rare that I chanced upon the perfect wrong woman at just the right moment.

We toasted and I almost forgot my problems.

“You sounded tense on the phone last night,” Marella said.

“Son’s in deep shit, wife tried to kill herself three months ago—”

“You’re married?”

“Yeah.”

She shrugged, tossing off this knowledge as unimportant, and I fell a little deeper into the dark passion she offered.

“I turned down a client two days ago,” I went on, “and he was murdered. The man who killed him, I believe, hired me this afternoon. Somehow I have to take all of that and make it right again.”

“My problems are small potatoes compared to yours,” she said, somehow managing to be both light and serious at the same time.

Before I could speak the waiter came to tell us the specials; at least he tried to. I cut him off, ordering the chef’s specialty Canard la Maison for myself and coq au vin for Marella.

When he left I said, “You probably have a close relationship with your father.”

Frowning, she asked, “Why do you say that?”

“Because only old men use the term ‘small potatoes.’ ”

Marella gasped and stood up. I wondered if I had somehow insulted her and now she was about to walk out.

She held out a hand to me. I took it and she pulled me from the booth.

At the front podium she told Monique that we’d be right back — in French.

Across the street from the restaurant there was a recess between a stationery store and bank. It was a dead-end alley blocked off at the mouth by a large locked plastic crate that was there to hold trash bins. This crate was maybe four feet high.

Marella pulled me until we were partially hidden by the receptacle container. She turned her back to me and lifted the flouncy red skirt. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath.

“I know you know what to do with that,” she said over her shoulder.

I did know and did not hesitate. There’s not nearly enough said about the smooth warmth of entering a woman without protection or worry. When she pressed back against me I noticed that she was clutching the same sacklike black satin bag she’d carried on the train. A sound erupted from us both simultaneously and I began to move with force that threw her against the wall more than once.

The sounds we made got louder over the seconds and minutes. At one point I glanced to my left and saw that a young couple had stopped to watch; a white man in a black suit and an Asian woman in a rainbow-glitter dress. I noted the couple but they didn’t matter to me.

“Harder, Lee,” Marella groaned.

I can’t remember any orgasm being stronger or more satisfying.

When it was over we put ourselves together and walked out from behind the big crate. The young couple was still standing there, still watching us. I wondered if they might take our place when we were gone.

On the way across the street back to the restaurant I checked my phone. I didn’t want to but there was too much going on. Nothing from Twill but there were eight messages from Zephyra; most of these about Coco Lombardi — most but not all.

Back in Chambre du Roi, Marella made a stop at the ladies’ room.

I spent the few minutes reading over the various texts and e-mails.

“That’s much better,” Marella said when she returned to our booth. “We needed to get that out of the way before being civilized.”

I suppressed the desire to tell her I loved her.

The waiter came, placing garlicky salads before us.

“It was my grandfather,” she told me.

“What?”

“My grandfather and I were close. That’s why I had to fuck you.”

“Who was this guy you were engaged to?” I asked.

“You jealous?”

“As if you were the only woman left in the world.”

“You don’t have to be,” she said instead of answering the question.

“What about that diamond?” I said. I wanted to feel businesslike and sophisticated because Marella was bringing out a beast in me.

“What about it?” Her smile was crazy-making.

“How much did you get for it?”

“Why so many questions, Lee? Isn’t this enough for you?”

“It’s just that I was wondering,” I said.

“About what?”

Neither of us had touched our salads.

“About how you could be so sloppy to have a thug like Alexander Lett get so close.”

Her smile faded when she said, “The less you know, the better.”

“But I know so much already.”

“Like what?” There was a hint of danger in her mien.

“You got engaged to the man somehow knowing that sooner or later he’d break it off,” I said.

“You’re a smart man, Mr. McGill.”

“No.”

“No?”

“I’m a fool. Otherwise I would have taken your money and ignored the fact of the three-point-six-million-dollar diamond you tricked out of Melbourne Westmount Ericson. There was an article about the engagement and the ring on the society page of the Washington Post.”

“Oh my God,” she said with genuine surprise in her lovely, deadly eyes. “You really are a detective.”

“Yes,” I admitted as humbly as I could manage. “I know, for instance, that you have a gun in that bag, that Mr. Lett would have died, or at least he would have sustained serious injury, if he tried to take you. I was the less lethal alternate plan.”

“You’re the kind of man I like to take pictures with. The kind of pictures that drive fiancés mad.”

“You’re something else, Marella Herzog.”

“What are you going to do?” she asked, as if there was a choice I had.

“You got me in this now, Mar, I got to make sure the Ericson family steamroller don’t make me Pancake Lee.”

“There’s a lot of rage in you,” she said. It was true but I didn’t know where that fact fit in our conversation.

“Maybe.”

“I’m the kind of girl who can let a man express that rage any way he wants, anywhere he wants.”

“I can see that.”

“So what are you going to do?” she asked again.

“Eat my dinner. Drink my wine. Look at you and be happy. Then walk you home and try to get my mind in the place it needs to be.”