Pursuit: A Novel

26

The apartment complex looked like an island fortress surrounded by a lake of asphalt. There were low ramparts along the sides that held captive plants, but there were no trees. Prescott pulled up to the west end, parked the Corvette, and got out to look for the right staircase. Almost instantly he heard the click of high heels, turned, and saw Jeanie hurrying toward him.

She was wearing a simple black dress and small diamond studs in her ears, and carrying a tiny handbag. Her shining dark brown hair was pulled back in a tight coil that Prescott noticed was more than merely reminiscent of the style she had worn when she was taking off the business suit in Nolan’s. He felt a pang of sympathy for her: maybe it was her uniform to signal she was on her best behavior.

He stepped toward her, his expression anxious. “You didn’t have to wait outside for me.”

She paused about five feet from him, as though she were wondering how to get by him without touching him. “I didn’t want to make us late.”

He said, “You look terrific.” It wasn’t a lie. She had a pretty little face with large brown eyes that looked much better without the sparkling blue smears of eye shadow on the lids and the heavily rouged cheeks. Her figure was what she used to make a living, her one reliable asset, and the cut of the dress showed that she was confident about it, relying on it to make everything all right.

She disguised her need to stay five feet from him by using the distance to appraise him critically, looking at his suit, shoes, and tie. “So do you.” Then she made a sudden, evasive step to the passenger door of the Corvette. Prescott held it open for her, then went around the back of the car and got in. She seemed to have a list of questions she had decided to ask him, and she started as he drove. “I see you hanging out at Nolan’s during the day. What do you do for a living?”

He turned to her and saw that she was nervous, her head quiver-ing slightly as she waited. He looked at the road. “I guess you’d have to say I’m a bum at the moment,” he said happily. “I owned a couple of car-wash places in Los Angeles, but I sold them a few months ago, and came east. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do when I grow up.”

“If you didn’t have a plan, why did you sell them?” she asked.

“It seemed like the right time.”

“The right time?”

“Yeah,” said Prescott. “I was doing okay—not getting real rich, but okay. People in California care about cars. I picked the places up when the price of land was way down, and anything that happened to be on it was down lower. So I bought the corner and got the first car wash almost for free. I hadn’t planned to be in that business, but there I was, so I kept it going. A little later the second one was available, so I bought it. Then, about three or four years ago, land prices shot up again.”

“And you couldn’t resist.”

“I did resist,” he protested. “I waited for a long time. But I kept asking myself, ‘Am I in this because I like the smell of carnauba wax, or am I in it for the money? If I’m in it for the money, I have to sell at the time when there are a lot of people who want to buy, not wait through a boom.’ So I sold. One of the car washes is probably a shopping mall by now. The other is going to be a parking lot for the Bank of America.” He looked at her again. “How about you? Do you always have a plan?”

She shook her head. “Nope.” Then she changed her mind. “Yes, I guess I do, but none of them works so hot.”

“Do you have a plan now?”

She looked at him in anticipation of an approaching disappointment. “I’m going to college at night, picking up a degree. That’s why I work the lunch hour now.”

“That’s a lot better than my plans usually are,” he said. “What are you studying?”

She said, “Let’s talk about you.”

He looked at her, puzzled. “What’s wrong?”

She sighed, and glared at him with a mixture of frustration and sadness. “I don’t like talking about me. You’re curious about how I arrived at making a living in a dark saloon taking my clothes off so a bunch of sad, lonely men can stare at my tits. You’re too polite to ask straight out, so you work up to it gradually. Only there’s no way you can broach the topic without my sitting here cringing and waiting for that part of it to arrive. I can see it coming from a long way off. It’s a conversation I’ve had too many times.”

Prescott drove in silence for a few seconds. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. How about if I promise not to ask you about that, and you just tell me what your major is in college?”

She stared at him with hard hostility, then seemed to see herself. A laugh escaped from her lips. “Accounting. I’m in a CPA program.”

“That sounds great,” said Prescott. “I admire and approve of it. And I hope you’ll notice that it hardly hurt at all.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and put her hand on his arm, then seemed to think better of it and pulled it back into her lap. “I just get so tired of it.” She sat quietly for a few blocks, but no other topic seemed to fill the void. It weighed on her. “How about if I just tell you quickly, and then we forget about it?”

“No,” said Prescott. “I don’t think so.”

She was very surprised. “Why not?”

“You think I have some eagerness to hear all the intimate details, so I was weaseling my way up to that. Actually, I wasn’t. You don’t find out much about people by looking into all that. It’s mostly decisions they don’t feel like defending, and luck. I learn more about people by hearing what they want than by hearing what they have. So if it’s a sad story, I don’t want to hear it.”

“It’s a pretty good story,” she teased. “And it’s not sad.”

“You sure?” he said skeptically.

“Yes. I was from a small town west of here, eighteen, and couldn’t afford college. I—”

“You said this wasn’t going to be sad,” he reminded her.

“I know,” she said. “That part’s over. I came to the big city and waited tables in a restaurant. I was very good at math, so I did a little of the bookkeeping, too: cashing out at the end of the day, and helping with the records. A girl in my apartment building was working at a strip place, and one day while we were doing our laundry, we compared notes.”

“Did she work at Nolan’s?”

“No, she worked at a different place, called the Harem,” she said. “But here’s the comparison. I worked at my restaurant five to eleven every night, doing setup, waiting for dinner from five-thirty until ten on my feet, then cleanup after. I made five dollars an hour plus tips, which all added up to about a hundred a night, because it was a nice restaurant and I was really sweet and eager and looked young and pretty. My friend spent two hours at work, which amounted to forty-five minutes of getting made up and in costume, two fifteen-minute dance shows on stage a half hour apart, and fifteen minutes getting the makeup off and changing to street clothes. She got two hundred for the two dance numbers, and her tips came to about three hundred a night. She was making five times what I was making, and working a third of the hours—meaning that she was getting fifteen times what I got on an hourly basis, and was actually doing what I call work for only a quarter of that time.”

“That’s quite a difference.”

“I was off on Sunday night because I worked the Sunday brunch, so I went to see her work. There were four girls on that night. None of them was especially good-looking. They all had lots of long, bleached hair and reasonably good shapes, but that was all you could say. They weren’t even very good dancers, except one. It turned out that my friend wasn’t exaggerating. They were all making more than she was. They had an amateur night just like Nolan’s does on Saturday night, so I signed up for it and called in sick at my job. It isn’t nuclear physics. If you can dance and you’ve seen four or five other people do it, you know about as much as you’ll ever know, and if you’re used to waiting tables in six-hour shifts, dancing for fifteen minutes isn’t exactly a triathlon, either.”

“So you got into it on the arithmetic.”

She laughed. “Numbers were always my weakness. I was a little nervous about it the first time. I didn’t know what to expect. Even though I’d spent a night watching it from offstage, I wasn’t used to the men. I also didn’t know what to wear that first time, but then I realized I had the perfect thing hanging on the hook on the back of my closet door: my waitress uniform. I looked good in it. It was all starched and ready for Saturday dinner, and I had comfortable shoes that went with it. A lot of the girls try to dance in spike heels, and you can do it after a while, but at first it makes you clumsy and stiff. May Company was having a lingerie sale, so I went and bought some nice underthings—a slip and everything, because I figured I might need a lot to take off, just to kill time on stage. So what I took off was the waitress outfit I was supposed to wear to work that night. I won the contest, made fifteen hundred for fifteen minutes’ work, and got offered a job. I thought about it for a week, and realized it didn’t make any sense to do anything else.”

“How long have you been doing it?” asked Prescott.

“About twelve or thirteen years, on and off.”

“On and off?”

“Yeah. I got married once, and quit. I met him at the Harem. He was one of those young guys you see a lot, who go out on a tear on Friday night, drink too much, and celebrate something or other. He was with about five other guys from a car lot. He was a salesman, and they’d beaten their quota that month and set some record. I didn’t expect to see any of them again, but the next time I came on, there he was. A little while later, we were dating.”

“What made you decide to go out with him?”

“Did I say he wasn’t cute?” she retorted. “And he seemed to me to be the one I wanted. A few months later, he changed jobs so nobody at work would know me, and we got married in Las Vegas. It didn’t last.”

“Why not?”

“First he wanted me to quit stripping. I could understand that, so I quit. Things went on okay for about a year. We didn’t have a whole lot coming in, but I had saved a lot at the Harem. I went back to waiting tables. But then things started to fall apart. He bought a new car and put a down payment on a house with most of the money I had saved. Then one day, he came home and said he’d been laid off. He wanted me to go back to stripping, just for a little while, to make the mortgage payments and get ahead for good. I felt really sorry for him because I thought it must be killing him, knowing how he felt. But since he asked me, and I didn’t have any better ideas, I did it. By then, Hobart had bought Nolan’s and opened it as a strip club, so I got a job there. I figured I’d better make the most of it, so the time I was back at it would be as short as possible. I worked five nights, four shows a night, and five on weekends. Weekends are a rougher crowd, but the money is great. I was taking home at least a thousand a night, sometimes more, most of it in cash. After about two months, I noticed my husband wasn’t looking too hard for a job. I kept track of him for a week, and realized he wasn’t looking at all. I asked him about it, and he said he already was working. He was acting as my business manager. Investing my pay, making hair appointments for me, and all that was a full-time job. He said it was stupid for him to kill himself trying to sell cars when I could make much more just taking off my clothes. I put up with that for a while, not wanting to do anything too hasty while I was thinking things over. Then I took a look at the bank statements and the bills, and saw that there were no investments, no savings. He had been spending it all, a lot of it on other women. I filed for divorce. My lawyer did a search to see if I still had any money left, and he found no money, but a lot of things I didn’t know: that my husband hadn’t been laid off from the car lot at all. He had quit, and told them he’d inherited some money.”

“After the divorce, you had to go back to work, right?”

“Already was working, remember?” she said. “I paid off the debts, sold the house, sold the new car and bought a used one. I was a little better than broke. I worked nights for another year, saved every penny, and went back to school. I go to class at night, and work the business lunch now. As you know. The crowd then is a nice, quiet bunch, mostly older men, and no rowdy drunks. They tip at least as well, though, because they have more. I’m not going to be able to make a living forever going on a stage and shaking my bare ass, but I’m hoping I’ll get away with it long enough to be a licensed CPA.” She paused and looked at him with a calm smile. “See? It wasn’t very sad.”

“Borderline,” he said.

“Come on.”

“All right. You’re only twenty-eight or twenty-nine, right?”

“I wish. I’m thirty-six.”

“You look younger. You could do this for a long time yet.”

“Maybe,” she admitted. “But I’m not the only one getting older. The business is getting older too.”

“It is?”

“Sure. It’s an old-fashioned thing. Like magic shows, or circuses. It made a lot more sense when you hardly ever saw a woman’s legs, or something. But the world is different, and what we do at Nolan’s is pretty tame. When I’m done with my act, you’ve seen maybe ten square inches that I couldn’t show you on the beach. Hobart can tell you. He knows. If you turn on your TV, you can see attractive people having sex.” She amended it. “Some are attractive, anyway. On the Internet there are sites with girls living in a house where there are cameras on in every room, even the bathroom. You can e-mail them and ask them to do things.”

“So you think the clubs will go out of business?”

“I think they’ll last a little longer than I do, but not the way they are.”

“I’m not sure I follow that,” said Prescott.

“A place like Nolan’s will either be girls doing the same acts that made your grandma upset—just kind of quaint, making fun of what used to shock people—or it will be stuff that would make you barf.”

“Which way is Nolan’s going?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Hobart thinks like you. He’s a businessman. He got the place cheap and thought of a way to make it pay. While it pays, he’ll keep it. But he has no emotional investment in owning a club. He’s into money. If it brought in more money to replace us with men demonstrating power tools, he’d do it.” She considered. “I think he won’t go the next step to keep up with the times. He hates legal troubles, so he keeps things pretty conservative. I think he’ll just sell out at a profit someday.”

“Do you like him?”

She shrugged. “He’s okay, I guess. He works hard at keeping the place up and running it. He’s good about protecting the dancers: nobody ever gets pawed twice. I guess what I’d have to say is that I understand him, and that makes me comfortable.”

“You understand him?”

“Yeah. He’s the greediest man I ever met—no, the second greediest. I just told you about the first. But you only have to know one thing about Hobart: he’s there to make money. He uses the bar as an office for all kinds of side deals, people coming and going all the time. He looks at the acts, but only to see if they’re good enough to keep customers there buying drinks. If we all offered him a choice—our bodies or our purses—he’d take the purses.”

“And that makes you comfortable?”

“Yeah,” she said. “It does.”

He could see her watching him out of the corner of her eye the rest of the way to Cavender’s. When they pulled up in front of the restaurant Prescott had to stop and inch forward behind two big black cars, as the parking attendants opened doors to let passengers out. Only then did she look away from Prescott to study the fashionably dressed people stepping from their cars to the big wooden doors. In a moment, the attendant was opening her door, and she stood, catching a glimpse of the big crystal chandelier, giant old-fashioned rugs, and heavy antique furniture.

When the valet had taken the Corvette and Prescott and Jeanie were inside, she was like a cat studying her surroundings intensely, but through half-lidded eyes, without appearing to notice them at all. Cavender’s was one of the best restaurants in St. Louis, but it had been since the 1920s: the antiques had aged in place. Prescott ordered them both a glass of wine, which they sipped while they looked at the menu under the watchful eyes of the waiter. She closed hers, set it on the table and said, “I’ll just have a small salad, no dressing.”

The waiter looked expectantly at Prescott, but Prescott said, “Can you come back in a few minutes, please?”

As soon as he was away from the table, Prescott said, “You’re making me feel bad.”

“I have to watch what I eat. It’s not my fault,” she said, not meeting his eyes. “I have to make a living.”

“Do you like fish?”

“I love fish.”

He beckoned and the waiter returned. “The lady and I will have a salad with no dressing, and we’ll both have broiled swordfish and another glass of wine.”

The waiter went off, and she looked at Prescott, puzzled.

“It’s only a few more calories. We’ll have martinis sometime, and you can skip the olive.”

She met his eyes this time. “It’s much more expensive than I thought,” she whispered.

“At a bad restaurant, the food is worth less than they charge—sometimes it’s worth nothing. At this place, the food is going to be worth more than they charge, so it’s a bargain.” He smiled again. “I can’t make you eat it, and I can’t make you have a good time. All I can do is put them both in front of you.”

She said, “You’re not like Hobart at all, are you?”

He shook his head. “I like money because it buys things like nice dinners. When I run out of money I get more.”

“You’re so sure?”

“Yes,” he said. “I am. And given the choice of the purse or the body, I don’t hesitate, either. If a man even looks at the purse, he loses her, because she knows he doesn’t deserve her.” He smiled again. “A man looks ridiculous with a purse anyway.”

In the middle of the entrée, she said, “You were absolutely right. I would have been stupid not to have this.”

“I knew the chef would convince you,” said Prescott.

She ate a few more bites, then stopped. “I can’t eat any more. I’m just not used to it. I don’t want to make you think I’m not doing what you asked, not having a good time. I love this restaurant. I love being here.”

“I’m very glad,” Prescott said. “It was the right place to take you, then. Being with the most attractive woman in the place is a special treat for me, and the food is the only reward for you.”

She looked around the room—a little nervously, he thought—as she compared herself to the other women. Then she looked down at her plate. “You say things that I should think are insulting, because no woman would believe you. But I don’t. It’s nice.”

They lingered for a long time over coffee. He had a small pastry for dessert, but she could not be induced to touch it. When they were outside and the valet brought the Corvette, she turned back toward the restaurant and stared into it. He said, “What’s wrong? Did we forget something?”

“No.”

“Is there somebody I forgot to tip?”

She got into the car, shook her head, and giggled. “No, I think you tipped everybody—even a couple of customers. I was just taking a last look.”

“If you like it, let’s come back. When are you going to have a night without classes again?”

“Not right away,” she said. “We can talk about it sometime, if you still want to.”

He drove along the Mississippi, looking at the lights on the water, glancing now and then at the huge concrete arch that dominated this side of the river. She said, “What do you think of it?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “It’s pretty remarkable. I’m not sure yet what it’s for.”

“I’ve lived around here all my life, and neither am I.”

They drove on for a time, not speaking. Finally, she said, “I’d invite you to my place for a drink, but I’m afraid I don’t usually drink, so there’s nothing there. Besides, the place is sort of a mess, and—”

“Then let’s go to mine.”

She hesitated for a few seconds, then said, “All right.”

When they entered his apartment and he turned on the light, he could see her looking around with extreme care, like a small animal sniffing for danger. He directed her attention where he wanted it. “The apartment is still kind of tentative. I’m not really unpacked, so try to ignore that stuff.” He pointed, and watched her eyes settle on the boxes and open bags of cameras, binoculars, expensive small furnishings, and the smaller, open boxes of wristwatches, women’s jewelry, and gold coins.

While he went to the kitchen to make the drinks, he could tell by the sound of her high heels on the bare hardwood floor that she was looking more closely. He returned carrying two martinis, and handed her one. “I remember you said you don’t drink very often, so you might want to take that in little sips over time.”

She looked at him guardedly. “Are you married?”

He jerked his head back in surprise. “Me? Don’t you remember? I’m one of the sad, lonely men you were talking about on the way to dinner. I think I might be their president.”

“I said they were sad and lonely. That doesn’t mean they’re not married.”

“Not me,” he said. “Never been married. I guess the ones I liked well enough all liked somebody else better. I’m hoping it was the car washes—that they weren’t glamorous enough—because that’s solved.”

She didn’t appear amused. “Then why do you have all this jewelry?”

“What jewelry?”

She pointed at the top tray, which was full of rings and bracelets and necklaces in little compartments. “Duh?”

“Oh, that stuff. It’s a small speculation. The company that bought one of my car washes is owned by a Malaysian family that has been buying up stuff in Hawaii and California. First they wanted to negotiate the sale in their currency instead of dollars. I said, ‘Forget it.’ A week later, the son comes back with another deal: half in dollars, and the rest in stock from a pawnshop they just bought in Phoenix. They wanted to close it and turn it into an office building. They had the permits and everything ready to demolish and build, so they were willing to give me an incredible discount. Look at this stuff: cameras, watches, all kinds of things. I figured I could write down the value a bit for tax purposes. Okay, write it down a lot. Come to think of it, I forgot to mention this stuff on my tax return at all. That’s why I took a loss on my car wash.” He grinned. “This is only part of it, too.”

Jeanie took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh, shaking her head in amusement. “You’re worse than Hobart. If I were your accountant, I’d have told you to stick with cash. Besides violating tax laws, you probably got screwed.”

“Oh?” he said. “Come take a look.” He pulled her to the side of the room, knelt, reached into an open box, rummaged around carelessly. He stood up behind her and pulled something around her neck.

“What are you doing?” she said. “That’s cold.”

He clasped the chain of the necklace and said, “That’s probably true. Do you suppose that’s why they call it ice? No, I guess it looks sort of like ice.” He picked up an antique oval wall mirror with an ornate gold frame and a convex surface. “Here. Take a look.”

She stared at herself in the mirror and saw the sparkle of diamonds against the black of her dress. The gold chain held a pear-shaped stone set as a pendant with a pea-sized round stone on either side of it. Prescott could see her chest rise and fall as she looked at herself. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “These can’t be real.”

“Of course they’re real,” he said. “I’m not the one who just got off the boat ready to buy everything in sight. I had all the stones appraised before I went into this thing. It’s not the most up-to-date setting, but they can be reset. Maybe the two side stones as earrings or something. That’s not important. I got them for a tenth of what you could get them for at Tiffany’s.” He laid the mirror on the floor beside the wall, picked up his drink again, and walked into the living room toward the couch.

Jeanie stopped beside the row of boxes, her hands behind her neck fiddling with the clasp. “Wait. Help me get this off.”

He stopped and looked back at her for a moment, studying her critically. “No, I don’t think so. It doesn’t look anywhere near as good as that in a box. You’d better keep it.”

Her eyes widened, and she froze, her hands still behind her neck. “You can’t be serious. You hardly know me.”

He smirked and waved a hand at her. “I don’t know anybody else any better, and what I know about them isn’t all good.”

She shook her head. “I can’t take something like this.” She undid the clasp, carefully lifted the necklace off her neck, and fastened the clasp again.

“I’m not trying to insult you or pay you for going out with me or something,” he said. “It’s an impulse present. If you’ll look in the other boxes, you can see I got more women’s jewelry on that deal than I know what to do with. I picked out that one because it looked like something you could use. If you can, good for you. If you can’t, pawn it and take a vacation sometime. That’s probably what the last owner did.”

She came to the couch, watching him as she let it dangle from the end of a finger. She sat down, unclasped it again, and turned away from him, holding the ends over the back of her neck. “Can you fasten it again?”

He clasped it. She stood and walked across the room with her drink, and sipped it. She turned on his radio and fiddled with the dials. Finally, she found a song with a beat. She turned it up and began to nod her head with the rhythm. She set her drink on the shelf beside the radio and began to dance, swaying her hips to the music. Her eyes were closed and her features assumed an expression that was transported. She turned away from him, tugged the zipper at the back of her dress down a few inches, then in a writhing motion reached up her back from below to pull it down farther. Her left hand rested on her thigh and began to slide up beside her haunch, bringing the dress with it.

“Wait,” said Prescott. “Hold it.”

She half-turned to look over her shoulder expectantly as she let the dress slide down to bare it, still moving with the music. “Something wrong?”

“Yes,” said Prescott. He stood, stepped beside her, and turned off the music. “Don’t do this,” he said.

She turned the rest of the way to face him, holding the front of her dress up at the neck. “Don’t?” she repeated, looking alarmed. “You don’t want me to?”

“No,” he said. “Please.”

Her eyes were worried, almost frightened. “Why not?”

“I asked you to go out to dinner with me, and try to have a good time. Not to work another shift.”

She shook her head like a person shivering, her eyes now earnest, pleading. “No,” she said. “I want to. This isn’t working, it’s just for you.” She seemed to search for an explanation. “It’s an impulse present too, not something I agreed to do or planned ahead.” She looked into his eyes again. “You have money, jewels. All I have . . .” She shrugged, and the dress slipped a little lower, the diamonds now sliding off the fabric to rest on the smooth skin between her breasts. She felt them and looked down, then quickly back up into his eyes, expecting that she had made the only argument she needed to. She saw something unexpected, his eyes delivering his accusation that her accidental gesture had been premeditated. She recognized it too, and he could tell she was fighting the sensation that nothing she did was, or could be, uncalculated. “Don’t you like me?”

He said, “Thank you. I like you very much. I want you to be my friend. But this . . . this isn’t the way for me to be yours. It wouldn’t be good for you. It’s my fault. I wanted to take you out, have a nice time, take you home, have you give me a good-night kiss, and leave. I still want to do that. The diamonds are nothing to me, just a little token like flowers. I didn’t even buy the necklace in advance, just picked it, like a flower in my garden, and handed it to you.”

Her eyes were beginning to look wet now. “You didn’t find me in some art museum or something,” she said. “This is what you like. You came to watch me all those times.”

He gave her a rueful smile. “You’re right. You don’t know how hard this is to resist. But tomorrow when you get up, what I want you to remember is that you had a nice date with a man who isn’t so bad, and went home without having to do anything but be pleasant. I don’t want you to remember that a man gave you a necklace in return for a private strip show.”

She shook her head hard, and put her hands on the sides of his head to force him to look into her eyes. “This is not hard for me, not humiliating or anything. I have a beautiful body. I like having you see it.” Finally she said, her eyes telling him it was extremely hard for her, “This isn’t like work. Don’t you get it? I want to have sex with you.”

He reached around her and zipped up the dress as he said, “Not like this.” He stepped back and walked toward the couch. “Not the first time we were ever alone together.”

She looked devastated. She stepped toward the door. “You’d better take me home now, okay?”

He put down his drink and walked toward the door. She seemed to take his acquiescence as a confirmation that he didn’t like her. He said, “You said you weren’t free again right away. Can I call you and see if we can arrange another dinner the first night you’re not busy?”

She looked at him, confused. She said skeptically, “You won’t call me again.”

“If you think that, then let’s arrange something now. Have you ever been to the Veranizzi restaurant at the Prince Andrew Hotel?”

“No.”

“Good. Neither have I, so it’s worth exploring.”

She was silent for a moment, her eyes averted, looking down at her feet.

At last he said, “Well? What’s wrong?”

She looked up at him, the tears now coming, but her mouth turned up, trying to keep from laughing at the same time. “I lied to you before,” she said. “About my schedule—in case I didn’t like you. I’m not really busy every night. I’m on break before summer session starts.” She struggled. “I don’t know how to tell you this, so I’ll just say it. I’m working one to two tomorrow, and I’d like you to pick me up tomorrow at three-thirty, take me to the Prince Andrew so we can check in at four.”

“I’ll pick you up at six-thirty,” he said. “For dinner.”

He drove her back to the apartment complex, but when he pulled up to her building, she said, “Not here.” She looked at him apologetically. “My building is way down there. I lied to you about that too, so if you were crazy or something, you wouldn’t know where I lived.”

He drove her to the distant building, let her out of the Corvette, and walked her to the door. She stopped, whirled, stood on her toes, and kissed him deeply, lingering for a long time.

“This is where you pick me up tomorrow. Three-thirty, sharp. Not six-thirty.” She released him, then took a step toward the door, came back, and whispered in his ear, “Come and watch me work tomorrow. I would like it.”

Prescott watched her disappear through the security door, heard the click as the automatic lock slid in. As he got into his car, he reviewed the evening. If there was any relationship between crimes and punishments, in a minute or two he was going to have to expect a big truck to come through the intersection at seventy, go right over his stupid little car, and drive the steering column straight through his chest.