Bad Business

33

Susan and I were cooking dinner at my place, for Hawk and a thoracic surgeon. Which is, of course, to say that I was cooking dinner and Susan was setting the table, and putting cut flowers around.

The surgeon was an absolute blockbuster of a black woman named Cecile. I was making my own version of moussaka, with zucchini and onions and peppers and no eggplant. I hate eggplant. I was drinking a martini made with orange vodka while I cooked, and the rest of them were sitting at my kitchen counter drinking martinis too, and watching me.

"I hope this isn't too exhausting for you," I said while the lamb was browning.

"No," Hawk said, "I'm cool with it. But how come you didn't prepare in advance."

"I was busy fighting crime," I said.

"Who's winning?" Hawk said.

"Crime," I said.

"Little guy with the long hair reappear?"

"Not yet. I'll let you know."

"I ready to pounce," Hawk said.

Susan took so small a drink of her martini that it might simply have been that she sniffed at it.

"Something I've been thinking," she said."When you had lunch with the CEO of that company."

"Bob Cooper," I said. "Kinergy."

"Yes. Wasn't that a private club?"

"That's why I felt so honored," I said.

"So how did Mr. Long Hair get in?"

"You're making me look bad," I said. "I never thought of that."

"As long as one of us did," Susan said.

"The finger of suspicion would point at Coop."

"I'd think so," Susan said. "Of course I'm not a detective."

"Oh shut up," I said.

Susan smiled her contented smile and took in another gram of martini vapor. I went back to my moussaka.

"Where did you learn to cook?" Cecile said. "I'm always curious about men who cook."

"We been cookin', " Hawk said to her.

"Shh," she said. "Did you learn from Susan?"

Hawk and I laughed.

"What?" Cecile said.

"If I made you coffee," Susan said, "I'd burn it."

"Oh. Then who?"

"I grew up in an all-male family," I said. "My father and my two uncles. All of us cooked."

"No women?"

"None that lived there," I said.

"So there was no stigma attached?"

"No."

The moussaka got made. The martinis got drunk. I opened some wine and we sat at the table to eat. Pearl took a position next to Hawk and poked her head in under his elbow and rested her head on his thigh. Hawk broke off a biscuit and gave it to her.

While we were eating I said, "I've got a plan."

"Oh, thank God," Hawk said.

"I need some information on a guy named Darrin O'Mara who runs, ah, sex seminars."

"Isn't he on the radio?" Cecile said.

"You listen to him?" Hawk said.

"No need," Cecile said. "I have you, Chocolate Thunder."

Hawk grinned.

"What you need?" he said to me.

"I need undercover," I said.

"At a sex seminar?" Susan said. "I'll do it."

"You've been seen too much with me," I said.

"I'll say."

"What I need is Hawk and Cecile to enroll, and see what's really up in these seminars."

Hawk looked at Cecile.

"What do you think?" he said. "Doctor Covert?"

"What are you trying to find out?" Cecile said.

"I think there's something fishy about everything O'Mara's involved in. I need information."

"I understand that," Cecile said. "But why look into these seminars?"

"Because, at the moment, I have nothing else to look into, and I hate spinning my wheels."

"And what do you expect to find out?" Cecile was not a fools-rush-in kind of girl.

"I want to know if there's any reason for someone to refer to him as a corporate pimp."

Cecile thought about it.

"I'd be with you?" she said to Hawk.

"Every moment," Hawk said.

"And I wouldn't have to do anything I didn't want to do."

"No," I said.

"'Cept with me," Hawk said.

"There isn't anything I don't want to do with you," she said.

I looked at Susan.

"Wow," I said, "why don't you ever say things like that to me?"

"You're not Hawk," she said.

"More deadly than the adder's sting," I said. "What do you think? Can you do it?"

Cecile looked at Hawk. "What do you think, Licorice Stick?" she said.

"Sure," Hawk said.

L icorice Stick?