Now and Then

60.

I stayed with the rest of the posse in a state of high readiness while Susan had her fifty-minute hour with Alderson or Turner or whoever he really was. When they were through and he had uneventfully gone, she came into the spare room. She was in her understated, for Susan, shrink garb. Today it was a dark blue velvet blazer over designer jeans.

“Anything?” I said.

“Interesting,” she said. “Nothing that can’t wait. I have my next client in a minute.”

“Can you give me a one-sentence slug line, on ‘interesting’?”

“I think there’s some kind of masturbatory mental sex going on,” she said.

Vinnie turned his head to look at her. Chollo smiled. Hawk showed nothing. Which was what Hawk always showed.

“In whose mind,” I said.

Susan grinned at me.

“I have a Harvard Ph.D.,” she said.

“So, only in his mind,” I said.

“Exactly,” Susan said.

“You think he’s still trying to seduce you?” I said.

“I think he thinks he has.”

“Which is why he keeps coming?” I said.

“He has not forgotten that he wants to use me against you.”

“But the tail has begun to wag the dog?”

“Maybe,” she said.

“And the fact that he has to walk past us when he arrives?”

I said.

“Half the fun,” Chollo said.

We all looked at him.

“You are his enemy,” Chollo said. “If he can walk past you on his way to having mind sex with the señorita . . .”

“Ay, caramba,” I said.

Chollo smiled.

“Sí,” he said.

All of us stared at Chollo. Except Vinnie, who might have been sleeping, or might have been listening to his iPod, or both.

“How you know that?” Hawk said.

“It is a trick we hot-blooded Latins often play in my village,”

Chollo said.

“There’s probably a lot of that going on where you live,”

I said.

“Mucho,” Chollo said.

“And part of my charm, for him,” Susan said, “is that he gets to strut past you and have his imaginary way with me, and strut back out, under, so to speak, my protection . . .”

She looked at her watch.

“You have other charms,” I said as she started across the hall.

She turned and her smile gleamed with possibility.

“And don’t you forget it,” she said.