Pale Kings and Princes

10

It was maybe a two-mile walk to the Reservoir Court, which took me a little less than half an hour. When I got there, Susan was sitting in the lobby with her feet on her suitcase.

We kissed.

She said, “They wouldn’t let me into the room because I wasn’t registered.”

“Can’t be too careful,” I said. “Once you got in there you might have undressed.”

“I think they were fearful of that,” she said. She was wearing a brilliant yellow coat of some glossy material that looked like a $700 slicker. Underneath was a suede suit the color of a green apple. She smelled of perfume and lipstick and her large dark eyes were full of knowledge and excitement. I’d never met anyone like her, and I didn’t expect to.

I picked up her suitcase and took her hand.

“Stay close to me, little lady,” I said. “I’ll get you through.”

The desk clerk looked stiffly past me as Susan and I went to the stairs and up to my room. I unlocked the door, and went in ahead of Susan. The room was quiet and empty. I turned on the overhead. Susan came in and closed the door behind her. She looked at me in a way that made me know she’d seen me go first. She glanced around the room.

“Isn’t this an ugly hotel room,” she said.

“It’s got a bathroom. It’s clean. Don’t be so demanding.”

“If I were demanding would I be weekending in Wheaton, Mass.?” she said. She took her coat off and dropped it across the back of a chair and opened her suitcase and began to hang up her clothes.

When she travels, Susan packs for all eventualities. An intimate dinner at the White House; a barbecue at the King Ranch; cocktails with Halston; white-water rafting. She had all of them covered. Not only outfits for all possibilities but full accessories, panty hose, shoes, lingerie, jewelry, hats, coats, gloves, belts. Her suitcase was like the clown car at the circus that keeps degorging occupants far beyond any possible capacity it might have.

While she unpacked she was entirely involved in it, fully taken with the task as she was with all tasks. It was one of her attributes as a psychotherapist, her capacity for laserlike concentration. She brought the concentration to everything she did.

“Isn’t it a sign of something,” I said, “when everything is equally important?”

“Anal compulsive,” Susan said without looking up. She was carefully refolding a blouse around some tissue before she put it in the drawer.

I sat on the bed and watched her. I loved to watch her. I loved to watch the bend of her arm, the attitude of her head as she paused to consider something. I loved the way she looked with everything exactly right. Her clothes fit just right, her makeup was flawless, her thick dark hair fell against her neck the way hair is supposed to fall. I loved the way her calf tapered to her ankle. I loved the way she chewed slightly on her lower lip as she decided which blouse to put on top. Watching her was timeless. Sound seemed to stop. Light seemed clearer.

Then she was finished.

“Now,” she said, “do we have a plan?”

“We were going to stay in and have a gourmet Italian dinner,” I said. “But it got burned up.”

“You were cooking?”

“No, it was in my car and a fat guy in a pickup truck set it on fire.”

“Your car?”

“Yeah, he didn’t know the gourmet Italian dinner was in it, though.”

Susan looked at me for a moment. “I expect you’ll tell me all about it in a while,” she said.

“Yes, but meantime I think we’re faced with the Reservoir Hunt Room for dinner.”

She bit her lower lip gently. “Okay,” she said, “here’s what I want to do. I’ll go in and take a bath and come out and seduce you. Then we can go to dinner refreshed and face the cuisine together.”

“That seems sensible,” I said.

Then she smiled at me and leaned forward. “I love you very much,” she said, and kissed me and went into the bathroom. I put my gun on the bedside table and took my shoulder holster off and hung it on a chair and then I lay on the bed with my hands behind my head. In fifteen minutes Susan appeared from the bathroom naked holding a thin bath towel in front of her.

She said “Ta da,” and dropped the bath towel, and seduced me. Easily.

It was after nine o’clock when we got down to the Hunt Room. Virgie was behind the bar with another bartender, a grayish man with horn-rimmed glasses and a red face. The bar was crowded and most of the tables were taken in the dining room, but there was one open near the back by the front window with a sweeping view of the driveway leading up to the front door.

When we were seated, the waitress showed up and took our order for drinks. I ordered beer, Susan asked for a vodka martini on the rocks with four olives in it.

The room was loud, people were drinking bourbon and eating roast beef and the surf and turf special at a boisterous pace. We looked at our menus. The waitress returned with our drinks.

Susan ordered a salad with house dressing and, when I had my entrée, a shrimp cocktail.

“That’s all,” the waitress said.

“Yes,” Susan said. She smiled at the waitress.

I ordered the chicken potpie and another beer. The waitress looked at the full bottle on the table.

“I know,” I said. “But by the time you come back I’ll be finished with it.”

“You want wine with your dinner?” the waitress said.

“No, thank you,” I said. I’d checked the wines listed on the back of the menu. They ran to André and Cribari.

Susan said, “I ate in a restaurant once, out near Sterling, and a man I was with ordered red wine with his meal and the waitress brought him a glass of port.”

“I thought it best not to challenge the cellars,” I said.

Susan sipped the martini. There were four olives in it, stuffed with pimento. “Don’t see that often,” Susan said.

“I know a place where they serve a slice of salami as a garnish on your beer glass.”

She smiled and put her hand out on the table. I covered it with mine.

“Tell me about the gourmet Italian meal we would have had,” she said.

“A turkey sub,” I said, “and a veggie sub, everything but onions.”

“Oh.”

“And a bottle of Chianti.”

“Paper cups?” Susan said.

“I was going to give you the bathroom glass at the motel and drink mine from the bottle.”

“Of course,” Susan said. “How did it come to go up in flames?”

“Some folks waylaid me on the road out to the motel. They implied I wasn’t wanted around here.”

“Un huh?” Susan said. She drank a bit more of her martini. I emptied my beer glass. There was none left in the bottle either. Luckily the waitress showed up with a new bottle.

“I’ll need another one, soon,” I said.

The waitress nodded and went away. Her name tag said her name was Gert.

“So then what happened,” Susan said.

I told her. She listened with her full attention and the warmth of it was nearly visceral.

“No one had a Hispanic accent,” she said.

“No,” I said.

“And no other cars came by, even though it was around five o’clock on a Friday night?”

“That’s right.”

“And no police car followed you,” she said, “for the first time.”

I nodded.

“That would point toward unsettling conclusions,” Susan said.

“I know,” I said. “Like maybe Wheaton’s finest were involved.”

“And maybe they had diverted traffic on that road for a little while,” Susan said. “Was there a sudden traffic flow after they left?”

“Out here there is never a sudden traffic flow,” I said. “A few cars passed me as I walked to the motel.”

“Does it mean the police are involved in the death of that reporter?”

“It might,” I said, “or it might mean they’re involved in the cocaine trade and the cocaine trade was involved with the killing, or it might just be they don’t want me to spoil the coke deal. Hard to make much money in Wheaton.”

Susan nodded. Gert appeared with the salad and put it in front of Susan. Iceberg lettuce, a wedge of winter tomato, and two carrot curls, with a splat of orange-colored French dressing on it.

Susan looked at it. “The lettuce is crisp,” she said.

“Always a silver lining,” I said.

Susan speared a piece of lettuce with her fork and ate a little of it.

“I think they used lard in the French dressing,” she said.

“What a nice idea,” I said.

Gert reappeared with my third beer. “You want another martini?” she said to Susan.

“No, thank you,” Susan said. Her smile was warm with gratitude.

Gert went away.

I poured some beer into my glass. “The thing that bothers me is, I don’t think these guys on the road were cops.”

“You can tell?” Susan said. She cut her tomato wedge in half and ate one of the halves.

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Even small-town cops?”

“Yeah, cops are cops. This is a small town, but if it’s cocaine central then it’s a pretty tough town and the cops straight or crooked are going to be more like city cops. These guys were shit kickers. They weren’t tough, they were mean. Cops are confident, or if they’re not, they make you think they are. They’re used to confrontation. They’re not uncomfortable with it.”

“And your, ah, assailants weren’t comfortable with it?”

I shook my head. “And they didn’t know what to do with the gunshot wound,” I said. “They should have if they were cops.”

Gert brought my chicken potpie and Susan’s shrimp. “You through with your salad?” she said.

Susan said, “No, I’ll keep it, thanks.”

“You want me to bring the shrimp back later,” Gert said.

“No, I’ll eat them both,” Susan said.

“You want another beer,” Gert said.

I shook my head. “Three’s about right,” I said.

Gert shrugged and went away.

I consulted my chicken potpie.

“What a disappointment,” I said to Susan.

“Canned?” Susan said.

“No, I was hoping for canned. I think they made this themselves.”

“Will you be able to finish?” Susan said.

“I think so,” I said.

“So, if they weren’t cops who were they,” Susan said.

“Don’t know. Maybe friends of cops, maybe non-Colombian coke workers, maybe guys hired to do the nasty stuff while the cops blocked off the highway.”

“Or maybe somebody that you don’t know anything about,” Susan said.

“That would be consistent,” I said.

“In that you’re trying to operate in a circumstance you don’t understand.”

“Yes.”

“That is consistent with everyone’s experience. You’re just more aware of it,” Susan said.

“Was that philosophical?” I said.

“I think so,” Susan said.