“They don’t whack it off.”
“They don’t?”
“No. Everybody thinks they do but they don’t.”
“Well, that’s good news for somebody.”
“They invert it.”
“They what?”
“Turn it inside out and stuff it back up there so it’s like a woman’s.”
“Well, that’s better than whacking it off.”
“I’m going to get my eyes done.”
“Good.”
“I mean, I’m gonna get all the plumbing done first but then I’m gonna concentrate on my face. You remember a movie star named Gayle Hunicutt?”
“Sorta.”
“Late sixties, around there, she was kinda big for a while. Anyway, her.”
“Her?”
“Her eyes. That’s how I’m gonna have mine done. If I can find a picture of her, anyway. That’ll probably be a bitch, won’t it? Findin’ a picture for the doctors to go by.”
“It’s one thing after another, isn’t it, Henry?”
“Then I’m gonna get a huge set of knockers.”
“Great. Henry, I really am gettin’ kind of sleepy.”
“You’re gettin’ uptight is what you’re gettin’. Straights like you always get uptight when people like me start talkin’ about their operations.”
“Maybe that’s it. Maybe I’m gettin’ so uptight that the blood isn’t gettin’ to my brain and I’m starting to pass out.”
“You really are a prick sometimes.”
“Henry, I just want a little sleep. That’s all. I think you’re beautiful and I hope you get those eyes you want — Gayle Harcourt or whatever her name is — and I hope you get a set of tits out to here. But right now, Henry, I really need to get some sleep. Honest to God I do.”
“I just wish you weren’t so pretty.”
“Oh, God, Henry, just knock off the crap for one night, all right?”
“Why don’t you come down here and make me?”
“You know what’s happening, Henry?”
“What is?”
“I’m getting pissed. You know how when you get all hot and sweaty you get real crabby? Well that’s what’s happening to me, Henry. I’m getting real hot and sweaty. But I’m goin’ right by crabby and right into enraged. Real enraged. So, see, Henry, I may come down there all right but if I do, I’m gonna kick your beautiful face in. Are we communicating, Henry?”
And there fell upon the prison cell, for the rest of that hot and sweaty night, many hours of pure and blissful and extravagantly wonderful... Henry-silence.
6
The day was so sunny and bright, so charged with spring, that I took my coffee out on the front porch and watched the baby-blue fog disperse in the piney hills. I went around the house picking spent blossoms from the daffodils the rain had pounded. The cats sat in the window going crazy over every birdie that swooped down on the porch railing.
Finished with coffee, I ran my one mile up and one mile back along the gravel road. Everything looked so damned good and clean and beautiful, all of it somehow making me feel immortal. But I kept thinking about last night, the gunfire through the window, the sounds of glass breaking, a car roaring off into darkness. I supposed he might be up in a tree even now, but that was a bit paranoid even for a former spook like me.
After my shower, I drove the jeep to my bank, and then to a hardware store on the edge of Iowa City. One thing about Iowa City: when they find a style they like, they don’t desert it. Lots of 1968 hippie holdovers wandering the aisles here. I expected to hear a Jefferson Airplane Up the Revolution! ditty come blaring out of the overhead speakers.
I like hardware stores. The sawn lumber in the backyard smells boyhood sweet, while the hammers and nails and glass and shingles and bolts and saws and screwdrivers and cement all attest to the purposefulness of human beings. When you think that we came originally from the sea, and then you look at the shelters we’ve built, not to mention the monuments in Paris and Rome and Cairo and Washington, D.C., you have to take at least a little bit of pride in our species, even if we do screw things up every once in a while.
I bought three pieces of window glass, some fresh putty and a putty knife, and went back home and put in the windows. The cats helped, of course, sitting prim and pretty in a little conga line a few feet behind me, making sure that I knew what I was doing.
By this time, it was 10:17 A.M. It was safe to assume that Nora would be up by now.
The receptionist at the Collins Plaza in Cedar Rapids rang Nora’s room six times and then said, “I’m sorry, sir. Would you like to leave a message?”
I left my name and number.
Then I took another cup of coffee out to the front porch and settled in with my morning newspaper.
She called twenty minutes later.
7
“I have a question for you, Nora.”
“I expected you would.”
“What happens if I catch him?”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“If I identify who he is — or at least who I think he is — and then I tell you, what do you do?”
There was a long pause. “You mean do I turn him over to the police?”
“Exactly.”
“Is this really any of your business? I don’t mean to be rude, but it seems to me that your job ends once you find him.”
“I’m not much for vigilantes, Nora.”
“Meaning what, exactly?” She was getting irritated. For all their niceness, nice rich girls aren’t used to being interrogated by the hired help.
“Meaning, I don’t want you or your friend with the mirror sunglasses to kill him.”
“You must have a nice image of me, Mr. Payne.”
“The name’s Robert and I don’t have either a good image or a bad image of you. I’m just trying to anticipate all the eventualities.”
“Of course, you may never catch him.”
“True enough.”
“In which case you’ll have earned yourself a great deal of money, anyway.”
“I’ll do my very best, Nora. I need the money, as you pointed out last night, but now I have a personal stake in this. I want to see if you’re right about Mike being murdered. And if he was, I want to see the killer brought in. I also don’t like the idea of some scumbag roaming the countryside killing little girls.”
“That’s what I’ve been waiting to hear. A little bit of anger. You’re a very quiet person, Robert.”
“If you mean, is macho my style, no. I don’t like hanging around guys who look like they just stepped out of a beer commercial. I saw too many of them in the army and too many of them in the Agency. Quiet usually gets the job done just as well as ape calls. Sometimes better. And that’s why Mike Peary and I got along, by the way. He didn’t have any peacock blood in him, either.”
She laughed. “I agree with you. About quiet getting the job done just as well.”
“I’m going to take the job, and I’m going to do the best I can. Hopefully, by the time I finish, we’ll have the man who killed your daughter and my friend in custody. How does that sound?”