She looked at me with open affection in the glass. “And you.”
She tugged at a place where her hair had knotted up. “We wouldn’t even need much money,” she said. “Money just takes the edge off. You need to be a little hungry to get that rush that comes with finding a really good one.”
Again she amazed me, this kid barely out of her teens.
“It’s not-having money that keeps you on your toes,” she said, meeting my eyes in the mirror.
I told her we were probably the most on-our-toes pair since Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, and she laughed. “Why couldn’t I’ve found you a year ago,” she mused. “Why-o-why-o-why?”
“It wouldn’t‘ve done much good,” I said absently, “since we’ve already got it well established that I’m old enough to be your father.”
She scoffed at this. “Yeah, if you’d started hiking up skirts when you were thirteen, maybe.” She looked at me in the mirror and said, blushing fiercely, “You’re probably not up to a little seduction right now, I’ll bet.”
I thought long and hard about how to respond, the words to use. The ones I picked were clumsy and inadequate. “Under the circumstances, you know, this is not the best idea you’ve had all day.”
“Well, it was just a thought.”
I told her it was a lovely thought, I was flattered. In another time, maybe…in another place…
“In another life,” she said, closing the book on it.
I decided to hang out here until just before our flight left. The certainty of Slater’s listening in on us I accepted as the lesser of two evils: here I could keep my back to the wall until the last possible moment. I looked at the wall but it told me nothing. I knew what I needed to know. Detectives today can punch a hole the size of a pin through a concrete wall, run a wire into bed with a cheating housewife, record her ecstasy with the other guy in eight-track stereo, and add a Michael Jackson sound track for the entertainment of the office staff. I told Eleanor none of this: no sense waving a red flag just yet. I called out and ordered a pizza delivered. She kept up a running chatter while we ate—her way, I guessed, of relieving her own building tension. She talked about all the great books she had found that had been screwed up by one anal-obsessive chucklehead or another. I laughed as only a fellow traveler can: I too knew that peculiar heartache. You find a grand copy of an old Ross Macdonald and open it to see that some fool has written all over it, destroying half its value and all of its factory-fresh desirability. Why is a book the only gift that the giver feels free and often compelled to deface before giving? Who would give a shirt or a blouse and write, in ink, Happy birthday from Bozo all over the front of it? Even worse than the scribblers, Eleanor said, were the name embossers. “When I become the queen of hell, I’m going to parade all those embosser freaks past me in a long naked line. I’ll have an embosser with the word IDIOT on it, smothered in hot coals, and I’ll emboss them , sir, in the tenderest place that you can imagine.” That punishment sounded pretty sexist to me, which was exactly her point. “Have you ever seen an embossermark with a woman’s name on it…ever?” I had, but only once and it probably didn’t count—a sadistic dominatrix whose murder I had investigated long ago. “Women write in the spirit of giving,” Eleanor said. “Men emboss like they’re branding cattle, to possess.” For the books, we sadly agreed, the result was the same.
I hoped Slater was getting an earful. I looked at the clock: the plane took off in three hours, I was almost home free. The day was ending on a wave of nickel-and-dime bookstuff. I asked her to define anal-obsessive chucklehead, please, and tell me how that particular characteristic expresses itself. She laughed and slapped my hand and said, “Get out of here, you damn fool,” and the night wound down. We drank a toast to the defilers of good books—scribblers, embossers, and the remainder goons at the Viking Press—may their conversion to the cause be swift and permanent. At eight-thirty she asked if she could mail a letter. She sat at the table and scratched out a few lines on hotel stationery: then she turned away, shielding the letter with her body so I couldn’t see it. I knew she had taken something out of her purse and dropped it in the envelope with the letter. I was riddled with second thoughts, but there wasn’t anything to be done about it: I could either be her jailer or her friend. She licked the envelope, sealed it, and called for a bellhop to mail it. And I sat mute, her friend, and watched it disappear.
I was a bit curt with her after that. She asked when we should leave and I told her not to worry about it, I’d let her know. I had decided to linger here until exactly seventy minutes before takeoff, then haul ass for Sea-Tac in a cloud of smoke. I hoped the TV would cover our sudden retreat. I’d let Slater listen to the Tonight Show until reality began to dawn: if I was lucky, we’d be halfway to the airport before he knew it. Out on the street I’d have only Pruitt to deal with.
Duck soup, I thought, an even-money standoff.
I always bet on me with odds like that. I had forgotten that line from Burns about the best-laid schemes of mice and men. I should read more poetry.
15
At 9:35 the telephone rang. We looked at each other and neither of us moved. I let it ring and after a while it stopped. Now we’d see, I thought: if it had been a test, somebody would be over to see if we were still here.
At 9:43 it rang again. By then I had rethought the strategy of silence, and I picked it up.
“It’s me.” Slater’s voice sounded puffy, distant.
“So it is,” I said flatly, with a faint W. C. Fields undertone.
“We need to talk.”
“Send me a telegram.”
“Don’t get cute, Janeway, your time’s running out.”
I gave a doubtful grunt.
“We need to talk now. I’m doing you a favor if you’ve got the sense to listen.”
I listened.
“Come out in the hall.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I’m in the room next door.” His voice was raspy, urgent. “I need you to come out in the hall so we can talk.”
Then I got a break I couldn’t have bought. Eleanor got up and went to the bathroom.
“You must think I was born yesterday,” I said as soon as she closed the door.
“This is on the level. I know you’re on the eleven-eighteen. I’m giving you fair warning, you’re never gonna make it.”
“Try and stop me and you’re a dead man, Slater. That’s fair warning for both of you.”
“It’s not me that’s gonna stop you, stupid. Goddammit, are you coming out or not?”
I thought about it for five seconds. “Yeah.” I hung up.
I opened my bag and got out my gun. Strapped it on under my coat and waited till Eleanor came out of the bathroom.
“Just a little problem with my bill, no big deal,” I told her. “I’ve got to go upstairs and straighten it out. You sit right there, we’ll leave as soon as I get back.”
She didn’t say anything but I could see she wasn’t buying it. She sat where I told her and clasped her hands primly in her lap, her face a mask of sudden tension.
I opened the door and eased my way out into the hall. I had my thumb hooked over my belt, two inches from the gun.
Slater was down at the end of the hall, looking at the wall. I pulled the door shut and he turned. I think I was ready for anything but what I saw. His face had been beaten into watermelon. His left eye was battered shut, his nose pounded flat against his face. His right eye was open wide, a grotesque effect like something from an old Lon Chaney film.