I sipped. It really was wonderful to be me, at least for the time being. I wondered if you ever got used to this kind of thing, jaded enough to call the waiter and send it all back if a pear slice had a blemish. I didn’t think I would, but who knew? Living this way changed people, and perhaps I would eventually turn into a self-centered dolt-like Robert, for instance. He couldn’t possibly have started out in life the way he was now, or his parents would have strangled him in his cradle.
So maybe I would change, too, after a couple of years of penthouse living. Of course, we would never know; this was all ending soon, far too soon, and I would be back to the world of bruised pears and watery-tasting apples. Sad, depressing, and inevitable-but why let the future ruin the present? For the moment, life was good. I was alive, and Patrick wasn’t, and I still had two strips of bacon left, and most of the fruit.
By seven forty-one I had eaten the last piece of perfectly ripe cantaloupe, pushed the plate away, and refilled my coffee cup. I had tried, but I really couldn’t make the meal last any longer without moving in slow motion. So I sipped my coffee and just sat there in the sunshine waiting for Jackie. In spite of the coffee, the size of the meal and the sun on my face made me feel a little drowsy, lazy, like a large and well-fed lizard on a rock.
By eight thirty I was saturated with coffee, and filling up with impatience. There was not even anything to be impatient about; it was Saturday, after all, and I knew of nothing urgent going on anywhere that required my presence. Even so, it made me nervous to sit there and do nothing. I suppose it seems a bit much to complain about having nothing to do except sit on the penthouse balcony and drink coffee. There are worse fates, after all-I have personally delivered many of them. But the truth is, I felt ignored, even slighted, and I wanted Jackie to spring out of bed and run to me so I could protect her-doubly stupid, since I knew very well that there was nothing left to protect her from.
But it was eight forty-two before she finally made her appearance, and it was not so much a spring-and-run as it was a stumble-and-trudge. She fell into the chair opposite me as heavily as if she had been dropped from the roof, and she stared at me for several seconds before she remembered how to speak.
“Guh mornuh,” she said, in a voice that was somewhere between a croak and a rasp. She cleared her throat, then closed her eyes, swaying slightly. “Coffee,” she said, and if a growl can sound both demanding and plaintive, hers did. I stared at her; her face looked puffy, rumpled, and her hair was scruffy and unbrushed.
She opened one bleary eye. “Please,” she croaked.
I reached for the coffeepot and she closed her one eye again. I filled a cup and put it in front of her, and when she didn’t move, I leaned over, took her hand, and placed it on the handle of the cup. Still without opening her eyes, she drained the cup and held it out toward me. “More,” she growled.
I refilled her cup. She drank this one a lot slower, and about halfway through it her face began to shrink back to its normal shape, and then she opened her eyes. They were violet again, and most of the red was gone from them. She finished the cup, refilled it herself this time, and sipped slowly.
“Sorry,” she said after a few minutes. Her voice was still a bit raspy, and she cleared her throat. “I couldn’t sleep last night,” she said, and she sounded nearly human again. “So I had a few shots of dark rum.” She shrugged. “Okay, more than a few. Anyway, it didn’t work. So I took a couple of sleeping pills.” Jackie closed her eyes and shook her head slowly. “Boy, oh, boy, did that work,” she said. “I think I almost pulled a Marilyn.”
“A what?” I said.
“Monroe,” she said with a very small smile. “You know, screen goddess takes fatal overdose. Oh, my head.”
“Do you want some aspirin?”
“I took four or five,” she said. “They’ll kick in in a minute.” She pursed her lips and sighed heavily. “It’s this guy. The stalker. Patrick Whatsit.”
“Bergmann,” I said helpfully.
“Yeah,” she said. “I just kept thinking, He’s out there, probably watching me right now, maybe sneaking into the hotel and picking the lock on my door.…”
For half a moment, I toyed with the idea of telling her that Patrick was not sneaking into anything except possibly decomposition. And in a rational world, why wouldn’t I? What reasonable person could object to the removal of a brutal killer who did appalling things to human beings and liked doing them? But on sober reflection, it occurred to me that if I told her, Jackie might realize that this was an apt description for me, too, so it might not be a good idea to tell her. And after all, rotting flesh was hardly a suitable topic of conversation for the breakfast table. So I settled for more pedestrian reassurance. “There’s a chain on the door,” I said. “And a heavily armed and deadly Dexter on the couch.”
She cleared her throat again. “I know, but this is last night, in the dark. Everything is bigger and meaner in the dark.”
Of course, she was right about that, but instead of telling her so I just nodded, and she went on.
“And then I started thinking about what you had said, about how he might drop down from the roof on a clothesline, and I swear I could hear him scrabbling at the window. I’d jump up and look, and …” She shook her head and smiled sadly at her last-night self. “Pretty dumb, right?”
“Well,” I said.
“Yeah, thanks, you don’t have to agree with me.” She sighed, and then eyed the large platter on the table with its silver cover. “Is that breakfast?”
“Your usual,” I said.
Jackie lifted the silver lid and stared at the meager scraps of food on the plate underneath. She closed her eyes, dropped the cover, and leaned away from it. “I think I need something a little bit more substantial this morning,” she said, and she stood up. “I’ll call down for some eggs.”
“The bacon is very good, too,” I said.
Jackie’s breakfast arrived so quickly they might have cooked it in the hall outside our room, and she tore into it like she hadn’t eaten for a week-which she hadn’t, as far as I could tell. The few miserable morsels of stuff she usually nibbled at didn’t really count, in my opinion, and it was a strange kind of relief to see her eating something that actually qualified as food. Even better, she left two strips of bacon on her plate. They looked terribly lonely, so I quickly gave them a good home.
And since the waiter had left us a fresh pot of coffee, we both filled our cups, and then, almost in unison, we sipped and sat back.
“Better,” Jackie said. “Much, much better.”
And it was; she looked almost superhuman again. Color and shape had come back into her face. Her cheekbones had emerged from the haze, and her eyes looked clear and bright and very violet once more.
For a minute or two we just slurped our coffee in comfortable silence. I didn’t feel any pressure to say clever and interesting things, and apparently neither did Jackie. Our reverie was finally shattered by the sound of the house phone, clamoring for attention. She jerked up to her feet, muttered, “Shit,” and stepped back in through the sliding glass door to answer it.
She came back a moment later, frowning. “Kathy,” she said. “They want to see me in wardrobe. She’s going to meet us over there.”
“But it’s Saturday,” I said. “I mean, don’t people take the day off?”
Jackie shook her head with a smile that said I had a lot to learn. “We start shooting Monday morning, Dexter,” she said. “The wardrobe and makeup people have tons of last-minute things to do, and they need us there to do them.”
“Oh,” I said, and with an effort I put on my bodyguard hat. “Will the Town Car be here to take us over?”
She nodded and sat down, reaching for her cup. “It’ll be in front in ten minutes,” she said. She drained the cup, put it on the table, and said, “I better get ready.” But before she could stand up, her cell phone chimed. She shook her head and said, “It never ends.” But when she picked it up and looked at the screen, she said, “Oh,” with surprise. “It’s your sister.” She touched the screen and held the phone up to her ear.