He forgot about it momentarily when she opened the door. Her hair looked like an Eva Gabor wig with highlights that weren’t there in the afternoon. She was wearing a short red velvet dress with spaghetti straps and a deep neckline. It looked ridiculous on a woman her age.
“You look wonderful!” Jules said, pecking her on the cheek.
“I hope you like Szechwan,” she said. “It’s being delivered from my favorite Chinese restaurant in Horton Plaza.”
“If it’s hot enough,” he said. “I like it hot.”
“I never doubted that for a moment,” she said, and Jules could see that she had an insurmountable cocktail lead.
The condo was tasteless enough to’ve been decorated by a Mafia wife. All it needed was a couple of candelabras, and a harp next to the pink marble fireplace.
While she was mixing him a vodka on the rocks, it came to him again, that worrisome moment on the elevator.
When she gave him the drink she pressed close and kissed him on the mouth.
“Mmmmm,” he said. “You taste like gin. Sweet.”
She smiled and said, “Take off your jacket?”
“In a bit,” he said, “but tell me something.”
“Sure, if it has nothing to do with age or money.”
“This is the thirteenth floor.”
She smiled and said, “We’re not superstitious in this building. We have a thirteenth floor and I choose to live on it. Are you superstitious?”
“I didn’t think I was,” Jules said. “I’m usually too secure to worry about such things, but there’re some bizarre goings-on in my life these days.”
“Such as?”
“Things in my business that I don’t understand. Inexplicable things’re happening and I feel I’m losing control right when everything seemed to be crystallizing for me.”
“Well, catch up with the drinks and you’ll forget all about boring business problems. Come over here.”
Jules followed Lou Ross to the view window. She took his hand and they clinked glasses. “See that?”
“Beautiful,” he said, not taking his eyes off her.
She loved it. “The view, I meant. The glorious harbor view.”
“That too,” he said.
“One question from me and then we’ll drop the topic of business,” she said. “What are you gonna to do when your escrow closes?”
“I have an investment idea,” he said, “if I can scrape up a few partners.”
“Willis told me you’ve had problems in the past. That investors’ve lost money with you.”
“I lost more than they did. Hard times. It won’t happen again. I’ve learned about plunging in too deeply.”
“Sometimes plunging in deeply pays off,” she said.
He grinned wryly, and said, “I’ll remember that.”
“If our friendship … blossoms as I hope it will, I might consider investing in your next project, Jules.”
He leaned over and kissed her bare shoulder, saying, “You wouldn’t be sorry.” Thinking, she could use some fade cream for that liver spot.
“Don’t try to con me, pretty boy,” Lou Ross said. “I’m not a fool.”
“Do I look like a con man?”
“That’s part of your charm,” she said. “I think we can be good for each other, but if I ever hear that you’re involved in anything shady or remotely illegal, well … you won’t be having any more Chinese suppers on the thirteenth floor. Nor will I entrust you with a dime of my money. Okay?”
Jules didn’t like this at all. Losing control to a woman? An older woman? The kind he’d always been able to manipulate with ease? Her brown eyes didn’t blink as they stared into his. She wore contacts, and up close, mood lighting or not, he decided she was at least sixty years old. Losing control to a goddamn senior citizen!
“Whatever you say, Lou,” he said, trying to smile earnestly. “I’ve had feelings for you since the first time we met.”
“I love a rogue,” she said, kissing him again, touching his lower lip with her gin-flavored tongue, “as long as he’s not too much of a rogue.”
There it was again, the nagging little thought. He turned away for an instant and looked at the street below. “It doesn’t bother you? Living on the thirteenth floor?”
“What’s the matter, Jules?” she asked. “Are you afraid of omens?”
“Only lately,” he said. “Something strange is happening.”
“Is it mysterious?”
“Yeah, mysterious.”
“Do you love mysteries?”
“I’ve always hated them.”
“We can eat later,” she said. “I wanna show you the master bedroom.”
It was a nest of apple green and orange satin. The tufted chaise was covered in it, ditto for the king-sized bed, including the headboard. The drapes were done in canary taffeta, and there were some lovely Lalique pieces scattered about, but a nice alabaster lamp was lost in the mess of colors. When they stepped inside the dressing area she kicked off her pumps.
Jules did not perform well that evening. He couldn’t stop thinking about the thirteenth floor. Was it an omen? Finally though, he blamed it on all the goddamn satin and the clash of vulgar tropical colors. It was like being trapped inside a coffin in Haiti.
CHAPTER 20
Fin and Bobbie were having an amazed conversation by the time their third drinks arrived, and he was as amazed as she.
“Wait’ll I tell Nell Salter tomorrow,” he said. “Nell talked to Jules Temple on the phone, and we both talked to the truckers, but nobody told us about you!”
“It’s obvious they didn’t want us to get together,” Bobbie said.
“The truckers I can understand,” he said. “Your instinct could be right. They might be your shoe thieves, but what about Jules Temple? Why didn’t he tell Nell about you? I’d say it was relevant that two different investigators were interested in Green Earth for two different reasons tied together by the same employees.”
“Pretty weird stuff,” she said, slurring the s.
“Wanna have dinner, long as we’re here?”
“Super,” she said, slurring again.
“My treat?”
“Dutch treat.”
“I’ll flip you for it afterward.”
“Okay.”
The restaurant was about half filled by then, and Fin signaled for menus. Bobbie was still wearing the blazer over her pink cotton shell. While reading the menu she started to take off the jacket, then remembered her sidearm and kept it on.
“I can take the gun to the car for you,” he said, “if you’re too warm in the jacket.”
“It’s okay,” she said.
“A forty-five?”
“Yeah.”
“Guess the navy and marines won’t abandon the forty-five till they get Star Wars lasers.”
“It’s a pretty good gun though, the nineteen eleven model.”
“Awfully big gun for …”
“Don’t say a little girl, okay?”
“Why?”
“I don’t want people to think a me like that. Do you know when you ordered the last drink you said, ‘Ready for another, kid?’ That’s what you said.”
“Did I?”
“I’ll be thirty in a few years and I’m a good investigator. I don’t have your experience but my forty-five’s loaded and I got two extra magazines in my purse and I’m not a kid or a little girl.”
Fin knew she was too polite and much too “navy” to have said that without a belly full of booze, but he was touched. “No, you’re not a kid,” was all he could say, and zing went the strings of his heart!
Then she grinned sheepishly and said, “But we’re not allowed to carry it with a round in the chamber so I couldn’t win a quick-draw contest with anybody.”
After the waiter took their identical orders of sea bass, Fin decided that he might give an arm or maybe a leg to be ten years younger. Well, a toe maybe, the little one with fungus on it. If he was still forty he wouldn’t feel that this infatuation was so preposterous. But of course the more he drank the less preposterous it seemed to be.