When she went to the rest room, he looked her over from the rear. She was a lot shorter than Nell Salter and maybe wore one size larger. Or did height have something to do with dress sizes? But she walked like a little athlete, and he was certain she had a very firm body. He wanted to be ashamed of himself.
The food came while Bobbie was gone, and he slipped his credit card to the waiter so she couldn’t argue about paying. When she got back he stood up until she was seated. He could see that he scored big with that move.
“The fish is real good here,” she said. “Not too much junk on it.”
“I’m glad we came.”
“Me too,” she said, “except I always eat too much sourdough bread.”
“Just be glad they still got the kinda joints that serve sourdough bread. My third ex-wife used to drag me to places where they sold you smoked-duck pizza topped with papaya, or ahi dunked in raspberry mango sauce. Anyway, you’re too young to worry about calories.”
“There you go again,” she said.
“Sorry.” Then to the waiter, “Bring us a nice bottle of white wine. Not Chardonnay. You pick it.” Turning to Bobbie he said, “Okay?”
“Okay,” she said.
“Chardonnay also reminds me of porcini mushrooms, tofu and blue-corn tortillas. And my third ex-wife who almost wrecked my health by smoking like Tallulah Bankhead.”
“Who?”
“If I said Bette Davis would it make any difference?”
“Who’s she?”
“Never mind,” he said.
When the waiter brought the wine and a wine bucket, Fin said, “Let the lady taste it.”
She smiled self-consciously, but performed the ritual she’d learned from her former boyfriend. She examined the cork and sniffed the bouquet.
“Real good,” she told the waiter. “I think.”
Fin was surprised at how much wine she could put away. She guzzled it.
When it was time for dessert Bobbie pointed to one on the menu and said, “You know what this is?”
He read it and said, “Crème brûlée. Yeah, that’s outta style now, so let’s have it. All it is, it’s your mom’s egg custard with burnt sugar on top.”
“I got a theory about Jules Temple,” she said after he ordered two of the desserts.
“What’s your theory?”
“That he didn’t wanna tell you guys about me because …”
“Because what?”
“Don’t laugh.”
“Okay.”
“Because he’s in cahoots with those two truckers. Maybe he planned the job.”
Fin laughed.
“So much for promises,” Bobbie said.
“I’m sorry, Bobbie,” he said, “but I don’t think somebody with a business as big as his would risk it for some shoes.”
“Two thousand pairs. They’re worth a lotta money.”
“I know, but …”
“Okay, you’re the old pro,” she said. “You tell me.”
“I can’t,” he said. “There’re pieces here that just don’t make sense, no matter how I figure it.”
“The truckers stole the shoes, that much we know.”
“That much we think we know.”
“Same thing.”
“Not exactly.”
“Anyway,” she said, “they stole the shoes and drove them to T.J. That’s what we think now, right?”
“That’s what I think I think,” Fin said.
When the desserts came, she wolfed hers, forgetting about truckers and shoes. When she was finished there was a creamy little globule of custard clinging to her upper lip. It was so cute and she was so young that he didn’t hesitate to reach across the table with his napkin and dab it off.
“Oops,” she said. “I’m such a doofus when I eat stuff like … What’s this called again?”
“Crème brûlé. My third ex-wife was a fad-food type. Used to drag me to a Vietnamese deli. In America they’re called pet shops. I think I ate Rin Tin Tin a couple of times.”
“What’s Rin Tin Tin?”
“He was Lassie’s role model.”
Then she said, “You have such perfect table manners. Me, I eat like a sailor.”
“You can thank my sisters for making me eat with the fork in my left hand, tines down. They trained me with a wooden spoon that was really a billy club. I was always having to sing or dance or recite poems for the entertainment of females. My childhood was a combination of Great Expectations and the Jackson Five.”
“You gonna eat your dessert?” Bobbie asked.
“No, you can have it.”
This time her smile had all the wattage of Las Vegas. Then she said, “You been married three times, huh?”
“So far,” he said. “Maybe the last one cured me. She needed a metal tag on her ear just so I could follow her migration habits.”
Three ex-wives didn’t seem to faze her. “Okay, so back to the case,” she said, spooning out every last drop from his little dessert bowl. “They take the shoes to T.J. and sell them. Then they dump their load a waste down there.”
“You got a problem already,” Fin said.
“What’s that?”
“They’d get very little money in T.J. for those shoes. Do you think Mister Jules Temple would risk his livelihood, his freedom, for such small profit?”
“You tell me then! How’d it go?”
Her eyes were bouncing boozily now, her pretty blue eyes. She wore no eyeliner, no mascara, and now her lipstick was gone. Fin thought she didn’t need it, not with her robust good looks. He also thought she shouldn’t drink any more unless he drove her home. “Do you live on the base?” he asked.
“No, I got an apartment in Coronado. Kinda expensive, but I like the privacy.”
“But your own car’s on the base, right?”
“No, I rode my bike to work today. I usually do when the weather’s this good.”
“Okay then, we can have an after-dinner brandy. I’ll drop you at your apartment.”
She smiled and said, “Yeah, my bike’s okay where it is till tomorrow.”
He’d forgotten how they smiled at that age. The old songs his sisters loved were right: This kid beamed.
“I wish I could solve your crime as easy as that,” Fin said.
“If I had your experience I bet I could do it.”
“Maybe I can come up with an answer by tomorrow,” he said. “I’d like to impress you.”
“You would? Why?”
“I’d just like to. I almost asked the waiter to call my beeper number so I could jump up in the middle of dinner and look important.”
“You are important!” she said. “You’re a San Diego P.D. detective. That’s what I wanna be when I leave the navy. And you’re an actor. I think you’re real important. People oughtta look up to you.”
A helpless sigh in the face of her unabashed innocence. Fin actually felt himself blush! And he stammered when he said, “I wanna be a screenwriter and an actor when I leave the job. I wanna write the first screenplay in the last twenty years not to have ‘Are you all right?’ or ‘Are you okay?’ in the dialogue.”
“Do they all have that in them?”
“Even the period films. All of them. The cliché of our age.”
“Does stuff like that bother you?”
“People in the business oughtta get bothered by bad writing.”
“In what business?”
“The business. You know? Show business?”
“I don’t know anything about show business,” she said. “You ever met Tom Cruise?”
“The guy twinkles too much. All that dentistry musta cost his old man more than four years at Harvard. You don’t go for guys like that, do you?”
“You kidding?”
He tried to think of an actor his own age. Finally, he said, “Do you think Bill Clinton’s attractive? Or Al Gore?”
“They’re okay for older guys.”