She sat up, the blonde hair finally mussed. “I was napping... I just woke up. Did I hear those police people leaving?”
“You did. Can you give me the name and number of a girl friend or two, who I can call so you can have some company tonight?”
She shook her head. “No, I’ll be fine. I don’t want to have to talk to anybody.”
“Understood. Look, I’ll be glad to camp out here. I just might be able to find a spare room someplace.”
She actually smiled a little, and touched my arm. “No, I’ll be fine, Mike. I’m a big girl.”
“Not really. You’re a slip of thing, and I’ve got ties older than you. I’ll be glad to stand guard.”
“You think I need guarding?”
“Truthfully... no. And since I’m somebody’s favorite target right now, maybe I’m putting you in danger just being here. Maybe I should go.”
She nodded, touched my face, then rolled over, her back to me as I went out. I was out by the waterfall waiting for the elevator when that electrically controlled door hissed open and she was standing poised in the doorway, hair every which way, her face washed of all make-up, in just a T-shirt and sheer panties, the former poked by the tips of pert breasts, the latter revealing a shade of blonde only slightly darker than her head of askew hair.
“Mike! Please stay! I don’t want to be alone tonight.”
She’s young, Hammer, a voice said in my head. And it would be a shitty thing to do to Velda. And this kid’s vulnerable right now, really hurting. You’d be taking advantage, you lowlife prick.
Silently I told the voice, Who says I’m going to do anything but comfort the kid? You have a dirty damn mind.
The elevator came and I ignored it. She held out her hand and I took it. We went up the stairs to the guest room. She’d said she couldn’t stand to be in her own bed, where she’d been with Borensen many times, or the master bedroom, where the couple had moved after her father’s death.
The room was dark. She got under the covers. I got out of my suit coat, tie, and shoes, but left everything else on, and lay down on top of the covers. Outside the sky laughed deep in its throat at me and then a downpour came, so loud we had to really talk to communicate. Whispering wouldn’t quite cut it.
“Someone came in this place today,” she said, dread in her voice, “and killed Leif — that really happened? Someone warped enough to mimic my daddy’s death? Just to send you a kind of... a kind of sick message?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“I know a lot of bad people, Mike. The theater has a lot of good, generous people in it, but also jealous ones, back-biters, producers and directors who want sex before giving you a part, liars, cheats, thieves, and you run into what you think is bad behavior, all the time, when you’re an actor. But this man is really bad, isn’t he? Not just awful, but evil.”
“Yes.”
“Will you stop him?”
“Yes.”
“Everything wrong that Leif did, I still... it’s horrible, Mike, but I still haven’t stopped loving him. My head knows he was terrible, but my heart can’t accept it. He killed my father, you say.”
“Or hired it done.”
“That’s... unspeakable. A betrayal that you can’t even imagine.”
I could imagine it. A woman once said she loved me, and accepted my proposal of marriage, and offered herself to me naked and lovely while reaching behind me for a gun in a potted plant.
In the darkness, nearby but a hundred miles away, her voice came: “Did he ever love me, do you think? Really love me? Or was I just someone he used... like he used my father?”
“Hard to know, honey. He may have loved you in his way.”
“His way?”
“Some people, the really evil ones, go through life as actors. Not your kind of actor, no, but actors who don’t have certain human feelings, so they watch and learn and imitate those feelings. They’re aliens moving among us, these people.”
“...Would you do me a favor, Mike?”
“Anything, honey.”
“Just... get undressed and get under the covers with me. I need to be held. Would you do that? And just hold me? Just make me feel not... alone.”
I stripped down to my skivvies and got in bed with the kid. She nestled under my arm and slipped an arm across my middle, her head against my chest.
“I wouldn’t be so hard to love, would I, Mike? I mean, really love?”
“No. It’d be easy.”
She lifted her head up and kissed me. It was tender, soft, yet electric. As if confirming that, the room strobed with lightning through the sheer curtains. The sky roared like a roused beast, and the rain kept drumming down, relentless but rhythmic.
She slipped out of bed and went to the window and looked out. I turned away from her. I couldn’t do this. It was wrong. She was a kid who had a thing for father figures and I wasn’t going to take advantage. She was wounded and I would not, goddamnit, take advantage.
I turned back over to tell her I thought I should go. Somewhere between the bed and the window, she’d lost her T-shirt and panties. At least I thought so — the room was very dark.
Then lightning strobed and there she was, every bit of her there in the stark white light the sky provided between roars, so slender yet shapely, her back to me, the globes of her bottom high and firm and round, the dimples so deep their dark hollows survived through the flash of light. When the strobing was over, she was just a lovely shape, barely distinct when she turned to me.
“I need this, Mike,” she said. “It’ll be just this once.”
“No,” I said. “Take a couple more sleeping pills and get some rest. This thing has you ragged.”
The sky strobed again and for an instant she was an ivory statue, a goddess with high superbly shaped breasts, not large, just perfect, and a sleek body, her belly flat but gently muscular, her sleek, supple legs apart just enough for the curly triangle to offer a glimpse of delights I knew I should not sample.
I got out of bed, intending to get into my clothes, but my interest in her obvious.
Her eyes widened appreciatively and then she did something I didn’t expect her to be able to, under the circumstances — she laughed. She came quickly over and shoved me on the bed. Then I heard her fumbling in a nightstand drawer and moments later I felt the rubber sliding down and I thought, No, she isn’t an innocent.
Then she rode me, slow and sweet and finally building to something not sweet at all, but just as wonderful as the sight of her when the lightning strobes showed her to me, little snapshots of youthful female perfection, and a head of blonde hair that swung like a mane, and a face so beautiful and so blissful, as the act cancelled out anything else in her mind, sadness, betrayal, it was all gone, for those minutes.
As for the voices in my head, nobody bitched.
She’d told me the help arrived at six-thirty a.m., so I got up around five, and had a shower, while she continued to sleep. Though Pat had the study sealed, I thought there might be a door from the second floor onto the upper level of the book stacks, where I could get in without tipping my hand. I was right.
Within moments I made my way to the desk where Borensen had died. On the desktop, a pool of crusty dried blood, black with hardly any red highlights, bore the imprint of where his head had fallen. No attempt at a chalk outline had been made, though an X in a circle indicated where the gun had been, and the chair was circled in chalk to show its position. Still, I felt free to seat myself in that chair of honor, and — fingerprints having already been taken — began looking through the desk drawers.