Neely, his lawyer, said, “Huggins may call you in for questioning tomorrow.”
“How’d you learn that?”
“Since I decided to be your lawyer, I also decided I better start calling in some favors from my DA office days.”
“So I’m still his favorite?”
“Afraid so.”
Tobin looked back to Marcie Pierce. Against the built-in bookcases and the jungle of ferns and plants, against the 45-inch TV set, against the sliding-glass library of video cassettes she looked almost frail and girlish. A huge poster of Orson Welles as Citizen Kane gazed down on her, seeming to leer appreciatively at her young flesh. Tobin whispered into the phone, “Neely, I’m really scared.”
“It’s going to be all right.”
“Really?”
A pause. “I’m not one hundred percent positive it’s going to be all right. But I’m pretty positive.”
“Well, give it to me in percentages.”
“What in percentages?”
“If you’re not one hundred percent positive things are going to be all right, then what percentage positive are you?”
“Jeeze, Tobin. That’s not fair.”
“What percentage?”
“Well, at least forty.”
“Forty!”
Marcie turned around as if Tobin had thrown something at her.
“Well, fifty then,” Neely said.
“That’s the best you can do? You’re supposed to be reassuring here, Neely, and you’re not reassuring me for shit.”
“All right, then, let’s make it between fifty-five and fifty-eight?”
“Fifty-five and fifty-eight?”
“Yeah, I’m between fifty-five and fifty-eight percent positive that things are going to be just fine.” By the end he was gushing with optimism. “Fifty-five to fifty-eight. No doubt about it.” Then he paused. “How’s your list coming?”
“I added two more names tonight.” And he had, too: Michael Dailey, because he had apparently been embezzling from Dunphy, and a man named Harold Ebsen because he may have been the one to break into Dunphy’s Hunter office.
“Good boy. Bring them along to Huggins’s office. They’ll help. And keep your chin up, okay?”
“Yeah. Fifty-five to fifty-eight.”
“Exactly, my man, exactly.”
“I see you’ve got Anthony Mann’s The Naked Spur out there.”
“Yes.”
“It’s one of my favorite movies.”
“Mine, too.”
“Jimmy Stewart really shocks you, doesn’t he? I mean, you don’t expect him to even be capable of a performance like that. So crazed and everything.”
“We’ve always underestimated him. We take him for granted too much.”
They were in his bed. She’d made him light the tiny Christmas tree on his bureau, and now the room was cast in deep shadows from red and yellow and blue and green lights.
She had let her hair down and wore a pair of his pajamas and was propped up against the back of the bed as if she planned to sit up and talk all night. She’d taken a shower and smelled wonderfully clean. Tobin had one of those punitive erections that he could find nothing to do with, just lie there and sort of try to flick down and be miserable with.
Thus far, in an attempt to show her that he was a nice guy with whom she had a lot in common (in fact, their taste in films was identical), he’d let her talk on about many of the mutual favorites: Budd Boetticher and Douglas Sirk and Bernard Herrmann, the composer, and Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro and Out of the Past and Charley Varrick.
Then finally he just rolled over and did it, brought her to him and really kissed her. They’d made a pass at it before, but this time it truly happened. She even parted her lips and let his tongue come in and then it was as if he were in the electric chair and she had just dropped the switch.
Fortunately, she seemed to be as much in need of him at that moment as he of her. So she didn’t stop him when his hand found her heartbreakingly gorgeous breast, nor when his legs began to entwine with hers.
It was one of those sweet little sessions, very passionate at first but ending up very tender, his head between her legs, almost as if he were praying in a shrine, her hand gently stroking his head (he might have been her child) as he brought her to release, and finally, when he was cradled inside her and just about to come himself, she said, “Thanks for putting up with me tonight, Tobin.”
“That’s all right,” he whispered back. “Thanks for putting up with me. I’m not exactly a prize.”
And then he died the death of pure pleasure and laid beside her watching as snowflakes hit the bedroom window and melted and slid down the black glass, and as the Christmas tree’s lights alternated flashing colors.
She was asleep in moments, and moments later he was, too.
He woke up a few hours later subconsciously expecting to find her across the bed from him. But he patted empty space. Cold empty space. Then one eye came open, then another, then he did a half-push-up and looked around the bedroom. Her prom gown was tossed with teenage abandon over the chair. Where had she gone?
When he decided she was in the living room, he assumed she was watching a movie, maybe The Naked Spur they’d been discussing.
But instead she was curled up by one of the windows, looking out over the city. Her hair and her pajamas were tousled and she looked very young and very pretty and he found himself moved in some simple way he hadn’t been for many years.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
“Couldn’t sleep, huh?” He found his voice tender, the way it was with his own kids. Or a woman he’d cared about a long time.
“Guess not.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“I’ll give you a quarter if you’ll turn around and look at me.”
Which she did. Sort of grinning. “Sorry. I guess that is kind of rude.”
“So what’re you thinking about?”
“Honest?”
“Honest.”
“I’m thinking about what I’m going to tell you when you ask me why Michael Dailey was handing me an envelope yesterday afternoon.”
“I see.”
“Because you are going to ask me, right?”
“Right.”
“So I’ve got to come up with an answer.”
“You could always tell me the truth.”
“Then I’d have to give the money back.”
“I see.”
She read the disappointment in his eyes. “That makes me sound like a real bitch, doesn’t it?”
He shrugged, not quite sure what to say.
“The trouble is,” she said, “I really like you now. I really do.”
“And I like you.”
“And the fact is, I don’t like Dailey at all. He’s really a creep.”
She was going to talk herself into telling him the truth. He knew better than to interrupt the process by encouraging it. He simply sat on the edge of a leather recliner and listened to her.
“Do you have any hot chocolate?”
He thought. “Maybe some of that instant stuff.”
“That’d be okay.”
“Fine. I’ll fix some.”
“You wouldn’t have any marshmallows, would you?”
“I can look.”
“Then will you sit on the couch next to me, when you come back, I mean?”
“Sure.”
In the kitchen he made instant cocoa in big fancy cups in the microwave and dropped half a dozen pearl-like marshmallows in the cups and carried them back to the living room and sat next to her.
She leaned over and kissed him and then said, “The only thing we need now is some Christmas music. I mean it’s so nice here with the little tree and everything. So peaceful.”