As she pondered Sam’s visit, her old impatience to help her brother returned. The phone rang.
“I’m on my way.” It was Sam on his cell phone.
“Great. You like granola?”
“Yep.”
“Have you learned anything?”
“Hal hasn’t finished looking. I did learn something interesting, though. Tell you when I get there. Not on a cell phone.”
“Well, hurry up, Sam.”
Despite her anxiety over Jason, she felt a strong sense of anticipation that Sam was coming. She found herself looking in the mirror pondering her hair, and the complete lack of any makeup. She could wear a thick robe or a thin one, silken or soft and shapeless. She daubed Joy perfume and felt completely ridiculous, then began with her hair. After a few minutes she figured it was decent. Going to the “old and comfortable” section of the closet, she grabbed a Lands End terry-cloth robe.
In her closet there were two full-length mirrors. She looked at herself and thought about Sam, his cool good looks, his easy confidence.
“Damn,” she muttered, walking back to the bathroom, brushing her hair more vigorously and applying a little rouge before the doorbell rang. When she started getting a crush on a man it didn’t matter about Oscars, or the adoration of millions, it mattered only about the one.
She trotted back to the closet, put the terry-cloth robe on a hook, and grabbed a Donna Karan robe instead. Blue with gold trim. Stylish but not steamy.
“You nut,” she said aloud as she glanced in the mirror one last time.
When she arrived at the entry she found Sam wearing a leather coat, a gray sport shirt, and black pants.
“Hi,” he said, and kissed her cheek.
There was only a brief, slightly disappointing hug. Something was on his mind. With other normally inscrutable men, a few actually, she could feel their mood when they walked past. It occurred to her that most such men had either been her lovers or were related to her.
Suddenly she had a hunch about what-other than her brother’s disappearance, dead friends, and a wounded pilot-might be bothering Sam.
“You’re worried about the kiss. That’s so touching.”
“Touching?”
“You’re afraid of hurting me.”
There was just a ripple across Sam’s cool.
“And you came all the way out here to talk about it.”
Sam looked at her, saying nothing, knowing that there were many weak words and few that were strong. He could talk about his need for privacy and that would be nearly indistinguishable from whining. Reasoning would be obvious and trivial, for there would be no logic on this subject that hadn’t already occurred to her.
So he watched her. As he did he noticed the brown amber of her eyes, and the way she half smiled but without the usual confidence. Normally there was a great evocative force to her personality, but she was not using it. Instead she seemed like an accomplished but vulnerable woman. Once again her hair was studied chaos with even more curly ringlets. There was a softness about her that made him want to crush her in his arms and whisper things. He could imagine that she would giggle softly in his ear and tease him with her fingers.
Apparently on impulse she stepped forward and kissed him, tentatively at first, then a little harder. Sam responded, then stopped.
“So?”
“I suppose we should… I know I kissed you yesterday and it was good. And this was better. But I’m thinking that until we get this figured out…”
She kissed him again, her tongue like a butterfly, her lips firm. He let his arms stay around her for a long moment, then released her.
“That was just one for the road until you get it worked out,” she said.
“You’re an amazing woman.”
“And?”
“We’ve got to put your brother first. This… kind of thing will slow us down.”
“I see.”
“What do you see?”
“That must be the right thing-keeping our relationship professional. It’s just that…” She stopped and took a deep breath. “Well, of course I understand.” She gnawed on her lip. “I still expect you to accompany me to the studio party.” But she smiled when she said it so that he knew it was a tease and not a weight around his neck.
“I have been thinking about it. Maybe I could take you. Maybe you could say I was like the friendly security man or something. But it’s still a bad idea.”
“Shall I take that as a complete capitulation?” she joked.
“And might we add the little detail that you will never consider talking about me? I mean other than the security-man story at the party.”
She batted her eyes to tease him. “You are as safe with me as I am with you.” She kissed him on the cheek and ran her hand over his bicep. “So what were you going to tell me? Your tone suggested something important. You talk while I start on the granola.”
Using a mixture of oats and almond and walnut fragments, she ladled on some canola oil and some honey, spread it on a pan, and popped it into the hot oven to bake.
“You’ve been asking about my former love interest,” Sam said.
“I’m busted. Peter is a statesman and a snitch. But this can’t be what you were going to tell me.”
Sam paused and thought about how to approach it There was a tension in her body.
“To understand about our latest discovery you need to understand about my former love interest. And the death of my son.”
She had heard the tone of his voice change-her eyes showed it. She sat down. He joined her.
“It was an assignment. Suzanne King-you know enough about her, I assume?” She nodded. “Suzanne had a stalker. He was coming onto her property and taking pictures. Even intimate pictures. My son and I set a trap at her house to catch him…”
Twenty-seven
A droplet of sweat hit the yellow pad, slightly fuzzing the blue line on which it landed. Sunlight through ten-foot windows was broiling Sam alive, and the flak jacket under his shirt exacerbated the effect.
He pressed his eye to the camcorder that scanned the gardens, large veranda, and pool. The kidney-shaped Olympic-size swimming pool lay translucent blue-the South Seas hue created by tiny square ceramic tiles laid across its bottom.
Suzanne, who rarely consented to wear less than one-piece bathing attire in her movies, swam in a thong bikini, doing a slow crawl with perfect form, just as her father, now deceased, had taught her. The August sun beat on her tawny arms and glistened her splashes. Sam found her as beautiful as any woman ever created by God or gazed upon by man.
Sam’s son, Bud, moved along the terraced hillside among the rhododendrons, azaleas, dogwood, myrica, sunflowers, japonica, and lilacs, looking for the same thing that now eluded Sam.
Every inch of Sam remained totally alert. Three feet away was the door to the veranda, cracked open. He had been very clear with Suzanne that there was an element of danger. Personally he didn’t like using this seminude swim as bait. For some time he had felt that Suzanne’s stalker was mentally deteriorating. It was evident in the notes sent by this strange left-handed peekaboo artist. The laws of testosterone, buttressed by the shoe size of the print in the garden, dictated that it was a man fond of composing his notes with letters clipped from magazines.
The intimate and candid pictures the stalker had taken of Suzanne, and thereafter shared with her and others on the Internet, were at once compelling in their beauty and composition and at the same time chilling. It was inconceivable that someone could get so close so frequently and remain undetected. There was no technology to be found, no miniature cameras or telescopic lenses, on the premises. Sam had been careful to search.
Judging from the angle of the sun apparent in the photographs, the stalker made his daylight forays around 2:00 in the afternoon. One picture had been shot through the louvers ventilating the dressing room in the poolhouse complex-a striking nude. Sam had received a disturbed look from Suzanne when he jokingly complimented her. Sam was always serious, but seldom acted that way except at moments of peak vulnerability for his clients; when they wept he tended to ease up on the dry humor.