She was beaming. “You know, tonight was even better than last night. Robbing a strip club. Holding hostages. Grand Theft Auto. And tomorrow, safecracking. I think I’m falling in love.”
19
JERRY GAFFNEY WAS only half asleep, because his mind couldn’t quite shut down. He was thinking about too many things, or rather, passing over each of them in a repetitive cycle. Words, phrases, images had to be revisited. He slowly rose toward consciousness. He was lying on the clean, crisp white sheet on the big California-king bed in an apartment in Manhattan Beach. He looked at the digital clock on his right side and it said 4:15 A.M. He looked to his left and in the dim light he saw the creamy back of Sandy Belknap.
It was a short, abruptly tapering back that started with lean but square shoulders that looked as though she did some kind of workout, and then narrowed quickly. The ridge of backbone near the top became a recess at mid-back until it flattened just above the dimple that announced the start of her perfect bottom.
Jerry felt reverence for the beauty he could see at this moment in the dim predawn light. He had no right to be with her, certainly no right to be naked with her in her bed. It was one of those sudden phenomena, rare and unexpected like hailstorms.
He had spent much of the day after his brother, Jimmy, left driving her around in a new sedan with dealer plates that she had borrowed from the car lot. They had gone from restaurant to bar to office building to apartment, talking to her friends. At each stop she’d introduced him as her cousin from St. Louis. Her girlfriends were all temptingly attractive.
But Sandy Belknap was not somebody who suffered from competition. She had been a cheerleader at the University of Missouri and had held some kind of national sorority office. She was not a genius, but she could speak fluently and confidently, and that probably was about as useful as high intelligence. She was beautiful in a blond, blue-eyed, Midwestern kind of way, but maybe not clever or single-minded enough to be what she so obviously must have wanted to be, an actress. All good-looking young women from other states wanted that, even if they didn’t do anything to accomplish it except present themselves in Los Angeles.
He lay in the bed feeling the subtle circulation of cool air from the grate over the bed and back into the intake in the hall ceiling at the other end of the room. The day had been one of those Los Angeles high-pressure summer days when the sky was a perfectly unvarying light blue bowl of infinity. The heat was the sort that radiated upward from the pavement to mid-thigh while the sun scorched the shoulders and back. Movement in the city was toward the ocean, like a tide that only began to subside around dusk as people moved inland to cool, dark bars.
When Sandy had introduced him as her cousin from St. Louis, the girls she was talking to seemed to take it for granted that she was lying. He would find an excuse to leave them alone for a few minutes at each stop, and she would confide to the other girl that she had an uncontrollable crush on Joe Carver and wanted him to have her address and cell phone number. She was even planning a party so he could show up without bothering to call or ask for a date.
But something else happened during the day, a kind of slow current that was always working on them and changing their course just a bit. As they went from place to place in the searing heat, they would get thirsty. He would buy them a drink. Twice they got into traffic jams, sat motionless in the skin-cooling conditioned air blowing over them, and talked. The alcohol made them imagine they’d known each other longer than they had.
In the evening they stopped for dinner at the Water Grill because the name sounded cool, and the fact that only fish seemed light enough to eat. They were already in a state of habituation from mere proximity, so many stops, so much talk, so many times when they had brushed against each other, breathed each other’s air. The dinner revived them, disguised the effect of all the alcohol, but it added to the talk and the familiarity.
They made it into three clubs afterward—Wash, Stable, and The Room. The experience began to blur into one long trek past turning faces in a long, dark tunnel with music so loud he could remember feeling it rather than hearing it. Lights sputtered, wavered, and swept, and the young faces appeared for a moment and then drifted away.
During the evening the talk that went on was between Sandy and her women friends in ladies’ rooms. At 1:00 A.M., Sandy got tired and he drove her to her apartment in Manhattan Beach. She warned him that she hadn’t been there in almost a week, and when they got there he had to help her carry a huge stack of unopened mail. A few letters slipped off her pile, and she bent to pick it up off the carpet and lost her balance. He steadied her, picked her up, carried her to her bed, and set her down gently. He assumed she would close her eyes and fall asleep instantly, but she didn’t. Instead she popped up on the bed, pressed her lips against his, and put her arms around him.
He had the thought that he didn’t belong there with her, but it was only a passing sensation and not the most powerful at the time. It was like the acknowledgment he had made a few times that this or that money didn’t belong to him: it didn’t affect his behavior. He had been wishing for this moment since he had met her, without allowing himself to think about it in specific terms, and now he knew that something similar must have been in her mind too. It was different for her because she had known, of course, that all she had to do was signify willingness and it would happen. Now it had.
It was 4:15. As he thought back on what they had done, he was pleased. To the extent that he could interpret her sounds and movements, he believed that she had fallen asleep happy and satisfied. But it had left him in a state of pleasant agitation, not capable of real sleep. She was a daylight creature, somebody who got up early in the morning and went to work. He had worked nights since the day after he had liberated himself from tenth grade fifteen years ago.
He could feel that the night was reaching its most silent, the bluish half-light that would allow him to sleep. He drifted off.
Ding-dong DONG dong. Dong-dong DING dong. There was a pause in the chime sequence, but it made the mind alert and disturbed, because it was waiting for the rest of the tune to complete itself.
Sandy sat up suddenly in the bed, her eyes wide. She leaned over him, her right breast brushing his shoulder as she squinted to see the clock on his side. She saw it, jumped off the bed, and had her feet on the floor. Jerry was startled by her athleticism. She’d had no more than an hour of sleep, and she must still be feeling the drinks, but she was moving fast.
She was at the window looking down at the doorstep just as the ring began again. She turned to Gaffney and spoke as though she were resuming an ongoing conversation. “It’s Paul. He’s here.”
“Paul, your boyfriend?”
“Yes. Paul Herrenberg. I knew I should have told him I was helping you.”
“Give me a second.” Jerry Gaffney sat up, snatched the pile of his clothes beside the bed, and pulled them on at high speed. He was dressed just as the next dreadful ring began and the man outside started to pound on the door. Gaffney stepped into his shoes, pinned the badge to his belt beside the buckle, and slipped the gun holster onto his belt where it would show. “Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“You’ve got choices to make. If you want me to hide, I’ll hide, and you can say you were too drunk to drive to his apartment. If you want me to tell him about the case, I’ll do that. If you want me to throw him out, I’ll do that.”
“Get in the closet.” She went to the dresser, plucked a folded flannel nightgown out of a drawer, and pulled it over her head while she walked toward the apartment door. She opened it and then went down two more steps across the tiny foyer to open the outer door.