“Let me guess. She’s really a multiple murderer.”
“She’s a manipulative schemer who picks Dornan up and puts him down whenever she feels like it. She flies hither, thither, and yon doing what she calls business development for a local company and is only ever in town for four or five days at a time. Sometimes less. Dornan thinks they’ll get married one day.”
“She wears his ring.”
“It’s worth a lot of money, and that’s all that interests Ms. Tammy Foster. She’s one of those women with a body like a magnet who just keeps trolling until rich fools clang up against her sides. I’ve seen her around town with different men when she’d told Dornan she’s in Baltimore or Chicago. She’ll drop Dornan like a rock the moment she has a better catch.”
“You sound very certain.”
“She’s very good at what she does, but if you watch her long enough you’ll see that she can’t help positioning herself sexually for every man who walks through the door. It’s an instinct. She’s been trained since childhood by her rich daddy in Connecticut to believe that who she is or what she does doesn’t matter nearly as much as who she marries.”
“You sound almost sorry for her.”
“That doesn’t make me like her. And when she realized Dornan’s best friend didn’t like her, she tried to win me over by propositioning me.”
“You mean…?”
“Yes.” I would rather go to bed with a python.
“And you haven’t told him.”
“No.”
“Why haven’t you frightened her off? I imagine that would be easy enough for you.”
“She makes him happy, and it won’t be forever.”
“You do like to play god.” She sounded thoughtful more than judgmental.
We drove half a mile in silence. “Turn left on Leonardo. It’s a bit quicker.”
When we pulled up, she leaned across me to unlock my door. “Thank you. It was an interesting evening.”
“Interesting in the Chinese sense?”
“No. I mean it. Thank you.”
There was a slight pause. We both just sat there, facing the velvet dark beyond the windscreen, breathing the same air, then I was outside the car leaning in, nodding, saying good night, telling her I would call sometime very soon to give her an update on my investigations. After she drove off I stood outside for a long time, listening to the tree frogs.
five
It was one of those Atlanta mornings when you step outside and the heat and humidity seal around you like shrink-wrap. The air is as thick as potato soup and you have to breathe in sips. I drove to Buckhead with the windows closed and the air-conditioning on and even the Mozart seeped limp and dispirited from the speakers.
I picked Beatriz up at the Nikko. She had replaced her glasses with contact lenses, her hair was sleek and groomed, and the unhealthy puffiness of her face was gone, or at least masked by professionally applied makeup. She wore a beautifully cut business suit, designed to show off a surprisingly generous figure, and instead of a purse carried a large leather portfolio. The way she did not meet my eyes when I said good morning was just the same, though, as was the facial spasm that passed for a smile.
Traffic moved south on Piedmont in fits and starts. Drivers in some of the cars around me began picking up cellular phones and calling in to explain why they were going to be late. Horns blared. We crept forward. With the engine at idle speed, the air-conditioning lost some of its bite. The car began to warm up. Just ahead, flickering red and blue lights across two lanes funneled vehicles past a car with its roof ripped off and a white-sheeted figure on the melting asphalt. I knew how a haemoglobin-carrying red corpuscle must feel as it squeezes through the hardening arteries of a fifty-year-old executive running about the tennis court in one-hundred-degree weather trying to impress his secretary, knowing that at any moment everything could jam up and stop forever. But then I was past the accident and traffic sped up and we all survived to hurtle endlessly along our paths for another day.
The sweat beneath the gun harness could not evaporate. With its seven-round clip full, the Walther PPK weighed less than a pound and a half, but it felt like more, an unaccustomed and unbalancing weight. Guns can be a distraction, a dangerous focus of one’s authority, a crutch. Many come to depend upon them: take away the gun and you take away their identity. Once I saw a police officer deprived of his weapon stand uselessly, dazed and uncomprehending, when he could have been calling for backup, chasing the perpetrator or helping me staunch the blood pumping from his partner’s thigh.
I wear a gun when the occasion demands it. I was being paid well to ensure that during the next three days strange little Beatriz del Gato came to no harm. Philippe Cordova would expect me to wear a gun. I wore one.
As we neared the centre of town and Atlanta’s one-way system we travelled west for a while on Tenth. The sun poured into the car through the rear window, and in moments the interior was swollen and thick with heat. I glanced in the rearview mirror. Beatriz did not seem affected. South again on Juniper, and into the cool shadow of the Peachtree Medical Building. The interior temperature dropped fifteen degrees. Beatriz stared out of the window and did not move a muscle the whole time.
I parked on Courtland and prepared for the long, long morning of appointments.
It was after she came out of the first office, face stiff, that I understood Beatriz del Gato was wasting her time. No one was going to employ an advertising executive who did not seem to understand the meaning of small talk and whose expression was as impervious as pottery glaze. She was utterly self-involved, did not acknowledge my presence at all but simply followed me doggedly through the hydrocarbon heat of downtown Atlanta to the sterile chill of another office tower for the second appointment. I waited in the reception area while she went off to some inner sanctum to show her wares. I tried to imagine her talking to one of these potential employers, and failed.
As the morning progressed, her expression began to change. She got paler, and there was a disturbingly gelid cast around her eyes and cheeks, as though the pottery glaze were on the verge of melting.
As we arrived at the offices of Perrin & Norrander, her fourth appointment, I found myself holding my breath, willing her to hang on. It was the usual Atlanta advertising agency: hand-knotted silk carpet, blond wood inlay (a competent assembly of ash and maple), men wearing Hugo Boss, women good jewellery, both with far too many clothes for this kind of weather; an ultimately self-defeating attempt to prove that advertising in the capital of the South was every bit as aggressive and cutting-edge as Madison Avenue. There is one thing Margaret Thatcher said that I agree with: if you have to tell people you’re important, you’re not.
The secretary was one of those sorority sisters from Ole Miss who didn’t believe in pronouncing l’s when they appeared in the middle of a word. She was on the phone. “Would you please ho’d one moment?” Efficient punch of button with terrifyingly red nail followed by professional smile at us. “How can I he’p you?”
“Beatriz del Gato to see Anthony Perrin,” she said, like one of those old-fashioned porcelain marionettes.
The Taloned One ran her finger down a screen, then favoured us with another artificial smile. “If you would take a seat, Mr. Perrin will be with you shortly. How do you like your coffee?”
I answered for both of us. The waiting room was frigid and the three chairs built more for looks than comfort. They were arranged under a horrible painting that looked like a television test card. Beatriz sat, portfolio on her lap; I didn’t bother. Even if the chairs were worth it, the painting hung so low I wouldn’t be able to lean back.