Was it too soon?
Probably, but how long should Wilde give it? A week? Two weeks? The wait seemed arbitrary and unnecessary. He wasn’t heartbroken. Neither was Laila.
It was what it was.
“Wilde!” Nicole called out, clearly happy to see him.
She brought him a beer. When it came to beer, he was, like the hotel, “unfussy,” but he enjoyed whatever local ale was on tap. Today, that was a “blonde lager” from the Asbury Park Brewery. Nicole leaned over the bar to buss his cheek. Tom down at the other end gave him a wave.
“Been a while,” she said to him.
Nicole smiled. She had a kind smile.
“Yeah.”
“Back on the prowl?”
He didn’t reply to that one because he didn’t yet know the answer.
She leaned toward him. “A few past conquests were asking about you.”
“Don’t call them that.”
“What name would you prefer?” A guy bellied up to the other end of the bar and raised his hand. Nicole said, “Think it over and I’ll be back later.”
Wilde took a deep sip from his mug and listened to the hum of the hotel. His phone buzzed. It was Hester.
“Wilde?”
He could barely hear her over the background noise on her end. “Where are you?” he asked.
“At a restaurant.”
“I see.”
“I’m on a date.”
“I see.”
“With Oren Carmichael.”
“I see.”
“You’re a great conversationalist, Wilde. Such enthusiasm.”
“Do you want me to yell, ‘Yippee’?”
“Naomi’s mother won’t talk to me.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“What do you think I mean? I mean she won’t talk to me. She refuses to return my calls. She says her daughter is none of my business.”
“So Naomi is with her?”
“I don’t know. I was going to send my investigator over to her house, but get this: She’s vacationing in the south of Spain.”
“So maybe Naomi is traveling with her. Maybe Naomi needed to escape all the bullying so her mother took her to Spain.”
“Where are you, Wilde?”
“I’m at the Sheraton bar.”
“Careful,” Hester said. “You hold your liquor like an eighteen-year-old co-ed at her first mixer.”
“What’s a mixer?”
“You’re too young to know.”
“For that matter, what’s a co-ed?”
“Funny. Let’s talk in the morning. I have to get back to Oren.”
“You’re on a date,” Wilde said. Then: “Yippee.”
“Wiseass.”
At some point, Wilde found himself talking to Sondra, a redhead in her early thirties with tight slacks and an easy laugh. They sat at the quiet end of the bar. She’d been born in Morocco, where her father had been working for the embassy. “He was CIA,” she told him. “Pretty much all embassy employees are spies. Not just the USA ones. All over. I mean, think about it. You get to bring in whoever you want to a protected location in the heart of a foreign country — of course you’re going to send your best counterintelligence people, right?” Sondra had moved around a lot as a kid, embassy to embassy, mostly in Africa and the Middle East. “My hair fascinated them. There are so many superstitions surrounding redheads.” She’d gone to UCLA and loved it and got a degree in hotel management. She was divorced and had one son, age six, at home. “I don’t travel much, but I do this trip every year.” Her son was staying with his dad. She and her ex got along. She liked staying at this Sheraton. They always upgraded her room to the presidential suite. “You have to see it,” she said in a tone that could knock a movie rating from PG to R. “Top floor. You can see the skyline of New York from it. It’s three rooms, so like, if we just wanted to have a drink in the living room space, I mean, I don’t want you to think...”
Eventually Sondra gave him a key card.
“They gave me two when I came in,” Sondra quickly explained. “One for the living room, one for the bedroom, you know what I mean?”
Wilde, still nursing his second blonde lager, assured her that he did.
“Anyway, I can’t sleep yet with the time change. I’m going to do some work in the living room, if you want to come up later and have a nightcap.”
Nightcap. Mixer. Co-ed. It was like he was living in 1963.
He thanked Sondra but promised nothing. She headed to the elevator. He stared at the key card so as not to stare at her. A drink, she’d said. In the living room — not the bedroom. Maybe that was all it was. Maybe it was nothing more than that.
Then a tall man with a ponytail asked, “Are you going to go up?”
The tall man grabbed the stool right next to him, despite the fact that there had to be twenty open ones.
“She’s very attractive,” the tall man said. “I like redheads, don’t you?”
Wilde said nothing.
The tall man stuck out his hand. “My name is Saul,” he said.
“Strauss,” Wilde added.
“You know who I am?”
Wilde didn’t reply.
“Well, I’m flattered.”
Wilde had seen Strauss on Hester’s show every once in a while. He was a good talking head — an endearing mix of that super-progressive college professor with the cred of being a bona fide war hero. Wilde was not a fan of pundits. They came on television to either confirm your narrative or piss you off, and either way, that wasn’t healthy for anyone.
“I didn’t catch your name,” Strauss said.
“But you know it.”
“Does anyone?” He gave Wilde an inquisitive look that must wow the college — to use Hester’s vernacular — co-eds. “They call you Wilde, right? You’re the infamous boy from the woods.”
Wilde pulled out the necessary bills from his wallet and dropped them on the bar. “It was nice meeting you,” he said, rising.
Strauss was unruffled. “So you’re going up to her room?”
“Seriously?”
“I don’t mean to pry.”
“Hey, Saul — can I call you Saul?”
“Sure.”
“Why don’t we skip the rest of the foreplay and get to it?”
“Is that your plan when you go upstairs?” Strauss quickly raised a palm. “Sorry, that was going too far.”
Wilde started to walk away.
Strauss said, “I hear you had a run-in with the Maynard kid today.”
Wilde turned back to him.
“You asked me to skip the foreplay, right?” Strauss said.
“Heard from whom?”
“I have my sources.”
“And they are?”
“Anonymous.”
“Bye then.”
Strauss put his hand on Wilde’s forearm. His grip was surprisingly strong. “It could be important.”
Wilde hesitated, but then he sat back down. He was curious. Strauss was a partisan — who wasn’t nowadays? — but he’d also hit Wilde as something of a straight shooter. Instinctively, Wilde had thought that the best move was to simply blow the man off, but with a little more time to reason, he started to wonder what he had to lose by listening here.
Not a thing.
Wilde said, “I’m looking for a teenage girl who probably ran away.”
“Naomi Pine.”
Wilde shouldn’t have been surprised. “Your sources are good.”
“You’re not the only one here who is ex-military. What does Crash Maynard have to do with Naomi Pine?”
Strauss was all business now.
“Maybe nothing.”
“But?”
“She’s an outcast. He’s Mr. Popular. Yet there’s been some interaction.”