I was relieved. “How long do think it will take you to figure them out?”
Regan closed the notebook and reached for the Pinot. “I’ll let you know when I’m done.”
I was impatient, but her tone said that I’d just have to wait and like it, damn it. She drank the rest of the wine, subtly making love to the glass. On cue, the waitress arrived and asked if we’d like another round. Regan said yes, leaving no room for discussion. When the waitress left, Regan reached across the table and took one of my smokes.
“I hope you don’t mind.”
I motioned nonchalantly. She lit the cigarette with her eyes locked on mine, like she was kissing another man. Her wine arrived, and the waitress sloshed a stream of so-called coffee in the general vicinity of my cup. Regan smiled as I mopped up with a cocktail napkin. “Tell me something… something interesting about yourself.”
“What you want to know?”
“Anything. I feel like you know a lot more about me than I do about you. It’s not very fair.”
I retreated to my pack of Lucky Strikes. “I was married once. How’s that?”
“Only once? That’s not very interesting. Everyone’s been married once.”
“I never said I was interesting.”
Regan poised her cigarette over the ashtray and flicked delicately. “So, what was she like?”
“Beautiful, intelligent, sexy… and rotten to the core.”
Regan smiled indulgently. “So why did you marry her?”
“I lost a bet.” I took a drag and wished I hadn’t brought up the subject.
“Do you hate all women now?”
I shook my head and reached for my cup of dishwater. “They’re like tequila, the greatest thing in the world until the one night you overdo it. After that, the slightest whiff of it makes you want to vomit. For a long time, you can’t even think about it without getting nauseous. After a while, you take a little sip, and you’re surprised to find that you can keep it down. Eventually, you go back to drinking it, but you never, ever forget that first miserable night.” I took another sip of dishwater. It tasted a bit like Cuervo.
“Nice metaphor.”
“Glad you enjoyed it.” I put my elbows on the table. “So, tell me, what’s your philosophy of love?”
Regan stared into her Pinot Noir and bit her lower lip. “I… Dance With Love — until it tries to lead.” She looked up seductively. “And I love to dance.”
“What a coincidence. I used to give lessons. Dance lessons.”
Regan cocked an eyebrow. “Really?”
“Yeah. Old family tradition. I know ‘em all — tango, samba, watusi, Charleston — “
“How about the Forbidden Dance of Love?”
“I know it, but I quit doing it. Kept throwing my back out.”
Regan smiled and sipped her wine. I thought of something I’d been meaning to ask. “So… where did the name Madsen come from?”
Her smile became less sincere. “I was married.”
Turnabout was fair play. “What was he like?”
“Oh, you know… handsome, intelligent, sexy… and rotten to the core.”
“What a coincidence.”
Regan cradled the Pinot in her hands. “He was my tequila. Now I drink wine.” She took a sip. “I won’t make that mistake again.”
“What do you mean?”
Regan set the glass down and leaned back. “I let myself be controlled by someone. I didn’t like it. Now I’m in it for myself.” She looked back at me, defiantly.
I raised my mug. “Here’s to looking out for number one, and sticking our necks out for nobody.”
Regan relaxed and smiled, then lifted her glass to my coffee cup. “To us.”
She was a piece of work. I was tempted to spend a few more hours looking into that flawless face, but I’d fallen enough for one day. My attraction to Regan wasn’t the warm, comfortable kind that I felt towards Chelsea. Instead, it was a fierce, primal craving that ached in my gut. She was a backdraft of desire, dancing, writhing, a mass of exploding embers they could easily blind anyone foolish enough to stare too long.”
I excused myself and placed a call to Fitzpatrick at the Savoy. He was still working on the boxes, but no luck. I hung around the vid-phone for a few minutes, going over the game plan. Pernell was handling the anagram problem, but it was way too soon to find out what he’d learned. Regan was going to go through Malloy’s notebooks. Hopefully she’d turn something up. It seemed like all I could do was hurry up and wait. I decided to fly back to my office.
I couldn’t see any nefarious loiterers on Chandler Avenue, so I parked and entered the Ritz brazenly. No surprises. It was good to be home. I flipped on the light, hoping that a co-operative brownie had come in and cleaned up, but the place was as trashed as I left it. Whoever had broken in the other night must have felt short-changed. Half the fun of breaking into a place is getting to ransack it.
I went straight to the shower, then shaved. After changing my clothes, I went to my desk and checked my voice messaging unit. There were two messages. I pressed the playback button and dropped into my chair.
“Hi, Tex. Lavercan Kimbell here. I just wanted to touch base with you on the PI Pension/401k, now that we’re past the first quarter. Boy, it’s been crazy.” my investment adviser laughed nervously. “Well, anyway, I just thought I’d let you know that not all the news is bad. I mean, we did lose quite a bit, but that’s really the best thing that could have happened. Now we can buy more shares, and when we hit an upward swing, we’ll make up for the past four or five years. Well, that’s about all. Call me if you’ve got any questions.”
Lavercan was a sincere man, with no apparent talent for investment strat-egy. At this rate, I’d soon own more worthless stock than anyone in the world. Luckily, I still had my Franklin Mint Civil War chess set — my true nest egg. The thing had to be worth a fortune. Hell, all the pieces were made of fine pewter.
The second message came up in hushed tones. “There are ears everywhere. I’ve got something to show you. Stop by as soon as you can.”
Ellis. I wondered what he had to show me. Probably a touched up still from Plan Nine From Outer Space. But, since I didn’t have anything better to do, I figured I’d drop by.
“Clearly, Kennedy knew about the alien infiltration of the government. Extraterrestrial contact was made by the Russians all through the ‘50s. It’s well-documented. The way I see it, the aliens had to get rid of Kennedy before he exposed them. LBJ was certainly under their control, if not actually one of them. Vietnam was nothing more than a ruse to divert the attention of the American public.”
Ellis took a sip of mineral water and gave me a knowing wink.
“Without question, the Depression of ‘98 was a veiled attempt by the aliens to throw our political system into chaos. Fortunately, the administrations of Dole, Gingrich, and Linderman recognised the threat and purged most of the aliens from high-ranking positions. Now we’re in what I call a “secondary state of checks and balances.”
“That’s fascinating.”
Ellis had started babbling the minute I stepped into his shop. He was like a drum solo — there was nothing to do but wait for it to end. It looked like he’d finished.
“So what was it you have to show me?”
“Oh, yeah. Sorry. I just get a little hyped when I find someone who understands what’s really going on. I’ve got a lot of, well, I think they’re brilliant, theories, but it’s hard to find people you can trust.”
He got up and walked to a file cabinet. As I watched him remove a key from the chain on his belt, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of ambivalence. On the one hand, Ellis was obviously lonely, isolated by his intensely conspiratorial beliefs, yet eager for companionship and shared vision. I felt a pang of empathy for this misguided, but sincere, nerd. All he needed to be happy was a crackpot pal, someone to share in his convoluted skein of warped theories. On the other hand, he was too annoying for me to ever be his pal.