He put his sack on the kitchen counter. “Look,” he said, “you need something to eat, to make you feel better.” He took out the pizza. “And a glass of wine to ease the tension. Then, when you’re ready to give yourself a special treat, you can eat this ice cream right out of the carton, don’t even put it in a dish. And after the food and drink is all gone you’ll still have the flowers. See?”
She stared at him as if he were a man from Mars.
He added: “And anyway, I figured you needed someone to come over here and tell you that you’re a wonderful, special person.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “Fuck you!” she said. “I never cry!”
He put his hands on her shoulders. It was the first time he had touched her. Tentatively he drew her to him. She did not resist. Hardly able to believe his luck, he put his arms around her. She was nearly as tall as he. She rested her head on his shoulder, and her body shook with sobs. He stroked her hair. It was soft and heavy. He got a hard-on like a fire hose, and he eased away from her a fraction, hoping she would not notice. “It’s going to be all right,” he said. “You’ll work things out.”
She remained slumped in his arms for a long, delicious moment. He felt the warmth of her body and inhaled her scent. He wondered whether to kiss her. He hesitated, afraid that if he rushed her she would reject him. Then the moment passed and she moved away.
She wiped her nose on the hem of her baggy T-shirt, giving him a sexy glimpse of a flat, suntanned stomach. “Thanks,” she said. “I needed a shoulder to cry on.”
He felt let down by her matter-of-fact tone. For him it had been a moment of intense feeling; for her, no more than a release of tension. “All part of the service,” he said facetiously, then wished he had kept quiet.
She opened a cupboard and took out plates. “I feel better already,” she said. “Let’s eat.”
He perched on a stool at her kitchen counter. She cut the pizza and took the cork out of the wine. He enjoyed watching her move around her home, closing a drawer with her hip, squinting at a wineglass to see if it was clean, picking up a corkscrew with her long, capable fingers. He remembered the first girl he ever fell in love with. Her name was Bonnie, and she was seven, the same age as he; and he had stared at her strawberry blond ringlets and green eyes and thought what a miracle it was that someone so perfect could exist in the playground of Spillar Road Grade School. For some time he had entertained the notion that she might actually be an angel.
He did not think Jeannie was an angel, but there was a fluid physical grace about her that gave him the same awestruck sensation.
“You’re resilient,” she commented. “Last time I saw you, you looked awful. It was only twenty-four hours ago, but you seem completely recovered.”
“I got off lightly. I have a sore place where Detective Allaston banged my head on the wall, and a big bruise where Porky Butcher kicked me in the ribs at five o’clock this morning, but I’ll be okay, so long as I never have to go back inside that jail.” He put the thought out of his mind. He was not going back; the DNA test would eliminate him as a suspect.
He looked at her bookshelf. She had a lot of nonfiction, biographies of Darwin and Einstein and Francis Bacon; some women novelists he had not read, Erica Jong and Joyce Carol Oates; five or six Edith Whartons; some modern classics. “Hey, you have my all-time favorite novel!” he said.
“Let me guess: To Kill a Mockingbird.”
He was astonished. “How did you know?”
“Come on. The hero is a lawyer who defies social prejudice to defend an innocent man. Isn’t that your dream? Besides, I didn’t think you’d pick The Women’s Room.”
He shook his head in resignation. “You know so much about me. It’s unnerving.”
“What do you think is my favorite book?”
“Is this a test?”
“You bet.”
“Oh … uh, Middlemarch.”
“Why?”
“It has a strong, independent-minded heroine.”
“But she doesn’t do anything! Anyway, the book I’m thinking of isn’t a novel. Guess again.”
He shook his head. “A nonfiction book.” Then inspiration struck. “I know. The story of a brilliant, elegant scientific discovery that explained something crucial about human life. I bet it’s The Double Helix.”
“Hey, very good!”
They started to eat. The pizza was still warm. Jeannie was thoughtfully silent for a while, then she said: “I really messed up today. I can see it now. I needed to keep the whole crisis low-key. I should have kept saying, ‘Well, maybe, we can discuss that, let’s not make any hasty decisions.’ Instead I defied the university, then made it worse by telling the press.”
“You strike me as an uncompromising person,” he said.
She nodded. “There’s uncompromising, and then there’s dumb.”
He showed her The Wall Street Journal. “This may explain why your department is oversensitive about bad publicity at the moment. Your sponsor is about to be taken over.”
She looked at the first paragraph. “A hundred and eighty million dollars, wow.” She read on while chewing a slice of pizza. When she finished the article she shook her head. “Your theory is interesting, but I don’t buy it.”
“Why not?”
“It was Maurice Obeli who seemed to be against me, not Berrington. Although Berrington can be sneaky, they say. Anyway, I’m not that important. I represent such a tiny fraction of the research Genetico sponsors. Even if my work really did invade people’s privacy, that wouldn’t be enough of a scandal to threaten a multimillion-dollar takeover.”
Steve wiped his fingers on a paper napkin and picked up a framed photograph of a woman with a baby. The woman looked a bit like Jeannie, with straight hair. “Your sister?” he guessed.
“Yes. Patty. She has three kids now—all boys.”
“I don’t have any brothers or sisters,” he said. Then he remembered. “Unless you count Dennis Pinker.” Jeannie’s face changed, and he said: “You’re looking at me like a specimen.”
“I’m sorry. Want to try the ice cream?”
“You bet.”
She put the carton on the table and got out two spoons. That pleased him. Eating out of the same container was one step closer to kissing. She ate with relish. He wondered if she made love with the same kind of greedy enthusiasm.
He swallowed a spoonful of Rainforest Crunch and said: “I’m so glad you believe in me. The cops sure don’t.”
“If you’re a rapist, my whole theory falls to pieces.”
“Even so, not many women would have let me in tonight. Especially believing I have the same genes as Dennis Pinker.”
“I hesitated,” she said. “But you proved me right.”
“How?”
She gestured to indicate the remains of their dinner. “If Dennis Pinker is attracted to a woman, he pulls a knife and orders her to take off her panties. You bring pizza.”
Steve laughed.
“It may sound funny,” Jeannie said, “but it’s a world of difference.”
“There’s something you ought to know about me,” Steve said. “A secret.”
She put down her spoon. “What?”
“I almost killed someone once.”
“How?”
He told her the story of the fight with Tip Hendricks. “That’s why I’m so bothered by this stuff about my origins,” he said. “I can’t tell you how disturbing it is to be told that Mom and Dad may not be my parents. What if my real father is a killer?”
Jeannie shook her head. “You were in a schoolboy fight that got out of hand. That doesn’t make you a psychopath. And what about the other guy? Tip?”
“Someone else killed him a couple of years later. By then he was dealing dope. He got into an argument with his supplier, and the guy shot him through the head.”
“He’s the psychopath, I figure,” Jeannie said. “That’s what happens to them. They can’t stay out of trouble. A big strong kid like you might clash with the law once, but you survive the incident and go on to lead a normal life. Whereas Dennis will be in and out of jail until someone kills him.”
“How old are you, Jeannie?”
“You didn’t like me calling you a big strong kid.”
“I’m twenty-two.”
“I’m twenty-nine. It’s a big difference.”
“Do I seem like a kid to you?”
“Listen, I don’t know, a man of thirty probably wouldn’t drive here from Washington just to bring me pizza. It was kind of impulsive.”
“Are you sorry I did it?”
“No.” She touched his hand. “I’m real glad.”
He still did not know where he was with her. But she had cried on his shoulder. You don’t use a kid for that, he thought.
“When will you know about my genes?” he said.
She looked at her watch. “The blotting is probably done. Lisa will make the film in the morning.”
“You mean the test is completed?”
“Just about.”
“Can’t we look at the results now? I can’t wait to find out if I have the same DNA as Dennis Pinker.”
“I guess we could,” Jeannie said. “I’m pretty curious myself.”
“Then what are we waiting for?”