Part 10 (1/2)
She made no move, no effort to cover herself or to avoid his gaze. ”My name is Mary Catherine Casey. Do you like it?”
”It's a good name. Mine is still John Walker.”
”Very pleased to meet you.” She looked into his eyes for a moment, searching until she found something that satisfied her. Then she sat down on the bed beside him and looked around, picking up pieces of clothing. ”When you're through with Stillman, you can get in touch.”
”I don't have to go with Stillman,” he said. ”What are you doing tonight?”
She shook her head. ”Finish with Stillman first.”
”I told you I don't need ... Do you know what Stillman and I are up to?”
She looked at him as though she were disappointed with his intelligence. ”I did your trace.” She put on her panties. ”If she's yours, get her out of your system. If she's your enemy, you can't let her get away with it. If she's in trouble and you abandon her without trying, you're no use to anybody.” She looked at him closely. ”Figure out which it is, and get it over with.” She stood up to fasten her jeans and walked around the room looking for something. The sudden transformation into a composed, businesslike person was so dramatic that he felt a sense of loss.
She slipped the big sweater over her head, then stared around her again. She focused her eyes on the floor. ”Oh, here they are.” She picked up her gla.s.ses and put them on. She threw her coat over her shoulder and walked to the door. ”Bye.”
She was out the door and gone.
12.
While Walker was in the shower, letting the hot water wake him up and soothe his sore muscles, he thought about Mary Catherine Casey. He directed his mind to the question of what was in her mind. He knew that the term ”charming eccentric” was an oxymoron. Whenever he had met girls who had said and done things for effect, he had instinctively known that they were trouble. Some lobe of their brains had been pinched by forceps during birth, or had been atrophied by a chemical put in women's food as a subst.i.tute for fat or sugar. He had imagined that one night he would wake up in bed and hear the sound of one of these women firing up a power drill to run it into his forehead and let the demons out. Mary Catherine Casey had not made him uneasy: she just seemed to have decided that she liked him and wanted to play with him. Serena made him very uneasy.
He turned off the shower, dried himself off, and walked to the bedroom. There was a man standing there, looking down at his bed. The man turned: Stillman. ”I knocked, but apparently you didn't hear me, so I let myself in. You alone in there?”
”Of course I'm alone in here.”
Stillman glanced at the wildly disarranged bed again, then back at Walker. ”Better get a move on if you're going to make it back to San Francis...o...b..fore they start storing golf clubs in your cubicle.”
”I'll take the chance,” said Walker. ”I'm not going back.”
”If you're going with me, you'd still better get a move on. We just have a different flight to catch.”
Walker dressed quickly in a suit like Stillman's and began to collect his belongings. He noticed the condom wrappers on the floor, hastily torn apart and flung there. As he picked them up, he looked at Stillman, who was staring intently out the window at the parking lot. Finally, Walker latched his suitcase. ”Let's get out of here.”
When he was sitting in the car beside Stillman, he squinted out the window at the glaring world. Los Angeles had always struck his Ohio eyes as shades of tan and light gray, with a few sickly pastels, but this morning it was patches of deep green gra.s.s and towering eucalyptus and palms, with scarlet roses and tangles of bougainvillea vines with impossible magenta flowers, and jacaranda trees that snowed purple petals on the ground. The sky was a blue so clear that it had never occurred to him that it was a condition that ever happened: it was a theoretical sky, without the hint of a cloud. ”I see the fog lifted,” he said.
”Yep,” said Stillman. ”I guess you didn't have a chance to watch the weather on TV, but they said the clouds were 'low night and early morning.' When that high pressure kicks in around here, it'll dry your eyeb.a.l.l.s.”
”Okay, so you know about her.”
”It wasn't my toughest case,” Stillman admitted. ”I've never seen her find anybody tolerable before.”
”What about Gochay?”
”They live on different planets,” said Stillman. ”No, the field is a wasteland. She leaves nothing alive within pistol range ... until now, anyway.” He looked at Walker contemplatively. ”I'd be willing to pa.s.s on some wisdom if you're in the mood to listen.”
”Why not?”
”You might think twice before you get too involved with a woman with her technical skills. She can hunt you down like a mad dog without leaving her computer. It would take her a minute or two to destroy your credit, delete your driver's license, and transfer somebody else's arrest warrant to your name.”
”I wouldn't have done it if I'd planned to p.i.s.s her off.”
Stillman smiled wistfully. ”We never plan to p.i.s.s them off. It just happens. In my short and uneventful life, I've had a woman go after me with a claw hammer, attempt to dust me with a twenty-two target pistol, and aim parts of her china collection at my cranium from a fourth-story window.”
”The same woman?”
”Of course not. She'd have to be an idiot.”
”So would you.”
”I suppose so, but I have a forgiving nature. Women don't. At some point you might want to give her a call just to see if you ought to rest easy or make a run for the border. I wouldn't trifle with Serena's affections, as they say.”
”Her name's not Serena.”
”Did she tell you to call her something else?”
”Yes.”
”First and last name?”
”Middle, too.”
”Flowers, then,” said Stillman. ”Definitely flowers. Big red roses. They like to be ambiguous, but they don't like you to be.”
”I'm supposed to take advice from a man that women chase with a claw hammer?”
”One way or another, I get under their skin,” said Stillman. ”It doesn't matter. I trust you'll know what's appropriate.”
”Thank you,” said Walker.
”And she's intriguing. If I weren't old enough to be her father, I'd have been interested myself.”
”I would never have suspected that Max Stillman would let mere propriety enter into that kind of decision.”
Stillman turned to look at him in surprise, then returned to his driving. ”Age isn't a matter of propriety. It's a whole series of inexorable changes that have already happened before you notice them. The ones you can't see are bigger than the ones you can. One day you just discover that you can't watch this movie or read this book or have this conversation anymore. Sometimes you've had it too many times already, but at others, it's not even that. It's just that nothing in it is anything that you're interested in anymore.”
”You mean you know too much.”
”Not exactly. There's nothing wrong with the conversation, and maybe it's a set of thoughts everybody ought to have pa.s.s through his brain at a certain time of his life. Everybody has a right to be young. It's a crime to be the one who's there when a young woman is having some kind of exciting revelation and not be in it with her: to be just kind of watching from a distance and knowing everything she's going to figure out in the next five steps. Because you're there, she can't be with somebody who will be surprised with her. It denigrates and devalues the experience she's having, makes her suspect that she's naive and foolish, and destroys it for her. She sees there's no uniqueness in it, and she knows it's not even her thought or experience, because plenty of people have had it first.” He frowned at Walker. ”You can kill somebody that way.”
Stillman brightened. ”If they're at least thirty-five or forty, and there's anything they still haven't found out, been taught, felt, or experienced, then it's high time and Max Stillman's their man.”
Stillman swung onto the divided drive into the airport. ”If you'd like to go to San Francisco, you've got a ticket waiting. That's your terminal coming up. I'll pop the trunk, you can get your suitcase out, and be on your way. Last chance.”
Walker said, ”I told you before, I'm not going to San Francisco. I'm not going to bail out until we find her.”