Pale Kings and Princes

She bit her lower lip gently. “Okay,” she said, “here’s what I want to do. I’ll go in and take a bath and come out and seduce you. Then we can go to dinner refreshed and face the cuisine together.”

“That seems sensible,” I said.

Then she smiled at me and leaned forward. “I love you very much,” she said, and kissed me and went into the bathroom. I put my gun on the bedside table and took my shoulder holster off and hung it on a chair and then I lay on the bed with my hands behind my head. In fifteen minutes Susan appeared from the bathroom naked holding a thin bath towel in front of her.

She said “Ta da,” and dropped the bath towel, and seduced me. Easily.

It was after nine o’clock when we got down to the Hunt Room. Virgie was behind the bar with another bartender, a grayish man with horn-rimmed glasses and a red face. The bar was crowded and most of the tables were taken in the dining room, but there was one open near the back by the front window with a sweeping view of the driveway leading up to the front door.

When we were seated, the waitress showed up and took our order for drinks. I ordered beer, Susan asked for a vodka martini on the rocks with four olives in it.

The room was loud, people were drinking bourbon and eating roast beef and the surf and turf special at a boisterous pace. We looked at our menus. The waitress returned with our drinks.

Susan ordered a salad with house dressing and, when I had my entrée, a shrimp cocktail.

“That’s all,” the waitress said.

“Yes,” Susan said. She smiled at the waitress.

I ordered the chicken potpie and another beer. The waitress looked at the full bottle on the table.

“I know,” I said. “But by the time you come back I’ll be finished with it.”

“You want wine with your dinner?” the waitress said.

“No, thank you,” I said. I’d checked the wines listed on the back of the menu. They ran to André and Cribari.

Susan said, “I ate in a restaurant once, out near Sterling, and a man I was with ordered red wine with his meal and the waitress brought him a glass of port.”

“I thought it best not to challenge the cellars,” I said.

Susan sipped the martini. There were four olives in it, stuffed with pimento. “Don’t see that often,” Susan said.

“I know a place where they serve a slice of salami as a garnish on your beer glass.”

She smiled and put her hand out on the table. I covered it with mine.

“Tell me about the gourmet Italian meal we would have had,” she said.

“A turkey sub,” I said, “and a veggie sub, everything but onions.”

“Oh.”

“And a bottle of Chianti.”

“Paper cups?” Susan said.

“I was going to give you the bathroom glass at the motel and drink mine from the bottle.”

“Of course,” Susan said. “How did it come to go up in flames?”

“Some folks waylaid me on the road out to the motel. They implied I wasn’t wanted around here.”

“Un huh?” Susan said. She drank a bit more of her martini. I emptied my beer glass. There was none left in the bottle either. Luckily the waitress showed up with a new bottle.

“I’ll need another one, soon,” I said.

The waitress nodded and went away. Her name tag said her name was Gert.

“So then what happened,” Susan said.

I told her. She listened with her full attention and the warmth of it was nearly visceral.

“No one had a Hispanic accent,” she said.

“No,” I said.

“And no other cars came by, even though it was around five o’clock on a Friday night?”

“That’s right.”

“And no police car followed you,” she said, “for the first time.”

I nodded.

“That would point toward unsettling conclusions,” Susan said.

“I know,” I said. “Like maybe Wheaton’s finest were involved.”

“And maybe they had diverted traffic on that road for a little while,” Susan said. “Was there a sudden traffic flow after they left?”

“Out here there is never a sudden traffic flow,” I said. “A few cars passed me as I walked to the motel.”

“Does it mean the police are involved in the death of that reporter?”

“It might,” I said, “or it might mean they’re involved in the cocaine trade and the cocaine trade was involved with the killing, or it might just be they don’t want me to spoil the coke deal. Hard to make much money in Wheaton.”

Susan nodded. Gert appeared with the salad and put it in front of Susan. Iceberg lettuce, a wedge of winter tomato, and two carrot curls, with a splat of orange-colored French dressing on it.

Susan looked at it. “The lettuce is crisp,” she said.

“Always a silver lining,” I said.

Susan speared a piece of lettuce with her fork and ate a little of it.

“I think they used lard in the French dressing,” she said.

“What a nice idea,” I said.

Gert reappeared with my third beer. “You want another martini?” she said to Susan.

“No, thank you,” Susan said. Her smile was warm with gratitude.

Gert went away.

I poured some beer into my glass. “The thing that bothers me is, I don’t think these guys on the road were cops.”

“You can tell?” Susan said. She cut her tomato wedge in half and ate one of the halves.

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Even small-town cops?”