Carrie began writing and filled up one side of the napkin, then the other.
Bob Cantor walked into the restaurant and stood at the front, waiting. Stone waved him over and introduced him to Carrie.
“Hi, Bob,” she said. “Let me explain this list to you, where everything is in the apartment.” She took him through it, item by item, and told him where to find a suitcase.
“Got it,” Cantor said, pocketing the list. “Do you have a photograph of your ex-husband?”
“No, I threw all of them away.”
“What’s his name and address?”
“Max Long, Atlanta. I don’t know his street address.”
“Your protection is named Willie Leahy. He’ll be at your house with his brother Jimmy at nine tomorrow morning. You want them to rent a car? I think it’s best; you can be a target while trying to get a cab.”
“They can use my car,” Stone said.
“Good idea, with the armor and all.”
“You have an armored car?” Carrie asked.
“Lightly armored,” Stone said. “It came that way, and it’ll stop a bullet.”
“You,” Carrie said, putting her hand on his and squeezing, “are the second-best thing to happen to me in a long time.”
7
CARRIE SLEPT IN STONE’S ARMS for most of the night, and neither of them was much interested in sex. Stone took a handgun out of his safe and kept it in the bedside drawer.
Carrie didn’t wake up when he gently disengaged from her. He put on a robe, went down to the kitchen, and made them bacon and scrambled eggs, English muffins, coffee, and orange juice, then sent it upstairs in the dumbwaiter. He got the Times and went back upstairs to find Carrie sitting up in bed with a breakfast tray in her lap, bare-breasted, which was all right with him.
“Your dumbwaiter woke me,” she said. “A little bell went off.”
Stone took his own tray from the dumbwaiter and got in bed with it, adjusting the back with the remote control. “I’m glad you’re feeling better this morning,” he said. She was digging into the breakfast with enthusiasm.
“I am, and I’m starved,” she said.
Breakfast finished, he put their trays back into the dumbwaiter and sent it downstairs. He poured them both some more coffee and got back into bed. “I need to know a lot more about your ex-husband,” he said, “if I’m going to be able to help.”
“What do you want to know?” she asked, sipping her coffee.
“How long were you married?”
“Nine years.”
“What was the character of the marriage?”
“At first, okay, then increasingly distant, then finally violent.”
“You beat him up?”
She laughed. “I got in a couple of good licks,” she said, “but I got the worst of it. I moved in with a girlfriend and got a lawyer.”
“Tell me about the settlement.”
“He wouldn’t settle, so it was really an award by the judge. I got the house on Habersham, which I sold immediately, half his brokerage account, which I put into a municipal bond fund, and one million dollars in cash, most of which I invested conservatively.”
“Did the house have a mortgage?”