“No.”
She added, a playful lilt to her voice, “I won’t tell. I won’t stain your precious honor.”
“I won’t hurt Lindsey,” I said. An interior voice said, You overestimate my honor. There was a time when I would have already had you down on the floor. I moved sideways and away from the wall.
“Every man wants to do sisters,” she said, following me with a buccaneer’s smile on her face. “I did a pair of brothers once. It was fun as hell. Later you can tell me how I’m different from her, and how we’re the same.”
She advanced on me again, and I started to push her away. She batted away one arm, then the other, and pinned me against the edge of the bookshelves. “You’re too slow, David. I took kickboxing for four years,” she laughed. “Maybe I’ll just rape reluctant David. Give him the ultimate excuse.” She pressed her breasts against me and ran her hands over me. “Not all of you is reluctant.”
“We’re both drunk,” I said, pushing against her. “I won’t hurt Lindsey, and I know you wouldn’t want that, either. She really loves you…”
Robin kissed me, her tongue burrowing past my teeth, and she started unbuttoning my shirt. When I moved my head, she whispered in my ear, “David is reasoning with Robin. David is trying to give himself lots of excuses for when this finally happens, when it happens and he really loves it, that he did everything he could to stop it.”
“It’s not going to happen,” I said. “You’re drunk. Lindsey would be ashamed of both of us.”
“You don’t know Lindsey as well as you think you do,” Robin whispered, her breath hot on my neck. “I bet you don’t know she has a kid.”
The edge of the tall bookshelves was digging into my back. I said, “Lindsey doesn’t want to have children.”
“Well it’s too late for that,” she whispered insistently. “When she was 16, she had a baby.”
“That’s not true. She never told me that.”
“She wouldn’t tell you. She had a boy. She didn’t want to give him up for adoption, but Linda made her. Then Linda made her join the Air Force, to get away from Ryan. That was the father. Now he was a bad boy. Nice try, Linda, but the barn door was already open, don’t ya know. Lindsey had a real thing for him, a real addiction. They got back together a few years later. She found him. They lived together until he killed himself on his motorcycle. But I know Lindsey still wants to find that baby she had with Ryan. I know it. I know the truth hurts, David. I know you want to be Lindsey’s true love. It just didn’t work out that way. Let Robin make things better…”
&nb
sp; I was dully aware that Robin was holding me like a drunken dance partner. When I felt her kiss me again, I shoved her away. She shrugged and smiled and mounted the stairs that led to the garage apartment. She said, “I’ll leave the door unlocked for you, baby.”
24
It’s wisdom as common as a child’s saying: two’s company and three’s a crowd. My personal paradise with Lindsey had become badly crowded by Robin. It was enough overpopulation to make old Malthus turn over in his grave. I’d been mind-fucked by some pros—but Robin was setting a new standard. If she had her way, the congress wouldn’t have stopped with my mind. I knew Lindsey could sense something wrong in my voice from 2,000 miles away. As we talked, I could hear a beep every few seconds—her federal minder—sounding like a supervisor monitoring a sales call. We couldn’t talk about anything real. Was she really working all the time in a highly secure environment? Or was there time off to see Patrick Blair? Could what Robin told me possibly be true? “I’ll be back soon, Dave,” she said, “so don’t fall in love with my sister.” And she laughed her fine, crystal laugh. For just a second, I thought about telling her that Robin had made a pass at me. But then I would want to say more, ask more.
I spent the weekend with my Khrushchev biography, mostly sitting in the study, sometimes with Lester Young and Sinatra on my headphones. How the world had changed—I found myself feeling a little sorry for the Soviet leader. Of course that was hindsight sweetened by the way the Cold War had ended. When K was in power and I was a child, I had lived in mortal fear of nuclear war. There were missile silos around Tucson back then. Reflecting on all that from the safety of my leather chair made the mortal information given me by Robin seem small in comparison.
If I were drafting a biography, I would write, “Mapstone’s family situation became complicated that summer.” I tried to sift this new information at a cool remove: that Patrick Blair was also in Washington with Lindsey; and that Lindsey had a baby, and now would be the mother of a grown man. It might have no more truth than any number of myths that historians are paid to debunk. But I had about the same cool distance as the SUVs tailgating on Central that Monday as I rode the bus downtown. On the sidewalk, a man wearing nothing but dirty cargo shorts walked north with a hand-lettered cardboard sign. It said, “Jesus is Coming.” The weekend had been all anti-climax. I saw Robin as she was coming and going, and both of us acted as if nothing had happened. But the house seemed to lack oxygen, and I was happy to go back to work. I stopped for a mocha at the Starbucks on Adams Street, then walked in the shade of the buildings over to the courthouse. Somehow I wasn’t sweating yet—it was only in the high nineties. So I took the winding steps up to the fourth floor.
Even though the county was chronically short on office space, my end of the building was deserted. It involved some ancient dispute between this and that department over the offices, with neither winning. It was a shame because the renovation had restored the 1929 beauty to the place, with dark wooden doors and transoms, pebbled glass, and dignified light globes. Many days the custodians don’t even turn on the hall lights and today was no exception. That’s why the light at the end of the corridor made me slow my pace. My door was standing open. It was probably a lazy cleaning crew. But given my luck lately, I pulled out the Python. My footsteps suddenly sounded horrendously loud. Another five steps and I came in the door with the revolver in one hand and a Starbucks cup in the other. I swept the room until the barrel rested on the compact form of Kate Vare.
“You look ridiculous,” she said. “Put that away. They shouldn’t even let you be armed. You could be like Barney Fife, and Peralta could keep one bullet for you in his pocket.”
I tended to like cops, but in Vare’s case it was easy to make an exception. As Phoenix PD’s top cold-case expert, she was convinced I was always on her turf. It didn’t help that she had the personality of my vinegar-faced fourth-grade teacher, who, come to think of it, she rather dressed like today. She wore a dark plaid skirt and high-necked blouse. Unlike Mrs. Mulcahey of the fourth grade, Kate had ash blond hair in a Martha Stewart style, and carried a 9-mm Glock on her hip. She sat on my desk, absently twirling her black pump on her right toe.
“Why are you here?” I demanded. “Why don’t you ever knock? Did you just break in?”
“Somebody did,” she said.
I turned back to the door. The lock had been completely removed, as if some tunneling device had bored right through it. I noticed it lying in pieces on the wood floor.
“Very professional job, too,” she said.
I looked around, and the office looked much like I had left it on Friday. If someone had been inside, he had been very careful, or been interrupted before he could ransack it.
“What are you working on?” Vare asked coyly.
“What business is it of yours?” I walked around, inspecting shelves, opening file drawers, feeling the vague shock and violation of the burglarized.
“You are such a bastard, Mapstone,” she said. Her bony lower jaw worked silently. “I know you were down at headquarters last week.”