“I was going to ask you how your love life is going,” Lorie said finally, “but I guess I have my answer.”

“I’m not sleeping with Julie,” I said. Technically true. Haven’t slept with her for a week. Why was I covering up? “I don’t even know where she is.” Too true.

“Mmm.”

“I have a friend,” I volunteered. “Kind of a work friend. We’re not even dating, really. But it feels nice to be with her.”

“Mmmhmm.”

“And you?”

She paused by a shop window and studied us reflected in the glass. “Oh, I don’t know.” She walked on. “We never really know anybody. And our expectations for forever are so out of place. I mean, when humans needed the family unit to survive and only lived to be forty, monogamy made sense.”

“You’ve drunk deep at the social science well,” I said.

She smiled. “I’ve been in love so many times, or at least I thought I was in love. Next time, I’d like to find a friend, maybe, before I get all obsessive and self-destructive. Remember how that is?” She laughed.

I thought about that and said, “I guess I have love vertigo. Ever since my marriage ended. If I get too high up, I just get dizzy.”

“Why did Patty leave you?” Lorie asked. “Sorry. Asking uncomfortable questions at the most inopportune time is an occupational hazard.”

We were at the door to the Republic.

“It’s okay,” I said. “My occupational hazard is getting shot at. I don’t know why. Maybe she fell in love with her boss. He owned a sailboat. Maybe the thought of being married to me for the rest of her life was too boring to contemplate. Now she’s living with a twenty-two-year-old tennis pro. She never gave me an explanation. She was a millionaire’s daughter, and I was just me.”

“I guess that’s the way it was for me with Richard,” she said. Husband number two. “I never knew why. I eventually made myself realize I’ll never know why. And I know I’ve probably done as bad or worse to my lovers. We live in an age of so much disconnection.” She gave a rueful laugh. “Here I am, one of the killers and one of the dead.”

“I don’t want to grieve for Patty,” I said earnestly. “I wouldn’t want the falseness of that life again.” Lorie looked at me. “But,” I said, “she had a way of getting under my skin that I miss, that I still seek elsewhere.”

“So you don’t want nice girls?”

“I was always a nice guy.”

“Yes, you were.” Lorie gave me a hug and said, “I’ll do some sniff work on this, David, and call you in a couple of days. But Phaedra is the key to your mystery. You’ve got to get into her last days. Her recent history, you know? Not what Julie says happened. But what really happened.”

Then she pushed through the door and was gone.

Chapter Twenty

After sundown, I drove back to Tempe, where Susan Knightly’s studio was still locked and dark. Most of the afternoon, I’d sat at home in the cool dimness of Grandfather’s office, listening to Charlie Parker and listlessly grading badly written essays, waiting in vain for the phone to ring. Now I was antsy and needed to walk, even in the heat. In the lobby of the building that housed the studio, two security guards were talking as I walked past. I caught only the end of their conversation: “That’s what love means!” one said. I stepped out and walked down Mill Avenue. Just a tall dark-haired man, officially unemployed, too near middle age and carrying a large revolver.

The street is the main drag through the old part of Tempe, near the university, but it had been rebuilt since I went to school. Pricey new office buildings, tourist boutiques, a multiplex theater, and exotic restaurants sat along what had once been a quintessential college-town street. Sidewalk cafes were cooled by elaborate systems that shot jets of mist into the superheated desert air. Even in the heat, Mill Avenue was crowded with people, mostly young and female, achingly sexy, wearing as little as possible. The sexual flux was so real, you could feel it. Tall, long-legged, tan goddesses who said something about the value of American nutrition in the last part of the twentieth century. Sweet young objects of desire. They never studied history in college voluntarily. They paid me no mind. This would have been part of Phaedra’s world, at least when she got off work every day at the photo studio.

I started at one end of the street and worked my way south, hitting the bars and restaurants, showing the photograph of the redhaired woman with the intense stare. The bartenders, managers, and maitre d’s were all amazingly friendly and wanted to be helpful. One woman behind the bar of a seafood place wanted to know if this would be on America’s Most Wanted. They all seemed to be from somewhere else and were eager to tell you about how much they loved the Valley. There was just one problem: None remembered Phaedra. As one older woman said, “There are too many beautiful women in Phoenix. Who can keep track?”

Until I got to a coffee place across from the Gilbert Ortega Indian art store. There, a brooding young man with a goatee and three earrings in one ear nodded slowly when I showed him the photo.

“She’d come in for an iced grande mocha,” he said deliberately.

“You’re sure it’s her?”

“I remember. I have a thing for redheads.” He smiled vaguely and stared out at the street. “There’s something mystical about redheads. And I thought she had a cool name. It’d be a great name for a band.”

“You ever ask her out?”

He shook his head. “Didn’t have the guts. She seemed too intense for me. A real bagful of emotions, you know? A little voice in me said, You don’t want to go there.”

I asked him if she always came in alone. He rubbed his stubbled chin. “Once she came in with another red-haired woman. She was older. Had a bunch of photo equipment on her shoulder. Seemed like they were friends.”

Tags: Jon Talton David Mapstone Mystery Mystery
Source: readsnovelonline.net