LITMIR.BIZ

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eyes over his ill-fitting suit with amusement. She could tell he’d spent some time preparing: his hair was still damp, he was freshly shaven, and she smelled cologne. But his eye sockets still sagged, and he looked exhausted. Everybody on the job looked tired the last while. But at the same time he looked a little excited and shy and she felt a bit of it herself. No one had been interested in a long time.

      She wondered how to handle him. Before being sidelined to the youth squad, she’d been a Sector Four detective, periodically detached to Homicide on sex cases. She was in demand for tough jobs that needed a certain hand. Now she was a just another brick in the wall. Being a brick wasn’t bad, necessarily. It simply meant you were a nobody like all the other blue nobodies, competent maybe, but without the distinction or talent to stand out. You were interchangeable with all the other bricks, part of the average crowd, a blue grid of wallpaper. You’d never get ahead, you’d never fall behind. Not being noticed had become her status quo and she was confused about the shy interest from this fat white poet.

      Her investigative specialty was conversation, although she never got to exercise it much any longer on the surly youths that came through her office. She hated the term interrogation. It was oppressive. Even interviewing wasn’t what she did. Dialogue had been her specialty. For hours she could sit in a room with a murder suspect and chat the day away, never asking a direct relevant question, slowly bringing the conversation around to why they were really there. People found her likeable, and, before being handcuffed and led away, many seemed to want to hug her or shake her hand. She always closed. Now she tried to get children to explain why they were voids, why they murdered and beat and robbed and raped. But they had no vocal skills beyond yelling and threatening and whooping.

      Brian Comartin was intimidated, knowing he was a cop in name only. He could detail how many cars on an average Wednesday in winter went through the intersection of Erie Avenue and Stonetown Way in any direction and at what average speed. He could tell you the gradient of Harrison Hill. He knew the loony mayor had the lights through the downtown timed so motorists never caught a break, forced to stop at each intersection, idling and fuming, then gunning to the next corner, only to be caught by another red light. There were twenty-seven miles of bicycle lane across the city, used for ten months, maximum, by two hundred people, maximum. He wondered what he could talk about to a real cop over a glass of wine under a crystal chandelier.

      The sommelier came by and saved him, offering a thick wine list. Comartin, who had been to Champagne for two nights during a two-week vacation after his divorce, handed it back without opening it. “We’ll have Cliquot. Chill it a little longer than you want to. Flutes, please.”

      The sommelier bowed slightly and went away.

      “Flutes keep the bubbles longer, better bouquet,” Comartin said for the sake of something to say. “If you’d prefer, I can get you a coupe.”

      Marty Frost recognized a suspect filling silence with babbling bullshit and began having the first really good time she had, except for acing the headquarters hump that afternoon, in a year. She stared at him without blinking.

      “The coupe is the shallow glass.” Comartin rambled. “They say it was modelled on Marie Antoinette’s breast.”

      Marty Frost turned her head slightly to the left and raised an eyebrow.

      Comartin licked his lips. “The left breast.”

      Marty Frost smirked a little cynical smile to go with her raised eyebrow.

      “But, ah, it was actually invented before she was born.”

      Marty Frost watched him try to mine the arcane for a moment, then had pity on him. “Traffic man, slow down. You might got a shot.”

      Comartin felt a thrill. He had tales about how to uncork champagne, tales about the life and times of Widow Cliquot. His hold-back story of his adventures in the champagne world was when he beheaded a bottle with a long sabre, the only person on his tour to do so on the first attempt. It was a rare, almost accidental physical accomplishment and the wine company had given him a certificate.

      He decided to save that for when he knew her better, when he needed the edge.

      As the wine steward subtly twisted the cork from the champagne, Djuna Brown entered the dining room, alone. Her hair was spiked and glossy. She wore a pair of batik-brown harem trousers, a sleeveless batik-blue shirtwaist blouse, and her lucky red slippers with the little silver decorations. Turquoise good-fortune earrings that some children in Indian country had made to protect her from harm dangled from her earlobes. Her skin shone. Her gun hiked the loose batik blouse a little behind her right-hand hip, and she looked boneless, fluid. In anticipation of connecting with Ray Tate and possibly having to pry him off a city chippy she’d packed a short black skirt, a tight red silk blouse, a push-up bra, and high heels she’d picked up in Chicago. Where to keep her gun out of sight had been a problem, and she’d wished she’d looked into a garter holster. She was certain that her little silver automatic in a black garter when he ran his hand up there would put him through the roof. But clearly the skirt and push-up and garter hadn’t been needed. The tight red silk blouse action could be kept in reserve for when he flagged.

      She saw Martinique Frost and Brian Comartin staring at each other over the candles on the table under the sprawling chandelier. They looked like stiff kids on a date.

      As she slipped into a chair, she looked around and said, “Oh, Ray’s not here yet? Anybody seen him?” Her long cat’s eyes were wide and innocent.

      Martinique Frost made a cynical smile. “Gee, wonder where he could’ve got to. Sure you want to stick to that attitude? I’ve locked guys up who went with that. And I haven’t seen a hickey in a long time.”

      “Well,” Djuna Brown said, caught but fighting it out, her hand going to the light red mark on her throat, “probably he went home from headquarters to get a jacket or something? Caught in traffic. He lives up past the cemetery.” She added, “I think he said.”

      “Traffic man here is telling me they modelled a champagne glass on a woman’s boob. You ever had a guy hit on you like that? The boob in the glass shot?”

      Comartin, carefully dribbling Cliquot into a glass for Djuna Brown, murmured, “If he was going directly from the Jank to up past the cemetery he’d been here by now. Twelve lighted intersections. Even with the signals timed against him, rush hour, the traffic off the Eight runs to about two hundred cars per twenty minute cycle, average, north and south. I figure, conservative, twenty-two minutes, unless he went to siren and lights.”

      “Yep,” Martinique Frost said, nodding at Comartin. “A shower, ten minutes. Dry off, maybe five or six. Dress up for the dining room, five, maybe ten minutes. Drive back, the Eight is thin downtown-bound by then, well, I figure he’d’ve been here long time before us, ordering the champagne when we walked in. So, maybe not? Maybe he got into something else, didn’t go home at all, lost track of the time, until late?”

      Djuna Brown sipped the champagne, the bubbles tickling her nose. Happily, she looked from Martinique Frost to Brian Comartin. “Boy,” she said, “I have a feeling that these guys dropping the women have no fucking idea what they’re up against.”

      But she was pleased that her glow showed.

      Ray Tate crossed the dining room, tucking in his shirt under his jacket, and dropped into a chair. “Sorry ’bout that. Traffic.”

      Martinique Frost nodded. “Djuna here told us you had to run back to headquarters.”

      “Ah, yeah, I forgot some stuff.”

      She looked at Djuna Brown. “Amateur.”

      Throughout dinner they talked about the city and the job, getting to know about one another without making declarative statements about who they were. You couldn’t tell a story in which you were heroic or victimized.

      Martinique Frost told about receiving a birthday card that morning, even though it wasn’t her birthday. A sad tale of a man who killed his abusive girlfriend and, when he confessed, had wept and said he wished he’d had her for a girlfriend

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