her and drift off into the night, but she’s completely out. You lay her on an ornamental bench, search her purse for the house key, accept another bill for expenses. Carrying charges. No key. The door’s locked. May have to break in through a window. Which are mostly barred at ground level and of the leaded-glass sort. It’s a shot in the dark, but you try your smugglers’ route passkey. It works.
You carry the kid inside, looking for a place to set her down, and she comes around long enough to say: Second floor? Thus, with questions, she guides you up the circular balustrade and down the chandeliered hall to her bedroom, which is itself bigger than most houses you’ve been in, with winking starlights on the ceiling, her bed the size of your efficiency flop. You drop her on it and she says: Jammies? Second drawer?
I’ve got you this far, sweetheart. You’re on your own.
Please . . . ?
WHEN YOU FIRST SET OUT YOUR SHINGLE, YOU IMAGined being involved in exotic complicated crimes, having to solve them with your wits, do the hero act when things got rough, walk away from the praise after, lighting up a smoke, but in fact you were mostly hired to tail adulterous spouses and get the goods on them. You knew less about sex than you knew about sleuthing, but you soon figured out what the goods were and got them. You were not so much a private eye as an eyer of privates. Your university days. You were good at it, but even so, your clients looked down their noses at you. You were a kid and they had grown-up problems, thought they did. So you were naturally flattered to meet someone who wanted your services and looked up to you, an affectionate little sex kitten a few years your junior, ignorant of the private detective racket and willing to pay whatever you asked. And a more interesting case, too: a missing person. Her sister.
She was afraid of her parents, believing they might have had something to do with her sister’s disappearance and worried something like it might happen to her, but they were off traveling somewhere, so she was able to take you home with her to show you some photos, her sister’s diary, a glove of which the mate was missing, her sister’s perfume, her underwear, anything that might help you locate the missing girl. She told you, rather breathlessly, everything she could remember about her sister, and especially the days just before she disappeared, and, taking your hand, gazing up at you adoringly, led you room by room through the family manor according to the thread of her story. Which had to do with a row her sister supposedly had just before her parents left on their previously unannounced travels. Vague threats. You weren’t sure if the story she was telling you held together, but solving the case was no longer foremost on your mind. You just liked to hear her talk and to feel her innocent little body rubbing up against yours. Also innocent. Was the missing sister alive or dead, and, if dead, who killed her and why? You didn’t really care. Maybe her sister was not really missing and this was just a ruse to lure you here to get laid. This was the theory you favored. So when she proposed a cooling-off late-night dip in the pool, you tucked your pencil behind your ear and flashing the insouciant smile you’d been practicing in front of your mirror, said, Sure, kid, why not?
She led you out to the pool and took off her clothes and, since you were a tad slow off the mark, helped you out of yours. Did you consider the possibility that, if the sister was dead and the parents got sent to the chair for murder or failed to survive their travels, she’d inherit the family fortune? Maybe in the back of your mind, you did, but women’s pubic hair was still fairly new to you and most of your attention was focused on that. That and the slightly embarrassing evidence of your throbbing excitement. She took hold of it as she might a pump handle, triggering instant convulsions, and then, with a mischievous grin, gave it and you, laughing giddily, a push into the pool. She’s great! you were thinking as you went under. This is fun! But then you glimpsed something at the bottom of the pool that shouldn’t be