a sleeping convict or she just plain didn’t want to get close to me, I couldn’t tell.
“I’m not Room Service,” she said.
“I fell asleep, okay? It’s not like I disrespected you. Save the speeches.”
“Then—”
“Then nothing. I’m not playing some guessing game. I came here to do something. You met me at the bus station, brought me here. I appreciate you doing that. But that’s enough.”
“Enough work on my part, or enough of my big mouth?”
“Both.”
She stood there for a few seconds. “You want the food, or what?”
We ate in that big kitchen, sitting on bar stools, chrome with thick black leather padding, using that slab of granite for a table. I still didn’t know anything about the stove, because my dinner was a big wooden bowl of salad, with slices of onion, radishes, celery sticks, and chunks of white chicken mixed in. There was also a little plate of garlic breadsticks.
Hers was the same, but her bowl was a lot smaller.
I had a glass of that enhanced water. She left the bottle on the countertop. Whatever she was drinking was a dark-cherry color. I didn’t think it could be wine, because she really slugged it down.
“Thank you,” I said when I was done. “It tasted real good.”
“No big deal; it’s pretty much what I eat all the time. I just cut you a bigger piece off the same loaf.”
I got up. Put my bowl and glass and the little plate in the sink, the bottle of water in the refrigerator.
“What about mine?” she said.
I closed my eyes for a second. Took a couple of quick-and-shallow breaths through my nose. “What’s the game?” I asked her.
“Which game? There’s always a game. Lots of them. Going on at the same time. Sometimes, one inside another.”
“That’s cute. You’re cute. This is your house. I get all of that. What I don’t get is why you keep trying to insult me.”
“Insult you? Like you said, it’s just a game, Wilson.”
“How about if I don’t like your games? I got to find this Jessop. So just tell me what you’re going to do … what you’re willing to do, okay?”
“What could I do?”
“Fair enough. Is it all right if I stay here while I’m looking for him?”
“Of course,” she said.
“Uh-huh. And could I borrow the car you picked me up in?”
“For what?”
“I have to look for somebody. I can’t call a cab to do that. That car, it looks like a thousand other ones. If the registration—”
“It’s in my name. So is this property, matter of fact.”
“You have a Xerox here?”
She just nodded.
“So I make you a copy of my driver’s license. You give me a phone number that the cops can call if I get stopped. That’s all the cover I should need.”
“You don’t know your way around.”
“This town’s not that big. I’ll find the kind of places I want easy enough.”
“What kind of places would those be, strip bars?”
“That’d be one kind, yeah. I don’t need his picture; I’ll know him when I see him.”
“And then what?”
“Whatever Solly told you.”
“Solly didn’t tell me anything.”
“There you go.”
I guess she liked doing stare-downs. Probably practiced on her mirror. I got up and walked out.
Maybe fifteen minutes later, she stepped into the little suite she’d put me in. I’d noticed before there was no lock on the door—I left it standing open, so she’d know I had.
I was coming out of the shower, wearing this fluffy white robe I found in the bathroom. She strolled over to the closet. Went through all my stuff in about thirty seconds.
“None of this is going to work.”
“Work? For what?”
“For you not looking like a stranger in town.”
“What do I care about that?”
“You care because you already look like a bad guy. A big bad guy. A guy who wears sunglasses indoors. You put on that stupid Sopranos stuff of yours, you’ll stick out a lot worse.”
“I don’t—”
“Sure, you do. What’s your plan? Visit the kind of places where Jessop might hang out? Think you’ll get lucky and spot him? Or maybe you just want word to get around? Leave your phone number, maybe he’ll call?”
“You got a better one?”
“A much better one. I’ve got Albie’s workbooks. His ledger, he called it.”
“So he’d have this guy’s contact info, right?”
“Probably. I never opened them.”
“So why can’t we just—?”
“Because you and me, we’ve got a problem.”
“Do we?”
“How could we not, Wilson? All we know for sure is that Albie and Solly, they trusted each other. We don’t know how much they trusted