It was probably just some guy in prison with Matt, making a phone call for him, trying to scare me, and doing a good job. And then I thought of Reilly’s assurance that Matt Bishop was harmless. I wanted to believe it, but now I wasn’t so sure.
But what I was sure of was that I wanted that drink with Morgan and her friends more than anything now. I checked my watch and sighed. It was still too early to leave. I sat at my computer and surfed the web and tried not to think about Matt Bishop or his friends or Steele or the note I found under my door. I tried not to ask myself who the hell Ray Gee was. And most of all, I tried not to think about Liz or ask myself any hard questions about what I was doing tonight or with my life in general.
It was all I could do to kill time. I couldn’t focus. I paced around my office. I did anything I could to distract myself from thinking that I was doing something I shouldn’t. But eventually, I put on my thin suede coat, turned off the light, and headed for the elevator.
10
Although Ben & Bev’s is a restaurant, it has the kind of little bar you expect to find in the financial districts of big cities, but that doesn’t generally exist in LA. It has dark wood. It has brass. It has raw oysters, good scotch, and a bartender who will light a woman’s cigarette. It is the place where young lawyers, stockbrokers, and accountants go after work to drink hard liquor and lie about how successful they are. I had never been there before.
It was crowded, but not too crowded. You could get space at the bar, you could move easily from place to place, but the noise and the clusters of bodies clad in business attire and illuminated by subdued, colored lights, told the casual observer that this place was happening. I looked for familiar faces — one in particular — among the otherwise homogenous professionals. My eyes moved from blonde head to blonde head, from black dress to black dress, and, not seeing her, I wondered instantly if it had all been a joke and made my way to the bar to wait and avoid looking like the insecure young man I was.
My thoughts had started to drift back to the threat from Matt’s crony. The voice had a quality to it that I didn’t recognize directly, but still felt communicated a familiarity with cruelty, with pointless violence and pain for the sake of pain and nothing more. But I barely had time to dwell on it. Before the waiter had even returned with my gin and tonic, I felt a tap on the shoulder, turned, and saw her standing there wearing a wide smile, a light jacket draped over her arm.
“Been here long?”
The bartender set a fizzing Collins glass on the bar, asked me for twelve dollars, and I nodded my head at the drink. “Just got here.”
It was the closest I’d been to her — almost face to face in the crowded bar — and I could see small clusters of very light freckles on each of her otherwise smooth and unblemished cheeks. Her teeth were perfectly straight, her eyebrows perfectly trimmed, her hair perfectly cut and curled.
She ordered a cosmopolitan and squeezed in beside me at the bar. I looked down at her as she struggled to place her purse and jacket at her feet. Bending down, the hair fell away from the back of her neck as she turned her face, glancing up at me from below. The curve of flesh running from the base of her ear, down between her shoulders, possessed a mystical geometry that stunned me.
She laughed and smiled, uttering, “Whaaaaat?” like the purr of a kitten.
“Nothing.” I caught myself, and shook my head as though I’d been deep in thought. “I was just thinking about that damned research. It’s a nightmare.” The work. Always blame the work.
“Ugh, I know.” She responded. The bartender brought the cosmo. I threw a twenty on the bar. The bartender took it and never even thought about returning with change. Morgan picked up the drink. “Cheers.” We touched glasses. “Let’s forget about all that for awhile.” She said as she sipped, peering up at me over the rim of the glass.
“Forget about what?” I smiled and sucked down half the gin and tonic.