'I guess I missed that in my English lit survey course,' she said, rising from her chair. 'Can I use your phone to call a cab? I should have asked him to wait.'
'I apologize. Don't leave like this.'
She shook her head, then walked into the library and used the telephone. I stood in her way when she tried to walk down the hall to the front door.
'You see yourself as a failure. You put yourself through law school. You were a Texas Ranger and an AUSA. You can be a lawman again, anytime you want,' she said.
'Then stay. I'll cancel the cab.'
I put my hand on her arm. I saw the pause in her eyes, the antithetical thoughts she couldn't resolve, the pulse in her neck.
'I'd better go. I'll call later,' she said.
'Mary Beth—'
Then she was out the door, her cheeks glazed with color, her hand feeling behind her for the door handle so she would not have to look back at my face.
But by Monday morning there was no call. Instead, a dinged gas-guzzler stopped out front of my office and a woman in a platinum wig and shades and a flowered sundress got out and looked in both directions, as though by habit, then entered the downstairs foyer.
A minute later my secretary buzzed me.
'A Ms Florence LaVey. No appointment,' she said.
'Who is she?'
'She said you'd know who she was.'
'Nope. But send her in.'
The inner door opened and the woman in the platinum wig stood framed in the doorway, her shades dripping from her fingers, her face expectant, as though at any moment I would recognize her relationship to my life.
'Can I help you?' I asked. Then I noticed that one of her eyes was brown, the other blue.
'The name doesn't turn on your burner, huh? San Antonio? The White Camellia Bar?'
'Maybe I'm a little slow this morning.'
'I know what you mean. I always get boiled on Sunday nights myself. I think it has something to do with being raised Pentecostal… Let me try again… A nasty little fuck by the name of Darl Vanzandt?'
'You're the lady he beat up. You're a waitress?'
'A hostess, honey.' She winked and sat down and crossed her legs. She opened a compact and looked at herself. 'I'd like to slip some pieces of bamboo deep under his fingernails.'
'His father says you and a pimp tried to roll him.'
She wet the ball of one finger and wiped at something on her chin and clicked the compact shut.
'His old man paid me ten thousand dollars so he and his son could tell whatever lies they wanted to. You interested in what really happened?'
'It's not of much value if you took money to drop the charges.'
'I'm not talking about what that little shit did to me. I read about that girl in the paper when she got beaten to death. But I didn't make any connections. Then last night him and this ex-convict named Moon come to this new bar I'm working in. Fart Breath starts talking about a trial, about this girl got gang-raped and her head bashed in, about how some lawyer is trying to make him take somebody else's fall. I'm standing behind the bar. I keep waiting for him to catch on who I am. Forget it.'
'Yes?'
'Get the girl dug up. See if she wasn't stoned-out on roofies.'
'We're talking about Ro—'