Eve's Men (24 page)

She asked if he would mind her smoking a cigarette, and he heard himself say, “Of course not,” even though he would just as soon have had her throw up on the dashboard. However, he did ease the electric windows partially down, hers as well as his.

“The phone calls you made at the hotel,” she said, “was one of them to the FBI?”

“Yeah. I wanted to let them know where I was and that I’ll be flying home tonight.” Smiling slightly, Charley looked over at her. “They asked about the Greenwalt thing, whether I was involved.”

“You didn’t tell them we were there, did you?”

“It must have slipped my mind.”

Eve shook her head in amazement. “God, what a scene that was. I’ll never forget it.”

“Neither will Greenwalt—or at least the aftermath.”

Taking a last drag on her cigarette, she stubbed it out in the ashtray and left it there, stinking. And Charley thought how preposterous it was that a smart, stylish woman like Eve could be so oblivious to such a gross act. But then he had been there himself. Until six years ago, he too had been a smoker. He too had had a stone dead nose.

“You called your wife too?” Eve asked, not looking at him, her expression casual, indifferent.

“Yes, but I couldn’t reach her. I’ll try later. By then maybe I’ll know what flight I’ll be on and can tell her when I’ll be home.”

“Does she know about the bail money?”

“Afraid so.”

“Then she must have a real high opinion of me, right?”

“Higher than she does of Brian, I’d say.”

“Which is not saying much, I take it.”

“Eve, she doesn’t know you. She’s never even met you.”

“Lucky lady.”

Charley looked over at her. “Oh, I don’t think I’d call her so lucky.”

He had intended it as a polite cliché, a counter to Eve’s denigration of herself. But once said, the words seemed to hang ominously between them, freighted with an entirely other meaning. Eve made no response, however, in fact did not even look over at him, so he couldn’t tell what construction she had put on them. Reclining her seat a few inches farther, she lay back and stared out the passenger window, which she had closed again. And for the most part, that was how the trip proceeded, with the two of them locked into an uneasy, almost electric silence.

Not until they reached Ventura was Charley able to see the ocean. Beyond that point the freeway snaked west, squeezed in between the sea and the mountains. And finally it skirted Carpenteria, a small seaside town located five or six miles down the coast from Santa Barbara. Just past the town, Eve told Charley to turn onto a side road, which soon curved north, climbing into the foothills between lemon groves that gave the salty air a fine, clean edge, therapy for L.A. sinuses. Higher up, there were more side roads with houses on them, expensive, modern dwellings with unrestricted views of the sea. And the house of Eve’s aunt was no exception, a small, well-built Spanish-type affair sitting on two acres of lemon trees, with a stunning view of the ocean from almost all its windows and especially from its terrazzo deck, at one end of which was a sunken, empty hot tub.

As Eve had promised, getting in proved no problem. After plucking the front door key from under a flower pot, she went inside and punched in the code that disarmed the security system.

“How the devil do you remember the number?” Charley asked.

She smiled impishly. “Easy. It’s my birthday: four, eight, sixty-seven. Aunt Maureen and I used to be very close.” She was moving about, opening windows and doors, letting in the lemony air.

“Christ, what a view,” Charley said, standing at the open doors to the deck.

Eve smiled. “Whenever I come here, I can’t get enough of it—for about five minutes. Then I want to see people again, or their cars and boats—something human, you know? An empty ocean is just that.”

Charley continued to look at it, vast and blue, sparkling under an equally vast, blue sky. “I don’t know,” he said. “It looks pretty damn nice to me.”

“Just wait five minutes.”

“Actually there’s plenty of action out there. Only it’s out of sight, under the surface.”

“But it isn’t human action.”

“You know what the tree-huggers and PAWS people would say to that? Thank God, it isn’t.”

“Right. But I’m not one of them.”

“You want humans. You want real blood-and-sweat action.”

She struck a self-mocking pose. “You bet.”

“Somebody like Brian,” Charley said.

She made a face, wrinkling her nose in deliberation. “No, not like him. Not right now. He’s too … what?”

“Reckless? Single-minded?”

“No—wacko.”

They laughed at that, but not very easily in the end, as if they both worried that they might have offended the other. Eve turned and headed for the kitchen, pausing at the doorway to look back at him.

“Listen, I don’t know when you plan on leaving, but Aunt Maureen really has a terrific larder—a freezer absolutely chock-full of anything and everything. And I would really like to make us dinner. I mean it, I
really
would. It’s been so long since I’ve even boiled an egg.”

“You poor thing,” Charley said.

“I’ll tell you what, you find out when you’re leaving, and maybe try to get as late a flight as you can, and I’ll try to get the food on the table in plenty of time. Okay?”

Charley smiled. “This is one of those offers a guy can’t refuse, right?”

“Right.”

Before Charley was able to reach Donna, he had learned that there were no nonstop flights from Santa Barbara to Chicago and that it was already too late for him to catch the last nonstop out of LAX to Chicago, a United flight leaving at six P.M. He made reservations for the next day, then tried again to reach Donna, this time succeeding.

He was in Aunt Maureen’s sewing room, which offered the only real privacy downstairs. So he was able to speak freely, omitting the sort of information that he knew would only anger Donna all the more, such as the fact that he was temporarily alone with Eve. Instead he told her that he was calling from a pay phone and had just left the FBI offices in L.A., having phoned them after hearing about Brian’s Bel Air escapade. They then had asked him to come in, which he had, in the process losing the whole afternoon.

“And you were right,” he said. “I didn’t find a trace of Brian until it was too late. And I’ve got no idea where he is now.”

“Big surprise,” Donna said.

“Right. So I’m coming home.” He told her that the last nonstop to Chicago was already booked up, so he was going to have to get a room out by the airport and fly home in the morning, which meant of course that he wouldn’t be getting in until late afternoon, Central Time. His car was still at the O’Hare parking lot, and he mentioned now that he hoped it would start.

“After all this time,” he added.

“And whose fault is that?” she said.

“Mine, Donna. All mine. Tell me, how’s Jason?”

“Mystified, like his mother. Just before I left him, we heard the news about Brian and the art gallery. And Jason asked me why on earth you’re still out there. I guess he feels a reasonable man would want to put as much distance as he could between himself and his psycho brother.”

“I’ll be home tomorrow afternoon,” Charley said. “Late afternoon.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“Good-bye, Donna. Take care.”

“I always do,” she said. “Unlike some people I could name.”

After hanging up, Charley took a deep breath and went back into the kitchen, where Eve was hard at work, with an apron covering her T-shirt and shorts. He saw that she had got out bottles of vodka and tonic, and had made drinks for them. He picked his up and took a deep draught of it.

“This hits the spot,” he said. “Thanks.”

“Later, though, at dinner, it’s martinis,” she said. “Okay?”

“You twisted my arm.”

“And how are things at home?” she asked, busying herself, not looking at him.

Charley smiled ruefully. “I guess they could be better. Donna wonders what I’m doing out here.”

Eve looked incredulous. “Well, what about the money? Doesn’t she think it would be a good idea to get back what you lost, paying his bail?”

“I don’t think she believes that’s going to happen. With good reason, I might add.”

“You came close, though. If you’d caught him at Stephanie’s, you could have got it back—what he hasn’t already spent, anyway.”

“You think he would have parted with it peaceably?”

“That I don’t know.”

“Well, it wouldn’t have mattered. Peaceably or otherwise, I would’ve taken it home with me.”

Eve looked over at him, evidently surprised by his tone. “Yes, I think you would have,” she said.

“Incidentally, it’s too late for me to catch a plane out tonight. After dinner, you point me to a cheap motel, all right?”

She gave him a look of mock disgust. “Don’t be ridiculous. There’s plenty of room here. With three bedrooms, I think we ought to be able to manage.”

Charley wanted to say that though
she
undoubtedly would manage quite well, it might not be all that easy for him.

Instead he shrugged in agreement. “If you insist, okay. This is another one of those mafia offers, right?”

“Right, the kind you can’t refuse.” Smiling, she took him lightly by the elbow and ushered him toward the doorway to the dining room and beyond. “So why don’t you go out on the deck and enjoy my aunt’s five-minute view. I’ve got important work to do.”

Charley smiled. “Ah, those are the words every man loves to hear.”

“I don’t doubt it, shiftless creatures that you are.”

“But cunning—you’ll have to admit that.”

“The devil, I will.”

Carrying his drink, Charley did just as Eve suggested, going out onto the deck and sitting back on a lounge chair. In front of him, Aunt Maureen’s terraced lawn dropped down to a grove of lemon trees small enough that he could easily see over them. Even though it was later now, the sea and sky appeared brighter as the sun descended off to the right, beyond Santa Barbara and a long white sickle of beach. By any reasonable standard, he knew that he should have been feeling pretty good, waiting there for dinner in this lovely setting, stretched out with a drink in his hand and the California coast spread out before him. But in point of fact he was feeling intensely uneasy, and he was afraid he knew the reason: the prospect of spending the night there alone with Eve. Not that he thought he would make a play for her or that she would respond favorably even if he did; he was reasonably certain that neither of those things would happen, even when night fell and the two of them might be less than sober. Still it worried him, just the thought of spending a long evening with her, and later trying to sleep in a bedroom near hers, probably with only a wall between them.

He knew how he already felt about her, how often he thought about her, how much he wanted her. And he worried that this pleasant evening and night spent together in the lemon-scented air would only set the hook deeper in him. He could already see himself taking off in the morning, a walking basket case, nose pressed to the jet’s window, to see if he could locate the little house in the lemon grove, where he’d left behind a sizable portion of his heart.

He vowed now not to let that happen. He would marshal his defenses and steel himself against her. After all, he was not some schoolboy who went around wearing his heart on his sleeve. He was a grown man with a wife and a son. He had a life a half continent away, and the lovely Eve Sherman was simply no part of it. Yet even as he sat there constructing his defenses, sipping at his drink and gazing out at the sea, what he really saw was Eve lying by the Bel Air pool and sitting next to him in the car and moving about the kitchen in her aunt’s apron, her hair a curly, lovely mess.

So when she came out and got him for dinner, he felt addled and clumsy, wanting to behave with a certain cool correctness, yet at the same time totally unable to stifle the pleasure, even the happiness, he felt at being with her, looking at her, listening to her. And the meal didn’t help much either, for she had made one of his favorites: stuffed pork chops, scalloped potatoes, applesauce, and peas. And she had set out everything he needed to make a pair of straight-up Absolut martinis.

“I’m sorry about the wine cellar,” she said. “There isn’t any. Aunt Maureen’s allergic to the stuff, so her guests get to abstain right along with her.”

“No problem,” Charley told her. “When it comes to wine, I’m a great connoisseur of colas.”

“And which do you like best?”

At the moment, he had his martini in hand. “This one,” he said, which made Eve laugh, a rich easy laugh that because of her beautiful mouth—all those perfect teeth—became something one saw as much as heard.

Before coming out to get him, she had combed her hair and put on a bone-white summer dress that accented her light tan. And she smelled good too, all of which pretty much routed Charley’s determination to keep his defenses up. Instead he found himself more than content just to sit there and eat and drink and make light conversation with her, hopefully funny enough so he could see more of her laughter.