The next block was mine, and we turned down Marlborough Street and into my apartment. Susan looked around as she took off her coat and draped it over the back of one of my counter stools.

“Well,” she said, “fire laid already, table set for two. Wineglasses?”

She shook her hair a little to get rid of the snowflakes, her hand making those automatic female gestures which women make around their hair.

“What did you have in mind?” she said.

“I’d like to emulate the fire,” I said. “Shall we start with a cocktail?”

“We’d be fools not to,” Susan said.

“Okay,” I said. “You light the fire while I mix them up.”

“Jewish women don’t make fires,” Susan said.

“It’s all made,” I said. “Just light the paper in three or four places.”

“All right,” she said, “I’ll try. But I don’t want to get any icky soot on me.”

She crouched in front of the fire, smoothing her skirt under her thighs as she did so, and struck a match. I went around the counter into my kitchen and made vodka martinis. I stirred them in the pitcher with a long spoon. I used to stir them with the blade of a kitchen knife until Susan saw me do it one day and went immediately out to buy me a long-handled silver spoon. I put Susan’s in a stemmed martini glass with four olives and no ice.

I put mine in a thick lowball glass over ice with a twist. I put both drinks on a little lacquer tray and brought them around and put them on the coffee table.

The fire was going and the paper had already ignited the kindling. Small ventures of flame danced around the edge of the yet unburning logs. Susan had retired. to the couch, her feet tucked up under her. She had on a black skirt and a crimson blouse, open at the throat with a gold chain showing. Her earrings were gold teardrops. She had enormous dark eyes and a very wide mouth and her neck, where it showed at the open throat of the blouse, was strong. Susan and I clinked glasses and drank.

“That’s a very good martini,” Susan said.

“Spenser,” I said, “the martini king.”

“What time do you leave tomorrow?” Susan said.

“Nine A.M.,” I said. “American flight 11. First class.”

“You deserve no less,” Susan said.

“Mindy,” I said, “the production coordinator. She looked at me and said clearly I don’t fit well in coach. Then said everyone else travels first class at Zenith Meridian.”

“Nonstop?” Susan said.

“To L.A.,” I said. “I’ll drive down from there. Nothing nonstop from Boston to San Diego.”

“I’ll miss you,” Susan said.

“Yes,” I said. “I don’t like to leave you.”

The logs had begun to catch in the fireplace, and the fire got deeper and richer and both of us stared into it in silence.

“You ever wonder why people stare into fires?” I said.

“Yes,” Susan said. She had shifted on the couch and now sat with her head on my shoulder. She held her martini in both hands and drank it in very sparing sips.

“You ever figure out why?”

“No.”

“You’re a shrink,” I said. “You’re supposed to know stuff like that.”

“Oh,” Susan said. “That’s right. Well, it’s probably a somatic impulse rooted in neonatal adaptivity. People will gaze at clothes in a dryer, too.”

“I liked your previous answer better,” I said.

“Me too,” Susan said.

We looked at the fire some more. As the logs became fully involved in the fire they settled in upon each other and burned stronger. Susan finished her martini.

“What’s for chow?” she said.

“Duck breast sliced on the diagonal and served rare, onion marmalade, brown rice, broccoli tossed with a spoonful of sesame tahini.”

“Sounds toothsome,” Susan said.

“You have several options in relationship to dinner and other matters,” I said.

“Un huh?”

“You may make love with me before or after dinner,” I said. “That’s one option.”

“Un huh.”

“You may make love with me here on the couch, or you and I may retire to the bedroom.”

“Un huh.”

“You make take the time to disrobe, or you may enjoy me in whatever disarray we create with our spontaneity.”

Susan ticked off the various choices thoughtfully on the fingers of her left hand.

“Are there any other choices?” she said.

“You may shower if you wish,” I said.

Susan turned her face toward me with that look of adult play in her eyes that I’d never seen anyone emulate.

“I showered before I came to your office,” she said.

“Am I to take that to imply that you intended to, ah, boff me even before you arrived?”

“You’re the detective,” Susan said. “You figure it out. I opt for now, here, in disarray.”

And she put her arms around my neck and pressed her mouth against mine.

“Good choice,” I murmured.

Chapter 21

THE drive down the San Diego Freeway from LAX takes about two and a half hours and seems like a week. Once you get below the reaches of L.A.’s industrial sprawl, the landscape is sere and unfriendly. The names of the beach towns come up and flash past and recede: Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, Laguna, San Clemente. But you can’t see them from the freeway. Just the signs and the roads curving off through the brownish hills.

Mindy had gotten me a hotel room at the Hyatt Islandia in Mission Bay, and I pulled in there around 3:30 in the afternoon with the temperature at eightysix and the sky cloudless: They assigned me a room in one of the pseudo-rustic cabanas that ran along the bay, as a kind of meandering wing to the tall central hotel building. I stashed my bag, got my list of addresses and my city map, and headed back out to work.

San Diego, like San Francisco, and like Seattle, seems defined by its embrace of the sea. The presence of the Pacific Ocean is assertive even when the ocean itself is out of sight. There is a different ambient brightness where the steady sunshine hits the water and diffuses. The bay, the Navy, the bridge to

Coronado seemed always there, even when you couldn’t see them.

Of my three Zabriskies, two lived downtown; the third was up the coast a little in Esmeralda. The first one was a Chief Petty Officer who was at sea on a carrier. His wife said he didn’t have any sisters, that his mother was in Aiken, South Carolina, and that she herself never watched television. The second was a Polish émigré who had arrived from Gdansk fourteen months ago. It took me into the evening to find that out. I had supper in a place near the hotel, on the bay, that advertised fresh salmon broiled over alder logs. I went in and ate some with a couple of bottles of Corona beer (hold the lime). It wasn’t as good as I had hoped it would be; it still tasted like fish. After supper I strolled back to the hotel along the bayfront, past the charter boat shanties and the seafood take-out stands that sold ice and soda. Across the expressway, gleaming with light in the murmuring subtropical evening, the tower of Sea World rose above the lowland where the bay had bcco created. It was maybe 9:30 on the coast, and halt past midnight on my eastern time sensor. Susan would be asleep at home, the snow drifting harmlessly outside her window. She would sleep nearly motionless, waking in the same position as she’d gone to sleep. She rarely moved in the night. Jill Joyce would have gone to sleep drunk, by now; and she would wake up clear-eyed and innocent-looking in the morning to go in front of the camera and charm the hearts of America. Babe Loftus wouldn’t.

In my cabana I undressed and hung my clothes up carefully. There was nothing on the tube worth watching. I turned out the light and lay quietly, three thousand miles from home, and listened to the waters of the bay murmur across from my window, and smelled the water, a mild placid smell in the warm, faraway night.

Chapter 22