“Oh, look, I even took a roll in the gutter since I was here last, Estelle. I’ve got to get a shower and—”

“The bathroom is right next to my room, Harry. I can shut the corridor door until you’re finished.” She touched my arm. “Harry, I’m so shaky and upset. Just for now — for the afternoon. I’ll wake you whenever you like. Just so I can know I’m not here by myself…”

Her voice tripped over a sob and she lowered her head. “Sure,” I told her then. “What’s a private cop for if he’s not around when you need him?”

She jumped up, having a little more luck with the smile this time. I supposed it did not make a hell of a lot of difference. A bed was a bed, and the way I was feeling the tailgate of a rolling truck would have done the trick.

I’ll fix it,” she was saying. ‘I’ll get clean sheets.”

“Hell, you don’t have to—”

“It’s no bother. Here.” She was at a closet in the hallway, and she held out a folded bath towel. “1*11 have the bedroom ready when you come out. I’ll be back out here, so you can just go through the hall. And here — here are some hangers.”

“Good enough,” I said. “Look, it’s a little after two. Suppose you wake me about five, maybe just before.”

“You’re certain? So early?”

“Be enough.”

“All right. I’m sure I’ll feel better by then. I appreciate this, Harry. I do.”

“Don’t be silly.”

Accommodating old Harry. I took the gear and went into the John. I loafed under the spray for a good ten minutes, then toweled off and hung my clothes behind the door. I was still making like two-gun Doc Holliday, with both the.38 and the Luger, and I tucked them away in a corner with my shoes. I wrapped the towel around my middle and poked my head out.

“Okay to go through?”

“Yes, Harry. And thank you.”

“Right, Estelle.”

I ducked across the hall. There was a tiny crack of sunlight breaking through a lower corner of the blind when I closed the door after myself, but otherwise the room was gloomy, with that odd, cathedral sort of light you get when you draw heavy shades in the daytime. The sheets were crisp and fresh and I melted into them. I rolled over on my right side, jammed a fist into the pillow to give it some substance, and corked off about as quickly as I had when Duke Sabatini had mistaken my skull for a high inside fast ball.

You asleep, Harry? I asked myself sometime thereafter.

Sure, I’m asleep, I told myself.

How come she’s here then? I wanted to know.

How come who’s here?

Me, silly, she said.

It was a dame I’d known once. She’d floated into my arms out of nowhere. I’d thought she was dead. You never know. Was only undressed.

I AM dead, Harry, she said. Isn’t that absurd? I played cops and robbers because I was bored and now I’m dead.

Go away, huh?

She wouldn’t. She said, You should have helped me, Harry. I told you to help me a year ago and you didn’t, and now look what I went and did.

She was chilly as wet oysters. I was doing my damnedest not to touch her, but she wouldn’t be put off. Hold me, Harry, she insisted. Don’t twist may. Everybody holds me, why not you? Anyhow it’s only a silly old dream.

Some dream. I could hear the bedroom air-conditioning as clearly as I could hear her rustling in the sheets.

“Hold me, Harry,’’ she said. “Oh, my God, hold me!’’

I did not know how long it had been. It might have been two minutes or two hours. I could still see the crack of light through the blind but I could not tell how much it had shifted. I had been asleep deeply enough so that I had not heard her come in. It had been the touch of her flesh that woke me.

Her thighs were pressed tight along my own and her face was against my shoulder. She was staring up at me.

“Estelle, for crying out loud—”

My hand had fallen over the curve of her hip and onto her thigh. Maybe I was still dreaming after all. If I hadn’t known better I would have sworn the body was Cathy’s. Everything about its touch was exactly as I remembered it.

“Harry,” she said. “Harry, I need you. I need you so much, so desperately. Hold me, Harry. Oh, God, hold me!”

No dream, Fannin. All very real, oh, yes, oh, yes. But did Fannin dig all this? Fannin was rather confused. He had had a bellyful of lunatic junkies, simpering fags, sour writers, greasy gun-punks. Now he had the frustrated old maid sister. The end of a perfect day.

Her arms had come around my neck, clutching at me, and I could feel the swell of her breasts. Her thighs were heaving. I hadn’t moved.

So talk then, Fannin. Try art maybe, or literature. Try the last quartets of Ludwig von Beethoven. Try your all-time favorite football players. Maybe you can get her distracted and nostalgic over Jay Berwanger, Ace Parker, George Gipp, Whizzer White, Jim Dieckleman, John Kimbrough.

Sure.

“Harry,” she said again. She said it like a cry from down a well, like a wail from a cell in the deathhouse, like a moan from an overturned car in a ditch. Her mouth was chewing my face and her legs were thrashing. Poor goddam Estelle. So you’re tired, Fannin. So Thomas Hobbes says the life of man in a state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Win one for Hobbes. You can do it, Fannin. Win one for all the loyal alumni, for all our far-flung boys in service, for all those sweet white-haired old ladies who told us they’ll never get off those sickbeds again if we lose, for—

“—Harry!”

It was a high, arching, lazy, end-over-end punt. It hung there, floating, almost suspended. Slowly, very slowly, it drifted down, and I waited for it between the goalposts. Five defense men swam up in front of me as I tucked in the ball and began my return. It was like running under water, and they never touched me.

After the game Knute Rockne himself came down into the locker room to pat me on top of the head.

“Harry,” she said. “Oh, Harry, I’ve wanted you so, needed you so. Don’t leave me, don’t go away. Don’t even move now, don t move.”

Her face was turned. There was still sweat. And then she was crying.

“Harry.” Her voice was ragged against the pillow. “I was so frightened. When you didn’t call me back after this morning, I was so worried. I was afraid they… afraid…”

“Estelle?”

“—Afraid they might arrest you when they found the money in your apartment, might think you killed her and—”

She winced, gasping in pain. She had to, because I’d grabbed her so tightly by the shoulders that I felt bone.

My face was no more than four inches above her own. I could feel her hot breath, see the sudden fierce panic in her eyes. My voice belonged to somebody else who was trying to scream with gravel in his throat, and I was the only one in the room who could hear him.

You never told this woman about the money in your pad, Fannin, the voice roared.

CHAPTER 18

I sat there on the edge of the bed and stared at the floor in the unreal light. There were Luckies on a telephone table and I took one. The match flared and died. The smoke turned to steel wool in my mouth.

So Henshaw’s batty clock had been right. She had had time to make another stop. Probably Leeds had not even found out what direction she’d taken when he tried to go after her.

“Here,” I said. “She came here.”

Estelle did not answer and I turned to look at her. The sheet was twisted low across her thighs and her hands lay motionless at either side of her, upturned and curled like dead things in the wake of plague. Her face was turned so that only the plane of her cheek was there. The line of her breasts was lovely, as beautiful as Cathy’s had ever been.

“And it probably didn’t have anything to do with the money then either,” I said.

“No.”

“Tell me, Estelle.”