“She’s a regular?” I wondered.
“Twice a week since her freshman year.”
Freshman year, my ass. I bit my lip not to say it. Kira probably came into the coffee shop after hard nights turning tricks on campus for a little mad money. And for an extra twenty bucks, she’d let you take her to breakfast. I felt the corners of my mouth curl into a nasty smile.
When my eyes refocused on the waitress, she was staring hard at me.
“Something the matter?”
Wagging her finger at me: “You look real familiar to me. I thought so the other day, too, but I couldn’t place you. Where the hell do I know you from?”
“Read any detective novels?”
“Never. I’m a Harlequin romance gal myself.”
“Go to Brooklyn College?”
“Honey, the closest I ever want to get to Brooklyn is watching reruns of Welcome Back Kotter on TV.”
“You ever get down to Long-”
“That’s it!” she snapped her fingers. “You look just like one of the boys that oriental girl used to come in here with. You his father?”
I shut the busybody out before she finished her question. What she said about the boy who looked like me didn’t make any sense, if that boy was Zak. Even if Kira really did turn tricks on campus, her new employers would never have risked using her to get close to me; too many variables. They could never be sure Zak hadn’t discussed her with me over a beer or in the locker room. A kid might not talk to his father about going to a hooker, but you couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t tell a favorite uncle. And if they were willing to wager Zak hadn’t told me, they couldn’t take the chance of some other customer recognizing her as she walked around Riversborough at my side.
“This the boy?” I showed her my wallet photo of Zak.
“That’s him. Sorry about that dorky college boy crack.”
“It’s forgotten. Listen, this girl we’re talking about, you ever catch her name?”
She was staring at me again. Why would I have to ask the name of someone I obviously knew?
“I know it’s a weird question, but humor me, please?”
“Well, mister, I ain’t the nosy type,” she said with a straight face.
“Oh, believe me, I know you’re not. It’s just that I worked as a waiter myself for a while and I overheard things I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop on. Come on. . Sandra,” I read her name tag. “As a favor to an old waiter, try and remember.”
Sandra screwed up her face for dramatic effect, but I don’t imagine she had to search her memory for more than a nanosecond. “Kiwi, Keela, I don’t know, foreign sounding like that.”
“Kira?”
“Sounds about right,” she nodded. “Can I get you anything else?”
I waved a fifty-dollar bill under her nose. “Is there a way out of this place other than the front door?”
“Through the kitchen, into an alley that leads to Beethoven Street.”
I handed Sandra the fifty. “Think you can arrange a tour of the kitchen for me?”
“For a handsome man like yourself,” Sandra purred, leering at me in a way she must have thought sexy, “I could arrange almost anything.”
“I might just take you up on that.” I kissed the back of her hand. “But for now, let’s see about the back door.”
With the fifty bucks worth of consolation, Sandra disappeared into the kitchen. She reappeared at my table within two minutes. Everything was arranged. I left a five on the table to cover breakfast.
“Listen,” I whispered to her as I stood up, “make like you’re pointing the way to the bathroom.” She did. “Great. Some men are going to come in asking about me in a few minutes. Whatever you do, swear to me that you won’t tell them I’m going back downstate for a few days.”
“I swear.”
As I trotted down the alleyway towards Beethoven Street, my legs were fueled by hope. Hope wasn’t something I was terribly familiar with, but it felt pretty damned fine. Now I needed some time, sans chaperones, to make certain my newfound hope wasn’t of the false variety. My exit through the kitchen was a start. And since I figured Sandra the waitress would confess as to my fraudulent travel plans within five minutes, I thought I could count on at least a few hours of unfettered activity.
My first stop was a ski shop. I grabbed a new parka, gloves, a turtleneck, pants, and a pair of hiking shoes off the shelf. I bought a wool ski hat-I hated hats-and a pair of those orange reflector sunglasses that make you look like an alien with no fashion sense. I hardly recognized myself. I doubted if anyone else would, not at first glance. When the salesman offered to put my peacoat out of its misery, I snapped at him. I had him box the clothes I’d come in with and paid for them to be shipped back to Sound Hill.
I strolled over to the campus under a bright sun. It was relatively warm and, for the first time since I’d arrived, snow wasn’t part of the forecast. That would help. Fewer students would be inclined to take the subterranean passageways between buildings. Now all I had to do was spot Kira and follow her without her noticing me. I took the high ground atop the library steps, watching.
Surveillance, boredom is thy name. I detested it. Hurry up and wait and wait and wait. It was the endless, often fruitless hours of loneliness that had helped push me out of insurance investigations. It was all about cold nights in cold cars drinking cold coffee. I used to think that Eliot had gotten it all wrong, life wasn’t about coffee spoons, but about coffee containers: I have known the ins, outs, downs and ups, I have measured out my nights with coffee cups.
But like MacClough used to say, “If you could quote T.S. fuckin’ Eliot, you were in the wrong job anyway.” He was right, of course.
I didn’t have to look at my watch to know an hour had passed. After doing enough surveillance, you gain intimate knowledge of the passage of time, the deathly slow march of it. Only in retrospect does time ever pass quickly. Besides, I was standing under the clock tower and the chimes were kind of hard to ignore.
By the second round of chimes, my more usual sense of pessimism had set in. I would never find Kira this way. For all I knew, she didn’t have class today. And I knew nothing for sure. For chrissakes, maybe she was an expensive hooker. I couldn’t recall the last time I felt so unsure of myself. I had forfeited control of my emotional life to desk clerks and chatty waitresses. I was so far removed from my original purpose that I doubted the value of getting involved. These things, I thought, were better left to hard men, men not so easily distracted.
I was on the downward spiral of negativity followed by self-recrimination. The anger and explosion would not be far behind. “Thanks Dad!” I said, wishing he could hear me. Noticing I was cold, I deserted my spot on the granite steps of the library.
The cafeteria wasn’t too difficult to find without a map. I poured myself the biggest container of coffee I could find. The fat, unsmiling woman at the register shook her head no at me.
“What’s the matter?” I gritted my teeth.
“That’s a soda container you got there. Can’t take coffee out of here in a soda container.”
“Charge me for it.”
“Can’t do that,” she explained. “Gotta get a coffee container.”
“Here’s five bucks, charge me whatever you want.”
“Can’t do-
“-that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
I left the coffee at the register and started for Dean Dallenbach’s office. I hadn’t wanted to go through him to find out about Kira, but now I didn’t see that I had a choice. I was wrong.
There she was, fifty feet in front of me, a distressed leather book bag strapped to her back. I slowed my pace and fell in behind a crowd of students arguing the merits of the Categorical Imperative. Wasn’t liberal arts grand? I hoped none of these kids planned on working for a living. As she moved, I moved. She came to rest in the third row, third seat from the front of room 203 of Snodgras Hall.
I couldn’t hear the lecture through the closed door, but f
igured it was an English class of some form or another. The professor’s salt-and-pepper hair was too long, falling on the shoulders of his green corduroy jacket. He strutted about, waving his arms like a hackneyed Hamlet, his eyes never straying too far from the prettiest women in class. I’d taken enough English courses to know that most literature professors were just frustrated actors with ids the size of Chicago. Okay, maybe some were frustrated writers. Id size remained constant.
At the end of the lecture I ducked into a nearby doorway and picked up on my shadowing routine. It went on like that until late in the afternoon. It wasn’t all bad, though. I did rather enjoy the live models in Kira’s sketching class. When the instructor shooed them out of the art room, I watched Kira disappear around a bend in the hallway. I failed to see the point in following her any longer. What would watching her sit through one more class prove? Yet, my doubts lingered. I was afraid to trust the obvious, that Kira was a student at Riversborough. I needed a little independent confirmation.
“Excuse me,” I called to Kira’s art instructor. “Can I have a word with you?”
“Sure.” She waved me up to the front of the class. She was a smallish woman with close-cropped brown hair and copper brown eyes. She had hollow cheeks smudged with charcoal and a friendly smile.
“Hi,” I put out my hand for a shake, but she showed me her blackened palms and we agreed that my gesture would suffice. “My name’s Dylan Klein.”
“Jane Courteau. What can I do for you, Mr. Klein?”
“I write books, detective novels.”
“I’ve never heard of you.”
“You’re in good company. Want to see my Authors Guild card?”
“I’ll take your word for it,” she said. “I’m supposed to be a talented artist and no one’s ever heard of me. And we don’t even get cards!”
“To tell you the truth, mine’s expired. Anyway, I have some say over what the cover design of my next book will be and someone suggested one of your students as a potential artist,” I lied. “I wanted to get your opinion first before I approached the student.”
“Which student?”
“Kira Wantanabe.”
Jane Courteau had trouble concealing her dismay. It wasn’t exactly horror I saw flashing across her face, but it was more than a frown.
I played coy. “No good, huh?”
“She’s not terrible.”
“I admire a woman who rejects faint praise as an option.”
“Look, Mr. Klein, what I mean to say is that Kira is competent. I’ve had her for three terms now and she’s improved immensely, but she doesn’t have her heart in it. I don’t mean to insult her.”
“It’s our secret. No one’s been hurt. Thank you,” I gushed, barely able to contain myself.
“I have several other students I might suggest.”
“That’s okay,” I assured her as I turned to leave. “If I go to anyone, it will be directly to you. I won’t forget you.”
Walking away, I realized I must’ve seemed quite the fool to Ms. Jane Courteau. I was a fool, a very happy and relieved fool. I stopped in the student lounge and called the lab from a pay phone. Although I couldn’t vouch for Kira’s activity before she met me, let’s just say that much of the suspense had been taken out of the call. In a thoroughly disinterested voice, the attendant confirmed I was HIV negative. You always tell yourself that you’ll deal with whatever happens, no matter how bad. But I’ll confess to feeling such a high at that moment I could have kissed the pepper-spray boy right on the lips, Rush Limbaugh and Joe McCarthy not with standing.
I bought two bottles of champagne at the liquor store. I intended to share the painted-flower bottle of Perrier-Jouet with Kira. I was undecided about the second, far less expensive bottle of Korbel. I was either going to send it to Jane Courteau without a note or use it as a fleet enema for the desk clerk at the Old Watermill Inn. I was thinking I’d been an idiot for listening to him. People get other people’s faces mixed up all the time. He had probably been drunk out of his mind when he was across the border at his buddy’s bachelor party. Then, like a kick in the groin I wasn’t expecting, it hit me; maybe the desk clerk hadn’t gotten it wrong at all. Maybe he was lying to me. I wondered about why he would do that. I’d have to have a chat with him on the subject when MacClough got back into town. I lacked John’s wherewithal when it came to interviews.
Walking up the street, I noticed the blue minivan parked across the way from the inn. I approached from the rear and rapped hard on the passenger side window. The campus security guy nearly coughed up his glazed doughnut.
“Just checking in,” I screamed through the rolled-up window. “Got back from downstate sooner than I thought.”
He tried, and failed, to look unfazed by my abrupt return. It’s tough to act cool with a chewed doughnut hanging out of your mouth. His partner in the driver’s seat was considerably less worried about my opinion of things and gave me the finger. I respected that. He and doughnut-boy had more than likely gotten reamed for losing me. As a gesture of goodwill, I showed them the bottle of Korbel and left it on the sidewalk.
Once inside the Old Watermill, I continued acting like a smug jerk. I found my pal at the front desk. He put down his spy novel and gave me a knowing smile. But what did he know, I wondered? There were no messages for me.
“Listen, buddy,” I whispered, “she’s coming over tonight. Do me a favor and send her right up when she gets here, okay?”
“Sure thing, Mr. Klein.”
“Anybody come in here today looking for me?”
“Nobody,” he said, giving the boy scout salute.
I handed him the champagne. “You think you can have this chilled for me and have it sent up when my date gets here?”
“No problem.”
I didn’t give him a tip. He’d made all the money off me he was going to make.
The room was different somehow. I can’t explain it. Hotel rooms aren’t like your own place. I couldn’t vouch for where I had put my dirty socks or what page the paper was turned to when I put it down before sleep. I didn’t know what bugs hung out in the corners of the ceiling. I didn’t know the smells or the sounds. And there was a cleaning service that came in every day to pick up after me, to make the bed, to fold the end of the toilet paper into a point. Even so, I could not shake the feeling that someone who did not belong had been in my room. But I also thought we’d have a colony on the moon by now.
The Day the Earth Stood Still
As promised, he sent her right up. Even called me to let me know she was coming. I was glad to see Jeffrey’s five hundred dollars hadn’t gone totally to waste. Hey, for another hundred, maybe he would have escorted Kira to my room.
I was obviously grinning like an idiot when I opened the door.
“What?”
“You’re what,” I said, pulling her into my room by the wrist and kicking the door shut behind her.
I proceeded to kiss her until the air she breathed out was the air I breathed in, until I was drunk from it. Although I will likely remember that one kiss even after I’m dead, it wasn’t overtly sexual. It was a kiss of joy, of relief; a kiss that hinted at the absence of love in my life. And when we finally let our lips pull apart, Kira hung her head.
“What is it?” I nudged her chin up with my finger.
She was crying, silently. Glistening streams ran over her translucent skin into the edges of her mouth. The tip of her tongue moved from side to side licking at the tears. I did not need to ask what the tears were for. If I had had the courage, I would have been crying, too.
“I am falling in love with you, Uncle Dylan. And last night, I was afraid. I could feel a wall around you, built to keep me out.”
“There was a wall, but I didn’t build it.”
“I don’t understand.”
I told her everything. I had to. There was never a thought of holding back, though I realized she might’ve felt betrayed by my readiness to believe the worst of her. I expla
ined that my disbelief in her said more about my life than hers. She did not flinch.
“Do you think he lied or just got it wrong?” Kira wanted to know.
“I’m not sure.”
Laughing, she said: “Professor Courteau must have fainted when you told her about wanting to use my drawings for your next book.”
“I had to call the paramedics.”
Kira slapped me playfully. I pulled her close again. We fell onto the bed. When we came up for air, she was smiling up at me with a glint of mischief in her black eyes.
“What now?” I asked.
“Would I have been worth the hundred and fifty dollars the desk clerk claimed they charged for me?”
“More.”
There was a knock on the door. It was room service with my chilled champagne. I shooed the waiter away with an overwhelming tip and a shove on the shoulder. I opened the champagne properly, holding the cork and twisting the bottle slowly. Kira had already helped herself to an empty flute which I filled with an inch of champagne and five inches of white foam. I didn’t bother with a glass myself and we clinked bottle to flute.
Coyly, she wondered, “How much more would I be worth?”
“Back to that again?” I tried unsuccessfully to sneer at her. “I don’t know, a buck and a quarter maybe.”
She punched me in the arm, less playfully this time.
“Ouch!” I rubbed it. “Okay, I’ll tell you how much more you’re worth. You’re worth the rest of my life. If I thought there was a chance you’d say yes, I’d ask you to marry me.”
Her face went utterly blank. She knew I wasn’t kidding.
“I’d like that,” she whispered, curling her arms and legs about me. “Ask me.”
“But I’m old enough-”
“-to make me happy.”
“What about school?”
“I suddenly don’t care much for Riversborough. Ask me, Dylan.”
“Will you marry me?”
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