Born Innocent

by Christine Rimmer

  “What can I do for you, Joe?” She spoke in a slow, steamy-sounding drawl, which Claire thought rather miraculous. The poor woman should be freezing, after all.

  Joe cleared his throat. “You can answer a few questions.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like what’s your relationship with Alan Henson?”

  Andrea’s melting chocolate-colored eyes narrowed. “Are you reporters?”

  “No.”

  “I already talked to the police. You’re not police?”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  Joe evaded the question with a provocative statement. “Since you’ve talked to the police, you must know that someone shot him.”

  Andrea clucked her tongue, a very pink tongue. “Yeah, I heard. Poor Alan. What an idiot. I could have told him this would happen.... You detectives or something?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “Who are you working for?”

  Claire cheerfully volunteered, “We’re working for me. I’m the one they think shot him.”

  Andrea licked her lips and smiled at Joe. “Wow, tough break.”

  Joe prompted, “You were going to tell us how you knew Alan Henson.”

  “I was?”

  “Yeah.”

  Andrea put a long crimson fingernail in her mouth and nibbled it very gently, considering. Then she wrapped her hands around the bars of the fence and sighed. “You know, Joe. You are really...hot. You have got this really...hot way about you. Oo-oh, and those eyes... Maybe you and your...client would like to come up to my place for a drink.”

  Joe glanced over his shoulder at Claire. His look said everything. Is this one absolutely necessary?

  Claire smiled. “We’d love to, Andrea.”

  Andrea made a big show of discovering a key between her incredible breasts. She unlocked the iron gate. “Entrez-vous.”

  It took them well over an hour to escape Andrea’s clutches. She made margaritas that tasted like straight tequila, and she kept asking if they were hot—and turning up her air conditioner.

  Each time she plunked herself down beside him, Joe scooted away from her, and asked her another question about Alan Henson.

  Andrea quickly explained that she’d been down in Los Angeles on a modeling assignment over the Fourth of July weekend—and only returned late Sunday afternoon.

  Then she backtracked to tell all about how she had met Alan Henson at her health club. She’d felt a little sorry for him; he seemed such a quiet, shy kind of guy. They’d had drinks together a few times—and, well, you know how it goes....

  He’d told her he was down on his luck. She’d lent him money. Though, of course, ordinarily, it was men who gave Andrea Tetley money.

  But Alan was just so sweet and, surprisingly, he was a real devil in bed.

  “I was just a sucker for that man, I tell you,” Andrea told Joe. “And I really wouldn’t have sued him if that little devil hadn’t gone and proposed to me. I mean, I believed him. My pride was hurt when I found out he was already married. What’s a girl to do, I ask you... ? But, when I heard he got shot, and could end up a vegetable, I felt bad about it, I did. Maybe I was hasty, hiring a lawyer and filing suit and all. I just don’t know.” She sat next to Joe again and put her slim hand on his thigh. “Tell me, Joe. What do you think I should have done?”

  “Exactly what you did,” Joe answered. He stood and grabbed Claire’s arm. “And now, Ms. Tetley, we really do have to go.”

  “So. What did we learn from our visit with Andrea?” Claire asked brightly once they’d returned to the hotel for the night.

  Joe, who was sitting at the little round table by the window and scribbling something on a steno pad, gave her a dark look. Clearly playing sex object was not his cup of tea. But he did volunteer, “That the woman actually has air conditioning, even though San Francisco rarely gets above eighty degrees year-round.”

  “Very funny. But seriously.”

  Joe snorted. “Okay. I’d say that Henson does seem to have a way with women.”

  Claire nodded, thinking of her mother, who’d been so taken with him, too. “You’re right. Obviously he could charm men, too, or there wouldn’t be any men on the list. But a sweet, naive man like Professor Whitling would be a pretty easy target for any smooth talker. However, Andrea didn’t strike me as the kind of woman to ordinarily waste her time on a guy without money or looks. I think she requires one or the other from most men.”

  Joe nodded. “Good point.” He went back to his steno pad.

  “What are you writing?” she asked.

  “Notes.”

  “About what?”

  “Just random stuff. It helps me put things together.”

  “Random stuff like what?”

  “Like things we’ve heard and found out. Whatever sticks in my mind. Things like what you said just a minute ago, about Henson being charming to women even without looks or money. Disjointed stuff—like Andrea Tetley’s air conditioner—or all those books Whitling had about some guy named Oscar Wilde.”

  Claire laughed. “Oscar Wilde was a writer, Joe.”

  “Oh, yeah? What’d he write?”

  She dug around in her memory of English Lit 1A. “Let’s see. How ’bout.. .‘The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden... It ends with Revelations.’ ”

  Joe grunted. “Don’t flaunt your college education at me.” But she could see the amusement in his eyes. He went back to his notes.

  Claire sat on the bed, watching him, thinking how much she enjoyed looking at him.

  Eventually she slipped off her shoes and hoisted her feet onto the bed. She closed her eyes, feeling marvelously content right then in spite of everything. She could hear Joe’s pencil as it scratched across the paper, and inside her, the baby they had made was safe—for the time being, at least.

  Thoughts of the baby brought on the thought that she had yet to tell Joe there was a baby. As guilt chased her peaceful feelings away, Claire turned onto her side, away from Joe, where he sat at the round table.

  Lord. She should tell him. It was wrong—especially now that she was sure she would keep the baby—not to tell Joe about the child. And it seemed even more wrong to keep quiet after all he was doing for her, after the amount of trust that had bloomed between them lately.

  It would hurt to lose his trust. Something inside her died a little at the thought. Yet it was very likely she would lose it, as soon as he knew that she’d managed to get herself pregnant during her “safe” time.

  Well, her conscience chided, if she lost his trust, it would be her own fault. And the truth was that no matter what he might think of her once she told him, he deserved to know that he was going to be a father. If she had any integrity at all, she’d open her eyes and say his name, and when he looked at her and said “Yeah?” she’d simply begin.

  We made a baby that night six weeks ago. I thought it was safe but it wasn’t. And I’ve decided not to have an abortion, so I...

  Claire sighed and shifted again on the bed. She found it difficult to even imagine how she was going to put the words together. The careful speeches she tried to make up in her mind always sounded awful, even inside her head.

  She had no doubt they’d sound ten times worse once she actually uttered them aloud.

  And beyond the difficulty of telling him, there was her determination to accomplish her goal here in San Francisco. She’d had a hard enough time getting him to go along as it was. Though so far they’d had no trouble, he’d said that sometimes the kind of thing they were doing could turn out to be dangerous. There was no way he’d let her continue with this if he knew she was going to have a baby.

  And that was why, beyond everything else, it was impossible to tell Joe now.

  She must find out who really shot Henson, or the baby could be born in prison. He—or she—would end up getting the same kind of rocky start in life that Joe had had. Born innocent, as Joe had been, but destined not to stay that w
ay for long.

  No, she couldn’t let that happen. The baby must have what Claire’s parents had given her, what Joe had never had—the chance to grow up unafraid to love and be loved.

  “Claire?” Joe sounded concerned.

  She turned her head and opened her eyes. He was still sitting at the table, with his pencil in his hand, but now he was looking at her instead of his steno pad.

  “Umm?”

  “You okay?”

  “Fine. Why?”

  “You were tossing around. Something bothering you?”

  She forced a weary smile. “Nothing more than the usual.” He set his pencil down and stood up. She lied some more. “Really, Joe. I’m fine.”

  He stretched, his long body strong and lithe in the shadowed light from the little lamp over the table. Then he came and sat on the edge of the bed. “Fine, are you?” “Yes.” She went on smiling. “Really. I am.”

  “Okay, you can stop convincing me.”

  “It’s not working, huh?”

  “No, so give it up.” He bent and placed a kiss on the bridge of her nose. “You were great tonight.”

  “I was?” His praise warmed her. She brushed his hair back where it had fallen over his forehead.

  “Yeah. Terrific,” he said. “If you ever get tired of the hotel business, we could go into partnership in a detective agency.”

  She could tell by his grin that he was joking. Still it was an appealing fantasy. “I can see it now...” He put his hands up, as if picturing the sign over the door. “Tally and Snow.”

  “Almost. Except you’ve got it backward.”

  “Oh, no...”

  “Oh, yes. It should be Snow and Tally.” She closed her eyes, briefly, as if listening to the sound of the title in her mind. Then, “Yes, that’s much better.”

  “Snow and Tally, huh?”

  “You bet. After all, besides sounding better, it’s also alphabetical.”

  “Alphabetical? The alphabet decides it?”

  “You can think of a fairer way?”

  “How about the guy with the most experience goes first?”

  She shook her head, and then took hold of his shirt and pulled him down, so his lips were only a fraction from hers. “Uh-uh. Alphabetical.”

  “Experience.”

  “Alpha-”

  He interrupted her in mid-syllable. “For an innocent, you learn fast.”

  “I have to. It’s a rough world.”

  Very lightly, with his tongue, he traced the shape of her lips. Then he suggested, “We could forget the world—and how rough it is—for a while—”

  “We could?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Okay. Show me how.”

  “Glad to...”

  And he kissed her, slowly and sweetly. She let go of his shirt and wrapped arms around his neck, drawing him down.

  All her shadowed, anxious thoughts began to fade.

  In a leisurely manner that set her senses aflame, he kissed his way down her body, unbuttoning and unbooking and sliding everything she was wearing out of the way and then off.

  She kissed him back and did a little unbuttoning and unzipping of her own. Soon enough, they both wore nothing.

  “Have I ever told you?” he wondered in a voice both gruff and tender.

  “What?”

  “How much I like— ”

  “Yes?”

  “Being naked with you.”

  She made a sound of agreement, of feminine understanding.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means—”

  “Yeah?”

  “That I feel exactly the same.”

  “Good.” He took her hand. “Come on.”

  He pulled her off the bed. She went without reluctance. He led her to the bathroom, where he turned on the taps in the huge tub, poured in some foaming bath oil provided courtesy of the Sir Walter Raleigh Hotel, and led her down into the steaming, bubbling water.

  “Is this the time?” she asked on a sigh.

  “The time for what?”

  “When you do all those things you mentioned this afternoon?”

  “What things?”

  “You know, the things that take more than twenty minutes.”

  He chuckled.

  She asked again, “Well, is this the time—or not?”

  He assured her that it was.

  Beneath the froth of bubbles, under the hot, soothing water, she felt his hand on her thigh.

  With a long, yearning sigh, Claire let her head relax against the rim of the tub. Joe’s hand moved higher.

  Claire forgot everything, as she knew he intended her to. She forgot the man who now lay unconscious in the hospital, and the unknown person who’d shot him and left her to take the blame. She forgot her hopes that she might learn what had really happened from one of the people on Joe’s list. She even forgot that there was a secret she was keeping from Joe—a secret that, once revealed, could destroy his trust in her, and shatter the wonder they now shared.

  For a long, long time, she thought of nothing but Joe’s hands, and the pleasure they were giving her. And once his hands were through, there was his mouth, and after his mouth, there was the best part of all____

  Sometime later he carried her to the bed, and he made love to her some more.

  After that, as soft as a baby’s blanket, sleep settled over her. She woke, but only partway, when she felt Joe cover her and pull her close.

  He kissed her, a breath of a kiss, and smoothed her hair back with his callused hand. “Shh. Sleep now.”

  The next thing she knew, it was morning.

  * * *

  The desk called them at six, as Joe had requested. They quickly showered, and room service was knocking on the door just as Claire finished dressing. She ushered in the bellman, who had their breakfast, and told him to wheel the cart over by the round table.

  “Breakfast!” she called to Joe in the bathroom as soon as the bellman had left. He came out right away, smelling of after-shave, with a towel around his waist and water droplets still gleaming in the triangle of hair on his chest.

  He leaned across the cart and kissed her. They sat down. She poured the coffee. As they ate, they planned the busy day ahead.

  Chapter Twelve

  Before noon, they’d been cursed at and threatened with two lawsuits. They’d put fifty miles on her car driving around Alameda and Oakland.

  Three people on the list had agreed to talk to them, and from them they’d only learned more of the same about Alan Henson. He charmed people and took their money, and he seemed to have no conscience about the personal destruction he left in his wake.

  They took a break for lunch, during which they decided on their next moves and talked about the few things they’d learned.

  After lunch, they went further south, to Daly City, San Bruno and Burlingame. They learned from a fortyish, exhausted-looking housewife that, thanks to Alan Henson, her children would be paying for their own college educations—if they could find jobs that made that much. They talked to a retired couple with nothing left of their life savings. The couple lived in a painfully tidy trailer that their children had chipped in to buy for them after Alan Henson had cleaned them out.

  By four o’clock, they began moving back toward San Francisco, trying again to reach the people who hadn’t been available on their first pass through the area. They were lucky—at least in the sense that they found the two people they’d missed before. But the first one, an older woman, yelled at them to leave her alone, she’d done nothing, and she’d already told the police as much. She marched into her small house and slammed the door.

  Joe said, “I have a feeling that’s all we’re going to get from Mrs. Yamamoto.”

  Claire sighed and agreed.

  The second one, Titus Paley by name, ran a dry-cleaning business in Daly City. Since he hadn’t been at his house or the dry-cleaning shop earlier, they decided to give both locations one more try.

  They foun
d him at the dry-cleaning shop. When they told him they wanted to talk to him about Alan Henson, Titus Paley pulled a .45 out from behind the counter and pointed it at them.

  “Alan Henson cost me two of my three shops and my cabin in Tahoe,” Titus explained in an extremely level voice. “I didn’t shoot him—if I had, you can be damn sure he’d be dead now. I got nothing else to say to anyone ’cept my lawyer, so get out.”

  Both Claire and Joe thought it wisest not to argue. They backed out of the shop and got in the car and speedily drove away.

  After that, they took a break for dinner.

  As dark drew on, they tried the little row house not that far from Union Square. Again, there was no one there.

  They drove across the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito that night. Two of the names listed addresses there. But they struck out on both counts that time.

  Finally, they went back to the hotel for the night, no closer to finding out who shot Alan Henson than they had been when Claire had insisted they come here.

  When they lay down together in bed, Joe reached for her. She went into his arms. He loved her as tenderly and thoroughly as he had the night before. Claire tried to give herself up to the beauty of his touch, but time pressed in on her. She couldn’t entirely forget how close they were to the end of the list—and how little they’d learned.

  At last, when he settled her against his body, she tried her best to simply close her eyes and forget everything. She succeeded, eventually. For a few brief hours she knew nothing except the soothing oblivion of a dreamless sleep.

  The next morning, Claire woke to the sound of the phone ringing. Joe answered it.

  “Yeah?” he said. Then, “Great. Thanks, Ted.” He hung up.

  Claire opened an eye and groggily demanded, “That was your detective friend?”

  Joe yawned and stretched. “Yeah.”

  Claire sat up in bed. All her grogginess had fled. “So? Don’t hold out. What did he say?”

  Joe yawned again. “Well, you know how he’s been keeping an eye on Mariah Henson’s apartment?”

  “Yes? And?”

  Joe reached out and wrapped his hand around the back of her neck. He pulled her close and kissed her, a lovely, lingering kiss. Then he told her, “It looks like she’s in town, maybe taking a break from sitting by her husband’s bedside.”