Ray Galindez looked more like a cop than an artist. He was medium height and stocky, with bushy eyebrows mounted over brown cocker spaniel eyes. At first I put him in his late thirties, but that was an effect of the weight he carried and a certain solemnity to his manner, and after a few minutes I lowered that estimate by ten or twelve years.

As arranged, he met us at Elaine’s that evening at seven-thirty. I’d arrived earlier, in time for her to make a pot of coffee and me to drink a cup of it. Galindez didn’t want any coffee. When Elaine offered him a beer he said, “Maybe later, ma’am. If I could just have a glass of water now that’d be great.”

He called us sir and ma’am, and doodled on a scratch pad while I explained the nature of the problem. Then he asked for a brief description of Motley and I gave him one.

“This ought to work,” he said. “What you’re describing is a very distinctive individual. That makes it much easier for me. What’s the worst thing is when you got an eyewitness and he says, ‘Oh, this was just an average person, real ordinary-looking, he just looked like everybody else.’ That means one of two things. Either your suspect had a face with nothing there to grab onto, or your witness wasn’t really seeing what he was looking at. That happens a lot when you’ve got different races. Your white witness looks at a black suspect and all he sees is a black person. You see the color and you don’t see the face.”

Before he did any drawing, Galindez led us in an eyes-closed visualization exercise. “The better you see him,” he said, “the more we get on the page.” Then he had me describe Motley in detail, and as I did so he worked up a sketch with a soft pencil and an Art-Gum eraser. I’d managed to get to the Forty-second Street library early that afternoon, and I’d located two newsphotos of Motley, one taken at the time of his arrest, the other during his trial. I don’t know that my memory needed refreshing, but I think they had helped clarify the visual image I’d had of him, the way you’d skim off the grime of the ages to restore an old painting.

It was remarkable, watching the face take shape on the sketch pad. He had both of us pointing out whatever looked off about the sketch, and he’d go to work with the eraser and make a slight change, and gradually the image came into focus with our memory. Then, when we couldn’t find anything else to object to, he brought the sketch up to date.

“What we’ve got here,” he said, “is already a man who looks older than twenty-eight years of age. Partly that’s because all three of us know for a fact that he’s forty or forty-one now, so our minds have been making little unconscious adjustments to our memory. Still, there’s more we can do. One thing that happens as you age, your features get more prominent. You take a young person and draw a caricature of him, ten or twenty years later it doesn’t look so exaggerated. I had an instructor once, she said we grow up to be caricatures of ourselves. What we’ll do here, we’ll make the nose a little bit larger, we’ll sink the eyes a little beneath the brow.” He did all this with a hint of shadow here, a change of line there. It was quite a demonstration.

“And gravity starts working on you,” he went on. “Pulls you down here and there.” A flick of the eraser, a stroke of the soft pencil. “And the hairline. Now here we’re in the dark on account of we lack information. Did he keep his hair? Is he bald as an egg? We just don’t know. But let’s say he did like most people do, most men, that is, and he’s got the beginnings of male-pattern baldness with the receding hairline. That doesn’t mean he’s going to look bald, or even well on his way. All it means is his hairline’s changed and he’s got himself a higher forehead, might look something like this.”

He added a suggestion of lines around the eyes, creases at the corners of the mouth. He increased the definition of the cheekbones, held the pad at arm’s length, made a minute adjustment with eraser and pencil.

“Well?” he said. “What do you think? Suitable for framing?”

 

* * *

 

His work done, Galindez accepted a Heineken. Elaine and I split a Perrier. He talked a little about himself, reluctantly at first, but Elaine was masterful at drawing him out. I suppose it was a professional talent of hers. He told us how drawing had always been something he could do, how he’d taken it so utterly for granted that it had never occurred to him to make a career of it. He’d always wanted to be a cop, had a favorite uncle in the department, and took the test for admission as soon as he finished up a two-year hitch at Kingsborough Community College.

He went on sketching for his own amusement, doing portraits and caricatures of his fellow officers; and one day in the absence of a regular police artist he was pressed into service to produce a sketch of a rapist. Now that was the bulk of what he did, and he loved it, but he felt himself being drawn away from police work. People had been suggesting that he might have the potential for an artistic career far greater than anything he could expect to realize in law enforcement, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

He said no to Elaine’s offer of a second beer, thanked me for the two fifties I handed him, and told us he hoped we’d let him know how things turned out. “When you take him down,” he said, “I hope I get a chance to see him, or at least a photo of him. Just to see how close I came. Sometimes you’ll see the actual guy and he’s nothing like what you drew, and other times anybody’d swear you must have been working from a model.”

 

When he left Elaine closed the door after him and engaged all the locks. “I feel silly doing this,” she said, “but I’ve been doing it anyway.”

“There are people all over town with half a dozen locks on every door, and alarm systems and everything else. And they don’t have somebody who’s threatened to kill them.”

“I suppose it’s comforting to know that,” she said. “He’s a nice kid, Ray. I wonder if he’ll stay a cop.”

“Hard to say.”

“Was there ever anything else you wanted to be? Besides a cop?”

“I never even wanted to be a cop. It was something I drifted into, and before I was out of the Academy I realized it was what I’d been born for. But I never knew that early on. When I was a kid I wanted to be Joe DiMaggio when I grew up, but that’s what every kid wanted, and I never had the moves to go with the desire.”

“You could have married Marilyn Monroe.”

“And sold coffee makers on television. There but for the grace of God.”

She carried our empty glasses into the kitchen and I trailed along behind her. She rinsed them under the tap, placed them in the strainer. “I think I’m getting stir-crazy,” she said. “What are you doing tonight? Do you have anyplace you have to be?”

I looked at my watch. I usually go to St. Paul’s on Fridays for the eight-thirty step meeting, but it was too late now, they’d already started. And I had caught a noon meeting downtown already that day. I told her I didn’t have anything planned.

“Well, how about a movie? How does that sound?”

It sounded fine. We walked over to Sixtieth and Third to a first-run house. It was the weekend so there was a line, but there was a pretty decent film at the end of it, a slick caper movie with Kevin Costner and Michelle Pfeiffer. “She’s not really pretty,” Elaine said afterward, “but there’s something about her, isn’t there? If I were a man, I’d want to fuck her.”

“Repeatedly,” I said.

“Oh, she does it for you, huh?”

“She’s all right.”

“ ‘Repeatedly,’ “ she said, and chuckled. Around us, Third Avenue was thronged with young people who looked as though the country were every bit as prosperous as the Republicans kept telling us it was. “I’m hungry,” Elaine announced. “You want to get a bite? My treat.”

“Sure, but why is it your treat?”

“You paid for the movie. Can you think of a place? Friday night in this neighborhood, wherever we go we’re going to be up to our tits in yuppies.”

“There’s a place in my neighborhood. Great hamburgers and cottage fries. Oh, wait a minute. You don’t eat hamburgers, do you? The fish is good there, but I forget if you said you eat fish.”

“Not anymore. How’s their salad?”

“They serve a good salad, but is that enough for you?”

She said it would be plenty, especially if she stole a few of my cottage fries. There were no empty cabs and the streets were full of people trying to hail one. We started to walk, then caught a bus on Fifty-seventh Street and got off at Ninth Avenue. The place I had in mind, Paris Green, was five blocks downtown. The bartender, a lanky fellow with a brown beard that hung down like an oriole’s nest, gave a wave as we cleared the threshold. His name was Gary, and he’d helped me out a few months ago when I’d been hired to find a girl who’d done some of her drinking there. The manager, whose name was Bryce, had been a little less helpful then, but he was helpful enough now, greeting us with a smile and showing us to a good table. A waitress with a short skirt and long legs came over to take our drink order, went away, and came back with Perrier for me and a Virgin Mary for Elaine. I must have been watching the girl’s departure, because Elaine tapped my glass with hers and advised me to stick to Michelle Pfeiffer.

“I was just thinking,” I said.

“I’m sure you were.”

When the girl returned Elaine ordered the large garden salad. I had what I generally have there, a Jarlsberg cheeseburger and well-done fries. When the food came I had what felt like déjà vu until I realized I was getting echoes of Tuesday night, when I’d had a late bite at Armstrong’s with Toni. The two restaurants weren’t that much alike, and neither were the women. Maybe it was the cheeseburgers.

Halfway through mine I thought to ask her if it bothered her that I was eating a cheeseburger. She looked at me as though I were crazy and asked why it should bother her.

“I don’t know,” I said. “You don’t eat meat, and I just wondered.”

“You must be kidding. Not eating meat is just a choice I make, that’s all. My doctor didn’t order me to quit, and it wasn’t an addiction I had to struggle with.”

“And you don’t have to go to the meetings?”

“What meetings?”

“Carnivores Anonymous.”

“What a thought,” she said, and laughed. Then her eyes narrowed and she looked appraisingly at me. “Is that what you did? AA?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I thought that was probably how you did it. Matt, would it have bothered you if I’d ordered a drink?”

“You did.”

“Right, a Virgin Mary. Would it have—”

“You know what the British call it? Instead of a Virgin Mary?”

“A Bloody Shame.”

“Right. No, it wouldn’t have bothered me if you’d ordered a real drink. You can order one now if you want.”

“I don’t.”

“Is that why you ordered a Virgin Mary? Because you thought it might bother me otherwise?”

“It didn’t even occur to me, as a matter of fact. I hardly ever drink alcohol these days. I hardly ever did. The only reason I asked was because you asked about the cheeseburger, and while we’ve been discussing meat and drink I’ve been sneaking your cottage fries.”

“While my attention was diverted elsewhere. We could probably arrange to get you some of your own.”

She shook her head. “Stolen sweets are best,” she said. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you that?”

 

She wouldn’t let me take the check, and then rejected my suggestion that we split it. “I invited you,” she said. “Besides, I owe you money.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Ray Galindez. I owe you a hundred bucks.”

“The hell you do.”

“The hell I don’t. Some maniac’s trying to kill me and you’re protecting me. I ought to be paying your regular rate, you know that?”

“I don’t have a regular rate.”

“Well, I ought to be paying you what a client pays. I certainly ought to be covering the expenses. Speaking of which, you flew to Cleveland and back, you stayed over at a hotel—”

“I can afford it.”

“I’m sure you can, but so what?”

“And I’m not just acting on your behalf,” I went on. “I’m his target at least as much as you are.”

“You think so? He’s probably a lot less likely to fuck you in the ass.”

“You never know what he learned in prison. I’m serious, Elaine. I’m operating in my own interest here.”

“You’re also acting in mine. And it’s depriving you of income, you already said how you’re not working at the detective agency in order to make time for this. If you’re contributing your time, the least I can do is cover all the expenses.”

“Why don’t we split them?”

“Because that’s not fair. You’re the one running around, you’re the one putting your regular work on the shelf for the duration. Besides, I can afford it better than you can. Don’t pout, for Christ’s sake, it’s no reflection on your manhood, it’s just a simple statement of fact. I’ve got a lot of money.”

“Well, you earned it.”

“Me and Smith Barney, making our money the old-fashioned way. I earned it and I kept it and I invested it, and I’m not rich, honey, but I’ll never be poor. I own a lot of property. I own my apartment, I bought right away when the building went co-op, and I own houses and multiple dwellings in Queens. Jackson Heights, mostly, and some in Woodside. I get checks every month from the management company, and every now and then my accountant tells me I’ve got too big a balance in my money-market account and I have to go out and buy another piece of property.”

“A woman of independent means.”

“You bet your ass.”

 

She paid the check. On the way out we stopped at the bar and I introduced her to Gary. He wanted to know if I was working on a case. “He let me play Watson once,” he told Elaine. “Now I live in hope of another opportunity.”

“One of these days.”

He draped his long body over the bar, dropped his voice low. “He brings suspects here for grilling,” he confided. “We grill them over mesquite.”

She rolled her eyes and he apologized. We got out of there, and she said, “God, it’s glorious out, isn’t it? I wonder how long this weather can last.”

“As long as it wants, as far as I’m concerned.”

“It’s hard to believe it’s something like six weeks until Christmas. I don’t feel like going home. Is there someplace else we can go? That we can walk to?”

I thought for a moment. “There’s a bar I like.”

“You go to bars?”

“Not usually. The place I’m thinking of is kind of lowlife. The owner—I was going to say he was a friend of mine, but that may not be the right word.”

“Now you’ve got me intrigued,” she said.

We walked over to Grogan’s. We took a table, and I went over to the bar to get our drinks. They don’t have waiters there. You fetch what you want yourself.

The fellow behind the stick was called Burke. If he had a first name, I’d never heard it. Without moving his lips he said, “If you’re looking for the big fella, he was just here. I couldn’t say if he’ll be back or not.”

I brought two glasses of club soda back to the table. While we nursed them I told her a couple of stories about Mick Ballou. The most colorful one involved a man named Paddy Farrelly, who’d done something to arouse Ballou’s ire. Then one night Ballou went in and out of every Irish saloon on the West Side. He was carrying a bowling bag, so they said, and he kept opening it to show off Paddy Farrelly’s disembodied head.

“I heard that story,” Elaine said. “Wasn’t there something about it in the papers?”

“I think one of the columnists used it. Mick refuses to confirm or deny. In any event, Farrelly’s never been seen since.”

“Do you think he did it?”

“I think he killed Farrelly. I don’t think there’s any real question of that. I think he went around showing off a bowling bag. I don’t know for sure that he ever opened it, though, or that there was anything in it.”

She thought it over. “Interesting friends you have,” she said.

Before our club soda ran out, she got a chance to meet him. He came in with two much smaller men in tow, two men dressed alike in jeans and leather flier’s jackets. He gave me a slight nod as he led the two the length of the room and through a door at the rear. Some five minutes later the three reappeared. The two smaller men walked on out of the bar and headed south on Tenth Avenue, and Ballou stopped at the bar, then came over to our table with a glass of twelve-year-old Jameson in his hand.

“Matthew,” he said. “Good man.” I pointed to a chair but he shook his head. “I can’t,” he said. “I have business. The man who’s his own boss always winds up working for a slavedriver.”

I said, “Elaine, this is Mick Ballou. Elaine Mardell.”

“A pleasure,” Ballou said. “Matthew, I’ve been saying I wished you would come by, and here you are and I have to be off. Come back again, will you?”

“I will.”

“We’ll tell tales all night and go to mass in the morning. Miss Mardell, I’ll hope to see you again as well.”

He turned away. Almost as an afterthought he raised his glass and drained it. On his way out he left the glass on an empty table.

After the door closed behind him Elaine said, “I wasn’t prepared for the size of him. He’s huge, isn’t he? He looks like one of those statues on Easter Island.”

“I know.”

“Rough-hewn from granite. What did he mean about going to mass in the morning? Is that code for something?”

I shook my head. “His father was a meatcutter in the Washington Street market. Every once in a while Mick likes to put on his father’s old apron and go to the eight o’clock mass at St. Bernard’s.”

“And you go with him?”

“I did once.”

“You bring a girl to the most remarkable places,” she said, “and introduce her to the most remarkable people.”

 

* * *

 

Outside again, she said, “You live near here, don’t you, Matt? You can just put me in a cab. I’ll be all right.”

“I’ll see you home.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive,” I said. “Besides, I’m going to need that sketch Galindez made. I want to get it photocopied first thing in the morning and start showing it to people.”

“Oh, right.”

There were plenty of cabs now, and I flagged one and we rode across town in silence. Her doorman opened the cab door for us, then hurried ahead to hold the door to the lobby.

As we rode up in the elevator she said, “You could have had the cab wait.”

“There are cabs all over the place.”

“That’s true.”

“It’s easier to get another one than pay his waiting time. Besides, I might walk home.”

“At this hour?”

“Sure.”

“It’s a long walk.”

“I like long walks.”

She unfastened both locks, the Segal deadbolt and the Fox police lock, and when we were inside she fastened them all again, the two she’d just unlocked and the other, the police lock that could only be engaged from inside. It was a lot to go through given that I was going to be leaving in a minute, but I was pleased to see her do it. I wanted her to get in the habit of setting all the locks the minute she walked into the place. And not just most of the time. All of the time.

“Don’t forget the cab,” she said.

“What about the cab?”

“All the cabs,” she said. “You want to keep track, so I can reimburse you.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said.

“What’s the matter?”

“I can’t bother with that kind of chickenshit,” I said. “I don’t go through that when I have a client.”

“What do you do?”

“I set some kind of arbitrary flat rate and it includes my expenses. I can’t make myself keep receipts and write down every time I get on the subway. It drives me crazy.”

“What about when you do a day’s work for Reliable?”

“I keep track as well as I can, and it makes me a little bit nuts, but I put up with it because I have to. I may be done working for them anyway, after the conversation I had with one of the bosses this morning.”

“What happened?”

“It’s not important. He was a little miffed that I was taking some time off, and I’m not sure he’ll want me back when it’s over. Then again, I’m not sure I’ll want to go back.”

“Well, you’ll work it out,” she said. She walked over to the coffee table, picked up a little bronze statue of a cat, and turned it over in her hands. “I don’t mean keep receipts,” she said. “I don’t mean itemize everything to the penny. I just want you to get paid back for whatever out-of-pocket expenses you have. I don’t care how you arrive at a figure, just so you don’t cheat yourself.”

“I understand.”

She walked over to the window, still passing the little cat from hand to hand. I moved alongside her and we looked at Queens together. “Someday,” I said, “all of this will be yours.”

“Funny man. I want to thank you for tonight.”

“No thanks are due.”

“I think they are. You saved me from a severe case of cabin fever. I had to get out of here, but it was more than that. I had a good time.”

“So did I.”

“Well, I’m grateful. Taking me to places in your neighborhood, Paris Green and Grogan’s. You didn’t have to let me into your world like that.”

“I had at least as good a time as you did,” I said. “And it doesn’t exactly hurt my image to be seen with a beautiful woman on my arm.”

“I’m not beautiful.”

“The hell you’re not. What do you want, reassurance? You must know what you look like.”

“I know I’m not a bow-wow,” she said. “But I’m certainly not beautiful.”

“Oh, come on. How’d you get all those houses across the river?”

“You don’t have to look like Elizabeth Taylor to make it in life, for God’s sake. You ought to know that. You just have to be a person a man’ll want to spend time with. I’ll tell you a secret. It’s mental work.”

“Whatever you say.”

She turned away, put the cat back on the coffee table. With her back to me she said, “Do you really think I’m beautiful?”

“I’ve always thought so.”

“That’s so sweet.”

“I’m not trying to be sweet. I just—”

“I know.”

Neither of us said anything for a moment, and the room turned deeply silent. There had been a moment like that in the film we saw, when the music stopped and the sound track went soundless. It heightened the suspense, as I recall.

I said, “I’d better take that sketch.”

“You’d better. I want to put it in something, though, so it won’t smudge. Let me go pee first, okay?”

While she was gone, I stood in the middle of the room looking at James Leo Motley as Ray Galindez had drawn him and trying to read the expression in his eyes. That didn’t make much sense, given that I was looking at an artist’s drawing instead of a photo, and that Motley’s eyes had been opaque and unreadable even in person.

I wondered what he was doing out there. Maybe he was holed up in an abandoned building sucking on a crack pipe. Maybe he was living with a woman, hurting her with the tips of his fingers, taking her money, telling her she liked it. Maybe he was out of town, shooting craps in Atlantic City, lying on a beach in Miami.

I went on gazing at the sketch, trying to let my old animal instincts tell me where he was and what he was doing, and Elaine returned to the room and moved to stand beside me. I felt the gentle pressure of her shoulder against my side and breathed in her scent.

She said, “I thought a cardboard tube. That way you wouldn’t have to fold it, you could just roll it, and it won’t get smudged.”

“How do you happen to have a cardboard tube on hand? I thought you didn’t keep stuff.”

“I don’t, but if I pull the rest of the paper towels off the roll I’ll have a tube.”

“Clever.”

“I thought so.”

“If you think it’s worth it.”

“How much is a roll of paper towels? A buck nineteen, something like that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, it’s something like that. Of course it’s worth it.” She extended a forefinger, touched the sketch. “When this is over,” she said, “I want this.”

“What for?”

“I want it matted and framed. Remember what he said, ‘Suitable for framing’? He was joking, but that’s because he doesn’t take his work seriously yet. This is art.”

“You’re serious.”

“You bet I am. I should have gotten him to sign it. Maybe I’ll get in touch with him later, ask him if he’d be willing. What do you think?”

“I think he’d be flattered. Listen, I was going to have a few Xerox copies made, but now you’re giving me ideas. What I’ll do is I’ll run an edition of fifty and number them.”

“Very funny,” she said. She moved her hand and laid it gently on top of mine. “Funny man.”

“That’s me.”

“Uh-huh.”

There was more of that utter silence, and I cleared my throat to break it. “You put perfume on,” I said.

“Yes, I did.”

“Just now?”

“Uh-huh.”

“It smells nice.”

“I’m glad you like it.”

I turned to put the sketch on the table, then straightened up again. My arm moved around her waist and my hand settled on her hip. She sighed almost imperceptibly and leaned against me, her head on my shoulder.

“I feel beautiful,” she said.

“You should.”

“I didn’t just put on perfume,” she said. “I got undressed.”

“You’re dressed now.”

“Yes, I am. But before I was wearing a bra and panties, and now I’m not. So it’s just me under these clothes.”

“Just you.”

“Just me and a little perfume.” She swung around to face me. “And I brushed my teeth,” she said, tilting her head, looking up at me with her lips slightly parted. Her eyes held mine for a moment, and then she closed them.

I took her in my arms.

 

* * *

 

It was quite wonderful, urgent yet unhurried, passionate yet comfortable, familiar yet surprising. We had the ease of old lovers and the eagerness of new ones. We had always been good together, and the years had been kind. We were better than ever.

Afterward she said, “I was thinking about this all night. I thought, gee, I like this guy, I always liked him, and wouldn’t it be nice to find out if the gears still mesh after all these years. So in a manner of speaking I had this planned, but it was all in the mind. Do you know what I mean?”

“I think so.”

“My mind was excited at the prospect. Then you told me I was beautiful and all of a sudden I’m standing there with wet panties.”

“Honestly?”

“Yeah, instant arousal. Like magic.”

“The way to a woman’s heart—”

“Is through her panties. Can’t you see new worlds opening up for you? All you have to do is tell us we’re beautiful.” She put her hand on my arm. “I think the reason it worked is you made me believe it. Not that I am, but that you think I am.”

“You are.”

“That’s your story,” she said, “and you stick to it. You know that story about Pinocchio? The girl sits on his face and says, ‘Lie to me, lie to me.’ “

“When did I ever lie to you?”

“Ah, baby,” she said, “I figured it’d be fun to do this, and I knew it was going to happen one of these days, but who would have guessed we’d be so hot for each other?”

“I know.”

“When was the last time we were together like this? The last time you were over here was three years ago, but we didn’t go to bed then.”

“No, it was a few years before then.”

“So it could have been seven years ago?”

“Maybe even eight.”

“Well, that explains it. The cells in your body change completely every seven years. Isn’t that what they say?”

“That’s what they say.”

“So your cells and my cells had never met before. I never understood that, the cells changing every seven years. What the hell does it mean? If you get a scar you’ve still got it several years later.”

“Or a tattoo. The cells change but the ink stays between them.”

“How does it know how to do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s what I can’t figure out. How does it know? You don’t have any tattoos, do you?”

“No.”

“And you call yourself an alcoholic. Isn’t that when people get them, when they’re tanked?”

“Well, it never struck me as the reasoned act of a sober man.”

“No, I wouldn’t think so. I read somewhere that a high percentage of murderers are heavily tattooed. Have you ever heard that?”

“It sounds familiar.”

“I wonder why that would be. Something to do with self-image?”

“Maybe.”

“Did Motley have any?”

“Self-image?”

“Tattoos, you dimwit.”

“Sorry. Did he have any tattoos? I don’t remember. You ought to know, you saw more of his body than I did.”

“Thanks for reminding me. I don’t remember any tattoos. He had scars on his back. Did I tell you about that?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Bands of scar tissue across his back. He was probably physically abused in childhood.”

“It happens.”

“Uh-huh. Are you sleepy?”

“Sort of.”

“And I’m not letting you doze off. That’s the thing about fucking, it wakes women up and puts men to sleep. You’re an old bear and I won’t let you hibernate.”

“Ummmmm.”

“I’m glad you don’t have any tattoos. I’ll let you alone now. Good night, baby.”

 

I slept, and sometime during the night I awoke. I was dreaming, and then the dream had slipped away beyond recall and I was awake. Her body was drawn close to mine and I could feel her heat, and I was breathing her smell. I ran a hand along her flank, feeling the wonderful smoothness of her skin, and the suddenness of my own physical response surprised me.

I filled my hands with her and stroked her, and after a moment she made a sound not unlike a cat’s purr and rolled onto her back, shifting to accommodate me. I eased onto her and into her and our bodies found their rhythm and labored together, endlessly rocking.

Afterward she laughed softly, in the darkness. I asked her what was so funny.

“ ‘Repeatedly,’ “ she said.

 

In the morning I slipped out of bed and showered and dressed, then woke her to let me out and lock up after me. She wanted to make sure I had the sketch. I held up the cardboard core from a roll of paper towels, Galindez’s effort coiled within.

“Don’t forget I want it back,” she said.

I told her I’d take good care of it.

“And of yourself,” she said. “Promise?”

I promised.