“Shit. Oh, shit. Oh, God!” she said, pushing herself up into a sitting position against the wall. “What the hell are you doing with me?”
“Stalking your heart,” I said, tossing the roses onto her desk. “Here, let me help you up.”
I squatted down and grabbed Lorna under her arms and gently lifted her to her feet. She made feeble motions toward pushing me away, but her heart wasn’t in it. I embraced her tightly and she didn’t resist.
“We had a date, remember?” I whispered into her soft brown hair.
“I remember.”
“Are you ready to go?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I told you last night, don’t think.”
Lorna disengaged herself. “Don’t patronize me, Underhill,” she hissed. “I don’t know what you want, but I know you underestimate me. I’ve been around. I’m thirty-one years old. I’ve tried promiscuity and I’ve tried true love, and they’re like my dead leg: they don’t work. I don’t need a charity lover. I don’t need a deformity-lover. I don’t need compassion–and above all, I don’t need a cop.”
“But you need me.”
“No, I don’t!” She raised her hand to slap me.
“Do it, counselor,” I said. “Then I’ll file on you for a 647-f, assault on a police’ officer. You’ll have to investigate it yourself and then be in the incongruous position of being defendant, investigator, and defense attorney all at once. So go ahead.”
Lorna lowered her hand and started to laugh.
“Good,” I said. “I drop all charges and grant parole.”
“In whose custody?”
“In mine.”
“Under what conditions?”
“For starters, that you accept my flowers and have dinner with me tonight.”
“And then?”
“That will depend on your probation reports.”
Lorna laughed again. “Will I get time off for good behavior?”
“No,” I said, “I think it’s going to be a life sentence.”
“You’re out of your bailiwick, Officer, as you once said to me.”
“I’m above the law, counselor, as you once said to me.”
“Touché, Freddy.”
“A standstill, Lorna. Dinner?”
“All right. The flowers are lovely. Let me put them in water, then we can go.”
We headed for the beach and the Malibu Rendezvous, a classy seaside eatery I had catalogued in my mind since the “old days” when I dreamed of the “ultimate” woman. Now, years later, I was driving there, an adult, a policeman, with a crippled Jewish attorney sitting beside me blowing smoke rings and casting furtive glances at me as I drove.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“You told me not to think, remember?”
“I retract it.”
“All right. I was thinking that you’re too good looking. It’s disarming and it probably makes people underestimate you. There’s a side to you that could take advantage of that underestimation very easily.”
“That’s very perceptive. What else were you thinking?”
“That you’re too good to be a cop. No-don’t interrupt, I didn’t mean it quite that way; I’m glad you’re a cop. Eddie Engels would be free to kill with impunity if you weren’t. It’s just that you could be anything you want, literally. I was also thinking that I don’t want to be fawned over in a fancy restaurant; I don’t want to go clumping through there getting a lot of pitying looks.”
“Then why don’t we eat on the beach? I’ll have the restaurant fix us up with a picnic basket and a bottle of wine.”
Lorna smiled and blew a smoke ring at me, then tossed her cigarette out the window. “That’s a good idea,” she said.
I parked in the blacktopped area adjoining the restaurant, about a hundred yards away from the beach. Lorna waited in the car while I went to fetch our feast. I ordered three orders of cracked crab and a bottle of chablis. The waiter was hesitant about boxing an order “to go,” but changed his tune when I whipped a five-spot on him, even popping the cork on the wine bottle and throwing in two glasses.
Lorna was standing outside the car, smoking, when I returned. When she saw me she stared up at the warm summer sky and pointed her cane heavenward. I looked up, too, and committed the twilight sky and a low-hanging cloud formation to memory.