“Very close.”
“I suppose the big question is why.”
I had delayed making up my mind until that moment, but I had respect for the intelligence I saw in her eyes. “Some people tried to kill her. It was a very good try. They thought they had. She had a miraculous escape. So when she showed up again, it had to be a very nasty shock. They made absolutely certain the next time. So if one of them should see her again… we might make some good use of the reaction.”
She stared at me, swallowed visibly, put her fingertips to her throat. “Couldn’t it turn out to be a nasty shock to me, too?”
“There’ll be no way for him to get near you. That is absolutely guaranteed. You’ll understand when we show you the physical layout. And if at that point, you want to say no, you’ll still get the five hundred.”
She looked at the picture again. “She’s very interesting looking. But it is sort of a cheap pose, actually. Do you know how she held herself, how she walked, all that?”
“Mr. Meyer and I spent two days with her.”
“She was about twenty-five?”
“Twenty-six.”
“What did she do?”
“She’d been a prostitute for twelve years.”
Merrimay’s brown eyes widened. “My word, that’s quite an early start, isn’t it?”
“For a time she was a five-hundred-dollar call girl in New York.”
She looked incredulous. “They make that much?”
“A few of them.”
She shrugged. “Okay, then. It’s a deal, provided I can back out if there’s something I don’t want to do. But I don’t want to know any more about this until Si Kretoffski gets me fixed up.”
“The sun poisoned her,” I said. “She was quite pale.”
“I can see that. It’s no problem. What about clothes?”
“I think,” Meyer said, “what she was wearing the first time they tried.”
He looked at me and I nodded. “Miss Lane, it was an oyster white wraparound skirt in that OrIon fleece material, and a sleeveless blouse, raw silk, natural, with sort of a Chinese collar effect in front, and cut halfway down the back, a circular cut.”
She frowned. “Wardrobe might have it. How much time is there?”
“It will happen early Tuesday morning.”
“Oh, then if they don’t have it, I can find something close enough. You’ll pay expenses?”
“Of course.”
By quarter of five that Saturday afternoon, we were ready to demonstrate the final result to Jake Karlo. Merrimay wanted time to freshen her makeup, so we went to Jake’s office. Meyer said, “Mr. Karlo, you have some fantastic talents available to you. And that girl may be better than you know. I am exhausted. She bled us of every shred of information. Every habitual gesture we could remember. She even worked on the voice, saying that she knew she wouldn’t need it, but it would make her feel more like the other girl. Travis, she deserves a bonus.”
“Approved.”
She tapped on the door and came in. The clothing was almost exact, and the shoes she had picked to go with it were what I could imagine Vangie picking. Kretoffski had worked a miracle on her eyes. Only the color was wrong, too deep and soft a brown.
It was Vangie’s walk, that tautly controlled sway, swing and tilt of hip, toeing in slightly. It was Vangie’s pallor, and her way of looking at you, head lowered, a look of brooding challenge. She tilted her head to thumb back a wing of the dark hair, and, pitching her voice deeper, came very close to achieving that same richness.
She stood, hipshot, in front of the desk. “They said you boys wanted me in here. I’m Vangie, it’s short for Evangeline. Bellemer. honest to God, it’s getting to be a real drag hanging around here the whole damn day long, I mean I’m like used to more action.”
She turned away, did a vague slow dance step, turned and dropped into a chair and scowled at us. “Trav, honey, the very least you could do is break out some good bourbon for Vangie, I mean it’s coming up that time of day, isn’t it?” She ran her tonguetip along her underlip. I’d seen Vangie do that, just as slowly, forty times.