Bindlestiff nd-10 Read online

  She asked, “Have you talked to Eberhardt?”

  “No. Not since Saturday.”

  “How did it go then?”

  I gave her a capsule account of the conversation I’d had with him.

  “Sounds grim,” she said. “Have you made up your mind yet about the partnership?”

  “No. I will pretty soon, though. Pretty soon.”

  She was silent for a couple of seconds. Then she gave me an up-from-under look, one of those shrewd jobs of hers. “What about your Chinese girlfriend?” she said. “Did you talk to her today?”

  “Ah, Kerry, come on. There’s nothing between Jeanne Emerson and me.”

  “But she’d like there to be.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Is it?”

  “Sure it is,” I said. And it ought to have been, but I was afraid it wasn’t. Jeanne Emerson had called again today, while I’d been downtown letting the FBI ask me a bunch more bright questions, and left a message saying she’d like to get together some night this week. To talk about the article, she’d said, but she’d also suggested we have dinner. I hadn’t called her back. Yet.

  Kerry said, “Are you going to see her again?”

  “How do you mean, ‘see her’?”

  “Are you going to do that article with her?”

  “I don’t know, maybe.”

  “What if she tries to seduce you?”

  “Hah.”

  “But what if she does? What would you do?”

  “Fight her off with a whip and a chair.” But the question made me feel uncomfortable. “Listen,” I said seriously, “don’t be jealous, okay? I was jealous of you and look where that got us; we almost broke up over it. I don’t want that to happen again.”

  “What makes you think I’m jealous?”

  “Well, you’ve been acting jealous…”

  She reached over and picked a piece of lint or something off the sleeve of my bathrobe. Then she winked at me. “For a detective, you make a lot of wrong deductions. That’s because you’re too literal-minded.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Don’t be too sure I was as jealous as I seemed on Saturday,” she said. “Maybe I just wanted you to think I was jealous.”

  “Oh, so that’s it. What were you doing, testing me?”

  She shrugged. “Figure it out, detective,” she said and winked at me again.

  I gave her a long speculative look. Then I said, “So what do you want to do?”

  That caught her off balance. “About what? Dinner, you mean?”

  “We can worry about dinner later. I was thinking about now, the next couple of hours.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “What do you want to do?”

  “Practice my salesmanship, for starters.”

  “Salesmanship?”

  “In case I ever lose my license again and wind up having to take a job as a clerk in a men’s store.” I stood and leered down at her. “Would you care to see something in a bathrobe, madam?”

  “My goodness! Such as what, sir?”

  I took her into the bedroom and showed her.

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