The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes

  “And if it was all the same to them, you’d just as soon get paid in pussy. Oh, come on. Don’t tell me you weren’t expecting this.”

  “I suppose I was.”

  “I’d have to be grateful, wouldn’t I? I was this close to getting locked up.”

  “You could have had a change of heart,” he pointed out. “The lines I printed out for you? You could have come up with them on your own, and meant them.”

  “But that’s not what would have happened.”

  “How can you know that for sure? We’ll never know, because I didn’t give you the chance to change your mind.”

  “And a good thing, Doak, because that wasn’t gonna happen. What was it you said, when you pretended to try to talk me back into it? ‘I bet you’ve got the thousand dollars in your purse.’ Well, you’re damn right I did, and that wasn’t all I had. There was another envelope, a thicker one, with twenty thousand in it, because I knew you’d want half the money before you did the work, and I wanted to move right on to the next step.”

  “Who told you the price was going to be forty thousand?”

  “Nobody. I was just guessing, and what I guessed was fifty, but twenty-five was more than I could come up with, it was a stretch to get my hands on twenty. And you know, a bird in the hand. Oh, that’s an idea.”

  Her fingers found him again. “Now I’ve got your bird in my hand. Now you touch me. Put your finger in. Yes, that’s nice. Let’s not do anything, let’s just go on conversating while we touch each other like this.”

  “Conversating?”

  “Haven’t you heard people say that? I love it, it’s such a nice clunky word. Suppose the price was fifty thousand and you wanted half in advance, and all I could come up with was twenty. You’d have taken it, wouldn’t you?”

  “Wouldn’t I have to be a hit man to answer that?”

  “Yeah, it’s a little too hypothetical, isn’t it? What kind of name is Doak?”

  “The only one anybody ever calls me.”

  “Somebody must call you Mr. Miller. That’s the last name you said for the tape, and it would have to be your real name if you were preparing something for use as evidence in a murder trial. Except it wouldn’t be murder unless you did it. What would I have been charged with?”

  “Criminal solicitation to murder.”

  “I was arrested once for soliciting. Which was pure bullshit, because I was the one girl from Minnesota who got off the bus in Port Authority and didn’t get turned out by a pimp.”

  “You came to New York?”

  “I didn’t stay long. The city scared the crap out of me. And the prices! Three, four days and I was back at Port Authority getting on another bus.”

  “But not back to Minnesota.”

  “No. How I got arrested, this cop in Houston hit on me and I wasn’t interested. I was a barista in a place that wished it was Starbucks, and this creepy guy hit on me, which happened all the time, and I blew him off. And he showed me a badge.”

  “And arrested you?”

  “Gave me a choice. ‘You can suck my cock and I’ll let you go, or I’ll slap the cuffs on you and swear you offered to suck me off, and you’ll say you didn’t, and who do you think they’ll believe?’ Me, I thought, because everybody must know you’re a lying sack of shit, and I held out my hands for the cuffs.”

  “And he laughed and let you go.”

  “No, I told you I got arrested. He put the cuffs on and told me I was under arrest and led me out of there, and when we got around the corner he laughed, like it was a big joke, and of course I didn’t think he was serious, did I? And after he copped a feel he unlocked the handcuffs and told me I was free to go, and when I walked into the shop everybody stared at me.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I could have toughed it out, but for minimum wage? I decided the hell with the Coffee Clutch, and the hell with Houston, for that matter. Criminal solicitation to murder. That sounds serious.”

  “It’s a step or two beyond littering.”

  “They’d have put me in jail, wouldn’t they?”

  “They’d have sent you to prison.”

  “But they won’t, thanks to Mr. Miller. Doak Miller?”

  “Right.”

  “You said some initials, and I don’t believe either one of them was a D. One was a J, and I’m not sure of the other.”

  “J. W. Miller.”

  “Which one of them stands for Doak?”

  “The W.”

  “You spell funny.”

  “My given name,” he said, “is Jay Walker Miller.”

  “What’s the J stand for? Mookie?”

  “No, Jay’s my first name, J-A-Y.”

  “Three letters, but it sounds the same as the one letter. That must be a pain in the ass, having to spell it out all the time.”

  “You got that right.”

  “I’ve known girls named Bea and Dee and Kaye, but those were nicknames for Beatrice and Dolores and Katherine, not actual official names. I still don’t get how the W got to stand for Doak.”

  “It’s not a very interesting story.”

  “Tell me anyway,” she said, and gave him a gentle squeeze. “And how would it be if you put two fingers in? And you could move them around a little bit while you tell me.”

  “So you don’t get bored.”

  “Oh, I won’t get bored. I’m a long ways away from bored. Don’t move your fingers too much, you don’t have to stir me up, just . . . yeah, like that. That’s kind of nice, moving them like that.”

  So he started talking, telling her how his name was Jay Walker Miller because that was how it worked in his family. His mother’s maiden name was Marjorie Walker, so he got Walker for a middle name, and his father’s name was Jay Prescott Miller, because his father’s mother’s maiden name, which is to say his grandmother’s name, was Juliana Prescott.

  So he was a Jay, like his father, but not a Junior, because they had different middle names. And it was actually a tradition that went back a total of four or five generations, but it stopped with him. He’d married a woman named Doreen Geoghegan, and he was damned if he was going to saddle a kid with a middle name no one was sure how to pronounce. The fucking Geoghegans couldn’t even agree on it, one branch of the family calling themselves GAY-gan, the others opting for Guh-HEE-gan. And nobody ever called him Jay, and a name that sounded like an initial was a pain in the ass anyway, so the hell with it. His son was Gary Andrew Miller, and he’d spared the little prick a lifetime of aggravation, and for what? The kid wouldn’t speak to him.

  “Why?”

  “We’ll get to that,” he said. “Everybody called my father Jay, so they had to call me something different, and they settled on Walker. And then somebody, I think it was one of my uncles, remembered a football player named Doak Walker. He was a Texas kid who played for SMU, a three-time All-American. ESPN put him fourth on the list of all-time great college football players. Then he went on to play half a dozen seasons for the Detroit Lions, and after he was through they retired his number.”

  “What was the number?”

  “Thirty-seven. Why?”

  “To see if you knew it. I’m sorry, keep talking. And keep, um—”

  “Doing this?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I know a whole lot about Doak Walker, and I’m tempted to tell you every last word of it because I don’t ever want to take my fingers out of you. Are you okay with that?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I grew up thinking Doak was his nickname, same as it was mine, but one day I looked it up and found out his actual name was Ewell Doak Walker, Junior. So it was his real middle name, and it was his father’s real middle name, and where it came from originally I have no idea. But I could make something up, just to keep on talking.”

  “Or you could forget him and tell me more about you.”

  “Or I could stop talking,” he said, “and eat your pussy.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Yes, you co
uld do that.”

  He slid his hands under her buttocks and put his mouth on her and the world went away.

  Twelve

  * * *

  “Well, I think we’ve established that you can make me come.”

  “I almost didn’t want you to,” he said, “because then I’d have to stop.”

  “But you didn’t stop, did you? Jesus Christ, you kept going and I kept coming. The Energizer Bunny, takes a ticking and keeps on licking.”

  “I think you just might have that backwards.”

  “And it’s not the Bunny anyway, it’s some other commercial.”

  “Timex watches.”

  “Okay. Okey dokey. Okey Doak-y, I mean. God, listen to me. Or don’t listen to me. You know that expression, fucking somebody’s brains out? I think that’s what just happened to me.”

  “God, you’re beautiful.”

  “Don’t change the subject. You know what I still don’t get? What it was that made you decide to sabotage the sheriff’s sting. It can’t be because you have a lot of trouble getting laid. I don’t believe that for a minute.”

  “I know, it’s a real problem. Women are after me all the time. My house is on a creek, but with a little digging I could extend it so that I had a moat around it.”

  “You’ve got a girlfriend, don’t you?”

  “There’s one woman I see three or four times a month.”

  “Married, right? And she’s the only one?”

  “Sometimes I go out for a drink and I get lucky. But not all that often.”

  “And you don’t look all that hard for it, either.”

  “No, I guess I don’t. And no, I didn’t write out a script for you last night because it was the best way I could think of to get laid.”

  “God, I hope not. Printing everything out by hand in big block capitals. I just know you’ve got a computer. You’d need it or how could you Google people like Doak Walker? Haven’t you got a little old ink-jet printer to keep it company?”

  “There’s a record of everything you do on a computer.”

  “Even if you erase it?”

  “I don’t trust any of that. It gets on your hard drive and you think you’ve deleted it and it stores copies of itself in six different places. And some kid who drove his teachers nuts until they kicked his ass out of school, he sits down with the computer you scrubbed, and he can tell you what you had for breakfast and where you got your shoes.”

  “So you decided to be careful,” she said. “I get it. I’m not used to thinking that way. I’ve never had to be careful before.”

  “You weren’t very careful talking to Richard Gonson.”

  “No.”

  “You asked me a question, and I keep not answering it. I suppose I’m afraid of sounding like a moron. Well, too bad if I do. I’m going to tell you a fantasy I’ve had for over twenty years.”

  Thirteen

  * * *

  It was still full dark during the drive home, but the sky was starting to lighten up by the time he pulled into his driveway. He needed a shower, he’d driven all the way home smelling himself and smelling her on him, but when he got his clothes off he stretched out on the bed, just for a minute, and when he finally opened his eyes it was past noon.

  He spent a long time in the shower, decided he didn’t need to shave, but looked at himself in the mirror for a long moment. A little more gray at the temples, and he didn’t mind it there, but knew it was the thin edge of the wedge. There’d be more gray coming.

  He checked his phone. There was a call he had to return, from an insurance office in Perry that used him now and again for background checks. It didn’t pay all that much, but he could generally get the job done without leaving his house, just noodling around a little on his computer.

  Funny how computers had scared the crap out of him when they first started showing up at the station house. He’d thought of himself as an old-school cop, getting out in the city streets and knocking on doors, burning rubber, wearing out shoe leather. But the fear went away over time, and it turned out he had a natural affinity for the machine. The department would pay if you wanted to take a course on your own time, so he went to a third-floor room at John Jay three nights a week and let a young woman with a nose ring and a Hello Kitty tattoo turn him into an expert, though he didn’t kid himself. He knew he was still nowhere near the proficiency level of the average twelve-year-old.

  He returned the call, and the agent agreed to email him the applicant’s name and vitals. The agent, Bob Newhouser, had played sports at Indian River State College in Fort Pierce, and now spent as much time as he could on the golf course. He liked golf jokes as much as he liked golf, and had a new one this morning, and Doak didn’t have to force his laugh.

  He booted up his computer, checked his email, deleted most of it. He stood up, realized he was hungry, and remembered emptying the milk carton over the last of the cereal. Was there anything in the refrigerator? Nothing but beer, and that wasn’t how the day ought to start.

  He checked his other phone. The new one.

  Nothing.

  He went out for breakfast.

  They’d taken both cars from Kimberley’s to the motel. She led in the Lexus and he followed her along the stretch of empty road, parked in the back near the cabin she’d rented.

  And when it was time to go he’d stood in the cabin’s doorway and watched her taillights disappear in the distance.

  First, though, he’d given her a cell phone. He’d bought two of them for $39.99 apiece in a 7-Eleven on 41, paying cash and waving away the receipt. He’d tossed the packaging and instructions and programmed each with the phone number of the other. And in the little Tourist Court cabin he’d given her one of them and showed her how it worked. “It’s prepaid,” he said, “with more message units than we’re likely to use. You use it only to call me, and only on the number that it’s already set to dial. Never call me on any other phone, and never call any other number from this phone, and—”

  “I get it. It’ll be in my purse, and I won’t leave home without it. But I think I’ll keep it turned off and just check it from time to time.”

  “That’s what I intend to do.”

  “It’s complicated, isn’t it? I like your fantasy better. We just get in the car and disappear. But it wouldn’t work, would it?”

  “For days, maybe weeks. Even as a fantasy that was about as much mileage as I could get out of it. You know the first thing you said to me at Kimberley’s?”

  “I forget what it was.”

  “ ‘Now what?’ ”

  “Was that what I said? Yes, I guess it was.”

  “A couple of days, a couple of weeks at the outside, and that’s the question we’d both be asking, and neither one of us would be able to come up with an answer.”

  “You did make it sound good, though.”

  “Riding off into the sunset.”

  “I was about ready to do it. Not even go back to pack a bag.”

  “That’s an important part of it, not wasting a minute. The clothes on our backs and nothing else.”

  “Not bad. How many years did you run that tape?”

  “Maybe twenty. Maybe more. You’re the only person who ever got to hear it.”

  “I think I knew that. And now—”

  “Now it’s gone,” he said.

  “Did I do something to spoil it?”

  He shook his head. “What killed it was hearing myself say the words. See, it’s a fantasy about running, about a new start in a new place. The partner’s just a reason to run and start over.”

  “In other words, a geographical solution.”

  “Which is how the West was won, you know. A whole swarm of malcontents telling themselves that the next place would be better.”

  “Makes me think of my mama and the losers she kept hooking up with. And me, for Christ’s sake, playing hopscotch with a map of America.”

  “I came to Florida for a new start. And found it, fair enough, but I to
ok myself along.”

  “Hard not to, isn’t it? I make that little mistake every time. Doak, if your fantasy’s dead, where do we go from here?”

  “ ‘Now what.’ ”

  “Yeah, that’s still the question, isn’t it? More than ever.” She tilted her head, showed him the blue of her eyes. “I guess we’ll have to look for the answer.”

  He drove to the Denny’s on the motel strip outside of Perry, because they served breakfast around the clock, but when he looked at the menu he decided what he really wanted was a patty melt and an order of onion rings.

  There was a 7-Eleven next door, but it was the one where he’d paid cash for the two cell phones. There’d be a different clerk at this hour, and nobody would bother to look at him twice, but it was just as easy to drive to the next convenience store on the strip for a box of cereal and a quart of milk and the couple of other things he’d run low on. He found enough items to get over the store’s credit card minimum, and used his Visa, because another thing he was running low on was cash.

  Back at his computer, he spent an hour checking out Raymond Fred Gartner, who’d been persuaded to insure his life for half a million dollars, with the benefit doubled in the event of accidental death.

  Double indemnity, in other words, and that made him think of the movie, and that made him think of Lisa.

  He finished his work on Gartner, and if there was any reason to turn down his application, he couldn’t see what it might be. As far as he could tell, the most interesting thing about the man was his middle name, which was in fact Fred and not Frederick or Alfred or some other more formal equivalent.

  He could have written up his report on the spot, he had all the data he needed, but a certain boots-on-the-ground presence made a good impression. So he got in the car and drove to the address he had for Raymond Fred.

  Why not either Raymond Frederick or Ray Fred? Full names all the way or get all good-old-boy and pair the nicknames cracker-style, as in Joe Bob and Billy Ray . . .

  He managed to find Gartner’s address and circled the block, fair-sized ranch houses on landscaped lots, a suburban neighborhood in keeping with the sense of Gartner his computer had furnished. It wouldn’t surprise him to know that the average homeowner carried a policy along the lines of what Newhouser had sold Gartner.