Read Online When the Sacred Ginmill Closes by Lawrence Block - Free Book Online

of people went from the office. I wouldn't have had to know how to get there, I could have had a ride, I could have been part of the office crowd, come to pay my respects along with everybody else. But he said not to, he said it wouldn't look right."
    Her bare arms were lightly dusted with golden hair. She was wearing perfume, a floral scent with anundertaste of musk.
    "He said it wouldn't look right," she said. "He said it was a matter of respect for the dead." She picked up her glass and stared into it.
    She said, "Respect. What's the man care about respect? What's he so much as know about respect, for the dead or for the living? I would just have been part of the office crowd. We both work there atTannahill, far as anyone knows we're just friends. Lord's sake, all we ever were is friends."
    "Whatever you say."
    "Well, shit," she said, drawling it, giving the word an extra syllable or two. "Ah don't mean to say Ah wasn't fucking him. Ah surely don't mean that. But all it ever waswas laughs and good times. He was married and went home to mama most every night"- she drank some Amaretto- "and that wasjes fine, believe me, because who in her rightmind'd want TommyTillary around by the dawn's early light? Christ in the foothills, Matthew, did I spill this or drink it?"
    We agreed that she was drinking them a little too fast. Sweet drinks, we assured each other, had a way of sneaking up on a person. It was this fancy New York Amaretto shit, she maintained. It wasn't like the bourbon she'd grown up on. You knew where you stood with bourbon.
    I reminded her that I was a bourbon drinker myself, and it pleased her to learn this. Alliances have been forged on more tenuous bonds than that, and she sealed ours with a sip from my glass. I offered it to her, and she put her little hand on mine to steady the glass, sipping daintily at the liquor.
     
* * *
     
    "BOURBON is low-down," she said. "You know what I mean?"
    "Here I thought it was a gentleman's drink."
    "It's for a gentleman likes to get down in the dirt. Scotch is vests and ties and prep school. Bourbon is an old boy ready to let the animal out, ready to let the nasty show. Bourbon is sitting up on a hot night and not minding if you sweat."
    Nobody was sweating. We were in her apartment, sitting on her couch in a sunken living room set about a foot below the level of the kitchen and foyer. Her building wasan Art Deco apartment house on Fifty-seventh just a few doors west of Ninth. A bottle of Maker's Mark from the store around the corner stood on top of her glass-and-wrought-iron coffee table. Her air-conditioner was on, quieter than mine and more effective. We were drinking out of rocks glasses but we weren't bothering with ice.
    "You were a cop," she said. "Didn't he tell me that?"
    "He could have."
    "And now you're a detective?"
    "In a way."
    "Just so you're not a robber. Be something if I got myself stabbed by a burglar tonight, wouldn't it? He's with me and she gets killed, and then he's with her and I get killed. Except I don't guess he's with her right about now, is he. She's in the ground by now."
    Her apartment was small but comfortable. The furniture had cleanlines, the pop art prints on the brick wall were framed simply in aluminum frames. From her window you could see the green copper roof of theParc Vendome on the far corner.
    "If a burglar came in here," she said, "I'd stand a better chance than she did."
    "Because you've got me to protect you?"
    "Mmmm," she said."Mahhero."
    We kissed then. I tipped up her chin and kissed her, and we moved into an easy clinch. I breathed in her perfume, felt her softness. We clung together for a moment or two, then withdrew and reached as if in synchronization for our drinks.
    "Even if I was alone," she said, picking up the conversation as readily as she'd picked up the drink. "I could protect myself."
    "You're a karate black belt."
    "I'm a beaded belt, honey, to match my purse. No, I could protect myself with this here, just give