AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Constance’s wake-up hour.”
“Transylvania time? Hell.” Crumley took a deep breath. “Do I drive you?”
A single peach fell from a hidden garden tree. It thumped.
“Yes!” I said.
34
“At dawn,” said Crumley, “if you’re singing soprano, don’t call.”
And he drove off.
Constance’s house was, as before, a perfection, a white shrine set to glow on the shoreline. All of its doors and windows stood wide. Music played inside the huge stark white living room: some old Benny Goodman.
I walked the shore as I had walked a thousand nights back, checking the ocean. She was there somewhere racing porpoises, echoing seals.
I looked in at the parlor floor, littered with four dozen circus-bright pillows, and the bare white walls where, late nights until dawn, the shadow shows passed, her old films projected from the years before I was born.
I turned because a wave, heavier than the rest, had slammed on the shore ….
To deliver forth, as from the rug tossed at Caesar’s feet …
Constance Rattigan.
She came out of the wave like a loping seal, with hair almost the same color, slick brown and water combed, and her small body powdered with nutmeg and doused in cinnamon oil. Every autumn tint was hers in nimble legs and wild arms, wrists, and hands. Her eyes were a wicked wise merry small creature’s brown. Her laughing mouth looked stained by walnut juice. She was a frisking November surf creature rinsed out of a cold sea but hot as burnt chestnuts to touch.
“Son of a bitch,” she cried. “You!”
“Daughter of the Nile! You!”
She flung herself against me like a dog, to get all the wetness off on someone else, grabbed my ears, kissed my brow, nose, and mouth, then turned in a circle to show all sides.
“I’m naked, as usual.”
“I noticed, Constance.”
“You haven’t changed: you’re looking at my eyebrows instead of my boobs.”
“You haven’t changed. The boobs look firm.”
“Not bad for a night-swimming fifty-six-year-old former movie queen, huh? C’mon!”
She ran up the sand. By the time I reached her outdoor pool she had brought out cheese, crackers, and champagne.
“My God.” She uncorked the bottle. “It’s been a hundred years. But I knew someday you’d come back. Got marriage out of your blood? Ready for a mistress?”
“Nope. Thanks.”
We drank.
“You seen Crumley in the last eight hours?”
“Crumley?”
“Shows in your face. Who died?”
“Someone twenty years ago, at Maximus Films.”
