The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [124]
Then another car pulled into a parking place on the far side of the lot and Warren Ormont emerged from it. He stopped to light a cigarette and she watched him outlined boldly in the parking-lot floodlights. He was wearing a long Edwardian jacket and pearl gray slacks. He took a handkerchief from his breast pocket, polished his glasses, put them carefully back on, folded his handkerchief and tucked it back into his pocket. He consulted his watch, then walked across the lot and up the steps and through the swinging doors of the tavern. He did not glance toward her car, did not notice her at all.
All she had to do was turn the key in the ignition and drive home. She could invent an aphrodisiacal story for Sully out of her own imagination. It would be easy enough for her to do this. She had already that evening imagined enough encounters for a dozen stories.
She laughed hard at herself. Then she got out of the car. At least she could get a drink inside, and she seemed to need one.
Couples sat at several of the round oak tables, but the bar itself was almost empty. Warren sat at one end near the piano, and there were three men she did recognize at the other end. She took a stool near the middle of the bar and ordered applejack on the rocks with a little water. The bartender brought her the drink and she sipped at it, fighting back the impulse to drink it straight down. It was commercial applejack, nowhere near as good as the kind Sully drank.
She turned toward the piano. She recognized Bert LeGrand now, remembered his face from the other time she had been here. Odd that she had been unable to remember his face, but she surely recognized it now. She looked at his hands and felt the blood surge to her face. At just that instant Bert looked at her and smiled. It was a very confident smile. A cocksure smile, she thought, and her color deepened at the word.
He played “Love for Sale,” then segued immediately into “The Lady Is a Tramp.”
I could leave now, she thought. I could.
“Why hello there! What luck running into you here!”
She turned, smiled back at Warren’s smile. She said quietly, “You sound surprised.”
“Merely pleased. Superb timing, I might say. One more number and Bert severs his shackles and becomes a free man again. May I buy you another of those?”
“Please.”
He ordered another applejack for her, another cognac for himself. “To our possibilities,” he said.
“Yes, that’s a good toast.”
“The waiting is difficult, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is.”
“I think it enhances things, though. We suffer from an embarrassment of cars, by the way. Bert has his, I have mine, and I assume you didn’t come here on foot.”
“No, I drove.” Bert wrapped up the set with “Lover,” pushing the song along at a dizzying tempo. “My car is outside.”
“I’ll finish my drink now and go outside. I’ll wait in my car. Take you time finishing your drink; then go outside, and start your engine. You can follow me back to our house. Bert will be along in no time.”
“I don’t want to leave my car on the street.”
“It’s recognizable?”
“Very.”
“No problem there. I’ll pull up in front, you run your machine into the garage, and we’ll stack ours in the driveway behind it. It will entail a certain amount of vehicular maneuvering when you’re ready to leave, but we can put up with that.”
She nodded.
“And that won’t be for hours,” he said.
What fascinated her was that she seemed to have no will of her own. This had not been the case before. Even when the men she chose were strong and self-confident, as Hugh Markarian had been, she had always been the one who initiated, and in the course of things she had been more leader than follower. Now, in the living room of Warren Ormont’s house, she felt absolutely powerless and lacking in volition.
“That’s Bert’s car now,” he was saying. “He’ll be with us in a moment.”
She nodded.
“The characteristic putt-putt-putt of Bertram’s Volkswagen. Is your car a Triumph?”
“No, it’s a disaster.” He looked at her as if astonished that she was capable of a joke. “It’s