A Date with an Angel

The angel behind the counter seemed to have completely forgotten our recent fond encounter. I was about to pull out another twenty to save time, when the black-haired seraph called to her.

"Please don't detain Mr. McGill, Candy. He's a guest of mine."

The girl in front looked as though she was about to pass out.

"Yes, Mrs. Patterson," she said. And led me rapidly—and deferentially—to the table.

Mrs. Patterson put down the book she'd been reading—Plato's Apology. She rose gracefully, smiled, and extended her gloved hand to me. She was wearing a simple, exquisitely tailored black dress ending just above the knee, with a string of pearls and matching earrings.

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The scent of very expensive, very subtle ginger perfume moved with her hand.

"Thanks for inviting me over, Mrs. Patterson. Don't let me interrupt your reading."

"Please. Lorna. Lorna Mackenzie. I try to avoid Patterson when I'm not in his direct presence." Somehow, the name didn’t fit. There was nothing Irish in her looks. I thought Eastern Europe. Probably Romania. I ignored that red flag for the moment—the first, though by now means the last. A lot of girls changed their names, I told myself—especially if those names were too obviously foreign.

"Having met the man, I can fully understand that," I continued with only the slightest pause. Though I was absolutely certain that Lorna felt the pause. And recognized her own attractiveness as the (partial) cause.

She smiled more broadly still.

"So I can assume that my husband hired you?"

"That is a completely reasonable assumption, Lorna. An assumption that may even be in full accord with the facts of the matter. But, of course, client confidentiality—which is as the very gospel unto me—forbids me from confirming or disconfirming that assumption."

She laughed then. Soft, like elven bells far away in a Dunsany story.

She then looked up at me with eyes that seemed not dark brown, but fully black, as though they opened into starless night. I thought momentarily of the very different eyes I'd seen two days earlier. The contrast was far more disturbing at close proximity than it had been a few minutes earlier on the street.

The image, though, was ephemeral—because her eyes were also disturbing in a far more ordinary, and staggeringly feminine, way. I found myself wondering actively why this woman would possibly be married to my esteemed client. Not that I believed that this seraph would have anything to do with my own shabby self. But Patterson? She could have done better.

She probably was doing better.

I reminded myself firmly of why I was there in the first place.

"I respect your commitments, Mr. McGill."

"We've met?" That I certainly would have remembered.

"I heard you play. Before the war. Haydn's 54th string quartet."

"At the DeLancey's. I remember the night. That was the best performance we ever gave. I've never known anyone to have an eye for second violins, though. We're pretty damned invisible."

"I never listen to the lead," she said simply.

She took out a cigarette. I lit it for her, and she looked at my left hand as I steadied the match.

"Shame about your hand."

"It is that," I replied.

"You miss playing?"

"Very much. Haydn particularly."

"His music always make me feel as though I'm walking in a garden on a sunny spring day."

"I know exactly what you mean," I said—and for an instant, fleeting as the heartbeat of a dying insect, I did know. As soon as the words were gone, though, there were no images to connect to those words. Just the gnawing feeling that something was wrong with endless winter.

She looked at me, piercingly, as though that offhand comment had been a test—and one that I'd failed. She smiled back at me. There was no joy in that smile

"Well, the war took a lot from us all, Mr. McGill. I was barely alive when Patterson met me. I didn't look like much then."

I stared at her in completely unfeigned amazement.

She smiled again. I was growing to like that smile. Too much. Far too much.

"Patterson, well, he saw potential. In me. In other investments. The war hadn't touched him. He was probably richer than before, though he never has told me a word about where the money came from."

I was liking Patterson less, and that was saying something. I asked myself if he could have been one of the War Profiteers. He had the build, and the arrogance. They were the lowest men walking. Not many of them left though; the Blue Berets had taken them out, one by one.

Blue Beret executions made the news once in a while. They weren't pretty. Nor were the faceless corpses they left behind. Just the words, "No face for faceless," written in precise, neat, military handwriting next to the deceased. In his own blood.

If Patterson was one of those bastards, making coin off the blood his countrymen, he'd be keeping an extremely low profile.

"I've wondered if I should have said no. Maybe starvation would have been better. But at the time? Food? Clothes? Jewelry? I just didn't have the strength to reject that.

"And he was different then. Not kind, certainly, but I believed that I was more to him that just an interesting investment. Now I know better."

I looked at the woman. I liked her, despite myself. Underneath the physical perfection, I thought I could see one of the starving teenagers who'd littered the streets just after the war.

"I'm sorry, Lorna. I mean that. But I'm working for your husband. You knew that—or suspected it pretty strongly. So why the cat and mouse? Why run, lose me completely, and then sit here waiting for me?"

"You're not the first, Mr. McGill." And there was a brief, almost cutting tone in her voice. "My husband," she said, visibly shuddering at the word as though she'd touched something unclean, "has sent several detectives after me over the course of the last few months. Some of the best men in Northside."

So that's what he meant about being disappointed in my higher-rent colleagues—and why he came down to the low rent district to talk to me, I thought.

"Good men in Northside."

"You're better, Mr. McGill. I was able to lose the others before they'd even left Cafe Neon. There are a number of distractions here."

"So I've seen."

"Candy—that's the little bitch at the front—is one of my best. You didn't even notice her."

"I did notice," I said honestly.

"But not enough to throw you off."

"Only a fool could be distracted from you by her, Lorna."

She smiled. I never have known a beautiful woman who tired of being reminded of that fact.

"But you'd lost me at the high-rise. My only option would have been to wait there. Possibly for days. I don't have that kind of manpower. The men on the Northside? They've got operatives. Stakeout teams. Frank McGill works alone." I smiled, trying to make poverty and failure into a definite, manly, and heroic, choice.

"You wouldn't have given up. 'Frank McGill gets it done.' Everyone up here has heard that.

I stared at her momentarily. Where had I gotten this apparently universal—and largely undeserved—reputation?

"I realized quickly that, at best, we'd play to a draw. I decided it was a better use of our time to speak directly."

I pretended to be flattered. But I'd seen her wait outside the cafe for me to disentangle myself from Candy. I decided to change the subject and play for time to start to unravel the conflicting signals I was getting.

"What happened to the other guys your husband—Mr. Patterson—hired?"

I'm sure she saw the tactic. But she ignored it completely.

"No idea. Several rather posh detective's offices did become immediately vacant after their failure."

I had no doubt about that.

"That's why I stopped here, Mr. McGill. Your music moved me deeply, and I'm not easily moved by such things. I feel I have some responsibility to you. If you go back to my husband," she said with the same shudder through her pale face, "and tell him you lost me, you're a dead man."

"I had that sense. Death doesn't frighten me, Lorna."

"Nor should it," she said enigmatically. Her hand brushed the book she'd been reading when I walked in. But there's no need to rush towards death."

"So you're going to offer me a better deal?"

"A deal, at least," she said with that laughter. Like elven bells.

"Do you gamble, Mr. McGill?"

I thought of my life, no security, no money in the bank, no steady income. Nothing, whatsoever, that I could predict.

"I gamble every day, Lorna. I'm a detective." I tried to make the line sound as hard as glass. I'm sure I didn't succeed.

"I thought so," she said with a touch of mockery in her voice, maybe.

"Here's what you're going to do. You're going to catch me. In the very act. Well, near to very act," she said smiling. "A girl does need to maintain some modesty."

"He'll kill you." I said simply.

"Well, that's my side of the gamble, Mr. McGill. He may. It's possible. But I don't think it's likely. He's invested too much in me, and he never walks away from equity. I'm betting that once his suspicions are confirmed, he and I will come to an agreement. He's done it before. With previous investments."

She looked down at the table, seeming to be profoundly sad.

"It's my only way out."

"There's no reason to rush towards death, Lorna.

She looked up, and I thought I saw tears in her eyes. "I'm not rushing towards death, Mr. McGill. I'm taking a calculated risk. I think the numbers are my favor."

I liked nothing about this deal. So I tried to play for time.

"And the gamble for me, Lorna?"

"The odds are that you'll have Patterson's undying gratitude. That will mean cash, and prestigious Northside business."

"The downside?"

"He may blame you for what you found out about me. He may kill you. But I don't think it's likely. And if you don't get him results..."

"I'm a dead man in any case."

"Exactly."

"So on my end, it's a risk versus a certainty. On your end, a risk you're willing to take."

"Exactly." She smiled, but I thought I caught a single tear on her cheek.

"One last question. If you don't mind."

"Always the detective, Mr. McGill?"

"I've got nothing else. Why didn't you let the other guys catch you?"

"Simple, Mr. McGill. They couldn't. I've never been unfaithful. It's simply not in my nature, however much I may loathe him. At least previously." She smiled deeply, looked at me with those black eyes, and for a moment I saw myself again in my tux, violin at the ready, waiting for the first violin's signal to begin.

That vision, like all visions, was extremely fleeting.

I was a broken-down detective again, with a client's wife trying to talk me into something that could only be profoundly deleterious to my health and future career opportunities.

"Today," she continued, with barely a break, "everything is in motion. That's why I ducked into the high-rise. Gave me a few minutes to make arrangements. Be outside in about 15 minutes. You'll have—probably—more business than you can handle, and a great deal of ready cash. I'll have an out. One way or the other."

She rose with astounding speed, dropped a hundred on the table, and left the café in a tornado of hair and legs.

I sat at the table for a couple of minutes, with the feeling that the rat must have in a psychologist's maze, if rats indeed have feelings about such things. But I didn't have the time to find any other moves.

I walked out of the cafe, slowly, to the clear relief of Candy, the low-level angel in front.

There was Lorna. Standing still, and apparently enjoying the more-than-appreciative looks from every man passing. She seemed slightly anxious, but smiled a triumphant smile when she saw me emerge into the blinding neon glare from the cafe.

A couple of minutes later, a Cadillac about the size of Vermont pulled up and she got in—showing considerably more of those impressive legs than was absolutely necessary. She kissed the driver. For a couple of minutes straight.

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I shot a roll of film with everything—from the leg show to the kiss. Everything was nice and clear. As though she and the driver were posing for the shots.