Nothing in Her Way - By Charles Williams Page 0,3

my shoulder, and brightened. “But perhaps Miss Holman can. Here she comes now.”

I looked around, and then stood up, trying to keep my face still and stiffen the weak feeling in my knees. She was wearing a clear plastic raincoat with a hood, and her hair was the color of a bottle of burgundy held up to the light. As he had said, Miss Holman was a very lovely girl.

The only catch was that her name wasn’t Miss Holman. I was reasonably sure of that. I’d known her for twenty-three years, and I’d been married to her for two.

Two

It was insane.

There wasn’t a quiver of an eyelash as Charlie introduced us. She’d never seen me before. She looked at me and said coolly and quite pleasantly, “How do you do, Mr. Belen?”

I could hear Charlie still talking. “Mike is an old, old friend, my dear. I am trying to persuade him to join us.”

I took it from her and played it deadpan. There didn’t seem to be anything else to do, and I was too dumfounded to think. God alone knew what she was up to, and there wasn’t any use even trying to guess. Was Charlie lying to me, or was she lying to Charlie? Since there was no known record of Charlie’s ever having told the truth about anything, the answer would seem to be obvious, but I wasn’t too sure. Dullness had never been one of her faults.

We sat down again, and she ordered a Ramos fizz. She was on Charlie’s side of the table, directly across from me, and when the drink came she leaned forward a little and said, wide-eyed, “I do hope you’ll help us, Mr. Belen.”

She could open a safe that way. In Salem, they’d have burned her—or they would have if there’d been enough women on the jury. Nothing had changed in two years. The dark red hair was short-cropped and as carelessly tousled as a child’s. Her face just missed being heart-shaped and petite, but there was nothing of the expressionless doll about it. It was mobile and almost flamboyantly alive, with only a subtle hint of the temperament you know damned well was there if you’d ever been married to her. She had a little dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose, and her eyes were dark brown and a little long for her face. Right now there was a blue silk scarf knotted about her chin, the big bow coming up beside her cheek and giving her a deceptively little-girl look. She was a little girl, all right—the same loaded little girl with a short fuse.

We were divorced two years ago, and the only thing I’d heard of her in all that time was that she’d married some New York bookie named Lane. I thought of the last time I’d seen her. It was raining that night, too, and I remembered how black and shiny the streets were as we walked down the hill from the hotel in San Francisco. We said good-by quite calmly at the airline office on Union Square, and then I’d gone on to the men’s bar in the St. Francis and ordered a drink, suddenly conscious of how peaceful everything seemed—and how empty.

I snapped out of it and came back to the present, realizing I’d been staring at her. Charlie’s proposition had been nothing but a bore, but now it had exploded right in my face. There was a horrible fascination about it, and it boiled down to that same question: Just who was bamboozling whom? Was Charlie trying to sell me the sad story of Elaine Holman, or was she selling him?

But that was unbelievable. Charlie was a pro; he’d dealt in flimflam all his life; he had a mind like a steel trap; and he’d been around so long he wouldn’t bet you even money you didn’t have three hands on your left arm unless you’d let him take it home first and look at it. She couldn’t have the colossal nerve to try to pull something on him. Oh, couldn’t she? I thought.

I lit her a cigarette, and then one for myself. She gave me a smile that would warm a duck blind, and turned to Charlie. “I do hope Mr. Belen will join us. He’s perfect for the job, and you just know instinctively that you can trust him.”

I loved that. Maybe, I thought, in this idea they’re cooking up, they have to leave somebody alone for a