Last to Know: A Novel(26)

“Mal, are you there?”

She closed her eyes, leaning back in her burgundy padded velvet banquette, the phone clasped to her chest. It was Harry.

“Of course I’m here,” she said, smiling to herself, “and you’ll never guess where I am either.” She lowered her voice and tucked the phone under her hair, keeping Harry close to her. “Are you calling to say you are getting on that plane?”

“Not this time, Mal. I just wanted to say…”

The phone went dead. Mal rattled it furiously, clamped it to her ear again, but he was gone. She couldn’t call him back from here, it would be positively rude and to the French, no doubt indiscreet, to call one’s lover from a public place so everyone could hear you fighting about getting on a flight and getting your ass over here to be with her …

She would call him back later, if she could ever get him, of course. You never knew where Harry might be from one minute to the next.

Still, he had called her. And she was surrounded by beautiful people so she might as well people watch, and enjoy a fabulous meal in one of Paris’s most beautiful restaurants. And the hell with Harry. Well, almost. Anyway, the food was fabulous! Oh God, she was so alone without him.





19


It was lateish, after ten that night anyway, when Harry finally sat himself down in his favorite red-vinyl booth at Ruby’s Diner, the one with the perfect view of the door so he could check who came in, who went out. The dog hunkered on its haunches awaiting its own “Squeeze special” raw burger, which it practically inhaled in one ecstatic mouthful. The procedure was always completed before Harry even put in his own order, though, like Squeeze’s, his was always the same: a Ruby cheeseburger, Swiss, charred, well done. Lately he’d been trying to do without the fries but the night seemed to call for comfort food. After looking at a particularly gruesome murdered body in the icy morgue and hours spent fruitlessly searching for a drug dealer by the name of Divon, who’d had a rap sheet since he was a kid with probation orders and time for drugs, and who seemed to have skipped town, he needed a burger and a beer. Besides, Mal was on his mind. He wondered what she was doing. Alone. In Paris.

Ruby’s was jammed. The plate-glass windows with their looped-back red-checked curtains gave a view of the cold and still-busy street, making inside seem even cozier. The Formica tables were the same ones that had been there since Ruby’s opened and the matronly waitresses might have been from the same decade. Doris, Harry’s favorite, came over as he sat down. Without asking she placed a cold bottle of Miller in front of him, took the iPad from the pocket of her white apron, and looked expectantly at him.

“Not that I need it,” she said, putting the iPad back into her pocket. “It’ll be the same old same. So, where’s the Eyetalian tonight, then?”

Harry sighed. “Come on, Doris, you can’t go on calling Rossetti that.”

“Takes one to know one.” Doris’s dark eyes crinkled in a grin. “Only an Italian can call another Italian an Eyetalian. So? Is it the usual?”

Harry nodded. Pulling off his old black leather bomber jacket, he checked the room. He’d sometimes brought Mal here. She had never liked it, and nor, he thought now, had Doris liked her, though both had been scrupulously polite. Mal had complained about the smell of fried food and chicken gravy that somehow always hung around the place, and Doris had decided the fiancée felt she was slumming.

Harry took a long cold gulp of the beer, closed his eyes, and tried to think good thoughts. He heard Squeeze give a warning growl and looked up.

A young woman was sliding into his booth. She sat down opposite him, not smiling, just looking, brows raised in a question. Then, “Hi,” she said.

Even sitting he could tell she was tall. Late twenties. Fire-red bangs over pale eyes, and a short swinging red bob. Roundish face but nice cheekbones; definitely not skinny but neither was she plump. She looked, Harry thought, like a woman who might enjoy the occasional french fry without too much guilt.

She held out her hand to him. Her short nails were polished shiny black and she wore a thin gold band on the third finger—right hand, though, not left. She had on a black leather bomber jacket, not unlike Harry’s own, with a white T-shirt under and though he could not see her feet because they were already under his table, Harry would bet she was wearing towering heels and a short skirt. She was just that kind of woman. Young, confident, and very much of today. And Harry very much did not have time for her.

“You’ll excuse me,” he said, icily polite, “I’m about to eat my dinner.”

“No trouble, I’ll join you.” She gave him a wide smile of such dazzling confidence Harry almost succumbed to his curiosity.

Squeeze emerged from under the table. Harry put a hand on the dog’s collar.

“Jeez,” the girl said, amazed, “I didn’t even see him. Is he supposed to be in here?”

“Special dispensation,” he said.

She took away the hand she had offered Harry and which was still unshaken, and instead offered it to the dog who sniffed it curiously then settled back down under the table.

“Such wonderful blue eyes,” she said. “I’ve never seen a dog like that.”

It was a direct line to Harry’s heart: love me, love my dog. “Squeeze is part malamute,” he said. “Arctic dogs, sort of like Huskies.”