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MYSTERY BY SARAH ANDREWS
AN EYE
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When he had finished asking his question, he put one elbow on the table, rested his chin in his hand, and waited for me to speak. He was old enough that such a gesture pushed the skin up on one side of his face, cocking one of his superbly graying eyebrows into an inquisitive angle.
I didn’t answer right away. Instead, I distracted myself by trying to calculate his age. Fifty? Fifty-five? Certainly the progress of at least that many years lay about him, imbuing his pleasant looks and rangy build with a comforting gravity.
He added cream—without stirring—to the coffee the waiter had just brought him and raised it to his lips, pretending to find great interest in this short view of the universe. Swirling steam. Black and white churning slowly into brown. He took a careful sip, and, content with its temperature, followed with a long, satisfied draw of the acrid brew.
The rich scent of coffee rose from my own cup, too. I stared at him gape-mouthed. He worked as an undercover agent for the FBI. I didn’t know his name. And if I understood him correctly, he had just offered me a job. Sort of.
I glanced away, hoping to see Ray returning from the men’s room. Seconds passed, half a minute. Feeling the agent’s eyes on me again, I squirmed, realizing that he was too confident
in his work, and too calmly intelligent to be deterred by silence. “What’s your real name?” I asked, trying next to avert the subject of the job by getting off the hot seat and offering it to him. “On the phone you said Tom Latimer, but like I said, that’s not your name, right? I mean, that was just the name you were using on the dinosaur job, right?”
“You help me with this job and I’ll tell you my real, honest-to-gosh, no kidding name,” he said, beginning to smile.
I wondered if trout see smiles like that on the faces of fishermen who feel the hook sink home. I tried to believe I would not thrash, but hooked fish have no dignity. And I wondered why had he waited until Ray left the table to ask his question.
With proper flourishes, the maitre d’ seated a couple at the table to my left, arranging their heavy cloth napkins on their laps as if American culture had a place for such groveling displays of class consciousness. The man searched around for a place to hang his cream-colored Stetson, and wound up resting it on the tablecloth. He kept a hand on it, fiddling nervously with the grosgrain ribbon at the edge of the brim.
Ignoring the waiter and the menus he artfully placed before them, the couple fell into a tense minuet of banal conversation and missed eye contact. The young blonde woman said, to the remarkably fit gray-haired man, “Well, like, I’ve known him like two months, but it’s like, so
real
when we’re together.” She shifted her slender torso constantly as she spoke and twisted a ring set with a huge stone, trying in vain to make it a casual motion. “I mean, we can, like, talk about
anything
. It’s really a
great
relationship. I’m really,
really
thinking this is something
special
this time, you know?”
The man drew his elbows up onto the table, folding his hands over his mouth so that his face was less readable. He bobbed his head a little, distractedly indicating that he had heard her.
Discomforted by his minimal response, she said, “I like,
love
to sit up late with him. It’s okay with him if all we do is
talk
. You know? But of course, I suppose
you
wouldn’t have anything to talk about with him, because you’re all, like, into the
environment
.”
The FBI agent took another sip of his coffee, retrieving my listening attention from the other table. “So, Em, was this a bad time to ask?” he inquired.
I switched my gaze from the couple to him, and caught an impish glint in his eyes.
Where was Ray? Just how long could it take a man to pee? “Well, um, I’d have to think about it,” I answered lamely. There, it was out: the preliminary put-off. The stall. The What-in-hell-am-I-doing-with-myself-anyway? pit gaping open at my feet.
The man who was not named Tom Latimer set down his cup and leaned toward me, bringing his salt-and-pepper crew cut within twelve inches of my own first threads of gray. “So, Em,” he said, keeping his voice down to a murmur that would not be heard over the clatter and clack of restaurant noise, “you’ve been here in Salt Lake a week now. I was thinking you might be getting a little bit bored or something, with nothing to do. And you don’t have anything pressing back in Denver. You’ve been laid off yet another job with this latest ‘consolidation’ in the oil business, and considering how many thousands of petroleum geologists are out of jobs this time, you have little hope of finding another. You keep telling yourself you’re a geologist, not a detective, but when you get down to it, the only real difference is in the time scale, right? I break a sweat over fresh evidence to crimes that happened yesterday and you think fragmental evidence for events four and a half billion years past are a walk in the park.”
I began to fiddle with my napkin. He was right, geologists are just a slightly different kind of detective. And his flattery was finding a disquietingly easy way to its mark.
He continued. “It’s been a while since you helped us with the George Dishey murder. Almost a year. All those months sitting behind a desk, then standing in line for your unemployment check. If I understand you at all, you’re itchy for a break from the ordinary. Ray’s been over to Denver four times courting you, and you just didn’t know what else to do with yourself, so you came here.”
I shot him a warning look, then shifted my gaze back to the table top. How did he know so much about my doings in the past months?
“About now I’ll bet you’re wondering,” he continued, “what you’re doing being a polite guest at his mother’s house when what you want to do is—”
“That’s enough!” I snapped. It was nobody’s business but Ray’s and mine, if he wanted to stay true to his Mormon upbringing and not bed me outside of wedlock.
“You’re right,” he said. “That’s getting a little personal. I apologize. But I’ve been keeping an eye on you. And don’t get paranoid; I’ve only been talking to your pal Carlos Ortega. Nice guy, Carlos. Good cop.” He paused for a moment, moving his head from side to side to draw my eye. “Hello?”
I glanced into his gray eyes for a moment, then once again regarded the tablecloth. I set to work corralling stray bread crumbs with a pinkie. As always, I had dropped at least five times as many crumbs as anyone else at the table. It seemed to be a special talent of mine. I hoped that somewhere on Earth it was considered good manners or perhaps a subtle clue to a superior intelligence.
The blonde at the next table continued her dissertation on her new boyfriend as she scanned the menu, her spine straight as a ballerina’s. “It’s like we’ve known each other
forever
,” she informed her companion.
I almost said out loud, Oh come on, honey, you can come up with a better line than that!
“So tell me how you met him,” the man said to his young companion. I glanced over toward him. He looked bored. No; blank. I wondered what their relationship was. May-December lovers? No, if that were the case then he would not be suffering to hear about her new swain as calmly as he was.
“Well,” the blonde said, straightening her spine with trumped-up dignity, “I was at a
concert
. I met him at the
bar
during
intermission
. He had flown in just for that day in his
jet
; like, he flew it him
self
. And, well, we were drinking the same brand of
Chablis
. It turns out he knows a
lot
about wine.
Quite
a lot.” She asserted this last with a horizontal chopping motion of her left hand.
She’s a southpaw
, I thought abstractly, then cursed myself for automatically collecting data about a total stranger.
“What do you see?” the agent seated across from me asked softly. “You’re a good observer, Em.”
The waiter appeared, and asked the couple, “Are you ready to order?”
The agent tapped my hand. “Em, I need your help.”
Silence hadn’t worked. Changing the subject hadn’t worked. Sulking hadn’t worked. I tried skirting the issue. “For an endangered species case?” I said. “I mean, what’s that got to do with me? I’m a geologist, not a biologist. You remember those major divisions they taught you in science class? Animal, vegetable, mineral? Biologists do the first and second parts. I do the third.”
He dropped his voice so low that I could barely hear him. “Sure, there’s a biologist on staff who could do the little fuzzies. It’s the setting that’s right up your alley. Gold mining, out in the middle of nowhere. Geologist’s heaven, eh?”
“You got that one straight,” I said, trying to sound jocular, hoping to cover just how little I wanted to consider options just now. “The only place I like better than the middle of nowhere is the back of nowhere.” I rolled my eyes at the fancy
appointments of the splendid urban restaurant in which we were seated, all dripping with coordinated colors and restrained centerpieces. The chow was fine, and the coffee was terrific, but sitting on the ground eating straight out of the cook-pot with a stick suited me even better.
Where
was
Ray? And what good was a boyfriend if he didn’t come save me from uncomfortable moments like this? After all, half the reason that I was uncomfortable was his fault. He had butted his way into this meeting, asserting his presence as an unspoken reminder that he had a proprietary interest in how I spent my time.
I tried to recall how the conversation with Ray had gone. “I’m having dinner with that guy from the FBI,” I’d said.
Being economical in his use of spoken language, Ray had said nothing, but his eyes had grown dark with sudden annoyance.
“Not a big deal,” I’d added defensively. “He just kinda called me up and said how are you, and suggested that we get together.”
Ray had come back with, “And just how do you think he got your phone number?” Leave it to Ray to grab the one loose thread in my thinking and give it a yank.
The FBI agent said, “Here comes Ray.”
I swiveled my head, searching the crowd for the advance of my dark, good-looking cop boyfriend. There he was, just outside the hallway that led back to the bathrooms. Some bald man I’d never seen before had stopped him, and was talking with his hands swinging so wildly that he looked like he was polishing the air. Ray stood straight and gorgeous, his lithe, muscular build the perfect foil for the dark blue uniform that graced Salt Lake City’s finest. It took a trained eye to know that he was jumping with nerves.
“You can come along on a recon,” the FBI agent told me softly. “We’ll catch a hop out there tomorrow, meet with one
of the other operatives. It’s just an hour or two’s flight into Nevada by light plane … .”
I squeezed my eyes shut. I loved flying. He knew that. What was so urgent about this case that he needed to seduce me into it? Or did the seduction lie in another vein?
When I opened my eyes again, Ray had turned a shoulder toward the man who’d buttonholed him and was storming toward the table. The bald man followed in his wake, still talking. The FBI agent across the table from me said, “Here he comes. What’ll it be?”
I said, “Why are you doing this outside his hearing?”
The agent shrugged. Smiled. Feigned innocence.
My pulse quickened.
Ray reached the table. Looked at his watch. Looked pointedly at me.
You possessive so-and-so
, I thought irritably.
Ray’s lips tightened. He had read my face. I stared at my hands; thought,
I should never play poker
.
The FBI agent across the table from me introduced the man who had detained Ray. “Em Hansen,” he said. “This is Tom Latimer. Ray, I see you’ve already met.”
Ray glowered.
The bald man gave the FBI agent an inquisitive look, shrugged his shoulders, stuck out a hand to me, and said, “Glad ta meecha.”
I glared at the FBI agent across the table from me. “Very funny,” I told him. Then I shook the bald man’s hand and said, “Amelia Earhart. Glad ta meecha yourself.”
Ray took my jacket off the back of my chair and held it for me. I stood up and let him put it on. The bald man slipped into my place. The FBI agent told him, “I’ll be right back,” rose, and followed Ray and me toward the front door. On the way, he caught my elbow as we shuffled through the maze of tables, artfully setting up eddies in the flow of human traffic
until I was walking a distance behind Ray. He murmured, “What was your take on the couple at the next table?”
“He’s her father,” I answered, falling too easily into the game of analysis of miscellaneous data. “He and her mother split when she was a toddler. She’s seen very little of him since. She wants him to make it all up to her, just as soon as she’s done turning him on a spit. But he’s just a shallow, self-obsessed old pretty boy.” When the agent smiled, I added, “And she’s inherited his shallowness. Why?”