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that way. They drew the more difficult cases, worked them deftly, only rarely bringing in a loser to molder in the unsolved file drawer. Jake just missed being a joke in his rumpled leisure suits dappled with cigar ashes, his gut bulging over his belt, and his eyes magnified behind thick glasses. He dithered and wasted time and energy, but with Sam he was transformed into something better, into a working dick with thirty years' experience. They filled in the chinks in each other's armor.
When Sam met Nina, she caught him to her before he could see the danger. The others had been young, so young that their personalities could not harm him. Nina was lost when he met her; she'd been lost for a long time, and yet he was drawn to her by the sheer strength of her mind.
The homicide dicks steered clear of Nina Armitage, wary of a brilliant woman, vaguely resentful of a woman in a business rightfully peopled by males. They brought cases to her in the prosecutor's office only because they had to. Nina had climbed to the position of chief criminal deputy, not through her charms—for she betrayed none—but because she was one hell of an attorney. She worked three times as hard as any man, driving her slender, awkward body beyond what seemed the point of endurance, and kept on going.
She considered all policemen, including the chief, dumb cops, and even in court, even when they were on her side, she questioned them in a patronizing way. Behind her back they called her "the titless wonder," and worse.
Still, Sam was enthralled by her presence in the courtroom, never giving ground or depending on her femaleness to curry favor with judge or jury. She was as caustic as lye, her voice so husky it seemed she fought consciously to keep any feminine modulation from it. Her long, straw-colored hair hung in her face as she bent over the yellow legal pads, scribbling constantly, and she tossed it back with the impatience that was an integral part of her. Her skin was pale and freckled. True, she appeared to have no breasts, but Sam thought her long legs were sensational.
When they carried their cases to her so carefully catalogued,
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so neatly sprinkled with "probable causes" and good physical evidence, she got them their arrest warrants, their search warrants, and never seemed to differentiate one cop from another. They were all "Officer" to her—never "Detective." And, for her, they seemingly had no names at all.
Jake couldn't stand the woman. "Sammy," he muttered one afternoon after a, two-hour session in her crowded little office in the courthouse,
"you know how all blacks and Filipinos and Japs look alike to us? Well, all cops look alike to that skinny bitch. Put you and me and Cap and Little John and Big John in a line-up, and I'll bet you she couldn't tell one from another."
Sam laughed, but half agreed. He'd never seen her smile, and she never even looked up when he tried to banter with her.
"She never leaves that building," Jake said. "She just crawls into a file drawer at night and goes to sleep. You cut her and all you'll get is dust."
Sam had been as surprised to see her on a rainy Tuesday midnight in the back booth of the Golden Gavel as if he'd run across the mayor himself sitting there with four scotches lined up in front of him.
"Hey, you! Clinton! Have a seat," she called. "I'll even move so you can face the door. You're all paranoid about your back to the door, aren't you? You've seen too many movies about Luciano and Capone." He'd sat down, staring at her. She was drunk, but alcohol gave Nina a softer look, a gentler mien, despite her smart mouth.
"I never thought you knew my name," he said grabbing one of her scotches.
"Now I have to order another." She lifted her hand and waved languidly to the bartender who appeared with one more scotch—neat.
"I know your name. I know all your names. The titless wonder never forgets anything."
He looked down at the rings on the table top, embarrassed. 53
"You thought I didn't know what you guys call me? I could tell you the others, if you like?"
"No thanks. For the record, I never called you any of those names."
"A genuine gentleman. But you don't like me any better than the rest of them do. You all have wives and girlfriends, and you all think women are supposed to cook and fuck and stay dumb, right?"
He stared at her. Her eyes were dark brown, wide and challenging, smudged with fatigue. She smiled at him, a wry smile—but a smile.
"I don't have a wife ... or a girlfriend," he said slowly. "I can cook, and I wash my own socks and shorts. And I think you're the best working lawyer I ever saw in my life. So now what do you want to fight about?"
"Nothing. I want to celebrate. I won today. Joseph Kekelahni. He should have been 'bitched,' you know. Third felony conviction in ten years. Rape, oral sodomy, assault with a deadly weapon ... and, oh yeah, burglary; he took all their purses after he was done with them. You know what he got instead of the Big Bitch?"
Sam nodded. "Let me guess. Sexual psychopath?"
"You got it. They slapped his little hands and sent him down to Western State so he can get in touch with his feelings. He'll be a real good boy for six months, and then they'll give him the key and a twenty-four-hour pass anywhere he wants to go—and he'll be right back at it. If anybody needs group therapy, it's the judge." She bent her head. "Oh shit!"
He started to answer, made a half move to touch her shoulder, but she looked up quickly and smiled again. "Wanta dance?"
She stood up and held out her arms and he held her, moving slowly around the tiny parquet dance floor to music from the jukebox. They were the only people in the place besides the bartender, who polished the long wooden bar and ignored them. Sam couldn't believe it; Nina Armitage leaning her head against his shoulder.
She was almost as tall as he was and she seemed to weigh
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half as much. She danced well, but even intoxicated she touched him without touching him, holding back so that their thighs barely brushed. He was amused to feel that she did have breasts, and as embarrassed as a high school boy to feel his body react to her. She gave no indication that she could feel him.
They danced for two hours without talking, stopping only to empty the glasses the bartender kept filling. Sam realized that Nina had been here before, that she had a standing order.
She allowed him to drive her home. If he had pictured her living anywhere, it would not have been in the tiny houseboat at the end of the rickety boardwalk on Lake Union. She didn't ask him in, but he could see through the door, see into a rats' nest of books, plants, dirty dishes, and discarded clothing. A gray cat ducked through his legs and disappeared down the dock, and he caught a whiff of the animal's litterbox inside. He stood, hesitantly, wanting, not wanting, to go in. She touched him lightly on the chest and pushed him into the rain.
"You can't come in tonight. But I thank you for the waltz .. . and the ride."
The door closed before he could answer. It was only as he walked unsteadily up the dock that he realized that she'd paid for all the drinks. That was a first. He grinned and ran up the steps to the road. He meant to tell Jake about it in the morning—but he didn't. He hadn't meant to go back—but he did.
He had never been exposed to a really intelligent woman before. He had never approached a woman who seemed to care so little whether he showed up or not. And yet Sam found himself standing at Nina's door night after night, his head bent against the icy spray that whipped off the lake, feeling the boards beneath his feet creak and groan with the undulating swells of the water that cradled her floating home. The houseboat was in terrible shape, listing to port where the logs had rotted away, the eaves leaking rain on his exposed back.
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She was always home, although she was slow to open the door. She admitted him with a shrug, letting him pick his way through the debris on the floor and clear his own spot on the old plush couch. She seemed to expect that he would come, but she showed neither pleasure nor annoyance at his arrival. She never fed him. Other women tried to coddle him with home cooking; he sometimes wondered if Nina cooked at all. Rather, he worried about her and brought her pizzas and greasy take-out chicken and urged her to eat. She ate pickishly, giving most of it to the gray cat, Pistol. She was never without a tumbler of scotch, laced sparingly with tap water.
Sam gradually stopped seeing other women, content to spend his evenings and nights with this intense woman who sat cross-legged on the floor with her elbows on her tender-boned knees and talked to him, listened to him. She understood the law and its intricacies in a way he had never grasped before. He had never believed that a woman might know more than he did; but he learned from her, reliving what had taken place during her long days in the courthouse, understanding for the first time the dynamics of a trial.
He asked her suddenly one night, "Why do you want me here?"
"Who says I want you?"
"You let me in. You've unbarred your doors."
"Some of them .. ."
"Do you like me?" He was afraid to hear her answer.
She studied him solemnly and then touched his cheek. "Sure, I like you. You're smarter than anybody else over in your little Kiddy Cop Station. You think. You even think abstractly if I push you. I like your face; it doesn't hide anything. I like the gap in your teeth, and I like your dimples." She poked a finger in the indentation next to his mouth; he moved away and rubbed his face.
"It's a wrinkle."
She shook her head. "The rest are wrinkles; that's a dimple, Officer."
"Do you miss me when I'm not here?"
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"You're always here."
She stood up to fill her glass, gliding deftly through the piles of junk on the floor, effectively shutting him out.
But he worried it, following her, blocking her way from the cramped Pullman kitchen. He pinned her arms with his and forced her to look at him.
"I need to know that you give a shit whether I show up or not. I need . . . something. Hell, are you my girl or aren't you?" She laughed. "Your girl? Why does that matter? Do you want to take me to the policeman's ball? Ahh, do you want me to be the policeman's ball?
Is that it? You're angry because I won't sleep with you?" He let her go. It was true; she wouldn't sleep with him, not even when she was so drunk she couldn't make her way across the room. And he wanted to sleep with no one else. He could touch her wrist and be as aroused as he'd been before with a fully naked woman beneath him, responding to him, but she refused him access to her the way a thoroughbred mare might deny a plowhorse. Sometimes she let him hold her, and she felt only of narrow bones and a heart beating in his arms. It made him crazy.
"It's control, isn't it," he said angrily. "You have to have control over everything? You deny both of us because you need the control."
"But Samuel, I have no control. Or at least so little. Would you take that away from me?"
He left, slamming the door behind him, plunging onto the dock with such force that the houseboat deck was awash with water.
He always came back, and she showed no surprise at his reappearance. There were some good times, enough to keep him holding on. Spring finally came—Seattle's green, water-washed spring with the sun breaking through the overcast only in late afternoon. They sat on her deck and tossed bread to the audacious ducks who ignored even Pistol. He brought her geraniums to replenish the dead foliage in the planters 57
edging the lake, and she thanked him gravely. He painted the weathered siding and carried a pickup load of trash away.
He wanted to move in, but she was resolute that he could not.
"I need down-time. I can't have someone here all the time—not even you."
To his surprise and delight, she submitted her body to him finally, and the melding with her brought him to a place from which there was no return. Nina was as wildly responsive in bed as she was removed from him everywhere else, all mouth and hands and lips as soft as bruised roses. She sobbed and cried out and murmured obscenities, shuddering in his arms with a passion he had never encountered in more than two decades of sex.
He was never sure that he pleased her even then. When it was over, she rolled away from him and became as quiet as death. He had actually propped himself on one elbow to stare at her narrow ribcage in the dark to be sure that it still rose and fell from the force of living lungs beneath. He could not comprehend how their two bodies could move and breathe together at orgasm and only an instant later be further apart than at any other time.
He found the picture of the baby on a Saturday afternoon as he gathered still another load for the dump, a three-by-five hospital picture of a newborn infant with squinted eyes, a red face, and a tiny bow atop the thick dark hair. Beneath the swaddled baby form, there was a number and the words, "Baby Girl Armitage. 1-2-69."
Nina stepped into the room and saw him studying it, puzzled as he sat back on his heels. She took it from him and put it in a kitchen drawer wordlessly. Her skin, always milky, turned so white that the freckles seemed black in contrast.
"Whose baby is that?" he asked.
"Mine. She was mine."
"Where is she?"
"Dead. Dead these many years."
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"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. It was such a long time ago. Mr. Armitage was sorry too, at first. And then, after he quit crying, he decided it was my fault. He was sure that I covered her up too tight, or not tight enough, or betrayed some other great defect in what a mother should be. I wasn't the maternal type; he always said that. He never forgave me. He took himself off and married a very maternal type, a real mother hen, and fathered three more babies to make up for... for... Sari."
"But you knew it wasn't your fault."
"Did I? No, I don't think I did. See?"
She pushed up the sleeves of her sweatshirt and turned her wrists over to hold them in front of his eyes. He saw the fine drawing up of skin there, almost lacy with corrugated scars. He kissed the white lines and held her wrists against his face.