Lawrence Block - The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes

Go ahead, try to picture her in the house on Osprey Drive. Once, maybe, before George Otterbein, before the stone house, before all the money. If the timing had been different, if their paths had crossed before she ever met the old man, before she got used to a life he’d never be able to afford. Maybe the same chemistry that worked for them now would have been there in that alternate universe, and they could work side by side at the kitchen table. She could keep the books and send out invoices, and he could teach her the handful of skills and street knowledge you needed in his business. Hell, she’d be a natural at undercover work, and she’d enjoy it, learn to make a game of it. Miller & Yarrow, Confidential Investigations...

Yeah, right.

It was hard enough to bring the image into focus, and that was before you reminded yourself it could never have happened because the timing could never have been right. It had taken every bit of his past and every bit of hers to bring them here now at the same time, at what was probably the only moment of their mutual lives when they were ready for each other.

And consider this. If that was what she’d wanted, a love match that partnered her with a guy who had to work for a living, she’d have found it a lot sooner in her hopscotch pilgrimage from Minnesota to Florida.

With her looks, her manner, she’d never have been involuntarily alone. She’d have had men around her all the time. She wouldn’t have had any trouble finding one to marry her.

The one she found was George Otterbein. And he might be twice her age, but that didn’t mean he’d snatched her from the cradle. She’d lived more than a handful of years, a grown woman on her own, before Otterbein came into the picture.

Picture Lisa Yarrow on Osprey Drive?

No, I don’t think so. But what if you flip the negative.

Could you picture Doak Miller leaning back in a recliner on a couple of acres of lawn? With a big stone house behind him, and a pond, and a rail fence?

How would that strike the eye?

Things to do.

He stopped at an ATM, got some cash. Drove south and east for half an hour, slowed down, and passed four motels before he found one that looked right.

He pulled up in front of the office. He saw a security camera positioned above the entrance, but they were everywhere these days, and he’d be a long time finding a motel without one. He reached into the backseat for a ball cap, wore it low over his eyes.

The woman behind the counter was chewing gum. If it was to keep her awake, well, that was a lot to expect from a strip of Juicy Fruit. She was long and lean and wasted, with bad skin and bad tattoos, a played-out tweaker who could only have been hired by an incurable optimist. Or a relative, hoping Florrie Mae could just put in her hours without giving the store away or burning it down.

He was looking for a room for a week, he said. Something in the back, something quiet.

She said they did, and quoted him a day rate. He reminded her he’d want it by the week. Be seven times the day rate, she said, and he pointed out that the sign out front offered weekly rates. She frowned and picked up the phone, relaying the inquiry to someone in another part of the unit, then bounced the answer back to him.

“You’d have to pay in advance. Pay for six days, get one for free. Sixty a night times six...”

“That’s three-sixty,” he said.

“Plus the tax.”

“Make it three-fifty even,” he said, “and forget the tax, and I’ll give you seven hundred now for the next two weeks.”

He figured anybody would say yes to that, and he’d have paid cash anyway, but this gave him a dollars-and-cents reason to pay cash, and gave the owner a reason to keep the whole thing off the books. She checked with whoever was on the other end of the phone, and nodded as she replaced the receiver.

“Be fine,” she said, and put a key on the counter. “So that’s seven hundred dollars plus — no, sorry, not plus anything. Just seven hundred dollars.”

There was a registration card to fill out. He’d already decided to be Martin Williams from Brunswick, Georgia. There was a place for the car’s tag number, and he used his own tag with a couple of numbers reversed, and indicated it was a Georgia license.

She could have asked to see a driver’s license. He had a reasonable assortment of fake ID, some of it pretty convincing, but none of it with Martin Williams’s name on it, none of it licensing its possessor to operate a motor vehicle in the state of Georgia. So if she asked for ID he’d have had to feign indignation and march on out of there, repeating his act at the next suitable motel down the road.

But why would she ask to see his license? It’s not as if he’d asked to borrow her car. And she spent all her working hours checking in people unlikely to give their real names, let alone carry ID to back them up.

“I got a few weeks work in the area,” he told her, “and the schedule’s crazy, so I’ll be keeping odd hours. I wouldn’t want the maid coming in while I’m sleeping.”

“You put out the doughnut,” she said, “and won’t nobody disturb you unless the building’s on fire.”

“The doughnut?”

She rolled her eyes. “The sign, Do Not Disturb. You hang it on the doorknob. Don’t y’all call that a doughnut?”

“Never used to,” he said, “but I guess I will from now on.”

The room was about what you’d expect. The TV was small, and fifteen or twenty years old, and mounted so high on the wall you’d get a stiff neck watching it, but he hadn’t booked the place so they could watch Vanna White earn big bucks turning letters. The walls sported fake wood-grain paneling, and the toilet had a strip fastened around the seat, announcing that it had been sanitized for his protection. He’d have found that more reassuring if it had also been flushed, but someone had missed that particular step. He flushed it, and determined that it was at least in working order. That was something.

The dresser bore several scars from unattended cigarettes, and the drapes held the smell of cigarette smoke. He’d never thought to ask for a non-smoking room, and then he saw the sign: this was a non-smoking room. That explained the absence of ashtrays, which in turn explained the burns on the dresser — and, he noted, on the bedside tables as well.

The bed was all right. There was decent water pressure in the shower. For the next two weeks the room was theirs, and they could come and go as they pleased without showing themselves at the front desk.

Quite a contrast, though, with Chez Otterbein. Except a French word like chez didn’t really go with a Teutonic name like Otterbein. Haus was the German word for house, or at least it ought to be, but Haus Otterbein didn’t really cut the moutarde .

The doughnut was reversible, Do Not Disturb on one side, with a cartoon drawing of a man sleeping; Please Make Up This Room on the other, with a drawing of a chambermaid fluffing a pillow. It was hard to imagine anybody fluffing a pillow in this room.

He hung the doughnut on the knob, pulled the door shut, checked that the lock had engaged, and got in his car and left.

Ten miles north on 19, he stopped at a Waffle House for eggs and hash browns and coffee. He checked the new phone, the Lisa phone. No messages, so he called and left one: Call me when you can .

When he got home he took a shower. He checked his phone, but she hadn’t called back. He set it so that it would ring if she did, and put it down on the table next to the computer.

Checked his email, checked the news headlines, checked a few websites he kept up with.

Went to Google Translate. Ah, gotcha. Schloss.