John Lescroart - Dead Irish

No, she’d pass on that. She didn’t come in here to fix herself up. She smiled. Yes, she did, she thought, only not that kind of fix.

She’d rolled the stuff at home, hidden it in the package of Virginia Slims, and taking it out, smiled again in anticipation. She’d really come a long way, baby.

It was the very best of the third world-C & C. Colombian and crack, although just a tiny bit of the latter. She lit the joint and inhaled deeply, holding it. Before she’d even let out the breath, the first jolt of the crack kicked in. She allowed herself one more. It was a good mix. The crack pumped you up to the sky, but the marijuana made coming down very nice.

Putting half the joint back into the cigarette box, she checked herself out one last time in the mirror and smiled prettily at herself. “Linda means pretty,” she said aloud, and giggled.

The mood was nearly wrecked immediately as she came out to the hallway. First, the heel on her shoe slipped on the tile and broke off. She would have fallen but for the wall.

“Fuck.”

Holding the wall with one hand, she was balancing herself to take off her shoes when an unknown face looked out from her office. “Can I help you?”

A man, and not bad-looking. Not too well dressed, but not a slob, either. She smiled crookedly, suddenly feeling dizzy with the rush of drugs. Damn, here she’d been alone all day and-it was just her luck-the minute she decided to let go just a little, someone shows up.

“I’m sorry,” she said to the man, standing there in the hallway with her shoes in her hand. Next she’d probably run her nylons.

The man shrugged. “No problem. I was hoping to find Mr. Polk? Is he in?”

She walked toward him, then brushed against him as she went around to her desk. She’d be better if she was sitting down. The man looked at the nameplate on her desk. “Are you his wife?”

She laughed at that, shallowly. “No, his daughter.”

Suddenly she stood up again, extended her hand. “Linda Polk, daughter of Samuel Polk and descendant of U.S. President James K. He was just after Lincoln, I think.”

The man had a firm, dry, no-nonsense shake. “I think maybe a little earlier,” he said.

“Whatever.” The glow was coming up roses. She could feel herself expanding, becoming nicer, easier to talk to, to like.

“Is your father in today?”

“No. He had a funeral this morning, then he and Nika-” She stopped. Nika. She didn’t want to get concentrating on Nika.

The man smiled. He had a wonderfully inviting smile. “I came from the funeral myself. I’m a friend of Ed Cochran’s. Or was.”

He extended a card that seemed to hover a long way away in his hand until she reached out and grabbed it. “My name’s Dismas Hardy, Linda. Do you expect your father back today?”

“I never expect him back.”

Whoops. She hadn’t meant to say that. “I mean, back the way he was.”

“Was when?”

“Back before Nika.”

“When was that, Linda?”

She liked the way he kept saying her name. He really was a nice-looking man, maybe a little old. Thirty-five? Good tan for a city guy. Maybe he did a lot of work outside.

“Pardon?” she said.

“When was before Nika?”

She waved a hand abstractedly. “Nika, that’s right. I guess late last summer, then they got married before Christmas, and that’s when everything seemed to start going wrong.”

“You mean with the business?”

“No, no, no. Not the business. That wasn’t ’til later. I mean with me and Daddy.”

Oh damn, she was going to cry again. That was the only bad thing about the pot-it got all the emotions stirred up. The trick was to quick get onto something else. “The business,” she said, “wasn’t ’til the whole thing with La Hora , like in February.”

But the man, surprisingly, didn’t pick up on that. “What happened with you and your daddy?”

He acted like he really cared. He was sitting back comfortably in his chair, hands folded across his chest, more relaxed than she was. In fact, just looking at him made her feel better. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I get all emotional sometimes.”

He nodded.

“Because before Nika… Well, you know my mom died when I was ten-that’s ten years ago, can you believe it?-and Daddy and I were always, after that, like best friends. I mean, I came to work here when he was building up the business and we did everything together, and it was like we were a team. And it wasn’t like he didn’t have girlfriends. That was cool. I mean, I wasn’t, we weren’t weird, you know. But Nika was different.”

He leaned forward. “Different how?”

“Just so, I don’t know, overpowering. And I don’t get it. Have you ever seen her or my dad?”

“I guess they were at the funeral but I didn’t know who they were.”

“Well, come look at this.”

She led the way back into her father’s office, with its big desk. And there was the picture, bigger than it needed to be in its silver frame. “Here, there’s my dad with Nika. I don’t think she’s that pretty.”

For as long as she could stand it, she glared at her new stepmother, probably only five years older than she was, though of course Nika would never say. It was, she admitted, a good picture but not a good likeness. It made her look more beautiful. And she wasn’t beautiful, not in real life.

She could tell the man only saw the outside, couldn’t tell from the picture how ugly she was underneath. He said: “I wouldn’t call her pretty at all.”

He was standing very close, right beside her. He smelled like a clean man-some hints of after-shave, maybe a pipe. But no sweat or gasoline like most of the guys she saw.

“They don’t really belong together,” she said. She realized she was still without shoes. Turning, facing the man, she raised her chin for a minute, then hitched herself onto her father’s desk. “What’s your name again?”

“Dismas. Diz for short.”

“I’m a little diz for dizzy,” she said, giggling.

“Probably better to be sitting down, then.” Unexpectedly, he reached out and touched her face, a light touch that tingled all over her. “Are you all right? Would you like some water?”

Without waiting for an answer he was gone, back quickly with her coffee cup filled with water from the fountain. It was like he knew his way around already.

She was ready for him to put his arms around her and do anything he liked at all, but instead he went to the couch and sat on the end of it. She sipped at the cup.

“So when Nika and your dad got married, things changed?”

She looked down. “He was like a different person. Just didn’t have time for me or anybody, or even the business, anymore. All he wanted to do was spend time”-a shot at Nika’s face-“with her.”

“And you think that’s been the problem with the business? I thought Ed was trying to get it back on track?”

“Oh, Eddie. Eddie was great. I didn’t mean to say he wasn’t good. At the job, I mean. Fair, and, you know, a really nice guy. No hassles, you know?” She sipped again at the water. “I can’t believe what they say, that he killed himself.”

Hardy let that go for now. “But there have been problems with the business, and they happened when Ed was managing, right?”

“Well, yes but no. It would’ve happened with anybody. It was all stuff about La Hora and El Dia .”

“You said that before. What does that mean?”

“You know El Dia , don’t you?”

He shook his head.

“Well, it’s another paper, you know, like La Hora , that wanted us to distribute it. La Hora was our biggest client but then they dropped us, took it all back in-house.” She looked around her father’s office. “And by then it was too late to get El Dia . They’d set themselves up with other distributors. Old Cruz really screwed us.” She shook her head, swinging her legs in frustration.