Donald Westlake - Smoke

The pool was behind the house, and up a slight slope, and off-center from the house just a bit to the right. An enclosing fence framed the pool and its stone-and-wood surround; it was made of vertical wood slats four feet high, with a two-foot latticework above that, to catch the breeze and permit the people inside to look out while retaining their own privacy. At the right end of the pool, where a round Lucite table and four white plastic chairs stood under a large blue-and-white-striped umbrella that stuck up like a Martian plant from the middle of the table, you could look through the lattice and down past the side of the house to the driveway in front, to see people arrive without their seeing you.

Here they were spending most of their time, when not in Dudley. The sun was warm, the air not too hot, the pool heated. Freddie frolicked like a walrus, a dolphin, but one you couldn't see, while Peg sat under the umbrella, wore a straw hat with a big brim, and white slacks and sleeveless blouses (she wasn't a maniac on the subject), and read Bleak House. (Having been a dental technician had led Peg to the Good Books; she liked to give book reports aloud while working on her patients. They couldn't say anything anyway, their mouths being full of slender chrome instruments, so if Peg was going to be reduced to monologues, they might as well be on something worthwhile).

The morning after their encounter with the police chief in Dudley they spent up by the pool. Freddie swam sometimes, and other times lay out on a beach towel spread in the sun on the duckboard surround; he said he wasn't worried about getting a burn. Peg alternatively hung out with the lawyers in Bleak House or, whenever Freddie enthusiastically and invisibly cannonballed back into the pool, she watched that spectral surge as it lashed and plunged through the heaving water.

The sun was high, and she was just beginning to think about lunch, when she heard a car door slam. The chief! At once, she slapped down the book onto the table and jumped to her feet. The chief! He found us!

Of course, there was no way. Even if the chief knew their license number, which was unlikely, all it would lead him to was the address in Bay Ridge. Still, it was the chief she fully expected to face when she hurried to the fence and stared through the lattice, and so it was with great relief that she saw, moving away from his red car in the driveway toward the front of the house, the real estate agent, Call Me Tom. "Up here!" she cried, and waved her hand above the fence.

He looked back and up. "Oh, hi." Waving, he reversed his route.

Peg turned back to the pool, hissing, "Freddie! Freddie!"

He was already coming out of the pool, which she could tell by the splashing, and then the wet footprints, and all those water drops suspended in the air, vaguely in the shape of a man.

"No, no!" She hurried toward him, with frantic shooing gestures. "Back in the pool!"

He went, dropping backwards, making a great splash, the idiot. Peg, shaking her head, ran over to open the wood-and-lattice door, just as Call Me Tom got there, smiling. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt with a pale green necktie, but he must have left his briefcase or sample book in the car. "Hi, Peg," he said. He was all the salesmen in the history of the world rolled into one and placed in bright sunlight, to see what would happen.

"Hi, Tom. Come on in."

"Thanks. Just checking, see how you're coming along," he said, as he entered the pool area.

"Fine, thanks."

He stopped and looked around. "Where's your friend?"

The footprints on the duckboards were fading fast in the dry sunny air. "He's in New York," Peg said. "He still has to work, poor guy."

"Oh. I thought . . ." Call Me Tom looked at the still-wet duckboards, the empty pool, the book on the table under the umbrella, and decided to give it up. "Catching up on your reading, eh?"

"Sure, why not? Good weather, nothing to do, no interruptions—"

"Except me," he said, and stopped smiling long enough to look sheepish.

"No, no, I didn't mean that," she assured him, though she had meant that, and they both knew it.

"Well, I won't take you away from your — oh, Bleak House! God, I read that years ago."

"First time for me."

"Jarndyce and Jarndyce," Call Me Tom said, and chuckled, and shook his head. "I could tell you some lawsuit stories," he threatened. "Real estate, it honestly brings out the worst in people, I believe that's true."

Beyond him, in Peg's line of sight, a wet forearm print appeared on the duckboard beside the pool. "You may be right," she said. "But not here, we're really happy with the place."

"I'm glad to hear it." Call Me Tom cast a look around, to be sure they were alone, and failed to notice the knee print that now appeared next to the forearm print. Nonetheless, he lowered his voice as he said, "You told me about the legal troubles your friend is having. The divorce and all."

It was hard for Peg to concentrate on what Call Me Tom was saying, when over his right shoulder she could see those wet footprints appearing one after the other along the duckboards on the other side of the pool. "The reason we're paying in cash and all that, you mean," she said.

"Exactly." Call Me Tom moved closer, being more confidential, as behind him a beach towel picked itself off a chair and whipped around madly and soundlessly in the air. Peg knew Freddie was doing this only because he was sore at the interruption, but it was so dangerous. "I just thought you ought to know," Call Me Tom murmured, managing to remain ebullient while expressing sympathy and concern and solidarity, "that I got a phone call this morning, first thing, some finance outfit in Syracuse, looking for you. "

This made no sense. "Syracuse?" Peg repeated, astonished. "For me? I've never been in Syracuse in my life." Meantime, that damn towel was still doing its dance, as though Call Me Tom might not turn around at any second.

And yet he didn't. Maintaining eye contact with Peg, "My hunch is," he said, "it has something to do with your friend's divorce. I think they know the two of you rented a place somewhere around here, and they're calling all the brokers, trying to track you down."

The towel opened itself, sailed briefly, then made a magic-carpet landing on the duckboards. At the same time, Peg suddenly realized what that phone call must mean. "Oh, my God," she said. If she'd permitted her face to pick up any color before this, it would have drained away now.

" You're my client," Call Me Tom assured her. Parts of the beach towel flattened more than other parts. "I have no complaint with you, and I trust you have no complaint with me."

"Complaint? What complaint?" I must not get hysterical, Peg thought hysterically, and used up some of the tension by waving her arms around as she said, "Look at this great place you found us!"

"Well, thanks. It is nice, isn't it?" Call Me Tom said, and now he did turn in a half-circle, taking it all in: the day, the pool, the beach towel. Smiling at Peg some more, he said, "Mention me to your friends."

"I will."

"I got" — he took several folded pieces of paper from his pants pocket, went through them, selected one, put the rest away, and handed that one to Peg — "the fellow's name and phone number, in case you want to call him and tell him to leave you out of it all. Sometimes that works, when they're bothering somebody other than the person involved in the case."

"Good idea," Peg agreed, taking the piece of paper but not yet looking at it. She couldn't help herself; even with this bad news, her concentration was still broken by that goddam towel, lying there so innocently. I'm going to hit him with a stick, she promised herself, as she said, "I really appreciate this, Tom. Thanks a lot."