Andrew Vachss - Down Here

“I don’t—”

“Yes, I know,” she cut me off. “Look, I’m not talking about asking. That’s more . . . intimate. You don’t ask a man if he thinks a certain dress makes you look fat unless you have something going with him.”

“She didn’t ask me—”

“She didn’t ask you anything, sweetheart. She told you all about ‘secretarial spread,’ though, didn’t she?”

“I . . . Yeah, she mentioned it, anyway.”

“But you couldn’t see what she was talking about, right?”

“Not with her sitting—”

“Exactly. Now, sometimes, if something bothers a woman, they can’t keep themselves from picking at it. The way magazines are today, I’m surprised more young girls don’t starve themselves to death or run around getting plastic surgery. So—a woman says to you, ‘I know I have a big nose,’ you’re supposed to say, ‘What?,’ as if it never occurred to you. But she tells you she has a big butt, what are you supposed to say then?”

“I don’t know.”

“For once, that was just as well,” she said, grinning. “There is no right answer to that one, not in the situation you were in. You can’t deny it, because you haven’t seen it. And you can’t say you like big butts, because this wasn’t supposed to be a date.”

“So what you said about habit . . . ?”

“Either it’s something that really bothers her, and she can’t keep herself from referring to it—there’re women who are compulsive like that, God knows—or it’s her way of getting sex into your mind.”

“She didn’t do any of the . . . other stuff.”

“Like bump her hip into you by accident when you’re walking together? Or licking her lips after she has some ice cream?”

“I . . . I’m not sure,” I said, trying to remember. “But she . . . It was more than that. More than not that, I mean.”

“Well, the way you left it, the next move is all hers, anyway.”

“What are you saying?”

“That she can’t tell, either.”

“Huh?”

“Burke, sometimes you are the thickest-skulled . . . Look, baby, let’s say the girl was interested in you. Not in this book you’re supposedly writing, or in doing something for her brother, or whatever. Just in you, okay? So she shows you a couple of little things, sees what you do. But you, being you, don’t do anything.

“Now she’s confused. Maybe you missed her signals. Maybe you weren’t interested. Or maybe you were interested as all hell, but you’re trying to be a professional—the book and all—and you didn’t want to blow it. See?”

“I can’t read her, honey. All I can tell you is, she’s not from down here.”

“‘Down here’ is not an address, baby,” she reminded me.

I moved my head. Not so much a nod as a bow, to the truth, letting my little sister’s core sadness reach out to hold hands with my hate, like the first time we met. “So you’re saying, even if she blows off the book, I could maybe—?”

“What could you possibly lose?” Michelle said. “You know what the Prof always says: When you’re looking to score, a window works as good as a door . . . ?”

“And a nun lies as good as a whore,” I finished for her.

“ You got an e-mail!” Terry, on the phone.

“Me?”

“Hauser. It came to the e-mail address on his site, and bounced right over to us. Just like the Dragon Lady said.”

“Read it to me.”

“It just says, ‘I knew I shouldn’t have had that torta.’ The word ‘knew’ is in italics, well, not really italics—but if you put asterisks around a word it means—”

“Just read the whole thing to me, kid, okay? Then you can fill in whatever I don’t understand.”

“Right. Okay, it says, ‘I knew I shouldn’t have had that torta. It’s back to the gym now for sure. I enjoyed our conversation, and I would like to have another. And to hear more about your project. Call me.’”

“Was it signed?”

“Yes. Just the letter ‘L.’”

“Okay, can we just—?”

“Wait,” he said. “Let me tell you what else, remember? Okay, first of all, after the word ‘torta,’ there’s the Internet symbol for a smile.”

“Like one of those happy-face things?”

“No. It’s just keystrokes, like from a regular typewriter. You take a—”

“Never mind, kid. Sorry to have interrupted you. What else?”

“After she says ‘for sure,’ there’s an exclamation point. And where she says she enjoyed your . . . conversation, there are three periods between the two words, like a pause.”

“Like you just did?”

“Egg- zact -lee!” he said. Dealing with my slow learning curve, the kid had learned to take his happiness where he found it . . . just like his mother. “The only other thing is, the letter ‘L’ that she signed it with? That was in lowercase, with no period after it.”

“Does that mean something?”

“Well, it could . . .” he said, doubtfully. “But there’s no way to tell. Some people use that lowercase ‘l’ to stand for ‘love,’ some people use a lowercase initial to be modest, or even to be . . . submissive, I think. But with e-mail, you can never really tell, because people write it and send it off so fast, they never check what they type. So sometimes you think something means something, and all it means it that whoever wrote the e-mail was sloppy.”

“Not this one,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Whatever she is, she’s not sloppy.”

“Oh. Well, you want to answer it?”

“Couldn’t I just call her? That way, she’d know I got her message.”

“You could, sure. But the message just came in, and it’s almost midnight.”

“I see what you mean. Anyway, I’m not supposed to have her home phone number—it’s not listed.”

“The e-mail came from her home account,” Terry said. “So we have that now, too.”

“What good does that do us?”

“I don’t know, not for sure. But the Dragon Lady says she might be able to tell us some things from the headers and the IP number—”

“Terry . . .”

“Sorry! I just got . . . Anyway, sure, you can answer her. But if you do it now, she’ll know you’re awake, and she might want to IM. You can’t do that from your computer—the one we left there—not without me there. She’d know pretty quick you weren’t used to doing it.”

“Doing it? I don’t even know what it is. ”

“See?”

“Yeah. Hey, wait a minute, T. Would she have any way of knowing when her mail was received?”

“Not unless you have the same . . . Ah, never mind, the short answer is no.”

“Okay, let me think for a second. I have to go meet someone tomorrow night, so it can’t be then. For her, I mean. How about this? We send her a message around three in the morning . . . like I couldn’t sleep, so I turned on the computer and found her e-mail.”

“That’s easy. All I have to do is queue it to . . . Never mind,” the kid said, cutting himself off again. His learning curve was a lot flatter than mine.

“All right, how about this, then: ‘Me, too. All counts, except the gym. I’m meeting a source tonight, but I’ll call you at work, okay?’”

“That’s cool,” Terry said. “You’ve got the e-mail rhythm down just right.”

“Beginner’s luck.”

“How do you want to sign it?”

“Uh, how about ‘J.P.’?”

“Caps, with periods—like initials?”

“Perfect. Thanks, T.”

“Hey, this is fun. And it’ll give Clarence another excuse to talk to the Dragon Lady, too.”

It was just going on eleven the next morning when I dialed her number.