"Meanwhile, you do have a job that you like, yes?" Leona said.
Nate said, "At Hollywood Station we used to have a sergeant we called the Oracle. He said that doing good police work was the most fun we'd ever have in our entire lives. And I've found that to be true." Then he thought of his former partner, Dana Vaughn, of her lying dead in his arms, and he said, "For the most part it's been fun.
"Where does acting come into it, then?" she asked.
Nate said, "I thought acting would be what I could do full-time after my pension is vested. I'll reach that in three more years, but if I retire at that time, I still won't be able to draw the pension until I'm fifty years old. I figure I could be a full-time actor in the interim. But I need a break. Don't we all?"
"So that's your dream, is it?" she said.
Nate said, "My dreams aren't complicated. Any one of the Kardashians could interpret them."
She said, "I'm surprised that when you serve twenty years as a cop you aren't able to receive any pension money yet."
"I'll still be too young then," Nate said.
"Too young," she said with a look of melancholy. Then her eyes narrowed and she said, "Me, I'm old enough to have my cop and eat him, too."
Talk about a cougar! This man-eater looked like she truly could come at him, fang and claw. While he was contemplating that troubling catamount image, she said, "I'm old enough for anything. Any damn thing at all."
With that she leaned over abruptly and kissed him on the cheek and then on the mouth. Her kiss was open-mouthed and warm, with lots of tongue.
When she pulled away, she looked at him, sloe-eyed, and he figured there was no way out, not if he wanted to be in Ressler's movie. This menopausal momma was about to debauch him right here in this goddamn marshmallow palace!
Leona stood up and unbuttoned her dress and let it hang open. He saw a lace-trimmed white bra that held breasts he guessed were helped by silicone, and a flat belly that she'd earned, and shapely thighs the color of burnished copper, compliments of a tanning bed, he supposed.
As though reading his thoughts, she said, "The tawny color is mostly mine even without tanning, compliments of my Italian old man. But my ma was Irish, so I can hold a grudge with the best of them. Don't ever cross me, gorgeous."
Nate watched her let the dress fall to the floor and he thought that she might be his mother's age but that's all they had in common. Then it occurred to him that he had actually flashed on a flittering image of his mother, and he thought, What the hell's this, Oedipus time? Was Hollywood Nate Weiss just another Jewish momma's boy? But no, that cliche was just too ridiculous.
Leona said, "We should behave like grown-ups and go to my bedroom for this first-timer, shouldn't we? Yet somehow, being with a lovely lad like you I don't want to behave like a grown-up. Do you ?"
She unhooked her bra and let it fall to the floor with the linen dress, and he thought, Silicone for sure, but understated and very acceptable. Then it was his turn to give a command performance, so he put his glass on the table beside the sofa and stood. Just then another image flared, as hot and blinding as a red carpet spotlight. His mother still used those same words on him at least once a month: "Behave like a grown-up and find a nice woman, Nathan." Goddamnit! If he couldn't sweep away the terrifiying notion that he was about to shtup his own mother, he'd never even get it up!
Nate started feeling feverish and not in a good way. If ever he needed the tips he'd learned in that UCLA film class ... Maybe if he were a method actor, he could go all Tom Jones sensuous and imagine something decadent, like a bathtub full of cherries jubilee or something. He had a sudden sensation of flop sweat, and he hadn't even flopped yet. Then he heard the sound of a car clattering down the axle-cracking, fake-cobblestone driveway, and it didn't sound like Rudy Ressler's purring Aston Martin.
"Shit!" she said. "That's Raleigh's car. What the hell's he doing back here after I gave him the fucking afternoon off? Jesus Christ!"
"I'd better get going," Nate said with more than a small measure of relief. "Does he come in through the main door?"
"No, the kitchen door, damn him. But you don't have to slink away, Nathan." She picked up her clothes hastily and said, "Let me run to the bedroom and change. We can still sit and chat."
"I'd better go," Nate said, moving quickly to the front door, thinking that he definitely didn't want the butler to gossip about him to Rudy Ressler. "You can tell him that I dropped you off and came in to use the bathroom for a minute so he doesn't wonder about my Vette in the driveway, okay?"
She stood with her crumpled dress in her arms and said, "When we get back from Europe, I want you here for dinner parties, yes? And other things?"