She said nothing.
“You came here to talk, didn’t you? Let’s talk. Don’t worry, I’m not running to Minot with it. And Bunny will keep you miles away. Not even a hint of red. No idea what Danny was up to. Somebody else he duped,” he said, looking at the paper. “But not over there. You’d have been a lot closer. Somebody he could trust. Doing what he was doing. You’d have to be one of them. I should have got that right away. Anyone from the outside would have been too risky. A death warrant. You’d have to be. Is that how you met?”
She looked down, shaking her head. “It was for him. A card even,” she said, her mouth suddenly crooked, almost in a smile. “He couldn’t. Too incriminating. They weren’t so worried for me.” She looked up at him. “I threw it away. A little ceremony. A new place, new start. For both of us. I thought it was anyway. He lied about that, too.”
“And not you? ‘Everybody was a little like that.’ Isn’t that what you said? The first night we went to bed, come to think of it. The first lie. One of them.”
“You think there were so many. It was—in the past. Why bring it up again?”
“And I bought it. And went around in circles for a while. I didn’t see a lot of things.”
She stared at him.
“Something gets in your eye, a little speck, and you miss things. I kept seeing you at Genia’s table, it kept coming back to you, and I’d look somewhere else. And then there we were drinking brandy— brandy—and I saw the glass and started seeing other things. The Paseo. Just visiting Uncle Lion if anyone had asked. The balcony. I remembered that in a clip. Girl your size. You just need leverage. The hospital. He said, don’t leave me, but I did. I saw you there, too.”
“Stop it,” she said, her voice edgy, upset.
“Even then I thought I was just—seeing things. What could I prove? If I wanted to. It wasn’t going to bring him back anyway. But not after the list. Not after I saw that. You should never have let me leave the house. I suppose you didn’t think I’d move to the Cherokee. Right to the mail drop. That must have been—” He stopped. “You should have kept me close.” He looked at her. “It would have been easy to do.”
She met his eyes for a moment, then looked away, picking at the newspaper, something to do. “So now it’s this. I’m a—what? A murderer? That’s what you think?” She held her arms out. “Do you want to look? Maybe there’s a gun in my dress.”
“No, you just came to find out how much I told Polly. How far it’s gone. And I’d tell you, wouldn’t I?” He nodded. “The dress helps.”
“Stop.”
“Give me a name.”
“A name?”
“I don’t think you hired the kid at the Cherokee. A pachuco? That had to be someone else. Give me the next guy, who had the key. I can tell Henderson I got to him through Kelly, keep you out of it. They have him, they can roll up the rest. You retire. Unless they turn on you, but I’m betting they won’t. But you retire. For good.”
“Why would you do this? If I’m—”
“It’s enough damage,” he said, indicating the paper. “Right now Danny’s a Communist who made a fool out of Minot. Some places that even makes him a hero. But this is something else. I’m not going to do it to him. Make him carry that mark around. So let it stop here. Let the Bureau have the others. And there’s your career to consider.”
She raised her head, about to speak, but he cut her off.
“No one else knew I had it. And didn’t know what it meant. You saw that with Henderson at the border. Why didn’t anyone come after me? Even Henderson was surprised. One try at the Cherokee and then— nothing. But by that time you knew it could stop there—Henderson didn’t know where to go with it. You were safe. No one else knew, Liesl.”
Her eyes opened wider at this, unsettled. “No one else,” she repeated, a little breathless, catching up with it.
“Give me a name.”
“How can you believe this?”
“What? Because of us? Let’s not do that again. I thought—” He broke off. “Tell me something, though.” He waited for her to turn to him. “Was any of it real? A few lines?”
She shaded her eyes with her hand. “A few.”
He said nothing for a second, letting it settle. “Give me a name. Then let’s talk about why.”
The phone rang and her hand jerked away from her face, a startled reflex. They both went still, looking down, the second ring louder.