I cut her off and sought to pry open that little chink I'd seen. "Your father was still fretting about it on his deathbed. That mean anything to you?"
Her only answer to that was a look that seemed intended to slice off the top of my head.
I went on. "So I doubt that it was only money. Dying people don't need cash. It was something more important than that. More important to a number of people. A woman put it in the safe. I'm betting that woman could only have been you. What was so important, Lydia?"
She held my gaze a moment, then dropped her eyes and rattled the ice cubes in her drink. For an instant this seemed a species of surrender, but quickly her face turned petulant, impatient, as though she were trying to convince us both that none of this was of real consequence; it was just a petty annoyance, hardly worth discussing. Then, into a scene that was already excruciating, she injected a note of the surreal. She gave her shoulders a bothered lift and said, "This top's a little damp. Excuse me."
She set down her vodka, leaned slightly forward, and with an impressive elasticity of limb, she reached behind herself, underneath her tunic, and undid the clasps of her strapless bra. Tension went out of the polka-dotted cloth, but the cups did not immediately fall away from her breasts. They clung for a moment, attached by heat or moisture or some more mysterious affinity, then fluttered down at last with the dreamy slowness of open parachutes. Tan lines appeared. Pale flesh billowed, swelling ripely before it tapered once again toward dark, emphatic nipples, which seemed to be the only part of Lydia that noticed the coldness of the room.
After a time she pulled the now-shapeless bit of cloth from underneath her tunic and dropped it on the coffee table. For a dizzy instant I was more fascinated by the empty garment than by her body. I stared at it with awe and terror, as though it were the hollowed pelt of an animal I had known when alive.
Struggling to hold my voice together; I said, "Listen, Lydia, you look great but it isn't going to work. I need to know what's in the pouch."
She reclaimed her drink, reclaimed, along with it, the goading tone. "Ask Mickey Veale."
"I'm asking you."
"Have you met him yet? Talked with him?"
"As a matter of fact I have. But—"
"And what'd you think of the fat bastard?"
I sighed. I did not want to be distracted by her boobs, and I did not want to be sidetracked by her relentless talk of Mickey Veale. Still, the question, her insistence on asking it, reminded me of a couple things. First, that there was something more than passingly sick in the relationship between the two of them, something that went beyond dislike to obsession; it suggested a case of adolescent thrall, in which miseries are linked, in which every wound is savored, every insult cataloged. Second, that I hadn't quite got around to sorting out my impressions of Veale. His largeness and his in-your-face manner made it difficult to see him in detail, to be confident of a few true things to say. But now, without really analyzing, I said, "Crude, crass, tries too hard. A buffoon." I surprised myself by adding, "And maybe sort of harmless in the end."
Did I really believe it? Or did I say it just to tweak her? In any case, Lydia seemed genuinely affronted by the word. Her features all pushed forward on her face; a flush spread up her neck and down between her breasts. "Harmless! Pete, you just might be an idiot."
Very likely true, but neither here nor there. I sipped some scotch. I eased my shoulders and tried to make my voice more coaxing, less aggressive. "Lydia—why do you hate him so much?"
She stared at me. Her eyes seemed almost to throb, as though they were being pushed from behind. But the impulse toward candor, if that's what it was, didn't last long. Her mouth curled into a mordant and challenging smile; she tongued the edge of her glass. With a phony nonchalance she leaned far forward so that her breasts, diddled by gravity, seemed to float free of her torso, became separate from her, took on pendant and compelling lives of their own. She said, "You want to touch me?"
I chewed my lip. I said, "No. I mean yes. But I'm not going to. I need to know what's in the pouch."
She held my eyes. She pursed her lips into something between a pout and a sucking shape. She mimicked my tone. "You need to know what's in the pouch. You need to know why I hate Mickey Veale. I take it you've never been blackmailed."
This made me blink. It was a long deep blink that momentarily erased the world, and when my eyesight returned, nothing looked quite the way it had before. Blackmail? On top of murder, and smuggling, and Kenny Lukens' stupid larceny that had set all this in motion? The little universe in which I spent my days and nights seemed suddenly like one big ransacked room. Numbly, I said, "Mickey Veale is blackmailing you?"