Along Came a Spider

nicely. “You’re in good shape.”
    “Whatever my stroke is called, it sure feels good tonight. After all those hours cooped up in that room. Those boxy little windows that don’t open.”
    “If they had big windows, all anybody would think about is escaping to the beach. They’d never get any work done anywhere in the state of Florida.”
    “Are we getting any work done?” I asked Jezzie.
    She laughed. “I had a friend who believed in the ’doing the best you can’ theory of police work. I’m doing the best I can. Under impossible circumstances. How about you?”
    “I’m doing the best I can, too,” I said.
    “Praise the Lord.” Jezzie Flanagan raised both her arms joyously. Her exuberance surprised me. It was funny, and it felt good to laugh for a change. Real good. Real necessary.
    “
Under the circumstances
, I’m doing the best
I
can,” I added.
    “Under the circumstances, praise the Lord!” Jezzie raised her voice again. She was funny, or it was late, or both of the above.
    “You going to catch a bite?” I asked her. I wanted to hear her thoughts about the case. I hadn’t really talked to her before.
    “I’d like to eat something,” she answered. “I’ve skipped two meals already today.”
    We agreed to meet up in the hotel’s dining room, which was one of those slow-spinning affairs on the top floor.
    She changed in about five minutes, which I found impressive. Baggy tan trousers, a V-necked T-shirt, black Chinese slippers. Her blond hair was still wet. She’d combed it back, and it looked good that way. She didn’t wear makeup, and didn’t need to. She seemed so different from the way she acted on the job — much looser and at ease.
    “In all honesty and fairness, I have to tell you one thing.” She was laughing.
    “What’s the one thing?”
    “Well, you’re a strong but really clunky swimmer. On the other hand, you do look good in a bathing suit.”
    Both of us laughed. Some of the long day’s tension began to drain away.
    We were good at drawing each other out over beers and a snack. A lot of that was due to the peculiar circumstances, the stress and pressure of the past few days. It’s also part of my job to draw people out, and I like the challenge.
    I got Jezzie Flanagan to admit that she’d once been Miss Washington, D.C., back when she was eighteen. She’d been in a sorority at the University of Virginia, but got kicked out for “inappropriate behavior,” a phrase that I loved.
    As we talked, though, I was surprised that I was telling her much more than I’d expected to. She was easy to talk to.
    Jezzie asked about my early days as a psychologist in Washington. “It was mostly a bad mistake,” I told her, without getting into how angry it had made me, still made me. “A whole lot of people didn’t want any part of a black shrink. Too many black people couldn’t afford one. There are no liberals on the psychiatrist’s couch.” She got me to talk about Maria, but only a little bit. She told me how it was to be a woman in the ninety-percent macho-male Secret Service. “They like to test me, oh, about once a day. They call me ’the Man.’” She also had some entertaining war stories about the White House. She knew the Bushes and the Reagans. All in all, it was a comfortable hour that went by too quickly.
    Actually, more than an hour had passed. More like two hours. Jezzie finally noticed our waitress hovering all by her lonesome near the bar. “Shoot. We are the last ones in this restaurant.”
    We paid our bill and got on the local elevator down from the spinning-top restaurant. Jezzie’s room was on the higher floor. She probably had a view of the ocean, too. From her suite.
    “That was real nice,” I said at her stop. I think that’s a snappy line out of a Noãl Coward play. “Thanks for the company. Merry Christmas.”
    “Merry Christmas, Alex.” Jezzie smiled. She tucked her blond hair behind her ear, which was a tic of hers I’d noticed before. “That was nice. Unfortunately, tomorrow probably won’t be.”
    Jezzie pecked my cheek, and went off to her room. ’I’m going to dream about you in swimsuits,” she said as the elevator doors closed.
    I went down four more floors, where I took my Christmas cold shower, alone in my Christmas hotel room. I thought about Jezzie Flanagan. Dumb fantasies in a lonely Miami Beach hotel room. We sure weren’t going anywhere together, but I liked her. I kind of felt that I could talk to her