Chase: Roman

seen them on girls - or on fairies.’
        He considered that for a moment and decided that they might be onto something after all. ‘Then you think the killer might be a - homosexual?’
        ‘I don't know,’ she said. ‘But it was a pinkie ring.’
        ‘Did you tell Wallace about this?’
        ‘I just now thought of it. You loosened me up, and it just came back to me in a flash.’
        He liked that. He could not think of anything more personally gratifying than slowly establishing a body of information about Judge - working outward from this first essential bit of data - and then presenting it to the police with just the proper note of disdain after they had written him off as a borderline mental case with complex delusions. If that was childish, so be it. A long time had passed since he had indulged himself in anything childish.
        ‘It may be a help,’ he said.
        She slid next to him with all the oiled smoothness of a machine made especially for seduction, all soft lines and golden tan. ‘Do you think so, Mr Chase?’
        He nodded, trying to decide how best to excuse himself without hurting her feelings. He could feel her thigh pressuring his.
        She put her drink down and looked at him sideways, though she made certain that he saw her glance.
        He stood up abruptly and said, ‘I ought to be going. This has given me something concrete to consider, more than I had hoped for.’ That was only a small lie, since he'd really not expected anything.
        She stood up too, very close to him. ‘Oh, it's early,’ she said. ‘I wish you'd stay and keep me company.’
        Close to her, he could smell the combination of womanly scents - perfume, soap, freshly washed hair, the hint of sex - that usually intrigued a man, but he was not the least bit intrigued. Aroused, yes. Amazingly aroused over a woman for the first time in many months. But arousal was something separate from intrigue. Though she was lithe and quite lovely, he could not seem to want her to any extent further than his erection, never a particularly reliable device for measuring the quality of any relationship between a man and a woman.
        ‘No,’ he said. ‘I've other people to see.’
        ‘At this hour?’
        ‘One or two other people,’ he insisted, aware that he was losing the initiative.
        She moved against him, leaned up and licked his lips. No kiss. Just the maddeningly quick flicking of her pink tongue.
        Then he knew why he couldn't let his erection guide him. Though Louise looked like a woman and proceeded like a woman, she was something far less. Not a child, surely, and not a girl. But she lacked a roughened surface, the burnish of contact with life and the problems of life. She had always been protected, and the result was a sensuous polish that would take them both the whole way in one sleek, gliding explosion of sensation - but leave him feeling hollow and bitter afterward. What on earth would they talk about once he had fucked her?
        ‘We've got the house for several hours yet,’ she said. ‘We don't even have to use the couch. I've got a great big white bed with a white canopy and gold-ringed posts.’
        I can't,’ he said. ‘I really can't, because these people are waiting for me.’
        She was enough of a woman to know when she had lost a point. She stepped back and smiled at him. ‘But I do want to thank you. For saving my life. That's something that deserves a big reward.’
        ‘You don't owe me anything,’ he said.
        ‘I do. Some other night, when you don't have plans?’
        Because there was nothing to be gained from angering her, and because he might require her cooperation later, he leaned to her and kissed her on the lips. He said, ‘Definitely some other night.’
        That's fine,’ she said. ‘I know we'll be good together.’
        All polish, fast and easy, no jagged edges to get hung up on. Chase wondered if, afterward, her lovers could remember whom they'd been inside of.
        He said, ‘If Detective Wallace questions you again, do you think you could sort of - forget about the ring?’
        She said that she could. ‘But why are you carrying on with this on your own? I never did ask.’
        ‘Personal,’ he said. ‘For personal reasons.’
        
        At home again, he thought about what he had learned, and he was no longer sure that it was at all important. The fact that Judge