Manhattan Is My Beat

thought maybe
you
were investigating it.”
    “The robbery? Me?” Dixon laughed again. He had a nice smile. Richard, she was thinking, had that mysteriousness about him. Something going on under the surface—you couldn’t quite believe his smile. Dixon’s seemed totally genuine.
    He took off his baseball cap, rubbed his hair in a boyish way, put the hat back on.
    She said, “I mean, it was kind of a coincidence you were asking about Mr. Kelly and everything.”
    “Bank robbery’d be the FBI, not the Marshals. I’m involved only ‘cause the killer used the kind of bullets a lot of hit men use. We check stuff like that out.”
    “Teflon,” Rune said.
    “Oh, you know about that?”
    “The police told me. But if you don’t care about the robbery then why’d you look up the case?”
    He shrugged, looked away. “I dunno. Seemed important to you.”
    A little tingle. Nothing as high-voltage as with Richard. But it
was
something. Besides, Richard, who she thought she was in love with, had just been giving her crap about her life, while this guy, almost a stranger, had gone to the trouble to help her with her quest.
    Little red hen …
    She gave him a coy look, a Scarlett O’Hara look. “That’s the only reason you came all the way down here? To tell me about a fifty-year-old case?”
    He shrugged, avoided her eyes. “I stopped by your place and you weren’t there and I called here and they said sometimes you just hang out and talk about movies with people.” He said this as if he’d practiced it. Like a shy boy rehearsing his lines to ask a girl out on a date. Embarrassed. He crossed his arms.
    “So you took the chance I’d be here?”
    “Right.” After a moment he said, “And I’ll bet you want to know why.”
    “Yeah,” she said. “I do.”
    “Well.” He swallowed. How could somebody with such a big gun be so nervous? He continued. “I guess I wanted to ask you out. I mean, if you don’t want to, forget it, but—”
    “Rune,” Frankie called, “phone!”
    “Wait right there,” Rune told Dixon, then added emphatically, “Don’t go away.”
    “Sure. Sure. I won’t go anywhere.”
    She picked up the phone. It was Amanda LeClerc. “Rune, I thought you want to know,” the woman said quickly, her accent more pronounced because of her excitement. “Victor Symington’s daughter, she over here. I mean, right now. You want to see her?”
    Rune glanced at Dixon, who was looking at video boxes. He glanced at the X-rated section, blushed, and looked away quickly.
    Rune, debating furious—what should she do?
    A man who wanted to ask her out versus the quest.
    This was totally unfair.
    “Rune?” Amanda said. “I don’t think she going to stay too long.”
    Eyes on Dixon.
    Eyes on the Brooklyn Yellow Pages.
    Oh, shit.
    Into the phone she blurted out, “I’ll be right over.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
     
    “You had the baby?”
    Rune looked up from the building directory, so thick with graffiti she couldn’t find the number of Amanda LeClerc’s apartment.
    Her surprised eyes rested on the surprised face of the young man who’d let her into the apartment building two days before—when she’d been extremely pregnant. Now, she let him open the door for her again and she walked inside.
    “I did, thanks,” Rune said. “Courtney Madonna Brittany. Six pounds, four ounces.”
    “Congratulations,” he said. He couldn’t help but stare down at her belly. “You, uh, feeling okay?”
    “Feeling great,” Rune assured him. “I just ran out for a minute and forgot my keys.”
    “Where’s your little girl?” he asked.
    When you lie, lie with confidence. “She’s upstairs. Watching TV.”
    “Watching TV?”
    “Well, she’s with her father and
he’s
watching TV. They both like sitcoms…. Say, which apartment is Amanda LeClerc in again?”
    “Oh, Amanda? On the second floor?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I think 2F.”
    “Right, right, right.” Rune started up the stairs two at a time.
    “Don’t you think you should take it a little easy?”
    “Peasant stock,” she called back cheerily.
    On the second-floor landing she noticed that there was a piece of plywood over the hole in Mr. Kelly’s door. There was also a large padlock on it. The police tape had been replaced. She walked past it.
    It’d been hard to turn down Phillip Dixon (
he
, unlike Richard, was somebody who had no problem with either the word or the concept of “date”).
    “Rain check?” he’d asked.
    “You bet.