“Which is it?” I asked. “The Olds, or that Caddy up there?”

She smiled. “Neither. Its in the garage back in the alley. You notice things, don’t you?”

“What’s the gag?”

“What makes you think there is one? Maybe I want two cars.”

“Do you?”

She looked me right in the face. “No,” she said.

I was burning. “What’s the idea of wasting my time?”

“Maybe I wasn’t.”

“No?”

“That’s up to you. I said we might make a deal. Remember?”

She went up the stairs and I followed her, remembering the long, relaxed smoothness of her on that towel. She put her purse on the table and tilted the Venetian blinds a little against the light. It was cooler in the apartment and almost dim after the glare in the street. When she turned back I was standing in front of her. I pulled her to me and kissed her, hard, with my hands digging into her back. But she wasn’t wasting my time then. I was.

It was all nothing. She rolled with it like a passed-out drunk and didn’t even close her eyes. They just watched me coolly. She broke it up with her elbows without seeming to move them, the way they can, and said, “That wasn’t quite the deal I had in mind.”

“What’s wrong with it?” I said.

“Nothing, I suppose, under the right circumstances. But I asked you up here to talk business. Why don’t you sit down? You’d probably be more comfortable.”

I was still angry, but there was no percentage in knocking myself out. I sat down. She went into the kitchen and came back in a minute with two drinks.

She sat down in a big chair on the other side of the coffee table and crossed her legs. She put a cigarette in her mouth and waited for me to leap up and hold the lighter for her.

The hell with her.

She shrugged and reached for the lighter on the coffee

table.

“What is it?” I asked.