Page 23 of The Bad Weather Friend

“That’s true enough. But all this blah is related—no job, no one returning your calls, some pig of an intruder mucking up your kitchen, girlfriend gone. Did Carla Cobra have a problem with your decor?”

“Who?”

“Your girlfriend, Patty Python, did she dump you because the place looks like a hospital surgery?”

“No. She loves white decor.”

“That pops your theory.”

“Her name is Jill Swift.”

“She sounds like a snake to me.”

“Well, no, that’s not fair,” Benny said, following her out of the kitchen, through the dining room, into the living room, as she gave everything a sharp-eyed lookover, as if searching for a splash of color. “You don’t even know Jill. She’s a lovely person.”

“You lose your job, she pushes you off a cliff the same day, and on your way to the rocks below, you send her a valentine?”

“You have a colorful way of talking,” Benny said.

“It’s part of the job.”

“I’ve never heard another waitress talk like you.”

“Private investigator. In training.” As he followed her into his study, she said, “Looks like the intruder put two pale-gray throw pillows on your white sofa. We catch him, I’ll kneecap the bastard.”

In defense of his taste, which he was rapidly coming to find embarrassing, Benny said, “For years as a child, I lived in squalor with cockroaches. Then my grandmother dressed me all in black and made it her life’s mission to depress me into suicide. Maybe white-on-white has been an unconscious effort to compensate for those oppressive experiences.”

“Don’t go Sigmund on me, boyfriend. Freud was a phony. The mind doesn’t work that way. Most likely, you saw a magazine spread of a place done like this, and the writer raved about the cool decor, and you wanted to be cool, because you’ve never felt very cool, so you copied the look.”

Benny was somewhat surprised and slightly chagrinned to hear himself confessing. “It was a six-page spread. High-end interior-design magazine. The Manhattan apartment of a famous playwright.”

Frowning at a desk made of slabs of clear Lucite, Harper said, “I’ll bet he was a pretentious mug who writes plays I’d pay big moneynotto see.”

“Mug?”

“In his case a mug who commits crimes against art. The word is from a more blunt-spoken and interesting era than our prissy times.”

One good thing about all this white was how good it made Harper look, dressed as colorfully as she was. Benny couldn’t stop staring at her. He almost said as much, almost compared her to aparrot in a snow scene. Then he intuited that he’d be vulnerable to a critique of his ability to craft a metaphor—or was it a simile?—so instead he restricted himself to an expression of curiosity. “Your baseball cap says ‘smooth.’ With an exclamation point.”

“That’s correct.”

“What’s the significance?”

“I’m smooth and blue.”

“Well, I guess you look very smooth, smooth in a nice way, but you aren’t blue.”

“I’m as blue as blue gets. You’ll understand when it’s time to understand, Benny.”

“When will that be?”

“When it is. Now, what’s the point of a glass desk with no drawers?”

“It’s Lucite. The drawers are in that brushed stainless-steel unit against the wall. I just have to swivel around in the chair and scoot over there to get to whatever drawer I need.”

“How charmingly inconvenient.”

“The playwright’s desk was made of Starphire glass, but I just couldn’t afford that. His drawer unit was hidden in the floor, and it powered up into sight when he pushed a button on his chair. That was cool, but for several reasons, I couldn’t make it work here.”

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