Out on the Rim Read Free Page A

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    Harry Crites was twenty-two minutes late when the muscle walked into the Madison and read the lobby with the standard quick not quite bored glance that flitted over Booth Stallings, lingered for a moment on the two Saudis, counted the help and marked the spare exits. After that the muscle gave her left earlobe a slight tug, as if checking the small gold earring.
    Booth Stallings immediately nominated her for one of the three
most striking women he had ever seen. Her immense poise made him peg her age at thirty-two or thirty-three. But he knew he could be five years off either way because of the way she moved, which was like a young athlete with eight prime years still ahead of her.
    She was at least five-ten and not really as slender as her height made her out to be. She carried no purse and wore cream gabardine slacks with a black jacket of some nubby material that was short enough to make her seem even taller, but loose enough to hide the pistol Stallings somehow knew she was wearing.
    Her hair was a thick reddish brown with the red providing the highlights. Worn carelessly short, it looked perfect. It also looked as if all she had to do to make it look like that was run her fingers through it. Stallings suspected that nothing perfect was that easy. The red-brown hair framed a more or less oval face whose features seemed to have been placed precisely where they should be—except her forehead, which was a little high. Her eyes were green, although Stallings couldn’t decide whether they were sea green or emerald green. But since she looked expensive, he finally settled on dollar green.
    A few seconds after she tugged at her left earlobe, Harry Crites made his entrance, wearing a nine-dollar cigar and a thousand-dollar camel’s hair topcoat. The coat was worn like a cape, much as a rich poet might have worn it, if there were such a thing, which Stallings doubted.
    The woman nodded at Crites. It was a noncommittal nod that could have meant either have fun or all clear. Crites paused. The woman removed the coat from his shoulders with no trace of subservience. Stallings wondered how much her services cost and what they included. With the camel’s hair coat over her left arm, the woman turned and left the hotel through the Fifteenth Street entrance.
    When Harry Crites caught sight of his dinner guest he narrowed his blue eyes and twinkled them behind what Stallings suspected were contact lenses. The wide joke-prone mouth, a shade or two paler than a red rubber band, stretched itself into a delighted smile, revealing
some remarkably white teeth that Stallings knew were capped. After remembering that Crites had been twenty-seven when he had borrowed that still unpaid $35 back in 1961, Stallings put his present age at fifty-two.
    Rising slowly, Booth Stallings extended his right hand. Crites grabbed it with both of his and pumped it up and down as he spoke from around and behind the immense cigar. “Goddamnit, Booth, too many goddamned years.”
    â€œFourteen,” said Stallings who had that kind of memory. “June seventeenth, 1972.”
    Crites removed his cigar, flipped back through his own mental almanac and made his eyes dart from side to side in mock panic. “The Watergate break-in. Christ, I didn’t see you there.”
    Stallings couldn’t hold back his grin. “My daughter Joanna’s twenty-first birthday. She’s the one you talked to today—the one married to Secretary Know-nothing of the State Department.”
    â€œNeal Hineline,” Crites said and nodded gravely. “A great fourteenth-century mind. Sound.” He frowned then. “But I don’t remember Joanna’s birthday.”
    â€œThat’s because you weren’t there. You were going into that fancy place that closed down and almost got turned into a McDonald’s. The—uh—”
    â€œSans Souci.”
    â€œRight. And I was heading for a birthday lunch