A/N: Our story continues.

Big Swamp

Chapter Two: Soft Boiled

I open the door that leads from the front room — the room Morgan and I call the waiting room, although almost no one ever waits in it, mostly Morgan and I play video games or watch movies on the TV — and into my office.

I admit I read too many roman noirs, detective novels: Chandler, Davis, MacDonald, Thompson, Ellison, Ellroy. That not only affects my thinking and speaking — my patterns and sometimes, to my regret, my sentiments — but that affects my taste in office decor. Mainly, it means I have none. Decor, not taste.

Well, maybe taste too.

My office is a small room with a tall desk. The desk is massive, metal, olive drab. I found it parked at an Army/Navy surplus store; I think it is a re-purposed Sherman tank. Behind the desk is my old, heavy, wooden desk chair. In front of the desk are two straight-backed wooden chairs, which always strike me as if infantry support for the tank.

A file cabinet huddles in one corner, a lone enemy armored car, an old, metal fan atop it like a turret, always on, and making a barely audible metallic, whirring sound, — although there is central air. A bare battle scene.

No knick-knacks. No flowers. Lots of dust.

A large Blade Runner poster hangs on the wall behind my desk. — As I said to the woman, I am a serious detective.

I gesture to one of the chairs as I hurry around the desk and I am standing in front of my desk chair as she sits. I didn't want to miss that. I could have watched her sit down a second time and a third, given each a standing ovation. The grace of her movements, the economy, — that bewitching black pants suit, those pointy heels. She crosses her legs and it might as well be the Apocalypse: the world could end and I'd end happily.

Again, she sat at attention. She glanced at her gold watch.

"Am I on the clock?" I ask without really thinking; I'm still replaying her seating herself in my head.

"Am I?" She replies, one eyebrow shaking loose of gravity.

"On the clock? No, no. I do get paid by the day, but I'm not working for you, not yet…"

She does not respond; she looks around the office. She seems marooned between curiosity and...what? Contempt, maybe.

She turns to me and gives me a frank, assessing stare. It unmans me enough to make me sit.

"So," she says at last, just when I feel like a specimen beetle in a box, "are you one of those hard-boiled detectives?"

I can't tell if she's joking with me, or serious, or what. Like before, there's something artificial about her tone, about her. Not fake. That's not the right term. It's a deliberateness to what she does, what she is. It's connected to what I called contempt — but I'm not sure that's the right word. I don't know how to say it any better. If she weren't here, I'd dig the Webster's out of my desk and try to hunt down a better word.

"Um, uh, no," I stammer, "I suppose I'm more a soft-boiled one, a few minutes short of hard."

She blinks at me for a moment; now she's unsure. Then she smiles that better smile, the natural one. I caught her by surprise. "Few detectives, few men, would admit to that."

Again, I can't quite make out her tone. This feels like banter but I can't tell. She's not dressed to banter; she's dressed to kill. She's killing me.

I look at her and shrug. "Honest to a fault."

She gives me a long, speculative look, her head tilting slightly as she does. "So, how does an honest, soft-boiled detective make a living in Opelika, Alabama?"

She doesn't say the town name quite like a native, but she's close.

I'm a soft-boiled detective and that's a hard question. The truth is I don't, strictly, make a living as a detective. I do okay, but not well enough to pay all the bills. Luckily, I have other sources of funds. When our parents died, they left Ellie and me a nice house in town and a tidy sum. We're not rich, not close — I drive a six-year-old Camry and rent the back half of an old house as an office, remember — but we have enough not to have to worry about making ends meet.

And of course, Ellie, now a doctor, makes plenty of money, but she donates a lot of it to charities. I'm also a writer. Yep, believe it or not. You see, I don't read all those detective novels just for fun, I read them for profit. I write detective novels on the side and under a pseudonym. No one knows that but Ellie. Not even Morgan.

"It's not easy," I answer misleadingly. She continues to look at me, her head still tilted as if she's trying to get me into focus.

"Can you do it, Chuck," she says my name and it's like little bells ring on trees, "can you do your job and be honest?"

"It's not easy," I say again but with a different meaning, no longer misleading.

It isn't easy. I could make a living if I were willing to skulk around town, taking photos of unfaithful spouses, say, but I haven't the telephoto lens, or the tin stomach, for that. I leave shit like that to the other PI in town, Daniel Shaw. Shaw's not choosy.

She finally stops giving me that speculative look, but as she does, I'm surprised to realize that the look was also reflexive. She wasn't just speculating about me, but about herself. That's the last thing I need — a client this beautiful who has haunted depths. Too much like the beginning of one of my novels.

Besides, I'm part coward when it comes to women. Just ask Hannah.

Sarah drops her eyes, puts her hands, one on top of the other, on her knee, and sighs, sits at ease. "No, I'm sure it's not. — As I said in the other room, I hope to hire you. What I want you to do may not seem like a job for a detective, but I need help and I don't know anyone in town. You see, I'm staying out at Noble Hall…"

"Oh, out toward Auburn?"

I know the place, a big, beautiful antebellum home, a petrification of the Old South.

She nods. "Yes, I'm staying there with my uncle…" she glances up at me and I am almost certain he's not her uncle, "...and I want to hire you to...get to know him."

"Get to know him?"

I must make a face because she immediately begins to explain. "Yes, no, I don't mean...You see, — "

I hold up my hand and she stops. "Wait, your uncle — is Wylie Stroud?"

I have seen Stroud around town a few times in recent months and been introduced to him once, quickly.

He was a fit man in his fifties, sporting a full head of non-gray hair, and a mouth full of non-dull teeth. Annoyingly attractive. Each time I'd seen him he looked like he was dressed for a haberdashery window, with substantial emphasis on dashery.

Stroud bought Nobel Hall about a while back, after the longtime owner, an eccentric woman named Jane Peterson, who used to walk the grounds at night with a swinging lantern for reasons no one understood, and who sometimes stood on the upstairs balcony, singing in the nude, died. The sale had been all the talk in Ed's for a couple of weeks, especially with the widows and divorced women, each hearing Gone With the Wind music sounding in her head and seeing visions of presiding handsomely with Stroud over her own plantation, her own Tara. — Did I say I didn't like Stroud the times I saw him, the once I met him?

"Yes," she said, "I'm his niece, Sarah Walker. I came out to visit him a couple of weeks ago."

Again, I don't believe it, the niece bit. But I play along. It's her business — but it does make my shitty mood begin to collect again, like fog in a valley.

"I see. It's good to meet you, Sarah Walker. But I still don't understand why you want to hire me."

She nods. "I want to hire you to get to know my uncle. He's always been...difficult with me...kept things from me. I worry he's up to something."

"Up to something?" I am beginning to sound like her parrot. So I add another repetition but this time of my own words. Better to parrot yourself. — Or is it? "I still don't understand."

She smiles at me, a smile without artifice but with a weight of weariness in it. "My uncle sometimes crosses the double-line between criminal practice and sharp practice. He's made his money mostly legally — if mostly unpleasantly. But I worry that he's taking the plunge into something big, something criminal, something that could get him into serious, irrevocable trouble — either with the law or...with the lawless."

"So, you think he's up to something shady?"

She nods. "I do, shady, or worse. And I can't get him to tell me what it is. That's why I need you. I need you to get to know him, become his friend, see if he'll tell you what he's up to?"

"But why would he tell me?"

She twists her lips to the side. It is so adorable I want to thank her aloud for doing it, mail her a fan letter. "He's always been more willing to talk around men, maybe it's just his way of showing off, trying to be the alpha, but it's true. And I think he's lonely for a friend here. You may not know it, but the South's reputation for hospitality is...um...inflated."

I nod. "I do know it. All the superficial honeys, and how do you dos, and bless your hearts in that unsulphered molasses accent can obscure the deep clannishness of the South. You can live here a long time and remain an outsider."

She gives me the speculative look again. "You talk like a writer, you know that?"

I shift uneasily in my chair. I'm not about to give up my pseudonym. And no one has ever said that to me before, the writer thing.

"My sister just says I talk too much. That I spiral."

"Like in the other room." She grins.

I had mercifully forgotten my display of fractured English but now it comes cruelly back to me. "Yeah, I fear that folks tend to remember the spirals better than the flourishes."

She laughs softly. "Aren't you a cradle Southerner?"

"No, not, actually. My parents moved here when I was young, but I wasn't born here. Dad taught at Auburn. Mom was a doctor, like my sister. They were from Chicago but they met out East. Mom was an undergrad at Harvard and Dad was a grad student at Boston College. They met on the T."

Sarah leans forward. "I know Boston, the T. People on the T don't normally interact much."

"No," I agree, laughing, "but I guess Dad stepped on Mom's foot. He was reading some fat book, struggling to balance it and himself as the T moved, and at some point, he over-balanced, and, trying to keep from falling, he stomped on Mom. She was reading too. He apologized. She asked about his book. Four years later, Ellie was born."

"So I guess he failed," Sarah says with a smile.

"Failed?" I do it again, the parroting.

"Yes, failed to keep himself from falling."

"Oh, oh! Right." I laugh and her smile brightens. She seems pleased to have made me laugh. I like her way more than ten minutes should allow. Too much.

"So," she asks with an interest that surprises me, "your Mom was at Harvard?"

"Yeah, a legacy. Her dad and her dad's dad graduated from Harvard."

"Huh," she nods, "and you?"

"Nope. I didn't. I disappointed my grandfather, seriously disappointed him. I didn't even apply. I went to Oberlin."

"In Ohio?"

"Yes, I wanted a small college, small town. I graduated and came back here to be with my sister."

"What's her name?"

"Ellie. She's a doctor in town."

"Oh."

She offers me nothing about her past, her un-avuncular family. We both realize at the same time that we've wandered off-topic. Sarah clears her throat and pulls us back. "So, about my uncle…"

"Right, right. Wylie. So, you want me to...befriend him, and see if I can find out what he's up to? Is that it?"

"Yes."

"But won't he be suspicious? This is a small town still — it's hard to keep secrets. People know me, know what I do."

She leans back. "That's fine. I don't want to keep what you do a secret, just that you're doing it for me. I assume you and Morgan can keep my visit today confidential, our business confidential?"

I'm not entirely sure Morgan can, given the phone call this morning, but I hope for the best and nod my head. "We can. So, if I do this, how do I get into your uncle's circle? I don't exactly move among the social elite hereabouts. I'm more Ed's Diner than Lee County Country Club."

"That's okay. My uncle's less fussy about that sort of thing than he...looks. I'm convinced now that you're the man for the job — that he'll like you. He'll abuse you, probably, but that will mean he likes you."

Great, that's what I need. Abusive liking. "So, if I take the job, do I just wait to run into your uncle somewhere?"

Her face betrays a moment of nervousness. "No, we're having a party Friday night, and I was hoping you would attend."

"By myself?"

"No, you should come — as my date."

I laugh out loud. I suppose a man ought to have more self-respect, but the thought of that woman on my arm strikes me as the very image of unequally yoked. But I also laugh because that image complicates my understanding of what is happening between Sarah and her...uncle Wylie. — Maybe he is her uncle, after all? But that still seems unlikely to me — though I can't say why.

When I look at her I'm baffled to see a trace of hurt in her eyes. I stop laughing.

She makes herself smile. Lots of artifice this time. "You don't want to?" She tries to make the question light, mocking, but it feels disappointed.

I wave both hands in the air in front of me, apologetic little circles. "No, no, I'd be pleased to be your date. I just — " I pause and change directions. "Will your uncle mind?"

She stares, puzzled. "Wylie? Why would he mind? It's his party but I can invite anyone I want."

"Do you think he'll buy it, that I would be the person you would invite?"

She tilted her head again and continued with her puzzled stare. "Of course. Why wouldn't he?"

I have enough self-respect to answer that evasively. "I don't know…" I make a vague gesture. "As I was saying, different social circles."

She brushes the comment aside. "Let the Old South go, Chuck. Live a little. Northern up."

I bark a laugh and sit forward. I take a moment to gather myself. "By 'date', what do you mean?"

"Why, Mr. Bartowski," she says in a remarkably accurate Alabama accent, "what is on your mind?"

She makes 'on' a two-syllable word, inserts a 'y' somewhere in the middle of 'mind'. It makes me wonder about her mispronunciation of 'Opelika'.

"Oh, nothing like that!" I now wave my hands wildly. "I meant logistics, times, cars, that sort of thing."

She laughs at my exaggerated reaction. "How about I pick you up at your place? 7 pm?"

"Won't we need some sort of backstory, some cover, if we're going to con your uncle?"

Her reaction to that surprises me. Her face slackens for a second. Then she gathers it back into a smile. "Right, how about I call you this week and we construct one together, make plans? You can give me your address then." Her tone is unexpectedly eager.

I feel an upsurge in my chest. I know it's a job, work, a client, not a real date, but her eagerness warms me head to toe. "Okay."

A moment of silence passes.

"So, I've hired you?" she asks, and as she does, some of the warmth drains back out of me. She seems to sink a little too.

"We should talk rates."

Another moment of silence as she stands. "That's not a problem," she says as she straightens her jacket. "I'm happy to pay whatever rate you charge."

I don't want to talk about money; I regret mentioning it. It changed the temperature of the room. The last of the warmth drains back out of me. Her eyes are velvety cool again, her face impassive.

I suddenly wonder about a black pants suit on an Alabama summer day. I'll never forget it — but she must be preternaturally cool.

"So, I'll hear from you before Friday."

"Yes, you will," she says simply, her tone ending things.

I start around the desk to open the door but she is out of it before I manage to get there. I'm standing in my office door when she goes out the waiting room door and down the steps. Sunlight and heat pour in as she goes. She glances over her shoulder as she steps into the parking lot.

I remember the poor Porsche, standing just so in the gravel, and I wish them both well.

A/N: Now back to Jeux (if you're following that one).