A Long Walk Up the Waterslide by Don Winslow Read Free Book Online Page A

the modern anemic fashion, and perhaps she is a bit … bed-worn … a woman of experience, one might say. Perhaps the blond hair comes from a bottle. So many good things do. Perhaps her makeup is a tad thick. A woman of a certain age is entitled. Perhaps she smokes incessantly. She came to maturity in the age of black-and-white films, and besides, it allows me to light her cigarettes for her. Perhaps she is a drunk. I have been buying her drinks.
    To loosen her tongue, among other things.
    He leaned over his glass and peered through the smoke into her eyes.
    “You look lovely tonight, darling,” he said.
    Gloria took a demure sip of her fourth martini and said, “Let’s go back to my place.”
    “Check, please,” Withers said.
    She saw his eyes light up and said, “Walter, if you think I’m giving you so much as a hand job, you’re fooling yourself. It’s late and I’m expecting an important phone call, if you know what I mean.”
    Walter knew what she meant. He paid the tab and gave the doorman a five to hail a taxi.
    Gloria lived in a huge drab building on West Fifty-seventh Street. A blue plaque outside the main door claimed that Bela Bartók had once resided there.
    Withers didn’t particularly care for Bartók.
    Her apartment was big, a testament to rent control. Withers plopped himself down in one of her old overstuffed chairs in the living room.
    “You want a drink, Walter? What a dumb question,” she said. She went into the kitchen, found a bottle of scotch, and poured a straight shot.
    “Why are you doing this?” Withers asked as she handed him the glass.
    “Does it make a difference? Look, I’m like an older sister to the kid. I love her. But she’s never going to beat Jack Landis in court and she’s never going to make it on her brains, so she might as well get something out of this mess.”
    “Posing nude for a magazine?” Withers asked.
    “Marilyn Monroe … Jayne Mansfield … Mamie Van Doren …” she said, counting them off on her fingers. “Look what it did for them.”
    “These will be pretty graphic shots, I think, Gloria.”
    She looked at him as if he was a dope, shrugged, and said, “You sell what you have to sell.”
    “Apparently,” he answered.
    Neal snuggled up against Karen. “What do you think?” he asked.
    She rearranged the blanket so that it covered both their shoulders and said, “I think she’s telling the truth.”
    “You do?”
    “You don’t?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “That’s your problem, Neal,” she said. “You don’t trust people.”
    “Occupational hazard,” he answered.
    “That’s part of it,” Karen said. “You really don’t trust women.”
    Skip the rest of it, Neal thought. I’ve already heard it. How my father never showed up and my mother was a junkie hooker and so I never really had a chance to be a kid and learn to trust and yadda-yadda-yadda. It might be true, but I still have to get up mornings.
    “I trust you,” he said, “and you’re a woman. Singular. You get trust combined with collective nouns and you’re right. I don’t trust women, and I don’t trust men, for that matter.”
    “You trust Graham.”
    True, he thought.
    “What about Landis?” he asked her. “He says he never touched her. Do you trust him?”
    “No.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because he’s lying,” Karen said.
    “And you know this because she’s telling the truth.”
    “Right.”
    “Try this out,” he said. “Suppose they had an affair, which I agree they probably did. One night he says he wants sex; she says she doesn’t. He thinks she’s playing and forces the issue. To him, it was a game; to her, it was rape. Which is it?”
    “Rape.”
    “It’s not that simple,” he said.
    “It’s just that simple,” she insisted. “The difficult question is, why does Polly have to become Audrey Hepburn before she can be believed?”
    “Let me remind you that just this morning all Polly Paget was to you was a Jacuzzi on the deck,” Neal