I took a swig of my drink. Said, “Why not?”

I slipped my gun in my waistband. We went out the front and she hooked her arm in mine. The humidity wasn’t bad for the Midwest and the warm night was mixing with the breeze like the ginger ale and whiskey in my belly. The three-quarter moon was filtering down through the many pin pines. Sap was in the air. And maybe his name was Heller.

“Listen,” she said, and her voice had a different timbre, “of course Carr sent me. That room is wired for sound recording.”

“I’m shocked.”

“Yeah, I’m sure. He might be watching—right now.”

“Oh?”

“Would kissing me make you sick?”

“Let’s try it and see.”

We stood there in a clinch and kissed and it wasn’t bad at all. She was a smoker and I could taste it, but the fullness and warmth of those sticky lips made it a nicely nasty experience. A perfect chaser for the Seagram’s and Seven.

We walked into the pin pines, back into the taller ones that had been there even before Carr got into gardening. I stood with my spine to one of the thicker trunks and she faced me, her lipstick smeared. Was she frightened?

“You want to know,” she said, “if the Greenlease money was ever hidden here. I don’t know the answer to that. It might have been, briefly. But I doubt it.”

“Why?”

“The inner walls at the Coral Court are thin. You’ve seen the layout—the rooms are adjacent to the individual garages. No need for heavy walls. The brick exterior is so heavy those inner walls don’t need much. These wild stories about the place being stuffed with ransom dough are just that—stories, wild, and stupid. Certain rooms are wired for sound, yeah, but the walls are just too thin for storing jack shit.”

I frowned at her. “You think Carr helped launder the loot? He freely admitted he does business with Costello and Wortman. Said he was their accountant in the old days.”

She shook her head. “But that was the old days. When he opened up, the Coral Court was meant to be a mob getaway, a place for Outfit guys to vacation or lie low. But then the motel took off with a straight clientele—cheating spouses and honeymooning couples and families with kiddies. Outfit guys were pissed after that—Wortman even took a shot at Carr, and Jack had to make peace. Does them favors when need be.”

“Like moving the Greenlease money?”

She sighed, looked back toward the motel. “We need to get in there and do what Carr expects us to.”

“Which is what?”

Her response seemed a non-sequitur. “Around when you knew me, I’d had my fill of men. I lived with another woman till about six months ago. I’m a switch-hitter, okay? But you need to know I haven’t been with a man for three, maybe four years.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because we have to go in there and do what Carr expects us to! Don’t worry—you’re not going to catch anything. And I haven’t had a visit from my friend in two years.”