“Who was it said, beware of any venture that requires new clothes?” Pender wanted to know. Dorie had half-dragged him to Khaki’s, an upscale men’s clothier in Carmel’s Barnyard shopping center.
“It wasn’t a woman, I’ll tell you that,” she replied. The only clothes he had were the ones he’d packed in his carry-on for what was supposed to have been a two-day trip. If she saw that yellow Ban Lon shirt one more time, she’d announced Tuesday morning, she was going to upchuck.
Her choice of emporiums backfired on her, though. Khaki’s advertised itself as a classy, post-preppy kind of store, but Pender had made a beeline for a rack of Hawaiian shirts and picked out a couple of doozies; he was trying on Panama hats when his cell phone began chirping.
Weird, thought Dorie, watching Pender as he wandered over to the doorway of the shop for better reception. She’d never fallen for a homely man before-it took some getting used to. Not in bed, oddly enough-she was surprised to learn how little looks seemed to matter when you were making love-but in broad daylight those eyes, under that scarred expanse of scalp, seemed much too small, and that putty nose and those LBJ ears much too big; only the full-lipped mouth was just about right, but somehow when it broke into that easy grin, it made the rest of the face seem just about right, too.
Still, she couldn’t help comparing him to Rafael, her Big Sur carpenter. Walk into a joint on Rafe’s arm, and you could sense every other woman in the place curling up with jealousy like the wicked witch’s toes after the ruby slippers were removed. And when Rafe was working, with his muscles rippling beneath his sweat-stained T-shirt like Brando’s in Streetcar and the heavy suede carpenter’s toolbelt slung diagonally athwart his narrow hips-
“Hey, Dorie!” Pender waved her over, his hand covering the mouthpiece of the phone. “Have you ever heard of a shrink named Luka-Janos Luka?”
“Janos Luka? Sure, who hasn’t?”
“Me and Abruzzi, for two.”
“He’s a famous gestalt therapist-he worked with Perls and Maslow, all those guys. He must be about a million years old by now-he still runs the Lethe Institute, down in Big Sur. Why?”
“Apparently he was Simon Childs’s psychiatrist at one time.” Then, into the phone again: “Linda? Yes, Dorie knows him.”
“Hey! I didn’t say I-”
Pender put a forefinger to his lips, gave Dorie a wink. “Yeah, he’s an old friend of hers. She says he’s pretty reclusive, though-maybe you ought to let us make the first contact…. Right, right, somebody from the resident agency should definitely do the interview itself…. Of course I will.…Okay, talk to you later.”
“What was that all about?” asked Dorie.
“Just a little Bureau-cratic gamesmanship. How long a drive is it?”
“How long a drive is what?”
“From here to Big Sur,” said Pender-and here came that grin again, lighting up his whole face, chasing away all the ugly.