“The maiden’s bed,” Martha Peebles said.
“Excuse me?” David said, not sure that he had heard her correctly.
“The maiden’s bed,” Martha said. “My bed. I suppose you think that’s a bit absurd in this day and age, a maiden my age.”
“Not at all.” He seemed to have trouble finding his voice.
“I’m thirty-five,” Martha said.
“I’m thirty-seven.”
“Do you think I’m absurd?” Martha Peebles asked.
“No,” he said firmly. “Why should I think that?”
“Enticing you, trying to entice you, up here like this?”
“Jesus!”
“Then you do,” she said. “I didn’t…it wasn’t my intention to embarrass you, David.”
“You’re not embarrassing me.”
“I’ll tell you what is absurd,” she said. “I never even thought of doing something like this until you came here this afternoon.”
“I don’t know what to say,” David said. “Christ, I’ve been thinking about you all day…ever since I almost dropped the Hamner Schuetzen.”
“When our hands touched?”
“Yeah, and when you looked at me that way,” he said.
“I thought you were looking into my soul,” Martha said.
“Jesus!”
“That made you uncomfortable, didn’t it?” Martha asked. “For me to say that?”
“I felt the same damned thing!”
“Oh, David!”
He put his arms around her. At first it was awkward, but then they seemed to adjust their bodies to each other, and he kissed the top of her head, then her forehead, and finally her mouth.
“David,” Martha said, finally. “Your…equipment…the belt and whatever, your badge, is hurting me. If we’re going—shouldn’t we take our things off?”
David backed away from her and looked down at his badge, then started to take off his Sam Browne belt.
When he glanced at Martha, he saw that she had removed her dressing gown. She hadn’t been wearing anything under it.
“Are you disappointed?” she asked.
“You’re beautiful!”
“Oh, I’m so glad you think so!”
At fifteen minutes to midnight, Officer Jesus Martinez drove down Glengarry Lane in Chestnut Hill, saw the unmarked car parked by the side of the Peebles house, recognized it as one he had ferried from the Academy, and wondered who the hell was in it. Obviously, one of the brass hats, stroking the lady. If there had been anything going on, it would have come over the radio.
He saw Matt Payne’s unmarked car and drove past it, made a U-turn, and pulled in beside it. Payne wasn’t in the car; maybe he was in the house with the supervisor.