Free When She Was Bad: A Thriller by Jonathan Nasaw

vibes. She could feel her nerve starting to fail her again—she’d never seduced a man before, and wasn’t sure she’d be able to manage it.
    Fortunately, the restaurant Irene had selected with the help of the hotel concierge was both romantic enough for her purposes and informal enough to accommodate Pender’s tragic wardrobe, which tonight consisted of a madras sport jacket, a boldly striped sport shirt, and rumpled polyester slacks; the only items that didn’t clash were his brown Basque beret and his beige Hush Puppies.
    Irene herself wore a green frock that showed off her best feature, her long slender legs. Emboldened by an unaccustomed in-take of alcohol—she’d polished off most of a carafe of house red while Pender stuck to his Jim Beam on the rocks—she contrived to rest her hand on his more than once during the meal. And in the backseat of the cab on the way back to their hotel she edged closer and closer to him, until their thighs were touching—any closer and she’d have been in his lap.
    But still he seemed clueless. In the elevator on the way up to their adjoining rooms he kept plenty of space between them. When they reached his door and she turned her face up to his for a good-night kiss, closing her eyes expectantly, all she got for her brazenness was a platonic peck on the cheek.
    So what’s a gal to do? Persuading herself she was drunker than she actually was, Irene took another shower, changed into a slinky, nearly transparent black negligee, and knocked on the door that communicated between her room and Pender’s.
    “Pen?”
    “Yeah?”
    “Can I come in for a sec?”
    The door opened. Pender, wearing a too-small hotel bathrobe—one size fits almost all—looked down at Irene, standing in the doorway with her arms at her sides. “Oh, shit, oh dear,” he said.
    Irene wanted to sink through the floor—or failing that, die on the spot. Instead, feeling stunned and foolish, she began backing away, her arms crossed over her chest. Pender, realizing the enormity of his gaffe, took her by the wrist and drew her back into his room. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean it like that.”
    “No, it’s my fault,” she heard herself say. “I shouldn’t have just…I mean, I had no right to…. “
    “Ssshh,” he murmured, wrapping his arms around Irene and pulling her tightly against him. “It’s not your fault—there’s no way you could have known.”
    “Known what?” she said, in a tiny voice.
    “Long story,” Pender replied gently.
     

    After six months, either the pain was beginning to subside or he was growing inured to it, Pender explained to Irene a few minutes later. The two were sitting side by side on the edge of his bed; he’d fetched her the monogrammed hotel bathrobe from her room, filled an ice bucket, and fixed them each a glass of Jim Beam on the rocks. Rare now were the body blows, he told her, the attacks of grief so visceral the sobbing literally doubled him over.
    The trouble was, said Pender, he wasn’t so sure he wanted the pain to subside. Except for his memories and a few trinkets, it was all he had left of his second wife, who’d died from pancreatic cancer only a few months after their wedding. So perhaps it had been a mistake to leave the tropical paradise where the two had met, wed, and lived happily ever after—if three months qualifies as ever after.
    But at the time, the reminders had been too plentiful and too painful to bear. Every Caribbean sunset broke Pender’s heart all over again, and with booze duty-free on the island and a bar on virtually every corner, it didn’t take him long to realize that you can’t drown your sorrows in alcohol, you can only pickle them. So he’d opted for the geographical solution instead, resigning his post as St. Luke’s chief of detectives and moving nearly four thousand miles west to the golfing mecca of the Monterey peninsula to take another stab at retirement—and at lowering his handicap, which