Free An Inconvenient Woman by Dominick Dunne Page B

got her drift. “How do you know so much?” he asked.
    “My last job. I used to know guys like that.”
    “Like Hector Paradiso?”
    “Yeah. I even knew Hector.”
    “What was your last job?”
    “We’re talking about Hector, not me,” she said.
    “Of course. What’s your name?”
    “Flo.”
    “Flo what?”
    “Flo M.,” she replied, emphasizing the
M
.
    “Oh, yes, sorry. I’m a little lax in the anonymity department sometimes,” said Philip.
    “You shouldn’t be. I abide by the rules. No last names in AA.”
    “You’re right. I’m sorry. I’m Philip Quennell.”
    “K,”
she corrected him. “You’re Philip
K.
”
    “No, not K. Q,” he said. “I’m Philip Q.”
    “Well, I was never much of a speller,” said Flo, smiling. “Do you mind if I smoke?” she asked.
    “No.”
    “Some of these people freak out. They’ve got so many no-smoking meetings now. This is the main reason I come to this one, at this ungodly hour of the morning—because I can smoke.”
    She opened a bag that hung from her shoulder on a gold chain and took out a gold cigarette case. Philip noticed that her name, Flo, was spelled out in sapphires on the top. “I’d give up smoking, but I love this cigarette case too much to put it in a drawer and never use it again.” She lit her cigarette with a matching gold lighter.
    “That’s not a good enough reason,” said Philip.
    “For me it is,” replied Flo. “I get a charge every time I open this pretty case. When I was still doing drugs, I used to carry joints in it.”
    Philip laughed. He was about to ask her another question, about Hector Paradiso, when the meeting started. Flo moved to a chair in the row behind him. Neither raised a hand to participate in the meeting, but each paid careful attentionto the speaker and to the people who raised their hands to share.
    At the end of the meeting, during the prayer, Philip looked around at Flo. She was saying the Lord’s Prayer with her eyes closed, holding the hands of the person on each side of her, with a cigarette dangling from her lips.
    “Will I see you at the Rodeo Drive meeting on Friday night?” he asked, as they were leaving the meeting.
    “Oh, no, I never go to the Rodeo Drive meeting. Or the Cedars-Sinai meeting on Sunday mornings either. Too social for me. This is the meeting I like. You never see anyone you know.”
    Philip, puzzled, nodded. “You wouldn’t want to have dinner one night, would you?”
    Flo looked at him and smiled. “No, I’m spoken for,” she said.
    He nodded, understanding. “I wasn’t coming on, if that’s what you were thinking,” he said.
    “Oh, yeah?” said Flo, smiling, with a hand-on-hip gesture.
    Philip laughed. “Is that what you thought?”
    “The idea had crossed my mind,” she answered. “You’re not exactly hard to look at, you know.”
    “Neither are you,” he said. “But that wasn’t what I had in mind, really. I thought it would be nice to have a cup of coffee and talk.”
    “Oh, I see. We’ve moved down the scale from dinner to a cup of coffee, have we? To discuss sobriety, is that it? Hey, good line, Phil Q. I bet it works. Most of the time.” She smiled at him and waved good-bye with a left-handed circular gesture and a toss of her red hair. He watched her as she walked away from him up Robertson Boulevard. There was a sway to her walk that he could not help but admire. Whether she meant it to be provocative or not, it was. Philip could imagine that she had been whistled at in her day. She turned into a parking place in front of an outdoor furniture shop that was not as yet open for business. She got into a red convertible Mercedes-Benz. He wondered where her money came from.
    That day Philip Quennell was to have his first meeting with Casper Stieglitz, for whom he was to write a documentary on the proliferation of drugs in the film industry. Casper Stieglitz had an office at Colossus Pictures in the San Fernando Valley.Once a studio unto itself in