Fever Dream by Dennis Palumbo Page A

was. She didn’t say a thing, but she knew. And I…well, all I said to her was that everything would be all right. That I was going to call someone who might be able to help her.”
    A sharp bleat of a klaxon drew my eyes to the river, and the rust-stained pilot boat skimming along its surface. A squirrel’s tail of dark water plumed behind.
    When I turned back to Eleanor, she was taking off the sunglasses. Folding them with a one-handed flip of her wrist and hanging them again from the deep V in her t-shirt. Then she gave me a frank look.
    “I assume what I’m about to tell you is confidential?”
    “I assume you’d know better than to ask. Unless you’re planning to kill someone in the near future.”
    A brief smile. “God knows, I have a list. But no immediate plans, no…So you can rest easy.”
    She looked away, and I watched her watching the pilot boat disappear under the South Tenth Street Bridge.
    “I met Treva in college,” she began at last. “Up at Penn State, junior year. All I’d ever dated up till then were guys. Big dumb jocks I could talk rings around. So when I found myself attracted to her…I mean, what the hell? Some skinny little white girl? Who wrote bad poetry and was devastated when she didn’t make the cheer squad?”
    “Must’ve been a confusing time for you.”
    “Spare me the therapeutic talk, will ya, Dan? It wasn’t confusing, it was great . Treva and I were—well, I’d never been into someone so much in my life. And I figured she felt the same. Six weeks after we first hooked up, we moved into a shitty apartment off-campus. But it felt like heaven to me. We started skipping classes, just staying in together, days on end. Making love like we invented it. Listening to music and reading to each other and talking about living overseas someday. Some Third World country. Away from everybody and everything.”
    Her eyes caught mine.
    “Yeah, I know. Typical college romance. That kind of stupid love you only feel when you’re young but think you’re older. When you don’t have a goddam clue how the world works. How things really are.”
    I nodded carefully. “What happened?”
    Her face was unreadable.
    “It ended. Treva left me. For a man.”
    I followed her gaze back out to the river, its slow-moving current pock-marked by hundreds of troughs and shallow peaks. The last remaining sunlight danced across its surface in cascades of diamond-like glitters.
    “I’m sorry, Eleanor.”
    “Hell, it was all a long time ago. I’ve had lots of shitty relationships since then.”
    A thin half-smile. “With men and women. Turns out, I’m not choosey. As long as they’re good in bed and will end up treating me like dirt, I’ll jump in with both feet. At least I used to. Now…”
    “What about now?”
    “Now my roommate is a Dobie named Luther. It works for me. I get all the testosterone, none of the bullshit.”
    I had to ask.
    “But why so secretive? I mean, about your prior relationship with Treva? Even if you told Harry and Biegler, the worst that’d happen—”
    “—Is that I’d be put on a desk for the rest of the investigation. Conflict of interest. Too personally involved with a prime witness to a multiple homicide and armed robbery.” She frowned. “Not to mention the endless shit I’d get from the squad. The other guys. Not the most enlightened group on earth. I mean, most of ’em think female officers are just a bunch of dykes, anyway. Even after all that sensitivity training…”
    Again, that thin half-smile. I was starting to see how her defenses worked. The cost of her cool self-assurance on the job, in what was still pretty much a man’s world.
    I chose my words carefully. “Maybe putting you on a desk isn’t such a bad idea. Given how rattled you were by seeing her again after all these years.”
    She stared at me. “Ya know, for a head-shrinker, you can be goddam clueless sometimes.”
    “So I’ve been told.”
    “I mean, okay, so I still care