“Well, like I said, I wanted to talk to you about an appearance. Maybe.”
“Doing what?”
“Well, I’m in a special club … there’s a special club meeting here next week, and …”
“What kind of club?”
“Well, it’s kind of different. It’s sort of an underground thing …”
I said nothing, let him twist. After the initial bravura, I could feel him get uneasy. Good.
“Oh crap, it’s impossible to explain over the phone. Can I, uh, buy you a coffee?”
“It’s too late for coffee,” I said, and then realized he probably didn’t even mean tonight, probably meant sometime this week, and then I wondered again how I’d kill the next four or five hours.
“A beer? Wine?” he asked.
“When?”
Pause. “Tonight?”
Pause. “Fine.”
LYLE WIRTH LOOKED like a serial killer. Which meant he probably wasn’t one. If you were chopping up hookers or eating runaways, you’d try to look normal. He was sitting at a grimy card table in the middle of Tim-Clark’s Grille, a humid dive attached to a flea market. Tim-Clark’s had become famed for its barbeque and was now being gentrified, an uneasy mix of grizzled old-timers and flop-haired dudes in skinny jeans. Lyle was neither: He was somewhere in his very early twenties, with wavy, mousy hair he’d tried to tame with too much gel in all the wrong places, so that it was half fuzzy, half shiny points. He wore wireless glasses, a tight Members Only windbreaker, and jeans that were skinny, but not in a cool way, just in a tight way. He had features that were too delicate to be attractive on a man. Men shouldn’t have rosebud lips.
He caught my eye as I walked toward him. He wasn’t recognizing me at first, just assessing me, this lady-stranger. When I’d almost reached the table, it clicked for him: the freckles, the baby-bird skeleton, the pug nose that got pugger the longer someone held eye contact.
“Libby!” he started, realized it was too familiar, and added, “Day!” He stood up, pulled out one of the folding chairs, looked like he regretted the chivalry, and sat back down. “Your hair’s blond.”