Belinda Read Online Free PDF

One costume follows another.
    "It's a hell of a lot cleaner than one of those skid row hotels," she said. She laid her spoon down properly, didn't drink the dregs in the bowl. The nails were long enough to look deadly. "I just need to stay here tonight. There's a hardware store up on Castro, where I can get the padlock."
    "It's dangerous living in a place like that."
    "You're telling me? I put the bars up on the window myself."
    "You could get raped."
    "Don't say it!" Visible shudder. Then her hand up demanding silence.
    Was it panic behind the paint? Cloud of smoke from the cigarette. "Well, why the hell-"
    "Look, don't lose any sleep over this, OK? I want to crash here for one night."
    That clipped quality was almost gone. Pure California voice. She could have been from anywhere. But it still sounded like butter. "There's got to be someplace better than that."
    "It's cheap. And it's my problem. Right?"
    "Is it?"
    She broke off another piece of French bread. The makeup job wasn't bad at all, just outrageous. And the soft black gabardine dress was vintage thrift shop. Either that or she got it from her grandmother. It fit snugly over her breasts and under her arms. A few sequins fallen off the tight neck band.
    "Where are your parents?" I asked again. I turned the steak over.
    She chewed the bread, swallowed it and her face set in a rather stern expression as she looked at me. The heavy mascara made her look even sterner.
    "I'11 go if you don't want me here," she said. "I'11 understand perfectly."
    "I do want you here," I said, "but I just want to know-"
    "Then don't ask me about my parents." I didn't respond.
    "I'11 leave if you mention that again." Very gentle. Very polite. "It's the easiest way you could get rid of me. No hard feelings. I will just go."
    I took the steak out of the broiler and put it on the plate. I turned off the broiler.
    "Are you going to mention it again?" she asked.
    "No." I set the plate down for her with a knife and fork. "Want a glass of milk?"
    She said no. Scotch was good enough, especially good Scotch. Unless of course I had bourbon.
    "I have bourbon," I said in a small voice. This was criminal. I got down the bourbon and fixed her a weak drink. "That's enough water," she said.
    In between rapid bites of the steak she was looking around the kitchen at the sketches I'd tacked up, the few dusty old dolls that had found their way to a shelf here. One early painting hung above the cabinets. It wasn't so good, but it was of the house where I grew up in New Orleans-my mother's house. She studied that. She looked at the old black wrought iron stove, the black-and-white tile.
    "You have a dream house here, don't you?" she said. "And this is real good bourbon, too."
    "You can sleep in a four-poster bed if you like. It has a canopy. It's very old. I brought it out here from New Orleans. I painted it in my Night Before Christmas."
    She seemed immediately delighted.
    "It's where you sleep?"
    "No. I sleep in the back room with the door open to the deck. I like the night air. I use a pallet on the floor."
    "I'll sleep where you want me to sleep," she said. She was eating incredibly fast. I leaned against the sink and watched her.
    Her ankles were crossed and the straps of the little shoes looked very pretty going over her insteps. The napkin was a perfect white square on her lap. But her neck was the exquisite part. That and the gentle slope of her shoulders under the black gabardine.
    She probably thought she looked grownup. But what the nail polish and the paint and cocktail clothes did, really, was turn her into kiddie porn.
    I was thinking it over.
    Seeing her got up like this, gulping bourbon and puffing that cigarette, was like watching little child star Tatum O'Neal smoke cigarettes in the movie Paper Moon. Children didn't have to be naked to look sexual. You could carnalize them by simply turning them out like adults, having them do adult things.
    The problem with this theory was, she had looked just