Obstruction of Justice by Perri O'Shaughnessy Page A

spade-leafed cacti armed with prickers like tiny knives, faithful sentinels guarding the stone patio at center. A wooden table covered with a clean white cloth had been set up. Paul sat down in one of the two iron chairs. Behind him was a fireplace with a grill set up and a tall chimney, the whole thing made of white rocks.
    "Let me make you a drink."
    "No, thanks," Paul said.
    "C’mon. If we’ve got to do this, let’s make it fun. Be a sport. I make a mean martini. It’s almost four o’clock, which makes it practically five."
    "I’m not much for martinis ..." he said, getting ready to make a little speech about how he hadn’t given much thought to martinis since he last admired Myrna Loy as Nora Charles ordering five of them to keep pace with her inebriate husband back in the days when alcohol had flash and panache and a total Hollywood detachment from its evil effects, but by the time he thought all this up, she had drifted off back toward the house. A few moments later, she reappeared with a stainless steel martini shaker beaded with evaporation and two of those invitingly wide conical cocktail glasses.
    "You know the right way to make one of these, don’t you?" she asked, examining an empty glass in the sun, wiping an invisible speck with the immaculate white towel she had brought. She was conjuring up a show for him, Paul realized, pleased. "Shaken, not stirred?" he suggested, recalling his earlier success with Bond.
    "No, no, no. Makes no difference whether it’s shaken or stirred. That stuff about bruising the gin is just a lot of hooey. First, you swirl the driest of vermouths in a frosted glass, like this." She poured it out of a silver and green bottle from high up, lifting her breasts for him to notice.
    "Then—and this is the fun part—you discard all excess." Keeping her eyes on Paul, she tossed all the vermouth in the glass over her shoulder, straight into a tumorous, twisted pear cactus barely supporting itself against the house, a real Elephant Man of cacti. "Finally, you pour perfectly frigid gin through cracked ice"—which she did, the gin flowing like diamonds from a jeweler’s pouch—"into the now supremely primed vessel." She finished, popped an onion-stuffed olive inside, and handed him the glass, her hand touching his.
    "Whew," said Paul. "That was great. You do make it sound luscious."
    She made another for herself "Chin-chin," she said, tapping his glass.
    He drank out of politeness, to test his memory about how closely gin resembled battery acid.
    "Don’t the cacti die in the winter?" he asked after two sips. He didn’t ask what the vermouth did to them in summer. If that prickly pear was any example, he already knew. Actually, the martini had a pleasant flavor, piquant almost, or was he merely seduced by the arrant sexuality of her little exhibition? He had some more of the drink.
    "Most of these are imported from the low deserts of New Mexico, where I grew up. See the barrel cactus there? The Indians used those curved spines as fish-hooks. And near the back, I keep the jumping cholla," she said, pointing to a thorny, many-branched bush resembling a sea anemone. "It has a bad reputation for jumping people, but really only has weak branches that break off and cling to people and animals passing by. I haven’t had much luck with the saguaro, or giant cactus, but there are a few out front that are surviving. Oh, and inside, later maybe, I’ll show you the old man cactus."
    "I saw it as we walked through," Paul said. "I even touched it; that white shaggy fur cover looked so soft. Fortunately, it didn’t get me."
    "It’s thornless, that’s why it works so well inside. Anyway, the winters are cold and snowy in New Mexico, although drier. The sun is strong here, and the summers are hot and dry, just like in the desert. This patio has a winter cover, and I remove some of the plants to a greenhouse out back to keep them warm through the worst of the winter."
    Paul’s glass was empty. She