The Search for the Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart Page B

was getting along just fine. She said she’d like to find Lukie too and give him a piece of her mind. She was still babbling away when they finally managed to leave.
    Larry and Honoria edged carefully down the old wooden stairs into the smelly night of Hempstead and were soon back in Larry’s Mercedes speeding towards Manhattan.
    After Arlene had closed the door behind her two visitors, she grinned, shook her head, and began to shuffle back into the living room. Then she stopped in front of an old full-length mirror and looked at herself. She stretched and smiled again.
    Then she reached up and began pulling at her white hair until, with a sudden wrench, the entire white wig came sliding off, revealing a mass of jet-black hair pinned down. After putting the white wig in a cardboard box with others on a closet shelf, she reached back and unpinned her hair, sending a cascade of touched-up black hair down on to her shoulders. She shook her head and smiled.
    She checked her watch, frowned and took off her black shawl. Then, as she began to walk with a decidedly younger step towards the bathroom she flipped her shawl into a bedroom as she passed. On the way she took off her thick glasses and left them on a shelf in the hall. In front of the mirror in the bathroom she began to insert contact lenses into her eyes. When she’d finished she began to apply ‘the works’, as she called the creams, mascaras, eyeshadow, line erasers, blushers that were any woman’s staple when she wanted to look younger. This done, she left for the bedroom to change her clothes and prepare for her evening out.
    But twenty minutes after Larry and Honoria had left there was a knock on the door of Arlene’s duplex. Itwas Agent Macavoy. He had dutifully followed Larry’s Mercedes and knew, when they had arrived at Browning Street in Hempstead, that the two were questioning Arlene Ecstein. After they’d left, he decided it might be worthwhile if he had a few words with the lady. If she told him what she’d told them it would simplify his surveillance.
    The door was finally opened. A big-busted woman wearing a low-cut flaming-red dress and high heels greeted him with a slow smile. If Arlene had looked well into her fifties for Larry and Honoria, she looked closer to a well-preserved and heavily endowed forty now.
    ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘What can I do for you?’
    Agent Macavoy pulled out his FBI identification and held it in front of her face.
    ‘Mrs Ecstein?’ he said coldly. ‘Macavoy, FBI. A few questions.’
    Arlene didn’t even glance at his ID, but simply swung the door open wide and invited him in.
    ‘Sure,’ said Arlene. ‘I was just going out, but I love answering questions.’ She walked over to her desk and, with her back to Macavoy – for a moment he worried that she might be going for a weapon – she seemed to fiddle with something there before turning. As she came towards him he saw that it was just a couple of dice.
    ‘So,’ she said, coming back up to him with a smile. ‘What can I do for you?’
    Macavoy halted at her approach and looked at her severely, hoping to put her in a properly respectful if not fearful frame of mind.
    Arlene ran her tongue around her lips and idly routed her shoulders so that her breasts momentarily swelled up towards the neckline of her low-cut dress then receded – two round white tides swelling and receding.
    ‘Few questions,’ said Macavoy. ‘Like did you tell your recent visitors where they might find –’
    ‘My God, you’re a hunk,’ said Arlene, reaching her twohands up briefly to knead each of Macavoy’s shoulders and eyeing him up and down. ‘You work out every day?’
    ‘Uh, every other day,’ said Macavoy, taken aback and actually retreating a step. ‘Uh, Luke Rhinehart, Mrs Ecstein. Did you –’
    ‘No, no, more than that,’ said Arlene, moving her hands inside his suit jacket to his chest and squeezing through his shirt the muscles around his nipples. ‘You must