That Touch of Ink by Diane Vallere

phone, and the call went to voicemail. I left a brief message. “I have something at my apartment I think you’ll want to see. Come over when you get the message. I’ll wait up.”
    As I waited for Tex’s return call or possible arrival, I sorted the contents of the wallet into piles: business cards, credit cards, membership cards, and condoms. In truth, the wallet contained only one condom, but it warranted its own pile by sheer nature of “one of these things is not like the other.”
    I stacked the Doris Day memorabilia back into the box with the wallet at the bottom and poured a glass of wine. I dozed off in the armchair twice, until it seemed as though Tex would not be returning my call. After a brief shower, I searched the closet for a clean pair of pajamas.
    I pulled a yellow chiffon nightgown out from a stack of peignoir sets that had been professionally laundered last year and dove into the sheer layers. Dozens of pleats heat-set in the polyester fabric cascaded over my trim body, like being inside a ray of sunlight. I blew kisses to Rocky, who stood up and followed me to the bed. Within minutes we were asleep.
    An unfamiliar sound woke me hours later. An eerie glow from the parking lot behind the building illuminated the room through my curtains. My heart pounded like a drummer keeping time in a parade, but I lay still, listening for sounds of movement. A stillness hung in the air, until I heard it again. A single tap on my window.
    My unit was on the second floor, facing the parking lot. Unless Spiderman had decided to pay me a visit, I doubted anyone was directly outside. I pushed the covers back and approached the window, peering between the floor-to-ceiling curtain panels. Tex stood in front of his Jeep. He wore a camel blazer over a white T-shirt and jeans and held a megawatt flashlight in one hand. He shined the light directly at me, and I backed away from the window. The light went out.
    I glanced at the clock on the wall. It was close to three thirty. In my experience, nothing good happens at three thirty in the morning. I slid the window open and hissed through the screen.
    “What are you doing here?”
    “Unlock the back door. We need to talk.”
    “Can’t this wait until the morning?”
    “No.”
    “Fine.”
    I belted myself into a plush white terrycloth robe, slipped into matching slippers, and went downstairs. I turned the knob on the back door and pulled it open. One of my neighbors cracked their front door in the hall behind me, but no one appeared.
    “Come in if you’re coming in,” I said in a low voice. I headed up the stairs to my apartment, and he followed.
    “If anybody should ask, I was never here,” he said once we were inside.
    I shook my head. “My neighbors are going to think I made a booty call.”
    “It’s a duty call, not a booty call. You said you have evidence?”
    My eyes bugged out. “I called you hours ago! Why didn’t you call me back?”
    “I did. Your phone’s off.”
    I looked around the apartment for my phone and located it on the corner of the Danish modern desk. The screen was black. I powered it on, the battery blinked twice, and it went black again. I walked away from Tex to the kitchen and plugged it in to the power cord. When I turned around, he was staring at the walls of the living room.
    “If you couldn’t respond in a reasonable amount of time, this should have waited until morning,” I said.
    “I had to get out of the house.”
    “In the middle of the night?”
    “I knew it would be safe here.”
    “Safe from what?”
    “I don’t want to talk about it.” He reached down and picked up one of the red kitten heeled shoes I’d worn earlier that day. It dangled there, rocking back and forth. They were a far cry from the stilettos I’d seen Officer Nast wear when she wasn’t in uniform. I couldn’t picture her and Tex as a couple. It seemed by his presence that he was having a hard time with the concept too.
    “Tex, when people are in a