Cases

Chapter Eighteen

Three weeks had passed. The blond man hulking over Dunc snarled, “Ve haff vays uff makink you talk!”

“Never!” croaked Dunc.

He was chest-deep in the half-dug grave, shirtless, almost black from the pitiless California sun; sweat rolled off his naked torso. When he drove his shovel into the dirt, in his mind Hent slashed the shovel down to cut the turtle in half.

Dunc unobtrusively picked up a dirt clod as big as his head and held it at arm’s length. “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy...”

“Vat nonsense are you tellink me?” roared the blond man.

“It’s from Hamlet — the gravedigger scene in Act Five.”

“But it’s not from a movie! You lose!”

“Olivier did a film version four or five years ago.”

“Oh yeah! I remember. Jean Simmons in a nightgown.”

“Except she killed herself.” To his earthen skull, Dunc said. “Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that...” But the clod wore the dead face of Artis. He threw it from him. “You win, Gus. I buy the beer tonight.”

Gus Trabert, another Notre Darner, was staying the summer at his uncle’s big old sprawling white frame house in Eagle Rock. He’d offered Dunc a place to stay, maybe a job; while waiting for it, at Dunc’s suggestion, they dug graves at nearby Forest Lawn.

Dunc struck the shovel in the dirt, upright, put his hands on the edge of the opening, kipped up easily, turning in midair to land sitting on the edge with his legs dangling into the hole.

“Gimme the water and start digging.”

Gus handed him the wet-sided canvas water bag, sat down beside him. He was taller than Dunc by half a head, but not as beefy of arms, chest, or shoulders. Blue eyes, blond hair. His people were from northern Italy.

“Friday,” he said. “The eagle shits tonight.”

Only five minutes to quitting time. They covered the grave with plywood, at a hose bib halfway down the slope sloshed the dust off their arms and chests and cleaned the shovels.

“Uncle Ben heard anything yet?” Gus’s uncle had heavy connections with the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese.

“I bet he’ll have the word tonight.”

These six hundred fantasyland acres of death were brilliant green, dazzling with flowers; in the distance, buildings gleamed like the Emerald City of Oz. Tomorrow the place would be full of tourists and people paying their respects; children would romp through Lullaby Land where dead children were buried amid hearts of living flowers and gingerbread castles with stone turrets.

“Why’d you want to work in a place like this?” asked Gus.

“I read a novel about it at Notre Dame. The Loved One.”

Uncle Ben was out watering the lawn, a tall leathery man with thin features and dark hair with gray wings swept back over his ears. During the 1936 Berlin Olympics he had taken bronze in the breast-stroke. He turned the hose on them.

“You two bums are in luck!” he yelled. “You start work Monday out at the San Fernando Mission’s new seminary complex!”

Thoroughly drenched, they fled into the kitchen. Aunt Pearl was mincing onions, tears glinting on her plump cheeks despite a slice of bread between her teeth to stop the fumes.

She made shooing gestures, a housewife driving chickens from her kitchen. “You’re soaking wet! Go on, get out of here!”

Grandma Trabert had lived in this house as bride, wife, and widow for fifty years, now spent most of her time in what once had been her sewing room. She was dwarfed by her huge leather armchair in front of the TV with its bunny ears and round eight-inch screen. A gun went off on the TV.

“Just the facts, ma’am,” said Gus.

“What day is it today?” asked Grandma in her sweet old lady’s voice as stern dum-de-dum-dum theme music came up.

“Friday, Grandma Trabert,” said Dunc.

“Joe Friday,” snickered Gus too softly for Grandma to hear.

A man wearing a cap with a star on it was holding a gas hose in his hand and urging his viewers to use Texaco Sky Chief gasoline with Petrox for maximum power plus engine protection.

“No, no, dear. The date.”

“The twenty-fourth. Of July.”

“Oh, boys, how exciting! Only two days to St. Anne’s Day. My patron saint! We’ll have such a good time! Don’t oversleep! I want you to hear the music at High Mass, Gus — you too, Dunc. The choir is so wonderful since Mr. Spinelli came to us.”

Gus winked at Dunc over her head. “Sure thing, Grandma.”

Actually Gus wanted to try and get into the pants of a trailer park gal out at the beach who belonged to a cult called the Seven Priests of Melchizedek. The priest, Gus said, would be great for Dunc’s notebook. He hadn’t written a word since Vegas.

Grandma Trabert called after them over the television, “I’m going to start praying right now that you boys don’t have to work with a bunch of niggers and spics out there at the mission.”

A huge Dutch windmill marked Van de Kamps bakery at the corner of Fletcher and San Fernando; if you wanted to eat inside on a Friday night, you stood in line for an hour. They preferred the drive-in; it had been one of the world’s first after the war, and featured young pretty carhops in tight clothes.

A teenage brunette took their orders. As they watched her backside twitch busily away, Gus said, “Paint a ‘W’ on each cheek, when she bends over — WOW!”

She returned with trays she hooked over the insides of their open windows and braced against the doors below. They munched cheeseburgers and fries and slurped chocolate malts.

Dunc had to talk with Pepe about that last terrible night; he sure couldn’t talk to Gus about it. So he said, “I met a piano player in Vegas who said he’d be playing on the Sunset Strip. Let’s go try to find him.”

“Better than Van de Kamps,” said Gus.

Sunset Strip on Friday night was Glitter Gulch without casinos. An unending stream of cars drove each way on the wide boulevard with lights flashing, horns braying, guys hanging out of windows to shout and whistle trying to attract girls. Some of the clubs were big and brightly lit, with marquees and floor shows and valet parking for gleaming expensive cars disgorging men in suits and women in gowns. Others were small and dim.

Pepe could be playing in any of them, alone or in a combo. No wonder he had been so cynical about Dunc finding him. By 1:30 in the morning they were bleary-eyed over draft beer in a little bar with nobody else there except a tough-looking bartender washing glasses and listening to Eddie Fisher’s throbbing overamped “I’m Walking Behind You” on the jukebox. Maybe if Dunc had been walking behind Artis that night, or beside Ned when he’d gone up against Carny Largo...

“Gimme the goddamn keys,” growled Gus in his ear, holding out his hand. “I’m driving home.”

“Smooth move, Ex-Lax,” agreed the bartender.

Dunc surrendered the keys, realizing with mild surprise that he was a little drunk. The night had been a busted flush. Maybe tomorrow at the beach everything would be different...

“I’m going to Mexico for my vacation.” Fayme had scraggly blond hair and a white blouse tied up to show her middle; faded loose blue shorts did nothing for her legs. “Look for a little talent.” She winked at Angela. “Why don’t you come along?”

Angela looked good in her tight swimsuit, but like Fayme was past thirty. In her lap was a little hairy dog named Muffy.

She gestured with her glass. “What about Muffy?”

“Leave him here with Birdie. Or at a kennel.”

“It would be no vacation without my Muffy,” said Angela.

The trailer court was on a low dusty hill where the rumble of Coast Highway I traffic from above merged with the mutter of the sea from below. They were sprawled in deck chairs under a canvas awning, drinking cold beer from beaded bottles.

Birdie leaned forward. “Joyce took her two Chihuahuas to Mexico last year and they both nearly died of the heat.”

Birdie was really old, over forty, with a pixie face full of wrinkles, and an amazing body under a clinging light blue one-piece dress. Gus had his deck chair hiked close to hers.

“Isn’t Joyce still down there?” asked Angela.

“Mexico City. But she lost her student permit.”

Birdie gave a throaty chuckle. “I didn’t know you needed a permit for what she’s been doing — not in Mexico anyway.”

A man came out of a trailer three doors down. He was tall, boxy, about fifty, wide in the body, a sack of stomach pushing out under his blue-and-white-striped sport shirt. Sandy hair straggled across his bulbous forehead.

“This is Hector,” said Birdie. She added, “My husband,” as if both surprised and distressed by the fact. “Gus you’ve met. This is Dunc Are you joining us?”

“Ahhh... no! I’m going to see my son.”

“Will you be back tonight?”

Without answering her, he ambled off along the sandy path that angled up toward the parking lot beside the highway.

Gus put his hand on Birdie’s thigh. “I didn’t know you had a son.” She removed the hand.

“His son — from wife number one. I’m wife number three. And he’s lying, he never goes to see the smart-ass little brat”

Gus wanted to get laid, but Dunc couldn’t listen to any more inanities for a while. “I’m going down to the beach.”

“Leave the car keys,” Gus called quickly, “and money.”

Dunc did. The narrow trail wound about, over, and down between dirt hummocks covered with low wiry vegetation.

He relieved himself against the side of a dune, writing the opening of Ulysses in the sand until he ran out of urine on the “g” of “Mulligan.” The beach, churned with footprints, was as deserted as if the bomb had fallen. He tried to imagine that searing whiteness against his eyeballs, and thought of Artis.

Two seagulls slipstreamed overhead, each with a tiny drop of red on its beak that looked like blood. A tern sliced the air with razor wings. The water shone like shook foil. When the sun touched the ocean would it hiss? But it sank without a sound.

When he returned, the light over Fayme’s trailer door cast a warm golden glow under the awning. Everyone was eating, they hadn’t bothered to send anyone down to get him. Gus handed him a can of beer and a church key, Angela gave him two burgers.

Her mouth full, she said, “We were too hungry to wait.”

Birdie laughed a slow laugh. “Some surfers wanted to pick us up but Gus defended us. He was sweet.”

“I flexed at ’em. Gravedigger muscles.”

Dunc drank beer and snapped at a hamburger like a hungry wolf. Fayme finished her second burger and lit a cigarette.

“God, I never eat this kind of crap! Vegetables and fruit and broiled fish — healthy food. This is awful for you. So much grease. You two think you’re big tough musclemen, but inside you’re in terrible shape. Your organs—”

“Hey, baby,” said Gus, “have I got an organ for you!”

“Men!” hissed Fayme. “You’re disgusting!”

Birdie looked up from her nails, said, “Oh, do get off it, Fayme dear. What will you be doing in Mexico for two weeks?”

Fayme jumped to her feet and stormed up the flimsy steps to her trailer and slammed the door. Dunc had finished his burgers. Gus had his hand on Birdie’s thigh again when Fayme came clattering back down the steps, a framed picture in one hand, her eyes flashing. She thrust it under Dunc’s nose.

“What do you have to say for yourself?” she yelled.

In the picture, she stood posed nude on the beach with her head back, eyes fixed on some distant goal. Her breasts were firm, the nipples erect, her pudenda had been shaved so the dark lips were visible. Dunc felt a stirring in his groin but said nothing.

She yelled, “Why were you looking at it while I was gone?”

“I’ve never been in your trailer, lady.”

Angela said almost lazily, “I was looking at it earlier.”

“Oh.” Deflated, she sat staring at her photo. The traffic had died, but waves thudded; the surf had risen since Dunc had watched the sunset. “I’ve had enough. I’m going to bed.”

The door to her trailer slammed behind her. Birdie also stood. “Come on, you,” she said to Gus, “let’s go get sweaty.”

Angela looked warily at Dunc. “I’m not going to sleep with you, so don’t get your hopes up. We’re a bad lot, you can’t get mixed up with us. You aren’t Gus, you’ve still got your innocence. Believe me, once it’s gone, it’s gone.”

“How about I sleep on the floor with Muffy?”

“He sleeps on the bed with me.”

A half-moon was up, playing tag with clouds scudding in from the ocean. Dunc went up to Grey Ghost for his sweatshirt and Gus’s windbreaker; it would be chilly sleeping on the beach.

He was glad Angela had refused the pass he hadn’t really made. But going by Birdie’s trailer he heard the steady thump of her bed against the thin aluminum shell. Sexual images exploded inside his head. And then pale light from the long narrow open window above the head of Fayme’s bed brushed his face as he passed the back of her trailer. He stopped, stared down.

Fayme’s nude photo was wedged upright on the cedar chest at the foot of the bed, flanked by lighted candles. Fayme herself was naked on the bed, her head propped up by her pillow so she could look at the photo, her legs splayed so her heels could be hooked over the edges of the bed. Her left hand was rolling her left nipple, her right hand was curved down around her crotch, the hidden fingers working diligently. Her body arched up and a soft cry escaped her lips.

He whirled away, zigzagged down the dirt path between the hummocks, jinking and cutting like a halfback in the open field. On the beach he tore off his clothes, splashed out to let the surf batter him with icy fists, knock him off his feet, kick his ribs, smash him against the bottom upside down. He fought his way out of the moon’s lead-foil wake, shivering, his hair full of sand.

Long after moonset, wrapped in sweatshirt and windbreaker, he drifted into uneasy teeth-chattering slumber.

Chapter Nineteen

A few miles north on the Coast Highway I, Fayme and Angela, Muffy on her lap, directed him down a steep blacktop past a weathered sign reading CHURCH OF THE ORDER OF MELCHIZEDEK. He parked behind a bankrupt motel next to a hulking olive-green army-surplus Jimmy six-by-six personnel carrier with slat sides and a canvas top. The cabins were set around a circular gravel drive. There was a cross over the office door. The swimming pool was half filled with foul water, its concrete apron tilted and broken.

The women took the last two of a score of deck chairs set out on the crumbling concrete; Dunc sat on the side of the pool. Rephaim, the Seventh Priest of Melchizedek, a tall man in white robe and leather-strap sandals, stood on the tip of the diving board and gently bobbed up and down as he spoke to his congregation.

“ ‘Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine: and he was the priest of the most high God.’ Genesis.” Hector appeared behind him wearing an ecstatic look and yesterday’s clothes. “Now come we to the 110th Psalm. ‘Thou art a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.’ ”

Rephaim easily rode the narrow springy plank up and down as it bounced, silver-bearded face crosshatched with wrinkles, lustrous hair gleaming long and silver in the morning sun.

“Paul echoes this, pointing out that the Psalmist was speaking of a Davidic Savior who was also a High Priest.”

The sun was making Dunc sleepy... He came awake with a start. Rephaim’s eyes, dark and hawk-piercing and much younger than the man himself, seemed fixed on his.

“Now, who do the Psalmist and the Epistle writer mean will be a priest forever after the Order of Melchizedek?”

Hector slipped away into the former office. Rephaim, arms spread like an eagle’s wings, bounced on his diving board.

“Paul knew, Paul understood, Paul remembered, and Paul gives us the answer in his Epistle to the Hebrews, Chapter Five.”

A score of short, silent, hard-bodied Mexicans with dusky faces and straight uncut black hair right out of Viva Zapata! had joined the otherwise all-white congregation. They stared at Rephaim with uncomprehending eyes.

“It is Jesus Himself Who is forever a priest after the Order of Melchizedek — and His message is love. That is why I am here, I, the Seventh Priest of Melchizedek. Are you stuck in your lives while other people seem to be going somewhere?”

Dunc stole a quick look over his shoulder. Fayme and Angela, and the other women, were leaning forward intently. They were actually buying this tripe! He couldn’t believe it.

“That’s all right! Where you are is where you should be. Your job is to love. Love God and love God’s works, nothing else matters. The Kingdom of God is in your own backyard.”

Not my backyard, thought Dunc. He asked, “How can there have been only seven priests of Melchizedek since the time of Christ? Do each of you live like three hundred years?”

“You choose to misunderstand. There are always seven of us in the world; when one dies another is chosen to take his place.”

Hector reappeared in a dingy white robe with gold trim, cradling a woven wicker basket. Behind Dunc, Fayme said, “I’m glad I’m going to Mexico. There’s no one here to love.”

“There’s Muffy,” said Angela. “I have Muffy.”

“Hector the Seminarian will now pass among you,” said Rephaim, “so that you may tithe to our Order of Melchizedek.”

Hector and the loot had departed, the knot of Mexicans had disappeared. The faithful were milling about as if a movie had just let out. Rephaim made his way to Dunc. His eyes burned.

“You do not believe,” he said in deep rolling tones.

“Maybe I just don’t understand,” Dunc told him earnestly. “Who chooses a new priest when one of you dies? The other six?”

“None of us knows the others.”

“Then how do you even know one of the priests is dead?”

“One feels the call here.” He laid a hand over his heart.

“Will you ever move up to Sixth Priest of Melchizedek?”

“I shall forever remain the Seventh.” Then he thundered, “Enough questions! You do not believe!” and Dunc found himself thrust into the outer darkness by eager female devotees. A remarkably pretty girl about Dunc’s age fell into step with him.

“You do not believe,” she said in a Rephaim voice.

“Nope. Do you?”

Laughter danced in her eyes. “Nope. But even Aunt Goodie takes advice from him. Drives Uncle Carl nuts.” She offered her hand. “Penny Linden.”

“Pierce Duncan. I’m sure we’ve met before.”

“I’d have remembered,” she said gravely. Her chestnut hair was in a sort of bun at the back of her head. Her face was round, with a generous mouth that laughed easily, a short nose, sparkling wide-set hazel eyes under beautifully arched brows.

The army six-by-six came wheeling past, Hector at the wheel, to disappear up the gravel road to the highway with roaring motor and clashing gears. Under the canvas top, tight-packed figures.

“Hector making his getaway with the loot?”

“Hector? Never. He spends every Saturday night here, helping Rephaim with his Sunday sermon.”

“And the guys in the back?”

“Fruit pickers from the San Fernando Valley. Hector gets them for the Sunday service and takes them back afterwards.”

“You’re saying they understand this guy?” She just laughed and shrugged, so he said, “You don’t seem to fit in with—”

“With Angela and Fayme and Birdie? The coven? Of course they aren’t a real coven of witches, but don’t you think Rephaim might be some sort of mystic con man?” Her clear hazel eyes flashed sideways at him from beneath luxurious lashes. She took his arm. “Come on. Aunt Goodie and Uncle Carl were in pictures, they can give you all the dirt on Rephaim.”

Uncle Carl was a short man in white shirt and slacks with crisp blue-black curly hair and bright eyes and a recent layer of fat on his cheeks. Aunt Goodie was a plump cheerful-looking blonde in shorts and red halter. Their arms were entwined.

“Your niece says you used to be in the movies.”

She grinned. “Birdie and I were extras at Paramount for a few years after the war.” She nudged her husband. “But Carl was a chorus dancer in all those MGM musicals, weren’t you, hon?”

Uncle Carl said, “How did you like Rephaim? I keep telling Goodie, the man’s selling snake oil. Back in the thirties, before he started dating Christ, he was in a slew of B pictures that—”

“Carl!” Goodie gasped. “What a way to talk!”

Penny said quickly, “Weren’t they sort of horror films?”

“Most of them with Bela Lugosi,” nodded Carl.

As they started away, Aunt Goodie said to Penny, “See you at the car, love,” leaving them alone together.

Dunc ventured, “Uh, Penny, have you heard of Muscle Beach?”

“Isn’t that where all those bodybuilders hang out?”

“That’s it. I was thinking of going down there to look the place over next Saturday. If you aren’t doing anything...”

She touched the intricate gold pin on her blouse. “I’m pinned. My fiancé is coming out from Iowa tomorrow for a week.”

“Pinned?”

“When a man gives a sorority girl his fraternity pin, they’re sort of unofficially engaged. We’ll be married after I graduate from the U of Iowa next June.”

“Oh.” Dunc was forlorn. “Notre Dame doesn’t have frats.”

She shook his hand. “They’re waiting for me, Dunc.”

Only after Uncle Carl’s car had pulled away did he realize that, feature for feature, she’d been the beautiful twenty-year-old in his Minneapolis dream who’d told him to face the killer.

Now she was gone and he didn’t know how to reach her. And even if he did, the girl of his dreams was pinned.

It was Thursday, their fourth day on the job at the San Fernando Mission some twenty-five miles north of Los Angeles, erecting three long two-story seminary buildings in a U-shape around a courtyard out behind the mission plaza. They were hod carriers on a cement crew, doing prefab work before the pours.

The other hod carriers were two Negroes and seven Mexicans. Osvaldo, who spoke English, brought the other Latins each morning in a rusty, rattling pickup, took them away at night.

“Dunc! Gus!” Mike Donovan was the crew supervisor, a red-faced Irishman with a beer drinker’s gut and pale bloodshot eyes. “Help Samuel and Joshua with those goddamn forms.”

Samuel was about thirty, good-looking, light-skinned, blocky and muscular, with thick, shapely arms shown off by a blue work shirt with the sleeves cut off. He had a habit of smoothing his heavy mustache with the side of his finger.

Those goddamn forms were sheets of plywood that contained and shaped the liquid cement in the monolithic pours — so called because each new layer was bonded to the layer below.

Samuel told Dunc, “We wet down the inside of the forms. Then we grout ’em.” Grout was hand-mixed liquid cement liberally splashed into the forms and over the rebar to bond them with the poured cement. “Then the cement crew itself makes the pour.”

Joshua was older, maybe thirty-five, India ink to Samuel’s milk chocolate, long and lanky and slightly stooped, with huge hands and long arms banded by stringy muscles of great strength. He wore Can’t-Bust-’Em coveralls, and his normal splayfooted gait was a slow shuffle.

“Ain’t got me but one speed — supreme low. But watch out when I’s coming through.”

At lunch break Dunc wolfed down Aunt Pearl’s sandwiches, then cut across the old-style Spanish-mission compound to the small fully restored red-tiled church. He knelt in a back pew with the rosary he’d bought for the penance given him by the Las Vegas priest. Thursday. The Joyful Mysteries. Perfect. He felt pretty much joyful right now, where he should be, when he should be. Of course Penny was pinned by somebody else, but...

Gus slid into the pew next to him, oblivious to the burning sacristy light that marked the Sacred Presence in the tabernacle behind the altar. “Get a look at those walls — seven feet thick at the bottom, five feet thick at the top. Built to last.”

Native designs of bright primary colors covered them. “Who did the artwork?” whispered a resigned Dunc. “Indians?”

“Originally, yeah. These are just copies.”

At quitting time Dunc drove them south through Sepulveda’s endless traffic toward Los Angeles, inching them into the smog, eyes smarting, thinking of Penny. Gus broke in on his thoughts.

“Birdie wants me to spend the whole weekend with her.”

“Congratulations,” said Dunc. “I’m going to Muscle Beach on Saturday, I’ll drop you off.”

On Friday morning they were on top of the wall pounding nails into forms. Dunc paused to wipe the sweat off his face; he noticed Osvaldo going into the portable latrine just as a blue sedan followed by a closed van raced up the dirt track to the seminary site. Two men in suits and two in uniform jumped out.

Mike Donovan cupped his hands to yell up at them.

“Dunc! Gus! Down here on the double.”

The Mexican members of the cement crew were being herded into a van by the uniforms. Osvaldo started from the latrine, saw this, stepped back in quickly, and gently closed the door.

A blocky man with lank reddish hair and a jaw like a sledgehammer walked over to Dunc and Gus. He had quick eyes set too close together. His thick neck bulged over his collar.

“Where were you boys born?”

“Rochester, Minnesota, but what business is it—”

“You?”

“Springfield, Illinois,” said Gus. “What’s this about?”

“Routine.” He went back to the sedan, got in beside the driver. The van was pulling out. Donovan raised his voice.

“Okay. Back to work. We’re gonna be shorthanded ’til Monday, everybody’s gotta pick up some slack.”

Back up on the forms, Dunc asked Samuel, “What’s going on?”

But it was lanky slow-moving Joshua who answered.

“Immigration and Naturalization. Those guys was illegals, they got busted. They’s on their way back to Mexico right now.”

Dunc felt outrage. “Why didn’t Osvaldo get grabbed?”

“He’s got his green card. Happen every two weeks, steady as clockwork.”

At the lunch break Dunc tried again at the chapel. Friday. The Sorrowful Mysteries. The Agony in the Garden while the Disciples slept — the bewildered faces of the Mexicans being taken before they got their pay, while he and Gus just watched. It put the day’s events under a spotlight. That priest had known what he was doing. You may not recognize the opportunity, but you’ll say, “This is it!” and you’ll do it.

Was this the chance he had meant? And if it was, what could Dunc do about it?

Half an hour before quitting time Donovan gave them their first week’s paychecks: $100 less withholds! A lot of money.

“Remember, you gotta cash ’em with the hod carriers’ union.”

The union’s office was a California-style bungalow in a tract so new half the houses weren’t finished yet, some of them not even framed. No landscaping, no lawns, no plantings. A two-by-four sheet of half-inch plywood leaned against the wall beside the open front door with big black letters painted on it: HOD CARRIERS LOCAL #2784.

In the middle of the living room was a battered hardwood table. On the table was a dark green money box, a stamp pad and rubber date stamp, a stack of gray-covered booklets about the size of bankbooks, and a pair of meaty elbows.

The elbows belonged to a swag-gutted man with the sleeves of a white dress shirt rolled up over thick forearms. His face, unsoftened by the cigar that graced it, looked as if it had been used for batting practice a long time ago.

The room’s only other furnishings were a couch and another straight-back chair, each holding a carbon copy of the deskman, equally blue of chin and flat of eye. The deskman snapped impatient fingers.

“Paychecks.” He threw them back, disgusted. “Endorsed.” As they endorsed, he wrote each man’s name in a booklet off the stack. “Your membership books. We keep ’em here for youse guys so’s they won’t get lost.” He used the rubber stamp on the first page of each booklet. “Fifteen bucks a week dues.”

He carefully counted out greenbacks into two equal piles, then extracted two twenties and a ten from each pile.

“We gotta take out your onetime initiation fee for bein’ let into the local.”

“Fifty bucks?” demanded Dunc, outraged.

“Local’s gotta lotta expenses.”

“Yeah, a table, a couch, and two chairs.”

“Union rules. You don’t like ’em, there’s plenty of guys want your jobs. You’re gettin’ top dollar here.”

“Your goddamn union’s getting all the dollars underneath.”

The chair-man gave a grunt of laughter. “All the dollars underneath. That’s a good one. All the dollars underneath.”

“Under the table, too,” insisted Dunc.

“Shut up, wise guy,” rumbled the couch-man, half rising.

Gus grabbed Dunc’s arm. “C’mon, let’s get outta here”

Osvaldo pulled his truck up outside in a cloud of red-brown dust, and Dunc got mad all over again; he could do nothing, the other Mexicans were on their way back to the border, but dammit, they’d been screwed out of their wages.

Gus drove Grey Ghost back down the dirt subdivision street.

“It’s better than digging graves,” he said, thinking Dunc’s anger was still about the hefty union initiation fee.

“At least digging graves nobody got fucked.”

“Here we get a hell of a lot more money”

“The Mexicans didn’t.”

“But I did — enough for the weekend with Birdie.”

Chapter Twenty

Since the radio predicted an unseasonably cool evening with fog at the beaches, Penny put on her favorite dress, a warm red wool knit that displayed her full bosom and narrow waist to perfection. She fastened her lustrous wavy hair back behind her ears with silver combs, and examined herself critically in the mirror. Light glinted from her matching silver earrings.

“Penny.” Gerald, outside the bathroom. “Are you ready?”

“In just a minute, hon.”

The week had not gone well. He had to report to his father in Cedar Rapids on California business conditions, so it had been aircraft factories instead of studio tours, tracts instead of romantic dinners. “Penelope!”

“Coming.”

They’d get married next June after he got his master’s in biz ad and she got her bachelor’s in history. Her mom liked him, and her sister, with two little kids, adored him. And she’d done an admirable job of keeping Pierce Duncan out of her thoughts.

She added subdued red lipstick, blotted it by pressing her full lips together with a tissue between them. On the tissue the O of her mouth looked huge. No time for anything else.

The cozy two-story house was one of many in Highland Park snatched up by returning vets. Uncle Carl was in his easy chair in the living room, watching the Saturday baseball game. Aunt Goodie appeared with iced tea and chocolate-chip cookies. Gerald was by the archway to the front door, impeccably groomed, sandy-haired, compact, his blue eyes impatient.

On impulse Penny twirled around in the middle of the room, her arms out and raised as if she were dancing.

“Hey! Hubba-hubba!” exclaimed Uncle Carl.

Penny was suddenly blushing. Goodie set the tray down on the coffee table to slap her husband’s arm.

“Carl, you stop that now, you’re embarrassing her.”

“Hey, am I blind? Am I dumb? She’s a great-looking girl.”

“Penny, you know what I think of that dress.” Gerald’s mouth was prim. “It’s too tight, too revealing.”

“Not in Tinsel Town,” said Carl with a quick grin.

Goodie poured, Carl grabbed cookies. Penny crossed her legs, Gerald reached over and pulled down her hem.

“Let’s go watch the sun set over the Pacific,” she said.

“The Seaside Hotel has a nice little restaurant called the Anchor Room that looks over the ocean and does good seafood. You kids take the car, and don’t worry about getting home late.” Aunt Goodie tipped Penny a bawdy wink that Gerald could not see. “And if that fog gets too thick, get rooms at the hotel.”

Her aunt had married Carl mainly for sex, and claimed to only occasionally regret it. Sure, save yourself for your wedding night, she told Penny, but there was something wrong with a man who didn’t at least try to sleep with his fiancée.

“Just south of the Santa Monica sport-fishing pier,” said Carl. “At a place they call Muscle Beach.”

Muscle Beach! A jolt of electricity ran through Penny’s body; she hadn’t driven Dunc out of her subconscious, after all.

“You have to wear a coat over that dress,” said Gerald.

Muscle Beach was a narrow strip of sand between the Santa Monica pier and a big old shabby hotel a quarter mile to the south. Dunc drifted down the boardwalk in the gray, chilly afternoon, past fried shrimp, ice cream, hamburger, beer, and Pronto Pup stalls decorated with photos of the bodybuilders and lifters who had trained there over the years.

He had started lifting in high school, with a hundred-pound barbell set that had a booklet of exercises modeled by the movie actor Fred MacMurray, had kept on at Notre Dame. But these guys!

In fact, even the gawkers were interesting: faddists, beach bums, physical culturists, high school girls with condoms in their purses getting their jollies from all the exposed male flesh, queers doing the same: a fringe world by the Pacific.

One girl with her back to him stood out from the rest, a diamond among zircons, wearing a red knit dress like the girl in his dream. When she turned to say something to the sandy-haired man at her side, he realized she indeed was Penny Linden.

Forty minutes before, Gerald had said icily, “You just stay here and order me a martini,” and went out to get Penny’s coat. She had forgotten it in the car and had gone into the Anchor Room brazenly exposed in her red dress.

He never acted this way back in Iowa. A nice start to their romantic night at the beach! “A martini for my fiancé, and...” She felt rebellion within. “A... third rail.”

The bartender had scar-tissued eyes and a flattened nose and wore a starched red knee-length apron.

“When I was fightin’ I always trained on good beefsteak an’ tomatoes. Lotsa protein, that’s what it takes.” He set the drinks in front of her, put a foot on the beer cooler, leaned forward confidentially. “Thirty-five fights, light-heavy like Billy Conn. I even got the same first name, but between you an’ me, I like tendin’ bar a hell of a lot better.”

“I bet you were a very good fighter, Billy,” Penny said.

“Billy? I leave you alone for five minutes and you know the bartender’s first name?”

Thinking he was joking, she said, “Oh, hi, honey. Billy was just telling me what it takes to be a prizefighter.”

“Years and years of no schooling.”

“Gerald!” she exclaimed, astonished. “What a terrible—”

“And you’ve had too much to drink.”

He grabbed the glass from Penny’s hand to slam it down on the bar. Penny grabbed it back up and drained it and waved it.

“I’ll have another one of these, Billy.”

She’d had a third, in fact, before Gerald finally got her out of there to “walk it off.” The third rails had bombed her.

“I’m sorry, honey,” she said in a little voice she hoped wasn’t slurred. “Let’s not let it ruin our last night together.” On a wooden platform twenty yards from the walk, three gargantuan lifters were taking turns doing three-hundred-pound repetition squats. “Let’s go watch those huge men lift those huge weights.”

Dunc didn’t like the boyfriend’s looks, his clothes, his build, anything about him. Especially his prim little mouth. When they moved back to the boardwalk from the lifting platform, Dunc tagged along behind. Muscle Beach was a rough place.

A teenage boy leaned against the edge of one of the stalls and blew into an empty beer bottle to make hollow whistling tones. Another, slightly older, wearing only swim trunks, was behind the counter tapping two Coke bottles together and moving his lean tanned body to the beat. A third squatted on an empty pop case playing the spoons back-to-back.

An older guy in his late twenties was crouched on a three-legged stool in front of the stand, pounding with an almost sexual fervor on the bottom of a five-gallon ice cream container. He wore Levi’s, hack boots, a crushed cycle cap, sunglasses, and a two-day growth of beard. The sleeves of his black leather jacket barely contained his massive biceps. Big guy.

He brought a bottle of dago red out from under his jacket. A silver skull ring glinted on the ring finger of his left hand.

“Hey, man, anybody got any more of this Sneaky Pete?”

The crowd parted for a pimply teenager wearing khakis and a white sweatshirt with a ketchup stain down the front of it.

“I got money, Johnny!” he said proudly.

“Hey hey hey! Double Bubble, run and get me my bongos.”

An overweight blond girl trotted off, her enormous breasts jouncing with each stride. Johnny winked at the crowd as he beat suggestively on his ice cream container. Reluctantly Dunc drifted away. After all, Penny was betrothed, not his to save.

“Isn’t it exciting, honey? These kids with no money, no jobs, no security, but with all that music inside. They’re—”

“Exciting? They’re tramps, beach bums!” Gerald realized that he hated California and everything it stood for. He heard himself blurt out, “That drummer with the greasy hair and the sunglasses, that’s what you find exciting. First the bartender and now this animal—”

Her fingers were icy but she managed to unclip his fraternity pin from the bosom of her dress. She dropped it into the pocket of his jacket. “I believe this is yours,” she said.

Gerald slapped her very hard across the face. In the same instant he regretted it, but she was already gone, leaving her coat behind on the sand. He returned to the Anchor Room, ordered a martini. She’d show up. He had the car keys.

Penny, wandering around alone! And then Dunc lost her in the crowd. Johnny’s bongos had arrived, along with a guitar and a set of maracas. They had moved to boxes set in the sand, had lit a forbidden driftwood fire. Dancing flames made red masks of their youthful laces. The bongo beat was formless, primitive.

“Dance!” someone shouted. Other voices made it a chant. “Jimmy dance! Jimmy dance! Jimmy Jimmy dance dance dance!”

The lithe boy m the swim trunks leaped into the middle of the circle to gyrate frenziedly. He arched back until his hair brushed the sand, came erect with deliberate pulsing movements.

A Negro girl wearing tight black, pedal pushers and no bra under a half-open black sweater leaped into the firelight facing him. She and Jimmy whirled, churned together, apart, against one another, on their knees. The sweater came completely open; eyes, cheekbones, ebony breasts shone in the firelight.

Jimmy fell, all through, was dragged away by his ankles like a vanquished gladiator. Johnny, head down and heavy shoulders hunched forward, punished his bongos savagely, thighs straining around the drums as around a woman’s body.

The Negro girl spun away, finished, but Penny, barefoot, threw away a wine bottle, drunk, languid, danced in her place without frenzy, undulating, almost dreamy, unutterably sensual. One silver earring was gone. Her hair had come loose, fireglow-lit with fluid highlights. The tight red skirt had slid up, her long legs flashed, richly ivory. She was magnificent.

Johnny was still attacking his bongos, but now his head was up, his eyes behind their sunglasses were fixed on Penny as she moved. Where in hell was her fiancé? This guy was huge, six-two, with arms like an ape. Together, maybe, just maybe, the two of them could handle him, but not Dunc alone. Could he?

Gerald was irritated. Perhaps he hadn’t been entirely blameless tonight, but after forty-five minutes and no Penny he stormed back out into the night. There was a bonfire on the beach, from the boardwalk he could see some cheap slut with her skirt up...

Oh God no! It was Penny!

He tried to elbow through the crowd to the ring of fire, but was shoved this way and that, casually. Flames danced redly as from the entrance to the Pit. Drums throbbed in his skull.

The music stopped, the crowd parted. Penny shambled by him, unseeing, eyes glazed, skirt still halfway rucked-up. Gerald floundered after her through the soft sand. But someone was before him, slipping a thick possessive arm around her waist.

That horrible greasy-haired drummer!

“Hey, chiquita.” Minus the sunglasses, Johnny’s eyes were blue and expectant. His bongos were slung over one broad shoulder. He sang in a good baritone, “Chiquita banana, and I’m here to say, my banana’s gonna get you in a certain way—”

“Stop that!” cried Gerald. “She’s engaged to me!”

Johnny laughed. One big hand began massaging her breasts. She tried to bite it. The other big hand planted itself in Gerald’s face, pushed. Gerald windmilled backward into the sand.

“You can have her back tomorrow, but tonight—”

But another man had materialized from the darkness, six inches shorter than Johnny but equally broad. Johnny let go of Penny and spoke in a soft, pleased voice.

“Hey, great, next to fuckin’ I like fightin’ best!”

“Dunc?” asked Penny in belated recognition.

Gerald got shakily back on his feet. How many men did...

Johnny came in a rush, heavy arms swinging like clubs. Dunc ducked and weaved desperately, but one of the haymakers caught him on the forehead to open a shallow cut with the silver ring. Despairing, panicked, Dunc aped one of Ned’s special three-punch combos: a slashing left jab to the nose, a hook to the heart, a right cross to the back edge of the chin.

As if by magic, Johnny went down, nose blossoming blood.

And just for an instant, Penny’s soft lips were pressed fiercely on Dunc’s as in another dream, then she was gone. Johnny, a surprised look on his face, was sitting on the sand, legs wide, waggling his jaw gingerly with one hand.

“Fuck you hit me with, man? A Mack truck?”

“A Nitro Ned Davenport combination,” said Dunc happily.

Chapter Twenty-one

But Penny, after all, had gone home with the wrong guy. Dunc still didn’t know how to reach her. After washing the blood off his face in the Anchor Room’s john, he had a beer at the bar.

“Get in a brawl down on the beach?” asked Billy.

“Yeah. You look like you’ve gone a few rounds yourself.”

“Thirty-six fights, but to tell the truth I never was much of a boxer.” Billy waggled his chin with one hand. “Glass jaw.”

Glass jaw. That must have been why Johnny had gone down so easily. Couldn’t take a punch. Talk of fighting inevitably led to thoughts of Nitro Ned. As Dunc drove north along the Coast Highway I, in no mood to go home to bed, he thought: for a minute there tonight Ned had been guiding his fists.

At the trailer park everyone’s lights were out. Pound on Birdie’s door? Gus might not even be there, and the fog made it too cold to sleep on the beach. He would sleep in his car by the Church of the Order of Melchizedek. Maybe Penny would show up in the morning to attend Rephaim’s service.

He parked behind the manzanita bushes at the foot of the road, at 6:00 A.M. sat up yawning and shivering. Had the cold awakened him? Or the smell of beans and chili? He got out, shut the car door carefully and quietly, and whizzed in the weeds, shivering in his light windbreaker. Why so stealthy? Why hadn’t he parked behind the motel last night?

The grass soaked his shoes and pant legs as he swished through it. The massive old surplus army six-by-six loomed up through the drifting ground mist like a misplaced rhino, so abruptly only an outthrust palm against the wet hood kept him from walking into it.

The smell of Mexican cooking got stronger. Through the thin wall of a boarded-up cabin he heard low male voices speaking in Spanish. The farmworkers. Hector had already picked them up; the food was for them. Except the hood of the six-by-six had been stone-cold. That engine hadn’t been fired up in hours.

A Mexican about Dunc’s age materialized from the mist, just buttoning his fly. He had a narrow-jawed face and aquiline nose and brown liquid eyes that would have been gentle had one upper lid not been pulled awry by an angry red scar like a knife cut.

“Buenos dias,” said Dunc.

The Mexican broke for the front of the cabin. Dunc shrugged. He’d go find something to eat, return; the little diners that dotted the ocean side of the Coast Highway I would be open for the surfers. The door of Rephaim’s church opened and Hector came out. His whole manner was different from their first meeting, and his voice was bellicose.

“Hey, you. What are you doing snooping around here?”

Dunc just nodded, waved an airy hand, and kept on going. At the stand of manzanita, he looked back. Hector had gone back inside, the door with the cross over it was shut.

When he got back from breakfast, Rephaim was on his diving board, arms wide, well into his spiel; Dunc recognized the knife-cut Mexican among the Latins, but none from last week. Neither Penny nor her relatives had showed. Not even any of the coven.

He left. He needed the order, assurance, and peace of Sunday Mass. The phone book gave him noon High Mass in Santa Monica. Back in Eagle Rock he found a singularly unrepentant Gus full of lurid sexual adventures he didn’t want to hear about. He went to bed early. They had a pour tomorrow, had to be on-site at 7:30, which meant up at six.

It was after eight when Osvaldo showed up with the back of his old pickup filled with a new complement of workers.

“Where’d he find another crew so quick?” Dunc asked Joshua.

“There’s lots of wetbacks looking for work,” said Samuel.

“Does the union know they don’t have green cards?”

“Course the union knows they’s wetbacks, but they keeps their traps shut, they gets fifty dollah a man ’nitiation fees.”

Something about this bothered Dunc, he didn’t know why — not yet. Another thought hit him. “Does Donovan know?”

“Wa’m bodies, that’s all he care ’bout.”

As if on cue, Donovan yelled, “Get back up on those forms!”

At the lunch break the Mexicans clustered together in the shade, eating rice and beans and tortillas out of folded pieces of newspaper. One of the brown-skinned men had a narrow jaw, aquiline nose, gentle brown liquid eyes — except the right upper lid had been pulled awry by the scar of a knife cut.

“Buenos dias,” Dunc said to him.

Again, surprised and scared. But he said, “Buenos dias."

Osvaldo sprayed him with rapid-fire Spanish, turned to Dunc with a big grin. “No Eeenglish, no use talking with heem, señor.”

How did the slender Mexican get from the boarded-up motel out by the beach to a construction site in the valley in just one day? Being there at Rephaim’s Sunday morning service made no sense anyway. The man had no English, he wouldn’t know what Rephaim’s sermons were about.

Who could Dunc ask about it all? Gus wouldn’t know any more than he did. Joshua. He waylaid the lanky Negro.

“Lordy, child!” Joshua slapped his knee with delight. “This here was all in place befo’ you show up, gonna be here long after you’s gone.”

That was that, Dunc thought. The guys were illegals, after all, most of them would try again, a lot of them would make it.

On Wednesday night he was lying on his bed reading a copy of Faulkner’s Sanctuary he’d borrowed from the Pasadena Public Library when Uncle Ben called up the stairs.

“Dunc! Telephone.”

He yelled his thanks and rolled off the bed. Now that they knew where he was, his folks were calling once a week. He picked up the receiver off the table in the downstairs hallway.

“This is Penny.”

It was like getting punched in the stomach it was so unexpected. “Penny! I thought... I didn’t... Hey, hi, it’s great to hear your voice. Listen...” He reached over to snag the L.A. Times sports section out of the wicker magazine basket beside the table. “I don’t have your phone number there.”

He wrote it down on the edge of the sports page and blurted out, “How does your boyfriend like California?”

“Gerald? He left Sunday. Actually he’s not my boyfriend anymore.” She laughed that wonderful laugh. “Aunt Goodie says she’d like you to come over on Friday night so we can all thank you for saving me.”

“I tell my mom something like that, she’d have a bird.”

“Oh, I can tell Aunt Goodie anything. Can you come? About seven-thirty?” Could he? She gave him the street address. “We’re in Highland Park two blocks off Figueroa. It’s a little white two-story house in the middle of the block with an old-fashioned swing on the front porch.”

They were pouring the second-story walls. The grout had to be wheelbarrowed up two flights of plywood ramps, then out across empty space on two-by-twelve planks that bounced and shivered under their weight, to the open forms. At first Dunc had been terrified, but by now he and Gus were nonchalant about it.

Samuel was wetting down the forms so they could splatter in shovelfuls of grout to prime the rebar. Joshua was on the ground two stories below, using a garden hoe to mix up more grout in a wooden trough. He tipped back his head and shaded his eyes.

“Come an’ get it!” he yelled up at them.

Samuel pointed the hose straight down the face of the building. The water blasted Joshua right in his upturned face. He lowered his head, carefully laid down his hoe, turned and plodded slowly away from the building. Samuel kept moving the hose outward to keep the stream on the top of his head.

Out of range of the hose, Joshua stopped and turned and slowly looked up. And slowly raised one fist and slowly shook it at Samuel. By that time, Dunc and Gus were laughing so hard they almost fell off the narrow planks.

At quitting time, still soaking, Joshua pointed a bony forefinger at Samuel’s gut as if the finger were a knife blade.

“Open,” he intoned. He made circular motions with the switchblade finger. “That’s all-l-l-l gonna be open in there.”

Then he started to laugh along with the others.

Chapter Twenty-two

“They just stuck ’em in the van and they were gone,” Dunc was saying. “What if they had families or—”

“They don’t bring their families,” said Uncle Carl with vast authority. “They come to make money to send back home.”

“That isn’t all. They brought a new crew in on Monday — one of them was at Rephaim’s Sunday service. I saw him myself.”

“Everybody at Rephaim’s says they’re farmworkers,” said Aunt Goodie.

“Farmworkers, construction workers,” said Penny. “People see Mexicans and they see illegal aliens.”

They walked from the ice cream parlor on Figueroa through the warm flowery August evening back to the house, two abreast on a narrow sidewalk made uneven by tree roots. Aunt Goodie said, “I think it’s time us old folks went up to bed.”

“I’m not tired,” said Carl.

“You are now.”

“Good night, Uncle Carl,” said Penny with her silvery laugh.

“Why do I get the idea I’m not wanted out here? Dunc, defend me, men against—”

“Good night, Uncle Carl,” said Dunc.

Carl followed his wife inside, laughing. Dunc and Penny sat on the old-fashioned front porch swing. He moved them lazily forward and backward with little shoves of his toe. The moment of truth: was Penny the still water that didn’t run very deep, or...

“Dunc, I’ve been thinking about those men the Immigration Service picked up. How often do they come out there?”

What had Joshua said? “Every two weeks.”

“Can’t you do something?”

Her hazel eyes were wide with compassion. Responding synapses seemed to suddenly crackle in his brain.

“Maybe there is a way — I’ll tell you in a week.”

She said teasingly, “Why do I have to wait so long?”

“So you’ll have to go out with me again to find out.”

She nudged him with her shoulder. A comfortable silence fell. Dunc found himself edging an arm around her.

“Aunt Goodie didn’t suggest asking you over,” she said abruptly. “I did. To thank you and apologize for getting—”

“Apologize? You don’t—”

“So drunk. Gerald and I had a big fight about what I was wearing and...” She was watching her fingers twist together in her lap as if by their own volition. “He was sweet as pie Sunday before he left, he said he was sorry he’d hit me—”

“Hit you!” Dunc realized he was on his feet.

“Dunc. Don’t. Please.” She tugged him gently down beside her again. “It’s just so... Nobody’s ever...”

“Nobody ever should.”

“He wants to talk it all through when I go back for the fall quarter.”

He didn’t like anything about that, her going back to Iowa, her talking things over with Gerald. He put his arms around her and kissed her. Her lips responded. It was a long kiss, closed-mouth but tender and passionate. When they finally drew back, he felt dizzy, as if he’d drunk too much.

“I didn’t want that to happen,” said Penny. “Not yet.”

“I’ve been wanting it to happen since I first saw you.” His voice was shaky. Their faces were still only inches apart. “And that was in a dream I had on the road.”

“You saw me in a dream?” She was pleased. “When you hadn’t met me yet? How can you be sure she was me?”

So he told her about it, though not about the killer being a dead man from a Georgia chain gang with a new face. “She was you, Penny. She was wearing your same red knit dress.”

“Maybe your mind supplied the dress after seeing me in it.”

“Nope,” he said, “that dress, exactly.”

She believed him, but almost wished he hadn’t told her. It was too strange. She gently disengaged herself to stand up.

“I have to go in, Dunc. It’s really late...”

“Tomorrow is Saturday. You can sleep in.”

“We’re going down to Newport Beach for the weekend with some friends of Aunt Goodie’s...”

He stood up and took her upper arms, drew her close. “Okay. But don’t forget we have a date next Friday night for the next dynamic installment of the Saga of the Misplaced Mexicans.”

“I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

They both laughed, she raised her face to be kissed. For a long moment she melted against him, then stepped back hastily.

“G-good night, Dunc.”

He went back to Grey Ghost Two, wondering if she’d stepped back so fast because she’d felt the instant erection he’d got from kissing her. Or maybe he’d been too insistent... No matter. Penny was going out with him next weekend!

On the way home he got lost, didn’t care, finally got back onto the parkway and drove to Eagle Rock singing “Vaya con Dios” at full voice. Go with God. And God, what a great girl!

When he went down to breakfast on Saturday morning, Gus waylaid him to shove a letter under his nose. It was from the office of architect Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago. Gus Trabert had been accepted for a two-year all-expense-paid architectural fellowship. He was supposed to show up at Taliesin West in Phoenix by the end of the month.

“Hey, Gus, that’s great! Tonight I guess we’d better—”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” Gus led him out on the porch where the rest of the family couldn’t hear them. “I... ah... want to spend the weekend in the sack with Birdie.”

“Sure,” said Dunc. “I don’t blame you.”

“Thing is, I... ah, well, I’d like to take her somewhere away from the trailer park. You know, get a motel room, really have a weekend with her.”

Dunc dropped the keys to Grey Ghost Two into Gus’s palm. “This’ll give me time to finally get caught up on my notebook.”

He was really just looking forward to some time alone. That was one thing being on the road gave you — time alone.

He walked all the way to downtown Pasadena, in the huge old ornate library returned the Faulkner and checked out The Long Goodbye. Two of his favorite movies had been based on Raymond Chandler novels: The Big Sleep and Murder, My Sweet.

Goodbye hooked him completely. He read it at the library, he read it on the bus home, he read it in bed far into the night and finished it at three in the morning.

The rich beautiful woman who attracted P.I. Philip Marlowe, Linda Loring, was nothing at all like Penny but reminded him of Penny all the same. It took a hell of a good writer to get his characters into your mind that way. How did you get that good?

Dunc was always saying that writing was all he would want out of life, but then was always getting himself sidetracked, neglecting his own dream for Nitro Ned’s, letting Penny take over his whole mind. Where would he find the discipline?

“Put your typewriter on a table and your butt on a chair,” his creative writing teacher at Notre Dame, Mr. Sullivan, had said, “and start typing. When you stand up ten years later, you’ll be a writer.”

But Hemingway had implied that if all you did was write, you’d end up with nothing to write about — and here was Dunc with a whole summerful of experiences, and he wasn’t even keeping up his notebook.

Sunday morning after church he helped around the house, then sat out under a tree with his notebook and started writing. He had nothing down about Las Vegas, was already forgetting details, and some of the details he remembered were almost too painful to write down.

Nitro Ned, his huge spirit stilled at last, being carried out of the Flamingo Hotel... Artis, covered with blood, dying eyes burning fierce into his... He wished he had the notebooks Falkoner had driven off with in El Paso. He had to get them back. Sometime...

Chapter Twenty-three

Gus would leave for Taliesin before Labor Day; Penny would go back to school right after the holiday. Dunc would move on then, too. Like Shane. The lone gunman, fixing things up before riding off into the sunset. Friday would tell for sure.

He talked to Gus as they wheeled liquid “mud” up the ramps and across the top of the building on the spidery network of two-by-twelves. “Who around here do you think knew that the immigration guys were coming, and knew when they’d come?”

“Osvaldo,” said Gus promptly. “He’s got his green card and he’s been around long enough.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s the Judas goat, but he just happened to go to the John just before the immigration guys came — right at the morning break, so they were all together.”

“So it’s safe to assume he’s the one. What do we do?”

“You’re the architect. Design something — like a sticking door on the crapper so he can’t get out and see what I’m doing.”

“Gotcha,” said Gus. “And what will you be doing?”

“I’m going to hablar with Alejandro” — he nodded toward the young, scarred Mexican — “whenever were working together. I want him to get used to me, so he’ll understand and trust me when the time comes.”

At 9:50 Friday morning Donovan headed for the job site office, where he could put his feet up and drink coffee for the fifteen-minute break. Sure enough, Osvaldo headed for the portable toilet. Gus sauntered along behind him.

Dunc gestured to Alejandro.

“Vamos,” he said. Alejandro stared at him with uncomprehending eyes. Dunc grabbed his arm, half dragged him to his feet. “Venir. Rápido.” He swept his arm at the rest. “All of you. Ah...” He’d memorized the phrase. “Todo el mundo. Rápido! Rápido!"

Alejandro spat Spanish at them, they scrambled to their feet, Dunc started running for the cornfield fifty feet from the edge of the construction site. They ran after him, impelled by fear of unknowns he couldn’t even imagine. Thirty yards in, surrounded by head-high stalks, green and rustling, heavy with golden-silked ears, the rows at right angles to the seminary, Dunc stopped. He pointed at each in turn.

“Ustedes,” he said. “Esperar. Yo regresar. Comprender?"

He lay down in the depression between rows to give them the idea, stood up again, swung his arm around in a big circle, then pointed in turn to each of them.

“Usted... usted... usted... comprender?"

They understood. As they spread out through the corn rows, Dunc ran back to the site. When he heard the car and the van roaring up, he sat down quickly in the shade, lay back with his hands interlaced behind his head, the sweat drying under his blue work shirt.

The vehicles skidded to a stop. The four agents jumped out and began to fan out through the site. Suddenly they stopped and looked around, surprise on their faces. No Mexicans.

“Hey! You!” It was the redheaded immigration agent with the bulging neck who’d braced them two weeks ago.

Dunc sauntered over to them, all innocence. “Yeah?”

They ringed around him in a loose circle.

“Where are the Mexicans?” asked Thick-Neck.

Dunc shook his head in simulated bewilderment. One of the uniformed agents snapped, “The wetbacks.”

“The illegal aliens,” Thick-Neck amended quickly, his close-set eyes darting about. “We received a report there were illegal Mexican immigrants working on your cement crew.”

“You guys took ’em away two weeks ago.”

“Bullshit!”

“Gotta talk to Donovan about that. I just wheel cement.”

“Where’s the Mex honcho?” The other man wearing a suit was lean and stooped, with a big Adam’s apple.

Dunc tried to look stupid. “They all look the same to me.”

Osvaldo appeared, Gus strolling along a discreet distance behind. The agents surrounded the Mexican for low-voiced discussion and arm-waving. Osvaldo kept shrugging, looking more and more miserable. Finally they got back into their vehicles and spun out of there in an angry cloud of red dust.

“Royally pissed off,” said Dunc happily. “How’d you keep Osvaldo in there long enough?”

“Stuck a little wedge in the bottom of the door, he finally had to kick it open. He didn’t even notice what it was.”

Dunc brought the Mexican crew back from the cornfield. Joshua collared him when he got back up on the forms. “Didn’t I tell you leave well ’nough alone?” he scolded.

“Who’s going to do anything about it? Osvaldo?”

“Wasn’t thinkin’ of him,” muttered Joshua darkly.

At the union office Joshua and Samuel were ahead of them, just pocketing their greenbacks. The table-man gave a start of ill-concealed surprise when the Mexicans came crowding behind Dunc and Gus, chattering and laughing among themselves.

Dunc would remember it later. But not today. Tonight he had a date with Penny, his workweek fatigue was dropping away.

The front door opened and Penny skipped lightly down the front steps. Dunc ran around the car to open the other door. Her hair was loose around her face, she brought the scent of flowers with her. She was wearing a plaid skirt and a blue blouse and dark blue pumps. He got in under the wheel. She turned to face him on the seat, eyes shining.

“Okay, tell me! What are you going to do?”

“Gee, about what?” he asked blandly.

She lunged toward him, laughing, pretending to strangle him. Her skirt rode up, giving him a glimpse of inner thighs. He instantly looked away. She blushed and pulled the skirt down.

“You know very well what I mean! The Mexicans.”

“Oh, them. We already did it.”

On the parkway he told her about his day. Toward the end her elation turned to concern.

“What did Joshua mean? Why was he worried for you?”

“I’m not sure. I’ll ask him on Monday.”

They went to see Strangers on a Train in Pasadena. Dunc gave a start of surprise at the credits: one of the screenwriters was Raymond Chandler, his new writing hero!

And what a great scary movie to take a girl to! When the old-time carny worker was crawling bug-eyed through the muck and mire under the out-of-control roller coaster near the end of the film, Penny jammed her head up against Dunc’s chest with her eyes squeezed tight shut.

They ate in an Italian restaurant called Louise’s Trattoria in shabby old Pasadena on East Colorado Boulevard. In a dark-wood booth, in the voluble care of dark-haired waiters, they split an Italian-sausage pizza and drank draft beer and talked about their whole lives.

Penny had never met anyone before who was actually trying to be a writer, and was full of questions. She said she loved Hemingway’s romanticism, and Dunc explained at great length that you had to call it doomed romanticism.

“How about you, Penny?” he asked finally. “What do you want when you get out of college? Love, marriage, kids?”

“All of the above — doesn’t everyone? But after I broke up with Gerald, I knew that I really want to come back out west.”

“California,” said Dunc with not a little complacency.

“Not really. The real West. I want to work on one of those great ranch estates that have horses and real western food, and people who come to stay, like a hotel.”

“A dude ranch,” said Dunc.

“Is that what they call them? All right, someday I want to have a dude ranch of my own.”

When they had stopped in front of Aunt Goodie’s house, Penny brought up the question of the Mexican illegals again.

“If you’re right that you saw the one with the knife scar on his face out at Rephaim’s church—”

“Alejandro,” said Dunc. “He was one of them, all right.”

“So you mean that most of the farmworkers at Rephaim’s don’t have their green cards at all.”

“We don’t know for sure, of course, but Rephaim could be smuggling them in. Wouldn’t the Church of Melchizedek be a good transfer point after they get up here? I don’t know much Spanish, but I think Alejandro said that they pay a hundred bucks each, up front, to get smuggled across the border.”

“Rephaim is too tied up in his church to—”

“Even Uncle Carl thinks he’s a con man.”

“That’s because he’s jealous of the way Aunt Goodie listens to what Rephaim says.” She paused. “Oh, Dunc, be careful!”

She was worried about him! Suddenly they were in each other’s arms, kissing almost wildly, tongues darting, panting for breath. Her head was back, her arms clinging to him.

Somehow, Dunc’s hand was on one of her brassiered breasts through the thin fabric of the blouse. His other hand moved up inside her skirt along the silken length of her inner thigh. He was wild with desire. She wrenched herself away.

“Dunc! No! Please!”

He stopped instantly, panting. “I... I’m sorry, I...”

She came back into his arms, whispered against his throat, “It’s just that... so soon... not here... not now...”

He walked her to the door, both of them still a little breathless. She pressed against him again.

“Tomorrow?” he asked.

“I can’t.” She gestured at the house. “Next Friday?”

“Next Friday,” he said, then added quickly, “and Saturday.”

She laughed. “And Sunday. Good night, darling.” And she kissed him and was gone.

Dunc drove home feeling the agony and the ecstasy — ecstasy over the “darling,” agony over his case of lover’s nuts.

On Monday Dunc asked Joshua if he’d meant the immigration people might give him a hard time over hiding the Mexicans.

“Trouble I’m talking ’bout come, you be knowin’ it for sure.”

Which told him nothing. At least being shorthanded meant Dunc had to concentrate on what he was doing instead of spinning emotional and sexual fantasies about Penny all the time.

Driving home from work, Gus was in a foul mood. “I couldn’t get near Birdie last Saturday. After a whole summer of practically handing her to me on a platter, all of a sudden Hector tells me he never wants me to speak with her again.”

“You’re lucky he didn’t come at you with a shotgun.”

“You don’t know the half of it. Last week he walked into the bedroom when we were humping away.”

Dunc was amazed. “What’d he do?”

“Called her the Whore of Babylon and said ‘Excuse me’ and stalked out again.”

“You’re making it up.”

Gus made the old Boy Scout sign with two raised fingers. “Scout’s honor. I tell you, Dunc old son, I’m out of my depth. Where are the honest, virtuous virgins of St. Mary’s?”

“Maybe he heard we hid the Mexicans in the cornfield.”

“What’s this ‘we,’ white man. And anyway, what difference would it make to him?”

“I’m just saying ‘What if?’ Alejandro was at Rephaim’s on a Sunday morning and at the seminary construction site on the Monday. This weekend Hector tells you to get lost.”

Gus nodded. “And he knows we’re buddies.” Then he shrugged. “Whatever the hell reason, I’m like the guy lost the key to his girl’s apartment. Now I get no new-key.”

There was no smog, nobody could figure out why it sometimes didn’t appear. The traffic on Sepulveda was at a standstill. Somewhere ahead of them flashing lights pinpointed an accident.

Gus leaned back in the seat and crossed his hands behind his head. “I’ve got a special place I’d like to show to you and Penny, Dunc. How about I take you guys there on Sunday?”

“I’ll ask her about it — but if she comes, don’t mention Birdie. Birdie is one of her aunt’s best friends.”

Penny chose the movie on Friday night, a romantic comedy called Roman Holiday. They both were wild about it. Audrey Hepburn was like a delicate bird, and Gregory Peck had been one of Dunc’s favorite actors since he’d played the writer dying on the African veldt in Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro.

After they had thoroughly discussed everything from Roman Holiday to Gregory Peck to Hemingway, Penny brought up Rephaim.

“I’ve given this a lot of thought, Dunc, and I still don’t think he’s involved in smuggling illegal aliens. I don’t believe in him any more than you do, but he believes in himself. Totally. And he wouldn’t profit by turning them in. Who would?”

“Well, the Immigration Service, for one.”

“Do they pay informers?”

“I doubt it, but maybe those guys have a quota to fill.”

“All right, who else profits in this whole thing?”

“Whoever gets them across the border.”

As he said it, Hector popped into his mind. But he didn’t say anything to Penny. Neither of them mentioned her impending departure, as if the infinity of time lay before them.

Dunc hadn’t ridden a horse since he was ten, when his family’d had a very sly pony named Tricksy. But Senator was a big horse, sedate and good-natured as he plodded along the winding bridle trails through the scrub brush and dusty-leaved live oaks of Griffith Park. Penny rode Yankee. She was a terrific rider. He’d have to practice so he could keep up...

Except it all ended in three weeks. Don’t think about it.

She spread a tablecloth under a smooth red-boled manzanita and gathered a bunch of wildflowers for a centerpiece. They ate fried chicken and potato salad and drank lemonade out of a thermos. Senator nudged between them to eat the bouquet.

As they returned to the stables on the northern rim of the park, Penny brought Yankee up beside Senator for a fierce saddle-to-saddle hug. “This has been one of the best days of my life!”

“Since you’re gonna own a dude ranch, I thought we’d better practice up.”

Their unsaddled horses ambled about the enclosure; Dunc mentioned Gus’s mystery location the next day.

“It’ll be fun,” said Penny. “And since he’s your friend I want to meet him before he goes off to Frank Lloyd Wright’s place in Phoenix. Do you think he could design a dude ranch house?”

“Sure, and the stables. And he specializes in outhouses.”

She patted her horse’s shoulder. “Sound good, Yankee?”

Dunc almost said it then, what had been growing in his mind. Ask her to stay, skip that last year of college; but he couldn’t. It wouldn’t be fair to her. Or to him, either.

A lion roared in the nearby zoo, and he thought of Hemingway’s African stories. Christ, he wanted to be a writer!

On Sunday Gus drove them down through a broad flat sprawl of little houses in South-Central L.A. east of the airport. “Just a couple of years ago this area was more white than black.”

From blocks away, they could see a strange openwork tower thrusting far above its surroundings, glinting in the noonday sun as if studded with jewels.

“What is it?” asked Penny in awe.

“A tower a guy named Watts has been building for years.”

The base of the tower was heaped with broken glass from bottles of every description — pop bottles, beer bottles, wine bottles. There was also a hand-lettered sign, “Admission, 25 cents.” Watts was a short middle-aged man who knew Gus and shook hands with him. Inside the tower, Penny and Dunc gazed up at its spires in amazement. Crazy wooden scaffolding flanked its sides.

“Concrete and broken bottles,” said Penny in surprise.

The concrete looked almost liquid, as if still dripping down the sides of the tower like candle wax. But it was totally dry. They spent over an hour there, gawking, touching.

“What a strange thing to spend your life working on,” said Penny as they headed home.

“He works alone, it just came to him that he had to do it.”

“He’s driven to it,” said Dunc, and hoped he would be that driven to writing when the time came.

That night, after Goodie and Carl had gone to bed, as they drifted back and forth together on the creaking porch swing, Dunc was surprised to hear Penny chuckle to herself.

“I was just thinking, maybe Gus isn’t the right architect for the ranch house. Even less for the stables. Can you imagine how a tower like that would spook the horses?”

“His drawings are nothing like the Watts towers, honest.”

Suddenly sober, she hugged him close. “Oh, Dunc, time’s getting so short.”

Chapter Twenty-four

Dunc was driving over to see Penny every night and getting home at one or two in the morning. Each day he knew he’d have to stay in and sleep that night; but when quitting time rolled around, he could hardly wait to go see her.

They took long rambling walks along darkened neighborhood streets, making up stories about the people behind the lighted windows. They’d see a movie, sit in a soda fountain, watch TV, swing on the old-fashioned porch glider. Always they ended up parked in a little wooded area across the parkway, feverish and excited, going a little further each time in mutual need.

Friday, Gus’s last day in L.A., he skipped work to spend time with his relatives, particularly Grandma Trabert; she had aged over the summer. Donovan gave Dunc a big ration of shit about the missing Gus, but labor was plentiful, he’d have no trouble getting a replacement for Monday’s pour.

Without Gus, Dunc went to Joshua for help getting the Mexicans hidden away in case Immigration came earlier. The lanky Negro gave his high laugh and clapped Dunc on the shoulder.

“Osvaldo!” he yelled. “Mr. Donovan says you an’ me, baby, we gotta go wait for the truck to bring the cement.”

Dunc led the others out to the edge of the field farthest from the building site, in case Osvaldo had learned where they’d been hidden last time. And sure enough the immigration agents arrived at 9:15, an hour early. When they saw no Mexicans, they stormed right over to Dunc. Osvaldo obviously had been talking.

Thick-Neck’s close-set eyes were angry slits.

“Okay, wise guy, where are they?”

Again, Dunc was all innocence. “Who?”

This time all four agents ranged around him like the hyenas around the dying writer in The Snows of Kilimanjaro. And like the hyenas their jaws were mighty: scavengers, Dunc thought with a touch of alarm, but also government men.

“We know you hid them in the cornfield last time.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Thick-Neck said, “We can arrest you for obstruction of justice and aiding and abetting federal fugitives.”

“I have to get back to work. We’re shorthanded today.”

Just then Joshua, shaking his head over the cement truck that mysteriously hadn’t arrived, returned with Osvaldo. The immigration agents halfheartedly poked around in the cornfield without success, finally drove off in a cloud of dust.

Dunc felt shaky. This had been just a game to him, but the agents’ anger had been personal and vindictive. Maybe they did have a quota. What worried him even more was Osvaldo. Dunc had expected open hostility from the Judas goat, but Osvaldo just looked scared. Of what? Of whom?

At the hod carriers’ office were just the deskman and the chairman, whom he had learned were Tony and Luigi. He laid down his check. “Take out thirty, I’m paying Trabert’s dues, too.”

Tony counted out his money, stamped the union books. His eyes shifted, and a heavy shoe slammed into Dunc’s kidney. He yelled in pain and arched back at the same time that he was driven forward, half running, into the wall. He fell down.

“Smart little fuck!” exclaimed Tony.

They were advancing on him, coming in from either side. Dunc staggered to his feet and backed up against the wall.

“We’re gonna show you what happens when you fuck around in union affairs,” said Luigi.

Suddenly, too late, Dunc saw it all with blinding clarity. Who Osvaldo was afraid of. Who had worked out the scam in the first place, who had been profiting from turning in the illegals every two weeks, even why the immigration agents’ anger had been so focused and personal. He held up placating hands.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, I didn’t know—”

“Well you’re gonna know now, fuckface.”

He charged them as he’d done so often in football when double-teamed by blockers protecting the quarterback, hoping to burst out between them and run for his life. He didn’t make it.

Luigi smashed an elbow into his jaw. He used his own elbow, felt a satisfying jar. But Tony’s arm was around his neck from behind in a chokehold, he was hauled bodily upright; Tony outweighed him by seventy pounds.

Dunc clawed at the tree trunk arms, couldn’t get any leverage. The kidney kick had weakened him, the half nelson was cutting off the blood to his brain; Luigi, in front of him, looked blurry.

“Hold him still. Fucker broke my nose.”

A pile-driver fist smashed into Dunc’s gut. His abdominal muscles were so work-toughened it didn’t quite rupture anything.

Tony said behind him, “Shit, you can hit him in the gut all day. He’s tough from working, this baby. Go for the face.”

Luigi’s right cross to the side of his jaw sagged his knees and blurred his vision even more. The next one would put him on the floor, where they could kick him to death if they wanted to.

Then Dunc heard a grunt of effort and Luigi drifted up off the floor in slow motion. He was spun into Samuel’s rising boot at the apex of his kick. It put him on the floor flat as a pancake, arms and legs wide, face full of blood.

In his place was Joshua, a surprisingly baleful grin on his ebony face.

“You bes’ let go of him,” he said to Tony.

But Tony warned, “I’ll break his fuckin’ neck!”

Joshua made a graceful movement too fast for the eye to follow, and was pointing his switchblade finger at Tony’s ample middle, as he had done to Samuel the day he’d been doused with water. Only now his finger was an opened-out straight razor, the gleaming blade making little eager circles in front of him.

“I takes me a swipe with this here razor, Mr. Union Man, an’ when you tries to nod your head you be in fo’ a big surprise.”

Tony stepped back, arms out wide from his sides. Obviously neither he nor Luigi had thought they’d need a gun to beat somebody up. Dunc gulped in great lungfuls of air.

“International’s gonna be mighty innersted in whut you been do in’ in this local,” Joshua said. “I hear they be as tough as you guys pretend you are. Dunc, we be goin’ now.”

The three of them backed out the door. Samuel’s rattletrap was alongside the Grey Ghost with both doors hanging open.

“I thought... you guys... were already gone,” panted Dunc.

“We figured you might need a little help when you went to cash your check.” Samuel was thoughtfully rubbing his boot in the dust to rid it of Luigi’s blood.

Dunc’s kidney burned, but it was not as bad as a kidney shot he’d taken from an opposing lineman’s helmet during his high school football days. Then he’d pissed blood for a week.

“You guys... knew all along... what was going on.”

Samuel shrugged. “Near enough.”

“Figgered you was havin’ a lotta fun workin’ it out your own se’f,” said Joshua. “But we think maybe you won’t wanna work here no mo’. Those guys gonna have long memories.”

“But what about you? If you lose your jobs over this—”

“Shit, man,” said Samuel, “we can work anywheres we want.”

Joshua gave his hee-hee-hee laugh. “We be the dynamic duo!”

“You go on now, Dunc,” said Samuel. “Jes in case they got some life in them yet.”

They didn’t. No one appeared at the open door of the tract house serving as a union office. It was all over. Joshua stuck out his hand; Dunc hugged him instead, the way he hugged his dad when he hadn’t seen him for a while. He repeated with Samuel.

“Christ, you guys, you — you saved my life!”

“Jes yo’ ass,” said Joshua, and all three of them laughed.

Driving away from the hod carriers’ office for the last time, in the rearview mirror Dunc could see Samuel’s ancient Plymouth bouncing along the dirt track in his dust.

At Sepulveda they went their separate ways.

Chapter Twenty-five

That evening Dunc regaled the family with the story of how his plan to again hide the Mexican laborers in the cornfield, which had gone so perfectly the first time, had gone awry.

Uncle Ben said, “You look pretty beat-up, Dunc. Something ought to be done about that assault at the union office.”

“I learned my lesson. I’m just going to let it lie.”

He called Penny for some loving commiseration and invited her to see Duke Ellington the next night. After another long hot shower he went to bed; there had been only the faintest pink tinge to his urine, so he knew his kidneys were all right.

Next morning the whole family trooped down to see Gus off on the Phoenix-bound Greyhound. Gus and Dunc shook hands.

“Christ, I wish I’d been there yesterday.”

“Then we both would’ve gotten the shit kicked out of us.”

Suddenly they knew it had been a good summer. One that could never be repeated. The women were fussing over Gus, tears on everyone’s cheeks; Dunc was suddenly homesick for his folks. Gus got a window seat, he and the family mouthed silent sentences at each other until the driver climbed in and the door hissed shut. The big vehicle was moving, and Gus was gone.

Dunc found a place to park on a side street a block from the Strip, in front of a small dark bungalow with a dried-out lawn but hot-purple bougainvillea rioting up the front porch posts to give the place a spurious festive air. A ’36 Chevy pickup was parked halfway up the drive. Dim light glowed against the drawn front room shades; they could hear radio music from inside.

“Good place for Philip Marlowe to discover a murder,” said Penny in almost a whisper.

They walked up the inclined street to Sunset holding hands. The air was warm, flower-scented; palm fronds clacked overhead. Dunc was very aware of the swing of Penny’s thighs beneath the clinging red dress.

As they strolled past an Art Deco cocktail lounge called the Purple Cockatoo, a posterboard beside the doorway caught Dunc’s eye. He stopped dead to stare at the photograph of a dapper black-haired man in a tux framed beneath the lettering:

Pepe, who had conned Nicky into letting Dunc go back to the Gladiator Club’s poker room for the fateful meeting with Nitro Ned and Artis in the first place! Pepe, who had sung to his piano riffs as he told Dunc stories as Dunc perched at the piano bar next to the tip glass on its felt coaster.

“That’s him!” he exclaimed. “It’s his photograph.” Penny already knew most of Dunc’s Las Vegas adventures, all except watching Artis die. Penny took his hand and drew him toward the door. “You need to talk to him,” she said. “You’re the only ones still alive.”

The Purple Cockatoo was a narrow room full of smoke and a lot of potted plants with spearlike palmetto leaves, but no cockatoos, purple or otherwise. Two barmen sweated behind a stick alive with the din of the alcohol voices of sharp-dressing men and blondes in revealing dresses and too much makeup.

Dunc shouldered a path for Penny toward a piano bar bathed in a purple spotlight. Pepe was singing the Tony Bennett version of “Cold, Cold Heart.” He looked up, did a double take, and schmaltzed up a dozen bars of the “Notre Dame Victory March.”

“Dunc! And the loveliest lady in the place!”

Penny gave a mock curtsy. “Thank you, kind sir.”

Dunc introduced them, then asked Pepe, “Are you the purple cockatoo they named the place after?”

“The purple spot?” Pepe chuckled. “Management insists.”

He looked just the same as he had at the Gladiator Club, impeccably groomed, slim and elegant, with the white wine, the cigarette smoldering in an ashtray, the glass bowl of greenback tips. Dunc realized all over again how much he liked this man. Pepe gestured them to stools at the almost empty piano bar.

“Same old story. People come to a place like this to pick up women, not listen to the music.” He grinned. “Not like Dunc. Always my biggest fan.”

When a harried waitress in a tight black uniform that showed a lot of breast and leg came by to take their orders, Pepe launched into Frankie Laine’s “Jezebel.”

“Pepper?” asked Dunc at the end of the piece.

“My producer’s idea. ‘Pepe’ sounded too Mexican. Pepper Paglia — possibly Italian, possibly a recording star.”

“You got your record deal!” exclaimed Penny.

He raised sad elegant shoulders. “Not quite yet, Penny.”

Between numbers they drank and talked about Penny going back to college, about Dunc maybe trying San Francisco, about Pepe playing his piano... And finally about Vegas.

Dunc asked, “Did they ever catch Raffetto?”

Pepe’s hands momentarily forgot to play. He shook his head.

“Dunc, I don’t even know! I got a call about my record deal and had to leave before the fight. A bad business.” He raised his glass. “To life!” he said.

“I’ll drink to that,” said Dunc.

There was an explosion of white light that momentarily blinded them all. Pepe was on his feet, face white and drawn, glaring at the photo girl.

“Hey, this is great! A picture of the three of us together!” Dunc told her, “Three prints, miss.”

Pepe said sheepishly to Penny, “I thought it was a bomb. Mickey Cohen used to have his bookie joint in the basement of the haberdashery right next door at 8800 Sunset. Sell you a suit upstairs, take you to the cleaners downstairs. Somebody who wanted to take over his vice empire set off two bombs under his house.”

“Did they ever succeed?” asked Penny, wide-eyed.

“The mob, no, but he got five years for tax evasion.”

“And his vice empire?” asked Dunc.

Pepe chuckled. “Now everybody wants to take it over.”

The photo girl in her brief costume came back. It was a good shot, not as somber as the moment had felt to Dunc.

“Ah, we were young then,” said Pepe.

“Monday we’re going to the American Legion Labor Day picnic at Griffith Park,” said Penny. “Could you—”

“I’d love to! How kind of you to ask.”

“I’ll drop by midweek with directions,” volunteered Dunc.

There were still a lot of things he needed to talk to Pepe about that he couldn’t say in front of Penny. Arriving just too late to save Artis from Rafe Raffetto, Ned giving him the car, maybe even the priest’s weird penance...

“I’ll be here,” said Pepe with mock resignation.

It was too late to catch the Duke, but the Strip was still alive with moving people, honking cars, cruising police vehicles. They walked with their arms around one another; once off Sunset, they stopped every few paces to kiss. The house where Philip Marlowe might have uncovered a corpse was dark. Their eyes met.

Dunc said, “Let’s go... some where.”

“Yes,” she whispered.

Out beyond the Strip, Sunset Boulevard was wide and dark, traffic light. At Westwood Village Dunc chose a glowing red neon MOTEL–Vacancy sign, turned in. His heart was pounding.

He parked, trying to remember warnings from college studs about checking into a motel with a girl. After rehearsing his story in his mind, he rang the night bell.

A yawning woman with a round pleasant sleep-filled face came into the little office to buzz him in. Before Dunc could even fumble out his wallet, she put down a registration card.

“Double with bath is six bucks. Noon checkout.”

California! He loved it. Inside, they embraced, kissed. He unzipped the red dress and drew it down her shoulders and arms. She drew it down past her hips and thighs herself, looking like countless French paintings, Herself Surprised.

She stepped out of it, leaving the dress a crimson puddle on the floor, and caught his silver belt buckle to draw him close to her. They clung dizzily to each other, with deep, long kisses, then she was opening his buttons as he unfastened her bra and her breasts sprang free, achingly beautiful in the dim light.

In bed together, naked, touching one another, both inexperienced. When he finally began to enter her, Penny arched her back and drew in a sharp breath.

A whisper, “Dunc, please, be... It’s... my first time...”

He was wild with passion, nothing had ever been harder than the restraint she needed. Moving slowly, ever so slowly, he had not even fully entered her before he came. He had never known anything as exquisite in his life.

He withdrew, still half engorged. They clung together, entwined. She whispered, “I... I love you, Dunc.”

“Love you, my lover,” he said into her hair.

Her hand found him, he started to get hard again.

“Oh, Dunc... yes,” she whispered.

This time, no holding back. Her legs locked around him, held him tight as he bucked and thrust. Suddenly she arched with a small astonished cry and he spent, and spent, and spent again.

The Purple Cockatoo was dark except for a bright fan of gold from the open door in the back wall marking the office where the manager tallied the night’s receipts. Pepe pulled the fitted cloth cover over the piano; he wouldn’t be playing here again.

Dunc had found him, Dunc would be back to talk about the deaths of Artis and Ned, things that Pepe couldn’t talk about. This was a smart, observant kid. If he started remembering...

Pepe sipped his white wine, considered. He couldn’t have Dunc in touch with him, but it would be smart to keep track of where Dunc went, what he did. Yes. Smart. He’d make a phone call. No telling what the kid was thinking about right now.

They slept, woke, found one another, slept, woke again shortly before noon in each other’s arms to the sounds of people moving around outside, cars starting. Kissing, shyly, neither of them moving. Then moving, slowly at first, then faster, faster, then wildly to mutual explosion.

When they finally got up for a quick shared shower, there were two fine streaks of blood on the sheet. It awoke in Dunc a strange, exciting meld of emotions he had never known before: possession, an intense desire to protect, commitment to her.

Chapter Twenty-six

Penny reassured romance-loving Aunt Goodie from a pay phone, then Dunc drove them out along winding Sunset Boulevard toward the Palisades. It was a warm and sparkling day full of music, he had a hard time keeping his eyes off Penny. She was wearing dark glasses, the windows were open and her hair was blowing around her face. Her legs were tucked under her, tracing the taut line of her thigh against the red skirt. A scant hour ago he had been between those thighs. He couldn’t believe it.

“Where are you taking me, mystery man?”

“I was thinking of lunch,” he said.

She slid over beside him to rest her head on his shoulder. “I knew there was something about you that I found attractive.”

Dunc stopped at a seafood place on the ocean side of the Coast Highway, at a window table they ate fisherman’s platters and watched swimmers splashing in the languid surf.

“I wish...” Penny left the thought unfinished.

“Me too,” said Dunc.

Farther north they saw the turnoff to Rephaim’s church and said in tandem, “Yeah, let’s,” and laughed in delight at the shared thought. Here they had first met, just over a month ago. They wanted to remember it. They would. A tan ’52 Ford and a police black-and-white were parked outside the open door with the cross over it. Three men emerged.

The first was tall and athletic with a hard-bitten face and frown lines on his forehead. The second was a uniformed bull with a revolver on his hip. The third was Rephaim in his flowing robes, his magnificent head of silver hair wild, his eyes even wilder. He raised both manacled arms to point at Dunc.

“Thy heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” He advanced toward them, quivering with righteous rage. He cried, “Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts!”

“I haven’t done anything to you,” said Dunc, taken aback.

Rephaim thundered, “I will feed thee with wormwood, and give thee water of gall to drink.”

“What is happening here?” demanded a bewildered Penny.

The cop led Rephaim away to the prowl car. The hard-bitten detective said, “We’re not too sure ourselves. We got a memo about the San Fernando police cracking a big illegal-alien smuggling ring out in the Valley.”

“But what does that have to do with Rephaim?” she asked.

“Well, this morning we get a call from somebody belongs to this Church of the Order of Melchizedek, complaining about greasy Mexicans, so we attend the reverend’s service unannounced, we find a couple dozen wetbacks. The reverend says they’re members of his congregation, but none of ’em has a word of English. No papers, no home addresses, no money. So we called Immigration.”

The prowl car with Rephaim in back accelerated up the road.

“The reverend just keeps saying they were farmworkers from the Valley, he has no idea they were illegals. But—”

Penny said forcefully, “I think he was telling the truth.” She turned to Dunc. “Honey, what’s going on?”

“I told Gus’s uncle about getting beat up. He must have passed it on to his friends in the archbishop’s office, and they may have gone to the police. But this I don’t understand, the aliens getting busted here...”

The detective said, “Anyway, we really wanta talk with his acolyte or deacon or whatever the hell he calls himself?”

“Hector?” asked Dunc.

“Yeah.” The three of them walked over to the edge of the pool. The detective added, “The reverend seemed pissed at you.”

“Maybe he thought I was the one who called you.”

“Maybe. Anyway, this guy Hector’s got a lot of explaining to do. I really want to talk to him.”

There was a roar like an enraged bull elephant. They whirled — the six-by-six was roaring down the road at them, Hector hunched over the steering wheel, shrieking, face distorted.

“I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!”

The detective dodged one way, Dunc dragged Penny the other, the massive truck’s nose and front wheels missed them all and hit the surface with a great splash, sending an inverted waterfall of filthy water out over the concrete skirting at the far end of the pool. Its rear wheels rested on the broken concrete apron, its engine drowning to silence.

“Here’s Hector now,” said Dunc to the detective.

It made the Metro section of the Monday L.A. Times, with a picture of Hector’s truck nose-down in the swimming pool at the church of a zany cult calling itself the Seven Priests of Melchizedek. Smart police work by the LAPD, said the paper, had broken up an illegal-alien smuggling ring involving the cult, three officials of a hod carriers’ union, and four immigration agents, who had been suspended pending an internal investigation. Six mentions of policemen, one of the archdiocese, none of Dunc.

They read it lying side by side on their stomachs on a big gaudy towel at Malibu beach, Dunc in dark blue boxer-style swim trunks, Penny looking like a movie star in her dark glasses and a shiny light blue one-piece swimsuit.

“So it was the union men all the time,” she said.

Dunc nodded. “They collected the first week’s dues and the fifty-buck initiation fee from each batch of Mexicans Hector and Rephaim brought up across the border at a hundred bucks each. They were making a mint.”

“I still don’t think Rephaim was involved.”

They rolled over onto their backs. “Okay, every two weeks Hector would deliver another crew. Immigration would show up every two weeks, steady as clockwork. They’d get a rake-off and great efficiency reports.”

“What about Donovan?” she persisted. “Was he involved?”

“Maybe he knew in a general way, but I don’t think so — he got too big a kick out of me hiding them away in the cornfield.”

He wanted to spend every minute with Penny until she went back east, but she needed her temp job for next term’s tuition. Dunc wanted to give her what he’d saved from his summer’s labors, just to have the time with her, but she wouldn’t take it.

After he picked her up from work, they’d go to a movie, or to eat dinner, or both; before he took her home they’d find a place to park and make love. No motels: Penny staying out all night would stretch her Aunt Goodie’s romantic nature too far.

One night when Penny had to work late, Dunc went to the Purple Cockatoo. But Pepe’s picture had been replaced by that of an impossibly blond woman calling herself Skylark Nightingale.

“When did Pepe leave?” Dunc asked the square-headed Germanic bartender. He had meaty hands and thick wrists but a surprisingly delicate touch mixing drinks.

The blue eyes looked blank. “Who?”

“Oh — uh... Pepper Paglia. The piano player.”

“Never heard of him.”

“He was playing here just last weekend,” said Dunc, fuming.

“I was off.” He turned away toward another customer.

Dunc nursed his beer. Would Pepe show up at the picnic on Monday? Or had he moved on again, abruptly, as he’d left Vegas? He always expressed himself better with music than with words; maybe he didn’t want to talk about that bloody night. Trying to hold him was like trying to hold quicksilver in your hand.

They were standing with a score of others in a line stretched out across the field, a wall of people on either side. Dunc wore Frisko jeans and a sport shirt; Penny, shorts and a sleeveless blouse. She had her hair pulled back behind her ears.

“May the best man win,” said Dunc with a manly grin.

Penny gave her marvelous laugh. “Or woman.”

A whistle blew. They began hopping frantically down the field in their potato sacks. Dunc tripped over his own feet and sprawled in the dirt. Penny won. Goodie and Carl were with Dunc; Carl sadly laid a dollar on his wife’s hot little hand, said to Dunc with a sneer, “Some great athlete!”

“I didn’t play football in a potato sack.”

Penny was aghast. “You bet against your own niece?”

A brass band was playing John Philip Sousa, the blare of horns carrying even over the cries and laughter of children. Cooking meat wafted its smell over from the picnic tables. At Griffith Park the great American Legion Labor Day picnic was in full swing. Pepe hadn’t showed.

“The turkey shoot starts in a few minutes,” said Carl. “I will single-handedly bring dignity back to the males.”

“Every year he enters the turkey shoot, every year we have to buy our Thanksgiving turkey,” Aunt Goodie said sadly. To Penny she added, “Let’s go reserve a picnic table.”

Penny said solemnly to Dunc, “Shoot one for the Gipper.”

Not that it was a literal turkey shoot. The contestants shot at suits of playing cards printed on paper. The one who got the best poker hand with five shots won a frozen turkey.

A large red-faced man was telling a joke about a sailor up from San Diego to pick up girls in L.A. A bartender had told him to go way out Sepulveda, find a shopping center, and carry the groceries of a pretty woman wearing a wedding ring to her car.

“ ‘Married broads are horny, she’ll take you home to bed.’ ”

“ ‘What if were in bed and her husband comes home?’ asks the sailor. The bartender says, ‘You run into the shower, and she tells her husband you’re her cousin in the navy up from San Diego. Then you get dressed and leave.’ ”

The big man was at least forty, at least an inch over six feet, with a round rubicund face and silvery receding hair swept straight back from his forehead. His nose was small, almost pug; his surface impression of beaming good nature was somewhat belied by small, quick blue eyes, watchful in repose.

“So they’re going at it when the husband drives up. The sailor runs into the shower and the wife tells her husband her cousin is up from San Diego. The husband takes one look at him and says, ‘You son of a bitch, I said way out Sepulveda!’ ”

They shot with .22 rifles with open sights; almost everyone was older than Dunc and nearly all of them had been in the service during the war. Uncle Carl was indeed a deplorable shot: only one of his five bullets even hit a card. The big jokester tried for a full house and got two pair, the best shooting yet.

“I can taste that bird now,” he grinned.

Dunc tried for a full house, too, and got it. Aces over eights. The big man came over to congratulate him.

“The dead man’s hand,” he said. “That’s fancy shooting.”

“Thanks,” said Dunc. Carl handed them both icy cold bottles of beer. The ladies appeared. Dunc said to Goodie, “You don’t have to buy your Thanksgiving turkey, after all.”

“How about a rematch?” The big guy was deceptively soft-looking; under his flowered sport shirt were thick arms and a wide chest.

“You’re on!” exclaimed Dunc. Penny hadn’t been there to see him win, but she was smiling confidently, serenely now. He really wanted to beat this guy in front of her.

His opponent tried for a full house again, this time got it. He turned to Dunc. “Beat that one, kid.”

Dunc put four consecutive bullets into the ace card.

“And Christmas, too,” he said to Goodie.

Penny hugged him, laughing in delight. “My hero.”

The big man drew him aside, stuck out his hand. “Eddie Drinker Cope. Everybody calls me Drinker.”

“Pierce Duncan. Everybody calls me Dunc.”

“Where in hell’d you learn to shoot like that?”

“Going out plinking gophers and blackbirds with a .22 back in Minnesota. Bluejays, sparrows, squirrels, chipmunks, feral cats — just about anything that moved and wasn’t a songbird.”

“None of the above for me,” said Drinker Cope. “I learned mine in the Marines.” He paused, frowning. “Duncan. Pierce Duncan. Yeah!” He snapped his fingers. “The alien-smuggling case — goofy religious cult, hod carriers’ union, some racketed-up immigration guys. You did some great detective work there.”

“Are you a cop?” asked Dunc.

“Used to be. Believe me, you got the knack, you could develop into a top-notch investigator.” He gave Dunc a card.

“Ever up my way...” said Drinker Cope.

On Tuesday morning Dunc packed and carried everything out to the Grey Ghost. Uncle Ben shook his hand and Aunt Pearl cried again. Even Grandma Trabert gave him a careful hug.

“You have a good life, Dunc. I’ll pray for you.”

“I’ll pray for you, too, Grandma.”

Before he got in the car and drove off, he promised them that he’d keep in touch, knowing that he wouldn’t. He was already starting to feel like a balloon slipping its tether.

At the nicest motel he could find close to Aunt Goodie’s house he got a room, picked Penny up at seven and promised to have her home by midnight. Her train left at ten the next morning.

For the first hour they just lay in one another’s arms and talked. Then Penny started sobbing quietly.

“Oh, Dunc, what are we going to do? I’ll have to spend Christmas with my mom and my sister’s family in Dubuque.”

“I know.” He was lying on his back with her head in the crook of his neck. “How about semester break? When is it?”

“End of February. But we only get a week.”

“Use both weekends, you can stretch it to nine or ten days.” He kissed the dimple at the side of her mouth. “Smile.” He did it again, she giggled and dodged and caught him in a long kiss on the mouth that ended in frantic loving, then laughing, then Dunc holding her and stroking her head while she cried again.

Aunt Goodie and Uncle Carl, with their usual understanding, asked Dunc if he could drive Penny to Union Station. They clung to each other, hardly noticing the stucco-colored Art Deco station walls, not getting a chance to finish their coffee and tea and Danish before Penny’s train was called.

“I feel like I’m in Casablanca,” she said sadly.

Once inside, she opened her compartment window and leaned out. By stretching up, Dunc could just reach her hand.

“Write to me,” she said.

She was crying again, but he couldn’t hold her and stroke her head this time. Far down the track the conductor called “Board!” and the train gave a sudden lurch, was slowly moving.

“You too.” He was walking along beside her, holding her hand. “You forgot to give me your sorority house number.”

The train was moving faster. Dunc was now trotting to keep up, holding on to her fingers as long as he could.

She called despairingly, “Where can I mail it to you?”

Their hands parted. Almost running now, he was still falling behind. He yelled, “General Delivery, San Francisco!”

The train had rumbled away from him, its metal wheels going ca-chunk ca-chunk on the joins where two sections of rail came together. He stood, watching until it was out of sight; Penny’s sweet small arm never stopped waving out of her window.