Necessity

26

Getting off the freeway at Pass Avenue she is looking in the rear-view mirror again. It has become a habit too strong to break. And she’s thinking it would be a tasty irony if Ray Seale has been hired to find her: an irony because his life will hardly be worth a thimbleful of dust if it ever gets out that he’s the very one who taught her how to vanish.

It’s half-past three and hot. Doyle and Marian are sitting at one of the outdoor tables in the corral of Buffalo Bill’s Saloon, having what is probably not their first drink of the afternoon.

Graeme Goldsmith is with them.

Damn.

As she parks in front of a wagon wheel someone meanders into the bookshop and she sees Doyle get up from his table and carry his drink toward the shop. Mustache twitching in anticipation, he waves to her as she gets out of the car, then disappears inside in hope the customer is more than a browser.

She leaves the windows open and the car unlocked. There’s nothing in it worth stealing and if you close the windows it’s a furnace when you get back in.

There’s no graceful escape. She joins Marian and the Australian in the shade of the table’s umbrella.

Graeme lifts his beer toward her in a casual welcoming gesture. Coming from him it is at best a meaningless courtesy. He’s made it clear enough that he doesn’t like her. Perhaps it’s her personality; perhaps he just doesn’t like women.

In either case she feels no obligation to change his sentiments.

As she sits down, George, the aged waiter, saunters out from his post in the shade. Marian says, “An iced tea for herself, honey.”

“That’s lemon, no sugar, right?”

Jennifer-she thinks of herself as Jennifer now-confirms it with a nod and George retreats.

Marian says, “So anyway-sorry, Jennifer honey, just finishing the story-anyway,” she says to Graeme in her prairie twang, “Nick used to come around once in a while with a jug and his ukulele. He had a great tenor voice, you know. He and Doyle used to tie one on, sing those old songs, we had a ball in those days, and that’s how we first learned those bawdy tunes. We got the lyrics from Nick. You want the real lowdown, I think his widow’s still got his song collection. Maybe you ought to call her. She’s in the book.”

Jennifer has made the discovery recently that a vast part of ordinary human conversation is made up of idle memories. People spend more time telling one another shaggy dog anecdotes about incidents from their past than they seem to devote to any other social activity.

It makes things awkward when the only past you can admit to is one you make up as you go along-and then have got to remember forever.

Marian is still reminiscing. “Nick used to know Reagan pretty well back in the actors’ union days and when Reagan started running for governor I remember Nick just shook his head in wonderment. He’d always say, ‘Trouble with Ronnie is, you ask him the time of day, he’ll tell you how to build an Elgin watch but the trouble with Ronnie is, he don’t know how to build an Elgin watch.’”

Both of them laugh and Jennifer joins in it. Marian is drinking something blood red with a stalk of celery in it. Her pert face is sleepily content under the tight helmet of salt-and-pepper hair. She’s forty-eight and her skin is brown and crosshatched by a fine netting of lines but she’s an attractive woman: tiny, tidy, slim, with the abrupt sure movements of a bird. Behind the dark glasses are brown eyes that twinkle more often than not.

“This is my second bullshot,” she says. “We’re celebrating. You remember that idiot collector in Spokane?”

“The Wyatt Earp nut?”

“Uh-huh. The one with the voice like a nuclear explosion.” Marian pronounces it “nucular.”

Jennifer feels the heat of Graeme’s eyes upon her. Marian’s talk drifts by:

“We got a catalog phone order from him a couple hours ago. About blew my ear off. Complete set of Alfred Henry Lewis. Bound volumes of the Tombstone Epitaph and a couple dozen outrageously overpriced first editions-Stuart Lake, Billy Breakenridge, Walter Noble Burns, that kind of whitewash stuff. Take us half the weekend to pack it for shipping but it pays the rent for the whole month and then some.”

“Congratulations.”

Graeme says, “Looks like the value of your stock just went up a point.”

She gives him a lazy glance through her sunglasses. Why is it that everything he says sounds like an accusatory innuendo?

George brings the iced tea. Graeme says, “I’ll have another beer.”

She tastes the iced tea and makes a face. “Can’t you just make real tea and put ice in it? This powdered junk is dreadful.”

“Use a lot of lemon.” George hobbles away.

Marian shouts, “Grouch!” at his back.

The waiter takes no notice.

“Top of everything else he’s going deaf,” she says to Jennifer.

Graeme says, “How’s the shrink?”

It takes her by surprise so that she has to think a moment. Then she says, “All right,” rather irritably and flicks a sharp look at Marian, who pretends an abrupt keen interest in her drink, wrapping both hands around it and peering down into it with an attention so studied it’s comical.

She’s explained her afternoon absences to Doyle and Marian by saying she’s been seeing a psychoanalyst to find out why she loused up her marriage. Evidently they’ve passed the confidence on to Graeme. Marian is right to be embarrassed. Jennifer makes no gesture to take her off the hook. She’s wishing they hadn’t told Graeme-and she’s wishing Graeme would stop asking so many questions.

She hasn’t told any of them about Charlie Reid or the flying lessons; she hasn’t told anybody anything-she feels like a spy, parceling out information on a need-to-know basis. She’s compartmentalized everything.

Graeme says, “I went to a shrink once. He told me I was full of shit. Hell, I already knew that.”

Marian laughs with him. He goes on, addressing Jennifer: “Bless ’em all-Freudians, Jungians, gurus, messiahs-must be a thousand bloody schools of thought and every single one’s got the corner on truth. The one true religion. Mob of charlatans, you know-all of ‘em. They haven’t got any answers. Just questions. You ask them what something means, they come right back at you with a question-what do you think it means?

“But then I suppose it’s something to spend the alimony on.” His smile, with a lot of white teeth, is as warm as a Times Square whore’s.

Jennifer says, “I take it you went through an expensive divorce.”

“Two of them, darling.”

Perhaps that explains his animosity; perhaps not.

Graeme drinks from the bottle. “I think of alimony like buying gas for a junked car. I’d like it a lot if once in a while maybe she’d pay for my bloody doctor appointments. But it doesn’t work that way, does it, ladies.”

Marian says, “He’s in a mood, as you can tell. He had to get up early to cover an unpleasant story. Somebody had the indecency to get murdered at five o’clock in the morning.”

A moment’s alarm. “I didn’t know you were on the crime beat.”

“Sure. I cover the organized crime types. You didn’t see my series about the mob in Hollywood?”

“I must have been out of town.”

It seems to take him a moment to decide whether he’s been subtly insulted. Finally he lets it go. “The bloody phone at half-past five-they told me to get right round there. Could have committed murder myself just then-on the bloody city editor.”

Doyle comes out of the shop with his customer. The sun’s angle has changed; the reflections seem even more painful and the heat is a tangible weight. Jennifer holds the iced glass against her forehead. Marian looks pleased because Doyle’s customer has a bulky parcel under his arm-a large paper bag full of books. Another day’s rent taken care of.

Doyle comes to the table and pulls a chair out and waves his empty glass at George. In the meantime Graeme describes his early-morning murder:

“Button named Petrillo. Thirty-seven. Fat bloke, hairy as a gorilla. I’d seen him a few times. They hadn’t loaded him into the ambulance yet because the medical examiners were still taking flash pictures. Cops held us back but I got more of a look at him than I wanted. He’d been shot three or four times-somewhere else, I’d guess. Dumped on the curb downtown where he’d be found.”

Graeme sucks in a mouthful of beer, flutters it around inside his cheek, swallows. The pause is purposeful. Finally he drops the punch line:

“Whoever did it wanted him to be found. He’s a mess. They’ve ripped his bloody tongue out.”

Marian’s face changes: revulsion, then withdrawal-she doesn’t want to hear this. Doyle says, “God almighty.”

Graeme seems pleased by Marian’s infestivity. “There’d been a rumor Petrillo was making some sort of deal to turn state’s evidence and get immunity from prosecution.”

Doyle asks, “Prosecution for what?”

“Cocaine. Petrillo had connections with the Cleveland mob. Allegedly, as we investigative journalists say, he was a conduit for distribution to Ohio. Anyhow, looks like he got his tail in a bloody crack and he was ready to name names to a grand jury and allegedly a contract was put out and he became the victim of a bloody mob hit a block and a half from the courthouse.”

Graeme’s grimace is actorish. “When they tear out your tongue it’s supposed to be a warning to anybody else who may be thinking about finking on his pals. The Mafia are like those bloody fundamentalist Moslems-you steal from a don, they leave you lying around with your bloody hands chopped off. You spy on the wrong people, they find your corpse with no eyes in it. Explicit and expressive, the bloody Cosa Nostra.”

Jennifer pretends to maintain a polite and discreetly shocked interest. In fact her heart pounds painfully and she clenches her muscles against a feeling of faintness. She has never heard of this man Petrillo, but Graeme unwittingly has just dashed her in the face with exactly the images she has tried vigorously to keep out of her mind.