The Black-Eyed Blonde

21

I slept till noon. What did I feel like like when I woke up? There was a stray cat in the neighborhood that kept cozying up to me in the hope that I’d take her in and let her run my life for me. She was a moth-eaten Siamese, but of course she thought she was the reincarnation of an Egyptian princess. The other day I opened my back door and there was Pharaoh’s daughter, sitting on the stoop holding in her mouth the remains of what had been some kind of bird. She gave me a winsome look and delicately laid the corpse down at my feet. I guess it was meant as a present for me, sort of a down payment prior to her moving in.

Well, that bird was me, glazed of eye and feeling chewed all over, as I lay there in a tangle of sweat-soaked sheets and watched the light fixture in the ceiling, which seemed to be spinning slowly around and around in an elliptical orbit. Take my advice: never drink six bourbons on top of a trio of gimlets. When I had unsealed my lips sufficiently to open my mouth, I was surprised that heavy green smoke didn’t come pouring out of it.

I got up and dragged myself into the kitchen, moving very carefully, like a very old man, brittle and frail. I spooned some coffee into the percolator and put it on the stove and set a flame going under it. Then I stood for a long time leaning on the edge of the sink and gazing vacantly into the backyard. The sunlight out there was as acid as lemon juice. The recent rain had livened things up greatly, though. Most of the blossoms on Mrs. Paloosa’s potato vine were starting to turn to berries by now, but the oleander bush behind the garbage can was a mass of pink flowers, where half a dozen tiny hummingbirds were busy about their work of pollination. Ah, nature, and hungover me the only blot on the landscape.

The percolator began to rumble, sounding just like my stomach.

I put on a robe and went out and picked up the paper the delivery boy had lobbed onto the porch. I stood in the cool shadow and scanned the front page. There was a report in column seven of “an incident” at the Cahuilla Club. A couple of unidentified intruders had broken into the club and had been tackled by the security staff — Bartlett wasn’t named — and two deaths had resulted. It appeared that the manager of the club, Floyd Henson (sic, as they say), had been complicit in the raid and later had accidentally died while in police custody. The owner of the club, Wilberforce Canning, had left late last night for an undisclosed destination abroad. I whistled, shaking my head. You had to hand it to Harlan Potter. When he killed a story, he did it with impressive thoroughness.

I went back into the house and poured a cup of coffee from the percolator and drank it. It was too strong and had a bitter taste. Or maybe the bitterness was already in my mouth, from what I’d just been reading.

A little while later, I took my pajama top off in the bathroom and was impressed by the bruises Bartlett’s ropes had left on my arms and across my chest and rib cage. They ranged in color from putty gray through livid crimson to a sickly, sulfurous shade of yellow. My lungs were sore, from the pressure of my being trussed up for so long and then from having to work so hard not to burst when my head was underwater, not to mention the cigarettes I’d smoked last night in the Beanery as I sank deeper and deeper into that bourbon bottle.

Bad as I felt, it was better than being dead, but only just.

When I had shaved and showered and buffed myself up as best I could, I put on a gray suit, a white shirt, and a dark tie. It’s always best to dress soberly after a drunken night. I poured another cup of the muddy coffee, which was lukewarm by now, and took it into the living room and sat with it on the sofa and lit up an experimental cigarette. It tasted like wormwood, or what I imagined something that was called wormwood tasted like. I have a suspicion that the worst thing you can do when you have a hangover is drink coffee and partake of nicotine, but you’ve got to do something.

When the mailman dropped the day’s second delivery of mail through the mail slot and it fell on the tiles in the hall, I jumped about a foot at the noise it made. I was in that kind of state. I went out and gathered up the sheaf of envelopes. Utility bills. An offer from a company in Nebraska to supply me with prime rib-eye steaks packed in salt and dispatched by air. A notice from PG&E that my electricity account was overdue. And a cream-colored envelope with my name and address written in violet ink in a neat, looping hand. I sniffed it. Langrishe Lace, faint but by now unmistakable.

I carried the letter back to the sofa, sat down, and held it up between a finger and thumb and gazed at it. I recalled Clare Cavendish at her little wrought-iron table in the conservatory that day, a day that now seemed an awful long time ago, writing in her notebook with her fancy fountain pen. I put the envelope down on the coffee table and looked at it some more, finishing my cigarette. What would it be, a Dear John letter, delivering me the final brush-off, the coup de grâce? A note accusing me of having engaged in improper relations with a client? Was I about to be given the sack? Or maybe it was a check, settling the account and saying a curt bye-bye.

There was only one way to find out. I picked up the envelope and slipped a finger under the flap, and as I did so I thought of Clare licking it, the sharp little crimson tip of her tongue sliding swiftly along it and moistening the gum.

I wish to know if you have made any progress in the matter which I engaged you to investigate. I would have expected significant developments by now. Please let me know soonest.

CC

That was it. No sender’s address, no greeting, and no name, only the initials. She wasn’t taking any chances. It was the handwritten version of a kick in the guts. I started to get mad but then told myself not to be so dumb. Getting mad puts a strain on the liver and doesn’t do a damned bit of good.

I put Clare Cavendish’s cold little note aside, sat back on the sofa, lit another cigarette, and, since there was no avoiding it, set myself to thinking. The Nico Peterson affair hadn’t made much sense from the start, but by now it was making no sense at all. I came across a nice word recently: palimpsest. The dictionary said it was a manuscript with the original text partly erased and a new one written over it. What I was dealing with here was something like that. I was convinced that behind everything that had happened there was another version of things that I couldn’t read. All the same, I knew it was there. You don’t do my kind of work for as long as I have without developing a nose for the missing facts.

I went over it all again, sitting there on my sofa in the quiet of noontime — the nice thing about living on a dead-end street is that there’s not much traffic and consequently the noise level stays low. But the text was the same as before and I got nowhere, or nowhere new, anyway. The thing I was certain of, the only thing I was certain of, was that Clare Cavendish was the one piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit. Nico Peterson I sort of understood. He was a rich man’s son whose aim in life was to get rich himself and spit in his father’s eye, only he didn’t have his old man’s brains, or daring, or ruthlessness, or whatever it is you need to make a million bucks. He’d gotten nowhere in the agenting business — even Mandy Rogers could see he was useless — and he’d probably fallen in with the wrong crowd.

I also suspected that whatever contraband Nico had been shipping up in a suitcase from Mexico for delivery to Lou Hendricks was worth a lot of dough: you don’t fake your own death for nickels and dimes. And I was pretty certain Floyd Hanson had been in cahoots with Nico and had supplied one of his Lost Boys as a substitute corpse. My guess was that Wilber Canning didn’t know what Hanson and Nico had cooked up between them and had believed that Nico was dead until I stuck my beak into the tent. As for Gómez and López, I presumed they were the original owners of whatever was in the suitcase Nico had made off with and they had come up here to find Nico and reclaim their goods.

That left Clare Cavendish. She’d hired me to find a boyfriend who had two-timed her in a spectacular fashion, first pretending to be dead and then turning up alive, but I didn’t buy that version of things. From the start I’d been unable to believe that a woman like her would have gotten involved with a man like Peterson. Sure, there are women who like to dabble in the dirt — it excites them to risk their reputations and maybe even their health. But Clare Cavendish wasn’t the type. I could see her throwing herself into the arms of a cad, but he would have to be her kind of cad, with class and style and money. All right, she’d gone to bed with me, a guy who wouldn’t know how to work the gears in a fancy foreign sports car. I couldn’t account for that. How could I be expected to, when every time I thought of it I could see nothing but her in my bed that night, leaning above me in the lamplight, touching my lips with her fingertips and letting her blond hair fall around my face? Maybe I reminded her of someone she once knew — once loved, even. Or maybe she was just keeping me sweet, so she could go on using me for whatever the hell it was she was up to. That was a possibility I’d rather not have entertained. But once you think a thing, it stays thought.

I had the phone in my hand and was dialing her number before I knew what I was doing. There are times when you find yourself following your instincts like a well-trained dog trotting behind the heels of its master. A maid answered and told me to hold on. I could hear her footsteps as she walked off down an echoing hallway. A house has to be awful big to produce echoes that loud. I remembered Dorothea Langrishe’s look of wonderment when she’d remarked how she’d made a fortune from the crushed petals of a flower. It’s a funny world.

“Yes?” Clare Cavendish said, in a voice that would have put a skim of ice on the surface of Lake Tahoe. I told her I wanted to see her. “Oh, yes?” she said. “You have something to report?”

“I have something to ask you,” I said.

“Can’t you ask it over the phone?”

“No.”

There was a silence. I didn’t know why she was being so cold. We hadn’t parted on good terms at my house that night, but I’d come when she’d called me to help her when her brother had overdosed. That hadn’t made me Sir Galahad, but I didn’t think I deserved such a chilly tone, or that nasty little note she’d sent me, either.

“What do you suggest?” she said. “It’s not a good idea to come to the house.”

“How about lunch?”

Again she let the seconds pass. “All right. Where?”

“The Ritz-Beverly,” I said. It was the first place that came to mind. “It’s where I met your mother when we had our talk.”

“Yes, I know. Mother is out of town today. I’ll be there in a half hour.”

I went into the bedroom and took a look at myself in the wardrobe mirror. The gray suit looked shabby, and besides, it was about the same shade as my face. I changed into a dark blue number and took off the tie I was wearing and put on a red one. I even thought of shining my shoes, but in my delicate state I didn’t fancy the prospect of bending over to do it.

When I stepped out the front door and saw the empty space at the curb, I thought at first the Olds had been stolen. Then I remembered how Travis had taken the keys from me last night and sent me home in a taxi. I walked down the street toward Laurel Canyon. The sun was on the eucalyptus trees and the air was fresh with their scent. I told myself I didn’t feel so bad, and I almost believed it. A cab cruised past me and I whistled after it and it stopped. The driver was the size of a moose, and when I looked at him I did a double take: he was the same Italian I’d flagged last night outside Victor’s. This town seems to get smaller every day. His mood hadn’t improved any, and sure enough he swore at every traffic light that was against us, as if someone in control of them was switching to red every time he approached.

It was turning out to be a day of coincidences. At the Beverly, I was led to the same table where I’d sat with Ma Langrishe. It was the same waiter, too. He remembered me and asked in a worried tone if Mrs. Langrishe would be joining me. I said no, and he smiled like he’d just thought of Christmas. I ordered a vodka martini — what the hell — and told him to make it as dry as Salt Lake City. “I understand, sir,” he said softly, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d winked. He was an experienced fellow, and no doubt he could spot a hangover at a hundred paces.

I looked around while I waited for my drink to come. Even the shapely fronts and rears of the Nefertiti statues couldn’t interest me much today. A few tables had the usual lunching ladies in hats and white gloves, and there were some sober-suited deal makers being businesslike and forceful. A young couple sat side by side on a banquette under a leaning palm. Honeymooners — he had that unmistakable goofy grin smeared over his face, and there was a hickey on the side of her neck the size and color of a mussel shell. I silently wished them happiness and good fortune. Why not? Even a man with a head as thick as a turnip couldn’t help smiling benignly upon such a tender display of young love.

My martini arrived on a gleaming tray. It was cold and just a little oily, and it tripped happily over my teeth with a silvery tinkle.

She wasn’t very late. The waiter led her to my table. She wore a white wool suit with a sort of bodice jacket and a slim skirt. Her hat was of cream straw with a black band and a big, swooping brim. My mouth had gone dry. She was staring at me with a shocked expression — I could imagine what I looked like — and when I leaned my face down to her, she kissed the air quickly a couple of inches short of my cheek and murmured, “My God, what happened?”

The waiter was hovering, and I turned to him. “The lady will join me in a martini,” I said.

Clare began to protest, but I pretended not to notice; this was going to be a liquid lunch. She put her patent leather purse on the table and sat down slowly, still staring. “You look terrible,” she said.

“And you look like your mother’s bank balance.”

She didn’t smile. This wasn’t a good start. “What happened?” she asked again.

“Yesterday was what you’d probably describe as ‘trying.’ You saw the story in this morning’s Chronicle?”

“What story?”

I smiled at her with my teeth. “Those frightful incidents at the Cahuilla Club,” I said. “Can’t think what that establishment is coming to, what with dead Mexicans about the place and the manager turning out to be a creep. You knew Floyd Hanson, of course.”

“I wouldn’t say I knew him.”

The waiter came with her drink and set the glass almost reverently in front of her. I could see him giving her that swift, all-over appraisal waiters are experts at. Probably his mouth had gone dry too. She bestowed on him a faint smile of thanks and he backed away, bowing.

“I imagine what appeared in the paper wasn’t what really happened, was it,” Clare said. She was looking at me with one eye from under the sloping brim of her hat.

“It rarely is.”

“Were you at the club? I suppose that’s why your day was — what was the word you used? — trying.” I said nothing, only kept looking at that single, searching eye and maintaining my steely smile. “How is it you weren’t named?” she asked.

“I have friends in high places,” I said.

“Do you mean Linda’s father?”

“Harlan Potter probably lifted the phone, yes,” I said. “Has Linda told you how well she and I know each other?”

Now she did smile at me, but barely. “She didn’t tell me, but from the way she speaks of you I can guess. Is the feeling mutual?”

I lit a cigarette. “I didn’t come here to talk about Linda Loring,” I said, more harshly than I’d meant to. She flinched a little, but I think it was only because she thought she should.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

She opened her purse and took out her cigarettes — so it was a Black Russian day — and fitted one into her ebony holder. I leaned across the table and offered her a lit match. “All right,” she said, blowing smoke toward the ceiling, “what did you come here to talk about?”

“Well,” I said, “I guess there’s only one subject between you and me, Mrs. Cavendish.”

She was silent for a moment, absorbing the tone in which I’d said her name. “It’s a bit late, don’t you think,” she said quietly, “to revert to formalities?”

“I think it’s better,” I said, “if we keep things strictly businesslike.”

She gave me another flicker of a smile. “Do you?”

“Well, that note you sent me certainly meant business.”

She colored just a little. “Yes, I suppose it was rather brusque.”

“Listen, Mrs. Cavendish,” I repeated, “we’ve had some misunderstandings, you and I.”

“What kind of misunderstandings?”

I told myself this wasn’t the time to indulge in the luxury of getting angry. “Misunderstandings,” I said, “that I’d like to clear up.”

“And how would we do that?”

“It’s up to you. You could start by leveling with me about Nico Peterson.”

“‘Leveling’ with you? I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

My glass was empty — I’d even eaten the olive. I caught the waiter’s attention and he nodded and veered off in the direction of the bar. I felt tired suddenly. My chest and my upper arms still hurt like hell, and there was the dull, distant pounding in my head that it seemed by now had been going on in there all my life. I needed to lie down in some cool, shaded spot and rest for a long time.

“What I’m talking about isn’t difficult or puzzling, Mrs. Cavendish,” I said, “although I am having difficulty, I am puzzled. Look at it from my point of view. At first it seemed simple. You come to my office and ask me to find your boyfriend who’s disappeared. It wasn’t the first time a woman had sat in that chair you were sitting in and asked me to do the same thing. Men tend to be weak and cowardly, and often, when love wanes, they prefer to scram rather than face their lover and tell her that as far as they’re concerned she’s history. I listened to you, and although I had some reservations at the back of my mind—”

“Which were?”

She was leaning forward intently, the cigarette holder tilted at a sharp angle and the smoke from her cigarette streaming upward in a thin, swift line.

“Like I said already, I couldn’t quite put you together with the kind of man I took Nico Peterson to be, from your description of him.”

“And what kind was that?”

“Not your kind.” She started to say something more, but I cut her off. “Stop,” I said. “Let me go on.” She wasn’t the only one who could be brusque.

The waiter came with my new martini. I was glad of the interruption. The sound of my own voice was becoming a scraping ground bass alongside that drumming in my head. I took a cooling sip of my drink and thought of the line in the Bible about the hart that panteth after water. Good thing the psalmist didn’t know about vodka.

I lit another cigarette and went on: “Anyway, despite my misgivings, I say to you, all right, sure, I’ll find him. Then I discover he’s passed on to the Happy Hunting Ground, then it turns out not, since you’ve spotted him trotting along Market Street in the cool and fashionable city of San Francisco. This is interesting, I think to myself, in fact, this is a three-pipe problem, and I put on my deerstalker and set off again on the chase. Next thing I know, people start getting killed all around me. Plus, I almost get killed myself, more than once. This gives me pause. I look back along the tangled way I’ve come and I see you off there in the distance behind me, at the point where I started, wearing that inscrutable expression I’ve come to know so well. I ask myself, Can this be as simple as at first it seemed? Surely not.”

I too leaned forward now, until our faces across the table were no more than a foot apart. “So, Mrs. Cavendish, I’m asking you, is it as simple as it seemed? That’s what I mean when I say I want you to level with me. You once asked me to do like Pascal and make a wager. I did. I think I lost. And by the way, you haven’t touched your drink.”

I sat back in my chair. Clare Cavendish glanced to her right and left and then frowned. “I’ve just realized,” she said, “this is my mother’s favorite table.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s a coincidence.”

“Of course, you met here, didn’t you.”

“In this very spot.”

She nodded distractedly. She seemed to be thinking of many things, sifting, calculating, deciding. She took off her hat and put it on the table, beside her purse. “Is my hair awful?” she said.

“It’s lovely,” I said. “Your hair.”

I meant it. I was still in love with her, in some sort of painful, hopeless way. What a chump I was.

“What were we saying?” she said.

I think she really had lost the thread. It crossed my mind that maybe she didn’t know any more than I did, that maybe her hiring me to look for Nico Peterson really had no connection with the rest of the stuff that followed. It was possible, after all. Life is far more messy and disconnected than we let ourselves admit. Wanting things to make sense and be nice and orderly, we keep making up plots and forcing them on the way things really are. It’s one of our weaknesses, but we cling to it for dear life, since without it there’d be no life at all, dear or otherwise.

“We were saying,” I said, “or, that is, I was saying, I was asking, if you can explain to me how your hiring me to go after Nico Peterson ties up with Peterson’s sister being kidnapped and murdered, and then her killers themselves getting killed, and Floyd Hanson killing himself, and Wilber Canning fleeing the country, and me ending up feeling like all these people rushing around have been rushing around over me, like a herd of buffalo.”

She lifted her head quickly and stared at me. “What did you say about Floyd Hanson? The newspaper said—”

“I know what the newspaper said. But Hanson didn’t die by accident — he tore up a sheet and made a rope of it and put it around his neck like a noose and tied the other end to a bar in the window and let himself drop. Only the window wasn’t high enough off the ground, so he had to make his legs go limp and dangle there until he had no more breath left. Think how much effort and determination that took.”

Her face had gone ashen, which made those black eyes of hers seem to start from her face, huge and moist and glossy. “Dear God,” she whispered. “The poor man.”

I watched her carefully. I can always tell when a man is acting, but with women I’m never sure. “This is a dirty affair,” I said, keeping my voice low and as gentle as I could make it. “Lynn Peterson died in a cruel, painful fashion. So did Floyd Hanson, though maybe he deserved to. A pair of Mexicans were beaten to death, and even if no one should feel sorry for them, it was brutal and ugly. Maybe you don’t understand the full extent of what you’re involved in. I hope you don’t, or I hope you didn’t, at least. Now you can’t pretend anymore. So are you ready to tell me what you know? Are you ready to let me in on the things I’m convinced you’ve been keeping from me all along?”

She was staring before her, seeing horrors, and maybe she was really seeing them for the first time. “I can’t—” she said, then faltered. “I don’t—” She made a fist and pressed the whitened knuckles against her lips. A woman at a nearby table was watching her and spoke now to the man opposite, who turned his head and looked too.

“Drink some of your drink,” I said. “It’s strong, it will do you good.”

She shook her head quickly, still with her fist pressed hard against her mouth.

“Mrs. Cavendish — Clare,” I said, leaning forward over the table again and speaking in an urgent whisper, “I’ve kept your name out of this all along. A very tough policeman — in fact, two policemen — have leaned on me pretty hard to tell them who hired me to look for Nico Peterson. I gave them nothing. I told them my search for Peterson had nothing to do with all the other things that happened, that it was just a coincidence that I was involved. Cops don’t like coincidences — it offends their sense of how things are in the world as they know it. As it happens, in this case it suits them to take my word for it, however much they grouse. If it turns out I’m mistaken, they won’t believe it’s a mistake, and they’ll come down on me like the vengeance of Jehovah. I don’t mind — I’ve been through things like this before, and worse. But if they turn me over, it means they’ll get to you. And you won’t like how that feels, take it from me. Even if for some reason you’re not concerned for yourself, think of what a scandal like that would do to your mother. Long ago she saw enough violence and suffered enough grief to last a lifetime. Don’t put her through that wringer again.”

I stopped. By now I was sick to death of the sound of my own voice, and the lone drummer in my head had been joined by an entire percussion section, a bunch of amateurs who made up for in energy what they lacked in proficiency. I hadn’t eaten anything yet today, and the vodka was burning like acid through my defenseless innards. Clare Cavendish, sitting hunched in front of me and still staring before her, suddenly looked ugly to me, and I wanted to be away somewhere, anywhere that wasn’t here.

“Give me time,” she said. “I need time to think, to—”

I waited. I could see she wasn’t going to go on. “To do what?” I said. “Is there someone you have to consult?”

She looked up at me quickly. “No. Why do you say that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You just look to me like you’re calculating what someone else will say when you report back on what we’ve talked about here today.”

It was true: she did seem to be thinking of someone else, the same someone she had been thinking of that night in her bedroom, though I didn’t know how I had guessed it. The mind has doors that it insists on leaning against and keeping firmly shut, until a day comes when what’s outside can be resisted no longer, and the hinges give way and the thing bursts open and all kinds of stuff comes tumbling in.

“Give me time,” she said again. She had made fists of both hands now and was pressing them down hard, side by side, on the table. “Try to understand.”

“That’s exactly what I’m doing,” I said, “trying to understand.”

“I know. And I appreciate it”—she glanced up at me again, in a sort of beseeching way—“really, I do.”

Suddenly she became very busy, gathering up her cigarettes and the ebony holder and putting them away in her purse. She picked up her hat, too, and put it on. The brim leaned down lazily over her forehead, as if a breeze had caught it in its caress. How could I have thought her ugly, even for a second? How could I have thought her anything but the most lovely creature I had ever seen, or would ever see again? My diaphragm gave a heave, like a roadway rippling in an earthquake. I was losing her, I was losing this precious woman, even if I had never really had her in the first place, and the thought filled me with a sorrow the like of which I didn’t think a person could experience and still survive.

“Don’t go,” I said.

She looked at me and blinked rapidly, as if she had forgotten I was there or no longer knew who I was. She stood up. She was trembling a little. “It’s late,” she said. “I have — I have an appointment.”

She was lying, of course. It didn’t matter. She had been trained from a young age to tell such lies, the mild, social ones, the lies that everyone takes for granted, or everyone in her world, anyway. I got to my feet, my ribs creaking under their casing of bruised flesh. “Will you call me?” I said.

“Yes, of course.”

I didn’t think she’d heard me; that didn’t matter, either.

She turned to go. I wanted to put out a hand to stop her, to hold her there, to keep her with me. I saw myself reaching out and taking her by the elbow, but it was only in my imagination, and with a murmured word that I didn’t catch she turned from me fully and walked away, weaving among the tables, ignoring the many male eyes that were lifted to watch her go.

I sat down again, though it felt more like a collapse. On the table stood her untouched drink, with a solitary olive submerged in it. Her crushed cigarette in the ashtray had a smear of lipstick. I looked at my own glass, half empty, at a crumpled paper napkin, at a flake or two of ash on the table that a breath would have blown away. These are the things that get left behind; these are the things we remember.

I took a cab over to Barney’s Beanery to collect my car. There were three parking tickets clipped to the windshield. I tore them up and dropped them down a storm drain. It wasn’t raining; it only seemed to be, to my eyes.