The Black-Eyed Blonde

25

I didn’t call Bernie. I reckoned he’d had enough of me for a while, and I’d sure had enough of him — I didn’t want him shouting down the line at me again, and calling me names, and telling me to do things to myself that the greatest contortionist in the world couldn’t have managed. So I phoned Joe Green instead, good old Joe, who’d drink a beer with you and share a joke and yap about the ball game, and whose underpants got all balled up in his crotch when the weather was hot.

Joe was on duty, as always, and twenty minutes after he got my call he arrived at Langrishe Lodge with a couple of squad cars yowling in his wake. By then Everett Edwards was curled up like a hedgehog on the sofa his drunken brother-in-law had earlier vacated. He was weeping bitter tears, not of remorse, it seemed. but some kind of frustration, though why he should feel frustrated I couldn’t say. Maybe he thought Terry had died too quickly, with not enough pain. Or maybe he was disappointed by the banality of what had happened; maybe he’d wanted some grand scene with swordplay and speeches and corpses strewn all over the place, like something that other Marlowe, the one who saw Christ’s blood streaming in the what’s-it, might have written for him.

Joe stood in the middle of the room and looked around with a worried scowl. He was out of his depth here. He was used to pounding up tenement stairs and kicking in doors and backing punks in sweat-stained undershirts up against walls and jamming the barrel of his.38 Special into their mouths to make them stop yelling. That was Joe’s world. What he had here looked like a parlor game among the country club set that had gone spectacularly wrong.

He hunkered down and squinted at the bullet holes in Terry’s skull, looked across at Everett Edwards cowering on the sofa, then at me. “Jesus Christ, Phil,” he said in an undertone, “what the hell is all this?”

I held out my hands and shrugged. Where to begin?

Joe got to his feet with a grunt and turned to Clare Cavendish. Clare, with her stricken face and her bloodstained hands hanging by her sides and the front of her blue gown soaked and glistening with gore, was a figure from an older type of play, one written long ago, by an ancient Greek. Joe began by calling her Mrs. Langrishe, which was my cue to step in and correct him. “Cavendish is the name, Joe,” I said. “Mrs. Clare Cavendish.”

Clare seemed to register nothing, just stood there like a statue. She was in shock. Her brother, on the sofa, let fall a juicy sob. Joe looked at me again, shaking his head. He was lost.

In the end he handed Clare over to one of the patrolmen, a big Irish lump with carroty hair and freckles, who gave her a Barry Fitzgerald smile and said she wasn’t to worry at all, at all. He had found a blanket somewhere, and he draped it over her shoulders and led her solicitously from the room. She went without the least resistance, gliding to the door in her bloodied dress, graceful as ever, straight-backed, expressionless, showing us all her lovely profile.

They clamped the cuffs on Everett and led him away, too, in his pj’s and his loafers. He looked at no one. His eyes were red from weeping and there were smears of snot on his cheeks. I wondered if he realized what was waiting for him in the coming weeks and months, not to mention in the years afterward that he was going to have to spend up at San Quentin, unless his mother bought a lawyer tough and clever enough to get him out through some legal loophole that no one had thought to plug. It wouldn’t be the first time the son of a rich family got away with murder.

Next thing, when her son and her daughter were gone, who should come wandering in again but Ma Langrishe, in her hairnet and her mask of white mud. She looked at the body on the floor, which someone had thrown a blanket over, but seemed not to know what it was. She looked at me, and then at Joe. She couldn’t understand any of it. She was just a sad, old woman, confused and lost.

* * *

When it was all over and the squad cars had left, Joe and I stood outside on the gravel beside his car and had a smoke together.

“Christ, Phil,” Joe said, “you ever think of going into some other line of work?”

“All the time,” I said. “All the time.”

“You know you’re going to have to come downtown and file a statement.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I know. But listen, Joe, do me a favor. Let me go home now and sleep, and I’ll come in first thing tomorrow.”

“I dunno, Phil,” he said, rubbing his chin in his worried way.

“First thing, Joe — I give you my word.”

“Oh, go on, then.”

“You’re a pal.”

“I’m a pushover, is what I am.”

“No, Joe,” I said, dropping my cigarette on the gravel and grinding it in with my heel, “I’m the pushover.”

I went home and had a shower and fell into bed and slept for whatever there was left of the night. At seven my alarm sounded. I got myself up somehow and drank a cup of scalding coffee and drove down to the station, as I’d promised Joe I would, and gave my statement to the desk man on duty.

I didn’t say much, just enough to keep Joe happy and to satisfy the court when the case of State of California vs. Everett Edwards III came around. I’d be called as a witness, of course, but I didn’t mind that. What I did mind was the prospect of testifying in the witness box and seeing Clare Cavendish sitting there in the front row of the court, gazing at her brother, known now as the accused, the one who had murdered her lover. No, that was a prospect I didn’t relish. I recalled her mother, that day at the Ritz-Beverly, saying how people could get damaged in this affair. I had thought she meant that I might hurt her daughter, but that wasn’t what she was talking about. It was me she meant; I was the one who was going to end up with the scars, and somehow she’d known it then. I should have listened to her.

When I came out of the station the Olds was standing in the sun, the heat humming off the hood. That steering wheel was going to be awful hot.

You think I’m going to say that later that day I went over to Victor’s and drank a gimlet in memory of my dead friend. But I didn’t. The Terry I knew had died a long time before Everett Edwards put a bullet through his brain. I wouldn’t ever have said it to him, but Terry Lennox had been my idea of a gentleman. Yes, despite the drinking and the women and the people he hung around with, like Mendy Menendez, despite the fact that when it came down to it he cared for no one but himself, Terry was, in some unlikely way, a man of honor.

That was the Terry I had known, or thought I knew, anyway. What happened to him, what was it that stopped him from being decent and upright and loyal? He used to blame the war, used to tap himself on the chest and say how since he’d come back from the fighting there was nothing alive left inside him. I didn’t buy that; it had too much of a doomed-romantic ring to it. Maybe life down there in sunny Mexico, with the waterskiing and the cocktails on the waterfront and having to be Mendy Menendez’s legman and fixer, had destroyed something in him, so that the style, the fine high polish, remained, while the metal underneath was all eaten away by acid and rust and canker. The Terry I knew would never have hooked a kid like Everett Edwards on heroin. He’d never have tied himself to a hood like Mendy Menendez. Above all, he’d never have gotten the woman who loved him to seduce another man for his own convenience.

That last bit of treachery I’ve decided to cancel. I’m going to believe Clare Cavendish fell into my bed of her own choice — I think of her that night, with Terry still behind the curtains, lowering her voice and putting a finger to her lips to stop me saying how we had been in bed together. And even if it wasn’t me she wanted, even if she slept with me only to get me involved in the search for Nico Peterson, I’m going to believe it was all her own work, and that Terry didn’t put her up to it. Some things you have to force yourself to believe. What was it she’d said? Make a Pascalian wager. Well, that’s what I’ve done. I’m still not too sure what Pascal was betting on, but I’m thinking it must have been something pretty significant.

Just now I opened my desk drawer and searched around until I found an old airlines timetable and started looking up flights to Paris. There’s no chance of my going there, but it’s a nice thing to dream about. Except I keep remembering that wedding band on the bottom of the swimming pool at the Cahuilla Club and wondering if maybe it was some kind of warning.

I did make one symbolic gesture, when I took the lamp with the painted roses on it from the table beside my bed and carried it out to the backyard and dropped it in the garbage can, then went inside again and filled a pipe. That was, for me, the last of Clare Cavendish. She’d walked into my life and made me love her — well, maybe she didn’t make me, but she knew what she was doing, all the same — and now she was gone.

I can’t say I didn’t, don’t, miss her. Her kind of beauty doesn’t slip through your fingers without leaving them singed. I know I’m better off without her. It’s what I keep telling myself. I know it, and someday I’ll believe it, too.

She was playing the piano for Terry that night when I arrived at the house. I guess it’s not vulgar to play for someone when you love him.

She never did pay me, for what she hired me to do.