The Blue Hour

Fourteen

Big Bill Wayne, erect in the captain’s chair of the panel van, steered through the great master-planned community of Irvine toward Interstate 5.

He looked out at the identical homes, the clean streets, the streetlamps glowing in the dusky summer evening. Orange County, California, he thought: home to the Happiest Place on Earth, a baseball team called the Angels, an ocean called the Pacific and over two and a half million people, many of whom are beautiful women who need the company of men.

And I’m a part of this place.

I, Big Bill Wayne — alluring blond bachelor and lover of women.

First he cruised the parking lot of a giant entertainment complex known as the Big One. It had twenty-one screens and a bunch of restaurants. The parking lot was large, outdoors and not well lit. He parked and followed a couple of nice-looking women toward the complex, aware of their perfumes trailing back to him, attuned to the click of their shoes on the asphalt. Like most women together they talked incessantly and paid him no attention whatsoever. He got into one of the long lines behind them and moved closer.

His knees felt weak and his heart was pounding as he tried to strike up a conversation about movies. One of the girls had brown eyes that shone like candlelight. The conversation seemed to be going well until one of them made a joke he didn’t hear, then they both laughed and turned their backs on him. And that, he thought, is the essence of what I hate most about women: the way they can change their minds so fast. He felt the white cold fury rise up inside him. He knew it would come because it always had and it always did. It grabbed his heart and made his muscles ready and brought a very sly smile to his face.

Bill followed a crowded walkway to a bar called Sloppy Joe’s, which was advertised as a replica of Hemingway’s favorite bar from Key West. The hostess was lovely.

He paced slowly along the bar, hands held behind his back and head slightly down like a man with heavy ideas. In the mirror behind the bar he admired his long coat and vest, his golden flowing hair and thick mustache.

He looked at the women’s faces, too. So challenging, their eyes, so haughty. He toured the perimeter of the place, analyzing pictures of the handsome writer — many with women — and wondered if writing a book would help him form relationships.

But it troubled Bill that writers needed to have a conscience to write good books, because he knew for a fact he had no such thing. He’d heard about it all his life — the way you were supposed to have feelings that guided you, helped you decide if what you did was right or wrong. Conscience.

It was easy to understand what you were supposed to feel. Parents and teachers, priests and cops, doctors and judges, TV and movies were all eager to tell you how to feel. But if you never actually felt it, if your actions generated absolutely no clear sense of either right or wrong, if those ideas were simply not present inside you, the way that some people are born without certain organs, then all you could do was fake it. And sometimes it was difficult, manufacturing the illusion of those emotions upon your face for someone to read correctly. Well, no use feeling sorry for yourself.

A few minutes later he cornered the hostess against one of the empty tables and tried to ask some questions about Ernest but she got away by leaning into a chair that slid away with a bark and she disappeared into a door marked Employees Only. A moment later a hefty young man came through the same door and glared at him.

Bill swept from the room, hands behind his back again and head forward, imagining what it would feel like to pump a round into the man’s heart and watch the expression of disbelief on his stupid face. Watch his eyes roll around like the last two olives in a jar.

Back up the freeway then to more familiar ground, better hunting actually in the indoor malls where women fearlessly wandered alone and were always so distracted by merchandise you could hover about undetected and think anything you wanted about them. His kit, shopping bag, bedsheet, the Deer Sleigh’R, Pandora’s Box and three purses were all back there, everything but the Deer Sleigh’r locked in two large metal toolboxes. He’d imagined more than once just what a policeman would think if he saw his things. But no officer could search his van without probable cause and Bill was not about to offer them anything remotely like probable cause to search his vehicle. He was clean. If pulled over routinely, or caught in a CHP sobriety checkpoint, his fake CDL from the counterfeiter in Little Saigon was a good one, descended from the high-quality false passports so indispensable in the early days after the war.

But thank God for the American Constitution’s Bill of Rights, Bill mused, because without it, his Deer Sleigh’R — advertised as “a great way to protect your trophy’s meat and hide from dirt and damage caused by rough, jagged ground” — would send your average cop into fits of suspicion. The purses would sink him. And what would they make of Pandora’s Box, he thought: it was a prototype, unique and one of a kind, just the sort of thing that would alarm a low-IQ policeman. An explanation would be demanded.

He remembered that it was about time to go see the box’s maker again, get the thing repaired. It wouldn’t even turn on the last time he tried it. Like the battery was dead, or a fuse blown or something. Luckily, he hadn’t needed it. But the inventor could figure it out and fix it — he’d created the damned thing in the first place.

So he drove through the exhaust-fragrant night to a newly remodeled mall called the Main Place. He cruised the lot once to get a feel for whether it was hot or cold. He liked the Main Place because it was small and seemed kind of homey, for a mall. In order to harvest he’d have to park safely away from the Main Place, in a construction zone he’d scouted months earlier where he could make the transfer from car to van. Where he parked the van was critical because it had to be safe for the transfer but not too long a walk or bus ride to the parking lot.

But he wasn’t in good enough spirits to collect tonight. No. Tonight was a night for tasting, for preparation, for inspiration. A night to be a scout, like the great Kit Carson.

Bill spotted a very attractive woman walking toward the Nordstrom entrance but her shorts and T-shirt disappointed him. Summer was always a time when women dressed down, it seemed, definitely harder to find one wearing good fashionable clothing.

The positive side was that many liked to wear their hair up against the heat, and hair up always signified to Bill breeding, class, education, sophistication and ungovernable carnal appetites. But this one had her hair down and wore unflattering flat-soled sandals and didn’t even roll up the sleeves of her T-shirt to expose the deliciousness of the upper female arm.

White trash, he thought: common as sparrows and about as interesting.

A blond woman in a red dress and red shoes: too flabby.

A lanky Negress: too young.

A Central American woman: rich and dark as coffee but what do you say to her?

A stubby little clerical type with a hop in her step and a face like a frog: um, sorry, ma’am.

But then out of the blue came a very interesting possibility, getting into her beat-up old sedan now, so Bill brought his van to a stop behind her and off to one side as if wanting her parking spot. She was tall with curly dark hair and an intelligent forehead and shapely legs. Her skirt wasn’t short except when she lowered herself into the car, but her shoes were high enough and her blouse was rich purple and sleeveless. She knew how beautiful her arms were. He imagined her face captured by photography on her driver’s license, and her physical characteristics listed beside the picture, in plain black and white. It was really something to have so many facts about a woman contained on a concise, durable, stackable card. You never forgot a birthday. And there was more truth on a CDL than most women would tell you in a lifetime.

He rolled down his window to give her a good look at his handsomeness. He motioned her out when she turned and looked through her window at him. She smiled and waved. Lovely teeth.

She backed out her long, boatlike American car and Big Bill waited, judging how well he would fit behind her seat. She made the half turn and shifted into drive but now, rather than nosing into her place, Bill backed his van into her path and all she could do was wait and look up at him, imperially seated in his captain’s chair. He was proud of the new silver paint job he’d given his vehicle. He smiled down at her and felt the cold white anger blooming inside him.

She rolled her window down to just below her mouth. “Thanks for waiting,” she said.

“You’re very welcome, ma’am.”

“Well, thanks. But now you’re kind of in my way.”

“I was just wondering if you’d like to have a drink.”

She was still smiling. He couldn’t believe it. In fact he didn’t believe it because he knew how fast things could change with a woman. In that second she measured him, he knew, making difficult decisions faster than any computer, assessing his threat and attractiveness, calculating his likely gifts and his potential dangers, judging both the safety and the profitability of his company.

“Look,” she said. “I work here, at Goldsmith’s Jewelry? Come in some night and say hi. Maybe we could get coffee. I’m Ronnie.”

“They call me Bill.”

“Cool! Nice to meet you.”

“Have a nice evening, Ronnie.”

He bowed his head in what he thought of as an Old West manner, then eased his van forward and into the place.

A moment later he looked to see Ronnie’s one-tail- lighted heap of a car wobble around a corner and out of the lot. He wrote down her license plate number just in case she didn’t work at Goldsmith’s Jewelry. Bill didn’t mind research. Research was part of scouting. And nothing on earth infuriated him more than being lied to by a woman he trusted.

The parking spot turned out to be a pretty good one — facing one of the main entrances, no cars in front of it to obscure his view of the crosswalk. He cut the engine and sat back. Ronnie’s car vanished onto the boulevard. The only reason he could tell it was hers was because of the broken light. What a smile. Bill felt a little stirring down there south of the belt line.

Bill watched a couple of teenage girls walk toward the entrance, but they didn’t interest him. He was a mature man with mature tastes. He believed that young people deserved a chance, and who knew, maybe one of them would grow into a woman he could enjoy someday. Bill then entertained himself with a recurring daydream: sailing down the highway in a fast car with a couple of his girls in the back with their hair blowing free, another in the front next to him with her hand on his crotch. Tape player up loud, that Springsteen song where the guy wants to get the electric chair with his girl on his lap. Heading for Vegas. Ninety miles an hour and a vintage 9mm Luger under his thigh. Oh, really, officer? B-LAM!

It was pleasant enough to imagine this, but a little absurd. He didn’t like to gamble and he had no desire to die at the hands of law enforcement. He didn’t quite understand martyrdom of any kind. There was no glamour in it.

He pivoted in his captain’s chair and stepped into the back of the van. He gloved up with fresh latex and took out the purses by their straps, stashing them behind his seat.

He started up the van and backed out of the spot. Out of the lot, down the boulevard where Ronnie had gone — she was almost certainly a lying, scheming witch — then back onto the freeway bound for the master-planned community of Irvine and the sanctuary of his home.

He felt behind him and brought out the purses, setting them all on the big console beside the driver’s station. Each had its own smell. He lifted and sniffed and enjoyed them one at a time. His program hadn’t been worked out for the first three — he didn’t know how to do what he wanted to do with them. He knew he had to keep something from each of the women he loved — why bother if you just dumped them forever, treated them like they didn’t matter?

He tapped to the radio on his steering wheel, wondering what he’d do if he could do anything in the world he wanted to.

One thing he’d do was develop that conscience. It seemed like life would be easier with such a thing. He’d know the difference between right and wrong.

And if you knew, you could easily pick the one that was best for you.

He’d also get that job at Saddleback’s, the one advertised on the sign in the window last week. The pay was decent, and he would be surrounded by boots, hats, dusters, thick belts with enormous buckles and genuine feed and tack. The place smelled of hay and leather. Either that, or get a job as one of the costumed gunslingers at Knott’s Berry Farm, blasting away while women in bonnets admired his gunplay.

Big Bill remembered the first time he actually saw John Wayne’s house — former house, to be exact. It was just over the hills there, on an island in Newport Harbor. He’d stood for hours, contemplating it. And gone back a dozen times, at least. That had naturally led to a dinner cruise aboard the Duke’s former boat, Wild Goose. The cruise had set him back $50 but Bill would never forget the majesty of the enormous wooden bar where John Wayne had drank and gambled, the master stateroom or the little berths set up for his kids. Standing on that ship while it hummed around the harbor Bill had felt like he was stationed in the very heart of the American West.

Now the West was mostly suburbia, but that was okay, because the suburbs thrived on the illusion of tranquillity.

Bill checked his speed and thought of the old detective they’d brought back to catch the Purse Snatcher — Hess was his name. He was in the papers this morning, a picture and everything. He looked like an Old West sheriff, all the lines in his face and those cold eyes. Obviously a man with a conscience.

Naturally, however, the cop in charge of his case was a woman. She’d clucked on in the article about what a privilege it was to work with the foul old investigator. In the newspaper picture, she looked about half the age of her new partner. Bill liked that idea: an old corpse of a guy and a perfectly preserved, young, fresh woman, trying to catch a criminal genius.

Give them something to think about. He reached into his shirt pocket, took out the folded paper and stuffed it into one of the purses — his very first, actually, the brown-and- black one.

He checked his mirror, then reached over, swung all three purses across his body and dangled them out over the carpool lane. The wind ripped them from his hand. He watched them in the sideview mirror, bouncing like heads along the asphalt.