The Murder of Miranda

Part II

It was only the second time since he’d worked for Smedler’s law firm that Tom Aragon had been summoned by Smedler himself up to the penthouse office.

The penthouse wasn’t far in terms of distance. The city of Santa Felicia had a building code limiting the height of buildings, so Smedler’s office was in fact only three stories from the sidewalk. But in terms of accessibility it might as well have been a mile. It was serviced by an elevator whose movements could be controlled by Smedler through a circuit breaker beside his desk. There were, of course, little buttons in the elevator for clients to press, giving them the comfortable feeling of being in command of the situation, but a few minutes trapped between floors, or behind a door that wouldn’t open, left them with reasonable doubts.

Smedler’s secretary, Charity Nelson, wearing her orange wig slightly askew, was gluing on her fingernails for the day. She said, without looking up, “Aragon, you’re late.”

“Sorry.”

“We expect our junior employees to be like the Boy Scouts, trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, punctual—”

“Punctual is not part of the Boy Scout creed.”

“Let’s add it right now. Punctual.”

“I couldn’t get the elevator moving,” Aragon said. “It happens all the time. The air conditioners and electric machines still function and the lights are on, but the elevator won’t work.”

“Electricity is a very mysterious thing.”

“Not all that mysterious. I was the assistant manager of an apartment house when I went to law school. If I could take a look at the transformer—”

“Well, you’re not the assistant manager here, so mind your own business. Sit down. Smedler’s on the phone.” Charity filed the glue and the rest of the fingernails under B for bite. “Did he tell you what he wanted?”

“No.”

“Maybe he asked for you specifically because you did such a bang-up job on the Lockwood case. By the way, we’re still waiting for Mrs. Lockwood to pay up. But that’s a mere trifle, forget it. We can’t have you worrying your pretty little head about anything as crass as money, can we? No indeedy.”

Aragon sat down in a leather swivel chair facing Charity’s desk. Though it was late October and only ten thirty in the morning, the room was uncomfortably warm and humid. Charity had turned off the air conditioner to protect her house plants, massed like a bonsai jungle in the east corner of the room. The plants didn’t like air conditioning, and she felt the same maternal obligation to them that she would have to a child or pet, rejoicing in their growth and good health and fighting off their enemies like aphids and mealybugs and red spider mites.

Aragon looked at one of the plants, wondering if Charity talked to it, and if she did, why it hadn’t shriveled up and blown away.

“You want to know why I believe you’ll make it as a lawyer, Aragon?”

“Not particularly.”

“You look dumb. Not dumb dumb, more innocent-like dumb. Any judge or jury would feel sorry for you seeing those calf eyes peering from behind those horn-rimmed glasses. Juries hate a smart-looking lawyer who dresses well.”

“Do you talk to your plants, Miss Nelson?”

“No.”

“I thought not.”

“I’m not a loony. What in hell would I say to a plant?”

“Oh, something soothing, pleasant, complimentary — you know, the way you talk to the new employees.”

“I don’t talk like that to any employees. You trying to come on funny, junior? Better think twice.”

Aragon thought twice and changed the subject. “What does Smedler want?”

“What he always wants, everything.”

“I meant from me.”

“The file sent up was from Probate, so don’t expect any fun and games like last time. Probates are ho hum.” A light flashed on the intercom. “Okay, he’s off the phone. You can go in.”

Even on Monday morning Smedler looked fit and vigorous. Though office rumors had him spending every weekend fighting with his third wife at the country club, he showed no signs of injury, physical or mental. He wore a vested pin-striped suit, a Dartmouth tie and a small permanent smile unrelated to anything he happened to be saying. His admirers, mostly female, thought this smile made him look inscrutable and they were always disappointed to find out how scrutable he actually was.

“This matter is more of a nuisance than a problem,” Smedler said. “So far, anyway. The reason I called you in is because I hear you get along well with women. Is this correct?”

“It depends on the circ—”

“Yes. Well, anyway, to get down to business, I have some probate papers that must be signed. An elderly man, Neville Shaw, died last spring, leaving his wife, Miranda, as the administrator and sole beneficiary of his estate. I made it clear to Mrs. Shaw that probate was often long and involved and that she’d better keep in touch with me, since there’d be matters coming up from time to time which would require her notarized signature. Well, matters have come up, a lot of them, but the past week I haven’t been able to contact her. There’s no answer when I call her house, she doesn’t respond to messages left at her club, and two registered letters have been returned to the office undelivered. Even with her full cooperation, probate may drag on for months. So find her.”

“I’ll try.”

“You shouldn’t have much trouble. I’m sure this isn’t a deliberate evasion on her part — she’s a nice little woman, a good deal younger than her husband, well-bred, pretty, not too bright, always acts somewhat scared. In this case she has damned good reason to be scared.”

There was a long pause, which Aragon recognized as a standard courtroom tactic: dangling question, delayed answer. He said nothing.

Smedler looked annoyed. “Don’t you want to know why?”

“I figured you’d tell me.”

“Of course I’ll tell you. The problem is how much. It’s important not to start any more rumors about Neville Shaw’s will. There are enough already. He was nearly eighty when he died, and the fact is the estate should have had a conservator for the last few years of his life. He was getting senile, making a lot of crazy purchases and investments, highly speculative stocks, foreign currency, real estate syndicates. He even put up his house as down payment on a stud farm in Kentucky. I didn’t know any of this was happening — and merely acted as his attorney when he made his will a dozen years ago — but I found out in a hurry. When the routine notice to creditors was published, they began coming out of the woodwork: brokers, bankers, developers, even the real estate hustler who’d handled the Kentucky transaction. To put it briefly, the creditors outnumber the credits. Shaw died broke.”

“And Mrs. Shaw doesn’t know this?”

“No.”

“That seems peculiar for this day and age.”

“The Shaws didn’t live in this day and age.”

“When are you going to bring her up to date?”

“The first step is yours, Aragon. Now, here’s the address and phone number of her residence and her club. When you contact her, inform her firmly that she must come to my office to sign some papers. After that, I’ll... well, I’ll simply tell her that she’s not quite as rich as she was at one time and that she’ll have to make substantial reductions in her standard of living.”

“Maybe you’d better tell her the truth; that she’s broke.”

“You don’t tell women the truth,” Smedler said. “Not all at once anyway, and certainly not a woman like Mrs. Shaw who’s been protected and insulated from the world. My God, she might scream or cry or faint. She might even shoot me.”

“If Mrs. Shaw is as insulated from the world as you claim she is, why would she be carrying a gun?”

“I only meant there’s no way of predicting how a woman will act when she’s in extremis. And believe me, that’s what she is going to be. If nothing else does it, the stud farm in Kentucky will.”

“It’s a nice Freudian touch.”

Smedler went over to the water cooler and poured himself a drink in a clear plastic cup. The water looked slightly murky and when he drank it he winced. “Ever taste this stuff, Aragon? It’s lethal. I often suspect my secretary of trying to poison me. The only reason I survive is because I’ve gradually built up an immunity. Have some?”

“No, thank you.”

“Better start working on your immunity. The water situation is not likely to improve. In fact, I predict that some day the world will dry up and blow away. There’ll be no nonsense about floods and arks, just a whole lot of dust. Think about it.”

“Yes, sir.” Aragon thought about it and concluded that Smedler’s weekend bash with his wife must have been worse than usual.

Smedler returned to his desk. “I was your age, Aragon, when I passed my bar exams and assumed I was about to enter the practice of law. What I actually entered was the practice of people. To put it another way, anyone can memorize the criminal code, but what’s important is the code of criminals.”

“That’s very good, sir.”

“I know. I’ve used it in a dozen speeches. Well, you have work to do, I won’t keep you.”

The Penguin Club was a long blue one-and-a-half-story building built on a narrow strip of land between the road and the sea. To passersby, it presented a windowless front except for a series of shuttered air ducts that peeked out from beneath the roof like half-closed eyes. In spite of the club’s reputation as a gathering place for the very rich, the cars in the parking lot were the same size and brand as the ones found outside a supermarket or a laundromat. The only difference was that there were fewer of them — less than a quarter of the slots were occupied. In a time and place of abundance, space was the only real luxury left.

Tom Aragon hadn’t been inside the Penguin Club since the night he and some of his high school friends had come up from the beach to scale the back fence and swim in the pool. Before they even hit the water the lights went on, every light in the place — at the entrance and inside the office, along the corridors and the terrace, under the water and from the depths of shrubbery, the tops of palm trees, the interiors of cabanas. A uniformed security guard appeared, his gun drawn. “Back to the barrio, you bobos!”

This time he was ten years older and went to the front entrance. For the first few seconds he felt nervous, as if the same security guard was going to be on duty and might recognize him.

The fancy gold lettering on the door didn’t soften its message: Members and Guests Only. No Trespassing. Dress Code Enforced. He went inside. No one recognized him or even noticed him. In the office, on the other side of the waist-high counter, only one person was visible, a young woman sitting at a desk with a pencil behind her ear. She didn’t seem to be doing anything except possibly thinking.

Aragon was the first to speak. “Miss?”

She removed the pencil and came over to the counter. She was tall and on the verge of being pretty, with dark hair and serious green eyes. The lids were pink, as if, not too long ago, she’d been crying. He wondered why, estimating his chance of finding out as very slight.

“May I help you?” The hoarseness of her voice tied in with the pink eyelids. “I’m Miss Brewster, the club secretary.”

He gave her one of his business cards: Tomás Aragon, Attorney, Smedler, Downs, Castleberg, McFee, Powell. “I’m trying to locate one of our clients, Mrs. Miranda Shaw. I understand she’s a member of this club.”

“Yes.”

“There are some important papers for her to sign and Mr. Smedler hasn’t been able to contact her at her house. He thought she might be here.”

“I haven’t seen her.”

“Does that mean she’s not here?”

“Not necessarily. She might have come in while I was on my coffee break or before I arrived. I was late this morning. My car wouldn’t start and I had to ride my bicycle.”

“What kind of bicycle?”

“What difference does it make what kind of bicycle?”

“No difference. I was merely putting in time until you decide to tell me about Mrs. Shaw.”

She took a deep breath. It seemed to hurt her. She began coughing, holding on hard to her throat.

He waited, looking toward the pool. A couple of swimmers were doing laps and half a dozen women were taking part in an exercise class at the shallow end. On the terrace an elderly man wearing a tennis visor sat at a table, writing. Most of the deck chairs on the opposite side of the pool were empty.

The lifeguard tower interested Aragon most. It was occupied by a red-haired boy about eight or nine looking through a pair of outsized binoculars. Aragon had the impression that they were focused on him. To test this he smiled and waved, and immediately the binoculars were lowered and the boy climbed down from the tower and disappeared.

The young woman had finished coughing. “We’re not allowed to give out information about our members. It’s in the rule book. Practically everything is, including fraternization.” She gave the word a certain bitter emphasis which he didn’t understand. “I... look, I’m having a bad morning. You’d better talk to the manager, Mr. Henderson. Wait here and I’ll see if he’s busy.”

“Sure. Sorry about the bad morning. By noon things may be better.”

“Or worse.”

“Or worse,” Aragon said. There was no point in wasting happy talk on Miss Brewster. She wasn’t in a receptive mood.

Neither was Mr. Henderson.

Henderson had been going over the delinquent-dues list, trying to decide whether to take the drastic step of posting it on the main bulletin board or merely to keep a copy in strategic areas like the card and game room. There was the added decision of which names should be removed.

Each case had to be judged on its individual merits, or lack of them. The Whipples, for example, were traveling in the Orient and probably hadn’t received the notice that the rent on their cabana was overdue. Billy Parr Davis had run up a two-thousand-dollar bill at his sixtieth birthday party, but it was only a matter of time before his mother sent a check to cover it as usual. The Redferns were in the throes of a divorce and custody of the club membership hadn’t yet been determined, so it was unreasonable to expect payment from either of them. Mr. and Mrs. Quinn were protesting the charges for damages little Frederic had done to the first-aid station and the plumbing in the men’s locker room. Mrs. Guinevere had gone to a fat farm to lose fifty pounds and her bill would be paid when the remaining two hundred returned.

There were, of course, the usual deadbeats, some, like Charles Van Eyck, very wealthy and intent on staying that way, others obviously having a hard time keeping up with inflation and the Joneses. Henderson was checking the list a final time when Ellen opened the door of his office.

He looked up, frowning. “You didn’t knock. I’ve told you—”

“Sorry. Knock, knock.”

“Come in and be brief.”

“Yes, sir. There’s a Tomás Aragon here. He’s a lawyer. I think you’d better talk to him.”

“Is he applying for membership?”

“No. He wants some information about Mrs. Shaw.”

“That’s a funny coincidence.” Henderson sounded uneasy. He didn’t like coincidences. Through some obscure mechanism they usually ended up working against him. “I was just going to ask you about her myself. Her name’s been crossed off the delinquent list.”

“She paid up,” Ellen said. “In cash.”

“Her bill’s been outstanding for some time. I haven’t pressed the matter because I wanted to give her a chance to get over the loss of her husband.”

“Well, I guess she got over it.”

“Why cash, I wonder. Nobody around here pays cash. It’s a dirty word... This lawyer, Aragon, what sort of information is he after?”

“He’s trying to find Mrs. Shaw so she can sign some legal papers.”

“That sounds plausible to me,” Henderson said. “What’s he like?”

“Young, dark-haired, horn-rimmed glasses, rather appealing.”

“I meant inside.”

“I can’t see his inside. Outside he looks honest enough.”

“Then there’s no reason to be secretive about it. Tell him Mrs. Shaw is not here. Unless, of course, she is?”

“I haven’t seen her.”

“Neither have I. Odd, she was coming every day for a while. Mr. Van Eyck used to stare at her across the pool. I sensed a possible romance between two lonely people. That would have been good for the club — we could have held a lovely wedding reception in the ballroom, with white cymbidiums and silver ribbon and podocarpus instead of ferns. Ferns are common... When’s the last time you saw Mrs. Shaw at the club?”

“I don’t remember exactly,” Ellen said. She did, though. Exactly, to the minute. “Goodbye, Ellen. Hasn’t it been lovely weather? I must fly now. See you tomorrow.”

She went back into the corridor. On one of the rattan settees placed at intervals along the wall, Admiral Young’s two daughters sat in identical postures. They looked so stiff and self-conscious that Ellen knew they’d been eavesdropping. Cordelia’s face was sallow, as usual, but Juliet’s cheeks and chin and the tip of her nose were pink with suppressed excitement.

Ellen tried to brush past them but they rose simultaneously and blocked her way.

“Sorry, girls, I haven’t time to talk to you right now.”

“You were talking to him,” Cordelia said.

“And that other him,” Juliet added. “We think something’s wrong. I smelled disaster the instant I heard Miranda Shaw’s name.”

“Juliet’s no magna cum laude,” her sister explained. “But she has very keen senses.”

Juliet lowered her eyes modestly. “I really do, don’t I, Cordelia?”

“I already said so. Now get on with the story.”

“Why don’t you tell it if you’re in such a bloody hurry?”

“No. You tell, I’ll edit.”

“Oh, I hate being edited,” Juliet cried. “Oh God, I hate it, it makes me throw up.”

Cordelia did her Rhett Butler imitation, Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn, which put Juliet in a good mood again and she was able to continue her narrative: “This year Mrs. Young had the peculiar idea of giving her brother, our Uncle Charley Van Eyck, a birthday party.”

“Why you didn’t smell that disaster, I’d like to know.”

“Heavens to horehound, I can’t smell them all... The trouble with Mrs. Young’s idea was fixing Uncle Charley up with a dinner partner because he’s such a weirdo. She decided to try Miranda Shaw, probably because Miranda doesn’t know Uncle Charley very well. Mrs. Young kept phoning and phoning, and when she couldn’t get an answer she gave us the job of coming down here every day to keep an eye out for Miranda so we could pass along the invitation when she showed up. Only she never did and the party was last week.”

Cordelia started to describe the party, how Uncle Charley got drunk and dressed up in one of the Admiral’s old uniforms and sang “Anchors Aweigh” with dirty lyrics, but Ellen interrupted.

“Thank you for your information, girls. Don’t worry about Mrs. Shaw, I’m sure she’s quite all right.”

“You are very unworldly, Ellen,” Cordelia said. “Things happen to women.”

Juliet nodded. “Even to us. Once in Singapore we were escorted by—”

“Shut up. The Singapore incident is nobody’s business.”

“Well, you told everybody at the time. You could hardly wait to spread it around the yacht club.”

“This isn’t Singapore and Mrs. Shaw wasn’t accosted,” Ellen said. And if she was, she accosted right back. “Mrs. Shaw probably decided to take a vacation.”

She told Aragon the same thing, while the girls stood in the background listening, Cordelia rolling her eyes in a pantomime of disbelief, Juliet waving one hand back and forth across her face as if fanning away a bad smell.

Aragon said, “Mrs. Shaw didn’t actually mention taking a vacation?”

“No. Some of our members talk about their trips for six months in advance and six months afterwards, but Mrs. Shaw is the quiet type.”

“I see. Well, if you happen to hear from her, please let me know. You have my card.”

“Yes.” She had thrown the card away immediately, without even stopping to think about it. “I’m terribly sorry I couldn’t be of more help.”

As he went out the door Aragon wondered why someone who was so terribly sorry didn’t look even a little bit sorry.

In the parking lot he found his car already occupied. Sitting behind the wheel was the red-haired boy he’d seen on the lifeguard’s tower. He wore a T-shirt with a picture of a surfer on it and the advice Make Waves, but he looked as if he didn’t need the advice.

He slid across the seat to make room for Aragon. “You should lock your heap, man. These old-model Chevs are very big.”

“Thanks for telling me.”

“I showed you, man, I didn’t tell you. Nobody learns by being told.”

“All right, thanks for showing me.”

“No sweat. It’s because of the ignition.”

“What is?”

“The reason the old Chevs are being ripped off. They’re easy to start without a key. Let me show you.”

“Don’t bother,” Aragon said. “I have a key.”

“Yeah, but suppose you lose it and—”

“The only thing I ever lose is my temper.”

The boy studied his fingernails, found them uninteresting, jammed his hands into the rear pockets of his jeans. The resulting posture made him look as though he’d been strapped in a strait jacket. “I suppose you’re wondering who I am.”

“It crossed my mind.”

“I am Frederic Marshall Quinn the Third, numero tres.”

“I figure you’re also a smart-ass numero uno.”

Frederic acknowledged the compliment with a worldly little shrug. “Sure, man. Why not? I got to survive.”

“Haven’t you heard, Freddy? — smart-asses are the first to go.”

“In your day, maybe. Times have changed.” His hands came out of his pockets and his fingernails were reexamined. “I heard you talking about Mrs. Shaw. You a lawyer?”

“Yes.”

“I may need a lawyer someday so I thought I’d do you a favor, then you’ll owe me one. Right?”

“I’ll consider it,” Aragon said.

“That’s not good enough. Let’s make it a real deal here and now. We’re both in the same boat, see, on account of I’m looking for somebody, too.”

“Sure you are.”

“Honest. There’s this lifeguard, Grady. He’s okay. I mean, he’s kind of like my friend. I’ve been learning about macho from him so I can pass the info to some of the kids at school. Only just when I was catching on to a few tricks, he split. Didn’t say goodbye or where he was going or when he’d be back, didn’t even wait for his paycheck.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I heard Ellen talking to Henderson about it, wondering where to send Grady’s paycheck. She got mad because it would screw up the bookkeeping if Grady didn’t cash his check. She was even crying about it. She cries easy. Really gross.”

“Who was Grady practicing his macho on?”

“That’s the favor I’m doing you, man. Her, Mrs. Shaw. She was his new chick.”

Aragon watched in silence as a fat brown bird landed on the hood of his car, hopped over to the windshield and picked a bug off one of the wipers. “You wouldn’t make up a story like that, would you?”

“Sure I would, but I didn’t. It was right here in the parking lot that I first saw them together. Grady was using a different technique, high class, no hands, lots of talk and eye contact. Then they drove off in her car, a custom-job black Lincoln Continental. What about our deal?”

“It’s on. I owe you one. When you need my services, give me a call. Here’s my card.”

Frederic shook his head. “I already got your card. I picked it out of the wastebasket where Ellen threw it.”

“All right, Frederic, now I owe you two.”

“Two? How come?”

“It’s a personal thing.”

“I like personal things.”

“So do I,” Aragon said. But not this one. She threw it in the wastebasket because she had no intention of telling me anything. The conversation was a cover-up, hocus pocus. “The girl in the front office, Ellen you called her, what’s she like?”

“She loses her cool and chews me out about once a day, but she’s not on my H list.”

“What’s your H list, Frederic?”

“H for hate.”

“Is this a real list or do you merely keep it in your head?”

“Real, man. Lots of people on it, too. I added one today, that old creep Van Eyck. He told me he was going to string me up by my thumbs in the boiler room. Imagine saying that to a kid.”

“I’m trying to imagine what the kid said first.”

“I only asked him if he was queen of the fairies.”

“That’s not an endearing question, Frederic.”

Frederic looked up into the sun, squinting. “How am I going to learn things without asking? If he isn’t queen of the fairies, he could have answered no. And if he is, well, we live in an enlightened society.”

“Don’t bet your thumbs on it, kid.”

“It wasn’t even my idea in the first place. The two flakies, those sisters that are always hanging around, they were talking about it. You know, hormones. They decided if the old man’s trouble was hormones it could be corrected, but if it was genes it couldn’t and they were stuck with it. Would you care to know what I think?”

“I don’t believe I would, no.”

“Van Eyck has blue genes.” The boy doubled up with laughter and his tomato-red face looked ready to burst its skin. “That’s a joke I heard at school. Blue genes, see? Hey, man, don’t you have a sense of humor?”

“It’s been temporarily deactivated,” Aragon said. “Now let’s leave it at that and you go back to school and I’ll go back to the office.”

“No. No, you can’t. You have to look for Grady. I got everything figured out for you — find Mrs. Shaw and Grady will be with her. They’re probably just shacked up in her house making macho and not answering the phone.”

“How many times have you called there, Frederic?”

“Six, seven. Why shouldn’t I? I mean, Grady and me, we’re like friends almost. When he’s not around I don’t have anyone to talk to.”

“You could attend classes once in a while. They have people there you can talk to called teachers.”

“Don’t lecture me, man. Every time I go near a grownup I get a lecture. Except Grady.”

“And what do you get from Grady?”

“Action. Anyway, he can’t afford to give me a lecture. He dropped out of the tenth grade and has been maxing it ever since.”

“Maxing?”

“Living up to his maximum potential, like doing what he wants to without being caught.”

Aragon watched the brown bird hop across the hood and down to the ground, thinking that Mrs. Shaw was an unlikely choice for Grady’s maxing. “Listen, Frederic, are you sure Mrs. Shaw is Grady’s new chick? She’s an older woman, a widow with a refined background—”

“Where have you been all these years? Backgrounds don’t matter anymore unless they’re real special like Bingo Firenze’s. His uncle is a hit man for the Mafia. Now that matters... Are you going to find Grady for me?”

“I’m going to keep looking for Mrs. Shaw. If Grady’s with her, fine. I can’t guarantee anything beyond that.”

“Why are you after Mrs. Shaw, anyway?”

“There are some probate papers for her to sign. Know what probate means?”

“Sure,” Frederic said. “It’s when a person dies and everybody’s fighting for the money that’s left and a judge decides who gets it.”

“Close enough.”

“I hope Mrs. Shaw gets the money. Grady needs it. He’s always scrounging. Last month he borrowed twenty dollars from my sister, April, just before they sent her away to riding school in Arizona. Grady doesn’t know it yet but April gave me the IOU so I could collect. I’m saving it to use sort of like blackmail when I need a very important favor.”

“Bingo Firenze’s uncle would be proud of you, kid.”

“Sure.” Frederic opened the car door. “Listen, when you see Grady don’t tell him it was me who sent you. I wouldn’t want him to think I care what he does or anything like that. Deal?”

“Deal.”

They shook hands. It was a solemn occasion: Aragon had acquired his first private client.

Leaving the parking lot, he drove past the front entrance of the club. The two sisters were standing outside the door looking as though they were expecting something or someone. He hoped he wasn’t it.

“That’s him, all right,” Cordelia said. “Did you notice how he stepped on the accelerator the instant he spotted us? Very odd, don’t you think?”

“Well, a lot of people do it,” Juliet said wistfully.

“A lot of people have reason to because they know us. But this young man doesn’t know us, so that can’t be the reason.”

“He has rather a pleasant face.”

“You gullible idiot, they’re the worst kind. Believe me, he’s up to no good. You mustn’t be taken in by appearances, Juliet.”

“I’ll try not.”

“They mean nothing.”

“I know. But wouldn’t it be nice to be pretty, Cordelia? Just for a little while, even a few days?”

“Oh, shut up.” Cordelia gave her sister a warning pinch on the arm. “We are us and that’s that. Don’t go dreaming.”

“I won’t. Still, it would be nice, just for a few—”

“All right, it would be nice. But it’s not going to happen, never ever, so forget it.”

Juliet’s eyes were moist, partly from the pinch, partly from the never ever, which was even more final than plain never. Through the moisture, however, she could see the Admiral’s Rolls-Royce approaching, as slow and steady as a ship nearing port. “Here comes Pops.”

“Maybe we should tell him.”

“What about?”

“The disaster,” Cordelia said, frowning. “You told Ellen you distinctly smelled disaster the instant you heard Miranda Shaw’s name.”

“I did smell it, I really did. Unless it was my depilatory.”

“Oh, for God’s sakes, there you go ruining things again.”

“I can’t help it. I only this minute remembered using the depilatory, which has a peculiar odor, kind of sulphurous, like hellfire. I’m sorry, Cordelia.”

“You damn well should be, blowing the whole bit like this.”

“It’s still very possible that something awful happened to her. We saw her and that lifeguard looking at each other and it was that kind of look, like in Singapore.”

The mention of Singapore inspired Cordelia to new heights. It was her opinion that Grady had lured Mrs. Shaw up into the mountains, stripped her of her clothes, virtue, cash and jewels, probably in that order, and left her there to perish.

Juliet contemplated this in silence for a moment. Then she said cheerfully, “So it wasn’t my depilatory after all.”

The Admiral had agreed, after a somewhat one-sided discussion with his wife, Iris, to forgo the football game on T. V. and take the girls downtown for lunch at a cafeteria. They both loved cafeterias and selected so many things to eat that they had to use an extra tray to hold the desserts. After consuming as much as they could, they packed the rest into doggy bags and took them down to the bird refuge to feed the geese and gulls and coots. The gulls and coots ate anything, but the geese were choosy, preferring mixed green salad and apple pie.

The Admiral parked the Rolls, then moved to the rear to open the door for his daughters like a salaried chauffeur. “Are you ready for lunch?”

“I guess,” Juliet said.

“You guess? Dear me, that doesn’t sound like one of my girls talking. What about you, Cordelia?”

Cordelia didn’t waste time on amenities. “Pops, did you ever know anyone who was murdered?”

“Now that depends on your definition of murder. During the Second World War and the Korean conflict I saw many of my—”

“Oh, not that kind of murder, it’s so ordinary. I meant the real thing, with real motives and everything.”

“What’s the point of such a question, Cordelia?”

“Miranda Shaw has disappeared.”

“Vanished,” Juliet added.

“We think she’s been murdered.”

“Done in.”

“Come, come,” the Admiral said mildly. “Miranda Shaw isn’t the kind of person who gets murdered. She’s a fine lady with many womanly virtues.”

“Ah so,” Cordelia said. “And what are womanly virtues, Pops?”

“My dear, I should have thought your mother would have told you by this time.”

“Maybe nobody told her.”

“Yes, I see. Well, I can’t speak for all men, of course, but among the traits I consider desirable in a woman are kindness, gentleness, loving patience.”

They both stared at him for a few seconds before Cordelia spoke again. “Then what made you pick Mrs. Young?”

“That’s a very rude question, Cordelia. I shall do my best to forget it was ever asked.”

“Oh bull. You always say that when you don’t know the answer to something.”

“Most likely,” Juliet said, “he didn’t pick her, she picked him. Ten to one it happened like that. Didn’t it, Pops?”

The Admiral cleared his throat. “I wish you girls could manage to show more respect towards your parents.”

“We’re trying, Pops.”

“But remember, you’re not in the Navy anymore,” Cordelia said briskly. “We’re not ensigns or junior looies. Are we, Juliet?”

“Not on your poop deck,” Juliet said.

Aragon left his car on the street at the bottom of the Shaws’ driveway.

It was an area of huge old houses build on large multiple acreages when land was cheap, and surrounded by tall iron or stone fences constructed when labor was cheap. Most of the residences had gatehouses, some not much larger than the gondolas of a ski lift, others obviously intended as living quarters for servants. The Shaws’ gatehouse had Venetian blinds on the largest window and a well-used broom propped outside the front door.

Aragon pressed the button that was supposed to activate the squawk box connecting the gate to the main residence. Nothing happened. The squawk box was either out of order or disconnected. He waited several minutes, trying to decide what to do next. The gate was iron grillwork ten feet high. It would be possible to scale it, as he’d once scaled the Penguin Club fence, but the results might be more severe — a couple of police cars instead of a lone security guard.

He was turning to leave when he noticed that two slats of the blind on the gatehouse window had been parted and a pair of eyes was staring at him. They were small and dark and liquid, like drops of strong coffee.

“Hello,” Aragon said. “Are you in charge here?”

“Nobody in charge. Nobody home. All gone, gone away.” The man’s accent sounded Mexican but there were Oriental inflections in his voice. “Maybe you are in charge?”

“No. I just want to see Mrs. Shaw.”

“Me too. I need my truck.”

“Mrs. Shaw took your truck?”

“You bet not. I have the keys. How could the Missus take my truck?”

“All right, let’s start over. And it might make it easier if we didn’t have to talk through the window. Why don’t you come out?”

“Sure.” The door of the gatehouse opened and a tiny man stepped out, moving briskly in spite of his age. He was so shriveled and hairless that he looked as though he’d fallen into a tanning vat and emerged a leather doll. “See, I can go in and out, out and in, easy for me. But for my truck to go in and out, out and in, I need to use the gate, and it won’t work.”

“Why not?”

“It is an electric gate and there is no electric.”

“Why is there no electric?”

“Missus forgot to pay, I guess. A man came and shut it off. I said you can’t do that, Missus is important rich lady. He said, the hell I can’t. And he did.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Very bad, yes. He wouldn’t wait for me to get my truck onto the driveway, so it is still up there behind the garage with all my tools in it. I can’t earn a living without my truck and tools. Here, see who I am.” The old man showed Aragon his business card, so dirty and dilapidated that the printing was scarcely legible: Mitsu Hippollomia, Tree Care, Clean Up, Hauling, Reasonable Rates. “I can’t leave without my truck, so I stay here in the gatehouse waiting for the electric and keeping my eye out for truck thieves.”

“How long have you been living in the gatehouse?”

Hippollomia, having no clock or calendar, didn’t know for sure. Nor did he care much. He was enjoying the closest thing to a holiday he’d ever had, with plenty of rest and food. He went to bed when it was dark and got up when it was light. He ate the avocados and persimmons that were ripening on the trees, and tomatoes reddening on the vines. From the storage room beside the main kitchen he had canned goods and preserves off the shelves, and melted ice cream out of the freezer. Besides such physical luxuries, he had the satisfaction of knowing he was doing an important job, protecting his livelihood.

Aragon said, “Do you mind if I come in and take a look around the property?”

“Why do you want to do that?”

“I work for Mrs. Shaw’s attorney. There are some papers for her to sign and he hasn’t been able to get in touch with her.”

“She’s not here.”

“Have you been inside the house?”

“Not so much.”

“How much is that?”

“Only in the storage room off the kitchen. I take a little food now and then.”

“How do you get in?”

“There are a whole bunch of keys on nails in the garage,” the old man said. “But I didn’t need any of them. Missus isn’t too careful about locking the house because the electric gate keeps strangers out.”

“You found the back door open, Mr. Hippollomia?”

“Not open, unlocked.”

“And it’s unlocked now?”

“Yes.”

“Would you have any objection to my going in?”

“It’s not my house. I have no say-so.”

“You’re the only one on the premises,” Aragon said. “That more or less puts you in charge.”

The old man’s shoulders twitched inside his oversized work shirt. “You go when you want, you do whatever, I’m out of it. I wait here.”

“I’d like to make sure Mrs. Shaw left the house of her own free will. By the way, do you work for her on a regular basis?”

“Yes.”

“Every day?”

“No. Twice a week I clip hedges and mow the lawn and haul away clippings.”

“Are there live-in servants?”

“No more. The fat lady who cooks, the college girl who vacuums and cleans, the handyman living in the room over the garage, I don’t see them for a long time. What do you think?”

“I think,” Aragon said, “Missus forgot to pay.”

The size and beauty of the place made its neglect more apparent. There was a sixty-foot white-tiled pool with a Jacuzzi at one end, but the water had turned green with algae and the weir was clogged with leaves and a dead gopher. Across a corner of the patio a dripping faucet had left a trail of rust like last year’s blood. A marble birdbath was filled with the needles and sheathed pods of cypress. Pollen from the jellicoe trees had sifted the flour over the glass-topped tables and latticed chairs.

Inside, the house was dusty but very neat. Two living rooms, a library and a formal dining room all had fireplaces scrubbed as clean as the ovens in the kitchen. Upstairs there was a sitting room and half a dozen bedrooms, the largest of which was obviously Miranda Shaw’s. It was here that Aragon found the only disorder in the house. The covers of the canopy bed had been pulled up over the pillows but the blue velvet spread was still draped across a matching chaise. Clothes were bulging out of one of the sliding doors of the closet. Beside the picture window a plant that looked like a refined cousin of marijuana was dying from lack of water. Some of its leaves had turned black and were curled up like charred Christmas ribbons.

In the adjoining bathroom used towels had been thrown into the pink porcelain tub. The chrome toothbrush holder was empty. So was the monogrammed silver tray made to hold a conventional hairbrush-comb-hand-mirror set.

Hippollomia was waiting at the kitchen door where Aragon had left him.

“Missus has taken a trip?”

“It looks that way.”

“I hope she comes back soon and pays the electric. I want to go home. All the ice cream is gone.”

“When I get back to my office I’ll call the company and see if I can arrange to have your truck released.”

“Why?”

“Because I feel that an injustice was done, probably due to a misunderstanding between you and the man who—”

“Misunderstanding,” Hippollomia said. “I laugh. Ha ha.”

It was noon when Aragon returned to the office. Smedler was busy on the phone, so Aragon made his report to Smedler’s secretary, Charity Nelson.

She didn’t like it. “What do you mean Mrs. Shaw went away?”

“Like in sayonara, auf Wiedersehen, adios.”

“Where did you get your information?”

“Various sources. First, a kid told me.”

“A what?”

“A child,” Aragon said. “And an old man, a Filipino, I think.”

Charity leaned back in her swivel chair, so that her orange-colored wig slid forward on her head and she had to peer out at Aragon through a fringe of bangs that looked like shredded pumpkin. “Smedler’s not going to like this, one of his attorneys prying information out of children and old men.”

“I didn’t pry and it wasn’t an ordinary child. It wasn’t an ordinary old man either. He’s waiting to get his truck out of Mrs. Shaw’s driveway. I promised to help him, so if you don’t mind I’d like to use your phone.”

“I mind.”

“Don’t you want to help an old man?”

“How old?”

“About seventy or seventy-five.”

“Sorry, I don’t help anyone under eighty,” Charity said pleasantly. “It’s one of my rules.”

Smedler came out of his office straightening his tie and smoothing his hair like a man who’d just been in a scuffle. He stared at Aragon the way he usually did, as though he wasn’t quite sure of his identity. “Did you arrange for Mrs. Shaw to come in and sign the papers?”

“No, sir. I couldn’t find her.”

“Why not?”

“She wasn’t where I looked.”

“That answer will be stricken from the record as frivolous and non-responsive. Better try again.”

Aragon tried again. “She left town.”

“Go after her.”

“I’m not even sure which direction she went, let alone—”

“Mrs. Shaw is not one of these modern flyaway women you find hanging around bars in San Francisco or blackjack tables in Las Vegas. If she left town she’s probably visiting some elderly relative in Pasadena. Miss Nelson, check and see if Mrs. Shaw has an elderly relative in Pasadena or thereabouts.”

“She ran off with a lifeguard,” Aragon said.

“This seems to be your day for making funnies... It is a funny, of course?

“No, sir. His name’s Grady and he’s broke. That’s about all I can tell you. I’m not even sure whether Grady’s a first or last name.”

“Find out and go after him.”

“The staff at the Penguin Club aren’t eager to give out information, especially the girl in the front office.”

“So make yourself charming.”

“That wasn’t part of my contract with you, Mr. Smedler.”

“It is now,” Smedler said and went back into his office.

The conversation, which seemed to depress Smedler, had the opposite effect on his secretary. Her normally flat eyes looked round as marbles.

“A lifeguard yet,” Charity said. “I wonder if she had to fake a drowning in order to make contact.”

“Probably not. Lifeguards are usually quite accessible.”

“Were you ever a lifeguard, Aragon?”

“No.”

“Too bad. I bet you’d look cute in one of those teeny-weeny Mark Spitz numbers.”

“Irresistible.”

“What a shame you’re married. I could arrange marvelous little office romances. I could anyway, of course, since your wife lives in San Francisco and you live here. That’s a terribly funny arrangement, by the way.”

“I’m glad it amuses you.”

“Don’t you get, well, you know?”

“I get you know,” Aragon said. “But San Francisco is where my wife was offered a residency in pediatrics and she took it like a nice sensible girl. Like a nice sensible guy I approved.”

Charity frowned. “I hate all that much sense. Takes the fun out of life... This Grady, I suppose he’s years younger that Miranda Shaw. She’s over fifty and there aren’t many fifty-year-old lifeguards around. By that time they’re gone on to better things.”

“Or worse.”

“Whatever. Actually, Mrs. Shaw looks marvelous for her age. In a nice dark restaurant she could pass for thirty-five. It can be done if you’ve got the money, the time, the motivation, the right doctor and lots of luck.”

“That’s a heap of ifs.”

“I know. I’ve only got one of them, motivation. But I wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life sitting around dark restaurants anyway.” Charity glanced toward Smedler’s door as if to confirm that it was closed. “I heard a rumor about Miranda Shaw which I would like to repeat, I really would.”

“Force yourself.”

“Okay. I heard she gets injections made from the glands of unborn goats.”

“Where does she get these injections?”

“In the butt, probably.”

“No, no. I meant, does she go to a local doctor, a hospital, a clinic?”

“The rumor didn’t cover details, but it doesn’t sound like the sort of thing you could have done locally. Santa Felicia is a conservative city. Unborn goats get born, not injected.”

“Where did you hear this about Mrs. Shaw?”

“Smedler. His wife picked it up at the country club. The injections are supposed to start working right away. You know, I wouldn’t mind having a face lift if it didn’t hurt too much and the results were guaranteed. But goat glands, that’s positively obscene. Though if I had to keep up with a young lifeguard, maybe I wouldn’t think so.” Charity was sixty. In a nice dark restaurant she could pass for fifty-nine. “What’s your opinion?”

“My opinion,” Aragon said, “is that you are a fund of information and I’d like to take you to lunch.”

Her eyebrows climbed up and hid briefly under her bangs. “Yeah? When?”

“Now.”

“Have you flipped? You can’t afford it on your salary.”

“We can go to some simple little place. Do you like chili burgers?”

“No.”

“Tacos? Burritos? Enchiladas?”

“No, no and no. I’m not a fun date at lunch anyway,” Charity added. “I have an ulcer.”

From his shoebox-sized office in the basement Aragon called the electric company and arranged to have Hippollomia’s truck released. Then he phoned the Penguin Club and was told Ellen Brewster had gone into town on an errand and was expected back about two o’clock. He didn’t leave a name, number or message; anticipating another visit from him probably wouldn’t improve Miss Brewster’s attitude.

He picked up a burger and fries at a fast food and ate them on his way to the public library.

The young woman on duty at the reference desk looked surprised when he asked for material on current methods of rejuvenation. “Starting early, aren’t you?”

“A stitch in time.”

“If we don’t have the information you need, you might try the medical library at Castle Hospital.”

“I just want a general idea of what’s being done in the field.”

“Okay. Be right back.”

She disappeared in the stacks and emerged a few minutes later carrying a magazine. “You’re in luck. The subject was researched a couple of months ago by one of the women’s magazines. It’s sketchy but it looks like the straight dope.”

“Thanks.”

“I get paid.”

“Not enough.”

“Now how did you know that?”

“A wild guess,” Aragon said, wondering if he would ever meet anyone who admitted being paid enough.

During the next half-hour he learned some of the hard facts and fiction about growing old and how to prevent it.

At the Institute of Geriatrics in Bucharest a drug called KH-3 was administered to cure heart disease, arthritis, impotence, wrinkles and grey hair.

In Switzerland injections of live lamb embryo glands were available to revitalize the body and prevent disease by slowing down the aging process.

A villa outside Rome offered tours of the countryside alternating with periods of deep sleep induced by a narcotic banned in the United States.

A Viennese clinic guaranteed loss of ugly cellulite, and not so ugly money, by means of hypnotherapy and massive doses of vitamins.

In the Bahamas the Center for Study and Application of Revitalization Therapies promised to help the mature individual counteract the pressures of contemporary life, and overcome sleeplessness, fatigue, loss of vigor, frigidity, impotence, poor muscle and skin tone, problems of weight, anxiety and premature aging. Many different techniques were used, including lamb-cell therapy, but here the cells were freeze-dried.

At an experimental lab in New York volunteer patients underwent plasmapheresis, a process in which a quantity of their blood was removed, the plasma taken out and the blood put back. The fresh new plasma which the body then created was the stuff of youth and supposed to make the patients look better, feel stronger and heal faster.

Nowhere in the article was there any mention of goats.

Aragon called Charity Nelson from the pay phone beside the checkout desk.

She wasn’t thrilled. “Oh, it’s you.”

“Listen, that rumor you heard about Mrs. Shaw, are you sure it was goats?”

“It was goats. What difference does it make? Where are you, anyway?”

“The library.”

“Wise up. You’re not going to find Mrs. Shaw at any library. She’s not the type.”

“I’m working on a hunch.”

“Well, don’t tell Smedler. He lost two grand playing one last week. Hunches won’t be popular around here until he figures out a way to deduct it from his income tax.”

“Will he?”

“Bet on it, junior.”

He reached the parking lot of the Penguin Club as Ellen Brewster was getting out of her car. It was a fairly new Volkswagen but it already had a couple of body dents that were beginning to rust in the sea air.

She didn’t notice, or at least acknowledge, his presence until he spoke.

“I see you got your car started.”

“Yes. The garage man came out and charged the battery.”

“Good.”

“Yes.”

“It could have been something more serious.”

“I suppose.” She pushed her hair back from her forehead with an impatient gesture. She had nice features. He wondered why they didn’t add up to make her a pretty woman. “Are you coming or going, Mr. Aragon?”

“A question I often ask myself.”

“Try answering.”

“I’m arriving. Is that all right with you, Miss Brewster?”

“It depends on what you want. If it’s the same thing you wanted this morning, I really can’t help you now any more than I could then. Really I can’t.”

“That’s one too many reallys.”

“It’s a speech habit I picked up from all the teenagers around this summer. You know, like you know.”

“I went to Mrs. Shaw’s house,” Aragon said. “It seems she took off in a hurry, didn’t even bother to lock the doors. What concerns my boss is that she was aware of the important papers she had to sign but she made no attempt to do it. Naturally there’s some question of whether she left voluntarily.”

“That’s a joke.”

“Is it private or do I get to laugh, too?”

“The question is not whether she left voluntarily but whether he did.”

The afternoon wind had begun blowing in from the sea, carrying the smell of tar from the underwater oil wells. It was a faint pervasive smell like a hint of doomsday.

“Forget I said that,” she added. “I’m not supposed to gossip about the members.”

“This ranks as a little more than gossip, Miss Brewster. I learned the man’s name this morning. Grady. He’s a friend of yours, isn’t he?”

“Did you learn that this morning, too?”

“Yes.”

“You were misinformed. He’s no friend of mine.”

She turned and walked away. He followed her. She was almost as tall as he was and their steps exactly matched, so they looked as though they were marching in single file.

“Miss Brewster.”

“If you already know so much, why did you come back here?”

“What’s his full name?”

“Grady Keaton.”

“Has he worked at the club long?”

“About six months.”

“Can you tell me something of his background?”

“He didn’t talk much about himself. Not to me anyway. Maybe to fifty other women.”

“Why fifty?”

“Why not? One thing I can tell you about Grady is his philosophy — why not?”

They had reached the front door of the club but neither of them made any move to open it.They stood facing each other, almost eye to eye. Hers were green and very solemn. His were obscured by horn-rimmed glasses which needed cleaning.

Aragon said, “A minute ago you made it sound as though Mrs. Shaw had kidnapped an innocent lad. Now he’s not such a lad and not so innocent, and Mrs. Shaw had to take a number and wait in line. Which version are you sticking with?”

“Are you going to make trouble for him?”

“I might. It’s not my main objective, though. All I really want is Mrs. Shaw’s signature on some legal documents.”

“Why keep coming back here?”

“This is where she’s known, where her friends are.”

“I’m not sure she has friends at the club. She and her husband sort of dropped out of things when he began showing signs of senility, and after his death she didn’t come around for ages. When she finally did she talked to me more than anyone else, mostly chitchat about the weather, food, clothes. Nothing heavy or even interesting.”

“What makes you dislike her?”

“That’s pretty strong. Let’s just say I disapprove.”

“Of what?”

“Her vanity,” Ellen said. “She probably had reason to be vain some time ago. But at her age she should be able to pass a mirror without stopping to adore herself.”

“Or criticize herself?”

“Whatever she’s doing, the key word is herself. No matter how big the universe is it has to have a center, and Miranda decided long ago that she’s it.”

“Do you call her by her first name?”

“She asked me to. I don’t, though. Mr. Henderson wouldn’t like it.”

“She must consider you a friend.”

“I... well, I’m not. It’s part of my job to act friendly toward the members and I do it. But when some of them expect or demand too much, that’s their problem. I couldn’t help them even if I wanted to. Mr. Henderson has rules about the staff becoming involved with any of the members.”

“Evidently Mrs. Shaw wasn’t aware of the rules.”

“Grady was. But then, rules aren’t exactly his strong suit.”

A small plane passed very low along the edge of the sea as though it was searching for something washed up by the tide. She shielded her eyes to watch it until it disappeared behind a row of eucalyptus trees.

“You’d better come into the office,” she said. “If people see us talking outside like this, some of them might think I’m carrying on an illicit affair. That wouldn’t bother me but I don’t suppose your wife would approve. You are married, of course.”

“How did you know?”

“Intuition. Extrasensory perception.”

“I don’t buy those.”

“Okay. How about research? The City Directory lists a Tomás Aragon, 203 Ramitas Road. Occupation, attorney. Wife, Laurie MacGregor, M.D.”

“No age, weight, political party?”

“I’ll have to guess about those. Twenty-seven, a hundred and eighty pounds, and a Democrat.”

“You’re very good, Miss Brewster. I wish you were on my side.”

“I might be when I figure out what game we’re playing.”

The door opened and a tall elderly woman came out, leaning heavily on a cane. In her free hand she carried a small red leather case with a snap fastener. She had short thick grey hair and colorless lips so thin they looked glued together. They came apart only slightly when she spoke. “There you are, Ellen. I’ve been asking for you.”

“Sorry, Mrs. Young. I had to—”

“My daughter Juliet has been complaining of burning eyes after swimming, so I brought over my own testing kit. It turns out Juliet is not imagining things, as she often does. Your chlorine registers too high and your pH too low.”

“I’ll tell the engineer.”

“He’ll deny it, of course, but I have the evidence.” She shook the red leather case vigorously. “Considering the dues we pay, I should think the club would be able to afford a competent engineer.”

“We try.”

For the first time, Iris Young acknowledged Aragon’s presence with a brief glance. Then she turned back to Ellen. “Who’s he?”

“Mr. Aragon is a lawyer.”

“I hope he’s not applying for membership.”

“I don’t think so, Mrs. Young.”

“Good. The club has too many lawyers as it is, sitting around encouraging people to sue each other. By the way, I expected to find the girls here. The Admiral brought them down this morning before his golf game.”

“They left some time ago,” Ellen said. “The Ingersolls gave them a lift into town.”

“I’ve instructed them not to accept rides from strangers.”

“The Ingersolls aren’t exactly stra—”

“Too late to fuss now. The whole problem will be resolved as soon as Cordelia gets her driver’s license back and I can buy her a new car, something more conventional. That Jaguar she had was a bad influence. It practically demanded to be driven at excessive speeds. It was too stimulating.”

“A Jaguar would certainly stimulate me.”

“I’m glad you agree.”

Ellen wasn’t entirely sure what she’d agreed about, but Mrs. Young seemed satisfied.

She crossed the road to her own car, a chauffeur-driven Mercedes, walking as if every step was painful. The chauffeur helped her into the back seat and put a blanket over her legs.

In Ellen’s absence Mr. Henderson had taken charge of the office, a job he despised, since it nearly always involved complaints ranging from errors in billing to the fat content of the hamburgers in the snack bar. Neither of these extremes, and very little in between, interested him. He thought of himself as creative, a man of ideas. His latest idea, closing the club one day a week in order to conduct a bus tour to Santa Anita, Hollywood Park or Agua Caliente, had been poorly received by the membership. It was noted in the club newsletter that plans for a weekly Racing Revel had been indefinitely postponed. So were plans for a Blackjack Bash, which violated a local ordinance, and a Saturday Cinema for Stags, sabotaged by does, who outnumbered stags four to one.

Henderson kept right on trying. When Ellen entered he was, in fact, sketching out in his mind a Garden of Eden Ball.

People were tired of costume parties and the main attraction of the ball was certain to be its lack of costumes — except a figleaf or three. There would be some opposition, of course, from the elderly and fat, but in the long run the ball seemed destined to be a rousing success, the stuff of memories.

Ellen said, “Mr. Henderson.”

He kept his eyes fixed on the ceiling and the future. The waitresses and busboys would be dressed as serpents, and from the chandeliers, just out of reach, would hang huge red paper apples. When the more athletic merrymakers succeeded in breaking the apples, confetti would come flying out with sinful abandon. Beautiful, beautiful.

“Mr. Henderson.”

Henderson dragged himself rather irritably out of the Garden of Eden. “Welcome back, Miss Brewster. Did you have a nice vacation?”

“I was only gone for two hours.”

“Two hours can be an eternity in this madhouse. The Admiral’s wife was just in here complaining that we have too much chlorine in the pool and not enough pH. What the hell is pH? When you find out, buy some and pour it in.”

“Mr. Henderson, this is Mr. Aragon.”

“I can’t help that. My God, people expect me to solve all their problems.”

“I don’t expect you to do anything about mine,” Aragon said.

“You don’t. Good. Stout fella. Now if you’ll pardon me, I have important work to do, pH and all that.”

“I understand.”

“Of course, of course you do. Very understanding face you have there. Not many of them around these days.”

Henderson departed, wondering why he was always meeting such odd people. Perhaps it was a family curse.

“We keep two files on each member,” Ellen told Aragon. “One is for regular office use: address, phone number, occupation, names of family members, and so on. The other is private, to be used only by Mr. Henderson and the executive committee. It contains each member’s original application for membership and the names and comments of their sponsors, letters of resignation and reinstatement, pertinent financial records, lists of other clubs they belong to. Some of this is useful, but mainly the file is a hodgepodge that should be cleaned out or updated.”

“What’s your definition of hodgepodge?”

“Oh, complaints from one person about another person, perhaps one or both of them long since dead, old newspaper clippings covering social events, divorces, scandals and the like; cards from members traveling abroad; photographs, many of them unidentified and unidentifiable.”

“Apparently you have access to the file.”

“Only when Mr. Henderson wants me to look something up,” Ellen said. “He keeps the key.”

“But you can ask him for it any time.”

“Yes.”

“Will you?”

“I’m supposed to have a good reason.”

“Mrs. Shaw skipped town under unusual circumstances. That good enough?”

“We’ll see if Mr. Henderson thinks so.”

While she went to get the key Aragon stood at the door and watched the people. There were about twice as many of them as there had been during the morning. Several small groups were having late lunch on the terrace and most of the chaises on the opposite side of the pool were occupied. The water of the pool itself was being churned up by half a dozen earnest swimmers doing laps to a pace clock. On the lifeguard tower an ivory-haired young man was picking absently at his chest, peeling away the dead skin of his latest sunburn.

The elderly man in shorts and tennis visor was still busy writing but he had changed his position from the terrace to a chair under a cypress tree at the corner of the fence. The tree was bent and twisted by the wind and salt air. It seemed a good place for him.

Ellen came back carrying the key and looking a little embarrassed, as though Henderson might have given her a reprimand or a warning.

Her voice was subdued. “Listen, I’m sorry I said some of those things about Mrs. Shaw and Grady.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t know for sure whether they’re together or not. They both left at approximately the same time but that may be only a coincidence. She takes trips every now and then, cruises and stuff like that. As for Grady, lifeguards come and go around here like the tides. It’s a boring job and the salary’s lousy, that’s why we mostly have to hire college kids who are subsidized by their families. Grady isn’t a kid and he has no family. We all knew he wouldn’t last.”

“It’s funny he didn’t last long enough to pick up his paycheck.”

“Where — how did you find that out?”

“Frederic told me.”

“What else did he tell you?”

“He had the idea,” Aragon said carefully, “that Mrs. Shaw was, in his words, Grady’s new chick.”

She looked down at the key in her hands, turning it over and over as if she was trying to remember what lock it fitted. “So even the kids were talking about it.”

“Or kid. And he’s not exactly typical.”

“They probably all knew before I did, everyone in the club. What a prize cluck that makes me. I never even suspected her because she’s so much older, and that day in the office they both pretended to be meeting for the first time.”

“Some first meetings can be quite electric,” Aragon said. The word reminded him of Hippollomia and his truck trapped behind Mrs. Shaw’s locked gate. “There is no electric... Missus forgot to pay.”

She said, “Afterward I watched them walk down the corridor together. There was something about them, something inevitable, fated. I couldn’t describe it but I knew Grady was walking out of my life before he was even in it.” She turned away with a shrug. “So scratch one lifeguard. He won’t be back.”

“Not even for his paycheck?”

“He won’t need it. Miranda Shaw is a very wealthy woman.”

He didn’t correct her.

The files took up half the width of one wall of the office. They were painted pastel blues and pinks and mauves to help conceal their purpose. They still looked like files. Ellen unlocked the blue one.

The material on the Shaws was sparse. Attached to an application form dated twenty years previously were enthusiastic comments from the Shaws’ sponsors, Mr. and Mrs. Edgar Godwit, and their seconders, Dr. Franklin Spitz and Mrs. Ada Cottam, and a card with a single word printed on it and underlined: OIL. Whether it was the OIL or the enthusiastic support, the Shaws were admitted to membership in the Penguin Club the following month, paid the initiation fee and a year’s dues in advance and rented cabana number 22. Neville Shaw’s other affiliations included the University Forum, the Greenhills Country Club, Turf and Tanbark, Rancheros Felicianos and the Yale Club.

An old letter from Shaw addressed to the manager and the Executive Committee deplored the kind of music played at the New Year’s Eve Ball. A later one canceled the rental of cabana number 22, citing excessive noise from 21 and 23. To the bottom of this someone had added a brief comment in ink: Party Pooper!

There were only two recent items in the file, a copy of a delinquent-dues notice signed by Walter Henderson, and a greeting card bearing an indecipherable postmark and addressed to Miss Ellen Brewster, in care of Penguin Club, Santa Felicia, California.

“Go ahead, read it,” Ellen said. “It’s not personal. She wrote cards like that to a lot of people. I think she was homesick, she didn’t enjoy traveling, especially in Mexico.”

“Where was she in Mexico when she wrote this?”

“Pasoloma.”

He had never heard of it.

“She didn’t like Pasoloma,” Ellen said. “There’s nothing to do except surf and fish, she told me. Yet she kept going back.”

“Did her husband always go with her?”

“As far as Pasoloma. Then he’d charter a fishing boat for two or three weeks and do his thing while she did hers.”

“That doesn’t sound like the sort of vacation a rich beautiful woman would plan for herself.”

“Not unless she liked surfing. Or surfers. Anyway, she went.”

“When she came back,” Aragon said, “did she look like a woman who’d just spent a couple of weeks lying on a beach?”

“No. She avoids the sun and salt water because they dry the skin. Even when she sits on the terrace here she hides under an umbrella and a wide-brimmed hat and a robe big enough for three Arabs and a camel.”

“You’re sure about the camel?”

She smiled faintly. “All right, scratch the camel and one Arab. The general picture remains the same.”

“Where is Pasoloma?”

“I looked for it on the map once and couldn’t find it. But I think it’s fairly close to the border because they always took their car and Mr. Shaw refused to drive long distances.”

He figured that would put it somewhere in the northern part of Baja California. During the Lockwood case, he’d covered the area by car and he couldn’t recall even a small village by that name. Either Ellen Brewster had made a mistake — which seemed unlikely — or else Pasoloma wasn’t a geographical location at all but merely the name of a resort where people went to swim in the surf or lie on the beach or charter a boat for deep-sea fishing. If so, it was a peculiar choice for a woman who didn’t like any of those things. Maybe Pasoloma offered other enticements Mrs. Shaw hadn’t mentioned to anyone at the Penguin Club.

Aragon said, “Is there a phone booth around?”

“At the south end of the corridor. But you can use the phone on my desk if it’s for a local call.”

“It’s not.”

“Oh. Well.” She looked slightly annoyed, as though she considered listening to other people’s talk a privilege that came with her territory.

“I am going to call my wife,” Aragon said. “She works at a hospital in San Francisco and the call will be put through a switchboard. The operators all know my voice and are certain to monitor the conversation, so it won’t be very interesting.”

“Why tell me?”

“I wouldn’t want you to think you’re missing anything.”

The switchboard operator at the hospital recognized his voice.

“Dr. MacGregor’s on Ward C right now, Mr. Aragon. You want me to page her?”

“Please.”

“Hold on. Won’t take a minute.”

The minute dragged out to three. He put in four more quarters, and as the last one clanked into its slot he heard Laurie’s voice.

“Tom?”

“Hi.”

There was a silence, the kind there often was at the beginning of their calls, as if they were trying to bridge the distance between them and it seemed, for a time, impossible.

Then, “Laurie, are you there?”

“Yes.”

“Can we talk?”

“Business-type stuff only. I’m on duty.”

“This is a business call.”

“Really?”

“You’ve just been appointed my special assistant in charge of regenerative processes.”

“What’s the salary?”

“It’s a purely honorary position.”

“I figured it would be,” she said. “You’re a terrible tightwad.”

“Of course, if you’re not interested, there’s a roster of beautiful blondes whose qualifications I’ve been studying.”

“Tell them to get lost. Now, what exactly do you mean by regenerative processes?”

“I’ve been doing a rundown on rejuvenation clinics. Most of them operate outside the country because they use illegal drugs or unorthodox methods, shots of KH-3, monkey and lamb embryo glands, hypnotherapy, plasmapheresis, deep sleep, et cetera.”

“So?”

He hesitated. “I’d like you to find out if there’s one that uses goat glands.”

“Goat glands? Now what have you got yourself into?”

“The story’s kind of long and I’m running out of change. Will you do it?”

“I guess so. How do you know such a place exists?”

“Smedler’s wife heard about it at the country club. Do you think you can find out by tonight? I’ll be at the apartment from six—”

There was a sudden click and the long-distance operator’s voice: “Your time is up. Please deposit another twenty-five cents.”

“All I’ve got is two dimes. Will you—?” She wouldn’t. The line went dead. He spoke into it anyway. “Hey Laurie, I forgot to tell you I love you.”

The Admiral’s daughters came charging through the front door, pursued by the dust devils that were whirling down the road behind them.

Neither wind nor sun had affected Cordelia’s face, which remained as sallow and somber as usual, but Juliet had turned pink from her forehead all the way down to the pearl choker that emphasized the neckline of her favorite thrift shop dress. Everything about her seemed to be in motion at the same time, as though one of the dust devils had caught her and infected her with frenzy. She shook her head and giggled and moved her arms around so that her bracelets kept jangling, clank, clank, clank. Cordelia didn’t have on as many bracelets but she wore a ruby and silver necklace, jade earrings, a pair of ruby-eyed owl pins, a diamond-studded pendant watch, a gold wristwatch and half a dozen rings.

Cordelia gave her sister a kick on the ankle to calm her down and said to Ellen, “We are back. Notice anything different about us?”

“Your mother was here,” Ellen said. “She left half an hour ago.”

“You’re avoiding the subject. Besides, she never comes to this place anymore. She hates it.”

“Considers it gross,” Juliet added. “Hoi polloi.”

“You must notice something different about us. If you don’t, you’re not trying. Concentrate. Use your eyes.”

“And ears. That’s a clue. Use your ears. Listen.”

Ellen listened and heard clank, clank, clank, clank. “The bracelets? Has it anything to do with the bracelets?”

“Not just the bracelets,” Cordelia said sharply. “Everything. We’ve changed our image.”

“Cordelia read about it in a magazine.”

“I thought about it before I ever read it in a magazine. That was merely the clincher, an article on How to Change Your Image in Twenty-Four Hours. So we went down to the bank this morning and took our jewelry out of the safe-deposit box and we’re going to wear it from now on, everywhere we go, night and day, even in bed. We are sick of being plain.”

“No more plain.”

“You are looking at the new us.”

“The new us.” Beneath the excitement there was a note of anxiety in Juliet’s voice. “In bed, Cordelia? My earrings hurt already and I’m not even lying down yet.”

“Stop fussing. Nobody gets a new image for nothing.”

“Well, I don’t see why it has to hurt. Are you sure the article specified in bed?”

“It did.”

“I’m going to hate that part. It’s fine for you, you sleep flat on your back like you’re on an operating table having your gall bladder out. But I’m a side sleeper.”

“You’ll have to change. That’s what this is all about, change. You’re the new you now, so act like it.”

The new Juliet nodded. The old Juliet simply decided to cheat. Instead of wearing the earrings at night, she would keep them on her bedside table so that in case of an earthquake or fire she could put them on in a hurry. No one would be any the wiser, unless Cordelia got scared by a strange noise and came barging into her room in the middle of the night. Anyway, the new Cordelia might not be scared of strange noises.

Cordelia fingered the ruby and silver necklace. “You don’t recognize this, do you, Ellen? Ha, I knew you wouldn’t. You’re not a noticer the way I am.”

“And I,” Juliet said. “I’m a noticer, too. In fact, I recognized it first. She wore it to the club’s open house at Christmas with a green dress. Red and green, it looked very Christmasy.”

“Are you telling this, Juliet, or am I?”

“You are, Cordelia.”

“Then let me proceed. We went to an auction last week and saw this necklace with a matching bracelet that was to be sold as a set. I wanted both, but there’s a limit on my charge card so I bought the necklace and Juliet bought the bracelet.”

“Wait a minute,” Ellen said. “Who wore it at the Christmas open house?”

“Mrs. Shaw,” Cordelia said.

“She looked very Christmasy,” Juliet said.

Ellen caught up with Aragon in the corridor. “Admiral Young’s daughters are here. They have some information which may or may not be accurate, but I think you should talk to them.”

The two girls were half hidden behind the door of Ellen’s office like children ready to pop out and say boo when a grownup came along. Aragon smiled at them in a friendly way but they didn’t respond.

“Why, it’s him,” Cordelia said. “The man who was staring at us this morning. Like in Singapore, that kind of stare.”

“Singapore? I’m sure you’re mistaken.” But Juliet glanced nervously around the room as though planning an escape if one proved necessary. Cordelia was very frequently right. “Why, this is our very own club and we’re just as safe here as—”

“Pops had two ensigns following us around Singapore, and what good did that do?”

Juliet couldn’t remember the ensigns and had only the vaguest recollection of ever being in Singapore, let alone of what had actually happened. But she was too sensible to admit this to Cordelia, who would merely take it as additional proof of Juliet’s inferiority.

“Stop this nonsense, girls,” Ellen said briskly. “I want you to tell Mr. Aragon what you told me.”

Cordelia came out from behind the door, her arms crossed on her chest in a defensive posture. “Why does he want to know?”

“He’s a lawyer.”

“We are not talking to any lawyer unless our lawyer is also present. Everybody who watches television knows that.”

“Oh, Cordelia,” Juliet said with a touch of sadness. “We don’t have a lawyer.”

“We’ll get one immediately.”

“Very well, you get one, but I refuse to pay for my half of him. He’ll be entirely on your charge card.”

“Wait a minute,” Aragon said. “We should be able to settle this quite simply. You hire me and I’ll waive the fee for my services.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m free.”

“Bull,” Cordelia said.

“No bull.”

“I never heard of a free lawyer.”

“There aren’t many of us around. Business is good but the pay’s lousy.”

“The arrangement seems rather loose, but it’s not costing us anything, so all right, you’re hired.”

Aragon congratulated himself. Not every young lawyer could afford to acquire in a single day such clients as the Admiral’s daughters and little Frederic Quinn. If the trend continued, it would be very handy, probably downright necessary, to have a working wife.

The girls had a whispered conference behind the door, punctuated by the clank of Juliet’s bracelets and the bronchial wheeze she developed when she became excited. Then Cordelia approached Aragon, licking her thin pale lips.

“No one could possibly connect us with Miranda Shaw’s disappearance. We didn’t get hold of her necklace and bracelet until a week ago when we spotted them at an auction. It wasn’t a regular auction, more of a small estate sale where the prices are set ahead of time. There’s this nice quiet young man who sells valuables other people want to get rid of for one reason or another.”

“We think he’s a fence,” Juliet said.

Cordelia silenced her sister with a jab in the ribs. “He seems to be a perfectly legitimate businessman who conducts auctions, the refined low-key kind. Most auctioneers are such screamers. Mr. Tannenbaum never raises his voice. Every now and then when we’re downtown we pop into his establishment to see what’s available.”

“Sometimes we buy, sometimes we spy,” Juliet said.

“We don’t actually spy, we just look around with our eyes wide open. I mean, you can never be sure, can you, Mr. Aragon?”

Aragon agreed that you could never be sure, at the same time feeling a twinge of sympathy for the unfortunate Tannenbaum. It was not an enviable fate, being the target of the girls’ suspicions, the recipient of their pop-ins, the focus of their wide-opens. He hoped the occasional sale recompensed Tannenbaum to some degree.

He said, “Was the jewelry expensive?”

“It’s crude to ask the price of things,” Cordelia reminded him.

“Yes. However—”

“A mark of ill-breeding.”

“Right. But I’d still like to know. It may be important.”

Juliet let out an anxious little wheeze. “You hear that, Cordelia? He said—”

“I heard him.”

“We’ve never done anything the least bit important in our whole lives.”

“Oh, we have so. We were born, weren’t we? And Mrs. Young’s often told us how much it changed her life. That’s important, changing someone’s life.”

“She didn’t mean it nice.”

“Important things aren’t necessarily nice.”

“I still don’t see what harm would come from answering the man’s question about the jewelry.”

“Mind your own business, sister.”

“It’s half my business,” Juliet said. “The bracelet was put on my charge card. If I want to tell someone what’s on my own charge card, I can. It’s a free country.”

“You shut up.”

“Fifteen hundred dollars. So there, ha ha! Fifteen hundred dollars.”

Tannenbaum’s place of business was on Estero Street in the lower part of the city. Two blocks to the east was the barrio where Aragon had been born and raised and gone to schools where English was in reality, if not in theory, a second language. The barrio was gradually filling up with the debris of poverty: pieces of abandoned cars, tires and doors and twisted bumpers, broken wine jugs and baby strollers, fallen branches of half-dead trees, disemboweled sofas and dismembered chairs.

Estero Street, at one time almost part of the barrio, had been salvaged by a downtown rehabilitation plan. Its two- and three-story redwood houses, built before the turn of the century, had been carefully restored and painted. Yards were tended, hedges clipped, lawns raked and clusters of birds-of-paradise and lilies-of-the-Nile bloomed under neat little windmill palms. The upper floors of the houses had been made into apartments, and the ground floors into small offices occupied by a travel agent, a chiropractor, a realtor, a bail bondsman, an attorney, an art dealer, a watch repairman.

In the window of what had once been somebody’s parlor was a small discreet sign: R. Tannenbaum, Estate Sales and Appraisals. An old-fashioned bell above the front door announced Aragon’s entrance. He found himself in a hall whose walls were hung with tapestries, some large enough to be used as rugs, some so small they were framed under glass. In a single spotlighted display case a collection of miniature musical instruments was arranged in a semicircle on a red velvet stage: a golden harp, an ivory grand piano, violins and cellos with silver strings fine as spider silk, trumpets and French horns carved from amethyst and woodwinds from tourmaline. No prices were shown. Tannenbaum’s merchandise — if the tapestries and miniatures were typical — was not that of an ordinary fence doing business in a small city like Santa Felicia. Fences gravitated south to Los Angeles and San Diego or north to San Francisco.

A large black and brown mongrel came loping down the hall like an official greeter, and behind him, Tannenbaum himself. He was a tall angular man about forty, wearing a beard and rimless glasses and formally dressed in a dark vested suit and tie, white shirt with cuff links and carefully polished black oxfords.

Putting his hand on the dog’s head, he said, “My partner, Rupert, likes you.”

“Tell Rupert I like him back.”

“He knows. In our profession we develop a sixth sense about people. At least in my case it’s sixth, in Rupert’s it’s probably first. Perhaps a very long time ago it was our first, too, and our initial reaction to the approach of a stranger was, is this a friend or an enemy? It remains a good question. You are—” Tannenbaum narrowed his eyes to concentrate their focus — “I’d guess somewhere in between, leaning a bit towards friend, right?”

“Well...”

“I see you were admiring my miniatures. Or perhaps admire isn’t quite the word. I don’t care for miniatures myself, life is small and meager enough. A sculpture by Henry Moore, that’s what I covet, though my mean little hall here is hardly the place for one.”

Tannenbaum had a soft pleasant voice which made what he had to say seem more interesting than it actually was. He went on to describe the particular Henry Moore he would have liked to own, now in a private collection in Paris. Evidently Rupert had heard it all before. He went back to his rug at the rear of the hall, leaving the practical end of the business to his partner.

The dog’s action seemed to remind Tannenbaum of his duties. He said, “What can I do for you?”

Aragon presented his card, which Tannenbaum glanced at briefly before putting it in his inside breast pocket. The pocket was already bulging, Aragon noticed, as if Tannenbaum’s collections were not confined to valuables like tapestries and miniatures.

“Are you buying or selling, Mr. Aragon?”

“I’m asking.”

“You want information?”

“Yes.”

“My profit on information will never buy me a Henry Moore. However, in the interests of good will and that sort of thing, I’ll try to oblige. What’s on your mind?”

“Our office is holding some important legal documents which must be signed by one of our clients. I have cause to believe she’s also one of yours, Miranda Shaw, Mrs. Neville Shaw.”

“So?”

“Mrs. Shaw has, for all practical purposes, disappeared.”

“Well, I haven’t got her,” Tannenbaum said reasonably. “My partner wouldn’t approve.

Rupert took an immediate dislike to her. Probably her perfume too much and too musky. Rupert has such a sensitive nose it sometimes affects his judgment. I myself found her attractive, though a bit over the hill, wouldn’t you say?”

“I might, but the fact is I’ve never met her.”

“You should.”

“My boss thinks I should, too, and the sooner the better.”

Tannenbaum brushed a piece of lint off one of the tapestries. His movements were quick and precise, as if even the least important of them was thought out in advance for maximum efficiency. “Mrs. Shaw is not one of my regular customers. She came in about three weeks ago with a number of things she wanted to sell me then and there. I explained to her that my business is usually done on consignment and there would be a delay in payment. Some of the stuff might go immediately — for example, I’ve had a buyer waiting a long time for a coin collection like Shaw’s. But other items, like the antique silver chess set and the jewelry, would have to wait for the right buyers. Mrs. Shaw was anxious to avoid a delay, so she offered to take whatever I was willing to pay her on the spot. I gave her what I believed to be a fair price considering the financial risk I was assuming. Actually, the deal’s turning out better than I expected — some of the jewelry has been sold already. I included it in an estate auction which I conducted last week and the right buyers came along.”

“Admiral Young’s daughters.”

“Why, yes. You know them?”

“Slightly,” Aragon said. Even slightly seemed like a lot.

“The girls come in here quite often looking for a bargain. They never find any, of course — it’s my business to see that people don’t get bargains — but they think they do, so they make a purchase now and then, usually a rather small one. The ruby necklace and bracelet set was more expensive than anything they’d previously bought. They took a fancy to it for some reason.”

“Juliet recognized it as Mrs. Shaw’s.”

“I see.” Tannenbaum took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose where the frame had carved a red arc. “Or rather, I don’t see. Surely you can’t believe they bought the set for sentimental reasons?”

“It’s possible.”

“Oh, come now, Mr. Aragon. The Admiral’s daughters aren’t given to sentiment. Behind all that moronic conversation they’re as hard-headed and hard-nosed as a pair of old Navy chiefs.”

“I think they’re pathetic.”

“Are they clients of yours?”

“Yes.”

“Wait till they try to beat you out of your fee. They won’t seem quite so pathetic.”

“The fee’s already been settled.”

“Well. You must have a way with you.”

Aragon resisted the urge to tell the truth. Smedler wouldn’t be too happy if word got out that one of his employees had, twice in the same day, offered his services free. “It’s a gift,” he said, more or less accurately. “What can you tell me about Mrs. Shaw?”

Tannenbaum replaced his glasses and looked toward the rear of the hall as if seeking the advice of his partner. Rupert was asleep and snoring. “She puzzled me, that much I can tell you. Many of my first-time customers act the way she did, nervous and ill at ease, but there was something contradictory about her, an air of excitement I couldn’t figure out. It was the watch that clued me in.”

“What kind of watch?”

“A man’s wristwatch, a gold Swiss Jubilee. Very sophisticated and classy, with a face that shows the time only when viewed from a certain angle. I picked it up to examine it for an on-the-spot appraisal, but she asked for it back, said she’d changed her mind and wanted to hold on to it as a memento of her late husband. This is a common enough practice, for a bereaved person to hold on to a watch and keep it running and ticking like a heartbeat. I didn’t believe her, though. Still don’t.”

“What do you believe?”

“A watch like that,” Tannenbaum said, “would make a very nice gift.”

Aragon was eating dinner, a barely warm pizza with mozzarella that clung in strings to the roof of his mouth and had to be dislodged with beer. He’d placed the phone on the table in front of him and every now and then he stared at it as though it was a stubborn little beast that needed to be urged into action. It rang, finally, shortly after seven-thirty and he answered on the first ring.

“Hello, Laurie.”

“Tom.” She sounded pleased. “How did you know it was me?”

“Just a lucky guess.”

“What a liar you are. You were thinking about me.”

“Yes.”

“Good things?”

“The best.”

“Me, too. Listen, Tom, we’ll see each other at Thanksgiving. That’s not too far away and I get three whole days off.”

“The last time you had three whole days off you slept two and a half of them.”

“I remember the other half-day very well,” Laurie said. “Do you?”

“Vaguely. I may have to refresh my memory at Thanksgiving.”

“That’s a lovely idea.”

“I hope so. It’s the only one I have at the moment.”

“Oh, Tom.” There was a silence. “We’d better change the subject. This one is getting us nowhere and costing twenty-four cents a minute. Let’s talk about goats.”

“I don’t want to talk about goats.”

“Yes, you do. You appointed me your assistant in charge of regenerative process, goat division... Well, I found out from a geriatric specialist at the County Medical Association that there are a couple of places where people can get injections of goat embryo glands to stay young. One is in Hungary, and that’s the extent of the information I could get on it. The other’s in Mexico, run by a Dr. Manuel Ortiz. Ortiz doesn’t advertise, but the word has spread around youth-oriented places like Beverly Hills. His clinic’s main attractions seem to be that it guarantees immediate results and costs a lot of money.”

“That’s the attraction?”

“It is for wealthy people who have only one thing left to spend their money on, turning back the clock.”

“Where does this Dr. Ortiz turn back the clock?”

“The clinic is a converted ranch in a small seaside village south of Ensenada.”

“Pasoloma.”

“That’s it. How did you know?”

“Just another lucky guess.”

“Come on, tell me.”

“It’s kind of complicated,” Aragon said. “And as you mentioned a while ago, this conversation is costing twenty-four cents a minute. I figure we should save our money so that when you’re old and grey we’ll be able to send you down to Pasoloma for some of Dr. Ortiz’s goat glands.”

“How thoughtful of you.”

“I come from a long line of thinkers.”

“Tom, you’re not going to tell me a thing, are you?”

“Just the usual. I love you.”

“Well, I love you, too, but it doesn’t prevent me from wondering why you’re suddenly interested in rejuvenation. Did Smedler put you on a case involving Pasoloma?”

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “Honest.”

“The last time you went to Mexico you got in all kinds of trouble.”

“Other people got in trouble. I didn’t.”

“The Mexican police aren’t normally interested in such fine distinctions.”

“Laurie, dear, I can’t tell you any more than I already have because I don’t know any more. I’m working on a hunch and it may be miles off the track. You’ve been a great help finding out about Dr. Ortiz. Tomorrow morning I’ll get Smedler’s secretary to call Ortiz’s clinic and see if our client is there. If she is, I’ll take the papers down to her for her signature and come home, mission accomplished. If she isn’t there, I’ll start thinking up another angle.”

It sounded logical, straightforward, easy. He wondered why he didn’t feel better about it.

Aragon arrived at the office shortly before nine o’clock and took up a strategic position at the door of Smedler’s private elevator. He was beginning to know Charity Nelson’s weaknesses and strengths, and one of them was punctuality. The bell in the City Hall tower across the street was striking the hour when she came in. In addition to her handbag, she was carrying a large canvas tote fully packed and showing a number of interesting lumps and bumps. Her wig had been anchored with a scarf tied so tightly under her jaw that her lips could scarcely move when she spoke: “Whatever you want, no.”

“I wasn’t asking for anything,” Aragon said. “I’m just reporting in.”

“Like on what?”

“Mrs. Shaw.”

“You found her.”

“No.”

“Then there’s nothing to report.”

“There may be.”

“Listen, junior, this isn’t the best time to mess around. Smedler spent the night in his office because he had a fight with his wife and he’d like her to believe he killed himself, which may not be such a bad idea, but who am I to suggest it. In here” — she indicated the canvas tote — “is his breakfast. Also mine. One thing Smedler and I have in common, we don’t like problems before breakfast, so bug off.”

Charity pressed the button and the little iron-grilled elevator came down from the top floor with the majestic dignity of a vehicle intended only for royalty.

When the door opened Charity said, “You’d better not come up yet, junior.”

“That canvas bag looks heavy. Let me carry it for you.”

“Okay. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Once in her office Charity untied the scarf anchoring her wig and filled the glass coffeepot from the water cooler. Then she began unpacking the canvas tote Aragon had put on her desk: cans of tomato juice, some fresh pears and oranges, a bag from a local doughnut shop, a plastic container of plant food, a bottle of leaf polish and a jar of instant coffee.

“I have to make a long-distance call to a place in Mexico,” Aragon said. “I thought you’d want me to do it from here.”

“Why should I?”

“Because it involves Mrs. Shaw.”

He explained. In spite of the early hour and lack of breakfast, she was pleased with his theory. It fitted not only the rumors she’d heard but also her own picture of Miranda Shaw as the kind of vain, stupid woman who would go to a clinic in Mexico to buy back her youth. Charity didn’t consider her own youth worth buying back.

She put the call in herself. Whether it was her crisp voice or just plain luck, the call was relayed through Tijuana to Pasoloma within five minutes. Almost immediately a woman answered in Spanish, switching to heavily accented English in response to Charity’s question. Yes, this was the Clinica Pasoloma but no Mrs. Shaw was registered.

Charity held her hand over the mouthpiece. “The lady says Mrs. Shaw is not there. That blows your theory, junior.”

“Let me talk to her.” He took over the phone and spoke in Spanish. But Mrs. Shaw wasn’t there in Spanish any more than she’d been in English.

The clinic, in fact, did not give out names or any other information over the telephone except to the proper authorities. Though Aragon tried to convince her that he was, as Mrs. Shaw’s lawyer, a proper authority, she didn’t wait for him to finish.

“You struck out,” Charity said. “Admit it.”

“Not yet. The woman was just following orders, no names over the telephone.”

“So?”

“Suppose I go down to the clinic and ask her in person.”

“Why don’t you take no for an answer, junior? You had a nice little idea that died. Bury it.”

Smedler came out of his office. He showed no signs of having spent a night involving any physical or emotional discomfort. He was freshly shaved and impeccably groomed. Even the frown he aimed at his secretary was normal for the time of day.

“I tried to use the phone, Miss Nelson, and it was tied up by a bunch of foreigners.”

“Sorry,” Aragon said. “I was one of them.”

Smedler ignored him. “I don’t like foreign languages spoken on my telephone, Miss Nelson. What if the CIA is listening? They might think I’m selling secrets to Cuba or something.”

“We don’t have any secrets to sell to Cuba, Mr. Smedler.”

“You and I know that but they don’t... Did you get the kind of doughnuts I asked for?”

“With jelly inside,” Charity said. “Mr. Aragon has a theory about Mrs. Shaw’s disappearance.”

“Cherry?”

“Yes, sir. It’s an interesting theory.”

“The strawberry ones have those irritating little things in them.”

“Seeds. Shall I authorize him to pursue it?”

“Use your judgment, Miss Nelson. You’ve shown excellent judgment in the past. Nothing has happened to warp it, surely? Then carry on.”

Smedler disappeared with the bag of doughnuts, two fresh pears and a can of tomato juice.

Aragon said, “Well, has it?”

“Has what?”

“Anything happened to warp your judgment?”

“It gets warped every hour on the hour,” Charity said with a kind of grim satisfaction. “What’s on your calendar for the next few days?”

“Nothing I can’t clean up by this afternoon or push off on someone else.”

“Will your car make it as far as Pasoloma?”

“Probably.”

“Then a couple of hundred dollars should do it.”

“Make it three.”

“The plants you see growing around here are not money trees, junior.”

“Okay, I’ll settle for two. If I run short I can always sell a few secrets to Cuba.”

“This is highway robbery,” Charity said and made out a check for three hundred dollars. “And listen, junior, you’d better get going first thing tomorrow morning before Smedler finds out how really warped my judgment has become.”