The Three Roads

chapter 8

The afternoon was warm for February, and they drove with the top down. It was good to be on the road again after the last dragging hour at the hospital, packing Bret’s luggage in the rear compartment of the roadster, listening to Commander Wright’s last-minute instructions: “There’s no reason why he shouldn’t enjoy himself in moderation. Sports like swimming and golf are just what he needs to build up his self-assurance. Maybe even the occasional night club, but he shouldn’t do any drinking.…”

When they got away from San Diego’s dreary suburbs and onto the coast highway, Paula drove fast. Their physical speed, their tangible advance through the whipping air, gave her the illusion of progress and the promise of fulfillment. But she was disappointed by Bret’s attitude. After months in what amounted to custody he’d naturally feel awkward and shy on his first day in the outside world. Commander Wright had warned her to expect this. Still his continued silence worried her, nagging at the edges of her hope and threatening to spoil this sunny, blowing birthday of his freedom.

Snatching at any straw to make him speak, she pointed to a landmark she had often noticed before, the tall, leaning chimney of a brick kiln on the inland side of the highway. “I bet an immigrant from Pisa built that.”

“I beg your pardon.” His voice was heavy and dull. He hadn’t noticed the leaning chimney. He hadn’t even heard what she said, and she had to admit the warmed-over crack hardly deserved an audience.

His face, in the quick glance she stole at it, was as dull as his voice, a closed door standing between his thoughts and her. For all she knew his mind, unconscious of the sun and wind, was trapped and digging vainly in a lightless, airless mine of memory. She thought of the pit ponies that lost their eyesight because they never saw the sun, and for a hopeless instant she supposed that Bret was lost to her forever in those subterranean tunnels. She rejected her depressed mood as soon as she recognized it, and drove five miles an hour faster.

“I didn’t hear what you said, Paula. Excuse me.”

“It was a silly remark, and I couldn’t possibly repeat it. Look, you can see the sea there between those two hills. Isn’t it blue?”

He looked dutifully at the polished wedge of sea between the hills and looked away again. His eyes were bright blue and mindless, like the sea. His attention was turned inward, looking down the dark shaft. She didn’t think explicitly that they were only a few miles from La Jolla, but his refusal to look at the sea shocked her. She was eager to show him all the things he had been missing, all the fine exhibits in the gallery of the world, and he wouldn’t even look at their own memento – the Pacific.

“What’s the matter, Bret?” her mouth said against her will.

“I’ve been doing quite a bit of thinking.”

“But what about?”

“About what I should do.”

“I thought that was all settled. You’ll stay with me and see Dr. Klifter on alternate days. The rest of the time you can enjoy yourself for a change. I have to be at the studio in the mornings, and that’ll give you a chance to do some work if you want to.”

“I don’t know whether I’ll bother with seeing Klifter.”

“But, darling! You have an appointment on Wednesday.”

“I don’t think my trouble is anything a psychoanalyst can help me with. It’s too real for that.”

“He isn’t one of your old-fashioned dream doctors, Bret. He doesn’t try to explain everything in terms of infantile bed-wetting. He knows the importance of the adult problems–”

“So do I. You see, I know what happened to my wife.”

“You remember?”

His answer was slow in coming. It seemed to her that everything hung on it, like Oedipus’ answer to the riddle of the Sphinx. The speedometer needle swung past seventy and hovered at seventy-five. The hair blew frantically about his head, but his face was as impassive as stone.

Would his face change at all if the car left the road and somersaulted down the bank of the arroyo? For a wild moment she played with the notion of giving the wheel a final twist and abandoning them both to the decision of mass and energy. A bright, windy day like this was as good a time to die as any. It would be fitting as the last gesture of her ending youth.

Almost before she was conscious of the moment, it was swept away by a deep rising hope. She caught a vision of herself years ahead living with her husband in a house with a garden and a big lawn where children and dogs could play. Her nerves leaned hard against the stability of that unbuilt house and that unconsummated marriage as she set her right foot on the brake. She turned off onto the shoulder of the highway and stopped the car. It seemed for an instant that the world had stopped, that the hills around them were waiting for a signal to move.

“Do you remember?”

“I don’t remember her death, if that’s what you mean. I remember marrying her in San Francisco.”

“How do you know about her death? Did Dr. Klifter tell you?”

“He gave me these.”

He showed her the bundle of clippings, and she felt like a dreamer whose recurrent nightmare has suddenly and incredibly become part of the real world. She looked into his face and trembled to know what was going on behind those steady eyes.

He felt most strongly a terrible pity for his dead wife, and a grinding shame. He had failed Lorraine, both living and dead. Living, he had abandoned her to violation and murder. Dead, he had forgotten her very existence, had sat snug and complacent for nine months in an animal world without memory, dreaming boy’s dreams of happiness with another woman. But the irreparable past, more fatal than any predestined future because it was unchangeable and absolute, had caught up with him and embraced him from behind.

“That’s what happened, is it?” His right forefinger tapped the papers he was holding in his left hand. She took them and looked at them, but she was so upset that she could decipher nothing but the headlines.

“Yes. Don’t you–?”

“You needn’t ask me again if I remember. I don’t. I probably never will. The last thing I remember is flying in to San Francisco and landing at Alameda in the morning. They still haven’t caught the man that killed her?”

“No. I’ve kept in touch with the police, and they’re no further now than they were then. Bret?”

“Yes.”

“Wouldn’t it be better if you didn’t let your mind dwell on this? I’m dreadfully sorry Klifter gave you those things. I shouldn’t have let him have them. I should have destroyed them long ago.”

“He did me a good turn. A better turn than you and Wright, keeping me in a fool’s paradise.”

“But this is in the past, Bret. It can’t change the present. It was sheer bad luck that it happened to us, and there’s really nothing we can do about it.”

“It happened to my wife,” he said coldly. “To us only incidentally.”

“I’m going to burn these filthy things.” She had found her lighter in the snakeskin purse that lay between them on the seat. She lit it and applied the tear-shaped flame to the corner of the clippings.

He knocked the lighter out of her hand and took them away from her.

“Damn you!” she cried. “I don’t like violence, Bret.” She controlled her anger immediately and said in a neutral voice: “You might pick up my lighter and light me a cigarette.”

“I’m sorry if I was rough.”

“Forget it.” She accepted the lighted cigarette he handed her as a further token of apology. “I don’t understand why you wouldn’t let me burn them though.”

“There are some names I want–”

“You’re not thinking of going to the police?” She tried to keep her voice steady and low, but terror lodged like a tin whistle in her throat and raised its pitch. “I went over the whole thing with them months ago, and nothing came of it.”

“I don’t suppose they’d be much help. I thought I’d look up this bartender Rollins. He might be able to tell me something.”

“Rollins?”

“He was one of the witnesses at the inquest.”

He riffled the clippings expertly, as if he had read them often enough to index them. “Here.” He pointed to a paragraph at the bottom of a column:

“He said she left by herself.” The whistle in Paula’s throat made a discordant tune. “What more could he tell?”

“Probably nothing, but I want to talk to him. Don’t you see, I don’t even know who her friends were. I’ve got to try and understand what happened.”

“But what are you going to do? There’s nothing you can do.”

“I have to prove that for myself. If I could find the man that was with her–”

“Are you jealous of a dead woman, Bret?”

“One might think you were jealous of her yourself.”

She started the car and turned it back onto the highway. It was hard to see the road through the tears that had been brought to her eyes by the wind or by her sudden feeling of desolation. The present and the future were slipping away again, and in some way the fault was hers. She blamed her own stupidity and weakness.

They rode in silence through the green valleys and the barren hills, past the scrubbed whiteness of the sea resorts and the geometric forests of the Long Beach oilfields. The past slid along behind them on a trailer, as real as the buzzing, sprawling confusion of the Los Angeles suburbs. She longed for a city where she could submerge herself, ditch the trailing past, forget even the future. But the roaring blankness of Los Angeles was a comfortless backdrop to her loneliness.

It was loneliness that made her speak at last, though she didn’t trust her voice.

“You didn’t really mean it when you said you mightn’t go to Dr. Klifter?”

“Didn’t I?”

She lifted one hand from the wheel and touched his arm. “I don’t think you should make any decisions when you’re feeling depressed.”

“I’ve got a reason for being depressed. I’m not going to get rid of it by fooling around with my childhood memories. I’ve got to act in the real world where the trouble started.”

“Act?”

“My wife was murdered. God knows our marriage never amounted to much, but I owe her something. The least I owe her is some attempt to find the man that killed her.”

The concrete pavement billowed before her eyes, and for the second time that afternoon she felt unable to drive. They were far out on the boulevard, so it was easy to find a parking space. She turned off the motor and leaned against his shoulder in a gesture of weariness and abandonment.

“You know you’re not fit to plunge into a thing like that. They only let you leave the hospital on the understanding that you’d be in Dr. Klifter’s care.”

“I can’t rest until I find the man that killed her. That makes no sense to you, does it? What makes no sense to me is your idea that I should waste my time telling my dreams to a psychoanalyst, instead of settling the trouble at its source.”

“Are you sure this is its source? Even if it is, it can’t be settled. You’ve got to learn to live with it.”

He gave her a narrow look of doubt. “What makes you so sure?”

“The police spent months on the case. You can’t do anything by yourself. I won’t let you bury yourself in the past–”

“You sound afraid.”

“I am afraid.”

She pressed her face against the rigid muscles of his arm. Even in this moment of doubt and alienation she felt an undercurrent of pride in his strength, and gratitude that he had come back to her physically whole from the war.

“I won’t argue with you any more,” he said. “Give me the key to the trunk compartment.”

“But you’re coming home with me now? I told Mrs. Roberts to have dinner ready at seven.”

“I’m sorry I have to spoil your plans. I’ve always spoiled your plans, haven’t I? Give me the key.”

“I won’t!” She turned the ignition key and started the motor. “You’re coming home with me whether you like it or not.”

Before she had finished the sentence he was out of the car. She called his name and started after him, running awkwardly on her high heels. A seedy old man who was standing in the doorway of a cigar store turned to watch her, smiling knowingly. Bret was walking rapidly away, his wide blue shoulders perfectly impassive. She called once more, but he paid no attention.

She went back to the roadster and crawled in under the wheel. His white hat was a hundred yards away, moving steadily along the sidewalk. She watched it like a fading hope until it was out of sight.

chapter 9

As soon as she got home she went to the telephone in the hall and dialed a number. While the signal buzzed at the other end of the line she shut the door of the kitchen with her foot so that Mrs. Roberts wouldn’t hear.

“Yeah?” A man’s voice answered.

“Larry Miles?”

“Well, this is a pleasant surprise. I wasn’t expecting to hear from you for a week or so.”

“It isn’t pleasant. Bret Taylor is in town.”

“Do tell,” said the softly modulated voice. “I thought he was all safely locked up with the other boys with the fantods.”

“And it isn’t funny. He may be looking for you.”

“So what do I do? Take a powder?”

“Yes. Get out of town.”

“It costs money to take a powder.”

“You have the money.”

“But nix, I had bad luck this week. No money. No money, no powder. Now a couple of C’s would take me to Las Vegas. I got friends there.”

“All right, you can have the money. If you’ll get out of town for two weeks. I’ll let you have it tonight.”

“That’s the good girl,” said the engaging voice. “Usual time, usual place?”

“Yes. In the meantime, you know a place called the Golden Sunset Café?”

“But yes. Do I pay it a visitation?”

“Stay away from there,” she said. “Do you hear me, Miles?”

“Excuse me while I adjust my hearing aid.”

“I said this isn’t funny. Bret Taylor’s a big man, and there’s nothing he wouldn’t do.”

“Be calm, my sweet, I heard you.”

“Then bear it in mind.”

She set down the receiver and climbed the stairs to her room. The solid floors and brick walls of her house seemed as insubstantial as a cardboard studio set. Even her bedroom lacked intimate meaning, as if its fourth wall were missing and the bed on which she flung herself stood in full view of the unfriendly city.

She got up and went to the mirror and looked at her face and didn’t like it. She crossed the room to the great closet to look for a beautiful dress to wear. Her wardrobe appalled her. Gowns and sweaters, suits and scarves and skirts and coats, were garish and hideous, like masquerade costumes on hangover morning. Out of the thousands of dollars’ worth of colored silk and cotton and wool, there wasn’t a thing she’d be seen dead in.

When Larry went back to the bedroom the girl was sitting on the edge of the bed. In the excitement of the telephone call he’d forgotten all about her. Her red hair was tangled, but it shone prettily in the thin light that filtered through the closed blinds. When you looked at it in a better light you could see the darkness at the roots.

“You were gone a long time,” she said. “Lover.”

She stood up and came toward him with a dopey look on her face. Her navel and two nipples made a cartoon of another face, a long and mournful one. Whenever he saw that face instead of a body, he knew that he’d had enough of a girl. He let her kiss him, but he didn’t kiss her back.

“What’s the matter, Larry?”

“Not a thing.”

“Who was that on the phone?” she whispered in his ear. Her arms felt sticky against the back of his neck.

“Business. I got irons in the fire.”

“Such as?”

“My business, not yours. Listen, Fran, why don’t you blow for now?”

“So you can keep a date with another girl.”

“I said it was business.”

“I heard the way you talked on the phone. You think I’m dumb?”

He looked straight into her eyes and grinned. “What do you think?”

“Who is she?”

“I thought I advised you to blow. Scram, fade, beat it, go away!”

She placed her right cheek against his chest and held on. “I’ll go if you tell me who she is.”

“All right,” he said. “You want to do it the hard way.” He took hold of her elbows with the air of a man removing an uncomfortable collar, broke her grip, and thrust her away.

“You shouldn’t treat me like that,” she said.

He took a step toward her. She backed away. “I’m going. But you’ll be sorry if you treat me like that.”

She put on her shoes and a tan polo coat. He followed her into the living-room. “Don’t be like that, Fran. I told you it was business. I might have to go to Nevada for a couple of weeks.”

“It’s nothing to me,” she said from the doorway, and added in a sweet and ugly voice: “Give her my love.”

Listening to her footsteps go down the hall to her own apartment, he shrugged his shoulders. Fran had the idea that it was another woman, and there was no use arguing with a dame. It was another woman, all right, but Paula West was no she of his. West had a little too much class for him, not just the surface class that was his meat, but the kind that went way down out of sight like an iceberg and chilled you off at ten paces. She had quite a bit on the ball too, but it wasn’t bright of her to tell him to keep his nose out of the Golden Sunset. He hadn’t been near it for months, but now that he had a reason not to, that was exactly the bistro he was going to frequent.

He flung off his dressing gown and went into the bathroom to shave. He didn’t have one of those three-way mirrors for looking at his profile, but by peering out of the corners of his eyes he caught a three-quarters view. He liked the way his chin jutted out from his neck in a clean line. Greek, but definitely. Not Greek like in the restaurant business, but like on monuments. They called him Adonis on the posters when he fought in the semifinals in Syracuse, and he’d looked the word up in the big dictionary in the branch library. His hair was light and wavy too, just like the picture of the monument in the dictionary.

Having applied brilliantine to his hair, suntan powder to his face, deodorant to his armpits, he started to dress in a hurry. He’d got out of the habit of wearing an undershirt before he got in the money, so the first thing he put on was a brown wool sport shirt. It had cost him fifteen fish, no less, but after all a fellow’s wardrobe was kind of an investment. He felt he owed it to his looks to wear classy clothes. And some of his best pickups came when he was least expecting them. If you didn’t want to run the risk of passing up elegant chances it paid to be on the make twenty-four hours a day.

He left the apartment building by the back door and took his car out of the garage in the alley. It was a Chevy coupé, the last prewar model, and the best thing about it was it was a souvenir from his hot-car days and hadn’t cost him a cent. It was a pretty sweet little job after he tore down the motor, and it still ran like a dream. Everything ran like a dream for him these days, with a car and an apartment of his own, and good contacts in more ways than one, and a roll that would choke a horse. Well, a small horse. He wasn’t so well heeled that another couple of centuries wouldn’t come in handy. After he had the folding money in his poke he’d decide about Nevada. It might be better business to stay right here in L.A. and keep an eye on Taylor. There was no telling what might break, and if he played it smart and careful he could end up sitting very pretty.

The thought gave him such a lift that he was going fifty on Wilshire before he knew it. When he noticed the speedometer he slowed down abruptly to thirty. It wouldn’t do to be caught speeding. Lawbreaking was the one thing he couldn’t afford. He let fifteen or twenty cars pass him on the way downtown. Let the jerks stick their necks out, he was protecting his.

He found a parking place off Round Street, just around the corner from the Golden Sunset Café. Unless he missed his guess Taylor would be turning up there. It was the place that West was anxious for him to stay away from, and what other reason could she have? Before he went in he cased the joint through the star-shaped window in the door. The bar was loaded, and most of the booths were full. But no sign of Taylor. Maybe he missed his guess. In a way it was a relief.

He went in anyway and found an empty booth at the back. The smell of cooking grease from the kitchen reminded him that he was hungry. When the waitress discovered him he ordered a New York cut medium rare with French fried potatoes and a double order of onions, and a bottle of beer to drink while he was waiting – Eastern beer.

Halfway through the steak he looked up and saw Taylor walking down the aisle between the booths and the bar. The guy was in uniform, and in any case he couldn’t forget that pan. He lowered his own face quickly. Not that there was a chance in a million that Taylor would know him. There was nothing to worry about at all. But he found that he couldn’t eat the rest of his steak. The food he had already eaten had taken on weight and hung in his stomach like a piece of lead.

When he looked up again Taylor was sitting at the bar. All he could see of him was his broad blue back. Larry caught himself wishing that he and Taylor were alone in the room and Taylor’s back was to him like that and he had a gun in his hand. He felt he was in pretty deep and it would take something like a gun to get him out. He brushed the thought away, but it kept coming back and spoiling the fun he got out of being himself.

chapter 10

Bret discovered that he didn’t like people any more. He didn’t like the middle-aged men with brown alcoholic faces going in or coming out of bars. He didn’t like the sharp-breasted bobby-soxers chattering in gay circles, their eyes alert for autographs; or the older women like buxom birds in bright incongruous plumage. He didn’t like the brisk, young, hatless men with their shirts open at the necks, and both eyes like one cyclopean eye on the main chance. Above all he didn’t like himself.

Though his uniform was heavy enough and the waning sun was still warm, he stood on the corner of Hollywood and Vine and shivered with an immaterial chill. The high buildings and the roaring street and the quick inscrutable crowds appalled him. He had a shameful nostalgia for his hospital room, and then for Paula. The homesick pain turned into a headache that trampled on his skull like rubber wheels. The store windows blew in and out like flexible glass curtains, and the tortured air twisted and shrieked.

An empty Yellow Cab stopped opposite him, and he hailed it. It was something he could get inside. The first thing he had to do was find a room for the night. He didn’t know for how many nights. Time and space had merged in an unreal continuum flowing past him in unnatural patterns. Tomorrow was Los Angeles, which nobody knew entirely and he knew hardly at all.

As he crossed the street to the waiting taxi, the traffic bore down on him from two directions like past and future impinging on the present. But the analogy was wrong. Time moved in a closed circle like a race track. He kept repeating himself in every lap. He was caught in a closed circle that only death could open. Game called on account of suicide.

“Where to?” the driver said.

“Do you know the Golden Sunset Café?”

“The place on Round Street? There’s a Golden Sunset Café on Round Street.”

“I guess that’s it.”

They drove across the city through white Chirico vistas, stark in the washed-out evening light, which led the eye only to other vistas like them. He felt relieved when they reached the older downtown section of slums and semi-slums. It was more human than the vast suburban wasteland, if only because a generation of men had lived there and died unwillingly. The headache still whined in his head like rubber tires, but they were receding. When the taxi let him out on Round Street he felt light-bodied and eager.

In each of the Venetian-blinded windows a sign in red neon script advertised cocktails. A painted sign over the door said: “Golden Sunset Chicken-Fried Steak and Jumbo Shrimp.” He passed through the imitation-leather swinging doors into a roomful of people he liked better than the people at Hollywood and Vine. The evening had hardly begun, or perhaps the afternoon had not yet ended, but nearly all the stools along the bar were occupied. The people at the bar, most of them of indeterminate age and income, sat over their drinks in attitudes that were almost prayerful, though the café was noisier than any church. Blood brothers by virtue of the alcohol in their veins, he thought, they prayed to the god of the bottle for a brief, immediate heaven on earth; and the alcohol was transubstantiated into the stuff of dreams. He felt like an interloper whose presence had to be explained, but nobody paid any attention to him. A flashy young man in a back booth looked up from his plate as if he were going to hail him, but looked down quickly.

In the aisle between the bar and the plywood booths a very old man was performing a shaky two-step, in approximate time to a scratchy jukebox version of Sentimental Journey. Bret stepped out of his way and let him totter by, isolated and supported by the dream of youth that glazed his pale old eyes. He couldn’t remember hearing the tune before, but its soft blue chords made counterpoint with the distant whining loneliness in his head.

He could understand the loneliness that had driven Lorraine to this place. Among the few things he knew about her he remembered that she loved crowds and jukebox music and the moist merriment of bars. The pain of remembering her was so intense that he wouldn’t have been surprised to see her in one of the booths hunched over her drink as he had seen her more than once, with her chin resting on her hand and her dark hair swinging forward over her temples like loosely folded wings. There was a dark-haired girl in the second-last booth who might have been Lorraine until she turned to give him a once-over. He was disappointed and repelled by her harsh black eyes and carnivorous mouth; grateful too that the faces of the dead came back only in dreams.

At the rear end of the bar, beside the steamed window in the kitchen door, he found an empty stool. A large man, whose dirty white apron bulged out over his belly like a maternity garment, came to serve him.

“Scotch and soda?” Until he opened his mouth he hadn’t realized how much he wanted a drink.

“We got no bar Scotch since the war.” The bartender spoke with a heavy accent, underlining his words with his thick black eyebrows. “You want Black and White out of the bottle? Cost you sixty-five.”

“Make it Black and White.”

This man with the Central European accent couldn’t be James P. Rollins. Rollins was an English name, or Irish. Maybe Rollins was the bartender at the other end of the bar, the dark thin fellow with side-burns that made his face seem narrower than it was.

When the big man brought him his change he left a dime on the counter and nodded toward the dark young man. “Is his name Rollins?”

“Naw, that’s Rod. Jimmie ain’t in tonight, it’s his night off.”

“You don’t know where I can find him?”

“Not at home, I know that. Jimmie goes home to sleep. Just stick around, Mister. He comes in all the time on his night off. Gets a discount on his drinks, see? I don’t do that myself. Never come near the place only when I got to, to work. I got a wife and family, that’s the difference. Three kids I got, two boys, gonna be big like their old man.” He thrust out his stomach in a gesture of exultant fatherhood.

“Good. What does Rollins look like?”

“Little guy. Curly hair. Bumpy nose, he broke it once. Just sit here, and I’ll tell you when he comes in. By eight or nine he comes usually. You just wait.”

“Rock and rye, Sollie,” somebody shouted halfway down the bar.

Bret flipped the quarter in his hand onto the bar. Smiling and bowing, Sollie picked it up and bustled away.

Bret looked at his watch. It wasn’t seven yet. He settled down to wait. When he had finished his Scotch he ordered another. By the time he finished his second the strong whisky had begun to soften and subdue his melancholy. The gilt-framed mirror behind the bar was like an archaic proscenium through which he watched the tragic life of the world. An aging woman with inexorably corrugated gray hair stood just inside the door in a tight flowered dress, searching the room with weary, myopic eyes. Somebody’s mother, he thought in burlesque sentimentality, looking for her erring husband or her wandering son. The aging Hero watching for Leander drowned in his nightly Hellespont of gin. Or Penelope the floozie, loverless after all these years, seeking the lost Odysseus to show him the results of her Wassermann test. A little man in dungarees, who had been sitting beside Bret, slid off his stool and jerked his head at the woman. They sat down together in a booth below the frame of the mirror.

A man in the uniform of a chief petty officer had climbed onto the empty stool and ordered a rum-and-Coke. In the mirror Bret saw that the chief was watching him over the rim of his glass. He avoided the keen little eyes, having no desire to talk.

The chief spoke to him anyway, abruptly but not irrelevantly if you knew the Navy mind. “They tried to make an officer out of me, but I wasn’t having any, and I can’t say now I’m sorry. I had a chance to make warrant, but I went to the captain and told him I didn’t want to be an officer, I didn’t want the responsibility, and I wouldn’t feel at home in the wardroom. He put up an argument, but I wasn’t having any, and that was that. I went on eating in the chief’s mess, best food on the ship.”

“That’s the way it was on our ship,” Bret said.

He didn’t want to talk to the broad-faced man, but there was no way out. One thing an officer shouldn’t do was snub an enlisted man, and though the war was over and he’d been out of action for a long time, he was still aware of the obligations of his uniform and felt he owed some return for the privileges of rank. When the bartender brought the chief another rum-and-Coke, Bret insisted on paying for it and ordered himself another Scotch. It was his fourth, and he was beginning to feel it. It worried him a little, but the worry was soon submerged in the good feeling the drink induced. After all he hadn’t had a drink in a long time, and he could expect to feel it. That was what it was for.

“You were on a ship, eh?” the chief said.

“For a couple of years. A jeep carrier.”

“My name’s Mustin.” The chief thrust out a thick hand.

“Taylor’s mine. Glad to know you.”

Their handshake had some of the aspects of a hand-crushing competition, and Bret caught the inference. Mustin figured he was tougher than any officer, but he’d be glad to be shown.

“I was on an AKA myself,” he said, “the last year of the war. Before that, a can. Right now I’m over at the Island, and if that shore duty holds out for two more years I got nothing to gripe about. Two more years I retire. I was ambitious once, but when I found my level I had sense enough to stick to it.” He called the bartender and ordered two more.

Bret looked into his face and saw, as if under a magnifying lens, the harsh lines in the weather-beaten skin, the rum-washed eyes, the tired flesh relaxing on the neck beneath the powerful chin. They earned their retirement after twenty years, he thought. If they enlisted young enough they could retire at forty, but they were old men after twenty years in that iron world. Twenty years of beating around the bars and cat houses that fringed the shores of the two oceans. The old chiefs all looked the same: heavy, hard, shrewd, and somehow lost.

“Women are as crazy as hell,” the chief said. After years of Navy bull sessions Bret found the abrupt transition as natural as speech itself. “Take the wife of a friend of mine for instance. He’s a chief, too. Been all over the world, from Shanghai to France, and thought he knew his way around. Married this girl in Boston six years ago, and right now she’s driving him nuts. When he got reassigned to the Pacific he brought her out here to live, and they got a little house in Dago, out in Pacific Beach beside the bay. This was before we got into the war, and for a long time he got home every night. Then when they sent the ship out, she was on the pineapple run, and he got to see his wife every two or three weeks. She was a good faithful wife, a religious girl too, but he told me she was passionate as hell. Not that he had any objections to that. He felt good about the deal.

“After Pearl Harbor, his ship got ordered to the South Pacific. She kept writing to him practically every day, but about a year after he left she sent him a letter that knocked him for a loop. It turned out she was all right when he was seeing her regular, but it was just too bad when she was on her own. She’d taken down her pants for somebody else, see, and she felt so awful about it, being a religious girl, that she just had to tell him. So she wrote and told him.

“This buddy of mine, his ship was operating in the Solomons then, and on top of his worry about his job this thing about his wife damn near drove him out of his head. Couldn’t he forgive her? she says in her letter – she’d never do it again. She didn’t want to do it that time, but she was drunk and she didn’t know what she was doing till after, when she woke up in bed with this guy in his hotel room. He thought about it for a couple of weeks and talked it over with some of his buddies, and finally he got a grip on himself and wrote her a nice, decent letter. He said he felt like hell about the business, but he was never one to cry over spilt milk, and since she said she’d never do it again he guessed he’d have to swallow it and forget it as well as he could. A couple of months after that he got her answer. She said he was the best husband in the world, and all that crap, and she was going to spend the rest of her life trying to live up to him. Crap!”

“Maybe she meant it,” Bret said. He felt sympathy for the woman. “One slip doesn’t prove anything.”

“Maybe one slip doesn’t. But I didn’t give you the pay-off yet. How’s about another drink?”

“It’s my turn.” Though the story was interesting and he wanted to hear the end of it, a violent impatience was rising inside him. He resented being made the confessor at third hand of a sinner he had never seen, the depository of a monstrous moral problem of which he wanted no part. But he accepted the drink and the rest of the story that went with it.

“It was another year or so before my friend got home and then it was only for five days. His wife was wonderful to him, he thought. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do for him, and at the same time she was more religious than ever, going to Mass every bloody day, and stuff like that. He figured that the Church had straightened her out or something had, and that he’d done the right thing when he stuck by her. He went out again for another eighteen or twenty months and went through six or seven invasions, and she kept writing to him every day and telling him how much she loved him and what she wouldn’t give to have him home with her in bed. In the spring of ’45 he got his orders to shore duty and came home for keeps. His wife was waiting on the dock, and as soon as he took one look at her he knew that something was wrong. Wrong isn’t the word. She hardly got him home before she told him that she’d done it again, she couldn’t help herself. He was kind of under a strain, hadn’t had any sleep since the ship left Pearl, and he gave her a swat across the face. She went to pieces then and came crawling to him on her knees, begging him to forgive her for her sins. ‘Sins?’ he said. ‘How many times, for Christ’s sake?’ ‘Fifteen or sixteen times,’ she said. But she said she only loved him, and she swore to Jesus that if he’d keep her on, she’d be a good wife to him for the rest of her life now that he was home. The hell of it is he still loves her in a way, and he can’t stand the idea of her opening up for a gang of lousy draft dodgers when he was at sea. When he looks at her he can’t help seeing a bitch, and he’s honestly afraid that he’ll get so mad sometimes that he’ll beat her to death. What’s a man to do, Lieutenant?”

“I don’t know,” Bret said. “What would you do?”

Mustin’s little eyes shifted and looked away. “We can have another drink.”

Over his sixth Scotch – or was it his seventh? – Bret considered the problem. He hated Mustin and his sordid story, yet he was as fascinated by it as if it had been a parable whose hidden meaning applied to his own life. Swayed heavily by the alcoholic pulse that was rising and falling in his brain, his imagination saw with hysteric clarity the pipes of sewage that branched like infected veins through all the streets of all the cities, the beast with two backs crying its rut in a thousand undomestic bedrooms, the insatiable appetite of female loins and the brutal meat that fed those blind, adulterous mouths. For the second time that day he felt the black wind blowing him toward extinction and the grave, that barren womb which feared no violation and threatened no second birth. A dead man, the fœtus of the grave, futureless and untormented by even the first pricks of consciousness, merged carelessly with the filth and trash of generations, without a history or a thought to disturb the long serenity of blankness, the timeless gestation of the final dust. Because he wished himself dead he ordered and drank a double Scotch, and another, and another. They gave him back his desire to live, but turned his inward loathing outward.

He turned to Mustin, who had been silent for some time, and said: “This friend of yours with the unfaithful wife, has he been faithful to her?”

Mustin’s face registered shock, as if Bret had named an unfamiliar obscenity. “Hell, no! He’s been in the Navy all his life. He doesn’t play around when he’s at home, but when he pulls into Panama or Honolulu, naturally he takes it where he can get it.”

“What’s bothering him then?” Bret said roughly.

“You don’t understand, Lieutenant.” Mustin leaned toward him in his earnestness. “You don’t get the situation. He married this girl in 1940 and thought he was getting a pure girl – you know, a virgin. Then when he’s away fighting for his country she turns out to be nothing but a two-bit floozie. Worse than a two-bit floozie, without even the two-bits to show for it.”

“You mean while he’s away fighting for his country and incidentally picking up all the tail he can get on the side.”

“What the hell!” exploded Mustin. “I’m a man, ain’t I? A man’s got a right to expect his wife to be pure, even if he isn’t.”

“Is this your wife we’re talking about?”

Mustin lowered his eyes. “Yeah. I didn’t mean to tell you.”

“And you want my opinion on what you should do?”

“I don’t know.” Mustin’s voice was thickened by alcohol and resentment. “You don’t understand the situation. You never had a wife, did you?”

“That’s none of your goddam business!” Bret cried. “I understand the situation well enough. You want to take it out on your wife for the rest of your life for doing what you’ve always done. Go home and tell her you’re sorry.”

The chief’s broad mouth worked and spat. “To hell with you, Lieutenant! You don’t know anything about it.”

“I know more than I want to. You forced your story down my throat and asked for my advice.”

“And what kind of advice did you give me? You can stick it!”

“Don’t talk like that to me.”

“Why the hell shouldn’t I?” The chief’s face was red and malevolent now, pushing closer and closer like an expanding balloon. “You’re no officer of mine, and I say thank God for that! If that’s the kind of ideas they teach you in a college I’m goddam glad I never set foot in one! Goddam college graduates pretending to be officers in a man’s navy–”

In a movement that he neither intended nor controlled, Bret placed his open right hand against the angry face and pushed it backward.

“Hey there, cut that out now!” Sollie the bartender began to climb over the bar.

Mustin went down heavily on his back and got up with his shoulders hunched and his fists extended. “Come on and fight like a man, you friggin’ coward!” The sentence was punctuated by a blow on the side of the head which sent Bret reeling. He came back to attack the red face behind the fists, as if it represented all the unspoken hatred of enlisted men for officers, and all the venereal sin of all the ports.

A left jab to the cheek and a right cross to the side of the jaw put Mustin on his back for the second and last time. Bret stood over the fallen man, pleased to see the blood on his face. He heard a sound in the air behind and over his head, but it was too late to duck. A hard blow jolted the back of his head and split the room into many tiny fragments. It must have been a bottle, he thought as his knees buckled and he fell forward onto the floor. Then the black wind blew out the fluorescent lights.

chapter 11

“Hold it,” Larry Miles called, but he was too far away to interrupt the arc of the descending bottle. He had been watching the progress of the argument between Bret and Mustin, but its climax came so suddenly that it caught him flat-footed. He ran to the end of the bar, stepping over the two prostrate men, and faced Sollie the bartender, who was idly swinging the undamaged beer bottle in his right hand.

“Better give me that bottle, friend,” Larry said.

“Who do you think you are? Who do you think you’re talkin’ to?”

“This officer is a friend of mine. I don’t like to see my friends get hurt.”

“Keep ’em from fightin’ in this bar then.”

“Should I call the cops, Sollie?” the other bartender said.

Half of the occupants of the café were watching the men on the floor from where they sat, but the other half had already lost interest in the fight. It hadn’t been much of a fight anyway. Three punches and the usual pay-off with the bottle.

Mustin sat up holding his jaw, then climbed awkwardly to his feet. “You didn’t need to sap the bugger,” he said.

“You want me to call the police?” Sollie said.

“What the hell for? He didn’t hurt me.” Mustin dabbed at his face with a handkerchief and examined it suspiciously, as if a sly enemy of his might have stained it with red ink.

“What about this guy here?” Sollie said. “We can’t just let him lie here on the floor.”

“I’ll take care of him,” said Larry Miles. He kneeled down beside the unconscious man and looked at the bruise on the back of his head.

“Is he hurt bad?” Sollie asked with some anxiety.

“Naw, he’ll be okay. He’d of come to already if he wasn’t drunk. But we better get him out of here.”

“You got a car – you know where he lives?”

“Yeah. I’ll bring the car around to the front, and you can walk him out.”

“You sure you’re a friend of his?” Mustin said. “He’s a set-up for somebody to roll him. What’s his name?”

“Taylor,” Larry answered smoothly. “Lieutenant Bret Taylor, USNR. I work for a very good friend of his.”

“That’s his name, all right,” Mustin said to the bartender. He put his hand under Bret’s shoulder, turned him onto his back, and raised him to a half-sitting position. “Well, let’s get under way. I’m sorry this happened, but I guess it couldn’t be helped. The guy’s a little nuts, if you ask me.”

Maybe you’re righter than you know, Larry thought. Little did you know that you were talking to a fugitive from a padded cell, and little am I going to tell you. He brought his coupé to the front of the café, and looked up and down the street for his best friends and severest critics, the cops. Not that he knew them west of Syracuse, and not that they knew him, but he had a very special reason for wishing to avoid that pleasure. When he had made sure that the coast was clear he honked. Mustin and Sollie came out through the swinging doors with Bret dragging half upright between them. Larry opened the door and helped to haul him into the car. He could tell by the sound of his breathing, or thought he could, that Bret had come to from the knockout and passed directly into an alcoholic sleep.

As Larry drove away with the semirecumbent blue bundle beside him on the seat, the situation pleased him so much that he could have crowed like a rooster. Come to think of it, there was a good deal to be said for being a rooster, even if a rooster did have a hatchet waiting for him at the back door of the harem. Hell, he had a hatchet waiting for him too, but he was going to give the hatchetman a long and merry chase before they buried it in his own particular neck.

He drove toward Hollywood along the wide boulevard, lit by the starry neon symbols of glamour and nocturnal delight, past lighted store windows through which he caught glimpses of the smooth and glittering world he was one day going to crash. Just how the unconscious man beside him fitted into the picture, he didn’t quite see, but it seemed like a good idea to take him along. He’d know what the guy was doing so long as he kept him with him, and the closer tab he kept on the new developments in the Taylor setup the better chance he’d have of keeping things running smooth.

More importantly, he felt, it pleased him to do the exact opposite of what Paula West expected. She’d ordered him to stay away from her lieutenant, and she was going to pay him to take the order. Only it happened he didn’t take orders from anybody. He’d stick to Taylor like a brother as long as he felt any pressure the other way. Matter of fact, he was better than a brother, he was a good Samaritan. He spent the rest of the drive home alternately wondering exactly what a good Samaritan was, and trying to decide whether it would be safe to take a small cut, say fifty per cent, of the contents of Taylor’s wallet. In the end he decided that it wouldn’t. That Navy chief in the Golden Sunset was a pretty shrewd character, and he’d probably have a long memory. Larry thought he’d better play it straight with Taylor and waive the petty profits in the deal. He felt sure that that’s what a good Samaritan would do, whatever the hell a good Samaritan was. Something like the Red Cross probably.

He drove straight into his garage and stopped the engine. Taylor was still sleeping, with his head wedged awkwardly in the corner of the seat. Larry took a flashlight out of the glove compartment and turned it on the closed face. There was a blue welt on the temple where the chief’s fist had caught him, but otherwise he looked all right, snoring away as if he was home in bed. It gave him a pleasant sense of power to have Taylor in his car like this, completely helpless and unsuspecting in the dark garage. Even in sleep it wasn’t the face of a man you’d want to fool around with. It was a strong, hard face, and Taylor was a strong, hard boy. The old one-two that put the chief to sleep was as neat as any he’d seen since the last time he fought himself. But right now the guy was as harmless as a baby. Larry slapped his face a few times in an experimental way, and damned if the guy didn’t open his eyes and try to sit up!

“Take it easy, Lieutenant,” Larry said.

“Who are you?” The words came thickly out of the dry and swollen mouth.

“Just a friend – a fine-feathered friend of the family. You feeling okay?”

“God, no! What happened?”

“You just got conked with a bottle, Lieutenant. The bartender put you out so’s you wouldn’t kill the other guy.”

“I must’ve been tight. What in hell did I want to fight him for? Something about a woman–”

“Yeah, it usually is. You think you can walk up to my apartment? What you need is some shut-eye. It’s no palatial abode, but you can use it if you want.”

“You didn’t tell me your name. I don’t know you, do I?”

“The name’s Milne, Harry Milne.” It was a name he kept handy to use when his own wasn’t convenient. “I was sitting in the café and I saw you get sapped, so I thought I’d get you out of there before the cops came. These L.A. cops can be kind of unreasonable.”

“You’re very kind, but I can’t impose on you–”

“Don’t give it a thought. I like the way you punch. I did a little fighting myself at one time. Let’s go, if you think you can make it.”

Taylor was shaky, but he could walk without help. Larry took him in by the back door of the building and up in the freight elevator, because there was no point in advertising the fact that he had a guest. Women were another matter: the girls that visited him were good for his reputation. If they weren’t, he visited them. But he didn’t know yet what use he’d have for Taylor, so he kept his acquisition to himself.

Taylor was as meek as a kitten and didn’t say a word until they were inside the apartment. Then he asked where the bathroom was and made a run for it. While Taylor was retching and cawing into the toilet bowl, Larry took his collection of autographed nudes off the wall and shut them up in a drawer. As long as things were sort of vague like this between them, he figured he might as well concentrate on making a good impression. The way things were going he and Taylor might end up as bosom pals. And that would be a belly laugh of the first water. He was a card, all right, a real wag out of the top drawer with bells on. In a way he regretted he didn’t have an audience for this, but naturally there was nobody he could trust. He was so slick he barely trusted himself.

When Taylor came out of the bathroom, he looked ready for nothing but bed. Because there was no blood in his face his tan was a dirty jaundice yellow. His forehead was shining with sweat, and his eyes were still watering from the nausea. He was walking straighter though, and that was a good sign.

“Feeling better?”

“Yeah. I had some stuff to get rid of. I’m not used to drinking whisky.”

“How’s your head?”

“Not so bad. It doesn’t seem to be bleeding.”

“You’re lucky the bottle didn’t break.”

“I suppose I am. Well, I’ll be shoving off–”

“Don’t do that, Lieutenant. Where do you want to go?”

“By the way, my name’s Taylor.” He shook Larry’s hand. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

“Forget it. You’re in no shape to go out again right away. You got a place to stay?”

“No, not exactly. But I couldn’t possibly take up any more of your time.”

“Hell, stay here. You can sleep in the other bed. Give me a reason why not.”

“It’s very good of you–”

“Nuts. I’d do the same for anybody, for any veteran, that is. The way I look at it we all owe something to you guys that fought the war.” Jesus, what corn! But he certainly put some real sincerity into the lines.

“If you’re certain it wouldn’t put you out in any way. I admit I don’t feel much like looking for a room tonight.”

“Consider the question closed, Lieutenant. You can stay here as long as you like. You can even wear a suit of my pajamas – we’re about the same size, eh? And don’t say another word. Your bed’s right in here.”

By ten thirty Bret was sleeping again, and Larry slipped out quietly to keep his appointment with Paula West.