of resentments, the perpetual nervousness his bravado only partially concealed. He worked swiftiy and with great intensity and thoroughness, pausing now and then to write down the address of a diamond cluster he couldn't identify.
On and on he worked, until it was growing light in the eastern sky. He looked at his watch. It was 6:00 A. M., and soon the day shift would come along. He still had five drawers to search, and not enough time to do so.
He determined to come back the next night, and the next too, if need be. Quickly he closed the drawer he was working on, looked to see if he'd left traces of his presence, and noted nothing and stood to rise.
But then he said: what the hell.
He plucked open one of the drawers yet unexamined, and pulled at a pile of diagrams, as if in a blur or a dream. He didn't even look hard at them, but simply let them flutter through his peripheral vision. He saw that somebody had spilled some ink. They'd made a mistake. He passed onward.
But then he thought: there haven't been any other mistakes.
He rifled back, found the page, and Jesus H. Christ Mother Mary of God, there was a concentration of phone lines so intense it looked like a Rorschach ink blot. In it, he saw his future.
He noted the address, and said to himself: Of course!
Chapter 29
'No,' said Ben, 'no, that one has splatters. It didn't have splatters. No splatters.'
'What did it have, darling? You have to help me, you cute little booboo,' said the Countess.
'You two birds,' said Virginia, 'you actually think this shit is fun! My feet hurt. We been walking for ten years.'
'Virginia, I told you not to wear them really high heels.'
'But she looks gorgeous, darling,' said the Countess. 'She's more edible than any of these paintings, and I love the shade of her pretty pink toenails.'
'Dorothy, you're the one they should call Bugsy. You're as screwy as they come.'
The threesome stood in the modern wing of the Los Angeles County Museum before a bewildering display of the very latest in decadent art. The painting immediately before them looked like Hiroshima in a paint factory, an explosion of pigment flung demonically across a canvas until every square inch of it absorbed some of the fury of the blast.
'That guy has problems,' observed Bugsy.
'He's a bastard. A Spanish prick who collaborated with the Nazis and beats all his women. But he's the most famous artist in the world. He gets a lot of pussy.'
Ben leaned forward to read the name.
'Never heard of him,' he said. 'He ought to take drawing lessons '
'You never heard of him! You never heard of nothing didn't have a dame or a ten-spot attached,' said Virginia, bored. Dammit! The spaghetti strap of her right shoe kept slipping off her foot and coming to nesde in the groove of her little toe. There, it rubbed that poor painted soldier raw. She kept having to bend over to readjust it. She did so one more time, and heard boyfriend Ben say to his best friend Dorothy the Countess from directly behind her, 'Now that's art!'
'You dirty-minded Jew-boy,' she said. 'Ben, you are so low. You come to look at pictures and you end up doing close-ups on my ass!'
'He's just a boy,' said the Countess. 'Virginia, what can you expect? That's why we love him so.'
'Yeah, Dorothy, but you don't have to uck-fay him no more. I still do.'
The Countess laughed. Her raffish friends filled her with glee. They were certainly more amusing than the dullards she'd grown up with in Dutchess County.
'Anyhow, dear: no splatters?'
'None. Not a one. I'm telling you, it looked like Newark with a tree.'
'Newark?'
'I been to that town,' said Virginia. 'It's New York without Broadway. It's just the Bronx forever. Wops and guns. I wouldn't go back on a bet.'
'Newark meaning? What was its quality of Newarkness?'
'Square, dark, dirty, crowded, brown. I don't know why I thought of Newark.'
'Oh, it's so obvious. In that little rat brain of yours, darling, New York is still glamorous and adventurous. But if you subtract the neon and the glamour, you're left with nothing but masses of grimy buildings. Voila: Newark.'
'I wish I could remember the fucking name. He told me the name. It just went right out of my head. Virginia, you remember the name? Oh, no, that's right, you were rubbing your tits against Alan Ladd.'
'I don't think he noticed. He'd never get me a part in a picture. His wifey wouldn't let him.'
'Our attentions are wandering again, are they not?' said Dorothy. 'Let us recommit them to the object at hand.'
'It may not matter, anyhow,' said Bugsy. 'He's smack in the middle of a fucking war down there. Eleven of his boys got blown out of their boots in some nigger cathouse thing. Everybody's talking he's going down.'
'That cowboy may get him,' said Virginia. 'Dorothy, did our hero ever tell you how he straightened this cowboy out at the train station in Hot Springs? Guy lights my cigarette, so Benny pulls his tough-guy act on him. But the cowboy ain't buying it. So Ben gives him a poke. Only it don't land, and the cowboy hits Ben so hard it almost makes him bald. Ben cry-babied for a month and a half and I notice he ain't been back to Hot Springs. He ain't going back until somebody takes care of the cowboy.'
'Virginia, he hits me harder every time you tell that story/' said Ben. 'It's her favorite story. She's been telling it all over town. I got New York guys calling me and asking me if I settled up with the cowboy, for Christ's sakes.'
'But you haven't. See, Dorothy, he really does fear the cowboy.'
'He knew how to throw a punch, I'll tell you that,' said Bugsy, remembering the hammerblow to his midsection. 'But I'll tell you what else. When I finally get a line on his ass, he will be?hey, hey! There it is! It was like that,' he said excitedly. 'Virginia, wasn't that it?'
He pointed to a dense, enigmatic work, darkish and lacquered.
Dorothy didn't have to examine the label. She knew a Braque anywhere.
Chapter 30
Earl's daddy? they said. Earl's daddy was a great man.
It wasn't like it was now, they said. Back then the law meant something and the law meant Earl's daddy, Charles.
Things are wild now, but they wasn't when Earl's daddy was around. Earl's daddy kept the law. Nobody done busted the law when Earl's daddy was around.
Earl's daddy was a great man.
Even if Earl won a big medal killing Japs, he wasn't the man his daddy was. Now that man was a great man.
I don't know nobody who'd stand against Earl's daddy.
You know. Earl's daddy was a big hero in the Great War. He killed a mess of Germans.
It was nearly unanimous. In Blue Eye, Arkansas, the one-horse town that was the seat of Polk County, the station stop for western Arkansas on the Kansas City, Texas & Gulf run to New Orleans, and a place where the weary traveler could get a cold Coca-Cola off of Route 71, Earl's daddy still cast a big and a bold shadow. You could ask about Earl in a grocery store and in a barbershop or at the police station and what you heard about wasn't Earl
