The photograph of the Ironist on the portico was staring unblinkingly into the afternoon sun. The offstage drama in Quinto, I told it silently, was better than the kind they rehearsed. It didn’t answer; it was lost in a dream of its own loveliness.
Chapter 3
I found a phone booth in a drugstore down the block. There was no James Slocum in the Nopal Valley section of the directory, but there was a Mrs. Olivia Slocum, presumably his mother. I made the ten-cent toll call and got a cracked dry voice which could have belonged to man or woman:
“The Slocum residence.”
“Mrs. James Slocum, please.”
There was a click on the line: “All right, Mrs. Strang. I’ll take it no my extension.”
Mrs. Strang grunted and went off the line.
“Archer speaking,” I said. “I’m in Quinto.”
“I hoped you would call. Yes?”
“Look here, Mrs. Slocum, I’m practically handcuffed. I can’t ask questions, or I’ll start talk where there isn’t any. I have no lead and no contacts. Isn’t there some way I can meet your family—your husband, at least?”
“But he has nothing to do with it. You’ll only rouse suspicion.”
“Not necessarily. If I float around without an explanation, I’ll rouse suspicion for sure. And I won’t find anything out if I can’t talk to anybody.”
“You sound discouraged,” she said.
“I was never encouraged, I told you that. Operating in a vacuum, I don’t stand much chance of helping you. Even a list of suspects—”
“But there are none. I can’t name a single person. Is the case really so hopeless?”
“Unless I get a lucky break, like somebody running up to me in the street and confessing. This is a very intimate business, there’s nothing overt in it like the ordinary divorce setup, and I need to get closer to your life.”
Very softly, she said: “Are you proposing to spy on me, Mr. Archer?”
“Hardly. I’m working for you. But I need a center to work from, and you and your family are it. I got a look at your husband and daughter just now, but a look is not enough.”
“I specifically instructed you not to approach my husband.”
Her moods were hard to follow and match. I changed mine: “If you don’t let me handle the thing my own way, I’ll have to drop it. I’ll mail you your money.”
In the silence that followed, I could hear her tapping with a pencil on the base of the telephone. “No,” she said finally. “I want you to do what you can. If you have any reasonable suggestion—”
“It’s not very reasonable, but it should do. Do you have any friends in Hollywood? Picture people?”
Another silence. “There’s Mildred Fleming, she’s a secretary in one of the studios. I had lunch with her today.”
“Which studio?”
“Warner’s, I think.”
“All right. You told her how good the play is. She has a boy-friend who works for an agent who deals in literary properties. Me.”
“I see,” she answered slowly. “Yes, that’s reasonable enough. Actually, it will fit in very well. A few of James’s friends are coming in for cocktails. If you could be here at five?”
“I’ll come early.”
“Very well, Mr. Archer.” She gave me directions, and hung up.
My shirt was dank from sitting in the steaming booth. I drove back to my motel, changed to shorts and went down to the beach for a swim. The blue-green swells were heaving slowly beyond the surf. Further out, a few white sails leaned across the horizon, curved sharp like wings in the wind, but motionless in the distance. I met a wave head-on as it broke and took the cold shock running. My feet kicked out behind me and I swam straight out for a quarter of a mile. There the kelp-beds stopped me, a tangled barrier of brown and yellow tubes and bulbs floating low in the water. I hated the touch of underwater life.
I turned on my back and floated, looking up at the sky, nothing around me but cool clear Pacific, nothing in my eyes but long blue space. It was as close as ever got to cleanliness and freedom, as far as I ever got from all the people. They had jerrybuilt the beaches from San Diego to the Golden Gate, bulldozed super-highways through the mountains, cut down a thousand years of redwood growth, and built an urban wilderness in the desert. They couldn’t touch the ocean. They poured their sewage into it, but it couldn’t be tainted.
There was nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn’t cure. Except that there were too many Ararats, and I was no Noah. The sky was flat and empty, and the water was chilling me. I swam to the kelp-bed and plunged down through it. It was cold and clammy like the bowels of fear. I came up gasping and sprinted to shore with a barracuda terror nipping at my heels.
A wave thrust me up on the beach, where a cold late afternoon wind took over, armed with small needles of sand. I wasn’t a noble savage after all.
I was still chilly a half-hour, crossing the pass to Nopal Valley. Even at its summit the highway was wide and new, rebuilt with somebody’s money. I could smell the source of the money when I slid down into the valley on the other side. It stank like rotten eggs.
The oil wells from which the sulphur gas rose crowded the slopes on both sides of the town. I could see them from the highway as I drove in: the latticed triangles of the derricks where trees had grown, the oil-pumps nodding and clanking where cattle had grazed. Since ’thirty-nine or ’forty, when I had seen it last, the town had grown enormously, like a tumor. It had thrust out shoots in all directions: blocks of match-box houses in raw new housing developments and the real estate shacks to go with them, a half-mile gauntlet of one-story buildings along the highway: veterinarians, chiropractors, beauty shops, marketerias, restaurants, bars, liquor stores. There was a new four-story hotel, a white frame gospel tabernacle, a bowling alley wide enough to house a B-36. The main street had been transformed by glass brick, plastic, neon. A quiet town in a sunny valley had hit the jackpot hard, and didn’t know what to do with itself at all.
More had changed than the face of the buildings, or the number and make of the cars. The people were different and there were too many of them. Crowds of men whose faces were marked by sun and work and boredom walked in the streets and in and out of the bars, looking for fun or trouble. Very few women showed on the main street. The blue-shirted cop on the main corner wore his holster on the front of his hip, with the flap unbuttoned and the gun-butt showing.
Trail Road turned off to the right on the far side of the town, and climbed through the oil fields to a gently sloping mesa which overlooked the valley. As it climbed it dwindled down to a narrow blacktop looping up the side of the sunbaked hill. The mountains rose sheer in front of the nose of my car, starkly shadowed by the declining light. A long, low house half-hidden by giant oaks sat in the middle of the mesa, as indigenous as a boulder. Before I reached it I had to stop and open a gate which barred the road. On either side of it a six-foot cyclone fence topped by strands of barbed wire stretched out of sight.
The road inside the gate was freshly gravelled, and sentineled by twin rows of young palms. There were a couple of cars parked in the circular drive that curved around in front of the house. One was the old Packard sedan I had seen in front of the Quinto Theatre. I left my car beside it and crossed the terraced lawn, dodging the rainbowed spray from a sprinkling system.
The house was built of adobe brick the color of the earth, pressed down to the earth by a heavy red tile roof, and massive as a fortress. A deep veranda ran along its front. I climbed the low concrete steps. A woman in a red sweater and slacks was curled like a scarlet snake in one corner of a green canvas porch swing. Her head was bent over a book, and red harlequin spectacles gave her shadowed face a look of queer concentration. The concentration was real; she gave no sign of hearing me or seeing me until I spoke:
“Excuse me. I’m looking for Mrs. Slocum.”
“Excuse
