Phillips expelled his breath, disbelievingly. “Is that all?” He rose from the chair. “Ten minutes, Mr. Rios, and you’ll go?”
“Never to darken your doorway again.”
“Wait here,” he said abruptly and left the room. I poured my sherry into a potted plant.
When Nicholas Paris entered the room, the air went dead around him. He wore an old gray blazer over a white shirt and tan khaki slacks. No belt. He might have been a country squire returning from a walk with his white-blond hair, ruddy complexion and composed features — there was more than a hint of Hugh in his face. But then you looked into his eyes. They were blue and they stared out as if from shadows focusing on a landscape that did not exist beneath the mild California sun. I felt the smile leak from my face. Phillips sat him down in a chair, scowled at me and said, “Ten minutes.”
I approached him. “Nicholas?”
He inclined his head toward me.
“My name is Henry. I was Hugh’s friend.”
He said nothing.
I knelt beside the chair and looked at him. It was as if he were standing behind a screen: the thousand splinters refused to add up to a human face. I saw that his pupils were moving erratically. Drugs.
“I was his friend,” I continued. “Your son Hugh.”
He looked away, out the window.
He said in a voice hoarse from disuse, “Hugh.”
“Hugh,” I said.
I kept talking, softly. I told him how I had met Hugh and how much I had cared for him. I told him that I believed Hugh’s death was a murder. I was telling him that I needed to know what, if anything, Hugh had said to him when he visited here.
Nicholas Paris stared out the window as I spoke, giving no indication that he heard anything but the loud chirping of a bird outside.
And then, suddenly, I saw a tear run from the corner of his eye. A single, streaky tear.
He said, “Is Hugh dead?”
He hadn’t known.
“Oh, God,” I muttered. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s enough,” a woman spoke, commandingly, above me. I looked up. Katherine Paris stood, coldly composed, beside me. Her face was red beneath her makeup, and her small, elegant hands were clenched into fists. I glanced up at the doorway. Phillips was standing there and, behind him, two burly orderlies.
I rose from the floor. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Paris.”
She raised a hand and slapped me. “Get him out of here,” she ordered Phillips.
He gave a signal and the orderlies moved in.
7
It was dusk when Katherine Paris’s bronze-colored Fiat came off the road that led from Silverwood and turned onto the highway. I switched off the radio, started my car, and followed her. There was no reason to think she would recognize my car; blue Accords are so common as to be almost invisible on the roads of California. She led me past vineyards, orchards, farm houses, and a desolate-looking housing tract with street names like Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. It was getting chilly out, a sign of autumn in the air. We drove on and on, deeper into the country between gently wooded hills now gloomy in the thick blue light of early evening. She turned her lights on and I turned on mine. A truck roared by and then a motorcycle and then it was just the two of us again, and the dense smell of wet earth rising from the darkened fields around us.
It would have been nice, I thought, had Hugh Paris been beside me. There was a restaurant in St. Helena that I’d been to once and liked. We could have driven there for dinner and stayed overnight somewhere and visited the wineries the next day. Eliot had it wrong about memory and desire; they smelled like wet earth on an autumn night and had nothing to do with spring.
My thoughts drifted back to the task at hand. The Fiat’s turn signal flashed on and we went down a narrow road. A brightly-lit three-story building rose just ahead of us. A sign above the entrance identified it as the Hotel George. The hotel was constructed of wood, painted white with green trim, a charming old place. A wide porch surrounded the first floor and chairs were lined up near the railing. They were mostly empty now. She parked and I watched her climb the steps and walk quickly across the porch into the building.
I waited in my car to see whether she would come out. There were some hot springs in the vicinity and I imagined that the George was a place from which people commuted to them. There were only three other cars in the lot; business, apparently, was slow.
When she failed to come out after five minutes, it occurred to me that Mrs. Paris might be meeting someone. Who? A member of the family? It was a small family to begin with and events had savaged it.
Of Linden’s grandchildren, John and Christina Smith, only Christina married. She and Robert had two sons, Jeremy and Nicholas. Of the two sons only Nicholas married and he and Katherine had produced only one child, Hugh. Of these four generations, the only survivors were John Smith, the judge, mad Nicholas and Katherine herself. The decimation of Grover Linden’s descendants proceeded as if in retribution. I shook myself out of my musing and realized that another five minutes had passed. I decided to go in after her.
The lobby was a little rectangular space, the floor covered with a thick gray carpet, the furnishings dark Spanish-style chairs and tables. A polished staircase beside the registration desk led to the upper floors. Across from the desk was an open door with a small neon sign above the doorway identifying it as the bar. I went over and looked in. Through the dimly-lit darkness I could see her, sitting on a high stool at the end of the bar. I walked in and approached her from behind. She was alone.
I took the stool next to her, ordering bourbon and water. I wished her a good evening.
Her head swiveled toward me until we were face to face. I saw exhaustion in her eyes so deep that it quickly extinguished the flash of anger that registered when she recognized me. There was contempt in her look and disdain and beneath it all a plea to be left alone. I regretted that I could not comply.
“May I buy you a drink, Mrs. Paris?”
“Why not,” she said mockingly. “I’m sure they’ll take your money here and I never refuse a drink.” I summoned the bartender and ordered refills. “You follow me here?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“To talk.”
“About Hugh?”
“Not necessarily. We could talk about you. Or your husband. Or your ex-father-in-law.”
“I find none of those subjects appealing,” she said. The darkness of the room cast shadows that hid all but the deepest lines in her face and she looked like a much younger woman. She was small, her feet not reaching to the metal ring at the bottom of the bar stool, and, for an instant, as she lifted her drink she looked as fragile as a child.
“Then tell me about your poetry.”
She looked sidewise at me. “Mr. Rios, I once had a talent for writing, a very small talent. I used it up a long time ago, or drank it up, perhaps. At any rate, that subject is the least appealing of all.” After a moment’s silence, she asked abruptly, “Do you like your life?”
“You mean, am I happy?”
“Yes, if you want to be vulgar about it.” She finished her drink. Another soldier down.
“I have been, from time to time.”
“A lawyer’s answer,” she said disdainfully. “Mincing — oh, pardon me. Equivocal. What I mean is,” and her voice was suddenly louder, “on the whole, wouldn’t you rather be dead?”
“No.”
“Well I often think I would,” she said softly.
