been the first old slob out there with a young wife who didn’t speak much English. Yeah, well. My cousin farm. For all I knew, Soledad would put the girls straight into another house. I hadn’t reached Halliday, either. All I’d done was make bad smells and loud noises, and all I had to show was eighteen dollars and a dead pimp. No, I’d left ten bucks in the tray. One of the girls had it now. Eight dollars and a dead pimp. The fire reached the gas line in the kitchen then and made me jump. I tossed the pimp’s gun in the ditch and drove back to town. Halfway there I remembered there wasn’t anything at home, not even coffee, so I stopped at an all-night diner and bought myself a couple plates of chicken hash with Delores’s money.
I expected to feel pretty bad the next day, but as it happened I didn’t feel much of anything. When I thought it through again, I still couldn’t see a way to turn the girls loose without killing the pimp. Not without getting cooled myself, then or later. I don’t pretend I know what people deserve, but the girls couldn’t stay there and I figured I had at least as much right to be perpendicular as the pimp. Actually, I did feel bad, like hell in fact, but about Metz’s tongue. It was Metz I still couldn’t stop thinking about. That didn’t make sense to me, but there’s no law that things have to make sense to me, and eventually I said the hell with it and went out to buy groceries.
I was planning to get juice, bread, bacon, eggs, potatoes, and a pound of coffee. While I was there I figured I’d better get some spaghetti and maybe some ground beef, and then I thought I ought to have some vegetables, growing boy like me, and some fixings if I wanted to make stew or a casserole, and by the time I was done I’d spent just about all I had on groceries. I didn’t really regret it. There’s worse things to blow your money on. It’s good having a house full of food. When I pulled back into the lot at home, I noticed a gleaming gull-wing Mercedes parked in one of the slots. It was empty. No one with any business at the Harmon Court would be driving a car like that. I got out carrying one of the bags and put a hand to the hood. Warm. I set my groceries down on the sidewalk, got my gun from the glove compartment, and walked around the corner of the manager’s office, holding it down by my leg.
The pool was deserted, as usual, except for the drifting clots of brown algae that weren’t supposed to hurt you. It was a bright morning and the sun was in my eyes. That wasn’t so good, and I considered swinging around and coming in the other way, but if they were watching from my window I didn’t want them to notice I’d noticed anything. The gun was down behind my right leg where they probably couldn’t see it. Then the shadow of the Sun- Glo Girl’s elbow fell across my face and I blinked in the dimness. My front door was half open. I strolled up at a little angle so whoever was inside wouldn’t have a clean shot, and when I was almost to the door, I kicked it open and spun back against the wall. Nothing. I barged into the room, gun first.
Scarpa had pulled my desk chair to the middle of the rug, and was sitting there reading
“It’s one of my favorites,” I said, my gun trained on his pocket handkerchief.
“This is an old book? Famous?”
“That’s right.”
“It’s a pretty good book. You mind I borrow it?”
“Go ahead.”
I lowered the gun.
Scarpa lay the book face down on his knee, open to keep his place, and looked around the room. “You live like a pig,” he said.
“I thought I kept it pretty neat.”
“That’s what I mean. Imagine having to keep a place like this neat.”
“You’re a hard man to please.”
“It’s not true,” he said. “I’m easy to please. All I want is people acting sensible, doing what they say, and I’m pleased. Of course, they got to do what I say, too.”
I stuck the gun in my pocket. My hand was sweaty, and I wiped it on my leg.
“I had a little trouble last night,” he said. “Somebody came to one of my businesses. Not a big business, just a little business of mine. But they chased everybody away, and shot a guy works for me. And then they burned the place down.”
“What, the whorehouse?”
“Oh, you know all about it?”
“It’s in the papers. That was your whorehouse? I wouldn’t brag about being in that line of work.”
“Just a little business,” he said, “and it’s not enough they got to kill everybody. They got to
“It’s a big town, Lenny. Every now and then something happens I don’t do.”
“You didn’t burn down my whorehouse?”
“I didn’t burn down your whorehouse. Why would I?”
“That’s what I’m asking.”
“I’ve got no reason to do it. Where’s the percentage?”
“No percentage.”
“Well then,” I said and lifted my palms.
“I’ll tell you something,” he said. “It’s the God’s truth. As long as I been doing this, I have never gunned anybody without a reason. It’s sloppy. You start gunning people just cause you got guns and everything goes to hell.”
“Good. Don’t gun me.”
“I got a feeling about you, Corson. But a feeling’s not a reason.”
“No.”
“But I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he said. “In twenty-four hours, no, let’s be nice. In seventy-two hours. I want you living someplace else. Some other city. Where I never see you or hear about you again. All right? Someplace far away. I’m not gonna come here again. I’ll send people. And Wednesday afternoon, if you’re still here? I’ll have my reason. Cause you didn’t do what I say.”
He closed the book and stood. “This was a nice short conversation,” he said, and walked to the door.
When he was halfway along the pool, he called back, “Thanks for the book.”
In a minute I heard the Mercedes start up, and then it ground off into the distance.
I put my desk chair back where it goes and opened up my trunk to see if he’d mussed my books. Then I opened the closet and sniffed. You could still smell the smoke on my jacket. It was nice Scarpa hadn’t thought of that, but I didn’t think he’d make enough mistakes to save me.
Aside from the chair, he hadn’t disturbed anything, but I walked around fiddling and putting things to rights anyway. My books, my bed, my clothes, my desk. It had been a pretty good room. I’d liked being here. There were plaid curtains, and I’d gotten used to seeing them when I woke up in the morning. They let me know that I wasn’t back on the road again. It was the first place I’d ever had a bathroom to myself, and I always kept it so it shone, so no one would ever be able to go in there and say, This is some bum’s bathroom. When you’ve been on the road, you hate to leave a room. You know they might not let you have another.
My bag of groceries was still on the front walk, and I fetched it back and got the rest from the car, and then put them all away in the kitchen. I’d planned a big breakfast and that’s what I had: four eggs up, a couple stacks of flapjacks, about half the bacon, a few pieces of buttery rye toast, and coffee. Then I cleared the dishes and washed the pans and drank another cup, slowly, while I read the paper with my feet up on the guest chair. And then I went for a ride, because the car was all mine now, bought and paid for.
I had it in mind to take a spin along the coast, with the waves rolling and racing as if they were skipping along with the car, and the sun warming my face and the clean wind in my hair, but I don’t drive a convertible and I wound up in a second-run movie theater on Pascal. It was some kind of science fiction deal. I’d come in in the middle. These octopus-things that lived in craters were dragging the spacemen underground. It was a planet of women, and you could tell their queen was evil because her eyebrows were pointy, and you could tell she was the
