yards. That was a shortcut he used all the time, he’d said, was it his fault if the goddamn city was full of creeps and muggers? We had nothing on either of them and they knew it; they thought the law couldn’t touch them. And they were right: the law couldn’t.
But I could.
Not for a few days, though-not until the busted up Humpty-Dumpty put himself back together again. So I slept, and little by little I mended. And sometimes while I slept I dreamed. Most of the dreams were bad: distorted replays of the assault jumbled together with images of Leonard Purcell crawling through blood that was no longer his, that was now mine. Once I woke up yelling and found myself thrashing around on the floor, fighting off the shades of those faceless attackers. Kerry wasn’t there at the time, and it was a good thing she wasn’t. Not only because the incident would have frightened her, but because I would not have wanted her to see my face just then, the naked truth of what I was thinking.
If any of them had been in the room-Dessault, the three sluggers, any of them-I would have killed them all.
But I had other dreams too, much less fearful and without any psychotic aftermath. They were like film montages: faces, objects, juxtaposed and often superimposed in no apparent order. Leonard Purcell, the Hainelin snuff box, Melanie, Alicia, the photograph of Danny Martinez and his family, the cliff behind the Purcell home, Dessault, Tom Washburn, Elisabeth Summerhayes sitting alone among the ruins on Sutro Heights, Margaret Prine, Alejandro Ozimas smiling at me across his breakfast table while the freaked-out blonde picked her cinnamon roll apart and his house boy mouthed the words Fuck you behind his back, Eldon Summerhayes, the housekeeper Lina, the Martinez farmhouse and the crucifixes on the wall, Dessault running away from the barn… other images that I couldn’t quite identify. There were voices, too, but I could only hear parts of them, the way I had only been able to hear parts of the one slugger’s shouted threats. “Deadfall so sorry fall how could you I know who pushed him two thousand dollars extortion the big gold rush fuck anything in pants disgusting little shit challenge man of my tastes whosoever toucheth her shall not be innocent lousy goddamn pervert once bitten twice shy lust is what binds them claws like cats like challenges like proof like profit like deadfall… ” None of it made any sense, and yet it did, I knew it did, it was all there and all I had to do was take the montages apart piece by piece, find the missing images, separate the voices and add the missing words. Except that I couldn’t, not while I slept and dreamed and not while I was awake because I couldn’t think clearly yet, my mind and my body were both still healing.
On Wednesday morning I felt well enough to get up for a while. My left side, where I had the two cracked ribs, gave me hell whenever I moved too suddenly. So did my concussed head. I had tape around my middle, adhesive and gauze here and there, a splint on my sore finger; when I looked at myself in the mirror I thought I resembled a mostly unwrapped mummy with a three-day growth of beard. But it wasn’t funny. Nothing was funny right now.
Kerry had insisted on unplugging the phone the past two days and I hadn’t argued with her. A few people had called Eberhardt at the office, including Tom Washburn; Eb had told me that when he stopped by on Tuesday evening. Nothing new on the case, though. Everything on hold, waiting for me to wade into it again, stir it up again.
I plugged the phone back in and called the office. Eberhardt said, “You sound better today. Feel better too?”
“Enough to get out of bed for a while.”
“How’s the eye? Swelling down on it yet?”
“Yeah. I can see out of it all right.”
“Another few days, you’ll be back in harness.”
“Another few days, hell. Tomorrow, maybe.”
“Hey, come on, hero, they cut you up pretty bad-”
“And now it’s my turn to cut somebody up. Don’t argue with me, Eb; I’m in no mood for it. Anything new this morning?”
He sighed. “Washburn came by twenty minutes ago. Dropped off that photograph he found.”
“What’s it of?”
“Alicia Purcell, he says. You want me to bring it over there?”
“When you get a chance. Anything else?”
“Nada. Well, Ben Klein got a lead on the whereabouts of Danny Martinez’s in-laws in Mexico-Cuernavaca, he said. But you know how it is with the Mexican cops. Be days before Ben gets word, even if Martinez is there and they pick him up.”
“No other calls?”
“That’s it.”
“If there’s anything else let me know right away, will you? I’m not unplugging the phone anymore.”
“Will do. Just take it easy, okay? Thing’s will keep for the time being.”
“Sure,” I said. “But I won’t-not much longer.”
I went back into the kitchen and heated up the rest of Kerry’s soup and ate it with a slice of bread. I wasn’t hungry, the food had no taste, and chewing the bread made my face hurt; but I ate it all just the same, for strength. Afterward I moved around for the same reason, shuffling from room to room; I was so damned stiff and sore from the beating and from lying in bed two days that I needed the exercise.
I got tired before long and sat in the living room and tried to think it all through. Still no good. Too quiet in there: I could hear the silence and it made me restless, edgy. I turned on the TV and stared at a movie that I didn’t really see. That made me drowsy, and I went back to bed and slept some more, and when I woke up it was dark outside and Kerry was there. I found her in the living room, curled up on the couch, reading one of my pulps.
“Hey,” she said when she saw me come out in my robe and slippers, “you sure you should be out of bed?”
“I was out for three hours earlier,” I said. “Didn’t do me any harm.”
“How do you feel?”
“Not too bad. I’ll live.”
“Well, you’d better.” She let me have one of her chipper smiles. I didn’t smile back; I did not feel like smiling, even for her. “Want something to eat?” she asked.
“Pretty soon. How long have you been here?”
“Couple of hours. Since five.”
“Eberhardt didn’t come by yet, did he?”
“He did. I wouldn’t let him wake you up.”
“You should have, if he had something to tell me-”
“He didn’t have anything to tell you. He just left you an envelope-a photograph, he said.”
“Where is it?”
“Over there on your desk.”
I went to the desk-an old secretary that I had bought a long time ago, before sixty-year-old Sears, Roebuck junk became “antiques” and quadrupled in value-and opened up the manila envelope that was sitting on it. The photograph was an eight-by-ten color glossy, professionally done. A full-length portrait of Alicia Purcell wearing a slinky black low-cut gown with glittery stuff on it; she had struck a provocative pose and was smiling moistly at the camera. I turned it over to look at the back. And there was an inscription, in green ink, that said: For Leonard. Love, Al.
Things moved around inside my head-but that was all they did; nothing came of the movement. I looked at the photo for a time. Then I said to Kerry, “I want to make a call,” and went back into the bedroom and dialed the number where Tom Washburn was staying.
When I got him on the line I let him tell me how sorry he was about what he called my “ordeal,” and then I said, “I’ve just seen the photo of Alicia Purcell. Where’d you find it?”
“In Leonard’s study. It was tucked away in one of his business files.”
“That’s an odd place, isn’t it?”
“Yes. If she gave it to him, I can’t imagine why.”
“They weren’t close, as far as you know?”
“Well, he seldom spoke of her.”
“When he did, what did he say?”
