Shackles

“Don’t call me ma’am,” she said. “I hate that… ma’am is short for madam, don’t you know that? Do I look like a madam?”

She did, as a matter of fact. But I said, “No, of course you don’t. My apologies. Now about Lawrence Jacobs-”

“Yes, yes, we usually ask for… I’m sure he must have given at least one personal reference. Yes, I know he did, I saw it in the file yesterday.”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d let me have the person’s name and address.”

She thought that over for maybe ten seconds, sighed, and then made one of her fluttery gestures and turned on her heel and stalked off across the room. I took that for an affirmative and trailed after her, dodging smoke and more ash from her cigarette. She plunked herself down behind a cluttered desk, aimed the remains of the cancer stick at a cut-glass ashtray; it caught the edge and showered sparks, a couple of which fell on a loose pile of papers. She didn’t seem to notice, so I reached over and smudged out the sparks before they started a fire. She didn’t notice that either; she was already turning toward a metal file cabinet to one side. But in the process she whacked her elbow into an onyx pen set and knocked the whole thing off onto the floor. That she noticed, along with everybody else in the office. She muttered something under her breath, and without any hesitation or pretense at decorum she slid off the chair onto her hands and knees, crawled under the desk with her skirt riding up on plump thighs to retrieve one of the pens, gathered up the rest of the set, hauled her pudgy body back into the chair, and threw the pens and base unit onto the desktop without looking at me or any of her co-workers. Then she swiveled around as if nothing had happened, fumbled open one of the file drawers, and began rummaging inside.

If I had a place to sell or rent, I thought, Susan Belford would be the last person I’d let handle the deal. It was even money she would either wreck or set fire to one out of every ten houses she entered.

It didn’t take her long to find the proper file. She even managed to get it out of the drawer and back onto her desk without doing any more damage. I watched her riffle through the papers inside, jerk one out with an unintentional flourish, and peer at it myopically for a few seconds before she said, “Here it is. Mmm, yes, now I remember… yes.”

She didn’t seem inclined to continue on her own initiative, so I made a throat-clearing noise to prod her.

“… Elmer Rix. Odd name, isn’t it?”

And just as meaningless as the others. “How do you spell the surname?”

“R-i-x.”

“What address?”

“The Catchall Shop, Yuba City.”

“No street or number?”

“No.”

“Telephone number?”

“Just a… yes, here it is.”

She read it off to me and I repeated it twice to memorize it. Then I asked, “Do you know the relationship between Lawrence Jacobs and this Elmer Rix?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Did you call Elmer Rix to check the reference?”

“Well, of course.” La Belford knocked over her purse reaching inside it for another cigarette; several items besides a pack of Salems fell out-comb, brush, compact, a Heath bar-but she left them scattered where they lay.

“Do you have any idea what the Catchall Shop is?”

She had fished a cigarette out of the pack and was bringing it to her mouth-but backward, so that it was the tobacco end she put between her lips. I thought she was going to light the filter, but she realized the mistake in time and reversed the thing. The flame on her lighter was turned up too high: She almost singed her bangs firing up the weed.

“Ms. Belford.”

“What?”

“I asked if you have any idea what the Catchall Shop is.”

“None whatsoever.” She scowled and blew smoke in my face-obliviously, not intentionally. I batted it away with my hand. “One question, you said… a dozen is more like it. Now really, if you don’t… I have work to do.”

“So do I,” I said, and got up on my feet.

She made a dismissive gesture with the cigarette. And smacked the burning end against her desk lamp and sent another fallout of sparks to the litter of papers strewn over the surface. One of the sparks started to smolder; she didn’t notice because she had swiveled her chair around to replace the file folder in the cabinet. This time I didn’t bother to smother the sparks. I went away from her instead. There was a thumping sound behind me as I crossed the office, but I did not turn around to see what it was. I didn’t want to know.

It takes all kinds, sure. But some kinds are harder to take than others.

EARLY AFTERNOON

I hadn’t been to Yuba City in twenty years. As with Vacaville, there was little reason to go there unless you had friends or relatives or business in the area. It is forty miles or so north of Sacramento, across the Feather River from Marysville, and to get to it you take arrow-straight Highway 99 through a dozen miles of rice fields-a crop that isn’t usually associated with California agriculture but that grows well in that part of the state-and then either a continuation of 99 or the quicker Highway 70 through Marysville. The countryside around Yuba City nurtures crops of a different kind: peaches, nectarines, apricots, walnuts. Mile after mile of orchards extend away to the south, west, and north.

Yuba City has two other claims to fame. One is provocative: In a couple of quality-of-life polls to determine the most desirable place in California to live, it had come in dead last. The other is notorious: In the early seventies it had been the scene of one of the more shocking mass-murder cases-the one in which Juan Corona was convicted of cold-bloodedly slaughtering twenty-five migrant workers after having had homosexual relations with them.

Visually, Marysville is a Cinderella compared to its stepsister across the river. Its downtown is filled with attractive old buildings and it sports a huge shady part with a lake in the middle. Yuba City, on the other hand, has an unaesthetic downtown area sans park and lake, plus a couple of miles of southern California-style shopping centers and fast-food joints. But looks can be deceiving where cities are concerned, too. Marysville also harbors a well-populated skid row and has larger crime and substance-abuse problems than its neighbor. Despite Yuba’s tarnished image, if you had to live in one town or the other, and you weighed the pros and cons carefully, Yuba City would be the one to pick.

The Toyota’s buy-gas light was on when I drove into Marysville a little past noon. I took the bridge across into Yuba City and stopped at an Exxon station off Bridge Street to fill the tank and to look up Elmer Rix and the Catchall Shop in the local directory. No entry for Rix; but the Catchall Shop was listed at 2610 Percy Avenue. According to the kid working the pumps, that address was less than a mile from here, out past the nearby Del Monte packing plant. “You’ll find it real easy,” he said. And for once, somebody who told me that was right.

The building at 2610 Percy Avenue was big, sprawling, and on the brink of condemnation as a fire hazard. A cyclone-fenced yard to one side was full of things like claw-foot bathtubs, random lengths of pipe, car parts, pottery urns and ceramic garden statues, rusty stoves, a twenty-foot-high carved oak likeness of a snarling grizzly bear. On the warped wood front of the building were several signs, some large and some small, some metal and some wood, all hand-painted by somebody with not much of an artistic eye. THE CATCHALL SHOP, over the double-doored entrance. SECONDHAND ITEMS OF ALL KINDS. BURIED TREASURES. TOOLS OUR SPECIALTY. PAPERBACK BOOKS, 25?. IF WE DON’T HAVE IT, YOU WON’T FIND IT ANYWHERE ELSE. BROWSERS WELCOME. CASH ACCEPTED FROM ANYONE.

But the most interesting thing about the place, at least externally, was the car parked inside the yard gates-a cream-colored Cadillac Seville, no more than a few years old and probably a 1985 model.