Necessity

do.

“For openers she’d have to clean out her bank accounts in cash and then throw away her checkbooks and all her credit cards.

“Best way to do that’s put it all in a wallet and let somebody else lay a false trail for her.

“How she does that, there’s a dozen ways. Railroad station’s pretty good. Trailways depots are okay. Airports aren’t so good because people tend to be a little more honest about lost possessions.

“Anyhow maybe she just gets on a turnpike in the direction opposite to the direction she’s really heading. She’d stop in one of those service area Howard Johnson’s and leave the wallet in the ladies’ room. Make it look like she left it behind by mistake. You know how women empty out their handbags when they’re trying to find the lipstick.

“The wallet may get turned in and returned to the husband, in which case he’s got a lead in the wrong direction, but people bein’ what they are it’s more likely somebody steals the wallet. Next thing you know they’ll be passing bad checks and running up credit card charges two hundred miles away, laying down a beautiful false trail for you. Am I boring you?”

She gave him another smile and tried to hide its insincerity. “If I get bored I’ll yawn. Go on, please.”

He did.

26

Getting off the freeway at Pass Avenue she is looking in the rear-view mirror again. It has become a habit too strong to break. And she’s thinking it would be a tasty irony if Ray Seale has been hired to find her: an irony because his life will hardly be worth a thimbleful of dust if it ever gets out that he’s the very one who taught her how to vanish.

It’s half-past three and hot. Doyle and Marian are sitting at one of the outdoor tables in the corral of Buffalo Bill’s Saloon, having what is probably not their first drink of the afternoon.

Graeme Goldsmith is with them.

Damn.

As she parks in front of a wagon wheel someone meanders into the bookshop and she sees Doyle get up from his table and carry his drink toward the shop. Mustache twitching in anticipation, he waves to her as she gets out of the car, then disappears inside in hope the customer is more than a browser.

She leaves the windows open and the car unlocked. There’s nothing in it worth stealing and if you close the windows it’s a furnace when you get back in.

There’s no graceful escape. She joins Marian and the Australian in the shade of the table’s umbrella.

Graeme lifts his beer toward her in a casual welcoming gesture. Coming from him it is at best a meaningless courtesy. He’s made it clear enough that he doesn’t like her. Perhaps it’s her personality; perhaps he just doesn’t like women.

In either case she feels no obligation to change his sentiments.

As she sits down, George, the aged waiter, saunters out from his post in the shade. Marian says, “An iced tea for herself, honey.”

“That’s lemon, no sugar, right?”

Jennifer-she thinks of herself as Jennifer now-confirms it with a nod and George retreats.

Marian says, “So anyway-sorry, Jennifer honey, just finishing the story-anyway,” she says to Graeme in her prairie twang, “Nick used to come around once in a while with a jug and his ukulele. He had a great tenor voice, you know. He and Doyle used to tie one on, sing those old songs, we had a ball in those days, and that’s how we first learned those bawdy tunes. We got the lyrics from Nick. You want the real lowdown, I think his widow’s still got his song collection. Maybe you ought to call her. She’s in the book.”

Jennifer has made the discovery recently that a vast part of ordinary human conversation is made up of idle memories. People spend more time telling one another shaggy dog anecdotes about incidents from their past than they seem to devote to any other social activity.

It makes things awkward when the only past you can admit to is one you make up as you go along-and then have got to remember forever.

Marian is still reminiscing. “Nick used to know Reagan pretty well back in the actors’ union days and when Reagan started running for governor I remember Nick just shook his head in wonderment. He’d always say, ‘Trouble with Ronnie is, you ask him the time of day, he’ll tell you how to build an Elgin watch but the trouble with Ronnie is, he don’t know how to build an Elgin watch.’”

Both of them laugh and Jennifer joins in it. Marian is drinking something blood red with a stalk of celery in it. Her pert face is sleepily content under the tight helmet of salt-and-pepper hair. She’s forty-eight and her skin is brown and crosshatched by a fine netting of lines but she’s an attractive woman: tiny, tidy, slim, with the abrupt sure movements of a bird. Behind the dark glasses are brown eyes that twinkle more often than not.

“This is my second bullshot,” she says. “We’re celebrating. You remember that idiot collector in Spokane?”

“The Wyatt Earp nut?”

“Uh-huh. The one with the voice like a nuclear explosion.” Marian pronounces it “nucular.”

Jennifer feels the heat of Graeme’s eyes upon her. Marian’s talk drifts by:

“We got a catalog phone order from him a couple hours ago. About blew my ear off. Complete set of Alfred Henry Lewis. Bound volumes of the Tombstone Epitaph and a couple dozen outrageously overpriced first editions-Stuart Lake, Billy Breakenridge, Walter Noble Burns, that kind of whitewash stuff. Take us half the weekend to pack it for shipping but it pays the rent for the whole month and then some.”

“Congratulations.”

Graeme says, “Looks like the value of your stock just went up a point.”

She gives him a lazy glance through her sunglasses. Why is it that everything he says sounds like an accusatory innuendo?

George brings the iced tea. Graeme says, “I’ll have another beer.”

She tastes the iced tea and makes a face. “Can’t you just make real tea and put ice in it? This powdered junk is dreadful.”

“Use a lot of lemon.” George hobbles away.

Marian shouts, “Grouch!” at his back.

The waiter takes no notice.

“Top of everything else he’s going deaf,” she says to Jennifer.

Graeme says, “How’s the shrink?”

It takes her by surprise so that she has to think a moment. Then she says, “All right,” rather irritably and flicks a sharp look at Marian, who pretends an abrupt keen interest in her drink, wrapping both hands around it and peering down into it with an attention so studied it’s comical.

She’s explained her afternoon absences to Doyle and Marian by saying she’s been seeing a psychoanalyst to find out why she loused up her marriage. Evidently they’ve passed the confidence on to Graeme. Marian is right to be embarrassed. Jennifer makes no gesture to take her off the hook. She’s wishing they hadn’t told Graeme-and she’s wishing Graeme would stop asking so many questions.

She hasn’t told any of them about Charlie Reid or the flying lessons; she hasn’t told anybody anything-she feels like a spy, parceling out information on a need-to-know basis. She’s compartmentalized everything.

Graeme says, “I went to a shrink once. He told me I was full of shit. Hell, I already knew that.”

Marian laughs with him. He goes on, addressing Jennifer: “Bless ’em all-Freudians, Jungians, gurus, messiahs-must be a thousand bloody schools of thought and every single one’s got the corner on truth. The one true religion. Mob of charlatans, you know-all of ‘em. They haven’t got any answers. Just questions. You ask them what something means, they come right back at you with a question-what do you think it means?

“But then I suppose it’s something to spend the alimony on.” His smile, with a lot of white teeth, is as warm as a Times Square whore’s.