“Oh…I’m sorry…I forgot…”
“I’m Jewish? That’s okay. I forgot it myself, a long time ago. Trouble is, other people keep bringing it up.”
Amy, Mantz, and Commander Williams had slaved over the charts till around six, at which time we all headed over to a steakhouse in Glendale where we hooked up with Toni Lake. Dinner was nice, though I was glad Amy was paying—it was a pricey seventy-five cents a steak, a la carte—and I dropped Amy back at Mantz’s bungalow, ostensibly heading back to Lowman’s Motor Court.
Only I didn’t head back. The Terraplane was parked over on Toluca Estates Drive, in front of Mary Astor’s house (always had kind of a yen for her and wouldn’t have minded a glimpse, but no luck). The night was cool and dry, a breeze riffling leaves, including those of the bushes I was snuggled behind; I was in a sportshirt and slacks and didn’t look much like a private detective, more like a peeping tom…if there’s a difference.
The blinds on the window were shut, but I could see around the edge of them, and—thanks to light from a lamp out of my range of vision, presumably on the bedstand—catch a view of the doorway and a dresser next to it; also the edge of the bottom of the bed. This angle would not give me the prize-winning
I’d done this kind of work plenty of times before, but tonight I had a sick feeling and a racing heartbeat. To tell you the truth, as close as I’d gotten to Amy, as much as I liked her, I might have ditched G. P.’s snoop job, if I wasn’t so goddamn jealous of Mantz. What did he have that I didn’t have? If she’d had the good sense and better taste to have an affair with me instead of Mantz, I would have never considered ratting on her to her husband.
I’m just that kind of guy.
Around ten-fifteen Mantz came in, alone. He was already in striped maroon pajama bottoms, and his chest was bare and hairy; he had a well-muscled upper torso, and a magazine was rolled up in one fist, as if he were going to swat a bug with it. For a moment I thought he might be coming after me, but he disappeared toward the bed and I could hear the box springs squeak as he climbed in, and even from my limited perspective could see that he’d gotten under the covers.
Presumably, he was reading the magazine.
No sign of Amelia. Was he waiting for her? Was she already in bed and I couldn’t see her from this angle?
It didn’t take long to figure out the latter wasn’t the case. Though the window was closed, the night being cool enough to warrant that, I’d been able to hear the box springs clearly when he climbed into bed. Presumably, the sound of conversation, and certainly the joyful noise of lovemaking on that mattress, would have found their way to my ears.
Half an hour later, he was still alone, and apparently still reading. No Amy.
Knowing where the guest room was, I worked my way around to the other side of the house and a new set of bushes. The window here was closed, as well, the blinds down, and furthermore the lights were out. But bed- springs were squeaking, so somebody was in there all right, possibly tossing and turning…
Only from the sound of it, that somebody was having one hell of a restless night. Either that, or getting their ashes well and truly hauled.
Puzzled, I returned to my previous post, wondering if Mantz had managed to perfectly time it and leave his bedroom and climb in with Amy just as I was circling the house to switch windows.
But Mantz was apparently still in bed, the bedstand lamp aglow; I would have sworn, listening closely, I could hear the pages of his magazine being slowly turned.
And so back to the guest bedroom window I went, where a bedspring symphony was still in full sway. Two voices, emitting muffled, restrained but very audible grunts, groans, sighs, and cries, accompanied the squeaking springs. Snugged between bushes and the stucco exterior of the bungalow, poised at the edge of the blinds, my Speed Graphic and I waited for things to settle down, hoping a light would eventually go on and satisfy my professional, not to mention prurient, curiosity.
Finally a light clicked on.
Amy had reached for the bedstand lamp and filled the guest room (the yellow plaster walls of which were decorated with framed Mantz aviation movie stills) with a golden luster appropriate to the afterglow of a satisfying amorous event. She wore the maroon pajama top that Mantz had apparently loaned her, but the person next to her in bed wasn’t Mantz, rather a nude woman, or at least nude to the waist because that was where the sheet fell. The woman was voluptuous bordering on plump, her torso pale next to her dark-tanned leathery face and short black boyish hair.
Nonetheless, there were less pleasant things in the world to view, particularly for a lech like me, than a nude- to-the-waist Toni Lake.
I backed away from the window, and the bushes behind me rustled like the wings of startled birds. Afraid I might have given myself away, I ducked down, hiding under and within the shrubbery like the weasel I was.
Shaking, sweating despite the night’s coolness, I didn’t know what the hell to think. I felt ashamed that I’d intruded upon such a scene, even though my intrusion wasn’t known to my victims; and I felt sickened, not by Amy’s sexual perversion—I was never one to sit in judgment of other people’s sex lives, being primarily interested in my own—but at the thought that this special woman, toward whom I’d been developing ever-deepening feelings, some carnal, some not, was in a sense a stranger to me. She was not who I thought she was, and I would never be close to her.
It just doesn’t pay for a guy to fall in love with a lesbian.
Crouched there in the bushes, thoughts racing, I knew one thing for certain, and one thing only: I would take no candid photos of Amy and her friend Miss Lake. If that was what Putnam had been after, he’d have to find another sleazy private eye to do it. This sleazy private eye had had his fill.
So I left my nest under the bushes, and was skulking away from the house toward the sidewalk, when a car came moving down Valley Spring Lane, very slowly, and with its lights off. Finding this curious, I slipped behind a palm tree and watched as the car, a snazzy red and white Dusenberg convertible, drew up in front.
I recognized the car, because I’d seen it out at United Airport the day we’d arrived: it belonged to Myrtle Mantz, who had left on the train yesterday afternoon, to visit her mother in Dallas.
