pastel place mat. The sandwich was cut into two triangles, each sporting a toothpick with an electric blue tassel. Four orange slices and four raspberries and a sprig of parsley offset the tassels. A water goblet sat to the right of the plate. To the left was a matching saucer with sweet pickles and pitted olives and Tuscan peppers, and a little gold fork to spear them with. A blue and gray linen napkin was rolled and peaked and sitting above the plate.
Ellen Lang sat at her place, staring out through the glass doors into her backyard. When she heard me she turned. “I put out water because I didn’t know what else you might want. We have Diet Coke or milk or Pabst beer. I could make coffee if you’d like.”
The table was perfect. “No, this is fine,” I said. “Thank you.”
She shifted in the chair. I sat and ate a Tuscan pepper. I prefer chili peppers or serranos, but Tuscans are fun, too.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” she said.
“In the box on the desk.” I showed her the stack of paper.
She closed her eyes. “Oh, God. I’m sorry. I put those things in there this morning. I don’t know why I didn’t see them.”
“Stress. You give a person enough stress and they begin to fog out. People start having little fender benders in parking lots. People forget their keys. People can’t see things right under their noses. It happens to everybody. Even Janet Simon.”
She took a nibble of her sandwich, then rearranged it on the plate. “You don’t like her very much, do you?”
I didn’t say anything.
“She’s my friend. She’s a very strong lady. She understands.” Sit, Ellen. Speak.
“She’s your anchor,” I said. “She is that because she’s abusive and insulting and she reinforces your lousy self-image, which is what you want. If she’s right about you, then Mort’s right about you. If Mort’s right about you then you deserve to be treated the way he treats you and you shouldn’t rock the boat which is something you do not want to do.” Mr. Sensitive. “Other than that, I like her fine.”
“You made a joke.”
I had said a very hard thing and she wasn’t angry. She should’ve been, but she wasn’t. Maybe enough years of Janet Simon will do that to you. Or maybe she hadn’t heard.
I shrugged. “Being funny, that’s one way to deal with stress. Investigators, cops, paramedics. Paramedics are the funniest people I know. Have you in stitches.”
She looked at me. Blank.
“Paramedics are the funniest people I know. Have you in stitches. ”
“Oh.”
“Another little joke.”
We smiled at each other. Just your basic lunchtime conversation.
“Did you mean that, what you said about Janet?” Maybe she had heard. Maybe, deep down, she was even angry. “Yes.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Okay.”
She took another microscopic bite of her sandwich, then pushed it away. Maybe she absorbed nutrients from her surroundings. “You must like being a private investigator,” she said.
“Yes. Very much.” I took the top off one of the sandwich halves, pulled the stems off two of the peppers, put the peppers on the sandwich, sealed it up again.
“Did you go to college for that?”
“University of Southeast Asia. Two-year program.”
“Vietnam?”
“Unh-huh.” I finished the first half of the sandwich, put three peppers on the remaining half, and started on that one.
“That must have been awful,” she said.
“There were some very real disadvantages to being there, yes.” I swallowed, took a sip of water, patted my lips with the napkin. “But adversity has a way of strengthening. If it doesn’t kill you, you learn things. For instance, that’s when I learned I wanted to be Peter Pan.”
She didn’t quite frown. She quizzled. “You’re quizzling.”
“Pardon me?” Confused.
“Me being funny again. I learned to be funny in Vietnam. Funny is a survival mechanism. I started yoga. Pranayamic breathing is a great way to keep your mind right. We’d be in a bunker, six of us, breathing in one nostril, out the other, oming to beat hell as the rockets came in. You see how this gets funny?”
“Of course.”
“Yoga led to tai chi, tai chi led to tae kwan do, which is Korean karate, and wing chun, which is an offshoot of Chinese kung fu. All very centering, stabilizing activities.” I spread my hands. “I am a bastion of calm in a chaotic world.”
Blank eyes.
“I learned that I could survive. I learned what I would do to keep breathing, and what I wouldn’t do, and what was important to me, and what wasn’t. Just like you’re going to learn that you can survive what’s happening to you.”
She pursed her lips, looking away to pick at a bread crumb on her milk glass.
“If I can survive Vietnam, you can survive Encino,” I said. “Try yoga. Be good for you.”
“Yoga.”
Apparently she didn’t consider yoga an appropriate substitute for a husband. “Mrs. Lang, do you know where Mort kept his gun?”
She looked surprised. “Mort didn’t have a gun.”
I showed her the receipt. “Well, this is years ago,” she said.
“Guns tend to hang around. Keep an eye out for it.”
She nodded. “All right. I’m sorry.”
“You say that a lot. You don’t have to be sorry. You look away a lot, too, and that’s something else you don’t have to do.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Quite all right.”
She took a sip of her milk. It left a moustache on her upper lip. “You are funny,” she said.
“It’s either that or be smart.” I killed the rest of the sandwich and sorted the paperwork: bank stuff together, credit card billings together, phone stuff by itself. Without Janet Simon around, she was much more relaxed. You could look past the frightened eyes and mottled face and slumped shoulders and get glimpses of her from better days. I said, “I’ll bet you were the third prettiest girl in eleventh grade.”
Happy-lines came to the corners of her eyes. She touched at her hair again. “ Second prettiest,” she said.
It was good when she smiled. She probably hadn’t done a lot of that lately. “You meet Mort in college?”
“High school. Clarence Darrow Senior High in Elverton. That’s where we grew up. In Kansas.”
“High school sweethearts.”
She smiled. “Yes. Isn’t that awful?”
“Not at all. You go to college together?”
Her eyes turned a little wistful. “Mort was in theater arts and business. His parents had quite a large paint store there, in Elverton. They wanted him to take it over but Mort wanted to act. No one can understand that in Elverton. You say you want to act and they just look at you.”
I shrugged. “Mort didn’t have it so bad.”
She looked at me.
“He had the second prettiest girl at Clarence Darrow Senior High, didn’t he?”
She looked at me some more until she realized what I was doing, then she grinned, and nodded, and finally gave a short uncertain laugh. She told me I was terrible.
I pushed the paperwork across the table to her. “Be that as it may, I want you to go through and notate all
