cool and still. Few places are more charming than a quiet cocktail lounge in the middle of the day with the ice tinkling in the glasses and the starched look of a bartender’s white shirt and the clarity of the beer in the glass with the bubbles drifting up. Soundless below, the noise shut off by glass and distance, the city seemed like something in a stereopticon. Here and there, where the developers had missed, the quintessential look of the twenties and thirties showed through, solid and full of confidence, a little rococo, a little imperial even-between the wars-hopeful even in Depression. Now it was being slowly blotted out by shiny surface, reflecting glass, gloss.
Candy came back from the ladies’ room with her makeup fresh and her mouth set in a look of fearsome self- control. She sat and sipped her bourbon. I raised my beer to her.
“Once more unto the breach, dear friend,” I said.
She smiled without enthusiasm.
“You want me to stick around,” I said.
“I can’t pay you.”
“It’ll count toward my merit badge in covert investigation.”
“I really can’t.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“You could move into my apartment,” Candy said. “It would save your hotel costs. You already have your ticket home, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I’d pay for the groceries.”
“Christ,” I said, “I can’t afford to leave. It’s cheaper than going home.”
She sipped some more bourbon. With the glass still near her mouth she looked at me from under her eyebrows and said, “Besides, there could be certain house privileges.”
It came out pribleshes.
“There goes the merit badge,” I said.
Chapter 20
CANDY AND I moved from the Hillcrest to her place on Wetherly Drive. Or I did. Candy was quite sloshed and did little more than stand and sway, first in my room while I packed, then in her room while I packed, then in the elevator while I hauled our luggage down, and in the lobby while I signed the bill. (I felt like John Frederics.)
“We’ll send that directly to KNBS, Mr. Spenser,” the cashier said.
I nodded as if I were used to that.
In the parking lot I had trouble getting all the luggage into the MG, but I managed with Candy sitting on one of her suitcases, and we drove off to West Hollywood.
Whatever the house privileges were, they weren’t forthcoming that evening, because by the time I got the luggage in from the car, she was zonked out on her bed with her clothes still on, lying on her back, snoring faintly. I hung up the stuff from her suitcase that would wrinkle if I didn’t. There was nothing to eat in the house, so I went up to Greenblatt’s on Sunset and got several roast beef sandwiches and some beer and some bagels and chive cream cheese and blackberry jam for breakfast. I brought it home and ate the sandwiches and drank the beer and read Play of Double Senses until eleven and went to sleep on the couch.
I woke up about six in the morning with the weight of the morning sun on my face. I could hear Candy moving about in the bathroom. I got up and went out to the pool and stripped down to the buff and swam back and forth in the pool for forty-five minutes until I thought I might drown. Then I got out and went in. Candy was back in her bedroom with the door closed. I went in the bathroom, showered off the chlorine, shaved, brushed my teeth, toweled dry, and got dressed.
I was in the kitchen grilling some bagels and percolating some coffee when Candy showed up. She looked as bad as she could, given where God had started her. And I was sure she felt worse than she looked.
“How are you this morning?” I said.
“I threw up,” she said.
“Oh.”
“What are you making?”
“Bagels,” I said, “and chive cream cheese and hot coffee…” Her face had a look of dumb anguish. “You don’t want any?” I said. “There’s blackberry jam and-”
“You bastard,” she said and went out of the kitchen. I sat at her dining-alcove table and had the toasted bagels with cream cheese and blackberry jam, alternately. Only a barbarian would eat chive cream cheese and blackberry jam on the same bagel.
Candy sat in an armchair in the living room and looked out at her pool with her eyes squinted to slits.
“How about just coffee?” I said.
“No.” She held her head quite still. “I need a Coke, or… is there any Coke?”
“No.”
“Anything? Seven-Up? Tab? Perrier?”
“No. How about a glass of water?”
She shivered, and that seemed to hurt her head. “No,” she said, squeezing the word out.
