Coronado seemed always there, even when you couldn’t see them.
Of my three Zabriskies, two lived downtown; the third was up the coast a little in Esmeralda. The first one was a Chief Petty Officer who was at sea on a carrier. His wife said he didn’t have any sisters, that his mother was in Aiken, South Carolina, and that she herself never watched television. The second was a Polish emigre who had arrived from Gdansk fourteen months ago. It took me into the evening to find that out. I had supper in a place near the hotel, on the bay, that advertised fresh salmon broiled over alder logs. I went in and ate some with a couple of bottles of Corona beer (hold the lime). It wasn’t as good as I had hoped it would be; it still tasted like fish. After supper I strolled back to the hotel along the bayfront, past the charter boat shanties and the seafood take-out stands that sold ice and soda. Across the expressway, gleaming with light in the murmuring subtropical evening, the tower of Sea World rose above the lowland where the bay had bcco created. It was maybe 9:30 on the coast, and halt past midnight on my eastern time sensor. Susan would be asleep at home, the snow drifting harmlessly outside her window. She would sleep nearly motionless, waking in the same position as she’d gone to sleep. She rarely moved in the night. Jill Joyce would have gone to sleep drunk, by now; and she would wake up clear-eyed and innocent-looking in the morning to go in front of the camera and charm the hearts of America. Babe Loftus wouldn’t.
In my cabana I undressed and hung my clothes up carefully. There was nothing on the tube worth watching. I turned out the light and lay quietly, three thousand miles from home, and listened to the waters of the bay murmur across from my window, and smelled the water, a mild placid smell in the warm, faraway night.
Chapter 22
ESMERELDA is in a canyon on the north edge of San Diego. It nestles against the Pacific Ocean with the hills rising behind it to cut off the rest of California as if it didn’t exist. Esmeralda was full of trees and gardens and flowers. The downtown lounged along the coastline, a highlight of stucco and Spanish tile and plate glass and polished brass clustered near Esmeralda cove. One would never starve in Esmeralda. Every third building along the main drag was a restaurant. The other ones sold jewelry and antiques and designer fashions. The pink stucco hotel in the middle of the main drag had a big canopied patio out front and a discreet sign that said CASA DEL PONIENTE, Three valet carhops stood alertly outside in black vests and white shirts waiting to do anything you told them to do. I nosed in and parked in front of a bookstore across the street from the hotel. According to my map, Polton’s Lane ran behind the stores that fronted Main Street. I left the car and walked back to the corner and turned left on Juniper Avenue. The street was lined with eucalyptus trees that sagged heavily, their branches nearly touching the ground in some places. There was a luggage shop, the window display a single suitcase with a fuchsia silk scarf draped over it. The suitcase and scarf sat on a black velvet background under a small spotlight. Beyond the luggage store was a discreet real estate office done in pale gray and plum, with color pictures, well mounted, of oceanfront property displayed in the window. Between the two buildings was Polton’s Lane. The name was too grand. It was an alley. Behind the stores, cartons and trash barrels were piled, overflowing in some cases. Two cats, a yellow tom with tattered ears, and something that had once been mostly white, scuttled out of sight, their tails pointed straight out as they hurried away.
The alley widened into a small vacant lot encircled by the back doors of affluence. In the lot were several small frame shacks, probably one room apiece, with low board porches across the front. To each had been attached a lean-to which probably was a bathroom. The yard in front of the one nearest to me was bare dirt. The rest of the lot was weeds. The rusting hulk of a car that might once have been a Volvo stood doorless and wheelless among the weeds, and beyond it someone had discarded a hot water heater. A line of utility poles preceded me down the alley, and wires swung lax between the poles and each house. I stood staring at this odd community of hovels, built perhaps before the town had acquired a main street; built maybe by the workers who built the main street. Here and there among the weeds were automobile tires and beer cans, and at least one mattress with the stuffing spilled out.
My address was number three. Once, a long time ago, someone had tried to make a front path of concrete squares set into the ground. Now they were barely visible among the weed overgrowth. From the house came the sound of a television set blaring a talk show. On the front porch a couple of green plastic bags had torn open, and the contents spilled out onto the porch floor. It didn’t look as if it had happened recently. It was hot in the backside of Esmeralda, and in the heat the rank smell of the weeds mixed with whatever had rotted in the trash bags. I maneuvered around the trash and knocked on the screen door that hung loose in its hinges from a badly warped doorjamb. Nothing happened. I knocked again. Through the screen, which was, it seemed, the only door, I could see a steel-framed cot, with a mattress and a pink quilt and a pillow with no pillowcase. Next to it was a soapstone sink, and in front of both was a metal table that had once been coated with white enamel. To the right of the door I could see the hack of what might have been a rocking chair. It moved a little and then a woman appeared in the doorway. The smell of booze came with her, overpowering the smell of the weeds and the hot barren earth.
“Yuh,” she said.
She was an angular woman with white hair through which faded streaks of blond still showed. The hair hung straight down around her face without any hint of a comb. She had on a tee shirt that advertised beer, and a pair of miracle fiber slacks that had probably started out yellow. Her feet were bare.
In her right hand she was carrying a bottle of Southern Comfort, her skinny, blue-veined hand clamped around its neck.
“Spenser,” I said. “City Services. Open up.” The door was hooked shut, although the screening in front of it was torn and I could have reached in and unhooked it myself.
She nodded slowly, staring at me through the door. Her face had not seen make-up, or sun, for a long time. It sagged along her jawline, and puckered at the corners of her mouth. Her eyes were darkly circled and pouchy. In the hand that didn’t hold the Southern Comfort was a cigarette, and she brought it up slowly, as if trying to remember the way, and took a big suck on it.
“Vera Zabriskie?” I said. I made it sound officious and impatient. Women like Vera Zabriskie were used to civil servants snapping at them. It was what they endured in return for the welfare check that kept them alive. She looked at me, still frowning, as she let the smoke drift out of her mouth. Then she took a slug of Southern Comfort from the bottle and swallowed.
“Yuh,” she said.
“You’re Vera?” I said. She nodded.
“Well, then, damn it, let me in. You think I got all day?”
She thought about what I’d said, turned it around a little in her head, got a look at it, and figured out, slowly, what it meant. Still holding the cigarette between the first two fingers, she raised a hand and fumbled the hook out of the door. She stepped back. I pushed it open and went in. The place smelled bad, a scent compounded of garbage, sweat, booze, cigarette smoke, and loss. A huge color television set was blatting at me from the corner. On top of the television set, framed in one of those cardboard holders that school pictures come in, was a color picture of Jill Joyce on the cover of TV Guide. The picture didn’t fit the frame right, and it had been adjusted with Scotch tape here and there. Can this be a clue I see before me?
