started.
'Call me Doc.'
'All right, Doc. I need names, names, and more names. All the friends and acquaintances you can recall.'
Harris shook his head. 'Mr. Walker—'
'Call me Fred.'
'Fred, Marcella picked up her lovers and her entourage of friends, if you can call them that, in bars. Bars were the sole focus of her social life. Period. Although you might try the people at Packard-Bell, where she worked.'
'I have. They were evasive.'
Harris smiled bitterly. 'For good reason, Fred. They didn't want to speak badly of the dead. Marcella hit bars all over L.A. She didn't want to become familiar in any one place. She had a tremendous fear of winding up as a slatternly bar regular, so she moved around a lot. She had, I think, several arrests for drunk driving. What's the name of this phony claimant?'
'Alma Jacobsen.'
'Well, Fred, let me tell you what I think happened: Marcella met this woman at some gin mill, drunk. She bowled her over with her personality and her nurse's uniform, and showed the woman, who was probably also half-gassed, some official-looking papers. Marcella then told the woman how desperately alone she was, and how she needed someone to carry on her anti-vivisectionist work in ease of her death. Marcella was a big animal lover. Marcella, in her alcoholic effusion, then probably made a big show of getting the woman's name and address and made a big show of signing the papers. Marcella was a superb actress, and the woman undoubtedly went for it. When Marcella's death made the papers, Alma thought she had herself a gravy train. Sound plausible, Fred?'
'Completely, Doc. Lonely people will do strange things.'
Harris laughed. 'Indeed they do. What do you usually do, Fred?'
I made my laughter match Harris's perfectly. 'I look for women. You?'
'I've been known to,' Doc laughed.
I got serious again. 'Doc, could I talk to your son about this? I think your theory is valid, but I want to touch all bases in the report I file. Maybe your son can tell me something that will disprove this Jacobsen woman conclusively. I'll be gentle with him.'
Doc Harris considered my request. 'All right, Fred. I think Michael is up at the park with the dog. Why don't we walk up there and talk to him? It's only two blocks from here.'
It was three, and it wasn't much of a park; it was just a vacant lot overgrown with weeds. Doc Harris and I talked easily as we trod through knee-high grass looking for his son and his son's dog.
When we did find them we almost tripped over them. Michael Harris was lying on his back on a beach towel, his arms outstretched in a crucifixion pose. The beagle puppy I had seen in the yard on Maple Street in El Monte was chewing grass by his side.
'On your feet, Colonel!' Harris bellowed good-naturedly.
Michael Harris got to his feet, unsmiling, brushing the grass from his blue jeans. When he stretched to his full height I was astounded—he was almost as tall as I. The boy looked nervously at his father, then at me. Time froze for a brief instant as I recalled another brown-haired, fiercely bright boy of nine playing in the desolate back lot of an orphanage. It was over twenty years ago, but I had to will myself to return to the present.
'. . . And this is Mr. Walker, Colonel,' Doc Harris was saying. 'He represents an insurance company. They want to give us some money, but there's a crazy old woman who says your mother promised it to her. We can't let that happen, can we, Colonel?'
'No,' Michael said softly.
'Good,' Harris said. 'Michael, will you talk to Mr. Walker?'
'Yes.'
I was starting to feel controlled, manipulated. Doc Harris's manner was unnerving. The boy was intimidated, and I was starting to feel that way myself. I had the feeling that Harris sensed I wasn't on the up-and-up. Intellectually, we were evenly matched, but so far his will was the greater, and it angered me. Unless I asserted myself I would only know what Harris wanted me to know.
I clapped Harris hard on the back. 'Jesus,' I said, 'it's hot here! I noticed a drive-in down on Western. Why don't we go get cream sodas? My treat.'
'Can we, Dad?' Michael pleaded. 'I'm dying of thirst.'
Doc didn't lose a second's worth of his considerable aplomb. He clapped me on the back, equally hard. 'Let's go, amigos,' he replied.
We walked the four blocks in the hot summer sun, three generations of American males united by darkness and duplicity. The dog trotted behind us, stopping frequently to explore interesting scents. I walked in the middle, with Doc on my left on the street side. Michael walked to my right, closed in against my shoulder by the hedges that ran along the sides of the homes on Beverly Boulevard. He leaned into me, seeming to relish the contact.
I queried Doc on his nickname, and he laughed and said, 'Med school dropout, Fred. It was too bloody, too abstract, too timeconsuming, too literal, too much.'
'Where did you attend?'
'University of Illinois.'
'Jesus, it sounds grim. Were there a lot of farm boys wanting to be country doctors?'
'Yes, and a lot of Chicago rich kids out to be society doctors. I didn't fit in.'
'Why not?' I asked. It was a challenge.
'It was the twenties. I was an iconoclast. I realized that I'd be spending the rest of my life treating smug, small-town hicks who didn't know shit from Shinola. That I'd be prolonging the lives of people who would be better off dead. I quit in my final year.'
I laughed. Michael did, too. Michael's prematurely deep voice went up a good two octaves in the process. 'Tell him about the dead horse, Dad.'
'That's the Colonel's favorite,' Harris laughed. 'Well, I used to have a racket going in those days. I knew some gangsters who ran a speakeasy. A real third-class dive where all the rich kids from school hung out. Cheap booze and cheaper food. The joint had one distinction: big juicy steaks for a quarter. Sirloin steaks smothered in onions and tomato sauce. Ha! They weren't steaks, they were fillet of horse. I was the butcher. I used to drive around the countryside with a stooge of mine and steal horses. We used to lure the nags into the back of our truck with oats and sugar, then we'd drive back to town to this warehouse and inject the nags with small quantities of morphine I'd stolen. Then I'd sever their neck arteries with a scalpel. My partner did the real dirty work, I had no stomach for it. He was the cook, too.
'Anyway, as events came to pass, business went bad. The owners tried to stiff me on my rustling dues. This was about the time I decided to give med school the big drift. I decided to go out in style. I knew the goombahs would never pay me, so I decided to give them a good fucking. One night there was a private party at the speak. My stooge and I got ourselves two broken-down old nags, put them in the truck and backed them up to the front door of the joint. We gave the password and the door opened and the nags ran right in. Jesus! What a sight! Tables destroyed, people screaming, broken bottles everywhere! I got out of town and Illinois and never went back.'
'Where did you go?' I asked.
'I went on the bum,' Harris said. 'Have you ever been on the bum, Fred?'
'No, Doc.'
'You should have. It's instructive.'
It was a challenge. I took it. 'I've been too busy being on the make—which is better than being on the bum, right, Michael?' I squeezed the boy around the shoulders, and he beamed at me.
'Right!'
Doc pretended to be amused, but we both knew that the gauntlet had been thrown down.
We took seats inside the Tiny Naylor Drive-In on Beverly and Western. It was air-conditioned, and Michael and Doc seemed to crash in relief from the heat as we all stretched our long legs out under the table.
Michael sat down beside me, Doc across from us. We all ordered root beer floats. When they arrived, Michael gulped his in three seconds flat, belched, and looked to his father for permission to order another. Doc nodded
