between them. He picked up a piece of bread and wiped up the egg yolk on his plate with it, crammed the bread into his mouth.
Most of them were through eating before I started. I had the dining room to myself when Owen Barr came in. I had forgotten that he was in the house. He wore a shiny purple bathrobe and flopping slippers. He was a little chunky man with red hair that stuck out here and there in tufts around his ears. The top of his head was bald. He had a bristly mustache and mean eyes. He looked worse than I felt.
He tottered to the table, grabbed the coffeepot and poured a slug into somebody else’s cup. He drank it, sobbing a little between gulps. He looked at me while he was drinking, but not as if he saw me.
“God damn it,” he said passionately. “Oh, God damn it.” He walked around in a big circle, his slippers flopping, his short arms stuck out to balance him. Then he had another cup of coffee, after which he half sat in a chair and half leaned on his elbows against the table and held the cup tightly with stubby fingers and worked up a belch, a look of great concentration on his blotched face. Big drops of sweat appeared on his forehead.
I drank the last of my orange juice, left the room and went in search of Macy. I found him in a study in an air-conditioned wing of the house, his feet on the desk, reading the morning paper. There was a loaded .45 on the desk within easy reach. When he heard my step in the doorway he put the paper across the desk, covering the automatic and the hand that grasped it.
Then he looked at me, picked up the paper again, flicking ashes off a cigarette in his mouth with a corner of it.
“Ready to go?” he muttered.
“Yeah. I’ll need a car. Rudy can return that rented job when he’s up and around. Expense money, too.”
“We got a lot of cars in the garage. Pick out one you like. Keys are in the ignition.” He went to his wallet and counted out money for me.
“From now on you don’t talk about what I’m doing,” I said. “You don’t tell anybody where I go or who I see. Is the phone bugged?”
He folded the paper and put it in his lap. “As far as I know, it isn’t. Telephone company watches it to see the line stays clean. I trust everybody here, Pete.”
I reached over and picked up the .45. “And you’re using this for a paperweight.” He didn’t say anything. I took it by the barrel and threw it at him. He sat there holding it foolishly.
“I don’t trust anybody,” I said. “Nice little family you got here, Macy. The blonde in particular. Where did you get her?”
“Diane? Oh, I found her wandering around the hotel one night three or four years ago. Nearer four. She was looking for a job. Well, you know, I liked the way she was built. I thought I’d try to get me some, but when I went to peel her clothes off she threw a hysterical fit and said she’d kill me.”
His eyes were fond with the memory of her and the pleasures of younger times. “I didn’t give up easy. I kept her around, but I never could — you know, hardly even touch her, she was so damn jumpy. Finally I got tired of chasing her and passed her on to Maxine and told him to put her to work somewhere. That was when I could still tell him things. Later on when I had Aimee on my hands I took her back because she was the only one who could handle the kid.”
“She a nut of some kind?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Diane’s probably a little off balance, but harmless. She has these fits sometimes if people try to push her. Or maybe she’ll just sit around and stare and not say a word. But she’s really okay and she’s good for Aimee.” He grinned. “How do you like Aimee? How do you like that little monkey, huh?”
I was expected to like Aimee. “Cute. She has a look like somebody chases her through her dreams.”
He wagged his head. “Couple more years, she’ll forget all about it. I’ve given her something here. Security. She wakes up screaming now and she’s not alone. She’s sleeping in a big bed with Diane, not on some piss-caked cot in a stinkin’ room. She’s in a solid house with the ocean outside singing her to sleep. I’ve done something for her. She’ll forget.”
“What’s she done to you?”
“Huh?” He looked at me stupidly, shaking loose the clinging paternal thoughts.
“Skip it,” I told him, and started toward the door.
“You let me know when you got something,” he said, far too casually. I could hear the tension in his voice.
“I’ll let you know.”
In my room I picked up a coat and put it on over my sport shirt. I walked down the hall and ran into Owen Barr. He stopped and chugged back like a myopic beetle. He showed some signs of being conscious, so I spoke to him.
“Hello, Owen. You still managing the Coral Gardens for Macy?”
He looked up at me and almost snarled, “Get out of my way so I can go to my room, unless you’d rather I puke here in the hall.” I sidestepped and he went rapidly along, tipping against the wall a couple of times. I shrugged and went outside to the garage.
Diane and Aimee were waiting for me at the garage. Diane had changed from shorts to a tweedy-looking green skirt and Aimee was wearing a pink and white dress and white shoes and looking as if she might be suffering from it.
I selected a Buick from the garage and they climbed in. Diane took sunglasses with heavy pink shell frames from her purse and put them on. Aimee regarded me steadily and inquisitively when she thought I wasn’t likely to glance at her. She was wearing a bit of lipstick, Diane’s shade. When we drove by the house Macy waved from the front porch and Aimee waved back, breaking out a smile for an instant. Then she sat forward on the edge of the seat with her small fingers curled over the dashboard and looked intently through the windshield.
Reavis let us through the high gate, having left his submachine gun inside the house out of respect to the ladies. This was my first look at him by daylight, and there wasn’t much to see. Medium height and heavy in the chest, but in time the flesh would sag. He was a younger Rudy Mask.
“It’s a beautiful morning,” Diane said. “I hope we don’t have to waste all of it in the doctor’s office.”
“What’s Aimee going for?”
“Shots.” Aimee almost flinched, her face troubled. Diane put an arm around her. “There’s nothing to it, baby. Diane’s going to get a couple herself.”
“Then can we go to the show?” Aimee said insistently, as if she had been asking since waking up that morning.
“Maybe we’ll have time. We have to eat lunch and see about your playsuits, too.”
“And a bicycle.”
Diane sighed. “I don’t know where you’re going to ride a bicycle around—”
“But Daddy said—”
“I know he did. I was just trying to be practical. We’ll see about the bicycle, too.”
“I want to see a Bob Hope picture.”
“Sounds good to me,” Diane said cheerfully. She smiled at me. “See how busy we’ll be today. You should come with us.”
“I can’t take those shots. Pass out every time.”
Aimee lapsed into stricken silence and Diane scowled at me, her eyes rolling in Aimee’s direction. She fussed with the child’s hair. Aimee began singing something to herself.
“Are you working today?” Diane said.
I nodded.
“What will you try first? I just don’t see how you could track down someone like this. I’ve heard Macy talk about the newspaper clippings. They’ve been mailed from everywhere.”
“I have to give it a try. There’s always a place to start.”
“Where will you start?”
