'Treasure of the Aztecs,' LaBrava said, nodding. He had never heard of it.
'Farley Granger was Montezuma's bastard son. In the last reel I'm about to be offered up to the gods on top of a pyramid, have my heart torn out, but I'm rescued by Cortez's younger brother. Remember?'
'The star,' LaBrava said. 'I can't think who it was.'
'Audie Murphy. I took the first flight I could get out of Durango and haven't made a picture since.'
'I imagine a lot of people liked it though.'
'You didn't see it, did you?'
'I guess that's one I missed. How many pictures did you make?'
'Sixteen. From '55 to '63.'
He could think of four titles. Maybe five. 'I might've missed a couple of the early ones too,' LaBrava said, 'but I saw all the rest. I have to tell you, whether it means anything to you or not, you were good.'
Jean Shaw raised her eyes to his, giving him that cool, familiar look. 'Which one was your favorite?'
Chapter 7
AT 8:10 P.M. JILL WILKINSON told Pam and Rob, the crisis center night staff, she was getting out before anything else happened. Three consecutive shifts without sleep was about it for hanging in and being a loyal South County employee. She said if she didn't go home to bed within the next hour, they'd be admitting her to Bethesda Memorial for intensive rehabilitation due to social-service burnout. South County would have to scrounge around for another wide-eyed, dedicated supervisor willing to work a seventy-hour week. Good luck. They didn't stay wide- eyed long. During the past twenty-four hours:
First there was the big blond creep with the Mickey Mouse badge and the very real gun. (The Delray cops were good guys; they did think it was sort of funny, but only after informing Mr. Richard Nobles that if he ever came in here and bothered Jill again they would fucking break his jaw on both sides of his you-all mouth and that was a promise.) Then Earl, smoking, had set fire to a mattress during the night--after they were absolutely sure he had no cigarettes or matches on him. Walter continued to drive them nuts asking if they'd ever seen an eagle, until he was finally shipped off to Crisis Stabilization. A girl who had shaved her hair back to the top of her head, shaved off her eyebrows too, locked herself in the john most of the morning while two alcoholics threw up in wastepaper baskets. A consumer waiting to be interviewed got into the case of john paper stored in the counseling office (there was no room for it anywhere else) and streamed several rolls of it around the office. And then there was the smiling Cuban who gave his name as Geraldo Rivera and walked into the center naked except for sporty perforated shoes and tan silk socks. He was sort of cute.
At first he said he had no English. Jill picked up the phone to request a bilingual Delray Police officer and he said wait, some English was coming back to him. He said perhaps he was suffering from amnesia. He remembered dressing to go to the jai alai, but must have forgotten to put his clothes on. He said this is the fronton where they play, isn't it? Jill told him they played just about everything in here except jai alai. She left him for a minute and he wandered through the offices, God, with his limp dong hanging free. The new girl, Mary Elizabeth, said wow, she had never seen one like that before, so dark compared to the rest of him. The drunks opened watery eyes to watch without comment. What else was new? Walter, who had not yet been shipped off when Geraldo arrived, asked him if he had ever seen an eagle. The Cuban said yes, in fact his mother was an eagle. He said he had been stolen by an eagle when he was a small baby, taken to its nest and fed the regurgitated meat of rabbits. They wrapped the Cuban in a sheet, which he seemed to like, rewrapping himself different ways until he settled on leaving one arm free, toga-fashion. He seemed to quiet down.
Then their twenty-year-old potential suicide, manic depressive, climbed up on a file cabinet and punched through the screen to shatter the glass of the ceiling-high window in the main office. They brought him down bloody, blood smearing the wall, an arm gashed from wrist to elbow. Sometime while the paramedics were taking him out to the van, the naked Cuban disappeared.
They called Delray Police to report a missing consumer who might or might not be running around their catchment area wrapped in a South County bed sheet and might or might not answer to the name Geraldo. They would take him back whoever he claimed to be.
There was no positive response from the police.
About five o'clock, when first Jill fantasized going home at a normal hour, seeing herself barefoot, alone, sipping chilled Piesporter, she discovered her wallet and ring of something like a dozen keys missing from her bag. The only person she could think of responsible was the naked Cuban.
Mary Elizabeth left about 6:45. She came back in with Jill's ring of keys and wallet, the wallet empty. Found them, she said, right out in the middle of the parking lot. She had kicked the keys, in fact, walking to her car.
Something was strange. Jill had looked outside earlier, front and rear. If the keys and wallet weren't there a few hours ago, how could they be there now?
Well, if the guy was chronically undifferentiated enough to walk naked into South County thinking it was a jai alai fronton... yes?... play with a bed sheet, rip off her wallet and keys... who knows, he could have sneaked back during a lucid period, basically a nice guy, thoughtful, knowing she would need her keys, her driver's license...
It was a guess that she could accept.
Until she was driving home to Boynton Beach--FM top-forty music turned low, the dark, the muted sound relaxing--and began to wonder if there might not be more to it.
What if that whole number, the guy walking in naked, had been an act? To get her keys, find out where she lived... imagining the naked, possibly-undifferentiated Cuban now as a thoughtful burglar. Did that make sense?
None.
Still it was in her mind, the possibility, as she mounted the circular cement stairway to the second floor, moved along the balcony walk past orange buglights at the rear doors of the apartments and came to 214.
Would it be cleaned out?
Jill held her breath opening the door. She had paid almost seven hundred for the stereo and speakers, God, over three hundred for the color television set. Her two-hundred-dollar bike was on the front balcony...
The apartment was dark. A faint orange glow in the kitchen window showed the sink and counter. She moved past the kitchen, along the short hallway to the living room. Saw dim outside light framing the glass door to her private balcony. Saw her bike out there. Felt the television set sticking out of the bookcase. She let her breath out in a sigh, feeling exhaustion, relief. Thought, Thank you, Jesus. Not as a prayer but a leftover little-girl response. And sucked her breath in again, hard, and said out loud, 'Jesus!' Still not as a prayer. Said, 'What do you want!' with her throat constricted. Seeing part of an outline against the glass door. Only part of the figure in the chair, but knowing it was a man sitting there waiting for her.
She turned to run out. Got to the hallway.
And a light came on behind her.
A lamp turned on in her own living room. The goddamn deceiving light that made her stop and turn, feeling in that moment everything would be all right because, look, the light was on and the unknown figure in darkness would turn out to be someone she knew who would say gee, hey, I'm sorry and offer an incredible explanation...
She knew him all right. Even in the two shades of blue uniform. The blond hair... Coming toward her, bigger in this room than he had looked last night, not hurrying. Still, it was too late to run.
Nobles said, 'Bet you're wore out. I swear they must work you like a nigger mule at that place, the hours you put in. See, I figured you wouldn't want me sitting out in the car, so I come on in. I been waiting, haven't had no supper...' He stretched, yawning. 'I was about to go in there, get in the bed. How'd that a been? You come home, here I'm under the covers sleeping like a baby.'
That thin coat of syrup in his tone.
Jill concentrated. All the words, the dirty words, the sounds in her mind, screaming obscenities, she kept hold of them as he spoke, as he grinned at her; she knew words would be wasted. She concentrated instead, making an effort to breathe slowly, to allow the constriction in her body to drain, and said nothing. She would wait. As she had waited nearly a half hour for the police while a psychopath dumped over file cabinets, tore up her office... She knew
