and tossed away the key.
'You know, Annie,' my mother had said, the first time I plucked up courage to explain, 'you can't really be a private eye, they only have them in the movies. And books. And besides, they're always men. '
My mom. God bless her, always seemed to have a vested interest in remaining firmly behind the times.
'Sure, Mom,' I said, 'you're right. ' And inched back the business card I had proudly given her, stuffing it back down into my wallet.
There'd be another time.
And so there had. My first major cheque safely paid into the bank and cleared, two other clients waiting in the wings, I had invited my long-suffering mother out for cocktails and dinner at her favourite Kansas City restaurant.
I didn't mention that, did I? About my mother being from Kansas City.
Well, that's an important part of it; it explains a great deal.
But back to cocktails. Emboldened by the second Manhattan, I had showed my mother my bank balance and launched into the spiel.
Adventure, independence, the chance to be my 62 own boss, run my own life 'Mom, I'm a big girl now. This is what I want to do. You see, it'II work out fine.'
Which so far, pretty much, had been true. During my time practising law I had made a lot of useful contacts, in that profession as well as the police. I was in pretty thick with a few good working journalists, too the kind that still spend more time on the street than in the office staring at their computer screen.
And Mom, I like to think, surprised herself with a smile of pride when some newfound friend asked over coffee,
'Marjorie, just what is it that your daughter does out there in California?' And my mom, smiling, saying, 'Oh, she's just a private eye.'
There were things about my life, though, that I didn 't tell her. A little knowledge may. in some circumstances, be a dangerous thing, but in my mother's case it's positively beneficial. I didn't tell, for instance, about the six weeks I spent in hospital after being stupid enough to get trapped up an alley with three guys who made Mike Tyson look like Mickey Mouse. Nor the occasion I stepped in front of a light and two. 38 slugs tore past me so close I swear I could feel the wind of their slipstream. And the bodies. I didn't tell her about the bodies. The one I had found tied upside down, offering freebies to half a hundred flies; the little girl I had discovered buried in a ditch. I hadn't told her about any of these things on account there was no need to upset her without cause which was why I had never told her about Diane.
My mom, you see, is strictly old school. The reason she can come to terms with what I do for a job is because, when it comes right down to it. the job I do is not that important.
At best it's a stage, a phase, it's what I do to fill in time before I finally settle dawn and get on with what the Good Lord set me on this earth for, get married, of course, and have children.
Somewhere, she has a picture of me, taken at a cousin's wedding when I was but thirteen. The same age as that poor child who ended her days in a shallow grave. There I am, on the left of the photo, wearing my pretty pink bridesmaid's dress and smiling through the jungle gym of my new braces as I cling on to the bride's bouquet which I have just caught.
When Miller and I were divorced, she took it pretty well.
'Everyone,' she said, 'is allowed one false start. ' Since when, despite the fact that in child-rearing terms, the years are no longer exactly on my side, she has continued, optimistically, to wait.
As, I suppose, had I. Oh, you know, a dinner date here, a concert ticket there, but pretty much I'd laid low, let my work carry the load, kept my powder dry while making sure my underwear was always clean just in case.
Diane had been a columnist for the Chronicle when I met her, women's issues mostly, date rape, who has the key to the executive wash room, the right to choose, you know the kind of thing. Her byline and a photograph (not flattering) and five bucks a word. Someone had persuaded her, with all the women Pis appearing on the bookracks, she should do a piece on the real thing.
Diane rang me and after a couple of false 64 starts we finally got to meet in a bar out by the ocean in Santa Cruz. We hadn't shaken hands before my stomach was bun gee jumping and. well, you're pretty sophisticated or you wouldn't have stuck with it this far, so you can guess the rest. That was almost a year ago almost, hell! – it- was eleven months, five days and around seven hours, and still, first thing I do once I've made sure my charge is seated safely at her table, is phone Diane's number just to hear her voice on the answer machine.
If that kind of thing happens in Kansas City – and I'm sure it does, both in Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, MO then I'm sure my mother doesn 't know about it. For now, for at least as long as Diane and I go on maintaining separate apartments, I intend to see it stays that way.
Right now I check my watch against the clock on the dash and they both tell me it's fifteen minutes shy often o'clock. The coffee the woman at the reservations desk organised for me is long reduced to a residue of cold grounds and, even in the expanse of my extravagant rental, my legs are beginning to cramp up and feel in need of a stretch.
At the desk the woman remembers me and says again, if I'd care to take a seat at the bar. But I assure her I'm fine and while she sends a waiter nimbly down the carpeted stairs in search of a fresh cup of coffee. I move close enough to the stained wood balustrade to see the young woman whose safety I am charged with protecting. She's sitting at a table, center room, pretty blonde head inclined towards the pretty young man who is her dinner date, a poet from Seattle and a pretty serious one. A first collection already published by Breitenbush Books of Portland (he happened to have a copy with him and was kind enough to show me) and another from Carnegie Melton on the way. They seemed to have reached the dessert stage, so we could be on the road by ten thirty.
'They make a lovely couple, don't they?' The receptionist has come to stand next to me and I nod in agreement.
'Yes, they do.'
'Do you work for Mr Reigler?' she asks.
'Sort of,' I say.
By then the waiter has returned with my coffee so I thank them both and carry it outside, back into the parking lot. The air is warm enough for me to be only wearing a light sweater and even though we're close to the lake, it isn't too buggy. I stroll for a while between the cars, remembering the morning Reigler asked me to his office. It was only the second or third time I'd seen him since resigning from his law firm; the first time since his stroke. It had left him with some paralysis down the right side, not so bad that he couldn't stand, with help, and, although it was necessary to concentrate, he could speak and make himself understood. Once out of hospital and through his period of convalescence, he had insisted on coming to the office every day. Much of the time, I guessed, he just sat there and they ran things past him, playing up to the formality that all decisions were his.
What Reigler had wanted to talk to me about was a series of threatening calls, someone, anonymous, who felt their life had been 66 ruined by some case or other Reigler's firm had handled.
'Now it ain't worth doing anything to you, you sorry bastard,' the last one had said, 'but you best watch out for your family, 'cause they can get hurt and there isn't a damn thing you can do to stop it.
'
Aside from notifying the police, one thing Reiglerdid was to hire me.
His daughter April was, {suspected, the one true love of his life.
She was a beauty, of a fragile kind; she was bright, dutiful enough, but stubborn. She was prepared to humor her father by agreeing I could drive her places, keep an eye out, but made it clear this wasn't going to be like the secret service and the President.
'Besides,' she reminded her father, a little, I thought, unkindly, 'what could they do when Kennedy was shot? Reagan? '
Reluctantly, April agreed that I could go along on her trip to Tahoe. as long as I didn't get too close. This evening she has made it clear that any ideas I might have of sitting alongside herself and her poet while they share beautiful thoughts and a lobster and mango salad are not going to pan out. And in all honesty the only danger I suspect she might be a prey to in the midst of that crowded and fashionable restaurant rests in the depths of the poet's brown eyes.
Another turn of the parking lot and I'm back at the Chevy and there they are, April and her own Byron or
