Well, either someone was in there or they weren't, and I couldn't squat in the lettuce any longer without running the risk of hypothermia. I went to the back door and opened it, failing to be surprised by the fact that it was unlocked, and shouted cheerily, 'Hi, honey, I'm home.' I felt like Ricky Ricardo. Lucy, Fred and Ethel, Little Ricky, or any combination thereof would have looked very good to me.
They weren't there, or if they were, they didn't answer. I was in a laundry room. The dryer was open and clothes were spilled out of it, a cascade of white onto the red clay tile floor. Sally Oldfield had looked like the kind of woman who sorted her whites. She hadn't looked like the kind of woman who emptied her dryer onto the floor.
Most laundry rooms open onto kitchens; it's cheaper for the contractors to keep all the plumbing in one place. Sally's house was no exception. I eased open the door at the end of the laundry room and stood there staring at chaos.
The drawers had all been pulled out and dumped upside down into the center of the room. Cooking implements were scattered everywhere. The top of the stove had been pulled off to reveal the gas pipes beneath. Pilot lights glowed a pale blue. The test of a great housekeeper is the area beneath the cooktop. Sally's was immaculate. I felt obscurely proud of her.
Whoever had taken the place apart had been uncommonly thorough. In the tiny dining room the table was upside down, as were the chairs, just in case something had been taped to their undersides. The sofa in the cozy little living room had been dismantled and the cushions and backs had been slit open. The oval hooked rug, probably a family hand-me-down, had been yanked to one side and turned over.
On the floor in a corner, near an uprooted potted palm, some rectangles caught my attention. I picked them up, shook the potting soil off them, and turned them over.
Pictures. Sally and a man who might have been Mr. Oldfield smiled into the camera, standing in front of someplace tropical, Hawaii maybe. Sally looked young and brave and full of conviction: this marriage was going to last forever. Their clothes, post-hippie loose and colorful, dated the pictures in the seventies.
The photographs had been torn from their frames. In two of them, a knife had made a savage X through Sally's face. The man who held the knife must have known he had all the time in the world, pausing for a meaningless act of spite. I felt murderous.
It was the same story everywhere. She had slept in a single bed, in a room that had once been almost Japanese in its austerity. The bed had been ravaged with the knife, one long jagged slash running from the head of the narrow mattress to the foot. Near an upended vanity table I picked up a hairbrush. It had a few of her hairs in it.
I sat on the box spring and pictured her getting up in the morning. She would have put on the pale blue robe that lay crumpled against the wall and gone into the bathroom for her shower. Then, probably even before she drank her coffee, she would have sat in the early sunlight streaming through the east-facing bedroom windows and brushed her hair. She'd had beautiful hair. She'd taken care of her hair, not out of vanity but out of self- respect.
'What was your secret, Sally?' I said out loud. 'Why did they do it?' This wasn't random, it wasn't a sex slaying that began and ended in some shithouse motel on Sunset. Sally Oldfield, as sweet as she had seemed to be, had gotten mixed up with pros.
In all, I sat there for an hour. Then I left, closing the front door on the odds and ends of Sally Oldfield's life and on her secret too.
Chapter 8
Her name was Rhoda Gerwitz, and she'd just canceled her wedding.
'I mean, honest to God, the creep, he's got the emotional depth of a cold sore. All chin and no forehead,' she said around a mouthful of hamburger. She'd briefly considered the chefs salad and then rejected it; after all, she could stop worrying about fitting into her wedding dress.
'Can you imagine?' She extricated a limp piece of onion from her mouth, looked at it critically, and put it on the edge of her plate. 'Here's my best friend, my number-one bridesmaid, vanished from the face of the earth. I was going to heave the bouquet straight at her, and she's fallen over the edge somewhere. Well, how could I don the lace and orange blossoms and waltz down the aisle under such a cloud? Pass the catsup?'
I handed it to her and she upended it over her french fries. It made a gurgling sound. 'If you're a girl,' she continued, monitoring the catsup's flow, 'men being what they are, odds are pretty good you're going to marry a jerk. No offense, I hope, present company excepted, and you seem like a nice-enough guy. But there's jerks and then there's jerks. If you're going to put up a sign that says no jerks, you're going to be an old maid.' She giggled. 'I always loved that expression,' she said. ' 'Old maid.' Like there's no way to have fun except getting married. If mama only knew. Still, like I said, there's jerks and jerks. A girl's gotta have standards.'
'And his J.Q. was too high.'
She stopped chewing and gave me a level gaze. 'J.Q.?'
'Jerk Quotient.'
She sputtered and grabbed a napkin. 'Don't do that,' she said. 'Not when my mouth is full. Sally always says that the only problem with eating lunch with me is that she needs a raincoat.' She stopped talking, looked at the burger, and put it down. 'Aah, shit,' she said, 'Sally.' She dabbed at a corner of her mouth with her napkin. It was the wrong corner. 'How long have you known her for?'
I tried to remember what I'd told Rhoda on the phone, couldn't, and said, 'A few months. Enough to want to try to find her.' I'd spent most of two days finding out everything I could about Sally Oldfield, and I almost felt like I was telling the truth. Patrick Henry had used his L.A. Times clout to trace Rhoda Gerwitz's name from the license plate I gave him, in exchange for a renewed promise to speak to him and only him when and if there were anything worth telling. I'd called Rhoda at Monument Records and set up a lunch.
'The cops,' Rhoda was saying. 'If she's not dead, they don't want to know about it. It's enough to make you crazy. I've been to her house, knocked on the door, phoned her a dozen times. They didn't even know the color of her eyes. And then there's Herbert. Herbert-that's el jerkerino's name-says to me, 'You don't need a bridesmaid to get married, all you need is a groom.' Can you imagine? All I asked was to put it off until she turned up, or… well, you know. The sonofabitch. But listen, even if he's as dumb as a toadstool, you're not supposed to explain to a guy that's popped the question, so to speak, that a husband is a husband but a girlfriend is for life. This is not considered good strategy in the war between the sexes.' The skin around her eyes crumpled up and she poked the hamburger with her index finger. It didn't poke back. 'Do you think she's okay?' she asked the hamburger. 'I don't think she's okay.'
She blinked a couple of times, fast. 'Can you return a wedding gown?' she said.
'I don't know. I've never bought one.'
'Sally said…' She swallowed even though her mouth was empty. 'Sally said that the trouble with a wedding gown was all those miles of fabric. If the bride had as much mileage on her as the gown, she said, no man would ever get married.' She tried a smile but it didn't work out. 'Anyway, they had to let it out,' she said. 'After all those salads. They're not going to take it back. And even if they did, I think I'd keep it. As a reminder of all the jerks in the world.' She lifted her glass of beer.
'To Sally turning up safe,' she said. 'So you're a bachelor, huh?'
'I'm too old to be a bachelor. I'm an old maid.'
'What're you anyway, thirty, thirty-one?'
'Thirty-four.'
'Sally is thirty-two. Always worried about her birthday, which, by the way, is coming up, always wrinkling her nose like every birthday took her one step closer to looking like Margo coming out of Shangri-La, you know that movie? She's always checking her hair like she expects it to be four feet long and gray.' She swirled the beer in the glass. 'Shit,' she said, looking at it, 'she'd better be okay.'
The waiter appeared. It was Roberto. Everybody who worked at Monument Records seemed to eat at Nickodell's, and Rhoda had chosen it out of all the restaurants in Hollywood when I'd called to ask her to lunch. Roberto looked more than professionally concerned. 'Somethin' wrong with the lady's hamburger?'
Rhoda summoned up a sweet smile. 'No,' she said, 'the hamburger's fine. Something's wrong with the
