lady.'
'You wan' Pepto-Bismol?' Roberto asked. 'We always got a lot of Pepto-Bismol.' He smiled sympathetically and included me in it. 'Pepto-Bismol is our insurance company.'
'It's okay, Roberto.' He started to leave. 'Wait,' I said. 'Last time I was in here, the guy I was with, you remember?'
'Terrible guy, bad-lookin' guy. Look like he wan' to eat the Easter bunny raw. I remember.'
'Did you ever see him before? Do you know his name?'
Roberto squinted at the wall as if he expected to see a Technicolor film unspool on its surface. 'Naw,' he finally said. 'Somebody as mean as that, I remember.' He shrugged. 'Sorry,' he said, dismissing it. In a waiter's world there are a lot of bad guys.
'No problem. Thanks anyway.'
'So what was that about?' Rhoda said as Roberto vanished toward the kitchen.
'Nothing. Another shitty business lunch.'
'Yeah. A business lunch is the shortest route between eating and the bathroom. Do not pass go. Do not taste. In fact, skip the esophagus entirely. It' supposed to punctuate the day, right? Sally said once that lunch was the only punctuation mark softer than a comma.'
'You're good friends.'
'She's a good friend. You think I'm easy to put up with? Until Herbert proposed I was five miles of barbed wire. Get married, everybody kept saying. Listen to your biological tock clicking.' She picked up her beer and looked at it with one eye shut. ' Tock clicking,' ' she said. 'Am I a cheap drunk, or what? So no wonder I was grouchy, the whole world waiting to watch me walk the plank to Lohengrin, all these damn women in Connecticut writing big fat books about the joys of late-life motherhood, and all I really want to do is go home to my dinky little apartment, feed the cat, and try to stay reasonably sober until it's time for David Letterman. Otherwise I don't get the jokes.'
She drew a long breath. 'Sally let me take it all out on her. When Herbert, may he catch a fatal case of athlete's foot and die slowly from his ankles up, when Herbert proposed and I didn't know what to do, Sally listened to me for weeks and weeks. Must have seemed like years to her. One day I was yes, one day I was no. Whichever way I felt, I'd ask for advice, which Sally would dutifully give, and I'd be back the next day with the same goddamned questions. And she'd listen again and give me advice again, and then we'd do it all over.'
She picked up the beer and put it down again. 'I'd like a real drink,' she said. 'A screwdriver, is that okay?'
I signaled for Roberto and ordered. 'What advice did she give you? Did she want you to marry Herbert or not?'
Rhoda's laugh was short and dry. 'She didn't give a shit either way. She just wanted me to do whatever would make me happy. It wouldn't have made any difference if Herbert was Bigfoot, as long as she was sure that he was what I wanted. Hell, if Bigfoot had been the boy of my dreams, she would have helped him rent a tuxedo.'
'She was indifferent?'
She gave me a long look while she tried to figure out what to say. 'No,' she said finally. 'She wasn't indifferent. She just wanted to make sure that I was doing what I really wanted. If I did, whatever that was, it was okay with her.
'She kept asking me questions. Sometimes they seemed dumb, like who was more important to me, my mother or me? Except, you see, that's not so dumb, because it's my mother who really wants me to get married. Or she'd ask me things about Herbert, like did he have a good time when he got drunk, and what didn't he want to talk about ever, and did he make love like it was fun or like he was trying to remember how he was supposed to do it, and did he seem to have a sense of humor about his underwear? Questions that made me look at him different. Wasted effort, the putz.'
'Is Sally married?'
'Sally? Sally married?' She picked up the screwdriver and took a long pull. 'Golly, do you know, I don't know.' She looked stricken. 'Gee, isn't that awful? That's the kind of question Sally used to ask, something that made you realize something about yourself. Oh, my God, I'm ashamed of myself. I was so busy talking to her that I hardly ever listened.'
'In every relationship there's a talker and a listener. You're the talker, that's all,' I said, trying to smooth her out. 'Sally is the listener.' Then I shut up so I could register the little click in my brain. I looked at a morose knot of disc jockeys at the bar; ratings must have been down. 'Rhoda. What's Sally's religion?'
'Religion? That she does talk about, in the last year or so, anyway. She keeps trying to get me to go with her. I'm not much into religion, you know, I'm supposed to be a Jew but I might just as well be a Chevrolet for all the attention I pay to it. But one thing I've got less than zero interest in is trendy California cults.'
'I'm sorry to do this,' I said, standing up, 'but I've got to go. Listen, the meal, anything you want, it's all on my credit card, and it's already signed. Have another drink, have a burger, have whatever you like. Better still, call in sick and go home, skip the rest of the day. Wash your hair. Stop worrying about Sally. Maybe you did do all the talking, but you're a terrific person and she was lucky to have you.'
She looked up at me with her mouth open.
'And when Herbert calls,' I said, 'tell him to go fuck himself.'
Sally was a Listener. Listener Simpson's mania for clarity had echoed Harker's insistence on understanding. That had been the only part of my description of Harker that had brought Skippy down from his plateau of bliss. I had to get home and review my notes.
At the bottom of my unpaved driveway I caught a whiff of something sharp, sweet, old, and slightly sickening. I slowed down for a moment to check it out but didn't see anything. Then, in a hurry, I slogged up through the mud at a forty-degree angle, slipping and falling to my knees only twice, not bad for a wet November afternoon on an unpaved driveway that asked nothing less from the world than that it should be beamed up Star Trek-style and then let down in Switzerland, where it could be pressed into service as an Olympic ski ramp.
That would be all right if the house at the top of it were worth getting to. It was slapped together in the twenties by an embittered alcoholic hermit who wanted to flee the madding crowd. He kept himself relatively sober long enough to build the thing-it couldn't have taken more than a couple of months-and then went on a bourbon toot that ended a year later when he saw workers paving Old Topanga Canyon about a half-mile below. He promptly tied a rope around the living-room rafter and kicked a chair out from under him.
He hung there, mummified by the dry summer heat, like a big strip of bacon for a couple of years, sharing the house with a pair of red-tailed hawks, until he was discovered by a determined census taker. The house passed to the hermit's sister, and then to her son, who went to the Balkans and took himself a Balkan bride during World War II. He then got himself killed in the war, and ownership of the house devolved upon the Balkan bride, Mrs. Yount. The house was essentially a three-room wooden cabin, but it had the best view in Topanga, all the way from the massive red outcrop of Big Rock to the little settlement of Topanga on the way to the ocean. And there were acres of clean stars above it at night.
Of course, to get to all of that, you had to climb the driveway. Once I made it to the top and muscled open the swollen wooden door, I looked on top of the computer, the first place I always looked because it was where I put everything. And there they were. Before I looked at them, I got a fire burning in the potbellied stove.
With the wood crackling, steam rising from the damp carpet, and rain throwing handfuls of tacks against the roof, I surveyed my options. There were remarkably few of them.
I didn't have a client. I did have a grudge against Needle-nose. I'd liked Sally Oldfield. And I had some information. Whatever chain of events had culminated in the murder of Sally Oldfield had begun with the Church of the Eternal Moment.
The obvious thing to do was call the cops.
Generally, I'd prefer not to call the cops. If everybody called the cops, I wouldn't be in business, and I'd hate to start a trend. But nobody was paying for my time now that the ersatz Ambrose Harker had faded back into whatever woodwork he'd crawled out of, and somebody had to do something about Sally.
So I went over to the computer, got the folded printout of my notes on the case, smoothed them open, and read over them. Then I did what I didn't want to do. I called my pet cop.
Alvin Hammond, Sergeant, LAPD, didn't know he was my pet cop. Sergeant Hammond weighed a
