work.'
'Thawed something.'
'I think it's lasagna. It's usually lasagna. Joyce cooks a boxcar full of lasagna and cuts the thing into one-foot squares and then freezes them. Our freezer flies the Italian flag.'
'Well, then, how about I come over for dinner?'
'Listen to that,' Dexter said. 'Man invites himself.'
'Like I said, I'll have to ask Joyce,' Bernie said. 'I don't know why there should be a problem. A square foot of lasagna is a lot of lasagna.'
'It sounds like a lot of lasagna.'
'It's good lasagna, though,' Bernie said defensively. 'Joyce makes a terrific lasagna.'
'I'll bring the wine.'
'Red,' Bernie said. 'I'm sick of Frascati.'
Dexter picked up my doodle pad and wrote something on it. He waved languidly at me and headed for the door.
'I'm going to want to talk to Joyce,' I said. 'Will she mind?'
'Depends on what you want to talk about,' Bernie said.
'See you,' Dexter called. 'Check the pad.'
'Thanks for getting the cat,' I said.
'Joyce likes cats,' Bernie said. Then he said, 'What have cats got to do with anything?'
'Nothing much. Seven o'clock fine?' Dexter pulled the door closed and went down the hill, whistling.
'Fine. Unless Joyce can't make it. Is this about cats?'
'No,' I said. 'It's about doctors. See you at seven.'
I hung up and went to the kitchen to dump my cup in the sink. On the doodle pad Dexter had written dexter smif.
555-0091.CONSIDERIN' ABOUT A CAREER CHANGE.
Chapter 16
Mrs. Yount's pendulous lower lip trembled. So did the paper cup in her hand. The cup, courtesy of McDonald's, said fresh coffee but the aroma was pure Jack Daniel's.
'I can't believe she's gone,' Mrs. Yount said. 'I always knew she'd come home. And now she won't.'
Mrs. Yount's living room was in its usual state of chaos. Clothes were piled about eight inches thick on the carpet, if there was a carpet. An old, worn fur coat was spread out in front of the TV, which was tuned to a daytime show about the turbulent emotional lives of doctors and nurses. Two yolk-spattered plates, the refuse of Mrs. Yount's significant breakfast, littered the coat's shedding collar. Outside, a waist-high wall of empty whiskey bottles dripped water around Mrs. Yount's pathetic little garden. Mrs. Yount didn't like to throw her dead soldiers away. The trashmen might talk. Instead, she stacked them neatly inside the cinder-block wall that surrounded her scraggly patio.
'I should of felt something,' she said. 'Wouldn't you think I'd of felt something if she was dead?'
'I'm sorry,' I said. 'There couldn't have been any pain, the man said. She ran right under the truck, and it was over.'
The lip trembled again. I was terrified that she'd begin to cry. 'I guess that's something,' she said. 'He was a nice man?'
'Very nice. He felt terrible.'
'What kind of truck?'
I wasn't ready for the question. 'A beer truck. Making a delivery to the grocery.'
'Fluffy liked beer. I gave her a little saucerful just before bed. She drank Anchor Steam.'
'She had good taste,' I said idiotically. 'I drink it myself sometimes.'
'Would you like one?'
'No,' I said. 'That's all right.'
Mrs. Yount raised her paper cup to her lips and started to swallow, but then she made a sputtering noise and drops of whiskey spattered the crumpled clothes at her feet. A fat tear squeezed itself loose from her eye. 'Oh, dear,' she said. 'Oh, dear… oh, dear.'
'Please, Mrs. Yount,' I said.
'What am I to do?' She looked at the television screen and the tears flowed down. 'She was only three. What am I to do?'
'You'll be fine.' I reached out and patted her arm.
She looked down at my hand and then heavily up at me, and there was a little click behind her eyes and the old Mrs. Yount was back. 'A lot you know, mister,' she said. 'Go away. Send me a bill.' She waved me away and picked up an empty Jack Daniel's bottle. Without turning back, she tottered toward the back door to add it to the wall of empties. 'Just send me a bill, mister, that's all.' The glass door to the patio slid open with a squeal that started a dog howling somewhere.
I left without saying anything about the leak in the roof.
In the high and palmy days of Hollywood glamour the place had called itself the Borzoi, and it had offered temporary and very expensive shelter to various Huntingtons, Hartfords, Sepulvedas, and Doheneys, not to mention a clutch of Barrymores. The Californians came there when the fires of autumn razed the elegant homes on the hillsides and when their wives were suing them for divorce, and the Barrymores when they were desperate enough for money to desert the adoring audiences of New York and hop the Twentieth Century for the three-day trip to Los Angeles. All day they'd labor in silence in the converted barns on Gower and Sunset, letting their famous voices go to waste and loathing themselves for pandering to a vulgar new medium, and at night they'd return to the Borzoi in their long white limousines to enjoy the fruits of their labors. They seldom took much money back to New York.
What remained of the Borzoi's elegance was mostly in the refined bones of the building, a sharp-elbowed piece of Art Deco that laughed at gravity, and in the long-dark neon portrait of two impossibly slim dogs that raced each other over the spiky chrome doors leading into the lobby. There were six pairs of doors in all, needing nothing more than a little chrome polish and a few hours of work to be restored to glory, but they hadn't been touched in years.
In fact, from where I stood, across the street, I couldn't see that the Borzoi's current owners, the Church of the Eternal Moment, had done much for the neighborhood. The sign that for sixty years had said the borzoi in angular letters had been replaced by a large, clunky hand-painted affair announcing the new landlord's presence, but that was about it. I'd arranged to meet Eleanor at one at the Times, and since that meant going downtown it seemed like an opportunity to take a look at Church headquarters. I don't go downtown much, and every time I go I remember why.
The Borzoi faced west across a sodden square that had probably once been a pleasant little park. Dozens of homeless men and women had moved or been herded into the square, using plastic trashbags and cardboard cartons to shield themselves from the rain. It was about as effective as it sounds. The sanitary facilities were as low-tech as the housing, and the square smelled like an open sewer, which, in effect, it was.
The extent of the Church's charity toward the dispossessed on its doorstep was evident from across the street. Ragged men and women sat, glazed and absent, in the doorways on either side of the Borzoi, and lurched up and down the sidewalk to the right and to the left. But no one huddled for refuge in the Borzoi's doorways, and no one strolled bedazedly in front of it. A waterlogged red carpet ran from the six pairs of chrome doors to the very edge of the curb. The carpet was flanked by thick black dripping wire ropes that traveled down the steps on heavy metal stanchions and terminated exactly eighteen inches from the gutter. There was enough room for someone with minimal motor control to squeeze by on his way to or from the brown-bag store at the corner, but there was obviously no invitation to sit on the Borzoi's steps and rest a spell.
This message was further underlined by the presence of two beefy jokers wearing the nautical outfits I'd seen up in Carmel. They stood just inside the right- and left-hand doors and glared vigilantly out toward the street.
