'You can still go to San Antonio. I've known people who kicked dope. If they did it, you can.'
'Cabron,' she said. 'Do me a favor, okay? Don' help me anymore.'
'Sorry,' I said. I went to the car, feeling like a Don Quixote who had just learned that windmills bleed. As I opened the door, she called out something from behind me. I turned and looked at her inquiringly.
'Has he got the knife?' she asked again.
'Not if he only had one,' I said.
'Tha's somethin',' she said. 'Now go away.'
I went. In the rearview mirror I saw her standing at the curb, looking at the phone booth. The little dog with the bow on its collar stared up at her, wondering what came next. That dog sure loved her.
Sally Oldfield surprised me for the next-to-last time that day at three-fifty-two. She came out of the entrance to Monument Records with a young woman, a dark-haired, chubby person in dieter's clothes: a too-tight short skirt and a bright pink blouse with enough ruffles on its front to decorate a Laura Ashley boutique. Sally slipped her arm unself-consciously around her friend's waist and the two of them headed down Gower to what had to be the friend's car. I jotted down the plate number as the two of them climbed in and I then followed them to a bridal shop on Sunset that was called, a little anxiously, I thought, I Do, I Do. One more 'I Do' would have been a dead giveaway. Fifteen minutes later they came out. The chubby one was carrying a big white box with a satin bow on it. They were talking a mile a minute in the excited, intimate way that men never manage. The friend laid the box lovingly in the trunk and then they headed back to Monument. I parked in the no-parking zone and settled in for a long winter's nap.
No matter how boring a stakeout is, you should never make assumptions. I'd made one, that she wouldn't come out until quitting time, and that she'd come out in her car when she did. It almost cost me the whole mile. It was quitting time but she was on foot. She was most of the way to Fountain before I realized who she was.
Same as before: the white Corvette parked out of sight around the corner. The same delighted hop into the car, the same quick trip to the Sleepy Bear, the same tandem climb up the stairs, the man holding her hand this time. It started to sprinkle.
The rain had begun in earnest when Needle-nose came out, right on schedule, thirty-three minutes after they went in. Four minutes later I turned on the windshield wipers and started looking for her cab.
At six-twenty the neon came on above me with a sudden snap of pink light and an electric buzz. A fuchsia bear holding a candle in its right paw trotted blissfully toward the sack. Neon being what it is, he was going to walk all night.
The evening bloomed damp and unpromising before me. I reproached myself for not having the courage to complain to Mrs. Yount about the leak in my living room ceiling and hoped briefly that Ambrose Harker's roof was leaking directly above his bed. Resignedly I turned on the radio and fiddled with the knobs. Sally Oldfield's cab was obviously sitting in rush-hour traffic somewhere, its driver swearing at the rain.
At six-forty-five I began to get nervous. The doors of the Sleepy Bear had been slapping open and closed at the bidding of cheerful adulterers like the stage set in a French bedroom farce, but the door to room 207 remained shut. She hadn't even lifted the curtain on the front window to look for her cab.
Then the pink light became redder and the cops arrived. They went straight to room 207. There were a lot of them.
Discretion is almost always the better part of valor. I locked Alice and went across the street to my phone booth. There was no bum in it, but it stank of urine and the floor was littered with crumpled balls that had been ripped from the Yellow Pages to meet needs more elemental than finding the nearest interior decorator. I was still standing there, breathing in Hollywood's heady perfume, an hour and a half later when two uniformed patrolmen wheeled Sally Oldfield out feetfirst. A white sheet covered her face.
Chapter 4
There was no answer. That made nine times, five from various phone booths and four from my living room, where water was dripping from the leak in the ceiling and the wood-burning stove was consuming oak and cedar at a rate guaranteed to chase away the chill about half an hour after I climbed shivering into a clammy bed. Right after I fell asleep the bedroom would warm up. By the time I woke up again it would have been cold for an hour.
Sarah Marie Theresa Oldfield had been cold for more than four hours. I hung up.
'It's a work number,' Roxanne said from the couch. She was wearing the only bathrobe I had. It looked warm. 'He wouldn't be at work now. You said so yourself.'
'I'm no authority,' I said. 'The last time I was right about anything, Wendell Willkie was president.'
She squinted at the red wine in her glass and fluffed through her memory for anything that made sense. 'Wendell Willkie was never president.'
'Right,' I said. 'But isn't it a great name?'
'Millard Fillmore,' she said, draining her glass and holding it out to me. 'That's a great name. Sounds like a cross between a duck and a dance hall.'
'I'm going to try Information,' I said.
'Real detectives, which is to say the detectives in books, never use Information. They use intuition, they use connections downtown, they use informants in corner pool parlors. But they never use Information.'
A minute later we both knew why. 'He's not listed,' I said.
'Nobody in L.A. is listed. I'm not listed, you're not listed.'
'Yes, I am.'
'But your address isn't. S. Grist, it says. Address nowhere. Your first name could be Susan. You live wherever the phone rings. Not very helpful to a girl in a hurry.'
'She's dead,' I said. 'She's not in a hurry.'
'I'm alive,' she said, 'and I'd like some more wine. If I hold this glass out any longer I'll get pins and needles.'
I poured without saying anything. I was remembering Sally Oldfield, holding the man's hand in hers as she hurried upstairs to the room he planned to kill her in. I was remembering the Chicana hooker, the tracks on her arms. I was counting my options, comparing them with theirs, and coming up sorry. It must have showed.
'Hey,' Roxanne said. 'She's not going to care if you drink. You can't bring her back to life by joining the Temperance League, if there's still such a thing. There's a big woolly bathrobe over here and I've already warmed it up.'
The world spun once or twice and then steadied itself, and she was right. Roxanne was on the couch, all milky and smooth, holding the bathrobe open so I could crawl in. She had four beautiful little moles, a sort of dermatological Little Dipper, just above her navel. Rain spattered single-mindedly on the roof. Sally Oldfield was on a slab somewhere, offering her secrets to the forensic team. The Chicana was probably shivering at an intersection, selling her secrets to make the money the body shop would charge for the Cadillac. Outside was there and inside was here. That was the reason people went inside.
'Roxanne,' I said, 'the world is something you scrape off your shoe.'
'That's why there's religion,' she said. 'To teach you the difference between your sole and your soul.'
I lifted the bottle and drank from it. The wine had the good, dusty taste of sunshine and Italian dirt. I held it out to her and she shook her head, hair falling around her face. Her glass was on the table in front of her.
'Come to mama,' Roxanne said. The robe was still open.
An hour later we were asleep, curled into a tight, chaste knot against the damp. Twice during the night I woke up, thinking the phone was ringing. It wasn't.
Roxanne was gone when I woke up. Adding to her already overwhelming total of karmic points, she'd made a pot of coffee. Clutching a cup for dear life, I went outside. The root garden, the sparse little plot where I grow my radishes, onions, garlic, and potatoes, was thriving. This time of year neither of us needed water. Not that I ever did.
Eight-thirty. The music business lurches foggily into gear sometime in the digestive interval between brunch and lunch. I tried Harker's number anyway; maybe corporate cops got in early so they could snoop through the secretaries' desks, looking for evidence of embezzlement or back issues of Playgirl. I got the same old lonely ring,
