“Sam,” the young woman said, “did you deliver a custom order last September for a …” She turned to the fugitive and said, “Was it imperial black or what?”
“I am sorry,” he said, with an apologetic shrug.
“Okay, coulda been marble, granite, bronze. Did you take any sort of custom job where the client wanted orchids on the plaque?”
“For an old woman,” the fugitive said.
“Lots of roses,” the man said.
“Orchids,” the fugitive said. “For an old woman.”
“What was her name?”
“We already been through that,” the young woman sighed. “He doesn’t know.”
“Orchids? No, we didn’t deliver no orchids.” Then he said, “A daisy. We delivered a daisy plaque for a little girl’s funeral.”
The mansion was an elephantine dead-white stack of rectangles—a Frank Lloyd Wright ripoff that didn’t work—but it was a short walk to downtown so the location was okay.
“You don’t look so good,” Nelson said, when he arrived and Lynn answered the door in pajamas.
“I was gonna go home early but I ran into a manicurist I met once before in Breda’s office. This time she didn’t look at me like I was something that’d go tits-up if you found it in your underwear and covered it with blue ointment.”
“Did you do her?” Nelson asked, and the leer looked particularly silly on him.
“I hope not,” Lynn said. “Cause anyone that’d ball me’d ball anybody, and that’s scary. But I’m prob’ly safe. In Zimbabwe when a chameleon crosses your path you become impotent. I think it’s also true of Palm Springs lizards.”
“Come on, Lynn, take a cold shower and let’s jam,” Nelson said. “I got some new ideas.”
When Lynn lurched past a huge gold-leafed mirror in the foyer of the massive house, he looked at his reflection and said, “I’m puffing up like a pigeon. I got MFB.”
“What’s that?” Nelson asked.
“Massive fluid buildup. I’m horny enough to do the tailpipe of a Studebaker, but it’s no use. My sex life’s history!”
When they were out on the road in Nelson’s Wrangler, with the desert wind in their faces and Lynn nursing a sick head, Nelson put in a tape. “I know you don’t like country, but wait’ll you hear this guy. It’s Clint Black. Listen for the cryin harmonica.”
Lynn groaned and said, “Got any Furnace Room music? You know, Snookie Lanson’s greatest hits?”
“That house you’re livin in is the most fantastic place I ever seen,” Nelson said as he downshifted, causing Lynn to lurch forward painfully.
“Yeah, it’s cozy, like the Kremlin, except the owner has the taste of a Manila pimp. I gotta line up another house-sitting job real soon or I’ll be begging a bed from a rich Indian I did a favor for one time. He might take me in. He lets his horse sleep on the patio. I could maybe do his gardening, trade in my gun for a weed-eater. Except his goats do it better. They live on his tennis court.”
“How do ya get house-sittin jobs, anyways?”
“Used to be, it was easy. There was always some millionaire looking for a Palm Springs cop to sit his house for a few weeks or a few months. We provided very cheap security for rich guys. But like always, some cop screwed up the deal. One a the house-sitting gigs turned into Animal House Revisited—a party for about twenty cops and two thousand and twelve beauticians, cocktail waitresses and masseuses. The rich guy’s dune buggy ended up in the swimming pool. When he got back from Aspen he had to be real careful with his swan dives and back flips. The word got out that cops’re unreliable house-sitters.”
“You’re right,” Nelson said with disgust, “there’s always a cop that’ll screw up the good things for all the others. Some stupid selfish moron.”
“That’s what everybody called me all right,” Lynn said. “For the longest time.”
Breda opened her office very early and used the quiet time to write checks, both personal and business. She looked through the local paper to see if there was any appropriate office space for rent that she hadn’t already called. There wasn’t. She started to make coffee but decided she’d had her morning limit. The fact was, it was too damn early to be in the lonely office. Early birds and worms had nothing to do with her business. She was wondering if there were enough clients in Palm Springs for the number of P.I.’s.
Breda looked at her watch. Most physicians opened up at 9:00 A.M. In that Clive Devon’s urologist was either stonewalling or knew nothing, she decided to take a shot at his G.P.
The medical building wasn’t far from Desert Hospital. In the days of Gable, Tracy, the Marx brothers, Garbo—in Palm Springs’ golden age—the hospital had been the city’s finest resort hotel, El Mirador.
The receptionist in the G.P.’s office wore a nameplate with only a first name, much like those worn by cocktail waitresses. And indeed she looked like a drink-wrangler. The nameplate read “Candy.”
“Good morning.” Breda was pleased that there was only one patient in the waiting area, an elderly man who had more than urinary problems; his face was alive with skin cancer.
“Yes?”
“I’d like to talk to Doctor Gladden. It’s about my husband.”
“He’s not with you?”
“No, he’s not willing to come in yet,” Breda said quietly, glancing at the old man, who was busy reading Palm Springs Life.
“Do you wanna make an appointment for him?”
“No … yes. I mean, I’d like to talk to the doctor. You see, I’d like him to take a semen sample.”
“A fertility check?”
“We’re pretty sure he’s okay in that regard,” Breda said. “Actually, we’re considering in vitro fertilization with a surrogate. For now, we’d like to have my husband’s sperm stored at whatever sperm bank you use.”
“Doctor Gladden’s seventy-three years old,” Candy said. “He’s semiretired and almost never takes a new patient. He’s never done anything involving sperm banks in the two years that I been here.”
“Really? We have a friend, Clive Devon, who’s a patient of Doctor Gladden. I thought he had it done here, the taking of the sample, the storage, all of it.”
“We haven’t seen Mister Devon in over a year,” Candy said. “Doctor has very few patients these days. If Mister Devon’s done something like that it musta been with another physician.” Then the young woman said doubtfully, “Are we talking about the same Mister Devon? He’s getting on in years, the one we know. A sperm bank?”
The Range Rover cruised south on Palm Canyon Drive and just kept going, to the Indian canyons. Clive Devon was going into the reservation, he and the young woman’s big brown dog.
Jack Graves wondered what he was doing with the woman’s animal. She’d have to come back to get it, or maybe Clive Devon and she were going to meet up for a desert picnic like the one Lynn had described. Jack Graves hoped there’d be other cars by the Indians’ toll booth, but there was only one vehicle on that narrow road. He decided to hang back and allow the Pace Arrow RV to pass, separating him from the black Range Rover. He paid $3.25 admission fee to a huge Indian woman sitting inside a wooden shack.
When the Range Rover got to the fork and turned right into Murray Canyon, Jack Graves stopped his Mazda and waited, letting a station wagon pass him. Then he too made the turn, staying behind the wagon. There were mostly four-wheel drives and station wagons in Murray Canyon that day, and Jack Graves counted at least fifteen hikers already up on the rocks and trails, so he felt safe when he pulled into the unpaved parking area with the other cars.
Jack Graves was wearing his hiking boots and a floppy hat. He’d brought a small canteen and a day-pack. He was ready to cover some ground but he didn’t believe that Clive Devon would attempt a strenuous hike. Certainly not to Upper Palm Canyon Falls.
Jack hadn’t seen those falls in several years, not since the drought. White water used to drop straight down in a serpentine, between gashes in the granite, and when the light
hit the falls just right, the chunky rock glinted like quartz. Cactus and wildflowers shot out wherever the gashes were wide enough to trap sand and seed. Clumps of leaning yucca lined the granite rock face, lending the oasis effect that made it one of the most photographed sites in the valley. But that was before the five-year drought.
Upper Palm Canyon Falls had always been Jack Graves’ favorite spot in all the world. He could stay forever, there by the falls, if such a thing were possible. That’s what he’d always thought.
As soon as Clive Devon and the dog began walking, the animal started to bark and romped into a tiny patch of desert sunflowers, Indian yellow, interspersed with the violet-rose of the verbeña. Jack Graves watched through binoculars as Clive Devon whistled for the dog, obviously not wanting him to paw the ground like a young bull and destroy the lovely wildflowers. The flowers were very early, believing spring had arrived.
As soon as he’d offered the minor correction, Clive Devon knelt and roughed up the dog’s ears and hugged him. Then they were off again, the man hiking briskly, the brown dog frolicking like a pup, bounding into the cold water of Andreas Creek, which meandered down from the mountains and passed through the palm-shrouded canyon oasis where the rocky cliffs jutted out at 45-degree angles. In past years, Jack Graves had spent hours picking out the profiles of people or the heads of animals in them, nature-carved.
He hiked into Andreas Canyon alongside a group of a dozen riders on horseback, men and women in western garb, two of them on the most beautiful Appaloosas he’d ever seen. There were many places of concealment within the tunnels of palm and rock that sheltered those canyons.
In the afternoon Clive Devon removed his day-pack and shared a picnic lunch with the dog. Using the pack as a pillow, the man reclined on the hillside with the dog’s head on his chest and fed the dog tidbits from his hand. Jack Graves watched from the crest of a terra cotta hill of rock and sand, a hundred yards above them.
Then Jack Graves dug out a nest for himself behind a shelf of rock the color of iron ore, near some Neowashingtonia Filifera palms, seventy feet in height and up to two centuries old. The fan palms were native to the valley, and their presence assured that there was sufficient water either on the ground or close underneath.
He smelled sage, and saw bluebirds overhead, and several wax-wings carrying palm fruit. As he watched, a falcon hovered high, then dropped like a rock, swooping up just before crashing into the face of the cliff, snatching something from the crevices that no man could see.
Sometimes he’d been lucky enough to spot some of the endangered bighorn sheep, most of them wearing transmitter collars attached by state conservationists who were trying to guarantee the sheep’s comeback. They were majestic beasts, the rams in particular, with their curled, furrowed horns and snowy haunches.
The elusive cougar was probably gone forever except for an occasional cat who’d roamed hundreds of miles from home. Years ago he’d seen one, hiding under the branches of a smoke tree.
He knew there were more than three hundred species of birds in the desert that went unnoticed by the golfing and tennis hordes in the valley below. Jack Graves was glad that the Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians were still the proprietors of these canyons as they’d been for centuries. There would be no resorts in this 32,000-acre reservation.
He looked through the binoculars again and was positive that man and dog were sound asleep now, alone out there by the canyon oasis, shielded from sun and wind by rock and palm, just as the Indians had been shielded since ancient times. He felt very sleepy too. Jack Graves put his floppy hat over his face and laid his head on his own day-pack.
He wasn’t close enough to the stream to hear trickling water, but the birds were trilling, and the wind whistled softly. The whine of bees sounded like a plane in the distance. Beyond that was silence, desert silence.
Five minutes later, he was jerked upright by a dream. He was trembling, and droplets of sweat ran from under his hat. He knew that the recurring dream must’ve started, but it shouldn’t come in the daytime! His mind had a new trick: Stop the dream before it gains momentum!
There he was in the darkness, outside the modest little house, the wrong house. He’d been detailed to watch the back door …
* * *
Nelson Hareem wasn’t fooling around anymore. This was his last day with Lynn Cutter so he was going to go for it. He’d even dressed better. He wore a shirt with a collar and long sleeves. And he wore Levi Dockers instead of jeans. But he still wore his red snakeskin cowboy boots.
The sun was high and the desert was warming fast, but Lynn in a short-sleeved knit shirt was chilled from riding in the topless Jeep Wrangler. Hanging on to the roll bar didn’t help his sick head. Nelson’s jerky driving made him nauseous. Lynn rubbed his arms with both hands trying to help circulation.
Nelson noticed and said, “You still cold, Lynn?”
“Not at all,” Lynn said. “Of course I don’t expect to find my shriveled balls till April or May, but what the hell, they’re useless anyhow.”
“How many motels we got left?” Nelson wanted to know, punching his cassette until he got “Miles Across the Bedroom.”
Hearing those lyrics, Lynn said, “Please, Nelson, that’s the story a my life. Haven’t you got something old and appropriate? How about ‘The Wayward Wind’ by Gogi Grant, since you insist on keeping your top down in hurricanes, with snakes and raccoons soaring across the desert like turkey buzzards.”
“How many motels, Lynn?”
“Four. We’ve visited every motel in Palm Springs and Desert Hot Springs that begins with A, B or C. Four more and that’s it. I’ve earned my freedom. Lord a’mighty, free at last!”
“I’m coming back tomorrow alone,” Nelson said. “I’m personally gonna check every car rental in this part a the valley. I don’t care how long it takes me.”
“I believe you,” Lynn said, as Nelson made a sharp turn, tossing Lynn against the door of the Wrangler. Without a seat belt he’d have been gone in the first quarter mile. “You march to a different drummer, and a restraining order couldn’t stop the beat in your little head.”
“I can’t help it,” Nelson said. “My sergeant says he thinks I’m full a naked aggression.”
“Can’t we put clothes on your aggression and go home?”
“Only four more motels, Lynn,” Nelson reminded him. “There’s the next one: The Cactus View.”
This one was on the mountain side of Highway 111, in the old residential section of Cathedral City, zoned for single-family residences, apartment buildings and motels. In past years it had been very cheap to live in this part of town, the high-density portion of the working-class community that was sandwiched between big-bucks resorts in Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage. Lately, with the population of the Coachella Valley booming, some very posh homes were sprouting up in Cat City, in the cove near the mountains.
The Cactus View Motel was ripe for redevelopment. It was a one-story, room-and-a-bath accommodation, tucked behind the commercial buildings on the highway. Old bougainvillea had overgrown all of the walls on the sunny side, and was creeping across the cracked and shattered Spanish tile roof. The whitewashed walls on the shady side were blistered, and streaks of rust from the rain gutters stained the stucco.
“This looks like the kinda place a terrorist’d hide,” Nelson observed, as Lynn yawned and looked at his watch. It was 2:25 P.M. Just a few more hours.
The manager’s office was wide open. Like rattlesnakes, the desert flies laid low during the winter. A pale, watery-eyed guy, bonier than Jack Graves, sat behind a formica counter on a low stool doing a crossword from The Desert Sun. He had a sparse tattered fluff of hair like a windblown dandelion. His arms were utterly hairless, and Nelson was astonished to see that he had hardly any eyelashes and eyebrows on one side!
Lynn recognized the motel manager immediately.
“Carlton!” Lynn Cutter cried. “It’s you!”
“It’s me,” Carlton t
he Confessor agreed. “Yeah, it’s me it’s me.”
He dropped the crossword and slunk from behind the counter like a bag-of-bones coyote. If he’d had a tail it would’ve been tucked.
“It’s me it’s me,” he repeated. “Ya got me again.”
Lynn turned to Nelson and said, “This is Carlton. Everybody knows Carlton.”
“Yeah I done it,” Carlton the Confessor said. “I done it. I’m ready to go back. I’m ready to go. They never shoulda let me out. I warned em I warned em.”
Nelson Hareem stared slack-jawed as Carlton the Confessor began nervously and compulsively pulling at his right eyebrow and eyelashes, where there weren’t any left!
“I was tryin to go straight, that’s why I took this job, but it ain’t no use, is it?”
“Wait a minute, Carlton,” Lynn Cutter said. “We just wanna ask a few questions.”
“You a captain, sergeant, lieutenant, what? I forget.”
“Detective,” Lynn said.
“Robbery, burglary, auto theft, what?”
“I used to work CAPS. Crimes against persons.”
“What department, I forget.”
“Palm Springs,” Lynn said.
“Oh yeah, I can clear a lotta old DR’s for ya. Oh yeah, I can,” said Carlton the Confessor. “Strong-arms, I did lotsa strong-arms nobody knows about.”
Nelson Hareem could see that Carlton the Confessor couldn’t strong-arm a sand flea, so he thought he better let Lynn handle this guy.
“We’ll talk about clearing up our DR’s later, Carlton,” Lynn said. “First I wanna know if you checked in a guy on Tuesday. A husky dark guy, maybe Mexican or maybe even an Arab. Bald, maybe wore a baseball cap. Coulda carried a red bag.”
Fugitive Nights Page 15
