A dilapidated pickup truck peppered with rust was parked in the same spot it had occupied on Laurie’s first visit, next to a pair of late-model cars probably belonging to customers. She pulled into an empty space and went inside.
Picture windows on the ocean side had been designed to flood the interior with light. That was before great carved slabs of oaken and walnut furniture had been moved in, skillets and lanterns and cartoon-character lunchboxes strung from the ceiling, and a counter erected to hold up a computerized cash register. What light managed to filter in through neglected layers of saltwash crept between dark massive German Expressionist shapes and crawled with dust-motes. The shop smelled of dry rot and cheap furniture polish.
Behind the counter, a woman in her late sixties, with bleached-out hair flying wild about her head, sat in a captain’s chair mounted on a swivel. She looked up from her fat, dogeared paperback to greet Laurie and tell her to be sure and ask if she needed help. She was the same woman who had waited on her before, wearing what looked like the same faded pink sweats and high-topped tennis shoes and reading the same Danielle Steel romance, but she gave no sign of recognizing Laurie.
“Actually, I’m looking for a man.”
The woman gave a short bawdy laugh. “You’re in the wrong place, dear. Unless he’s old enough to be an antique.”
“It’s my husband. Medium build, six feet, in his mid-forties. I’m meeting him here. We were in before.”
“Don’t remember, sorry. I get a lot of drop-ins.”
“We bought a picture, a painting. It was a Gypsy. A man in a blue bandanna, anyway. He looked like a Gypsy.”
“I remember the picture. I spend a lot more time with the merchandise than I do with people. I don’t think your husband’s been in, but like I said, a lot of drop-ins. You’re welcome to browse while you wait. I’m open till six.”
She felt the sudden sinking certainty that Peter wouldn’t be coming. She’d known it was a long shot—he was still running Maggiore’s errand, or had decided to give her up as a bad risk—but she hadn’t let herself entertain the thought that she would be leaving the shop without him. And under it all she felt a kind of chilly relief. She hadn’t known what she would say to him, or how she would react if he tried lying to her about what he was, or—more horrifying—told her the truth. But then there was Abilene. On her way out of the bed-and-breakfast she’d heard something on the radio in the owner’s office about a security breach at the airport, but nothing had been said about the police having a suspect in custody.
A mantel clock in need of a cleaning bonged four times, its mechanism grinding and wheezing between the chimes. Her wristwatch told her the clock was eight minutes slow. She had almost two hours, and another hour before the sun went down. She decided to take her time browsing. The shop was full of homely things, books and butter churns and old outboards and eggbeaters with hand cranks, ordinary domestic objects that had survived their time. It seemed no place for the Abilenes of the world.
He cruised past the shop without slowing or looking in that direction. Three-quarters of the population of Los Angeles was convinced there was such a thing as sixth sense and that they had it, which was horseshit or no one would have signed off on Man in the Moon. But there was no sense asking for it, staring at the place and little nursie feeling it at the base of her neck and looking out the window just as his Jeep rolled past. He parked at a scenic lookout to figure his approach, got out to stretch his legs, and damn if he didn’t have a sweet view of the shop off there to the left and down a couple of hundred yards. All Abilene had to do was lean on the redwood railing like a rube and wait.
Back in town he’d been stuck in traffic for twenty minutes, waiting as it turned out for AAA to show up and change some pussy’s flat tire, and he’d used the time to put an edge on the Buck knife’s blade with the whetstone and some spit. Now he got the can of three-in-one out of the Jeep and dribbled a little on the hinge and walked back to the railing, working the blade open and shut to loosen it and watching the ocean and the front of the shop like Rudy Rubbernecker from Des Moines.
TWENTY-SIX
Detective Sill was doing the good news/better news thing. He’d irritated the hell out of Childs the first several times he’d done it, but then Childs had discovered how good Sill really was, and if a little personal drama made the detective’s day easier to get through, it seemed a small enough price to pay to keep him from burning out and going into private security. And the lieutenant wondered if this little bit of tolerance was a sign he’d begun to go Texan. He saw himself in a year or so, trying on his first pair of shitkickers in Shepler’s.
“L.T.?” Sill said.
Childs opened his eyes, then adjusted his glasses. “Sorry. I need a new prescription. What you got?”
The big detective looked at the computer printout he’d carried into the lieutenant’s office. “I got cross-matches from Washington on five passengers. Two Dallas-Fort Worth, one Houston, two San Antonio. Starts out good and gets better. I already said that, sorry. You want dates and times?”
“Later. Start with felony convictions.”
“One in Dallas-F.W., robbery armed, three busts, one stuck, twenty-six months in Ossining, that’s SingSing?”
“I heard of it. I go to the movies.”
“Second Dallas, one bust, one conviction, assault with intent to commit great bodily harm less than murder, a year and a day in Q. That’s—”
“San Quentin. Mob affiliation?”
“All I got’s summaries of rap sheets. Fella landed in Houston, five arrests, three stuck: B and E, armed home invasion, possession of burglar tools. Six months Elmira, New York, two years Ossining, sixty-two months total, McAlester and Ossining, on burglar tools and parole violation. Should of stood back East.”
“I like the change of scenery. New place, new job. I’d like it more if the charge was CCW. What else?”
Sill read on, poker-faced. But he had that Ben Johnson glint in his eye. “First San Antonio, one bust, one conviction, nine counts A/B, one resisting, one officer assault with intent. Stabbed him in the neck.”
“Whoa!”
“Not quite. Served less than two years. Released last month on a compassionate medical. Testicular cancer, final stage. They rolled him off the plane on a gurney. He’s got relatives here.”
“Okay, give me the winner.”
The detective’s tone was even, featureless. Childs would have tossed in his hand if Sill made a raise using that voice. “Last San Antonio. First, really, day ahead of the A/B. I was saving him.” He looked at the sheet another moment, then said, “Shit,” and handed it to the lieutenant.
Childs looked at the last entry, circled in blue pen. “Shit,” he said.
TWENTY-SEVEN
“Dear, I have to close. I’m sorry.”
The white-haired woman in sweats managed to keep irritation out of her voice. Laurie had been hearing her sighing and clicking her tongue off her teeth for twenty minutes. Six o’clock had come and gone, and Laurie was pretending interest in a cheap woven basket full of campaign buttons, rummaging among the Nixon Nows, Mondale-Ferraros, Come Home Americas, and a psychedelic assortment of pink and yellow and vomit-green numbers promoting someone named Abolafia. She’d been around the shop four times and had outlasted a half-dozen customers who had wandered in, taken their time browsing, made purchases or thanked the old lady (apparently for not throwing them out), and left. Now, one of those spectacular sunsets peculiar to the poisonous atmosphere of southern California was gathering its colors on the other side of the brine-streaked windows.
The first several times the little copper bell mounted above the door had tinkled to admit customers, she had looked up, but the succession of strange faces had dulled her expectations and finally eliminated them. She knew Peter wasn’t coming. But she would see the day out, if for no other reason than she had no place to go.
Feeling suddenly guilty, she picked up a black Bakelite ashtray with SCHWABB’S
embossed on it in white letters and carried it over to the counter. She didn’t turn it over to look at the price and flinched when the woman entered forty dollars into the computer.
“Can that be right?”
The woman looked at the sticker again, as if the number might have changed since she’d looked at it the first time. “Yes, the store closed down, oh, years ago. Lana Turner was discovered there, you know. For all anyone knows, she could have used this very ashtray. Will that be cash or credit? We recognize all the major cards. Except American Express, of course.”
Laurie hesitated, then separated two twenties from the fold she’d been carrying in her pocket and put them on the counter. She was dangerously low on cash, but couldn’t bring herself to cancel the purchase. Neither she nor Peter smoked.
“And three-twenty for the governor.” This time the woman sounded annoyed.
Laurie added a five-dollar bill. “That’s a myth, about Lana Turner.”
“Oh?” The woman made change.
“She had an agent. A producer at MGM discovered her picture in a stack on his desk. He gave her a bit in A Star Is Born.”
“Really? Judy Garland?” The woman wrapped the ashtray in a sheet of newsprint and taped it.
“No, the first one. Janet Gaynor.”
The woman put the package in a small paper sack and stapled the receipt to the top.
“So it’s just an ashtray,” Laurie said.
“Well, it’s your ashtray now, dear. Thank you and come again.”
The wind had come up from the west, heavy with the sea. She hurried to the car, hugging her shoulders, the sack with its ridiculous contents flapping in her hand. She would probably leave it in the car when she returned it, let someone for whom Hollywood still meant movies and glamor discover it. It was no wonder the Abilenes of the world recognized her for a victim. She couldn’t even stand up to a woman who read Danielle Steel.
She threw the sack onto the passenger’s seat and reached into the backseat for the cheap thin sweater she’d bought at K-Mart, then remembered what it was covering. She left it where it was, started the engine, and waited, shivering, for the heat to kick in before turning on the blower.
The woman came out of the shop wearing a man’s zip-front jogging jacket with an enormous woven-leather bag slung from one shoulder, and unlocked the rusted pickup. She looked across the top of the cab, saw Laurie’s car, and frowned. Then she unslung the shoulder bag, tossed it inside, and walked around the bed, hands deep in her jacket pockets, hair flying about her head. Her face wore a steely smile.
Laurie opened the window. The woman leaned down to look in. Her gaze swept the interior of the car. Laurie was glad she’d left the sweater where it was.
“It’s none of my business, dear. You aren’t doing either one of you a favor by waiting around for him. You have to train a man for marriage.”
“Thank you.” She was getting tired of women of a certain age calling her dear. What gave them the right, apart from managing not to contract cancer or walk in front of a bus before they were invited to join AARP? She ought to be calling them dear. She’d spent most of the week with Abilene.
“I never married, myself. But you hear a thing all your life—and I’ve been around a bit longer than you—you start to think it must make sense.”
“Like the Lana Turner story,” Laurie said.
“What?”
“Thank you.” She closed the window.
The woman drew her chin into her neck. Then a flush appeared under the patches of rouge on her cheeks. She straightened with a jerk, spun around, and strode back to the truck, pumping her fists as if she were climbing a hill. The motor started with a roar and a rattling of tappets. The pickup swept around in a wide arc, popped its clutch, and jounced up the incline to the highway, spraying Laurie’s trunk with sand and bits of gravel. It spun its wheels entering the pavement and headed north, accelerating with a whine between gears.
Laurie felt a stab of shame. Then she remembered the forty-dollar ashtray—three-twenty for the governor—and the feeling went away.
Abilene, who had started to make some headway against the stiffness in the mechanism of the Buck knife, straightened when he saw Laurie Macklin leaving the shop. At first he wasn’t sure it was her. The tailored student nurse with the middle-aged husband had disappeared, replaced by a lanky teenage type in a T-shirt and jeans, the cotton tight across her titties. But she walked the same and when she turned away from the stiff ocean wind, he recognized the face he’d tapped a few days before. She didn’t look like a teenager then.
He’d thought she was pulling out, and took a step toward the Jeep, but that was as far as he could tear himself away from that balcony view of the antiques store and its rutted little parking lot. He was afraid if he took his eyes off the Macklin woman for a second, she’d dematerialize. He’d only half believed she was inside, didn’t recognize the car, and now that he knew he’d played it right … Then there was that shitty old Dodge pickup, which meant there was someone still inside, the owner or the manager. A witness.
And finally there was the postcard in the hotel back in town. I’ll wait for you there until dark. She wasn’t going anywhere, not yet. That big-ass sun would be going down for another hour. She’d made the trip, she’d waited this long. When women put the time in they saw it through, no matter what. Just like the old lady back in Blytheville. Standing around saying, “Please, Ritchie, don’t. He’s just a kid, he don’t know,”—all the time the son of a bitch that pissed him out the end of his dick went on slugging him, filling his throat with bloody snot and trying to kick his spine up through his skull when he curled up on the floor covering up. All for looking too much like his mother. Or maybe too much like the old man. Well, Abilene could understand that. Some mornings, wiping the steam off the mirror and seeing that fucker looking back at him, the same long jaw and shallow blue eyes, he felt like caving in his own face. And then the day the old man strangled him to death the old lady was in Little Rock, shopping for oven mitts. Giving herself an alibi. They stuck by cock no matter what. They didn’t care what it was attached to, or anybody else, not themselves, not their own flesh and blood. He worked the blade of the big Buck knife open and shut, open and shut.
He knew a flash of doubt when she got into the car and a minute later smoke started coming out of the exhaust pipe, thick and blue in the brisk air until the wind shredded it, but he stayed leaning on the railing and the car didn’t move. A woman dressed like a man, with a mane of white hair, came out of the store and put something in the pickup and walked around it and bent down next to the car. After a little she shot up stiff and stomped back to the truck. Abilene grinned, wondering what the Macklin woman had said to her. He pretty much hated everybody except Mr. Major, but he most enjoyed hating people who plowed everybody’s field except their own. They were the ones who came out of nowhere to testify just when you thought you were going to walk because some dumb cop failed to show probable cause for a search.
The old cunt scratched some serious gravel getting out of there, and Abilene folded his knife and put it in his pocket. He didn’t want his hands cramping up on him. He decided to give the white-haired woman ten minutes not to come back for something she forgot, and watched the sun setting behind Laurie Macklin’s Buick.
There was nothing peaceful about the Pacific, Laurie thought. Balboa must have caught it on a good day when he named it, or else he’d fortified himself with Madeira during that climb up the mountain and the world was pitching and rolling so hard the ocean had looked calm by comparison. As the surface went from blue to violet, long white bars of what looked like molten iron hurtled into shore as if they were tumbling off a stack and exploded when they hit, flying up like sparks. Sitting in the car with the blower going, warming her ankles and feet, she could feel the reverberation through her tires, and imagined all of North America had given way a quarter-inch to the east.
“Balboa discovered the Pacific Ocean climbing up a mountain,�
�� she remembered her grandfather saying, more than once. The image had always made him laugh.
She felt hot suddenly. She switched off the engine, but it was as if she’d turned up the volume on the crashing surf. She opened the door and got out. She wanted to walk up to the edge of the highway with her back to the ocean. Maybe she’d see Peter coming her way around the curve to the south. But then she had no idea what kind of car he’d be driving.
A haulaway semi swept around the curve, taking up part of the other lane, changing gears and accelerating as it climbed the grade. For a moment the bellowing diesel and the groaning transmission wiped out the ocean noise. The vibration made the soles of her feet tingle. Then came the slipstream, pulling at her so that she had to spread her feet to keep from being sucked under the wheels. She felt the heat of the engine, her nostrils filled with the brown smell of the exhaust. The red-and-silver cab and then the yellow articulated trailer flashed past carrying its rainbow of shiny new cars, feeding the insatiable maw of the mother of all vehicular states. She waited until the truck had gone and her clothing stopped rippling, then turned away from the road and started back down to the car, hugging herself. The ocean hammered on, obsessed with its errand of demolition.
Tires crunched gravel behind her. She swung around. Peter. Then she saw the black Jeep Cherokee bouncing on its springs, brake lights redder than the sun, a roostertail of brown dust cresting from under its tires, lifted by the shoreward wind, the door popping open before the frame finished rocking, a glistening black lizard-skin toe headed for the ground.
Something Borrowed, Something Black Page 18
