Obedience

by Joseph Hansen

  “A hell of a place to bring anybody,” Dave said.

  “Ah.” Smith grinned. “You do not know Nigeria. Now, Nigeria—that is a ‘hell of a place.’” He laughed.

  Dave sighed, turned, looked across the street to the palisades, lawns, flower beds, old palm trees, railed paths, the ocean a gunmetal color with the sun glaring off it. Fancy kites bobbed and swooped above the beach, trailing ribbons. Gulls soared and cried. “Jemmie Thomas had one suitcase, is that right?”

  “Rather a large one, and heavy.” Smith nodded. “As if it contained all her worldly goods. Brown simulated leather. Soft. And a handbag, one of those large, shapeless ones, worn over the shoulder on a long strap.”

  “And you don’t know where she was headed?”

  “I carried the grip for her into the station, and set it at the ticket counter,” Smith said. “She put a dollar in my hand and thanked me. A dozen persons were lined up to buy tickets. I could see out the window, someone had already got into my cab here at the curb. So I did not stay long enough to learn to what destination she bought a fare. Sorry.” He frowned, and bent above Dave, craning a long neck. His breath smelled of chewing gum, sweet, spicy. “Can you tell me? What was she so frightened of?”

  “Somebody shot the man she was living with,” Dave said. “Not in her presence. He was away, playing weekend games. Action combat. You ever hear of it?”

  Smith looked blank and shook his head.

  “It’s like military exercises,” Dave said, “only just for fun. They pretend to be soldiers, dress up in camouflage outfits and run around in the woods, potting at each other with balls of paint.”

  Smith laughed disbelief. “What a mad country. Do they not know that war is not a game? Where I come from—”

  “Not most of them,” Dave said. “Too young.”

  “And someone killed him there?” Smith said.

  “He knows it wasn’t a game,” Dave said. “Now.”

  “And his wife—Jemmie. She too knows.” Smith drew in air sharply. “Does she know who did it?”

  “Looks that way,” Dave said, “doesn’t it?”

  “She was young.” Smith took off his beautiful cap and turned it in his fingers, watching it thoughtfully. “She would have living parents. Perhaps she was only running home.” That his own home was hopelessly far away hollowed his voice. “That is what we all wish to do at such times.”

  “The wish doesn’t stop, even when there’s no home to go to.” Dave watched a blue-and-white bus spattered with dried mud creak up off the street and pass in, roaring, at the smoky entryway of the station garage. “I have to find out where Jemmie Thomas’s home is. And I haven’t much time. Thanks.” He poked a ten-dollar bill into the shirt pocket where Smith kept a fasces of ballpoint pens. Smith put his cap back on. Dave crossed sandy sidewalk to the hand-smeared glass double doors of the station and pushed inside.

  Passengers from the newly come bus trailed with their luggage into the waiting room. The blue-and-white paint of the room was scratched, scarred, incised with initials, sprayed with graffiti. Coin-operated television sets bolted to chrome plastic-cushioned chairs had gray faces. All but one. A pair of brown-skinned little kids in Levis and King Kong T-shirts watched cartoons on that one. They occupied the same chair and wiggled, elbowed, and kicked each other without once taking their glossy brown eyes from the muscular warriors snarling and shooting fire-spitting assault rifles on the tube. Field workers with straw hats pulled down over their eyes slept on other chairs. Women guarded scuffed suitcases and twine-tied cartons. A stubbly-haired blond teenage boy in grubby yellow surfer trunks leaned beside a door whose sign said MEN. He looked bored, but he was watchful. He noticed everybody who came and went. When his look caught Dave’s, he smiled sourly, and his dull blue eyes said, Do you want me? You can have me.

  Dave got into line at the ticket counter where one station was open, three closed. It seemed longer, but in five minutes he was facing a fat black agent who wore a blue uniform with a jauntily tilted cap. Dark glasses covered her eyes, but he sensed her totting up the cost of his clothes, sensed her wonder at meeting here a man who had that kind of money. But she merely smiled a practiced smile and asked him where he wanted to go.

  He showed her his license and said, “Yesterday, at two in the afternoon, a small, dark young woman with a little blond boy about five or six years old took a bus out of here. Blue jeans and a sweater, one suitcase and a shoulder bag. Do you remember her?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t,” the agent said. “I’m sorry, but I see too many people. ’Less they dressed in a gorilla suit or something, I’m not likely to remember.”

  “I need to know where she went,” Dave said. “It could be a matter of life and death.”

  The woman flipped open a loose-leaf book. “Yesterday, at two?” She ran a finger down a plastic-covered printed list. “Buses that next hour left up the coast for Santa Barbara, inland for Santa Ana, and down south for San Diego”—she looked up—“so that don’t exactly narrow it down for you, does it? I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks for trying,” Dave said. He turned to leave the counter and felt a bump. “Excuse me,” he told the little old woman behind him. Her face was brown and deeply wrinkled by sun, weather, years, and when she opened her mouth to speak he saw she had no teeth. She said in Spanish:

  “The little sparrow has taken your wallet.”

  Dave turned in time to see a flash of yellow disappear into the garage. He ran that way. The garage was a bleak cement cavern that smelled of exhaust fumes, gasoline, tires, and five hundred thousand miles of country highway. Greasy-handed men in coveralls serviced engines. Filipino women with hair wrapped in white vacuumed inside the buses, sprayed and wiped windows. Drivers leaned against the buses, smoking, laughing, tilting up shiny cans of soda pop.

  Dave stepped quickly among the buses, looking this way, that way, but the little sparrow had flown. Dave tried a door at the rear of the garage and found himself in a gritty, sunstruck lane parked tight with cars of citizens playing truant on the sand. Far down the lane, a boy and a girl lifted purple surfboards out of the back of a pickup truck. A fifty-year-old skateboarder with skin like leather and white hair on his sagging chest zigzagged between the parked cars. But yellow tail had vanished.

  Wanly, Dave slid a hand into the inner jacket pocket where he’d kept his wallet. The touch he’d felt there had been light and fleeting. Funny. He’d marked the kid for a hustler. Instead he was a pickpocket, and a good one. With a wry laugh and a shake of his head, Dave started along the lane, peering into trash modules. Sometimes they took only the cash and threw the rest away.

  On the red-tile doorstep of the large, white Spanish colonial that rose back of trees on a long, broad slope of lawn and flower beds in Beverly Hills, he waited for such a time that he began to wonder if anyone was home. Then the carved door with its black wrought-iron knocker opened, and a young man looked at him. He was in shirt sleeves, the knot of his necktie dragged down, bluish beard stubble on his smooth jaws. He wore his hair long, like a rock musician. But it needed tending to. He looked frazzled, exhausted. A blue pencil was between his teeth. He took off horn-rimmed glasses and blinked at Dave with eyelashes so dense, black, and long they looked artificial. His eyes were bloodshot.

  “Yes?” he said. “What is it?”

  “Dave Brandstetter”—he held out a business card—“to see Mr. and Mrs. Thomas, please?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Thomas just lost their son,” the young man said. “They’re tired of being pestered. They deserve some privacy, for Christ sake.”

  “I won’t stay. I’m a private investigator, looking into the disappearance of the young woman Vaughn was living with.”

  The young man jerked in surprise. “Disappearance?”

  “I thought the Thomases might know where she’s gone.” Dave stepped at him, and he reflexively backed off. In the cool entryway, Dave took the door from him and closed it. “I know it’s an intrusion, but it’s i
mportant.”

  “They don’t know anything about her,” the young man said. “They only met her once.”

  Dave said, “Who are you? What do you know about her?”

  “O’Neil.” The young man pushed the glasses into a shirt pocket and held out his hand. “Neil O’Neil. I work for Thomas Marketing. I’m Mrs. Thomas’s assistant.”

  Dave shook his hand and let it go. “And Jemmie? Did you ever meet her?”

  O’Neil turned his head, looked at Dave from the corners of his eyes. “Private investigator? Working for whom?”

  “Channel Three.” It was as good a lie as any. “Their employee insurance company. Perhaps she went home. Do you know where that is?”

  O’Neil shrugged. “Some backwoods place. All she had to do was open her mouth for you to know that. Her daddy breeds saddle horses. That’s all I know.”

  “A place with no name?” Dave said.

  “Not that I ever heard. You see, Vaughn went—”

  From some place far off and high up in the house a woman’s voice called, “Neil—where the hell are you? Who is the fascinating conversationalist—Dr. Samuel fucking Johnson?”

  “Jesus,” O’Neil said. He turned and started toward a tiled, iron-railed, spiral staircase housed in a white-walled round tower with slit windows. “You’ll find Mr. Thomas in there.” He gestured at an archway and ran up the stairs two at a time.

  Dave called after him, “Ask Mrs. Thomas to come down for a moment, please?” Dave waited at the stair foot. Faint sounds leaked down to him, the beeping of electronics, the whine of a computer printer, the electronic ring of a telephone. Was this a house in mourning? It sounded more like business as usual.

  “I’m really terribly busy.” A woman in her mid-forties came down the stairs with a clack of heels. She was dressed in blousy clothes, scarves, pants—the dominant color was peach. Even her hair was peach. “Just what is it you want to know?”

  “Jemmie’s whereabouts,” Dave said.

  She yelped a mirthless laugh. “Jemmie. What in the world makes you think I know Jemmie’s whereabouts? Or care?”

  “She meant a lot to your son,” Dave said.

  “She was nothing but redneck trash. I can’t think how a boy with Vaughn’s upbringing, with all his advantages, could choose a girl like that. A married woman. And with a child. Vaughn was only a child himself.” Sylvia Thomas had stopped halfway down the stairs. Now she turned and started up again. And stopped. And looked down at Dave once more. “I don’t believe for a minute she ‘meant a lot to my son.’ I believe he only took up with her to spite me.”

  “Sylvia!” In the archway O’Neil had pointed out to Dave an old man stood, a drink in his hand. Steven Thomas looked like Dave, reedy, six feet tall, blue eyed, with a thick shock of expensively cut white hair. But he was ten years older, with a river map of tiny broken red veins across nose and cheekbones. “Control your mouth. You always hated him. Always. Always correcting him. Always finding fault. To your mind he never did anything right. And then when he brought Jemmie and little Mike here, you turned them away.”

  “She had a husband,” Sylvia said. “What kind of mother would allow her son to cohabit with a woman like that under her own roof? You were always a fool about Vaughn. Anything he wanted he got. You spoiled him rotten. And every time he was in trouble, you made excuses for him, you bought his way out. If you’d used a little discipline on him, he’d have respected you, he wouldn’t have run wild.”

  “Will you shut up?” the old man shouted, red in the face. “He’s dead. And it’s your fault, your fault, Sylvia. If he’d been living here where I could have looked out for him … but no. Oh, no. When we thought he was dead—when we thought we’d never see him again—and he came back, did you welcome him with open arms? No. You drove him away. The language you used on that poor little girl of his—”

  “She was a tramp and a troublemaker,” Sylvia said. “Steve, I really haven’t time for this. I’ve got a thousand loose ends to clear up on the Sweepstakes.” She climbed the stairs. “Talk to the nice man. Tell him your troubles.”

  Dave called, “Where did Jemmie come from, Mrs. Thomas? Where did Vaughn find her?”

  “I don’t know, but wherever it was”—Sylvia Thomas reached the top of the stairs, and moved out of sight, heels clicking—“he should never have gone there.” A door slammed.

  Mutely, Steven Thomas led Dave down short stairs into an immense living room furnished by a decorator who might not have wished to remain invisible but surely had managed it. Everything here was costly and well made but none of it had any distinction. Thomas went to a bar at the room’s end.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  “Jemmie has disappeared,” Dave said. “I have to find her. It’s an insurance matter.”

  “Disappeared?” Thomas set a whiskey bottle down, frowning. “When? I talked to her yesterday, at noon.” He winced. “She loved Vaughn. And the police came here to notify us, but they didn’t know about her. She and Vaughn weren’t married, you know. I mean, she only just filed for divorce a few weeks ago, so it had to be me, didn’t it? To tell her about—about Vaughn—what happened to him.”

  “Divorce from whom? What was her married name?”

  Thomas frowned. “By God, I don’t think I ever heard.”

  “Dallas? Does that ring a bell?”

  A head shake. “Sorry. You say she’s run off?”

  “She left right after you did. Where would she go?”

  “I don’t know.” Thomas took a quick swallow from his glass, then looked at Dave. “A drink, Mr. Brandstetter?”

  “Scotch, thank you.” Dave walked with him back to the bar. The label on the bottle Thomas chose read Laphroaig. Dave had never run across it before, but he’d heard of it. The neck of the bottle rattled against the glass.

  Dave said, “Vaughn’s mother didn’t go with you?”

  “Vaughn’s mother”—Thomas handed Dave his glass—“is long dead. Sylvia is—was—his stepmother.” He glanced toward the hallway. “Please excuse the scene—we’re both upset. You understand. She loved Vaughn as if he were her own son.” Thomas drank deeply of his sour mash. “But she’s just winding up the biggest marketing campaign in our shop’s history.” He peered at Dave, almost pleadingly. “You’ve heard of it, of course—the Shopwise Supermarket Sweepstakes? You’ve seen the promotion on television?”

  Dave watched only CNN and videotapes. But he nodded.

  “There’s no way to stop these things or even take a breather, once they’re underway.” Thomas went and dropped into a white easy chair, part of a group near an arch-shaped fireplace. He waved at another chair, and Dave took it. “Truth is,” Thomas said, “Sylvia runs Thomas Marketing these days.” He twitched his mouth, disgusted, resigned. “I’m past it. Angina. Can’t even climb stairs anymore.”

  “I think the girl went home.” Dave tasted the Scotch. Glorious. “Where would that be, Mr. Thomas?”

  The old man shook his head. “Vaughn disappeared, you know, last winter. And—” He waved a hand. “No, let me start at the beginning, so you’ll understand. He got booted out of college. Most unfair thing that ever happened. Cleared his name, you know, but he was hurt. He wouldn’t go back. Tried working for Thomas Marketing, but he was restless. Lasted two years, but it was an awful strain on him. Loved the outdoors. Action. Nervous boy. Couldn’t stand being cooped up, trapped behind a desk. Had these dreams of being a soldier of fortune.” With a mournful smile, Thomas took a swallow from his glass. His hands trembled, jingling the ice. “And on his twenty-first birthday, he went to the lawyers and collected a little money his mother had left him, and took off.” Thomas gestured in the air. “Not a word to me or Sylvia, not a word at the shop. Just vanished. Then just as suddenly, three, four months later, he was back. From where, he never said. Might have—but Sylvia wouldn’t have him here at home where we could talk. He worked for her at Thomas Marketing for a little while, then quit again and went to work at
the television station. I hardly saw him. He never even tried to talk to me.” A tear ran down Thomas’s face. Bleakly, he brushed it away.

  “How far would his mother’s money take him?”

  Thomas moved his shoulders. “Five thousand dollars?”

  “What kind of trouble?” Dave said. Thomas’s white brows went up in confusion.

  “You said he got into trouble in college.”

  “They claimed he painted swastikas on a Jewish fraternity house,” Thomas said scornfully. “No truth in it, of course. Ridiculous. He was unlucky enough to be in the vicinity when the campus police patrol car answered the call. He was running. He’d seen the mischief. He didn’t want any part of it. Course not.” Thomas knocked back the rest of his whiskey. “Good Lord. He was raised among advertising people, television people. Half the guests in this house down the years have been Jewish. Sylvia is Jewish, for heaven sake. How could he be anti-Semitic? But he had the red paint on his hands. And they were going to get him because they couldn’t find the ones who really did it. Well”—Thomas’s mouth twisted in a wry smile over expensive false teeth—“my lawyers were too much for them.” He sighed. “But … that ended college for Vaughn.” Thomas pushed up out of his chair. “Seemed to him like the world was against him.” Thomas wandered back toward the bar. “He was getting into one scrape or another from the time his mother died.” Thomas clinked ice into his glass. “I was too busy building the business. Never took time off to be a father to him.” He filled the glass and left the bottle open. “So much older too. When I married Sylvia, I hoped things would be better. Young, you know. She did her best, at least by her own lights, but it was too late.”

  “Who would have wanted to kill him?” Dave said.