THIRTEEN
Through hours of starless darkness I slept well into the following afternoon. When I woke I saw that I had undressed at a single spot near the window and that I must have been out of my senses. I took a cold shower and sat on the balcony in the sun to warm up. As I sipped my room service coffee, I saw, on the neighboring balcony belonging to Linder, a late coffee service for two laid out on the table as if the occupants had also been up all night. Wasps hovered around the coffeepot, but there was a feeling of abandonment about his balcony—or there was until the glass doors opened and a woman stepped out into the sea glare and sun and sat with her back to me on the wall, a halved grapefruit in one hand and a small spoon in the other. Down the back of her rose silk blouse ran a vertical line of nacre buttons, and as she ate the grapefruit with the spoon, scooping out the segments, her back muscles didn’t move. I was too surprised to move out of sight, and since it wasn’t Linder I didn’t mind much. But as I looked at the chignon and the back of her neck I knew almost at once that it was Dolores Araya.
I was too fascinated to move, and a thousand things passed through my mind in orchestrated disorder. I was about to get up and dart back into the room, but in that split second of deciding to do so she had half-turned her head, like an animal that senses a predator it cannot yet see. As she turned, she saw me immediately out of the corner of her eye and turned more fully. Despite my shoddy disguise she recognized me at a glance. I felt a jolt of longing and hopelessness. She was made up like a nightclub singer, and her lips, even in the afternoon, were fleshed out with rouge. She put down the spoon and the grapefruit, and her stare was harsh and incredulous. I could no longer move out of its way and had to brave the ferocity that emanated from her. Her lips moved and she said something, but there was no sound. She turned her whole body toward me and took off her sunglasses and I could see the dark-green edges of her pupils. Her face had drained of color and her hands gripped the edge of the balcony wall. We were too far away from each other for her to call over softly, and she didn’t want to make a noise. Perhaps Linder was in the room. But the silent semaphore was enough.
She seemed to be calculating how many doors away I was, and when she had done so she went back through the glass doors. I also went back into my room, packed up the radio, hid it, and dressed in a Sulka tie and a cantaloupe shirt.
An hour passed before there was a knock on my door and I saw her through the spyhole standing in the corridor in the same rose blouse.
I remembered how sorry I had felt for her before, and then how un-sorry I had felt for her afterward. Now I smiled to myself and relished the way I had accidentally trapped her in honey, little fly that she was.
I opened the door wide and without pretending to be amazed, I asked her to step inside—it wasn’t the moment for phony theatrics and pretenses.
“I can’t believe it” was all she said as she floated into the room and turned to confront me standing up, all Cleopatra in a rage, but more like Elizabeth Taylor as the Queen of the Nile. I closed the door and locked it behind me, and for the second time within a month we were alone.
“You,” she said, stammering a little.
“I come in through keyholes like Peter Pan.”
“Who’s that?”
“Never mind.” There was no play in her eyes at all. “Shall we go outside or stay here?”
“Are you joking?”
She glared at the still-open glass doors and I invited her instead to sit on the sofa. But I noticed something about her at once: there was an oval bruise on the side of her neck about the size of a thumb pad.
“You’re not going to tell me—” she began.
“No, I’m not. I don’t come here for vacations. I go to New Jersey for that.”
“You little bastard,” she sighed, looking me over as she sat and then glancing at the door.
“It’s work,” I said.
“It’s slimy, whatever it is.”
“I admit I’m a bit of a snail. By the way, what happened to your neck?”
For a moment her hand went up to the bruise and then she dropped it with a dismissive contempt for her own moment of weakness.
“I ran into a reindeer. What’s it to you?”
“Lucky you ran into me instead, then.”
“You’re lucky I saw you first.”
I asked her why.
“You’ll find out,” she sneered.
“You should be happy that I follow you around—it’s a compliment.”
She looked very precious in her white cotton pants and silk shirt, her pearl earrings and Patek watch. She had gone up in the world.
“Well, I’m lucky, then. What can I offer you?”
“I don’t want a drink from you. I want to know what you’re doing here.”
I told her she knew what I was doing there. If she didn’t, I could explain it.
“I should have known,” she said.
“If you’d known, what would you have done?”
She said nothing, perched on the edge of the sofa with heron-like poise, her mind spinning behind the licorice lashes.
She would have done anything, I thought. Whatever was necessary.
“It’s very cruel of you,” she said then. “You don’t know what we’ve been through.”
“I know what the insurance has been through.”
“You don’t care about them. You’re just getting paid. I’m talking about what he and I have been through.”
I leaned back and had to admit I was enjoying it now. Her eyes had filled with the expected crocodilian tears, but they didn’t go anywhere; they didn’t fall, nor did they explode. I didn’t believe them anyway.
“I don’t know what you’ve been through,” I said. “Maybe Mr. Linder went through something as well. Is Donald enjoying his retirement?”
She looked stunned for a moment, but she was a master at crisis control.
“I would advise you not to talk to him,” she said simply.
“I had no intention of talking to him. All I wanted was photographs, and I have those. I can take them back to San Diego and we’re done.”
“That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”
I said, watching her recompose her long limbs as her mind changed tack, “That’s more like it. You’re friendlier when you want to be.”
“I don’t want to be unfriendly, I just wasn’t expecting to see you here. You probably think Donald knows all about you, but he doesn’t. I didn’t tell him. To be honest, I didn’t think you would come here looking for him. I was wrong, I guess.” Finally she relented a little and her tone warmed. “I want to know why you’re doing this and what difference you think it makes now.”
“That’s a good question.”
I’d thought about it already, but I hadn’t come up with much of an answer. Transparently, it made no difference at all what I did now as far as the greater good was concerned. It only made a difference as to whether she and Donald would spend a few years behind bars. That was a small thing.
“What if I told you,” she went on, “that it wasn’t planned. That it all happened by accident. That a man died in an accident and Donald just decided to do it on the turn of a dime—he had the insane idea there on the spot. You wouldn’t believe it, I suppose.”
“I don’t believe I would.”
“What if I said that was the truth anyway? He’s an opportunist. There’s nothing more to it than that.”
“That’s like saying you believe in a flat earth. Do you?”
She brightened and her fingers relaxed.
“Maybe I do. It seems more logical to me—a flat earth. It’s less frightening, don’t you think?”
She was sweating, her face shiny and beautiful, childish in its eagerness.
“Even so,” I said. “What you just said doesn’t change much now.�
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“Maybe it doesn’t legally, but I mean, morally—”
“That’s a tricky word at the best of times. But now it’s a word that shouldn’t be on the air. Who was the sap?”
“He wasn’t a sap. He was someone Donald knew.”
“It’s always good to have friends who remember you. Did Donald have a quiet affection for him? You’re going to tell me now how he died.”
She was suddenly flustered and lost her grip for a moment. Her lower lip moved uselessly for a moment before she took up the thread again:
“Maybe we should calm down a bit and think this over. There was nothing suspicious about Paul’s death. Donald got a wild idea and ran with it. It was a terrible thing to do. But he did it. It’s spilt milk now, isn’t it? It doesn’t make any difference to anyone. Pacific paid up—it’s nothing to them. Don’t tell me it’s the principle of the thing. You don’t believe that and I don’t either.”
But I said that it was the principle of the thing.
“I’d like to know who Linder was—I’m curious that way. But if you don’t want to tell me, I can find out some other way.”
“Oh, please. You don’t care about him. You’re just here to blackmail us.”
“Me?”
I had to laugh, and she didn’t like it.
In fact, I pointed out, I hadn’t expected to see her there at all. I’d never blackmailed anyone in my life.
“But you’re blackmailing me now!” she burst out.
“I haven’t asked for anything, Mrs. Zinn. I could, but I haven’t. But now that you mention it, it’s not a bad idea at all. The thing is, though, there’s no reason to do it. I don’t need the money, unless I wanted to give it to charity.”
“I don’t believe you,” she shouted.
“Keep your voice down. Your fine husband might hear through the walls. By the way, how does he like being called Paul?”
“He doesn’t care what he’s called. He just wants to live his life.”
Now the tears rolled.
She confessed to his massive debts. It was a way out—everyone wanted a way out. Didn’t they?
“Not really,” I said.
“Just because you’ve never been in a desperate situation. You don’t even know what a desperate situation is. I’m not saying it wasn’t our fault. But still, things get out of hand. It happens. It happens to ordinary people.”
“Are you ‘ordinary people’?”
“Of course we are. We just walked into an extraordinary situation. We’re not evil people, as I’m sure you think. I go to church.”
“I doubt Donald does.”
“He’s a decent guy. He’s probably more decent than you, come to think of it.”
“That’s a high level of indecency to match.”
She got hold of herself a little and her eyes calmed down and dried. She seemed to realize that she had to be cunning now and not lose control of a delicate, rather than desperate, situation. Her eyes stilled and concentrated on the pathetic old man across the room from her. How could I not be managed as one manages a Pomeranian dog? It just required a little thought and discipline.
“We can be rational about this,” she said quietly.
“Why don’t you start from the beginning? There’s no rush. We have all afternoon, unless your husband is waiting for you to go water-skiing?”
“No one’s waiting for me.”
I didn’t ask her for her life story, nor even her history with Mr. Zinn. But she related it anyway.
As I had already heard, she met Donald while a waitress at the Flamingo Club in Mazatlán. Older men certainly don’t have their charms, but they do have their uses and Donald had his. He was generous, careless with his cash, and given to expressions of wild emotion that struck women as genuine when they were in the moment but that seemed stranger when they woke up sober the next day. No matter. He had a way about him and she had liked him on the spot. So unusual, so extravagant. He used to come down to Mazatlán alone and marlin-fish with his friends. When things turned romantic he had invited her to California. It was every Mazatlán bar girl’s dream. He took her on weekends to Julian in the mountains and to the 29 Palms Inn in the Mojave Desert; they went to fancy dinners at Mille Fleurs in Rancho Santa Fe and stayed at his townhouse in Coronado. When he asked her to marry him she had not hesitated for a moment. He was old but full of beans, as she put it, and he had property and money on an incomprehensible scale.
“You couldn’t have blamed me,” she said coyly, suddenly warming up again and seeming to relax. “And in the end, you and I are not so different, are we? You can say Donald is a con man, but he isn’t a cheap one. I can’t stand the cheap ones, can you? Of course you can’t. Like me, you just want what you can get out of it.”
“Are you going to make me an offer?”
“I’m still thinking. I’m wondering what kind of person you are. I couldn’t do it without telling Donald, though. I can’t give you a payday and make you go away behind his back.”
I asked her if that was what she wanted, for me to just disappear.
“Sure,” she said. It came with a beautiful smile.
“But Donald holds the purse strings. So I should meet him and he can see what he thinks?”
“I think that’s best, don’t you?”
“I’d say that was pretty dangerous for me,” I said.
“You mean he might decide to kill you instead? Let’s not be melodramatic. That would create all sorts of problems for us. We just want to be left alone, and I think you know that. We can have dinner, and after we pay you, we go our separate ways. It’s easy money for you, I’d say. You can tell the insurance company whatever you want. They can’t prove anything, and if you say so, they’ll leave us alone.”
“You worked it all out in five minutes.”
I didn’t really think this, of course. She had worked it out long before, and for that matter, the two of them had both worked it out. I could see what an effort she was making to keep her surface calm and composed. She was never going to flip her wig, but from time to time a little shudder broke the surface and there was nothing she could do to conceal it. In a way, it reassured me. There was human struggle there in her violent depths. She was not a machine or a complete fraud, and it was even possible that there existed, in those unseen depths, the last vestiges of a once functional conscience. Her smile was at first cold as she proceeded to the question of money, but it was not as cold as she wanted it to be: money was something she humanly understood and greed was something with which she instinctually sympathized.
“I don’t think it’s very complicated. But it depends of course how much you’re asking. People usually ask for too much.”
“I’m not asking anything,” I said. “You can make your offer and I can decide whether it’s worth taking.”
“All right.”
Her eyes narrowed and she was wondering what to accept or deny on the spot. Better to buy a little time.
“I’ll have to discuss it with Donald—”
“You do whatever you want. Shall I meet you both downstairs at nine?”
“Let me ask him first. I mean, we have to discuss it. He might be very unpleasantly surprised.”
“Let’s assume the worst, shall we?”
“He’s got a bad temper when he’s surprised.”
In younger days I would have tried a different tack and made a bid for her at that moment. Her vacillation and disgust would have drawn me in. But I am just the medaled veteran now, the man with slow legs and the gleaming metal chest. I am off the battlefield, as I had told the spinning-top man, and the moment came and went with nothing more than a thought or two. She got up, and I did as well, but with the usual struggle. She watched me with a slight disbelief. We went to the door. Her eye took in a few details of my room, the things that I migh
t have hidden before her arrival, and then she turned before opening the door and told me that I would be better off taking their money and going home. Being retired wasn’t so bad. It was better than a life like this. Living in hotel rooms in Mexico and spying on people.
“That’s a miserable life for someone like you,” she said.
“What would be a merry one?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Sitting by the fire with your dog while your maid makes lasagna.”
“That’s what I’ll go back to.”
“It’s a good plan. I think you should stick to it.”
She pulled the door open herself and I thought she was afraid to go back to her room now.
“I’ll let you know about dinner,” she said, and slipped back out into the world in which she was so comfortable.
“I’ll be waiting by the phone.”
FOURTEEN
In fact I called room service and ordered a gimlet and then called Bonhoeffer in El Centro. I knew exactly where to find him. He was at the diner eating alone, as I supposed was his sorry wont, and the heat of the desert seeped through the earpiece of the restaurant telephone. I was glad not to be there.
Only to Sleep: A Philip Marlowe Novel Page 10
