She nodded. “That’s Paul. He’s getting the car. My name is Fairbrass now.” She spelled it for him.
“Fairbrass.” He didn’t care for the name, nor had he expected to. “Didn’t you want him to meet me?”
“Not particularly.” She said it without emphasis, then allowed herself to laugh, as if admitting the awkwardness of it all.
“Fair enough. What does he do?”
“He owns Fairbrass Pipe Fittings in Long Beach.”
“He’s a plumber.”
“No, he’s a. . . .” She stopped. “You’re making a joke. No, he’s not a plumber. His company installs pipe fittings for steam plants and oil pumping systems and I don’t know what else. Paul took over the firm when his father died. Then the war came, and government contracts. They did a lot of work for the Navy. Anyway, Paul’s done well.”
“I’m glad for you,” he said, wondering if she could tell he didn’t mean it. “So where are you living now?”
“Hancock Park.”
“Nice neighborhood, huh?”
“I suppose.”
“I hear the mayor lives around there somewhere.”
She only shrugged, and he was almost disappointed that she wouldn’t take the bait, to meet his veiled sarcasm with something pointed of her own. Iris had never been one to shrink from a fight.
She extracted one of the new filter-tip cigarettes from a case and, when he didn’t offer to light it, fished a delicate lighter out of her black leather purse and clicked a flame alive. She studied the tip of the cigarette for so long he thought she was about to mention the divorce, but she was silent.
“How’s Clea?” he asked. “I expected to see her here, since I know she liked Scotty.”
“She couldn’t be here,” Iris said vaguely. She looked over her shoulder, watching for the car.
He wanted to talk more, to ease into the horrible subject that was coming, but there wasn’t time. Scotty’s funeral may be the only occasion when she’d let her guard down enough to listen to him. It had to be now.
“I need to talk to you,” he said. “Not long before he died, Scotty showed me something he’d found in his father’s office. It was a bunch of photos, what you’d call dirty pictures.” Iris, who was about to brush the hair away from her face, stopped. Her expression—what he could see of it behind the glasses—did not change. Jesus, does she know? “They weren’t the usual kind. They had little girls in them. Very little.” He knew he was talking too fast, but there was no going back now. He plowed ahead, feeling the sweat break out on the back of his neck. “There was one picture he wanted me to see. He. . . It was a little girl who looked like Clea.”
She drew in her breath. There. It was done. Only one thing left. He pulled the picture from his inside suit pocket and held it out to her.
She studied it without removing the glasses. He saw her wince, set her lips in a thin line, shake her head. “Oh, Lord,” she said. “The poor girl.”
“I know,” he said awkwardly. “I didn’t want to show you this, but—”
She handed it back to him. “It’s not her,” she said flatly.
“What?”
“It’s not her. Oh, it looks a little bit like her back then, before you knew her. But it’s not Clea. At that age, she had longer legs, and the shape of her head was very different. I’d know better than anybody.” She shook her head. “But it makes me sick to look at that picture. I feel so sorry for her. How could anyone—”
“Come on, Iris.” He felt himself getting angry. “Scotty recognized her. So did I.”
She backed away from him slightly. “What do you want me to do? You got this idea, and it turns out to be wrong. It was good of you to worry about us, but you didn’t need to.” She looked over her shoulder. “There’s Paul.”
He felt desperate. “I think Scotty was killed because of this,” he blurted out.
That stopped her. She seemed to be studying him. “The paper said it was probably an accident,” she said carefully.
“Just listen to me. The pictures were taken at the Bullards’ hunting lodge, the place we went to once, and Arthur Bullard was one of the men who took them.” He thought she reacted to that, with a flicker of her eyelids, but he couldn’t be sure. “Scotty was killed by someone who wanted the pictures back.”
She hesitated, taking it in, then reached over and touched his arm. “Oh, John Ray,” she said, and he could hear the sadness in her voice. “You’ve had a bad time, and I’m part of the reason. I’m sorry for everything. I just hope you get things back in order. I really want you to be happy.”
“Thanks,” he said, laying on the sarcasm. “Would you do me one favor?”
She waited, fidgeting with the purse strap around her shoulder.
“I’d like to see Clea once. Just to talk. All right?”
Her face turned hard as she shook her head. “No, you can’t,” she said.
“She was my daughter,” he said. “For a while.”
“You could have adopted her, but you didn’t. Paul did.”
“I wanted to,” he said, hearing the tightness in his voice. “We talked about it.”
“Once,” she said. “You were drunk. You made a lot of promises whenever you were drunk.”
“If I was drunk, there’s a good chance you were too. Remember?”
She turned away. “I have to go now, John Ray. I don’t think we should talk any more.”
“Believe me, I don’t want to bother you,” he called after her. “But why can’t I see her, just once?”
“Because she’s run away,” Iris said without looking back.
* * *
The Glendale diner where he’d stopped for coffee on the way to the lodge was only a few blocks away, so he drove there for lunch. The day’s special was hot turkey sandwich, mashed potatoes on the side, and choice of apple or cherry pie. He ate slowly, trying to keep his thoughts away from Iris lest he feel the anger build again. So he focused on his food, thinking how much better the sliced turkey and gravy would taste if the white bread were replaced with his mother’s cornbread. But Horn was generally an unfussy eater, and he cleaned his plate.
He rolled a cigarette and smoked over his cherry pie and coffee. In the corner, the television set sat unattended, the small screen glowing with a geometric test pattern accompanied by a steady, irritating hum. He noticed that the waitress was the same one who had served him before, the one he had imagined was looking down on him for bringing in doughnuts for his coffee. But today she looked tired, not disdainful, and kept shifting her position against the far counter as if her feet hurt. He left her a tip this time.
Back at the cabin, he found a note on the door. Don’t Forget Pool, it said, and was signed H.F. A week earlier, Harry Flye had told him to clean out the old swimming pool up at the estate. It was untouched by the fire, but over the years it had accumulated a layer of sediment that hid a mass of junk left there by a generation of bums and hoboes who stayed there for a while and then moved on. With the brush cleared, this was Horn’s next project.
He changed into his work clothes. Then, hoisting an old folded tarpaulin over his shoulder, he picked up a shovel and hiked up to the estate. The deep end of the pool was packed with two feet of dried mud. He began digging it out, tossing the shovelfuls over his shoulder and stopping every now and then to pluck out a piece of trash, which he deposited on the tarp. The trash heap grew steadily. Empty cigarette packs, beer bottles, whisky bottles, tin cans that once held beans, tomatoes, soup, sliced peaches. Tattered clothing. A deflated football. The charred remnants of campfires.
After three hours, much of the sediment was shoveled out, and he could barely drag the tarp back down to the cabin. Later, he decided, he’d carry it in the car down the canyon to one of the big public trash barrels near the highway.
He took a bath, then opened a bottle of beer and a can of beef stew for dinner. After his meal, he put his plate in the sink and wiped his hands on a dish towel, then sat on the sofa by the phone for a while.
Scotty was dead. Clea had run away, and Iris wanted nothing to do with him. Horn felt powerless about all of it. Almost absent-mindedly, he thumbed through the bills in his wallet. Twelve dollars, and a few more dollars in change in his pocket. If he was frugal, he could live on that for a week or more, but after that. . . .
He picked up the phone and dialed the casino. At least, he thought, he could earn some money. There was that dentist Mad Crow mentioned, God’s gift to poker but slow to honor his debts. Horn had been dismissive about the job, but he could tell the Indian he had changed his mind.
Lula, Mad Crow’s secretary, answered the phone and went to look for him. Minutes later, she came back. “Finally found him out in the loading area, where they’re bringing in some cases of beer,” she said. She paused.
“So is he coming to the phone or not?”
“No,” she said carefully. “He’s in what you might call a bad mood.”
“What did he say?”
“Well, he cussed a little, and then he said he’d try to call you back if he gets a chance.”
“Tell him never mind. Maybe you can help me, Lula.” They spoke for another minute, and he hung up. He stacked some records on the spindle of his boxy phonograph. They were all by Jimmy Rodgers, “the singing brakeman,” who had recorded for six years in the 1920s and then died. Out on the porch, Horn rocked and smoked, listening to Blue Yodel No. 9, and pulled slowly at what remained of his beer.
Mad Crow’s moods could shift like the weather in the mountains, and all Horn could do was ride them out. But it was Iris who was on his mind now. How could their marriage have started so well and ended so badly? He knew he’d loved her, she’d loved him. What happened? Was it just the drinking? There were a handful of memories in Horn’s life that were almost too shameful, too painful, to summon up. The time up in the mountains in Italy was one of them. And then there were the times with Iris when things turned bad. Or sorrowful. Or violent. When he saw her today, he’d stolen a glance at her left arm, which was bare between her glove and elbow, to see if it looked different from the other. It didn’t, of course, but he knew that if he rubbed his thumb along the tendon below her elbow, he could feel the knot of a broken bone that had healed improperly. And remember how it was broken.
One of the worst memories was of the last day he saw Clea. He’d been given a day to settle his affairs before surrendering himself for the trip up to Cold Creek Prison. She locked herself in her room, screaming at him through the door. You’re not my real father anyway, she told him. No wonder I can’t count on you. He understood that it was just a young girl’s hysteria, but the words hurt nonetheless. He’d thought he would have a chance to prove her wrong once prison was behind him. But one day at mail call, the letter from Iris arrived, forever closing the book on that part of his life.
Once out of prison, he had held back from contacting Clea. He told himself he was still too full of hatred for Iris, and there was truth in that. But by keeping his distance, wasn’t he validating Clea’s own words—that she couldn’t count on him?
Clea was not the girl in the picture, Iris said. She seemed sure. Was she lying, or just wrong?
This was not the first time Clea had run away. About a year before he’d gone to prison, Clea frightened them by disappearing. She and a girlfriend, whose name he’d forgotten, took a bus out to Santa Monica and then hitchhiked several miles up the coast to a spot where he and Iris had once taken Clea on a holiday. Guessing where she’d gone, he spent two days showing her picture up and down the coast before he finally found the two girls in a motel, smoking cigarettes and reading movie magazines. At the sight of him, the look on her face said, I knew you’d come.
All the way back in the car, the two girls giggled in the back seat, reliving their adventure. Although he lectured Clea on the dangers of hitchhiking, secretly he admired her courage at heading off on her own. It was something he might have done at her age. Iris too.
Now she was gone again. Her mother wanted nothing to do with him, and even Clea had screamed at him that last day he had seen her. He retained his strong suspicions about Scotty’s death, but how could he know there was any connection to Clea? Maybe she was off with a friend somewhere, having some forbidden fun. Eventually she might call home, or even come back on her own. Horn had been raised to stay out of other people’s business. Why should he get involved in this? Why not let her new father find her this time?
After a while, he went to bed. Sometime before dawn, when the first birdcalls began to break the quiet of the canyon, he drifted into a half-dream, half-memory of a little girl, not much more than six, her face frozen in a mixture of fear and fascination as she reached out a hand to touch a horse’s muzzle for the first time in her young life. Later in the dream-memory, he lifted her astride Raincloud, his big hands encircling her waist, and she tossed her corn-silk ponytail and shrieked with delight as he took the reins and walked girl and horse around the corral.
Then the little girl’s face changed, and she seemed to be asking him for something, and he wanted to protect her against a threat neither of them could even see. He felt his chest tighten with sadness, knowing that she’d never be six again and that no one would ever ride Raincloud again. He tried to will himself out of the dream, but just before he was able, he saw the thin-faced boy with the bad leg standing some distance away, leaning on a fencepost and watching them, his face full of sadness and contempt.
He woke up sweating and went out to the porch, where he sat and watched the half-light begin to define the trees. He felt his thoughts take shape the same way. He remembered Scotty’s words that night in his father’s office: I hope she’s doing all right.
He knew he had to find her.
CHAPTER SIX
In Horn’s old movies, hunting down badmen had presented only nominal problems, usually hinging on the search for a particular brand on a horse’s flank or a distinctively hand-tooled holster or a pony’s shoe that left a peculiar mark on the trail. It never took Sierra Lane more than a few reels to get his man. Horn, on the other hand, had no formal training as a policeman or an investigator. But a year of collecting debts for the Indian had taught him a few things about finding people.
He started early, right after breakfast. He drove deliberately up the coast as far as Santa Barbara, stopping at every motel and gas station and cafe and gift shop to ask about Clea. He portrayed himself as a distraught father looking for his little girl. That was partly true, of course. But he had to lie about being her father, and even though he desperately wanted to find her, the lie came too easily, and he felt uncomfortably like an actor reading lines, making up a story to gain people’s sympathy.
He had forgotten to bring a picture of her, he told people apologetically, but she was sixteen, fair-haired, a little tall for her age, and might be traveling with a friend. Having not seen her for three years, he was reluctant to be too specific about her appearance, the kind of clothes she liked or how she wore her hair. Most of the waitresses and motel keepers seemed sympathetic and not inclined to question him too closely.
The drive turned up nothing. The next day he drove down the coast as far as Laguna, repeating his inquiries. Again, nothing. As he drove, he racked his brain to come up with new searches, new avenues to explore. A girl runs away from home. Where does she go? It would help if he knew why she was gone, but presumably only Iris could tell him that, and she was not forthcoming. If Clea stayed missing, maybe her mother would eventually welcome his help.
She was likely to be traveling or staying with someone, and he was handicapped in not knowing who her current friends were. In fact, he knew little about Clea at sixteen. When he last saw her, she was partial to horses,
hair ribbons, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. Now, she was probably using lipstick and going out with boys, he reflected with some discomfort.
After he returned, he spent some time with the information operator and was able to get a number for Mr. and Mrs. Paul Fairbrass, with an address in the Hancock Park neighborhood. When Iris answered, he said, “It’s John Ray. Any news about Clea?”
She sighed. “Please. . . .”
“I’m not going to make trouble for you. I just want to know.”
He heard a man’s voice in the background, and Iris put her hand over the mouthpiece for a moment, then came back on. “Well, there’s some good news,” she said, a little too brightly. “Clea called us. She said not to worry. She’ll be home soon.”
“Where is she?”
“She didn’t say, but. . . .” She stopped. Something in her voice, something he’d always been able to hear, gave her away.
“I don’t think you’re telling me the truth.”
She said nothing. He tried again: “Did she really run away?”
“Yes,” she said quietly.
“Do you want to tell me why?”
“It’s not any of your business.”
“Tell me who her friends are.”
“Please, I have to go.”
“Have you called the police?”
“Of course we have,” she said bitterly. “Why don’t you just stay out of this?”
“I can’t,” he said, and hung up.
* * *
Like most of those who had worked in and around Hollywood, Horn knew Hollywood Boulevard well, from the Hollywood Palms Hotel near Vine to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre several blocks west, but he had never been in Geiger’s bookstore. For one thing, he was not much for serious reading. For another, the interior visible through the awninged and curtained window always reminded him of a gentleman’s club with its deep carpet, leather chairs, and shelves of rare and expensive-looking volumes resting behind glass-front bookcases. Not the place to pick up a copy of Wanderer of the Wasteland or The Last Trail.
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