True-Life Adventure

by Julie Smith

  But why? If they wanted to make a plea before, why not now? I didn’t see how the bad news could have made a whit of difference as to whether it would be appropriate.

  I just didn’t get it.

  I stopped at Denny’s, the closest fast-food joint to the Watergate, and ordered a burger. The decor was monochrome (mustard-colored plastic), the clientele polychrome. Most of the men wore short-sleeved shirts, a sure sign of working-class status. Apparently this was a popular spot with the folks from the wrong side of town.

  While I waited for my order, I phoned the office. First I said there wasn’t going to be a Koehler story and then I asked about Brissette. He was dead on arrival at Central Emergency.

  It was what I expected, but somehow I didn’t expect to take it so badly. I went up to my neck in the Slough of Despond the second the receiver clicked back into place. I knew I couldn’t eat my burger, and I should have canceled it, but I couldn’t get the words out. I didn’t want to talk to anyone.

  So I just left. I got in my Toyota and drove back across the bay, toward San Francisco. That was where I lived, but I didn’t want to go home. There was no one but Spot there.

  As soon as I thought that, I could see the paradox in it. I didn’t want to talk to anybody, but I didn’t want to be alone. That certainly simplified matters.

  The thing to do, I supposed, was go to a bar. That way I could have as much human contact as I wanted and never have to say a word to a soul.

  But it probably wouldn’t work that way. I’d go in all morose, and I’d drink something or maybe a couple of somethings, and then things would start looking better. I’d perk up a little and someone would get up the nerve to speak to me, and it would be a dumb someone with nothing interesting to say. And I’d talk to him— or her— because I didn’t want to add any more layers of jerkhood to my already severely endangered soul.

  I looked at my watch. It was early yet. Barely 6:30. Maybe I could find someone to have dinner with, someone I wouldn’t mind talking to. But who?

  It was a dumb question. There was only one person I wanted to have dinner with and she didn’t like me. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have called someone who didn’t like me, but this was an emergency. I went home and dialed Pandorf Associates. She was still there.

  “Hey, listen,” I said. “I’m really not as low-down as Birnbaum. It only seems that way until you get to know me. Underneath the hostile asshole most people see, there’s a sweet, timid guy struggling to get out.”

  She did me the honor of a polite chuckle. “I was snippy. I’m sorry.”

  “You mean the hatchet’s buried? Just like that?”

  “Sure.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I thought I was going to have to plead with you over dinner. I mean, that was going to be my excuse for asking you to dinner. Now I don’t have one.”

  I talked fast, not letting her get a word in. “Some guys would give up at this point. But not me. No sirree. I’m going to think of another excuse before you have a chance to turn me down. Just watch. I’m thinking now.”

  “Listen, Paul, I…”

  “I know. We’ve gotta celebrate. That’s it.”

  “Celebrate what?”

  “Resolving our differences. It’s a momentous moment.”

  “You’re sweet, but really, I have a lot of work to do. Maybe another time.”

  “Sardis? I really need somebody to talk to.” It was hard for me to say stuff like that, but I felt pretty strongly about seeing her.

  “You do?” she said. “About Lindsay and all that?”

  “Yes. Would you have dinner with me, please? I could have you back at your office in a couple of hours.”

  “Oh, the hell with it. I’ll come in early tomorrow.”

  We went to Basta Pasta, which is one of two restaurants in town that always seem to feed you even if you don’t have reservations.

  A little red wine, a little French bread, and both of us started to unwind. For a while we just kind of chatted, like any couple on a first date. She was a curious young woman— twenty-eight years old and still angry about a lot of things. It was hard on her, being an adolescent misfit; it was hard on all of us, but she was in the South at the time and she said that made it worse.

  She’d come to California with a degree in art and a lot of talent and chutzpah (to hear her tell it, anyway), and she’d started out doing paste- up for a firm of graphic designers. For the first time in her life she met the kind of people she always imagined there must be somewhere, and these people she described as the sort who would speak to her honestly without meaning something other than what they were saying.

  About then I started catching on that maybe her adolescence actually had been tougher than the average. Anyway, she later moved to another firm, where she was a designer herself, and from there to Pandorf, where she was an executive— a “project coordinator,” meaning a person who organized the getting together of C.I.’s. She’d been doing this for two years and she was beginning to hate it. She wanted to paint.

  Much like a thousand other stories in the naked city. Much like mine, when you got down to it. But I found her fascinating. She seemed a lot like me in a lot of respects— her background, all that early teenage, early young adult stuff, and her anger, held even after it was all over and she had come out on top. I identified with it as if I were in her skin. I carried the same anger and I knew it.

  But that wasn’t what made her fascinating. It was the way she was different from me. She had a softness, a vulnerability, a way of speech and manner that seemed to treat each person she met— me, the waiter, each fellow human being— with a respect that bordered on awe. How could she be like that and be so much like me? That was the fascinating part.

  After she told her tale, I reciprocated with a little spellbinding information about myself— how I was the first person in my family to go to college and how I had to clean toilets to do it, even though I had scholarships, and how I became an ace but unappreciated reporter for a metropolitan daily and ultimately a ghostwriter for a private detective.

  I even mentioned Maureen to her, and I didn’t talk about Maureen much. She’s kind of the one who got away, though I doubt if she’d see it that way. I said something to Sardis that I’d never said before. I said that I regretted losing Maureen. The reason I never said it is that I never thought it before. Never thought it because I was the one who dumped Maureen.

  Lately, though, something funny had been going on. I’d started feeling things I hadn’t felt before, and one of them was Maureen-regret. It probably had to do with my age and level of achievement. I wished it would get lost.

  Anyway, the thing about Maureen popped out and all of a sudden Sardis was crying. I didn’t know what to say. I offered her some water and she refused. Then I just sat there, twisting my napkin till she could speak.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m feeling sort of vulnerable.”

  “You regret something, too,” I said.

  “Yes. But he dumped me, you see. I couldn’t stop the thing.”

  “Was it recently?”

  “Last month.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I want to tell you about it. I think you ought to know.”

  I didn’t really want to know, to tell you the truth. I hardly knew this woman and the ought in her sentence sounded possessive. It sounded like maybe she thought we were going to be seeing each other on a regular basis. That got my hackles up.

  Why? you may ask. You might point out that I thought she was terrific in just about every way and she was the only person in the world I wanted to be with that night. So why didn’t I like the idea of seeing her on a regular basis? Well, I did, so long as she wasn’t so amenable to it. Does that make sense? Hell, no, of course it doesn’t.

  But that’s the way it was. I didn’t like Sardis thinking there was something I ought to know and I didn’t want to hear her goddam heartbreak story. I didn’
t want to hear anybody’s heartbreak story; I didn’t want to know anybody that well.

  But I couldn’t ask her not to tell it without alienating her forever, and if I did that, I couldn’t see her on a regular basis. See what a bind I was in?

  I answered her as noncommitally as possible. “Oh?” I said.

  “I just had an abortion. I mean, a few weeks ago.” Her eyes were filling up again.

  “That’s tough,” I said, hoping I was making my voice gentle enough to sound sympathetic. God, I was awful at this stuff. I was embarrassed as hell and beginning to sweat.

  “The man I was seeing was married and he lied and… it’s the usual story.”

  I nodded. I knew exactly the story she meant.

  “The thing was, the guy was a client. He stopped using Pandorf when it was over. I mean, he stopped on account of me. I personally cost the company several hundred thousand dollars.”

  Maybe I didn’t know what story she meant. Maybe I was losing my grip. Was her heart broken, or was she worried about losing business?

  “I shouldn’t have gone out with a client. It’s unprofessional as hell, and I could probably get fired for it. But probably I wouldn’t get fired. Probably I just wouldn’t get any good assignments anymore. It wouldn’t happen to a man, of course, if the situation were reversed, but that’s the breaks. It’s happened before at Pandorf, and at other corporations I know of. Your career just sort of unofficially stops dead. You get a ‘reputation,’ like in the nineteenth century.”

  “But if no one knows about it…”

  “Jack Birnbaum did. I thought you ought to know.”

  Oho. “I thought you didn’t know him.”

  “Those messages he left. The first two said he wanted to talk to me about A&L. That’s the name of my friend’s company. The third one mentioned the man by name. So that’s how I happened to remember your name after I saw it in the paper— I was pretty interested in the Birnbaum story. And that’s why I spoke to you sharply at lunch. I’m sorry.”

  I took her hand. I didn’t know what to say again.

  “What the fuck,” I said at last, “was Jack up to?”

  “I thought you might know.”

  “Let’s have some more wine. It might help us think.” We did, and it did. But not right away. This is the way with wine.

  We kicked the thing around awhile.

  Finally, it occurred to me to ask an obvious question. “What did you think when you saw the messages?”

  “I got sort of paranoid about them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She looked embarrassed. “It’s dumb, but for some reason I got the idea of a blackmailer in my head. I mean, I know it doesn’t happen much in real life, especially when you haven’t got a lot of money in the first place, but it popped into my head.” She shrugged, as if to excuse herself.

  “Maybe that’s not so crazy.” My mind was humming along like a Japanese import. “Maybe Jack had a habit of buying information. I mean, maybe he was going to use Mr. A&L as leverage with you— to make sure you told him what you knew about Lindsay.”

  “My God. You’d work for a man like that?”

  “I didn’t know. I mean, I don’t know. But I never liked the guy much, if you want to know the truth. I guess I thought he was a little sleazy.” It was my turn to shrug. “I sort of thought it went with the territory. P. I.’s have had a pretty bad reputation ever since Philip Marlowe went out of action.”

  “Nonsense. Marlowe lives.”

  Sardis was nothing if not full of surprises. We’d have to explore the subject of Chandler in depth. But some other time. My little brain was still busy.

  “There was something about Jack that always struck me as peculiar. Sometimes reasonably easy cases seemed to take a lot longer than they ought. He explained it by saying he had a lot of ‘background checking’ to do. So take this as a hypothesis— he investigated everyone he wanted to question before he questioned him, only going to the questionee when he finally had something damaging on him. Something to use as a persuader. Does that fly?”

  “It’s weird. If he was going to be a blackmailer, why not blackmail people for money instead of information?”

  “Maybe he did both. Maybe that’s what got him killed.”

  “Omigod. Do you know who else he talked to about Lindsay?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Was Mike Brissette one of them?”

  I saw what she meant. There was a guy with something to lose. And he’d been as blackmailable as a movie star with a rap sheet. He had a coke habit a twelve-year-old could ferret out. But I didn’t think he killed Jack.

  “You know Brissette?”

  “Not really. Lindsay talked about him, that’s all.”

  “He was killed this afternoon. I found the body.” I picked up my wineglass and drained it. The time had come to alter my blood chemistry. For a while I’d been pretty successful forgetting things I wanted to forget, but now I had to think about them.

  “Killed! Was he murdered?”

  “I don’t know. I think he may have been.” I told her the story. And then I told her about the attempt on my life. I got drunker and drunker as I did it.

  I hated the whole situation. I hated having someone on the loose who wanted to kill me and I hated possibly being an unwitting instrument of Brissette’s death and I hated needing somebody to talk to.

  In the morning I’d probably hate myself for getting drunk and forever ruining my chances with Sardis. But getting drunk I was.

  I’m pretty good at disguising it, though, so she didn’t catch on right away. Not only did she consent to let me drive her home, but she invited me in and offered me a brandy. I had three. Four, maybe.

  By then I had the courage to make a pass at her. We were sitting on her sofa, at opposite ends. I was thinking she had the greatest legs I ever saw. On the pretext of putting my glass on the coffee table, I moved a little closer to her. Then, very suavely, I put my right hand on her left breast and squeezed.

  She yelped.

  Not only that, she leaped up. Terrified, maybe. Repelled more likely.

  “Paul Mcdonald,” she said, “you are definitely not driving home.” And she disappeared.

  When she came back with a pillow and blanket, I was already half asleep. She leaned down to tuck me in and I grabbed her right breast. What a sophisticate.

  No wonder I was so popular.

  CHAPTER 9

  I was right about one thing. I hated myself the next morning. I had such a hangover that losing my chance with Sardis seemed secondary. I woke up way the hell early, a frequent occurrence when I’ve overdone. Some people say you wake up like that when the alcohol has left your bloodstream, but I don’t believe it. If it’s not there anymore, why do you feel so lousy?

  Sardis was still asleep and I didn’t want to wake her, so I didn’t even scrounge around for coffee. I just left, thinking I’d call her later at Pandorf and thank her or apologize or something.

  It was maybe 7:30 when I turned onto Chenery Street. Already light. But my house didn’t look quite right to me. It was strange because other people’s looked the same as ever.

  When I got closer and saw what was wrong, I couldn’t take it in. Bad news is like that.

  But a long time has passed since then and I have come to believe it happened, so I can now write down with perfect confidence what it was: Sometime in the night my house was gutted by fire.

  I got out of my car and the air smelled funny. That was further evidence that it was true. But I still didn’t believe it, so I walked to the front door and looked in. I wished I hadn’t. It was like looking at the body of a dead friend; nothing like the live person had been. It wasn’t a house at all anymore— just a stucco shell with black streaks all over its nice terra-cotta paint.

  Somewhere in the rubble, I supposed, there might be something that could be salvaged. I’d have to look, eventually. But Spot’s body would probably be in there, too, and that was literally the
body of a dead friend. I didn’t want to find it. At least I hadn’t lost my life’s work— I’d stashed copies of all my manuscripts, including my current one, at Debbie Hofer’s, just in case.

  At the end of the front walk there was a little step, and I sat down on it, feeling about as bereft as it’s possible to feel, I guess. Maybe it hurts more to lose a wife or kid, but if your house and cat are all you have, they become more precious than they’d be to a guy with a wife and kid. Because you know how close you are to having nothing. And that’s what I currently had.

  I was going to miss Spot.

  For a long time I sat on my step feeling numb and awful. A couple of people came out to get their papers and I was afraid someone would speak to me; I didn’t want to talk to anyone, so after a while I got in my car. My throat felt tight and every muscle in my face was straining. My body wanted to cry, but it couldn’t. Crying wasn’t a skill it had learned.

  My next door neighbor came out to get her paper. Her name was Mrs. Civkulis. She saw me, waved, and started walking toward the Toyota. I pretended not to see her. I liked her, but I couldn’t face her then. She started hollering my name. I left her in a cloud of dust.

  Where to go, though?

  The Toyota answered me. It turned toward North Beach and headed there without my help. North Beach was where Sardis lived. Once again, when I thought I didn’t want to talk to someone, it turned out I did. This was getting to be a habit.

  She was just leaving for work. Already outside, turning her key in the lock.

  “Paul!” She seemed glad to see me. Can you feature that? Then she saw what I looked like and she closed up her smile. “What happened?”

  “My house burned down.”

  “Oh, no,” she said, or “Oh, shit.” Whatever people say when they hear someone else’s bad news. The thing she said wasn’t memorable. The thing she did was. She walked over to me and kissed me all over my face, saying between pecks how sorry she was.