Square in the Middle

by William Campbell Gault

  ten

  Where now, brown cow? A sunny day, a day for golf or a picnic or the beach. Where now? The motel? The office?

  I stopped at another drugstore and looked in another phone book. And then came out to swing the Olds around and head for Bel Air.

  The house is difficult to describe. It looked to me like it was an intriguing combination of Spanish and moderne, but that doesn’t really do it justice. It was on a rise, overlooking Sunset Boulevard, and the driveway led into a walled parking area on a level above the patio.

  Rita Edlinger came to the door, and I sensed that she’d been drinking enough to affect her. She said with special distinctness, “Are you answering my drunken invitation at Heeney’s?”

  I shook my head. “I’m at loose ends, looking for some gab.”

  She smiled mechanically. “Come in.”

  I came into an entrance foyer a step above an immense and lofty living room with beamed ceilings. “Some house,” I said.

  The mechanical smile again. “My ideas and Tom’s draftsmanship. But my ideas and don’t forget it.”

  “I won’t,” I said. “Was that you at the barroom beyond Malibu last night? It was too dark to see.”

  She turned to face me. “Whose business is that?”

  We were in the living room now. I said, “Your business. I didn’t mean to pry, Rita. Am I annoying you?”

  She stood next to a gargantuan davenport in coral, swaying slightly, considering me owlishly. “Not today. But last night. Jim Gullible and little Miss Roundheels. You can’t quit, eh, Gullible? If you’re going to cheat, couldn’t you pick something better than that purse-size prostitute?”

  “Easy, Rita,” I said. “Don’t get all worked up, now.”

  She sat down on the davenport and her face went suddenly slack. “Mix me a drink, Jim. Mix a pair of big ones.”

  I hesitated. “Are you sure that …”

  “I’m sure.” Her big, soft eyes met mine. “There are times when it’s spiritually and psychologically advisable to get stewed to the ears. This is one of the times. Won’t you join me?”

  “You’ve got a point there,” I said, and smiled at her. “But how about my virginity? Will I be safe?”

  She played it straight, her face blank. “You’re safe. Any married man is safe with Rita Edlinger and don’t ever forget it.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind. Whiskey and what?”

  “Whiskey and anything you find in the cabinet. Whiskey and gin, if that’s all there is.”

  I mixed a pair of bourbons and water. It was expensive bourbon. I handed her hers and sat a few feet away on the same davenport.

  On the coffee table in front of us the Daily Star was spread out. “A Democrat, are you?” I said and nodded toward the paper.

  She looked at her drink. “All minority groups are Democrats. Didn’t you know that, Mr. Gullible?”

  I nodded. “I knew it. My name is Jim Gulliver.”

  “Maybe it was until Skin-and-bones came into your life. What in hell do you see in her, Jim?”

  “Somebody who needs help,” I said. “You explained that to me very carefully the other day.”

  “Did I? I suppose you’re not sleeping with her, eh?”

  “You suppose correctly. I’m not and I don’t intend to.”

  “Oh …?” She turned her head to stare at me. “And what the hell are you doing here, now?”

  “I’m having one drink and then I’m apologizing for the intrusion and then I’m leaving. I should have phoned, I guess.”

  “Huh!” she said, and sipped her drink. She licked her lips and said softly, “Don’t mind me. Mercurial, you know, Spanish. I’m kind of bitchy today, Jim, but don’t mind it.”

  “I’ll stay until you fall asleep,” I said.

  “You’ll have a long wait.” She took a gulp of her drink. “That Chopko’s kind of cute, isn’t he?”

  “I guess. I don’t lust for men much.”

  She turned to face me again. “My, my, aren’t we the sharp ones today? Did you bring that corn all the way to California from the farm?”

  “I thought it was pretty good,” I answered. “Mike Chopko’s a handsome man. And, I think, an honest one.”

  “He dances like Astaire,” she said quietly. “Some of those big bastards surprise you, don’t they?”

  “I haven’t danced with many of them,” I said. “I don’t follow very well.”

  For the third time, she faced me, her face grave. And then she began to laugh and I began to laugh and she spilled her drink and I had to rush to the kitchen for a dish towel to sop it up.

  And we worked our way into that vintage bourbon, like a couple of high school punks whose parents were out of town. Crawling into a bottle for refuge isn’t anything I’d ever done before. But then, I’d never had quite as much provocation before.

  I’m not looking for an alibi, but I think if I hadn’t made that first drink too strong, I could have held out and stayed reasonably sober. After the second, I was on the toboggan.

  It’s an easy world to enter today, the blurred, bright and carefree world of alcohol. She tried to teach me to tango, I remember, and how to rumba and some of those other Latin dances. Twice we wound up on the floor, laughing like idiots.

  Then, before the sun went down, we had a dip in the pool. It brought me part way back to sanity and the knowledge that I’d had only a cheese sandwich for lunch.

  Rita’s one servant, the housekeeper, was gone for the week end but Rita broiled a pair of steaks and we ate them out in the sheltered patio.

  There, for a while, the dialogue became coherent.

  And she said something I was to remember later. She said, “This I know. If one of that gang killed Tom and any of the others knew about it, the police would never learn it from them. They’re as loyal to each other as religious fanatics.”

  And then she wanted me to try a rum drink she’d invented and we went back to wonderland. I wasn’t conscious of time, but it must have been fairly late in the evening that we began to quarrel.

  I don’t remember what it was about but I’m quite sure it was one-sided. I remember trying to placate her. And then she went stomping off toward the bedrooms and I sat down on the biggest davenport.

  There were some book matches on the coffee table and the cover bore the Gulliver-Schuman imprint. I hadn’t remembered that she’d asked me for a match, but there were a lot of things I didn’t remember. None of the matches had been used.

  My knees felt weak and I stretched out on the davenport. Somewhere a phone rang, but nobody answered it and it stopped ringing after a while.

  Later, I thought I heard door chimes, but it must have been a dream because I heard Max’s voice calling Rita and then George Wallace asked me for a match. And Mike Chopko danced with Janis Paige and Janis ate a cheese sandwich while she danced.

  And I wakened to a big, dark and lofty room. And it was cold, and I was scared. From below, far below, the headlights of Sunset Boulevard traffic flickered through the shrubbery and glinted off the huge windows of the room.

  The room was cold and big and I had gone through some crazy dreams, but that shouldn’t be enough to frighten me. The silence was almost absolute; not a murmur of the traffic below reached me.

  There wasn’t any reason I know of to think of Tom’s house in Mandeville Canyon, but for a drunken second I had a feeling I was there, in that living room where I’d found him.

  I stood up and my legs faltered. I remembered there’d been lamps at both ends of this davenport and I felt my way along the davenport’s edge until my groping fingers found the table and the lamp.

  When the light went on, I felt better. I went over to the thermostat on the entrance foyer wall and saw that it had been left down at 60 degrees. I set it up.

  The silence still bothered me and I moved in the dim light from the hall to the bedrooms. The first two were unoccupied. When I came to what I thought must be the third, I found the door locked and I rapped softly.r />
  There was no answer, and I rapped louder.

  Nothing.

  I could see a dim light coming out from under the door, and I called, “Rita? Are you all right, Rita?”

  No answer and I raised my voice and still got no answer. I didn’t want to force the door, but neither did I want to take a chance on not seeing that she was all right.

  I went to the den and out that sliding glass door to the patio and along the patio to where I could see the light from her bedroom window.

  There were drapes on the windows, but they didn’t completely obscure the view. Rita was lying stark naked on a king-sized bed. Her olive body was worthy of sculpture.

  I stared and stared until I saw that she was breathing. I began to breathe myself, then, and stood for a moment in the clear, cold night, trying to drive the mustiness from my mind.

  The chill got to me and I went inside again. The heating fan had started to hum; warm air poured through the immense house.

  I was in no condition to drive and there wasn’t any reason why I couldn’t spend the night here. I sat for a moment on the davenport, and then decided to use one of the bedrooms.

  • • •

  In the morning, I wakened to the sound of running water in a shower; her bathroom and the one serving this room must be adjoining. I stretched in the fine bed in Sunday morning luxury.

  Three bedrooms and den and four bathrooms, overlooking Sunset Boulevard and the hills behind. Swimming pool, badminton court, four-car garage and a loving wife with a figure like that. What in the name of sweet reason could Tom Edlinger have sought at Heeney’s?

  Were we still under the spell of Robin Hood, we lucky ones with loving wives? Did we seek adventure and romance like the knights of old and were we likely to find it in bars? It didn’t add. What we sought was the strange, new bed. And why? Beds, like women, are all on the same pattern and one serves as well as the other.

  Revolt from the rut? Wasn’t Heeney’s a rut? The dialogue was considerably below the Rotary luncheon level and the expressed opinions about as banal. Was it the booze? A man can drink at home.

  There was a soft knock at the door and Rita asked, “Are you decent, amigo?”

  “I’m covered from head to foot.”

  The door opened and she grinned in at me. “I was rude last night. I was a bitch.”

  I nodded. “And you locked your door, too.”

  She nodded back to me. “Always, for married men. You get a divorce and a license, Jim, and I’ll give you a key. Could I fix you a bloody Mary?”

  “No, thanks. I’ll have some coffee and seven or eight scrambled eggs with my bacon. You know, you’re about the only rich girl I know?”

  “I’m quite a catch,” she admitted. “You give it some thought,” She winked and closed the door.

  Mine was one of the smaller bathrooms, hardly as large as my living room at home. I showered and found a razor in the medicine cabinet with a package of unopened blades.

  When I came out into the kitchen, Rita pointed to the Sunday Times still folded on the breakfast-nook table. “Make yourself at home.” She sighed. “I sure love a man around the house on Sunday.”

  “No Star this morning?” I kidded her.

  “Not on Sunday. The Times is so fat and it scatters so well. It gives a place that Sunday look.” She went to the refrigerator. “How many eggs did you really want?”

  “Four will do it. What did we argue about last night?”

  “I don’t know.” She paused, halfway between the refrigerator and the range, to look at me. “Why?”

  “I just wondered.”

  “You sounded like — like a policeman, or something.” She turned on the flame under the huge griddle. “It’s Sunday, Jim. Relax.”

  I sipped my tomato juice. “Do you know Max Schuman, Rita?”

  She bent down to study the flame. “I used to see him around when Tom and I were bar-happy. Again, why …?”

  “I saw some Gulliver-Schuman matches in the living room.”

  Again, she looked at me and the big eyes glowed ominously. “You are Gulliver, I believe? What’s come over you, Jim?”

  I looked away. “It must be a hangover, I guess.”

  “Last night,” she said quietly, “I asked you for a light. You started to give me one and then I found my lighter at the same time. You even made some crack about me being afraid to accept favors. Look at me, Jim.”

  I looked at her.

  She asked, “Why did you come here yesterday?”

  “I don’t know. I wanted to see you. I was — lonely.”

  “And suspicious?”

  “No. Not suspicious.”

  She nodded. “And I am not suspicious of you. Even though you were drunk that night and unconscious for a long time at Lynn’s party. Are you examining yourself as closely as the others, Jim?”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “Maybe, when you blacked out …? Do you know what you did during that time?”

  “I slept. Anyway, I suppose I did. Somebody would know if I did anything else.”

  “That’s right. Somebody would know. Somebody in the gang, in that closed corporation. But you’re one of them, Jim; they wouldn’t rat on you.”

  “I’m not one of them and I don’t want to be. I’m sorry, Rita. I’m not thinking straight this morning, I guess.”

  “Nor nice. Now, relax.”

  I wondered how she knew so much about the party. I read in the Times that no new clues had been uncovered in the Edlinger murder. I smelled bacon and coffee and looked up to watch Rita at the stove.

  I wondered, if a man married one of those Latin types, would it keep him at home, too spent to chase? Or was that another schoolboy myth? It hadn’t kept Tom Edlinger off the trail.

  “Tom was a fool,” I said.

  She looked over at me, startled. “Now, what …?”

  “To give you up.”

  “I can be difficult,” she said. “Sunny side up?”

  “Please. Difficult, but not boring, I’ll bet.”

  “Is your wife boring, Jim?”

  I paused before answering. “No, I guess I’m the bore. But she is interested in things that I find dull. Like P.T.A. and politics …”

  “Men,” Rita said contemptuously.

  “You’re against them?”

  “Huh.”

  “Let’s start over,” I said.

  “Men. They want a woman to think of nothing twenty-four hours a day except an act that takes about twenty minutes at your age. The women are supposed to sit at home while the husband is out on the job and while they sit, they’re supposed to get themselves ready for that one service. You’d think we were domestic animals. Well, we’re not, Jim. We’re people.”

  “That’s unfair. That’s not even remotely true, what you said about men.”

  “Don’t tell me. Most men never get out of high school. They never get older than nineteen.”

  “Let’s not fight again,” I said. “Not before breakfast.”

  She smiled. “All right, Jim. And after breakfast, we’ll swim. We’ll have a nice Sunday, won’t we?”

  I nodded. I’d have a better Sunday than I would at the motel or at Heeney’s. But I could think of a still better one.

  “Mike’s coming over later,” she said, “to swim. And I’ve a freezer full of aged steaks.”

  “Mike Chopko …?”

  “Mike Chopko. Do you want your coffee now?”

  Perhaps Mrs. Rita Edlinger was already out of mourning. The ubiquitous Michael Chopko had a wide range of services, from Miss Padbury to Mrs. Edlinger, from credit reports to murder cases.

  “Don’t look so smug,” Rita said. “Don’t get that vulgar, man look.”

  “I didn’t mean to. What part of the paper do you want?”

  “The financial. I want to look at my Bancroft Oil.”

  I handed her the financial section. “Bancroft? The best they ever paid was eight percent.”

  “That’s
bad, eight percent on a blue chip stock?”

  “I can guarantee you ten.”

  She smiled patronizingly. “I know. On second trust deeds. But you’re new out here, Jim. I was only a high school kid during the depression, but I can remember houses like this selling for eight thousand dollars. And what good is your second mortgage then?”

  “We won’t have another depression,” I said.

  “With the depression party in the White House? We’re heading for one, right now.” She shook her head. “Republicans.”

  “You and Carol must get together some day,” I said.

  She didn’t answer. We ate and read and drank our coffee and read. Below us, the beachbound traffic was bumper to bumper on Sunset.

  Boom country, drawing the rootless and the restless from all the other forty-seven states. The aircraft plants humming, the building industry setting new records every day, the industrial smog turning us into another Pittsburgh. Desert country, our water coming in from three hundred miles away. Scorned by the East and envied by the rest, make-believe land lured them all.

  “Some country,” I said.

  Rita looked up. “America, you mean?”

  “Southern California, I mean.”

  “I liked it better twenty years ago.”

  I smiled. “Before the rubes and the rascals came out, eh?”

  “More coffee?”

  “Answer me,” I said. “You resent us, don’t you?”

  “Just the trash. Not you, Jim.” She poured another cup of coffee for herself and looked at me.

  I took half a cup and went back to my reading.

  Later we did the dishes together and then she got me a pair of swimming trunks and we went out to enjoy the sun. The water was cool, the sun hot.

  I began to burn a little, and we put on robes and went to the shadier side of the patio for a game of Scrabble. We were having an argument about a Spanish word Rita insisted was in the dictionary when Mike Chopko came.

  He said, “I had those reports in the car, Mr. Gulliver. I put them on the front seat of your car.”

  “Thanks, Mike. Get your trunks on. The water’s fine.”

  He nodded. “I think you’ll find the reports interesting.”

  “How about Dyke?” I asked him, “and his pocket lint theory?”