“Will you find her, you think?”
“Yeah,” I said.
Susan smiled at me and the heat thickened.
“Yes,” she said, and leaned across the table and put her hand on top of mine, “you will.”
33
AFTER lunch I dropped Susan at Harvard, where she taught a once-a-week seminar on analytic psychotherapy.
“You’re going to stumble into the classroom reeking of white wine?” I said.
“I’ll buy some Sen-Sen,” Susan said.
“You consumed nearly an ounce,” I said, “straight.”
“A slave to Bacchus,” she said. “Drive carefully.”
She got out and I watched her walk away, until she was out of sight. “Hot damn,” I said aloud, and pulled out into traffic.
I went through Harvard Square and down to the river, and across and onto the Mass. Pike. In about an hour and forty-five minutes I was in Waymark again. It took me a couple of tries but I found the road leading into Pomeroy’s cabin. There had been snow here, that we hadn’t gotten in eastern Mass., and I had to shift into four-wheel drive to get the Cherokee down the rutted road.
The cabin door was locked when I got there, and inside I heard the dogs bark. I knocked just to be proper and when no one answered but the dogs I backed off and kicked the door in. The dogs barked hysterically as the door splintered in, and then came boiling out past me into the yard. They stopped barking and began circling hurriedly until they each found the proper spot and relieved themselves, a lot. Inside the cabin there was a bowl on the floor half full of water, and another, larger bowl that was empty. I found a 25-pound sack of dry dog food and poured some into the bowl and took the rest out and put it in the back of the Cherokee. Finished with their business, the dogs hurried indoors and gathered at the food bowl. They went in sequence, one after another until all three were eating at once. While they ate I found some clothesline in the cabin and fashioned three leashes. When they were done I looped my leashes around their necks and took them to the car. They didn’t leap in easily, like the dogs in station wagon commercials. They had to be boosted, one after the other, into the backseat. Once they were in I unlooped the rope and dropped it on the floor of the backseat, closed the back door, got in front and pulled out of there.
On the paved and plowed highway I shifted out of four-wheel drive and cruised down to police headquarters. The patrol car was parked outside. It looked like a cop car designed by Mr. Blackwell. I left the dogs in the Cherokee and went on in to see Phillips.
He was behind his desk, his cowboy boots up on the desktop, reading a copy of Soldier of Fortune. He looked up when I came in, and it took him a minute to place me.
“You went out and hassled him, didn’t you?” I said.
Phillips was frowning, trying to remember who I was.
“Huh?” he said.
“Pomeroy. When I left you went back out there and made him tell you everything he told me, and then you couldn’t keep it to yourself, you went to the Argus and blatted out everything you knew, and got your picture taken and your name spelled right, and ruined what was left of the poor bastard’s life.”
Phillips had figured out who I was, but he kept frowning.
“Hey, I got a right to conduct my own investigation,” he said. “I’m the fucking law out here, remember?”
“Law, shit,” I said. “You’re a fat loudmouth in a jerkwater town playacting Wyatt Earp. And you cost an innocent man his life.”
“You can’t talk to me that way. Whose life?”
“Pomeroy killed himself this morning, in Boston. He had a copy of the Berkshire Argus story with him.”
“Guy was always a loser,” Phillips said.
“Guy loved too hard,” I said. “Too much. Not wisely. You understand anything like that?”
“I told you, you can’t come in here, talk to me like that, that tone of voice. I’ll throw your ass in jail.”
Phillips let his feet drop off the desk top and stood up. His hand was in the area of his holstered gun.
“You do that,” I said. “You throw my ass in jail, or go for the gun, or take a swing at me, anything you want.”
I had moved closer to him, almost without volition, as if he were gravitational.
“Do something,” I said. I could feel the tension across my back. “Go for the gun, take a swing, go for it.”
Phillips’ eyes rolled a little, side to side. There was a fine line of sweat on his upper lip. He looked at the phone. He looked at me. He looked past me at the door.
“Whyn’t you just get out of here and leave me alone,” he said. His voice was hoarse and shaky. “I didn’t do nothing wrong.”
We faced each other for another long, silent moment. I knew he wasn’t going to do anything.
“I didn’t do nothing wrong,” he said again.
I nodded and turned and walked out. And left the door open behind me. That’d fix him.
34
“I know people who might take one dog,” Susan said. “But three? Mongrels?”
“I’m not breaking them up,” I said.
We were in my living room and the dogs were around looking at us. The alpha dog was curled in the green leather chair; the other two were on the couch.
“Where did they sleep last night?” Susan said.
I shrugged.
Susan’s eyes brightened.
“They slept with you,” she said.
I shrugged again.
“You and the three doggies all together in bed. Tell me at least they slept on top of the quilt.”
I shrugged.
“Hard as nails,” Susan said.
“Well,” I said. “I started them out in the kitchen, but then they started whimpering in the night . . .”
“Of course,” Susan said, “and they got in there and you sleep with the window open, and it was cold . . .”
“You’re the same way,” I said.
Susan laughed. “Yes,” she said. “I too think the bedroom’s too cold.”
“Dogs do not respect one’s sleeping space much,” I said.
“Did we sleep curled up on one small corner of the bed while the three pooches spread out luxuriously?” Susan said.
“I wanted them to feel at home,” I said.
“We must be very clear on one thing. When I visit, we are not sleeping with three dogs.”
“No,” I said.
“And when we make love we are not going to be watched by three dogs.”
“Of course not,” I said. “Hawk says he knows some woman owns a farm in Bridgewater and is an animal rights activist.”
“Don’t tell her about my fur coat,” Susan said.
“He thinks she’ll take them.”
Susan put the palm of her right hand flat on her chest and did a Jack E. Leonard impression. “I hope so,” she said, “for your sake.”
“You wouldn’t like to take them over to your place today,” I said. “I need to go to my office.”
“I have meetings all day,” she said. “It’s why I’m here for breakfast.”
“Oh yeah.”
“I’m sure they’ll love your office,” Susan said.
And they did, for brief stretches. Every hour or so they felt the need to be walked down to the Public Garden. In between walks they sat, usually in a semicircle, and looked at me expectantly, with their mouths open and their tongues hanging out. All day.
Outside, Christmas was making its implacable approach. The dryness in the mouth of merchandising managers was intensifying, the exhaustion had become bone deep in the parents of small children, the television stations kept wishing me the best of the joyous season every station break, and the street gangs in Roxbury and Dorchester were shooting each other over in
sults to their manhood at the rate of about three a week. In the stores downtown people jostled each other; bundled uncomfortably in clothing against the cold, they were hot and angry in the crowded aisles where people sold silk show handkerchiefs and imported fragrances for the special person in your life. Liquor stores were doing a land-office business, and the courts were in double session trying to clear the calendar for the holiday break.
I got up and went to the old wood file cabinet behind the door and got out a bottle of Glenfiddich that Rachel Wallace had delivered to me last Christmas. It was still half full. I poured about two ounces in the water glass and went back to my desk. I sipped a little and let it vaporize in my mouth. Outside my window the dark winter afternoon had merged into the early darkness of a winter evening. I sipped another taste of the scotch. I raised my glass toward the dogs.
“Fa la la la la,” I said.
I could feel the single-malt scotch inch into my veins. I sipped another sip. In my desk was a letter from Paul Giacomin in Aix-en-Provence in France. I took it out and read it again. Then I put it back into the envelope and put the envelope back in my desk drawer. I swiveled my chair so I could put my feet on the windowsill and gaze out at the unoccupied air space where Linda Thomas had once worked. Beyond it was a building that looked like an old Philco radio. A Philip Johnson building, they said. I raised my glass to it.
“Way to go, Phil,” I said. Lucky I hadn’t been assigned to guard it. Probably lose it. Was right here when I left it. My glass was empty. I got up and got the bottle and poured another drink and went back and sat and stared out the dark window. The dogs stood when I stood, sat back down when I did.
The light fused up from the street the way it does in a city and softened into a pinkish glow at the top of the darkened buildings. Maybe she was dead. Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe the pills and powders and booze and self-delusion and bullshit had busted her, and she had simply run and was running now.
I looked at the pinkish glow some more. I had nowhere I needed to be, nothing I needed to do. Susan was shopping. What if Jill had gone home? To her mother. To the hovel in the middle of the putrid hot field in the back alley of Esmeralda. I called Lipsky.
“Maybe she went to her mother’s,” I said.
“Esmeralda police checked,” Lipsky said. “No sign of her. Just the old lady, or what’s left of her.”
“You thought of it,” I said.
“Honest to God,” Lipsky said and hung up.
I drank a little more scotch. I had a feeling I might drink a lot more scotch. One of the dogs got up and went to the corner and drank from the bowl of water I’d put down. He came back with water dripping from his muzzle and sat and resumed staring.
The phone rang. When I answered an accentless voice at the other end said, “This is Victor del Rio.”
“Hey,” I said. “Qué pasa?”
“She is here,” del Rio said.
“In L.A.?” I said.
“Here, with me,” del Rio said. “I think you better come out and get her.”
35
I had my ticket. I was packed: clean shirt, extra blackjack. And I was having breakfast with Hawk and Susan, in the public atrium of the Charles Square complex in Cambridge.
“Jewish American Princesses,” Susan was saying, “particularly those with advanced academic degrees, do not babysit dogs.”
I looked at Hawk.
“That is even more true,” he said, “of African American Princes.”
The three mongrels, tethered by clothesline, sat in their pre-ordered circle, tongues lolling, eyes fixed on each morsel of croissant as it made its trip from paper plate to palate.
“Can you imagine them tearing around my place,” Susan said, “with all the geegaws and froufrous I have in there, getting hair, yuk, on my white rug?”
I was silent, drinking my coffee carefully from the large paper cup, holding it in both hands. Hawk broke off a piece of croissant, divided it into three morsels and gave one each to the dogs. They took it delicately, in each case, from his fingers and stayed in place, eyes alert, after a quick swallow, and a fast muzzle lick, tongues once again lolling.
“Put ’em in a kennel,” Hawk said. “Till my friend in Bridgewater gets back.”
I looked at the three dogs. They gazed back at us, their eyes hazel with big dark pupils and full of more meaning than there probably was. They weren’t young dogs, and there was a stillness in them, perhaps of change and strangeness, that had been in place since I got them.
“I don’t think they should go in a kennel,” Susan said. “They’ve had some pretty bad disruptions in the last few days already.”
Hawk shrugged. He looked at the dogs again.
“Huey, Dewey, and Louie,” he said.
We all sat in silence, drinking coffee, eating our croissants. A blond woman wearing exercise clothes under a fur coat passed us, carrying a tray with two muffins on it. The dogs all craned their heads over nearly backwards sniffing the muffins as they went by, and when the scent moved out of range they returned their stare to us.
“Well,” Susan said, “I could come over to your place and stay with them at night. But during the day, I have patients.”
I nodded. We both looked at Hawk.
Hawk looked at the dogs.
They stared back at him.
“What happens during the day?” Hawk said.
“They need to be walked.”
“How often?”
“Three, four times,” I said.
“Every day?”
“Yuh.”
Hawk looked at me. He looked at Susan and then back at the dogs.
“Shit,” he said.
“That’s a part of it,” I said.
“I meant shit, as in oh shit!” Hawk said.
“You and Susan can work it out in detail between you,” I said. “My plane leaves in an hour.”
Hawk was looking at me with a gaze that one less optimistic than I might interpret as hatred. I patted the dogs. Susan stood and we hugged and I kissed her. Hawk was still gazing at me. I put my hand out, palm up. He slapped it lightly.
“Thanks, bro,” I said.
“Honkies suck,” he said.
I took a cab to the airport. The plane took off on time, and I flew high above the fruited plain for six hours, cheered by the image of Hawk walking the three dogs.
36
DEL Rio had her in a hotel on Sunset in West Hollywood, a big one with a great view of the L.A. Basin. She was in one bedroom of a two-bedroom suite. The Indian in the Italian suit who had first taken me to see del Rio was in there, in the living room, reading the L.A. Times with his feet up on the coffee table. He had on a white cotton pullover today, and I could see the outline of a gun stuck in the waistband of his tight pocketless gray slacks. He glanced up once when Chollo brought me in, then went back to the paper.
“Vic in with her?” Chollo said.
The Indian nodded. Chollo nodded at one of the chairs.
“Sit,” he said.
I sat. The room was large and square with the wall of picture windows facing south and the brownish haze above the basin, slightly below eye level, stretching to some higher ground in the distant south. To the left I could see the black towers of downtown poking up above the smog and to the right the coastline, fusing with the smog line in a sort of indiscriminate variation. The room itself was aggressively modern with bars of primary color painted on various portions of it and round-edged chrome structured furniture. The air-conditioning was silent but effective. The room was nearly cold. Chollo leaned on the wall near one of the bedroom doors and gazed at nothing. His lips were pursed as if he were whistling silently to himself. His arms were folded comfortably across his chest. He was wearing a blue blazer over a white polo shirt. The collar of the shirt was tur
ned up. I crossed one leg over the other and watched my toe bob. When I got bored I could cross my legs the other way.
I stared at the view.
After about ten minutes del Rio came out of the bedroom and closed the door behind him. He looked at me and nodded once. Then he looked at the Indian.
“Bobby, wait outside.”
The Indian got up, folded the newspaper over, and went out of the hotel suite. He closed the door behind him. Del Rio went to the bar in one corner of the room. There were three stools at the bar. He sat on one of them. Chollo peeled off the wall and went past him and behind the bar. He mixed a tall scotch and soda, added ice, and handed it to del Rio. Del Rio looked at me and gestured with the glass.
“Sure,” I said. “Same thing. Lots of ice.”
Chollo made me a drink, and then poured out a short one and tossed it off himself, put the glass back on the bar, leaned back against the mirrored wall behind the bar, and waited. Del Rio sampled his drink, smiled.
“It’s blended,” he said.
“Want I should call down for a single malt?” Chollo said.
Del Rio shook his head. “Won’t be here that long, I hope.”
I tasted my drink. I couldn’t tell, not with the soda and ice. Del Rio took another sip.
“Nice to see you again, Spenser.”
“Sure,” I said. “When do I see Jill?”
“Pretty soon. I think we better talk first.”
I waited. Chollo refolded his arms behind the bar and his gaze fixed on something in the middle distance. Del Rio was in black today, a black silk suit, double breasted, with a white silk shirt, and a narrow black scarf at the open neck. He wore black cowboy boots with silver inlays. Del Rio tasted his drink again.
“She showed up here yesterday morning in a state. Barely functional. She doesn’t know where I live, but she came to one of the, ah, offices I use in East L.A. and told the guy there that she had to see me.”
“Guy know who she was?” I said.
“Yes. But he is discreet. So he called the house and Bobby Horse went down and got her and brought her here. I keep a suite here, anyhow.”
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