“Yeah. I get impatient. I get impatient.”
He looked up at the high sun as if he hated it. Without another word he turned and padded into the house. He left the door open, presumably for me, and I followed him in.
The room was lofty and raftered. Spiders had been busy in the angles of the rafters, webbing and blurring them. The rattan furniture was coming apart at the joints. One of the pieces, a cushioned settee, was supported at one corner by a stack of girlie magazines; at least the top one was a Playboy. The Navajo rugs around the floor had been trampled into brown rags.
The redeeming feature of the room was the double glass door that opened onto a balcony and the sky, where white gulls circled. Barr stood with his back to them. His bare feet were horny and knobbed.
“One-seventy a month I pay for this dump, in the off-season. Two months in advance, and the landlord won’t even fix the furniture. He says when he fixes the furniture he raises the rent. The rent goes up to five hundred on the first of June, anyway.” He glared at me as if I’d come to collect it. “The country has changed, I tell you.”
“Have you been out of the country?”
“Yeah. A long time out.” He thought about the long time, his heavy chin sinking towards his chest. Iron-gray tendrils of hair grew out of his open collar. “But I didn’t bring you out here to talk about me.”
I waited.
“Sit down,” he said. “I’ll tell you what the pitch is.”
Avoiding the broken settee, I sat on a straight chair in a corner. He spoke rapidly, like an embarrassed amateur making a prepared speech:
“There was this girl, beautiful girl named Rose, auburn-haired. I fell for her, hard. That was a long time ago, but I still dream about her. I wanted to marry her at the time, but it was no go then. I had woman trouble on my hands, other kinds of trouble. I went into the army—the war was on at the time—and after the war was over I didn’t come back to this country. I wanted to make it big and come back in style.
“I made it big, in case you’re wondering.” With the air of a conjurer, he flourished a roll of fifties in my direction. The outside bill was a fifty, anyway. “I have a nice little chrome mine in New Caledonia. I can give Rosie everything she needs. And I’m not old,” he added with harsh wistfulness. “There’s still time.”
I waited. A spider descended from one of the rafters, swinging into the sunlight. The sound of the surf was like a giant systole and diastole slowing down time. A jet went over, very high, leaving a shrieking track.
Barr started. “Goddamn, I hate those things. A shock wave woke me up this morning, I thought it was the Russians.”
He shook his fist at the ceiling. The spider climbed up his rope. Another jet went over.
Barr sneered. “They can take ’em and they can shove ’em. A man comes looking for a little peace.” He took a twisted cigar out of a box and rammed it into his face as if he needed something to keep his lips still. His brown teeth started to chew it.
“You were telling me about Rose,” I reminded him. “You want me to look for her? Is that the problem?”
“That’s it. I want to see her in the flesh. See if she’s still got her looks, see if she’s married. If she isn’t, I’ll make her a proposish—a proposal, I mean. It’s why I came back to this country. It’s why I’m here. I love the girl, see. I can’t go on living without her.”
It wasn’t very convincing. Middle-aged romanticism seldom is, except to the one who’s bitten by the bug. He had been bitten by something. His eyes were hot, malarial with passion.
“If you haven’t seen her for twenty years, she won’t be a girl any more.”
“Fifteen,” he corrected me. “It’s fifteen years since I had word of her. She was only twenty-one or -two at the time. She still isn’t old, no more than thirty-seven. She’s still got twenty good years in her. So have I.” He spat out flakes of tobacco onto the floor, and pointed the frayed end of his cigar at me. “I come from a long-lived family.”
“Good for you. What’s her full name?”
“Rose Breen, unless she’s married. If she’s married and raising a family, I guess it’s all off. But I got to find out.”
“Where was she when you heard of her fifteen years ago?”
“Up the pike a piece from here, in a town called Santa Teresa. You know it?”
“I know it. What was her address?”
“I don’t have that. All I can give you is the name of the people she worked for. She was a kind of a baby-sitter, or nurse. They hired her to look after their little boy. He isn’t so little now.”
“You’ve seen him?”
“Yeah, I went up there day before yesterday on the bus. He gave me a bad time. They all did. They’re very la-di-da.” In a flash of savage satire, he minced on his misshapen feet, making effeminate gestures with his hands. “All I wanted to ask them was where Rose went, but they didn’t even let me get to first base. Something about me that puts people off, I dunno. Maybe I lived too long in a—on an island. People don’t like me.”
He looked at me as if he hoped I’d deny it. I didn’t like him. There was an odor about him, and it wasn’t the odor of sanctity. It was whiskey and fear and cigars and appalling loneliness. And sickness or evil—they have the same smell—as penetrating as chlorine in my nostrils.
The word goodbye rose like a gorge at the back of my tongue. I swallowed it. He interested me.
“You haven’t told me the name of the family Rose worked for.”
“It was Chantry. It isn’t any more. She lost her husband or something and married a second time—a doctor named Leverett. They’re still living in the Chantry house on Foothill, though, 265 Foothill Drive. That’s the rich end of town.”
“I know.”
He didn’t hear me. He was off on a private kick: “When I realize my finances, I got a good mind to buy in there, spang in the middle of the Foothill district. They think they can brush me off? I’ll show ’em. Naw.” His voice dropped, and he shook his head. “It’s too rich for my blood, I guess.”
I prompted him: “You say they gave you a bad time.”
“They froze me out. The lady—Mrs. Leverett—she acted like I was trying to insult her when I brought up the name of Rose Breen. But then she said she never heard of her. I told her I knew damn well she did, I had it on good authority. Then she admitted she knew her, fifteen years ago. I asked her where Rosie went, and she called in her husband and son to throw me out. I could have handled them.” His fists clenched and unclenched. He looked down into his palms, crossed by curved black lines of ineradicable grime. “But what was the use? I didn’t want trouble. All I wanted was Rosie. And I’m willing to bet my bottom dollar the Leverett dame knows where Rosie is.”
“What makes you think so?”
“The way that she reacted to the name. The way they all reacted. You’d think I was asking them for the keys to their safe.”
“Why wouldn’t they tell you, if they knew?”
“Because I wanted them to,” he said with a sour grin. “People never give me what I want. I have to take it, always have had. So I take it.”
He laughed. It sounded like machinery. He tramped around the room swaggering, swinging his shoulders, jostling shadows.
The money test isn’t a particularly keen one, but it was one I had available. If he had made it big, as he said, he wasn’t spending any of it on front.
“There’s a Spanish proverb: ‘Take what you want, then pay for it.’ Under my credit system, you pay for it first.”
“How much?”
“A hundred a day. Two-fifty in advance.”
“What happens if you don’t find her?”
“That’s your tough luck, Mr. Barr. I sell my services, period. You understand a job like this could take me a day, or it could run into weeks.”
“Yeah.”
“Also, she could be dead.”
“Rosie dead? She better not be.” It was a queer smiling threat: I’ll kill you if you�
�re dead. “You trying to talk yourself out of work?”
“No. I simply want you to understand the conditions.”
“I understand ’em all right.” Better than you do, said his gap-toothed leer. “I understand ’em fine, and mainly you want two-fifty. How do I know you won’t walk out of here with my money and never come back?”
From most other men it would have been an insult. From him it was a natural thing to hear. Barr was living on the ragged edge, holding on with bitten fingernails while hope and suspicion took turns at his liver.
“That’s a chance you have to take. I’m taking a chance on you, too.”
“How’s that?”
“I have an idea there’s more to Rose Breen’s story than you’ve let on. Do you want to tell me the rest of it? It might save time and trouble.”
“There is no rest of it. All I want is for you to locate her, see. When you do find her, I don’t want you talking to her or telling her anything. Just pass the word to me, and I’ll make my own pitch. You got that?”
“Yes.” But I didn’t say that that was what I would do.
He hoisted his roll out of his hip pocket and turned his back on me, crouching over the money like a dog over a red bone. I could smell burning, and it triggered a fantasy: Barr was a dead man who had climbed up out of hell to look for Rose, drag her back down with him into the fire. I was his little helper.
I didn’t like the role. But I took his money, five fifties, and put it away in my wallet. He sniffed:
“Do you smell something burning?”
“It smells like woodsmoke.”
“Damn them!”
He opened one of the glass doors and stepped out onto the balcony. Wisps of smoke were rising past it, yellowish gray against the blue sky. Leaning over the railing, I could see half a dozen boys huddled around a small fire. Most of them were bare-backed; one or two were wearing black rubber shirts. Their surfboards lay around them on the sand.
“Get out of here!” Barr cried. “This is private property.”
The boys looked up in unison. “It isn’t, below the mean high tide line,” one of them said. “We’re below the tide line.”
“Don’t you talk back to me. Scram! Beat it! I pay rent for this place. I don’t pay it so a gang of beach bums can set fire to the property.”
“It’s perfectly safe,” their spokesman said.
“Safe? You must be crazy!”
“Somebody is,” one of the boys muttered. He made the ancient gesture, rotating forefinger pointed at his temple.
Barr picked up a red clay flowerpot containing a dead plant and threw it down at him. It chunked harmlessly into the sand, but the boys began to disperse. Picking up their long boards and carrying them on their heads, they marched off along the beach. The one who had spoken first lingered behind to kick sand on the fire. He didn’t look up again, but Barr stood watching him until he had gone.
He had seemed very large for a minute, larger than he was. Like a rubber figure losing air, he dwindled till he seemed smaller than he was.
“This is the second day in a row,” he said. “They’re trying to make me blow my top. They’re deliberately out to get me.”
“That I doubt.”
“Oh yes.” He grasped my arm. “If it wasn’t planned, they wouldn’t torment me like this. They hate me, see.”
“Do you know them?”
“No, but they know me. You can tell by the way they act, the way they look at me.”
His grip was like a tourniquet on my arm. I shook it off, and peered into his eyes. They were shallow and glazed, with no inner light behind them. His mouth was working. His entire body trembled with sincerity.
“I wouldn’t pay any attention to them,” I said. “They’re just a bunch of kids having fun on the beach.”
“That’s what you think.”
“I know it. Pay no attention to them.”
“How can I help it, when they come torturing me?”
“I’m sure they won’t be back.”
“They better not!”
“If they do come back, I wouldn’t throw any more flowerpots. One of those could kill a man, or a boy.”
“Yeah. You’re right.” He hung on the railing like a seasick passenger on a ship, wagging his head slowly from side to side. “I blew my top. I got to learn not to blow my top.”
The boys were far up the beach, some of them on the sand and some in the water. Barr’s flat pale gaze was following them, the way the dead watch the living, if they do.
“You’ve been alone too much, Mr. Barr.”
“Yeah. Tell it to Rosie.”
“I don’t think I will. I won’t be seeing Rosie.”
“I gave you money to find her, didn’t I? You took it, didn’t you?”
“I’m giving it back.” I removed the five bills from my wallet and held them out to him, spread like a poker hand.
“What the hell for? The money is good. You think it’s counterfeit?”
“The money may be good, but the story isn’t. I’m not buying it.”
“You calling me a liar?”
“I’m giving you a chance to change your story.”
“To hell with you. If you don’t like my story you can shove it.” He snatched the money and waved it in my face. “I’ll hire another boy, or run her down myself.”
“Then what?”
“We get married, me and Rosie.”
“You’re sure you’re not planning a funeral instead of a wedding?”
He crumpled the bills and pulled his fist back to his shoulder. He was shaking, and his eyes were almost white. He braced himself with his other hand on the railing.
“I wouldn’t throw that punch, old man. I’ve got at least ten years on you, at least twenty pounds. And your face has already had it.”
I was up on my toes, ready to move in or away. But my words held him, long enough for me to move sideways through the door, across the dim room and out.
“Yellow-bellied coward!” he yelled after me.
A flowerpot smashed on the door as I slammed it shut.
—
The years since the war hadn’t affected Santa Teresa as much as some other places in California, where people moved on the average every three years. In spite of the housing tracts and the smokeless industries proliferating around it, the older parts of the city had a changeless quality. Settled old families lived in well-kept old houses behind mortised fieldstone walls that had resisted earthquakes, or cypress hedges that had outlived generations of gardeners.
Except for its palm trees and the brown hills rising behind them, Foothill Drive was like an English lane where you could feel the cool shadow of the past. J. Cavendish-Baring was one of the names I read off the rural mailboxes. I noticed the name because J. Cavendish-Baring had a couple of does and a fawn browsing under the oaks in his front yard. Birds were singing, with a faint English accent.
Dwight Maclish, another mailbox announced, and a hundred yards farther on, F. Mark Leverett. I turned up the gravel drive. The house was wide and low, with an overhanging roof and a deep verandah.
A woman in a wide straw hat was kneeling shoulder-deep among the roses with a pair of clippers in her gloved hand. They snicked in the silence when my engine died. I got out and shut the car door. After a while the woman rose to her feet and came towards me, stepping carefully among the bushes. Her body, concealed in a loose blue smock, moved with a kind of heavy certainty, as if she knew that she was beautiful, or had been.
She was. She took off her hat as she came up to me, and fanned herself with it. She was past forty and showed it, but the lines in her face had not destroyed its beauty. Her smiling blue eyes were wide-spaced under level brows. Her heartbreaking heartbroken mouth was as red as any of her roses. Passion or something resembling it had left bittersweet marks at its corners.
“What can I do for you, sir?” If there was a lilt of coquetry in the question, I didn’t think that it was meant for me. It was simply there
, a surplus from her youth.
“You’re Mrs. Leverett?”
“Yes. If you’re hoping to catch the doctor, he isn’t home for lunch yet. I am expecting him.”
“It’s you I’d like to speak to.”
“What on earth about?”
I had my story ready: the plain truth, with a little varnish on the rough spots. “I’m in a bit of a dilemma, Mrs. Leverett. A man named Joseph Barr visited here the day before yesterday, he tells me. He didn’t tell me that he made a nuisance of himself, but I suspect he did.”
“ ‘Nuisance’ is putting it mildly. He’s a dreadful man.” A frown puckered her brows. She dropped her clippers in the pocket of her smock and smoothed the frown away with her gloved fingers. “Are you an officer?”
“I have been. I’m in private work at present.” I told her my name. “What did Barr do, exactly?”
“Nothing overt. His very look was enough. I didn’t feel safe in the same room with him. I called my husband and son, and they asked him to leave. He left rather reluctantly, muttering threats.”
“Threats of violence?”
“I don’t believe so. He spoke of buying and selling us, as if that were possible.”
Her gaze went past me and rested as if for comfort on her house, planted securely in its place in the sun. A man in blue clothes was watching us from just inside the doorway. He was very thin and still, and very young.
“I did sense violence in him, though,” she said. “What sort of a person is he?”
“One to look out for.”
Her hand went to her breast. I could see a tiny blue pulse beating in the hollow of her temple. “Is he a wanted man?”
“More of an unwanted one, I’d say. He’s been brushed off and pushed around in his time, and it may have driven him a little off his rocker.”
“You mean that he’s insane?”
“It’s possible.”
“My husband thinks he may be. Dr. Leverett is not a psychiatrist, and of course he only saw him for a minute, but he has had some experience with disturbed patients. He thinks the man is paranoid.”
“Did he say why he thinks so?”
“You can ask him yourself. Fred should be here at any minute.”
The Archer Files Page 51
