Girls in Pink

by Bob Bickford

  I dismissed it as nonsense, but I couldn't help glancing at my unlocked front door.

  I tried not to think too much about the fact that I had fallen in love with a killer, one who would probably never change or get any better. I tried not to think about the line that I had crossed, the dirty secret I was keeping. I was desperate to see her again, and would do anything to help her get away. I was never going to be myself again.

  The other call came from Sal Cleveland.

  “She cried at the very end,” he said. “I wanted you to know that. She wasn't afraid. She wept because she was happy to see me.”

  His voice sounded relaxed. He sounded calm and reflective. My hand tightened on the receiver. I thought that he had killed Annie.

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “My wife,” he said. “Who else would I be talking about? Didn’t she start all this? Isn't that what got you all worked up in the first place? I thought you deserved to know how it went for her, at the end. You've worked so hard.”

  “I already know how it went,” I said. “When she was defenseless and probably dying, you screwed up enough courage to shoot her.”

  “At the very end, she was relieved. She thought you were going to rescue her, and you didn't. You let her down. I was the one there at the end, and she cried.”

  “You're a goddamned maniac,” I said. “When you look in the mirror, do you see what a monster you are?”

  “You let the other one down, too. She's going to die, too. Maybe the cops will get to her first and cheat me out of the chance, but it will get done and that's good enough. I wonder if she’ll think about you at the very end. I wonder if she'll hate you on the way out.”

  “You son-of-a-bitch,” I hissed.

  “You know what, pal? She probably won't think about you at all. I bet she cries when the bullets catch her or the noose goes around her neck, because she loves me. She probably misses me already.”

  “I'm going to kill you,” I said. “I'm going to put a bullet in your head.”

  “Do your best, pal,” he said. “I planned for a long time to have you killed, but I'm starting to feel different about it. I think maybe I'll let you live. It might be worse for you...a whole lot worse.”

  My reply got wasted, because he hung up.

  The rapping on the door insisted, and pulled me from the first good sleep that I’d had in weeks. About the time I roused myself enough to identify it, the noise stopped being polite and turned into banging. I undraped yesterday’s pair of pants from a chair by the bed, pulled them on and headed downstairs.

  I saw a head and shoulders silhouetted in the frosted glass.

  “Leave the thing on its hinges, would you?” I called to it. “I’m coming.”

  My voice sounded raw, and I wished I’d stopped off for a glass of water. The racket went quiet when I flipped on the porch light. I pulled open the door, and was faced with a badge in a leather case.

  “Police. Come on out here, pal.”

  The speaker pocketed his case, turned and went down the steps to join his companion. He tossed his cigarette onto my lawn as he went. The two of them faced me from the darkness, just beyond the reach of the yellow bulb over the door. I stood alone in the light, and figured that was on purpose.

  “What do you guys want, can’t wait until morning?” I asked.

  “It is morning,” one of them said. “It's after four. How much morning do you want?”

  They both laughed.

  “What do you want?' I asked, again.

  “Works a lot better, we do the questions and you answer.”

  The two men stood, shoulder to shoulder, nearly identical in the blue gloom. They were dressed in dark coats and ties against luminous shirts, and they smelled of late nights and hair oil. A pre-war Plymouth coupe idled at the curb. The streetlight reflected off the chromed spotlight mounted on its doorpost.

  “You're Crowe?” one of them asked, and I nodded. “How well do you know a woman named . . . Anne Kahlo?”

  I glanced at the house next door. The windows were dark, and crickets chirped softly in the hedges. I tasted the sorrow of her leaving all over. If I ever saw her again, I figured things wouldn’t be the same. They never are.

  “I know her.”

  The cops looked at each other. I didn’t need to see their faces to read them. Finally, one of them spoke up. “We were sent to pick you up,” he said. “Lieutenant Raines wants to see you. Get your shoes. We'll take you to him.”

  “What's happened?”

  They wouldn't tell me more. I dressed as quickly as I could, splashed my face with water, and followed them to the car. I sat in the backseat and looked out the window. There was no more conversation. We threaded our way through a downtown still asleep, and out to the highway. The driver pushed the sedan up to seventy all the way through Summerland and Montelindo. I didn't realize that I held my breath until we had passed the exit for the Star-lite Lounge. Apparently, that wasn't where the trouble was. Annie hadn't confronted Sal, at least not yet.

  We left the highway and started climbing inland, up the same canyon road that led to the old Kahlo ranch. I remembered the previous trips here, to see Charlene Cleveland in her wrecked convertible and June in her party dress. I hoped I was done with seeing bodies out here. I started to feel apprehensive.

  Several miles in, we rounded a bend and found a pale green Forest Service truck blocking the road. An exhausted-looking firefighter stood on the center stripe with one hand held up. He came to the driver's window and nodded when he saw the badge. His face was smeared with soot. The truck got started and moved enough to let us squeeze by.

  “Fires have gotten this close?” I asked.

  The cop in the passenger seat looked back at me and raised an eyebrow.

  “Look that way to you?” he asked. “You private operatives don't miss much, do you?”

  I decided it would be pointless to talk to them anymore, and looked out my window the rest of the way. The smell of smoke in the car got stronger, and became visible in places, hanging in pockets in the hillside. When we reached the stretch of road running above the Kahlo place, the hillside showed patches of black. A collection of vehicles, marked and unmarked, scattered the road. They all looked official. We pulled over and stopped at about the spot where Charlene's convertible had gone over the side.

  I got out, and was surprised at the weak feeling in my legs. I acknowledged, for the first time, the sense of dread that had been building inside of me ever since we had turned up this road. I recognized Rex Raines, standing and waiting for me. He wore his hat and coat, despite the heat. My escorts left me with him.

  “They say the fires are out,” he said. “This is the last of it.”

  I didn't say anything. We stood together at the top of the hill and looked down into the arroyo. Everything was ashes. Black spikes stuck up from the ground in uniform rows as far as I could see, all that was left of the avocado trees. The outbuildings were gone. Low piles of rubble indicated where the house and barn had been. Smoke drifted across everything.

  “Funny thing,” he said. “It’s never one fire . . . did you know that? It’s always a whole series of them. The conditions were just right for it. The brush has been piling up for thirty years or better. Once it started in one place, then it just started all over the place, just took the one thing to get the ball rolling. Separate but connected. The fire boys explained it to me, but I don't really understand it. It just all seemed like one big fire to me.”

  “What's this about, Raines?” I asked. “Why am I here?”

  My voice hurt my throat. I would have given just about anything not to hear what he was going to say next. He looked at me bleakly. His eyelids looked heavy and red. He had aged some in the last twenty-four hours. I hated to guess what I looked like.

  “She's dead, Nate,” he said. “Annie Kahlo's dead. I wanted to tell you myself. I'm sorry.”

  I felt as though I had fallen out of an airplane. I didn't know what wou
ld stop me, and then some kind of merciful numbness settled over me, like cotton around my brain and senses. I looked at the empty, smoking landscape below and waited for him to go on. Even the dirt was black.

  “She made a play on Cleveland last night,” he said. “We knew she would. We had him covered. We were watching.”

  “You protected him,” I said. “Should have been the other way around. If you people had been better at protecting people from Sal Cleveland, none of this would have ever happened.”

  “Cut me some slack, Nate.” He sounded very tired. “This isn't my mess. I'm just the slob who got detailed to clean it up.”

  I wanted to sit down, but there was nowhere to sit. I thought I might need to sit on the ground.

  “So just tell me,” I said. “Where is she?”

  He pointed to the mound that had been the barn.

  “She's in the barn,” he said. “It's still too hot to get a close look, but one of the fire boys went down there, as close as he could. Part of what's there is a Mercury convertible, or used to be.”

  He took his hat off and fanned himself with it.

  “Let me correct myself,” he said. “There's the burned out shell of a car in there, a convertible. Sheriff's deputies followed her up here at high speed. They witnessed her turn into the drive here. She almost turned over leaving the highway. The place was already on fire, including the barn, although the structure was still standing. She drove right in. It was too hot to follow. By the time they radioed fire trucks in from the next ridge, the barn had collapsed. Since a car is still there, it would be crazy to think it isn't her.”

  “Is there a body?”

  “I don't know if we'll find anything when this cools down or not. Ashes are ashes, probably nothing left that we'll recognize as a body. There's no doubt she's there, though. Don't hurt yourself with hope. They all saw her drive in. No one came back out, and the place was engulfed.”

  “You're telling me she drove straight into a burning building?”

  “Straight in, Nate. Didn't even slow down. There were seven cars that chased her up here. They followed her all the way up from Montelindo.”

  “And not a one of them did a thing,” I said bitterly. “They stood and watched her burn.”

  He put a hand on my shoulder. “Hell, Nate. I'm sorry. I'm as sorry as can be. I know you cared about her. It wasn't going to end well, anyway you cut it. This is how it ended.”

  From the corner of my eye, I saw his shrug. I started walking down the hill.

  “Nate, don't go down there,” he called from behind me. “It's too hot still. There's nothing to see.”

  The mound that had been the barn radiated its own intense heat, like a charcoal burner. There wouldn’t be anything left of Annie to bury. I had an absurd catch of grief, seeing the place that had hidden June for so many years gone. A curved lump close to the center of the smoking debris might once have been a car. The longer I looked at it, the more the convertible's remains seemed recognizable.

  I saw her light hair, her dark, dark eyes and the enigmatic, lovely smile she turned on and off for no apparent reason. I smelled her hair and touched her skin, heard the silver screen voice.

  I played so long . . . I need to rest.

  I stared until my vision blurred. It must have been the heat off the smoldering barn that made my eyes water, because my grief went a long way past tears. After a while, Raines walked up beside me, and I let him put an arm around me and lead me away.

  It didn't take much to jimmy the lock. I thought in passing that I'd have to talk to Annie about getting some better locks installed, and then I realized I wouldn't be talking to her again, about anything. I opened the front door and slipped inside. I saw right away that someone had cleaned up the blood in the vestibule, leaving no trace of the violence that had happened there.

  The dim air felt empty, as if the house had been abandoned for years, and not just hours. I left the lights off, and walked a little way down the front hall. From the living room walls, her paintings looked back at me, bright watercolors turned blue-gray and black by the dark. A vase of orchids had drifted dead petals across a table top.

  The hush was perfect. There was no drip of faucet, no creak of floorboard; just the tiny sound of the clock in the living room. Underneath the scent of wood polish and oranges, I caught the palest ghost of Annie’s fragrance. I strained for the faint sweetness of her, as though I could follow it to wherever she had gone.

  As I looked up the stairs to the second floor landing, the sound of her voice startled me badly.

  “That's where you'll find me,” she whispered.

  It came from everywhere, and nowhere. I heard my own pulse, and reached for the banister to steady myself.

  “You're dead now,” I whispered back.

  No answer came, just the tick of the clock in the next room. All at once I knew. I was going to find Annie Kahlo, dead or alive. As quietly as I had come in, I let myself out and made sure the door latched behind me.

  All at once, I had somewhere to be. I was going to kill Sal Cleveland.

  -Thirty One-

  I got off the highway in Montelindo and drove along the frontage road, past the Montelindo Hotel. Ahead of me, a big black car pulled out of the entrance to the Star-lite Lounge and drove off in the opposite direction. Instinctively, I stepped on the gas, but it didn’t turn out to be Sal's Buick. I let it go and turned in. Not quite lunch time, and the parking area was deserted.

  Outside the car, the morning was blue and soft. My feet crunched across the broken shells. The sound of a meadowlark came from somewhere out of sight, to keep me company. Nothing else moved. I didn't care very much, but I had to believe that Cleveland would sense me coming for him. I wondered why he assigned no welcoming party, and if an ambush waited. I shrugged off the feeling, since I didn't really expect to walk out of here.

  The stool beside the big front doors sat empty, the big man who usually guarded nowhere in sight. The front doors were unlocked, and I went in.

  The main lounge was empty, dim and shadowed. Ranks of tables bristled with the spindly legs of upside-down chairs. The silver walls were lit here and there by spots of sun from the tiny windows set high up, near the ceiling. It was different without the nighttime blue glow and smoke. Potted trees stood around on the black-and-white tiles, perfectly still, and watched me to see what I would do next.

  A thin man in a jacket and tie stood behind the bar, polishing glasses and cutting fruit and doing whatever bartenders did when they had no customers. I crossed the room to talk to him. The sound of my heels made a muted echo.

  “Sal Cleveland around?” I asked him.

  The soothing murmur of hidden voices from the kitchen made the quiet seem quieter. He kept working with his white rag and ignored me, so I repeated the question a little louder. He stopped and gave me a deadeye look.

  “It's eleven o'clock in the morning,” he said. “Does this place look open to you?”

  “If I order a double bourbon and you give it to me, then we'll both know it is.”

  “Not too early to crack wise,” he said. “Never too early for that, for some people.”

  He went back to what he was doing. I pulled out my wallet, found a five-dollar bill and laid it flat on the bar top. He didn't look at me, but it got his attention like I thought it would. Without a word, he took an expensive bottle from the rack. He barehanded a couple of ice cubes into a tumbler and got them good and wet. He slid the glass across the bar. It was all as smooth as silk, and he made my money disappear the same way.

  “Water?” he asked, and I shook my head.

  I picked up the drink and tasted it. The whiskey felt cold in my mouth, then hot the rest of the way down. It was swell stuff, eleven o’clock in the morning or not.

  “Boss is here . . . in the back,” he said. “In his office.”

  “Five bucks buys a hell of a drink here,” I remarked. “Considering you're closed.”

  “Enjoy it,” he said. “Ch
ances are, it's your last one. Drink it slow.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Think so?”

  I took another sip, and set the glass back onto the bar. The ice cubes chimed gently. The air that moved against my face was cool and pleasant, laden with the ghosts of last night's cigarette smoke and perfume.

  “I know so,” he said. “Matter of fact, make book on it. You walk into Mister Cleveland’s office, you're not walking back out.”

  I was all at once terribly tired, and I closed my eyes. I thought about Annie Kahlo, her eyes and her voice. She seemed very close. Her sweet, dark looks and slow smiles were gone for good, and that hurt a little, even over the numbing burn of liquor. Maybe it hurt a lot. Some things just didn’t go away easy.

  “Suits me,” I said. “There are worse things than that.”

  He shrugged and turned away. After a minute, he thought of something he had to do somewhere else. He flipped the towel onto his shoulder and left, his footsteps echoing on the tiles. I took a last sip of bourbon, and left the half-finished drink on the bar. I took the Browning from my pocket and went up the hall to Cleveland's office.

  The door stood open six inches, and I stopped outside and listened, pistol up and ready. I waited, perfectly still. After only a few seconds, the smell on the air told me someone had fired a gun inside, very recently. A worse smell wormed under the spicy scent of gunpowder, the unmistakable odor of blood. I eased the door open a little further with a toe, and went in all at once.

  I stopped still. Sal Cleveland sat in his chair, slumped forward. He wasn't looking at me, because he had his head on the desk. His left arm bent in front of him, across a careful fan of playing cards. He looked as though he were napping, except for the blood. The pool around his head had soaked into the green felt and ruined some of the cards. The gunpowder-and-blood smell was very strong, mixed with something sweet.

  “Come in, Mister Crowe.”

  The voice came from my left. I turned to see Fin relaxed into a deep leather armchair. His suit was vanilla, set off with a lavender tie. I realized it was an intense fragrance of almonds I smelled under the odor of fireworks.