After a moment she follows him through the hangar. Two of the Beechcraft mechanics are working on a plane; they both wave to her and she smiles back. She stops at the coffee machine and plugs quarters into it and carries two cups of the wretched swill around the corner into Charlie’s sanctum. She finds him in the chair with his elbows on the desk and his face in his hands.
She puts his coffee in front of him and tastes her own. “I wouldn’t’ve thought it was possible to get used to this stuff.”
“I once thought it was possible to get used to anything,” he says.
“What changed your mind?”
“You did, my love.”
“Am I supposed to be flattered or is that another joke?”
He says: “Some people are born piano players and some people are born aviators.”
“And I am not one of the latter.”
“You don’t have the instincts, my beauty. Listen. A few years ago my kid was in a rock band. High school combo. They played for club dances and things. A couple appearances on some local public-access cable TV channel.
“They were all eleventh graders except this one guy who played the Fender bass. He was a senior and he graduated and went back East to college, and Mike’s senior year the kids had to find themselves another bass player.”
His voice rumbles around the room, throwing ominous echoes. She enjoys the sound of it but she knows how a man’s deep voice can deceive by making him sound as if he’s got answers for everything.
“They hunted around school,” he says, “talked to the music teacher, all that, and it ended up they auditioned about five kids for the job. In my garage. I heard them all. Couldn’t tell much difference—all that junk sounds the same to me. Kids’ music always sounds like crap to a parent. I grew up on the jitterbug—I hear that stuff now, it sounds like crap even to me. We just couldn’t have been that naive.
“Now there was this one kid they auditioned from the school marching band, played the tuba, but he knew how to play the bass and he was by far the most accomplished musician of the bunch. You give him the notes, he can play them—almost never makes a mistake. Mike said this guy was the best-trained technician he’d ever heard.”
He goes on: “But they turned him down. They went for another kid instead. Because this guy, the earnest zealot with all the training, he stood there like a lump and just played the notes. He didn’t have the music in his bones. He heard it—but he didn’t feel it. How’d they put it? They said he just didn’t have soul.”
“I had a feeling there’d be a moral to this story.”
“Honey sweet, you may be the world’s greatest pole-vaulter for all I know but you ain’t got the soul of an airplane driver. You study long and hard, you’ll memorize enough to get you a license, but every time you go up in the air you’re going to be scared of the aircraft. You’re never going to have a feel for it.”
“Why are you so anxious to do yourself out of a paying customer?”
He smiles briefly: he can be surprisingly gentle. “Baby love, you’re not going to make a good pilot. And if you can’t do it well, why do it at all? Take up water skiing or horseback riding or amateur theatricals.”
She doesn’t reply. She watches him. Charlie sips coffee and makes a face. “We having dinner tonight?”
“That depends.”
He gives her a straight look. He has an airman’s blue grey eyes and when he isn’t being sardonic they seem morose. The random thought crosses her mind that if you were filming The Charlie Reid Story you could cast Robert Mitchum in the title role. Charlie doesn’t carry his eyes at half mast and he doesn’t really look like the actor but he’s got a similar resonance and he presents to the world a rough facade that hides a good ear and an ironic intelligence.
Charlie says, “I wish I could tell when you’re really mad. Everything’s an act with you.”
“When I’m really mad you’ll know it.” She perches a hip against the desk; there’s only one chair in the tiny room and he’s sitting on it. She glances at the ten-year-old snapshot of Michael above his head. The kid’s big-jawed face has the same effect as Charlie’s: a little shifty and a littly ugly but somehow you know that against your better judgment you’re going to like him.
“Does he still play in a band?”
“They’ve got a little group. Sorority dances and such. Just casual stuff. They have fun.”
“What instrument does he play?”
“Saxophone.”
“Is he good?”
“Put it this way. He’s enthusiastic.”
She pictures the kid—tall now and hulking like his dad. Honking into a saxophone, trying to sound lyrical. Probably has girls hanging all over him.
She says, “What did you do in the Air Force?”
“Flew fighters.”
“Vietnam?”
“I did a couple tours. You want us to talk about my war crimes now?”
“Did you commit any?”
“I made a deal with myself not to wear sackcloth and ashes the rest of my life. You get tired of examining the philosophy of what constitutes being a Good German and what constitutes being a normal human critter. You get tired of trying to define what’s a crime in those kinds of circumstances. It’s about as useful as counting angels on the head of a pin.”
Then he adds: “I never was much on moral introspection. I don’t feel warped about it. I don’t think it turned me into a hero or a maniac. I went there, flew airplanes, did what I was told most of the time. Tried to keep my self-respect, stayed alive, came home.”
“You retired as a light colonel.”
He gives her a quick look and she realizes her mistake. No one must ever know she’s an Air Force brat. She’s not supposed to know the jargon.
She’s relieved when he lets it pass. He says, “I was a major. Deputy squadron CO. They wanted to promote me to a desk. Said I was getting too old to keep flying. So then I took my retirement—I was thirty-eight. Maybe that is too old to fly jets. I like piston planes better anyway. They’re for fun, you know?”
She points to the old map on the wall. “Were you a mercenary?”
“I flew in Africa a few times. You like asking questions, don’t you.”
“I’m curious about you.”
He says, “I’m kind of curious too. I don’t even know what you do for a living.”
“I own part of a bookstore.” She’s pleased to be able to say it with such ingenuousness.
“You sure in hell don’t look it.” He’s drinking coffee; his eyes over the rim of the cup are examining her body frankly. When he puts the cup down his eyes droop with amusement and his mouth opens and he actually begins to laugh.
“What’s funny?”
“Thinking about the first time you walked in here. Soaked to the skin.”
She stands up. She remembers his lewd leer at the time. To cover her abrupt self-consciousness she says, “Why didn’t you get an airline job?”
“I’m not rated for multiengine jets.”
“You could learn.”
“I doubt I’d like it much.”
“You were born too late. You should have been a barnstormer.”
“Sleeping out under the wing of my Jenny. You think I never dreamt of that?”
Then he says: “Let me recommend Chez Charlie Reid. One and a half stars in the Michelin guide. It’s a dump but the cook does a pretty good patio barbecue. You like rib steak?”
24 It is about half an hour’s drive from the airfield to Doyle and Marian’s bookshop in Burbank. She has made a discovery about the Valley: wherever you start from, you’re half an hour from your destination.
That half hour conveniently is the running time of one side of a standard audio tape cassette. The car has a built-in player. (Apparently every car in California has one.) For camouflage she has tuned all the buttons of the car radio to innocuous mood music stations but the player overrides the radio as soon as you insert a tape.
Now she carries in her
handbag several cassettes—baroque music mainly, and Mozart—and she knows it’s cheating but she can’t bear the thought of giving up good music for the rest of her life. She’s made a pact to listen to it only when she’s alone.
In the East a car was transportation. Here it is a cocoon: Californians spend half their lives in their cars; they drive everywhere with windows rolled up and air conditioners blasting even in mild weather—you see them jammed up on the freeways alone in their cars, sealed in, shouting soundlessly, gesticulating to the beat of the programs they’ve turned up to top volume. When you glimpse them it’s always startling: they’re like mime characters in an absurdist fragment of silent film, the plot of which hasn’t been revealed to you.
At the interchange she’s looking in the mirror while she negotiates the exit ramp from the San Diego Freeway to the Ventura Freeway. Two cars behind her take the same turns.
When she merges into the eastbound traffic she uses side mirror and indicator to ease over into the far right lane. The two cars are still back there: a rust red one and a boxy black sedan. They seem to hover in the mirror.
The traffic is clotted here, moving fitfully, backed up behind the exit for Van Nuys Boulevard, and it is only out in the far left lane that things move smoothly.
She watches the two cars go by in the fast lane. One of them has four teenage Valley Girls in it; the black sedan is driven by an old man with a scowl. He’s gesticulating with one hand and talking to himself. It looks like a violent argument.
That’s all right then.
She moves back into the faster lanes, listening to the Magic Flute overture, thinking wryly of a stale joke: help—the paranoids are after me.
Sometimes it seems so silly. Is it all only a melodramatic fantasy?
Maybe—maybe.
But suppose you choose to behave on the basis of that hypothesis—and suppose the hypothesis is incorrect.
It’ll be a little late to change your mind when they’ve dragged you back to him and he’s killed you.
She thinks about stopping at the apartment on Lankershim for the mail. Too hot. Do it later.
Poking along on the freeway she’s remembering her visit to Ray Seale last winter. That was the day when anxiety finally drove her beyond speculation into decision.
For the umptieth time she rehearses it in her mind: has she forgotten anything he told her? Done anything wrong?
She tries to review the details of the meeting.
25 It must have been not long after New Year’s Day. She remembers how she contrived it to look like a coincidental encounter.
She drove to Newark early that morning and went into the building where Ray Seale had his office, examined the building directory, and chose from it Dennis Nobles, D.C., P.C., and made a mental note of the suite number: 1127.
She got the number from Information and made an appointment from a pay phone in the lobby and then she took the elevator down two flights to the garage level and got in her car and locked the doors.
She waited more than an hour and had started to decide he wasn’t coming to the office today when she saw him drive in and park the Eldorado in the slot with his name on it. He waved to the garage attendant and walked toward the elevator.
It was ten after ten. She got out of her white Mercedes and went after him.
He was wearing a narrow steel-colored suit. His hard heels—Italian leather—struck the concrete floor with a crisp echoing that made her think of dice. He pushed a finger into the depressed plastic square and it lit up and he waited for the doors to open.
She came up beside him and gave the button an unnecessary push. She didn’t look at him; better to let him make the discovery for himself.
At first he gave her a surreptitious sidewise glance. Then a more direct look: surprise and recognition. Then hesitation—he’d be thinking about whether to speak or hold his tongue.
If he’d been less brash he’d have let it go. Knowing who she was he might have been afraid to speak to her; he could have pretended he didn’t recognize her—they’d only met once, after all, and it had been a crowded dinner party.
But she was counting on his nerve and he didn’t fail her.
Big beaming grin. “Hi. Mrs. LaCasse, isn’t it? Hello there.”
She gave him a startled look and one of those polite smiles you use when you’re accosted by someone you don’t recognize.
The elevator door opened and he held it for her. “Ray Seale? We met a few months ago at the Sertics’?”
“Of course.” She let the smile grow broader. “You’re the detective.”
“You got it.” You could see how pleased he was that she remembered him. He punched a button.
She said, “Would you push eleven please?”
“You bet.”
The doors slid shut and his eyes drifted restlessly down her body, unclothing her. She put on the polite smile again. “Are you—‘on a case’? Is that how you put it?”
“No ma’am. Just going to work. My office is on twelve.”
“Why, I didn’t know you were in this building. It’s my first time here. I have a little trouble with my lower back … someone told me Dr. Nobles is a very good chiropractor.”
“That so? I’ve got a little back trouble myself now and then. Good to know.”
The car stopped on the ground floor and several people boarded. She moved back into the corner and watched Ray Seale. He seemed uneasy; at first he gave her a little smile but then he stood with his head thrown back, watching the illuminated numbers climb. He didn’t speak again until the last of the other passengers got off at the ninth floor. Then he waited for the doors to close and said in a voice that was too offhand, “If you feel like it come on up and visit the office when you get done at the doctor’s.”
“I wouldn’t want to disturb you.”
“Be a pleasure to have some distraction from paperwork and telephones.” The doors had opened; he held his thumb on a button to keep them from closing. “Come on up. Show you how the real investigators operate.”
“Well, thank you very much. If you’re sure it won’t be a disruption.”
She stepped off the elevator and smiled at him until the doors shut.
On the remote chance that Seale might decide to check up on her story she made good on the chiropractic appointment, spent twenty minutes filling out a detailed medical history form, read part of an article about the world series of poker in an old New Yorker and submitted to half an hour’s chaste examination by the bald doctor, who listened to her complaint about recurring pains in the lower back and prescribed a number of exercises she could do at home and told her to come back Monday morning to begin a program of traction-machine treatments and chiropractic manipulations.
She thanked him very much and went out to the desk and made a Monday appointment that she would cancel later by telephone if she got everything she needed today from Ray Seale.
It was half past eleven when she went up to his office. The black legend on the frosted glass panels of the double entrance doors was in big bold lettering to inspire confidence. Seale & Edwards—Confidential Investigations.
The opening of the door made a bell jingle. There was a bullpen—eight desks behind a wooden railing. It was half occupied: three men and one woman on telephones and typing and reading stapled documents.
Most of them glanced up when she entered. The jingle of the bell above the door drew Ray Seale out of the private office across the room; he smiled when he recognized her.
An acned receptionist at a desk, fat rump overflowing the seat of her chair, was on the phone:
“I’m sorry. That’s Mr. Edwards’ special field. No, I’m afraid we haven’t got anybody else in the firm who can handle that kind of thing. Mr. Edwards? No, I’m sorry, he’s away on an important case. No telling how long he may be gone …”
She hung up and winked at Ray Seale, who came forward to greet his visitor. As he passed the reception desk and opened the low gate in the railing he said,
“Who dat?”
“Some woman wanted us to find her Pekingese. I told her Mr. Edwards was away.”
“Old Edwards does spend a lot of time away, don’t he.”
He turned and welcomed her with a gesture and explained: “There’s no Edwards. Never has been. Seale & Edwards is a corporate name I just made up when I went into business for myself. In the event of complaints it’s useful to have a partner to pass the buck to. And there’s always the cases you don’t want to take.”
His smile was sly; his mannerisms were lubriciously ingratiating. He was narrow and slight with pointed shoulders and the small clever dark eyes of a ferret. His hair—possibly a hairpiece—was the color of dark stained oak, combed carefully into a high prow that jutted forward above his forehead; he probably thought it made him taller and more attractive. The face was boyish and unlined but there was a crosshatching of creases at his neck under the chin; he had to be well up in his forties, trying to pass for thirty-five. You got the feeling about him that there was an excess of oil in his skin and his hair.
He swept an arm around, indicating the bullpen. “Here’s where we do the job. You see four desks unattended. That’s because I’ve got a kid and two ex-cops out chasing leads this morning. That fourth desk belongs to a redheaded girl never turns up before ten-thirty, eleven, but that’s all right. Girl’s got the most amazing telephone voice—she can seduce more information over the phone than you can believe.”
He dropped his voice to a confidential level. “She’s got beady crosseyes and ugly buck teeth but you can’t see that on the telephone. She can come in at four in the afternoon for all I care, long as she keeps producing the kind of results she’s been getting. Well come on in the private office here. Gloria, this is Mrs. LaCasse.”
The name made its impression on the receptionist; she all but stood up. “Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”
Ray Seale showed her into the office and shut the door. It was redolent of stale essence of cigar. Halfway to his desk he hesitated. “I hope you don’t mind. I always keep it shut. No point having the employees think I’m spying on them.”
Necessity Page 7
