“I guess you’re telling me old Albert ain’t poor.”
“He’s in the construction business.”
“Yeah. What does he build? Skyscrapers?”
“Sometimes.”
“And he and his buddies like to hunt. So there are guns around the place.”
“Yes.”
“You haven’t gone so far as to say it’s an armed camp, honeybunch, but would that be a fair conclusion?”
“No.” Try to calm him down now. “It’s not a fortified stronghold, Charlie, it’s just a big rustic summer house. All wood—varnished, not painted. Mostly cedar. Big picture windows—a lot of glass. There’s a cathedral ceiling in the living room, open beams, I guess it’s forty feet high at the peak. You could seat eight people at a table inside the fireplace if you wanted to—I’ve never seen a fireplace that big anywhere else. The house is huge but it’s not a fortress.”
“How do you expect to get in and get Wendy out?”
“I know how.”
“That’s reassuring,” he says a bit drily. “What about an airstrip? Something to land on.”
“There are two or three places.”
“All of a sudden you’re being evasive.”
“I think I’ve already told you too much. Maybe it’s the wine,” she lies.
“Come on. You want me to fly the airplane for you. Don’t you.” He starts to chuckle. “Why not quit beating around the bush?”
“Oh dear. Am I that transparent?”
“I wish you wouldn’t bat the big blue eyes at me. It just makes my heart go all pitty-pat.”
She puts the corncob down and cleans her fingers on the napkin. Without raising her eyes she says, “I’m sorry I’ve turned your romantic dinner into a business meeting. Sometimes my timing’s not very good.”
This time he doesn’t smile; he doesn’t let her off the hook. He says: “I expect it’s time I asked what’s in it for me.”
By leaping ahead of her he has taken her by surprise and as she watches him gnaw corn she reassembles her thoughts and chooses her words:
“It’s become painfully obvious I can’t fly the plane myself. I suppose I could try—but I don’t want to put my child’s life in that kind of danger. So it looks as if I can’t do this without you, Charlie, and I guess that means you can pretty much name your own price.”
“And lead us not into the valley of temptation,” he murmurs. “You like some more wine?”
“No, thank you.”
The steak is blood red. He shaves it in slivers to eat it, she notices; no big hunky mouthfuls for him. He likes to savor what he’s eating. She’s practically finished and he’s hardly started.
He says, “Special occasions like this, I get the meat at a little Italian butcher shop in Encino.”
“It’s very good. Everything’s delicious. You’d make somebody a terrific wife.”
“Yes ma’am.”
She says, “How much is fair, Charlie? What would you say to five thousand dollars?”
“Probably not enough. On the other hand ten thousand sounds like too much. Why don’t we say seventy-five hundred?”
There’s an interval during which she is acutely conscious of the bashing of a pulse behind her eyes. She finally dares to say, “You mean you’ll do it?”
“Sure, my sweet love. Why not. I haven’t had a good silly adventure all week.”
His grin is at once reckless and mysterious. He lifts his wine glass in toast. “To Wendy. Her very good health.”
She drinks to that. To Wendy Hartman A/K/A Ellen LaCasse. She can smell the baby now: she has a tactile memory of tiny fingers clutching her own: she hears the burble of Ellen’s laugh and the strident demand of her outcries. She can see the wonderful smile that crumples the little blue eyes into happy wedges. She can feel her child’s warmth.
29 Driving away she feels by turns elated and confused: uneasy, at intervals, because too often Charlie seems to have that ability to take her by surprise—as he did ten minutes ago when, dishes washed and cognac swirled and lights turned down, he took the glass out of her hand and kissed her as she had not been kissed in longer than she could remember—flicking tongue and hard body pressure—and then lifted her to her feet and steered her toward the door.
“Peaches, I’ll delight in making love with you and I hope we do it soon but right now neither of us could be sure it isn’t just putting the signatures on a business deal. I don’t mind doing it out of sheer adrenaline. I don’t even mind a gratitude fuck. But I don’t like screwing for business. Big bad Charlie may be a pretty loose fellow but he ain’t yet standing in doorways.”
As it happened he was standing in the doorway when he said that. It made them both laugh a bit.
Then he said, “I don’t know where you’re coming from. I’ve been around you a month or so and I still haven’t figured out whether you used to be a librarian or a high-priced call girl. Now just on the off chance it’s the former, I don’t want to feel guilty if you wake up in the morning hating yourself, you should pardon the expression. So let’s take a rain-check.”
She kissed him on the lips—she can still taste it—and when she drove away she saw him in the mirror standing under the street light, not waving, just watching her go.
She likes Charlie. It’s easy to become fond of such a man. But when there may be an enemy lurking around every corner you learn to distrust the unexpected and those who purvey it.
Charlie may not have been a wise choise. There’s too much captain in him and not enough crew. And the sexual attraction doesn’t make things any easier.
But there’s not much she can do about it now.
She’s going to have to be very careful in deciding how much of the truth she can reveal to him about Albert. If she tells him too little he may not take the dangers seriously enough; if she tells him too much it may discourage him.
She’s thinking: I can handle it. I can handle him. You know I think it’s going to work. I honestly think this ridiculous scheme is going to work. You hear me, Ellen? Don’t give up. Momma’s coming, darling.
30 A beige Datsun sports coupe is parked in her numbered slot behind the building. She finds another space.
The Santa Anas are starting to blow. Dust whips along the alleyway. Straight overhead she can see stars quite clearly: the Santa Ana is an ill wind that brings dry heat and pollen off the desert, stirs up dust and spores, carries misery to allergics and fans brushfires in the canyons—but it clears off the smog.
Alongside the oleander hedge she unlocks the mailbox. The skirt flaps around her knees. A gust nearly rips the mail from her grasp. She goes around the corner in the lee of the building and sorts through the sheaf.
Amid the mail order catalogs she discovers an envelope containing her new bank credit card.
Jennifer C. Hartman. She rubs the embossed letters with the pad of her thumb; gets out a pen and signs the back of the card and slips it into the transparent window of her wallet opposite the California driver’s license.
They look so preposterously real. It’s an eerie thrill—this feeling that Jennifer Corfu Hartman is actually beginning to exist.
She glances up the outside stair and along the railed balcony. A light glows through the lowered blind of the furnished room. The lamp is on a timer; it will switch off at eleven-thirty.
It has been more than a week since she’s had a look inside; may as well dump the junk mail in a wastebasket, make a bit of noise for the neighbors’ benefit and move a few things around—just in case the superintendent or some repairman has had occasion to let himself in. No point encouraging them to believe the premises have been deserted. How ironic it would be if the well-intentioned concern of neighbor or janitor led the police to issue a missing-persons report on Ms. Hartman.
The wooden stair clings tentatively to the building; it gives when she puts her weight on it.
When she goes along the upstairs balcony the footing is uneven and she walks slowly in the bad light.
<
br /> The television in the next-door apartment casts blue illumination against the slitted Venetian blinds and she can hear the laugh track of a situation comedy as she fits the key into the door and enters and catches a man in the act of pawing through the clothes that hang in her closet.
31 He’s heard the door; he’s looking over his shoulder. His expression is a comic exaggeration, like that of an animated cartoon character taken by surprise.
She recognizes him immediately and realizes now that the Datsun 280Z out back is a car she’s seen before, parked near the bookshop.
The reporter.
Graeme Goldsmith.
32 Indignation—rage—terror: for a moment her reactions trample one another and she only stares.
Then a swift instinct takes charge. You’ve got to behave like a real person.
Indignation, then.
“What on earth are you doing here? How did you get in?”
“Well.” A furtive smile; he withdraws his hand from the closet and faces her. “I didn’t think you were going to turn up.”
“Obviously.” She says it with bite.
Then she steadies her voice: “You’ve got about five seconds to explain this before I call the police.”
He’s trying to regain his composure: straightening up, rearing back on his dignity. “I don’t think you want to do that.”
“Why shouldn’t I? You’re breaking and entering. What in the hell is the meaning of this?”
She’s glaring at him with unfeigned animosity and she’s thinking:
You’ve got to play this all the way through. Stay innocent. Don’t let the son of a bitch rattle you. Find out what he wants—find out what he knows—but don’t give away a thing.
He lets the silence go on a beat too long. She says, “All right, Graeme, I’m calling a cop,” and turns as if to go.
“Don’t do that, Miss Jennifer nonexistent Hartman.”
Anticipating the effect of the statement he attempts a smile. It is too sickly to achieve the swaggering effect he intends.
He says, “I’ve come by here four nights running. You don’t live here. Nobody lives here.”
He waits for her response. She gives him none—only a hooded anger.
“It’s a front—it’s a blind.” His voice is rising. “I want to know what for.”
She watches him bleakly. If you’ve ever thought fast in your life, do it now.
She says, “You make a habit of burglarizing people’s apartments, do you?”
“I haven’t stolen anything. I thought I’d find out something. And I did.” He gestures toward the open closet. “Those things don’t even fit you. You must’ve bought them so fast you didn’t bother to see what size they were.”
“For a reporter you’re not very observant.”
“No? Very well—then just for fun let’s see you walk around the room in any of the shoes in there. Go ahead. Show me.”
Her heart is skipping beats; she’s faint now. She covers it by crossing to the island of the kitchenette and resting her weight on an elbow on the pretext of poking into the fridge; she takes out a can of vegetable juice and pops the ring top off it and slams the fridge door and drinks.
When her head stops swimming she says, “I don’t owe you anything—least of all explanations—but I’m tired and I want you out of here. All right. I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you there may be some significance in the fact that they’re all the same size, even if it’s not my size?”
She slams the can down on the counter and wheels to face him with virulent wrath. That much isn’t feigned; but nor is it uncalculated. She knows she’s got to take control and hold it.
“Listen to me. I’ll try to do this in simple language that even you can understand. I’m subletting to a friend and she’s out of town and I just stopped in to pick up the mail and check things out.”
She moves toward the door. “So much for your mystery. Now if you’re all through sniffing around in that closet—”
He shouts at her: “Where do you live then, ducky? Where do you hang your pretty little hat that you’re too bashful to use it as your legal address?”
“Where and how I live is none of your business.”
He continues to shout, trying by sheer volume to intimidate her. “Who’s paying your rent? What’s the guy’s name? I can see him—the thousand-dollar suits and the Rolls-Royce—some honcho with a society wife at home and a ten-million-dollar image to protect. Tell me the bastard’s name, ducky. Tell me his fucking name!”
The very question pegs him: now she understands. He smells a profit in this. He sees his chance to blackmail someone.
Well then—why not let him think it? Let him go right on assuming she’s the well-kept mistress of a politician or movie mogul. Let him put his nose to the ground and follow that lead as far as he’d like: let him outsmart himself.
She says: “I owe you nothing—least of all information. I know the law. Would you like me to tell you the penalty for breaking and entering? It’s a felony, you know.”
He’s not meeting her glance. She puts her hand on the doorknob and goes on, driving it in: “You’re slime. I can’t stand the sight of you. I don’t want to see you ever again. I don’t want to hear from you. If you want to hang around with Doyle and Marian, do it when I’m not there.”
“Your name doesn’t even need to come into it. You’re a confidential source. Nobody’ll pry your name out of me, not even with a writ. Now all I want to know is who he is.”
“Believe me, you can’t afford to know the answer to that question. It could kill you.”
“Don’t be melo—”
“Get out now, Graeme—or I call a cop.”
His mouth begins to assume a disgusted expression of defeat; he even slouches a few paces toward her—toward the door. But then cunning returns.
His mouth curls into a smile that is more like a snarl:
“Go ahead and phone. I shouldn’t be surprised if they’re just as interested as I am to find out how come Jennifer Hartman was born two months ago. How come there isn’t a trace of her in existence before that. No credit rating, no Social Security account, no driver’s license in California or Illinois. You did say you came out here from Illinois, didn’t you, ducky?”
He leans forward to peer furiously at her. “I think there’s a story in you. Quite possibly a big story.”
She manages somehow to give him a slow cool smile. “Even if your ridiculous suspicions were true, there’s no crime in any of that. On the other hand you broke in here and I ordered you out but you’re still here …”
She walks wide around him, making her way to the telephone, watching him, knowing she’s got to carry the bluff all the way.
He pivots on his heels to keep her in front of him. She picks up the receiver and dials the operator and meets his eyes icily while she listens to it ring.
“Operator? Get me the police, please. It’s an emergency.”
“Put it down,” he says. “I’m leaving.”
But she holds it to her ear. A voice comes on the line: “Police Department. May I help you?”
“I’d like to report a breaking and entering in progress. The address is fifty-one sixty-sev—”
By now he’s got the door open and he’s gone through it and she watches it slam behind him. She hangs up the phone and realizes she’s hyperventilating but she has the presence of mind to walk unsteadily across to the window and pry the blind back.
He’s halfway down the stairs. He doesn’t look up.
He descends out of sight. A few moments later she hears the slam of a car door and the belch of a sports car muffler.
Oh dear God. What am I going to do now?
33 She drives west on Chandler. The street is divided by railroad tracks and trees. It’s after midnight; there’s no traffic.
No evidence of headlights behind her but she feels a crucial need to be certain and so she makes three right turns in succession, switches off the lights and coasts
to a stop at the corner, keeping her foot off the brake because she doesn’t want the taillights to flash.
She waits at the corner with the engine idling, watching Chandler in both directions, watching the narrow street behind her—watching everything.
A few cars pass under the street lights. None of them is Graeme’s Datsun.
An instinct compels her away from her natural course; she turns south on Van Nuys Boulevard and drives up into the canyons, up Beverly Glen all the way to the top of the rugged spine that divides Beverly Hills and Bel Air from the Valley. She runs west on the ridge, hairpinning slowly along the tight twists of Mulholland Drive, here and there glimpsing a startling thirty-mile panorama of urban lights; up here on the thin strip of road corkscrewing through rocks and brush she has the atavistic feeling she’s been flung back into primordial wilderness.
The road swoops across a graceful bridge span, crossing above the freeway in Sepulveda Pass, and she continues to pursue the westering half moon, concentrating on her driving, putting everything else out of her mind except steering wheel and brakes and accelerator: the car and the road and the constantly shifting sliver of the world that is illuminated by her headlights.
There’s a clump of buildings on the left—a posh private school—and just beyond it is a wide graded pull-out where half a dozen cars are parked facing the sparkling view of the Valley. She comes slowly through the bend; her headlights sweep across the parked cars and she catches a sign of movement as two heads duck down behind a car seat. Lover’s lane.
Soon Mulholland Drive peters out. She wonders whether to take the steeply descending road to the right or turn around and retrace her course.
What the hell. Why not explore.
Down to the right. The road keeps curving back on itself; it becomes a residential street—one of those high canyon suburbs, houses perched on land-fill outcrops so that each site commands a view. You pay for the houses by the square foot; for the views by the square mile.
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