Erased From Memory (24 page)

Oh, Jesus.

“I’m buying a house here,” she says.

“Ah,” I say. “Wow.” This takes a minute to percolate, then suddenly I become appreciative. “Hey. How great.

“I mean,” I stumble around for a minute, “you’re gonna be the sheriff?”

“Looks like it. I mean, for them it’s just this minor appointment in a real small county. Something a lower office can handle. The governor doesn’t even need to see it.”

“Wow,” I say again. That’s an inconclusive comment, but I am trying to get all the angles straight. Cherie will be sheriff, which is a lot better for me in many ways. But she will be living here, full time, next door to Rob, so to speak. And that is not good. So is the situation a washout for me?

I waste a full half-minute speculating on the aspects of Cherie and Rob. Like, how badly suited are they? She is an accomplished, handsome older woman. He is a young doctor. In some ways he seems younger even than he is. She is nervous and intelligent and ambitious. She bounces around. He is solid and reliable. Maybe a little on the stolid side.

When she is seventy he’ll be forty-nine, which sounds better than now, when she is fifty and he’s twenty-nine.

“The other thing I have to tell you,” Cherie interrupts all this. “Sweetcakes, how about just another teeny bit of that stuff? Life is on the tense side these days.”

I divide the rest of the bottle between us.

“Well, darlin’, one part of this news isn’t a shock exactly, more just what everbody thought all along. But the other part is a surprise and a bit of a tummy-grabber. Anyway, here goes.”

She takes a meditative swallow. “He was murdered. Marcus Broussard, that is, victim numero uno. That’s what everybody thought, right? So that’s not a surprise; that’s the part we assumed, just from the surrounding circumstances. The one that’s a surprise is the
way
he was murdered.”

“And?” I say. Actually Cherie is waiting with her mouth half-open to tell me the rest of it. I don’t have to do any prompting.

“Darlin’, he was stabbed.”

I think, but just for a minute, because almost right away I can respond to that. “Oh, no, he wasn’t.”

“Oh, yes, he was.”

“Cherie, I saw him. He was laid out, on his back, his arms stretched out . . . There wasn’t any place to hide a stab wound. There was no blood.”

“Darlin’, there was. But in a place where you don’t exactly look.”

I say, “Well, maybe,” still trying to summon up my memory of Marcus Broussard spread-eagled across Egon’s garden plantings of lavender and oleander.

“Baby, this is the part that is kinda gross: he was stabbed in the ear.”

That rattles past my own ears. I stare at her and say, “Huh?”

“Yeah. Weird. I mean it. Exactly like in Shakespeare. Bang, right on through the eardrum and into the brain.”

“Cherie, I saw him close up. I held his hands in my hands.”

“And did you see his ears?”

No, I didn’t. Not really. Ohmigod. An ear. Why is that so awful? “Hamlet’s father wasn’t stabbed; he was poisoned.”

“Well, darlin’, I know all that, into the porches of his ear, okay? So it’s not exactly the same, but it was the first thing I thought of and I’ll bet the first thing you thought of, too, if I hadn’t said it first.”

“You have to be still for someone to stick something in your ear,” I say. “Not running around. Sort of knocked out, like Hamlet’s dad.”

“I know, I know. But this is what forensics up in Sacramento says. They did a big fat report and I’ll be glad to let you look at it. Which I prob’ly shouldn’t, but I will. Incidentally, he had three wives.”

“Marcus Broussard had three wives?”

“Not exactly all at once, I guess, but that part’s unclear. The reason I raise it is that one of them—I don’t know yet which one—is the person that ought to see the forensics report. But since I am almost the new sheriff now, I will do what I want and you may see it, too.”

“My goodness,” I tell her. It’s a time when no comment is adequate, so I use a proven inadequate one. “Hey. . . . Stabbed in the ear,” I say after a minute. “What with?”

“Somethin’ sharp.”

“A stick?”

“Maybe. But more likely something metal. Some long skinny piece of metal with a sharp end.”

“And they searched the grounds for a weapon that looked like that.”

“Of course not. In the first place, Slimeball didn’t have the brains to search for anything; I guess he was absent from crime class the day they did that page. And, secondly, nobody knew until now they should look for that kind of a weapon. So, no.”

“It’s late now, to look.”

“A’course it is, but we’ll still try. I got my two Klingons down there right now poking around.”

I survey her; she’s perky, very handsome, and fast. “God, are you going to be a new order around here.”

And Cherie, who is unfolding her legs, nods complacently. “New order, I guess you got it. Totally different order, different species, right?”

 
 
“No, Daddy’s not okay,” I tell Rob, who calls about five o’clock. “He says he misses the museum, he wants to go back there; he thinks of it as the Promised Land that he got excluded from. I guess he’ll get over it. He’ll forget.”

I let this slide into an uncomfortable minute. My father does a lot of forgetting.

“Thank God he’s out of there,” Rob says. “You, too.”

I say, “Yeah, yeah,” because Rob has put some possessive emotion into that
you, too
. Unspoken message: I, Rob, continue to help; I am Old Reliable; I got you to leave that place. In a minute he’s going to tell me that my father is his oldest friend.

I tell him that I had a nice session this afternoon with Cherie.

He says, “Oh. Fine,” in a suppressed voice.

“She didn’t say anything about you.”

Rob says, “Uh-huh.”

“How’s that relationship doing?” I persist. There’s a pause.

What answer do I want? Do I wait for him to say, Terrible, or Wonderful, or We’re made for each other, or We’re breaking up?

“Fine,” Rob says.

You can’t accuse him of being verbose.

“Maybe I could come over to see Ed this evening,” he says.

I advise, “Don’t.”

I don’t want Rob this evening because Scott is coming this evening.

Also because I don’t want him.

He says, “Well, I have to come tomorrow anyway to take him for his calcium shot,” and hangs up, quick, before I can beat him to it.

Chapter 19

Scott shows up at eight o’clock in his rented convertible.

“I think we should head south,” he says.

“Okay. What’s south?”

He pulls out a map and we cluster over it. A BMW, even a rented one, has a good dashboard light.

South is Santa Cruz, Monterey, Carmel. I tell him that I went to school in Santa Cruz and I don’t want Santa Cruz and he says,
Well, then, maybe Monterey
? and I say,
Okay
.

“There are a hundred and fifty restaurants in Monterey,” he announces. “Some have a fish theme and some have a Mexican theme and some have a rob-the-tourist theme. There is one farther along, in Carmel in somebody’s garden that I went to last month and kind of liked. I went there with Rita, but I guess I’m okay to do it again.”

We decide, yes, we’ll go south and to Carmel.

We start off down the coast road, which is too dark to see the scenery, but you can kind of feel it: bushes and hill on one side, cliff-edge and ocean on the other.

“This road will be real quiet until Santa Cruz, when it turns into a mob scene,” he says. “Maybe I can circumvent that.” He drives with one hand, capably.

“Reet and I,” he ventures. I haven’t asked, but maybe he wants to fill in the silences. Maybe he wants to talk. “We were sort of lovers, maybe I told you, and then we were sort of friends. I miss her. I miss her a lot.”

I say, “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, right.

“Hey,” he adds quickly, as if he thinks I found
Yeah, right
off-putting, “I know you’re sorry.”

Well, I did get off-put, but he pushes along with, “You really helped, did I say that? I’m not good with saying how I feel. Even with
knowing
how I feel.”

Quit it, chum, you’re getting at my unarmored places. Any guy that admits to vulnerability and then admits that . . . Oh, phooey.

“Sorry,” he says. “Difficult stuff. Too personal.”

We have a half-mile of darkness with ocean noises off to the right. “When I first met you,” I finally essay, “I thought you were a horse’s ass.”

“I probably was.”

“You were snotty. Mean to Rita.”

“Damn right. She could get to me. To see somebody go under like that. And kind of on purpose, know what I mean?”

“Yeah. I saw.”

“I identified. I do those things, too.”

“You!” I fling the word out across the darkness. I’m amazed. “You’re the least . . .” I can’t think of the right word-cluster. “You’re in control.”

“It’s a pose . . . I used to think I was. I talked myself into that.”

We’re approaching some lights. A big red sign announces SARTORI’S ITALIAN. Laughter and a few bars of music make the road feel even emptier.

“Jesus,” he says. “It got me down about her. But lately everything gets me down. Like, I’ve been thinking back and brooding about death. I don’t get it.”

“Oh, come on.”

“First somebody is. And they’re here and they’re part of it. And then bang, all of a sudden, out. And what’s left?” He gestures off to the side, where the bank and the bushes are. “Nothing? Memories? We’re supposed to console ourselves with that? ‘The person lives on in our memories’? Phooey.”

I start out on the speech about how as long as you are alive and remembering the person and grieving for them and recalling the good things they did and all that. It does sound kind of thin. And underneath I’m thinking that Scott has really taken off about Rita’s death. It’s the kind of response you get from somebody who’s had other experiences with death and feels these previous experiences reviving each time a new one happens.

“Did you lose somebody else earlier?” I ask. “Somebody important who died on you?”

He jerks the car slightly. We are passing the intersections leading into Half Moon Bay. “No.” He sounds cross.

We have quite a bit of silence as he negotiates some lighted crossings.

“Tell me about your dad,” he says abruptly after we start again onto the dark part of the highway. “Doing better? Settling in okay?”

I get the idea: this recent subject is dropped. We spend the whole twenty-five miles between Half Moon Bay and the Santa Cruz approaches talking about Daddy. I give the latest on him and accept Scott’s sympathy. I decide Scott keeps starting subjects and then dropping them. I’ll return to some of this stuff later. I want more about Rita, death, the Hartdale. And Danielle. I really want to hear from him on Danielle. She keeps sounding important to me.

I don’t understand you, Scott
, I think.
It’s always intriguing not to understand someone when you think there’s a complicated second person below the top one. If you follow me.

He manages to drive skillfully and not say anything much all the way into Carmel.

I’m debating whether or not to share the news about how Marcus Broussard died. And about how Cherie will be our new sheriff. I decide on silence. Scott is withholding stuff from me. He’ll learn all these info bites pretty soon.

Meanwhile I can feel superior.

 
 
“Superiority is evanescent,” I tell Scott as we climb the hill into Carmel, which brightens up beside us, all lights and gas stations and even one Carmel-type cottage left out beside the road.

Scott says, “Huh?”

I like Carmel, in spite of its phoniness. My great-grandmother should have bought a cutie-pie house here instead of the one she bought in Venice.

I tell Scott that when Rob and I lived in Santa Cruz, we hardly ever came down to Carmel. We were too poor. The town is quaint and charming, and quaint costs money.

Scott’s restaurant in the garden has heat lamps and colored lights and a quaint, charming main building to retire to when the fog is in. Tonight there is no fog. The waitresses wear Laura Ashley prints, which Rob once described as the local equivalent of peasant dress. The menu is extensive. Both Scott and I opt for crab salad and chardonnay. I think (a) that I know some important things Scott doesn’t yet know, and (b) that I really don’t miss Rob at all.

“Do you miss him—what’s his name, Rob?” Scott asks.

 
 
Over dinner we talk first about my dad and about research into Alzheimer’s, which Scott says is getting more daring and maybe looking hopeful. I keep forgetting that he has had a year of med training.

We sip industriously at the chardonnay. And he finally lets me broach the subject of the Hartdale, which I’ve been poking at for several minutes.