Flash and Filigree (7 page)

An ill-bred man, this Captain delighted in handling the cases of first generation immigrants.

Dr. Eichner stood easily, cleared his throat once, and when it was quite apparent that they were all waiting for him to speak, addressed the Captain. “Identify yourself, please.”

“How’s that?” said Captain Meyer, though he had heard very well.

“I’m asking you to identify yourself, Captain. I think I’m entitled to know who it is I’m speaking with, isn’t that so?” He addressed the last to the patrolman, Eddy, without lowering his voice even though they were standing shoulder to shoulder, whereupon Eddy grimaced uneasily, shifted from one foot to the other, and failed to meet the Doctor’s eye, but where his allegiance now lay was never more uncertain. “You’ll find it in your ordinances, I believe,” the Doctor ended sternly, nodding his head.

“Captain Meyer,” said the old man distinctly then, “—or so I’m told, Doctor, though you might be better informed about it. Captain Howard K. Meyer, Middletown, Pennsylvania. Police Officer Number 4276, County of Los Angeles. If you’d like to see my record,” he went on, shaming some famous old actor or other in a joke, with a wink at the two patrolmen, “—though I won’t say it’s exactly ‘light-reading.’ Forty-two years’ worth to be exact, Doctor!”

"That won’t be necessary,” said Dr. Eichner shortly. “Let’s just get on with the accident report.”

“Accident?” returned the Captain. He allowed himself still another reflective look at the report in his hands, shaking it a little. “Could be, Doctor,
could
be. But from what I know about these things,” he raised his eyes to meet the Doctor’s squarely, and despite all this senile foolishness, a soft, strange drama took hold of his words—“a Grand Jury might want to call it ‘Manslaughter.’ ”

F
OLLOWING ANY PERSONAL
or professional ordeal while on duty at the Clinic, it was the practice of the young nurses to “take five,” as they expressed it, in Nurses’ Rest Room. This meant lying down on one of the mohair sofas, or taking a Coca-Cola from the giant dispenser and sitting easily with it before the dressing-table mirror, where each might sip the coke and freshen up her image while, if she were not alone, talking animatedly with anyone else who might be present.

It was Babs’ habit to do all three of these at once. This was not difficult since one of the sofas was situated at the proper level just opposite the dressing-table mirror. As she was alone now, however, she merely lay on the favored couch, legs stretched down and crossed under her tightly drawn skirt, one arm behind her head, and the other curved graciously forward holding the bottled coke that rested just on her diaphragm. She was quite deliberately relaxing, and for the moment not too mindful of her reflection in the glass, but did continue, perhaps out of habit, to focus her eyes there.

Sometimes, alone here in Nurses’ Rest Room, the girl would enjoy the most elusively delicious, and somehow unexpected transports of fantasy. These were not exactly vicarious, since they did not seem, really to concern
her,
even indirectly, but dealt rather with the reflection in the mirror, which she had to glance at from time to time as if to assure herself that the adventure was real after all. Today, however, for some reason or other, Barbara found the images too fragmentary, the sequences broken and unsatisfactory, or more precisely,
unfair;
so that after a few minutes she got up and sat at the dressing-table where she began to brush her hair, which she appeared to do with an infinite concern and tenderness, though actually she was absorbed in counting: twenty-five strokes each, to back and sides. Having no head for figures, she was very careful. Then she combed it and, finally, fluffed it here and there with her hand, setting to rights a temple-ringlet or two. She put on fresh lipstick and squeezed two blackheads from her nose, which she dusted then with very light powder. She believed that she was mostly appreciated for her fresh, natural look—which was, in a sense, true. Then at last she stood, and still before the glass where her eyes now were less adoring than critical, adroitly smoothed the back of the skirt, which was slightly wrinkled from lying with it so drawn under. She adjusted her habit completely, from collar and shoulders to the hem—first, frontally before the glass; then sideways, at which time, it still being before lunch, she drew in her belt one notch. That she was able to do this, had anyone else been present, would have come to her as an animated surprise. As she did it now, however, her face remained tranquilly grim.

After she was perfect, her movements became slower and more deliberate, yet were not without a certain luxury and grace, as though an added responsibility had been taken on, but one that was quite familiar. And then she walked about the room with an easy, inimitable assurance, holding the coke, which was only half-finished and, by now, quite flat.

A perfect white at the window, looking over the broad estate, the slopes of green and the planes of white cement, with her head lowered in absently sipping the coke, and her eyes raised round and wide, almost as in magic goodness, she could have been the one child-princess of an angel-cake kingdom, all white-iced and perfect. She was standing slightly back from the window, with the same cautious ease she had crossed the room, now in avoiding the everplay of Pacific breeze that stirred over the land with an anxiety that never left off lightness. So, back from the window and distrait, Babs was not aware of the car’s approach until it was there, rounding the gravel slope before her. It was a yellow convertible, and the girl’s first impression was that the occupants were movie-stars, since they both wore dark glasses, and the young woman at the wheel had her startling sun-like hair half hidden in a jet black kerchief, while her face shown brown as fine leather. She stopped the car at the Clinic door, and the young man got out, handsome and worldly, his dress, it appeared, richly casual. When he turned his back to close the car door and speak a word to his companion who raised her hand briefly and smiled before pulling away, Babs believed for an instant that he was Tyrone Power, and a drop or two melted from her heart. In the next moment the young man, having apparently seen Barbara at the window when he turned to bound up the Clinic steps, slowed his pace and, looking that way, was waving and smiling, unmistakably at her. And it was only then, of course, that she realized, though not without a shocking ambivalence that ricocheted between discovery and insult that it was Mr. Edwards the pharmacist’s nephew, Ralph, from the University. And she saw too clearly now that what had been his weary, decadent smile, was, after all, simply a boyish grin. She wanted to be furious with him for this, and for the moment, almost was, for where her mouth had dropped slightly open when he first waved, she snapped it shut now and twisted away with a really offended toss of her head, as though he had again, for the second time in as many days, tried to look up her dress.

B
ABS
M
INTNER OWNED
a pair of sun-glasses, but she never wore them except when she went swimming, which she occasionally did on Saturday afternoon, when she was off duty from the Clinic. To wear them otherwise, not being a movie-star, she would have felt too self-conscious, or even “silly.” And though the glare of the sun could be troublesome during her lunch time away from the Clinic, it was a luxury, indeed a
pretense,
that had never occurred to her. Besides, she had great, beautiful, blue eyes.

Nonetheless, to see others wearing these glasses, except at the beach, never failed to distract her, for she always assumed they were stars, or the President, and so would scrutinize them.

Once she had taken a de luxe tour of Hollywood that included having lunch at the Brown Derby, and the most impressive thing she had yet seen in her life was, in that already tomb-gray, the dark and isolate forms hunched silently over strange plates, and so sinister behind their smoked glass that the poor girl had failed to recognize a single soul.

“That is the famous director, Buñuel,” the guide had said of one serious man who sat alone to eat and drink without once raising his eyes past a pair of glasses that were death black; and for a long time afterward Babs had felt, at the movies, an anticipation over the screen-credits, looking for the name, Buñuel. Later she began to regret that it had not been Hitchcock, or Cecil B. DeMille, she had seen at the Brown Derby. But she had never even for a moment, doubted the dangerous importance of the men in black glasses, nor above all, their right to wear them.

So, standing at the Dispensary counter and seeing that Ralph Edwards, even now, had his dark glasses on, made her so cross she could have snatched them away and pinched his nose.

“Hello,” he said, almost absently. He was just hanging up his jacket, although it had been fully ten minutes since Babs saw him enter the Clinic. And haying taken this tack, he forced her into changing her lines completely, though, even so, they had only been half-planned.

“Oh, hello,” she said coolly, even as if she hadn’t expected to see him here, nor, certainly, could care less.

For some reason this caused him to laugh, and when he came to the counter he was all boyish again and smiling. Below the dark glasses, his teeth were like pieces of beveled ivory. They were so straight and even they looked false, and the awareness that they were actually alive came as a very disturbing threat to the girl.

“Where is Mr. Edwards?” she said, trying to recover, looking around the hall and then at her watch, which, without even having made it out, she began to wind, so tight that it almost burst then and there.

“The pharmacist,” she added quickly, in a tone that would make it certain she did not wish a repetition of the young man’s last performance.

“Do you like music?” he asked, undeceived, and suddenly bold in a matter-of-fact voice, still smiling, his head to one side. And he reached in his shirt pocket to take out what might have been two tickets to a school concert. But the
truth
was, that ever since his unexpected laugh, displeasure on the girl’s face had grown so fiercely that now, when she raised her head, she was so obviously near to tearful outrage that he hesitated, and asked, in real sympathy: “What’s the matter?” Whereas Babs, perhaps mistaking, or rightly taking, this for pity, said furiously, straight at where his eyes lay smoked in mystery behind the offensive glass, “Nothing’s the matter with ME! What’s the matter with YOU?” And so saying, she turned abruptly and, leaving Ralph Edwards agape at the counter, marched down the hall, no longer tearful, but shocked into numbness by the kind of profound surprise that can border on, but never quite touch, revelation: that is to say, that her memory now was not the image of the young man left agape at the counter, but rather of the sun-ambered blonde who still smiled easily from behind the cream-colored wheel of the yellow convertible.

T
HE NEW
L
OS
A
NGELES
County Records Building was constructed after a design by Raoul Krishna, which the artist made in 1936, when he was living in Salt Lake City. The original blueprint had been drawn up and entered for competition at the Texas Centennial, where, had it been placed, it would have become one of the permanent exposition buildings of the State Park Fair Grounds in Dallas. With its failure there, however, the artist revised the drawing, and where the main façade had originally been fashioned to meet the requirements of opening in wide descent onto the State Park Esplanade, introduced, instead, a level, domed cloister with eight converging approaches. And in this form, the plan was submitted, during the next few years, to various competitions in the United States and Europe, occasionally receiving some secondary acclaim. In 1940, it came to the attention of the first woman member of the Los Angeles Board of City Planning. An extremely active and popular person, the wife of an influential citizen, she was herself a patron of the arts and, in fact, so much so of this particular artist that she presented his plan to the Board. It was accepted in the summer of 1940 and, following one major alteration (where the original had called for a gigantic, self-supporting dome-roof—which, because of the earth tremors in the Los Angeles area, was held inadvisable—a more conventional type roof-structure was submitted) the work was begun, and the building completed on Christmas Eve Day of that year. It was an immense structure, made almost entirely of plaster-stone, and at a cost of about two million dollars.

Dr. Eichner scarcely knew this building. Although he had passed it in his automobile a number of times, and, from being well-read, knew its history, civic functions and so forth, it was his habit to give almost no visual attention to things that were not immediately and vitally pertinent. Yet, it must be said, that once a thing did become pertinent, he had an amazing faculty for absorbing it wholly. A case in point was his behavior toward Music. When he went to the opera, for example, it was not without having first made himself closely familiar with the life of the composer and, so far as possible, the principal singers. And while he had no particular taste for music or drama, during the presentation he scrupulously followed a libretto and score, the margins of which he filled with comments about the performance, always in the language of its presentation. For this purpose, he had once learned Italian in six hours.

Thus it was that on the eve of his convocation to the Grand Jury Hearing, he had spent the entire evening in the Public Library making himself knowledgeable of the Grand Jury process, points of law, the names, lives and personalities of the judges, prosecutors, and other city and county officials; scanning the back-issues of newspapers, periodicals, legal journals; devouring everything that might in any way relate to the situation.

Before the evening was out, he had even familiarized himself with a plan of the County Records Building, and now, as he stood outside it, shading his eyes, at 10:20, precisely ten minutes before the scheduled convening of the Jury, he surveyed the whole with interest, mentally checking the accuracy of the detailed description he had previously read. Standing close, the building was a formless stretch of flat plastered white, without depth or surface quality except at the farthest end where one brief section was flung so abruptly against the sky it seemed to die away entirely, leaving only a texture, a sick glaze in the heat of noon. More than anything else the modern building resembled a huge uncertain mausoleum.