Grist 01 - The Four Last Things (8 page)

My plane left two hours late. At two-twenty that morning I coasted Alice to a stop in front of Sally Oldfield’s house and watched the rain spatter the windshield.

There wasn’t a lighted window on the block. I could have fired a load of grapeshot down the middle of the street and not hit anyone. Even the cats were inside waiting for the rain to let up. The clouds were low enough to reflect the lights of the city with a chill, chalky glow. It looked like the cats were going to have a long wait.

I wasn’t dressed for this. By the time I’d pushed open the little gate at the side of Sally’s house, I was soaked to the skin and colder than the glimmer of hope at the gates of hell. The low-hanging leaves of a ficus brushed at my face as I tracked along the side of the house. They felt almost warm by comparison. I rounded the corner into the tiny backyard and found myself looking at a perfectly maintained little vegetable garden. I was so cold that my thought processes had slowed; it took me maybe ten seconds to realize why I could see it.

There were lights on in the back of the house.

I ducked beneath a window and let the rain pelt me. I had visions of running into the boys in blue. Then I remembered that they didn’t have Sally’s name, and I had visions of running into something worse.

The time seemed ripe for a futile gesture, so I turned up the collar on my shirt and got exactly what I should have expected: an icy rivulet of water down my back. In the conventions of Japanese samurai literature, such moments usually bring the hero instantaneous enlightenment. What this one brought me was an overpowering desire to sneeze.

But I didn’t. And then I didn’t again. In all, I didn’t sneeze about once every thirty seconds during the fifteen minutes or so I huddled there waiting for any kind of movement within the house. When the fifteen minutes were up I raised myself an inch at a time and looked in through the window. Another futile gesture. The blinds were drawn.

Well, either someone was in there or they weren’t, and I couldn’t squat in the lettuce any longer without running the risk of hypothermia. I went to the back door and opened it, failing to be surprised by the fact that it was unlocked, and shouted cheerily, “Hi, honey, I’m home.” I felt like Ricky Ricardo. Lucy, Fred and Ethel, Little Ricky, or any combination thereof would have looked very good to me.

They weren’t there, or if they were, they didn’t answer. I was in a laundry room. The dryer was open and clothes were spilled out of it, a cascade of white onto the red clay tile floor. Sally Oldfield had looked like the kind of woman who sorted her whites. She hadn’t looked like the kind of woman who emptied her dryer onto the floor.

Most laundry rooms open onto kitchens; it’s cheaper for the contractors to keep all the plumbing in one place. Sally’s house was no exception. I eased open the door at the end of the laundry room and stood there staring at chaos.

The drawers had all been pulled out and dumped upside down into the center of the room. Cooking implements were scattered everywhere. The top of the stove had been pulled off to reveal the gas pipes beneath. Pilot lights glowed a pale blue. The test of a great housekeeper is the area beneath the cooktop. Sally’s was immaculate. I felt obscurely proud of her.

Whoever had taken the place apart had been uncommonly thorough. In the tiny dining room the table was upside down, as were the chairs, just in case something had been taped to their undersides. The sofa in the cozy little living room had been dismantled and the cushions and backs had been slit open. The oval hooked rug, probably a family hand-me-down, had been yanked to one side and turned over.

On the floor in a corner, near an uprooted potted palm, some rectangles caught my attention. I picked them up, shook the potting soil off them, and turned them over.

Pictures. Sally and a man who might have been Mr. Oldfield smiled into the camera, standing in front of someplace tropical, Hawaii maybe. Sally looked young and brave and full of conviction: this marriage was going to last forever. Their clothes, post-hippie loose and colorful, dated the pictures in the seventies.

The photographs had been torn from their frames. In two of them, a knife had made a savage X through Sally’s face. The man who held the knife must have known he had all the time in the world, pausing for a meaningless act of spite. I felt murderous.

It was the same story everywhere. She had slept in a single bed, in a room that had once been almost Japanese in its austerity. The bed had been ravaged with the knife, one long jagged slash running from the head of the narrow mattress to the foot. Near an upended vanity table I picked up a hairbrush. It had a few of her hairs in it.

I sat on the box spring and pictured her getting up in the morning. She would have put on the pale blue robe that lay crumpled against the wall and gone into the bathroom for her shower. Then, probably even before she drank her coffee, she would have sat in the early sunlight streaming through the east-facing bedroom windows and brushed her hair. She’d had beautiful hair. She’d taken care of her hair, not out of vanity but out of self-respect.

“What was your secret, Sally?” I said out loud. “Why did they do it?” This wasn’t random, it wasn’t a sex slaying that began and ended in some shithouse motel on Sunset. Sally Oldfield, as sweet as she had seemed to be, had gotten mixed up with pros.

In all, I sat there for an hour. Then I left, closing the front door on the odds and ends of Sally Oldfield’s life and on her secret too.

Chapter 8

H
er name was Rhoda Gerwitz, and she’d just canceled her wedding.

“I mean, honest to God, the creep, he’s got the emotional depth of a cold sore. All chin and no forehead,” she said around a mouthful of hamburger. She’d briefly considered the chefs salad and then rejected it; after all, she could stop worrying about fitting into her wedding dress.

“Can you imagine?” She extricated a limp piece of onion from her mouth, looked at it critically, and put it on the edge of her plate. “Here’s my best friend, my number-one bridesmaid, vanished from the face of the earth. I was going to heave the bouquet straight at her, and she’s fallen over the edge somewhere. Well, how could I don the lace and orange blossoms and waltz down the aisle under such a cloud? Pass the catsup?”

I handed it to her and she upended it over her french fries. It made a gurgling sound. “If you’re a girl,” she continued, monitoring the catsup’s flow, “men being what they are, odds are pretty good you’re going to marry a jerk. No offense, I hope, present company excepted, and you seem like a nice-enough guy. But there’s jerks and then there’s jerks. If you’re going to put up a sign that says no jerks, you’re going to be an old maid.” She giggled. “I always loved that expression,” she said. ” ‘Old maid.’ Like there’s no way to have fun except getting married. If mama only knew. Still, like I said, there’s jerks and jerks. A girl’s gotta have standards.”

“And his J.Q. was too high.”

She stopped chewing and gave me a level gaze. “J.Q.?”

“Jerk Quotient.”

She sputtered and grabbed a napkin. “Don’t
do
that,” she said. “Not when my mouth is full. Sally always says that the only problem with eating lunch with me is that she needs a raincoat.” She stopped talking, looked at the burger, and put it down. “Aah, shit,” she said, “Sally.” She dabbed at a corner of her mouth with her napkin. It was the wrong corner. “How long have you known her for?”

I tried to remember what I’d told Rhoda on the phone, couldn’t, and said, ”A few months. Enough to want to try to find her.” I’d spent most of two days finding out everything I could about Sally Oldfield, and I almost felt like I was telling the truth. Patrick Henry had used his L.A.
Times
clout to trace Rhoda Gerwitz’s name from the license plate I gave him, in exchange for a renewed promise to speak to him and only him when and if there were anything worth telling. I’d called Rhoda at Monument Records and set up a lunch.

“The cops,” Rhoda was saying. “If she’s not dead, they don’t want to know about it. It’s enough to make you crazy. I’ve been to her house, knocked on the door, phoned her a dozen times. They didn’t even know the color of her eyes. And then there’s Herbert. Herbert—that’s el jerkerino’s name—says to me, ‘You don’t need a bridesmaid to get married, all you need is a groom.’ Can you imagine? All I asked was to put it off until she turned up, or… well, you know. The sonofabitch. But listen, even if he’s as dumb as a toadstool, you’re not supposed to explain to a guy that’s popped the question, so to speak, that a husband is a husband but a girlfriend is for life. This is not considered good strategy in the war between the sexes.” The skin around her eyes crumpled up and she poked the hamburger with her index finger. It didn’t poke back. “Do you think she’s okay?” she asked the hamburger. “I don’t think she’s okay.”

She blinked a couple of times, fast. “Can you return a wedding gown?” she said.

“I don’t know. I’ve never bought one.”

“Sally said …” She swallowed even though her mouth was empty. “Sally said that the trouble with a wedding gown was all those miles of fabric. If the bride had as much mileage on her as the gown, she said, no man would ever get married.” She tried a smile but it didn’t work out. “Anyway, they had to let it out,” she said. “After all those salads. They’re not going to take it back. And even if they did, I think I’d keep it. As a reminder of all the jerks in the world.” She lifted her glass of beer.

“To Sally turning up safe,” she said. “So you’re a bachelor, huh?”

“I’m too old to be a bachelor. I’m an old maid.”

“What’re you anyway, thirty, thirty-one?”

“Thirty-four.”

“Sally is thirty-two. Always worried about her birthday, which, by the way, is coming up, always wrinkling her nose like every birthday took her one step closer to looking like Margo coming out of Shangri-La, you know that movie? She’s always checking her hair like she expects it to be four feet long and gray.” She swirled the beer in the glass. “Shit,” she said, looking at it, “she’d better be okay.”

The waiter appeared. It was Roberto. Everybody who worked at Monument Records seemed to eat at Nickodell’s, and Rhoda had chosen it out of all the restaurants in Hollywood when I’d called to ask her to lunch. Roberto looked more than professionally concerned. “Somethin’ wrong with the lady’s hamburger?”

Rhoda summoned up a sweet smile. “No,” she said, “the hamburger’s fine. Something’s wrong with the lady.”

“You wan’ Pepto-Bismol?” Roberto asked. “We always got a lot of Pepto-Bismol.” He smiled sympathetically and included me in it. “Pepto-Bismol is our insurance company.”

“It’s okay, Roberto.” He started to leave. “Wait,” I said. “Last time I was in here, the guy I was with, you remember?”

“Terrible guy, bad-lookin’ guy. Look like he wan’ to eat the Easter bunny raw. I remember.”

“Did you ever see him before? Do you know his name?”

Roberto squinted at the wall as if he expected to see a Technicolor film unspool on its surface. ”Naw,” he finally said. “Somebody as mean as that, I remember.” He shrugged. “Sorry,” he said, dismissing it. In a waiter’s world there are a lot of bad guys.

“No problem. Thanks anyway.”

“So what was that about?” Rhoda said as Roberto vanished toward the kitchen.

“Nothing. Another shitty business lunch.”

“Yeah. A business lunch is the shortest route between eating and the bathroom. Do not pass go. Do not taste. In fact, skip the esophagus entirely. It’ supposed to punctuate the day, right? Sally said once that lunch was the only punctuation mark softer than a comma.”

“You’re good friends.”

“She’s a good friend. You think I’m easy to put up with? Until Herbert proposed I was five miles of barbed wire. Get married, everybody kept saying. Listen to your biological tock clicking.” She picked up her beer and looked at it with one eye shut. “ Tock clicking,’ ” she said. “Am I a cheap drunk, or what? So no wonder I was grouchy, the whole world waiting to watch me walk the plank to
Lohengrin
, all these damn women in Connecticut writing big fat books about the joys of late-life motherhood, and all I really want to do is go home to my dinky little apartment, feed the cat, and try to stay reasonably sober until it’s time for David Letterman. Otherwise I don’t get the jokes.”

She drew a long breath. “Sally let me take it all out on her. When Herbert, may he catch a fatal case of athlete’s foot and die slowly from his ankles up, when Herbert proposed and I didn’t know what to do, Sally listened to me for weeks and weeks. Must have seemed like years to her. One day I was yes, one day I was no. Whichever way I felt, I’d ask for advice, which Sally would dutifully give, and I’d be back the next day with the same goddamned questions. And she’d listen again and give me advice again, and then we’d do it all over.”

She picked up the beer and put it down again. “I’d like a real drink,” she said. ”A screwdriver, is that okay?”

I signaled for Roberto and ordered. “What advice did she give you? Did she want you to marry Herbert or not?”

Rhoda’s laugh was short and dry. “She didn’t give a shit either way. She just wanted me to do whatever would make me happy. It wouldn’t have made any difference if Herbert was Bigfoot, as long as she was sure that he was what I wanted. Hell, if Bigfoot had been the boy of my dreams, she would have helped him rent a tuxedo.”

“She was indifferent?”

She gave me a long look while she tried to figure out what to say. “No,” she said finally. “She wasn’t indifferent. She just wanted to make sure that I was doing what I really wanted. If I did, whatever that was, it was okay with her.

“She kept asking me questions. Sometimes they seemed dumb, like who was more important to me, my mother or me? Except, you see, that’s not so dumb, because it’s my mother who really wants me to get married. Or she’d ask me things about Herbert, like did he have a good time when he got drunk, and what didn’t he want to talk about
ever
, and did he make love like it was fun or like he was trying to remember how he was supposed to do it, and did he seem to have a sense of humor about his underwear? Questions that made me look at him different. Wasted effort, the putz.”

“Is Sally married?”

“Sally? Sally married?” She picked up the screwdriver and took a long pull. “Golly, do you know, I don’t know.” She looked stricken. “Gee, isn’t that awful? That’s the kind of question Sally used to ask, something that made you realize something about yourself. Oh, my God, I’m ashamed of myself. I was so busy talking to her that I hardly ever listened.”

“In every relationship there’s a talker and a listener. You’re the talker, that’s all,” I said, trying to smooth her out. “Sally is the listener.” Then I shut up so I could register the little click in my brain. I looked at a morose knot of disc jockeys at the bar; ratings must have been down. “Rhoda. What’s Sally’s religion?”

“Religion?
That
she does talk about, in the last year or so, anyway. She keeps trying to get me to go with her. I’m not much into religion, you know, I’m supposed to be a Jew but I might just as well be a Chevrolet for all the attention I pay to it. But one thing I’ve got less than zero interest in is trendy California cults.”

“I’m sorry to do this,” I said, standing up, “but I’ve got to go. Listen, the meal, anything you want, it’s all on my credit card, and it’s already signed. Have another drink, have a burger, have whatever you like. Better still, call in sick and go home, skip the rest of the day. Wash your hair. Stop worrying about Sally. Maybe you did do all the talking, but you’re a terrific person and she was lucky to have you.”

She looked up at me with her mouth open.

“And when Herbert calls,” I said, “tell him to go fuck himself.”

Sally was a Listener. Listener Simpson’s mania for clarity had echoed Harker’s insistence on understanding. That had been the only part of my description of Harker that had brought Skippy down from his plateau of bliss. I had to get home and review my notes.

At the bottom of my unpaved driveway I caught a whiff of something sharp, sweet, old, and slightly sickening. I slowed down for a moment to check it out but didn’t see anything. Then, in a hurry, I slogged up through the mud at a forty-degree angle, slipping and falling to my knees only twice, not bad for a wet November afternoon on an unpaved driveway that asked nothing less from the world than that it should be beamed up
Star Trek-style
and then let down in Switzerland, where it could be pressed into service as an Olympic ski ramp.

That would be all right if the house at the top of it were worth getting to. It was slapped together in the twenties by an embittered alcoholic hermit who wanted to flee the madding crowd. He kept himself relatively sober long enough to build the thing—it couldn’t have taken more than a couple of months—and then went on a bourbon toot that ended a year later when he saw workers paving Old Topanga Canyon about a half-mile below. He promptly tied a rope around the living-room rafter and kicked a chair out from under him.

He hung there, mummified by the dry summer heat, like a big strip of bacon for a couple of years, sharing the house with a pair of red-tailed hawks, until he was discovered by a determined census taker. The house passed to the hermit’s sister, and then to her son, who went to the Balkans and took himself a Balkan bride during World War II. He then got himself killed in the war, and ownership of the house devolved upon the Balkan bride, Mrs. Yount. The house was essentially a three-room wooden cabin, but it had the best view in Topanga, all the way from the massive red outcrop of Big Rock to the little settlement of Topanga on the way to the ocean. And there were acres of clean stars above it at night.

Of course, to get to all of that, you had to climb the driveway. Once I made it to the top and muscled open the swollen wooden door, I looked on top of the computer, the first place I always looked because it was where I put everything. And there they were. Before I looked at them, I got a fire burning in the potbellied stove.

With the wood crackling, steam rising from the damp carpet, and rain throwing handfuls of tacks against the roof, I surveyed my options. There were remarkably few of them.

I didn’t have a client. I
did
have a grudge against Needle-nose. I’d liked Sally Oldfield. And I had some information. Whatever chain of events had culminated in the murder of Sally Oldfield had begun with the Church of the Eternal Moment.

The obvious thing to do was call the cops.

Generally, I’d prefer not to call the cops. If everybody called the cops, I wouldn’t be in business, and I’d hate to start a trend. But nobody was paying for my time now that the ersatz Ambrose Harker had faded back into whatever woodwork he’d crawled out of, and somebody had to do something about Sally.

So I went over to the computer, got the folded printout of my notes on the case, smoothed them open, and read over them. Then I did what I didn’t want to do. I called my pet cop.

Alvin Hammond, Sergeant, LAPD, didn’t know he was my pet cop. Sergeant Hammond weighed a conservative two hundred and thirty-five pounds, ten pounds of which were bass voice and twenty-five pounds of which were potential whisker, and he wasn’t given to terms of coy affection, however discreet. What Sergeant Hammond was given to was drinking lethal quantities of Scotch in cop bars, with the ultimate objective of being the last man in the room who could stand up. I’d begun risking life and liver in police bars downtown when I first became an investigator. It had occurred to me that I might need to know one cop better than you usually get to know the guy who’s writing you a speeding ticket. I’d remained relatively conscious longer than Al Hammond on two or three nights, and that was the extent of the bond between us.