Hush Money (5 page)

What it meant was that the TV teams headed back north, lugging their cameras with them, and overnight young Karie was shoved off the front pages of the blatts. From there it didn't take too much doing to get her back where she belonged among the dearly beloveds.

Expenses? Half in cash and the rest in promises of exclusives if and when the “real” story ever broke. In between I'd been given my first tour of the campus by the Vice Chancellor in charge of Twink Beydon's hired hand and I'd talked to the boss man himself four times over the phone.

Time elapsed? A little over twenty-four hours.

A piece of cake?

Not quite.

You'd think all this would have earned me at least a roll in the hay and a good night's sleep, wouldn't you? Out of common courtesy if nothing else?

I did, in any case, and I headed for home, but the phone was ringing before I got my front door open. It was the biddy from the answering service, with a stack of messages from you-know-who.

“Where've you been?” my friend, Miss Plager, wanted to know. “I've been trying to get you all over.”

“I've been playing bumper tag on the freeways,” I told her. “I'm hot and tired and I want to take a bath. But if you can get it through, I'll have a phone installed under the dashboard.”

“He's furious,” she said. “He's ready to walk up one side of you and down the other.”

I was trying to think up a rejoinder when he got on.

He wanted my report.

I gave it to him, chapter and verse, and even though I had more details for him than I've put down here, it sounded pretty skimpy with the words laid end to end, so I added a few embellishments.

“Don't shit me, Cage,” he said. “Whatever you do, don't shit me. You save the horseshit for your other clients.”

He told me he wasn't paying me to take guided tours of the University of California but to find out how his daughter died. He told me everything I'd accomplished so far he could have done himself just by picking up the telephone. And he told me some other things too, all in the King's English, with Anglo-Saxon for salt and pepper.

I hung up on him.

It was easy, all I had to do was take the receiver out of my ear and lay it in its nest. It would have been easier still to let the damn thing ring, let the answering service worry about it, stuff earplugs in my ears, tear the wires out of the wall, move back to Yakima, you name it.

Sure it would have.

The phone rang again. I let it go for three long rings.

“We must have been cut off,” my friend, Miss Plager, said.

“A bad connection,” I agreed.

Then he came on again, all milk. He even apologized, in his way. He said I couldn't quit on him then. I said I hadn't. He said I should try to put myself in his shoes, and so forth, and even though I knew it was just for show, well, I guess I've always been a patsie for remorseful millionaires. Then, somewhere in there, he said:

“What do you know about the Society of the Fairest Lord?”

I thought he was putting me on. No, I didn't know anything about the Society of the Fairest Lord, other than that it sounded like something Aimee Semple MacPherson might have dreamt up on a rainy day when the collections were off.

He was serious though. He said it had something to do with the kids.

“You mean the Jesus freaks?” I said.

“I don't know,” he answered. “You find out.”

And eventually I did.

So the next morning I moved out of Santa Monica and down the road a piece, some forty miles' worth. I checked into a motel sandwiched between the local airport and the freeway, where the soothing sound of the semis at night would drown out the couples from Illinois splashing in the heated pool. Across the road behind some handsome stands of eucalyptus was where the Diehl Ranch started. Further down began the long low sheds of “clean” industry, which was all the Diehls would let in, and then the first of the Diehl tracts hiding behind their walls, two shopping centers, and here and there the remnants of the orange groves, which let them call the tracts names like Rancho Naranja. It must have been gorgeous once, and they still hadn't ruined it altogether. In the light morning smog you could see to where the flat land ended and the pre-desert hills began, low humpy hills with elephant backs and a yellow-green fuzz which wouldn't burn brown for another few weeks. The sun was shining, it was hot enough for seersucker, and the phone at the motel hadn't started to ring yet, and yours truly was going back to school.

The campus was just at the end of the plain where the hills started. Way off across the tracts you could see its towers squatting against the yellow-green background. It was new and big and unfinished and expensive, and as I found out, built for automobiles and not shoe leather. It took me most of the morning to track down the young lady I'd decided to begin with, only to find her just a hop and a skip from where I'd left the Mustang. Finally I tramped back across the huge green central mall, back past the Administration Building and across the concrete plaza where they still had the flags of the United States and the State of California at half mast for Karen, past the visitor's parking lot and across the entry road to the off-campus coffeehouse-saloon-and-hamburger-joint, which they called the Fish Net.

The Fish Net had an inside and an outside. The inside was dark and jammed. The stench of grease was fierce, so was the din from the jukebox. I held my nose, ordered a pitcher of beer, two glasses, and went outside where some boxwood hedges made a sort of patio and the action was quieter. Some bearded Socrateses were holding their morning kaffeeklatsch at a round table with a few admiring disciples, but beyond them, alone, I found Miss Robin Fletcher hunched over an empty mug of coffee and pretending to read
You Can't Go Home Again
by Thomas Wolfe.

Well, you've got to start somewhere.

I'd seen her face in the friendly sheriff's files, but not her feet, which were dirty and big. So for that matter was the rest of her. She was stuffed into a pair of jeans a half-dozen sizes too small. She had on one of those gypsy blouses which usually fit like blankets, and her boobies had been left to fend for themselves inside with only a neck chain for company. Her face was broad and round, a Cupid's mouth, blue eyes, but it took a while to pick out the details because her hair hung over them like a weeping willow. Maybe at that mud was its natural color, but I wouldn't have bet on it before it had been run through a laundromat three or four times.

She bit her nails, also her knuckles.

“Hi!” she said in my direction. “You lookin' for someone?”

“You, I think. Are you Robin Fletcher?”

“I think so,” she said. “Why don't you pull up a chair and find out? Bring your beer, Brother.”

I sat down and poured us each a glass. She shoved Wolfe aside, using the empty mug as a bookmark, and she put away half her beer in two hefty swallows, brushing her hair aside to let the glass through. Then she let out a big “Ahhh,” saying:

“It never changes, does it? Same old horse piss!”

I laughed out loud, I guess because I never expected Karen Beydon's roommate to come on like a hooker from a San Pedro champagne parlor. Then I introduced myself and my business (the dodge I'd worked out with my Vice Chancellor the day before) and took out my pocket spiral for show.

She gave me a big disappointed sigh.

“Sweet Jesus Lord, not another one! For a minute there I took you for a talent scout.”

“It's O.K.,” I said. “You can leave out which hand she brushed her teeth with. Just tell me the dirty parts.”

She giggled at that, sipped her beer and ran her fingers down the side of her hair.

“O.K.,” she said, looking at me dreamily, “the dirty parts.

“Sure,” she said, “somebody ought to tell all the dirty parts.”

She did too, in time, but the way to get to the dirty parts turned out to be not through Karen but through Robin Fletcher. Maybe no one else had tried. All it took to get her going was my inimitable charm and another pitcher of beer along the way, plus hamburgers, two for her, plus a paper boat of french fries which she ate with her fingers, dabbing the ends into a blob of ketchup.

She came from Tulare County, Robin Fletcher did, which is up toward Fresno, which is the heart of the San Joaquin. They grow grapes up there and pretty much everything else that goes on your table. You could still hear the hick in her voice, certain words like “grand,” and once when she was talking about Karie she said she was “skinny like she was standing in the shade of a Number Four wire,” but she said she hadn't been home in three years except for one summer when she'd worked for “Cesar.” She said she wasn't in much of a hurry either, it'd been a bad scene there, but in a wistful long-ago-and-far-away tone that made you wonder. The hooker bit was only her first mask. It was funny, but sometimes she seemed savvy way beyond her years and the next minute she came on innocent, little-girly, and the next she'd clam up and her eyes would get this glazed dreamy other-world expression, full of knowledge only Robin Fletcher had.

Maybe it was because she was a poet. So was Karen, so was each of Karen's “scenes” but one, so was just about everyone she mentioned. They had this deal there called The Writing Center, and once you got accepted into it you could spend four years writing poetry and walk away with your sheepskin. Not bad. The guy who ran it wasn't a professor exactly but a Writer-in-Residence, one Billy Gainsterne (another name out of the friendly sheriff's file), and his deal didn't sound bad either. Karie had had a scene with this Billy Gainsterne, and I gathered Robin Fletcher wanted to but hadn't made it. She pointed him out to me a few tables away, a shaggy lad in a suede vest with gray locks down to his shoulders, and her voice went up a few decibels as though she hoped he'd turn around, which he didn't. She said I ought to talk to Billy Gainsterne, just for the hell of it. She mentioned some others I ought to talk to too, including Andy Ford. Andy Ford was a Taurus, she informed me. He was the non-poet Karen had run off with, when she'd tried to bust out.

“Bust out?” I said.

“That's right. That was Karie, she was always busting out.”

“Busting out of what?”

“Yeah. Like maybe that was her hangup, she didn't know what. Something. She was into things all the time. Everything she got into was a box she had to bust out of, and like every time she managed to bust out she found herself locked up again.”

“Like what things?”

“I don't know. Like relationships. People, places. Situations. Everything except poetry, though maybe that got to be one too. A box, you know? Poor Karie.”

I couldn't tell how to take that “poor Karie.”

Then she said, “D'you read poetry?”

“A little,” I said, which made it only a little lie.

“You ought to read some of hers. She was the best, but it was tight, y'know what I mean? Locked up, everything, words, images, that was Karie's poetry. But beautiful, weird kind of. Bloody. You ought to read some. I'll read you some of my own some day, when you feel like it. It's not bad either.”

She said this last casually, looking halfway at me. Then the Cupid's mouth spread into a grin and she asked if I'd been over to the Bay Isle place yet. I said I'd tried but so far hadn't been able to get by the stormtrooper at the moat. “Who, Ingie?” she said and broke out laughing. They all knew “Ingie,” it seemed, and also Tito and Henry Lopez, who were my two aztecs, Gomez and Garcia. According to Robin, they'd waited on Karie hand and foot, and she said she wouldn't be surprised if one or both of them had been after her—in a way which left all the suppositions in my dirty mind.

From the sound of it, there'd been times when the whole Writing Center had “busted out” and crashed at Bay Isle. When Karie felt like crashing, she said. I asked her if she'd ever run into Karie's father, and she said Twink?, no, he was always up in L.A. or some place, though she'd met Nancy Beydon there once before she died. Nancy Beydon struck her as weird, cold, though Nancy Beydon might have been a great painter if she'd ever busted out of her own box. Even a better writer, she said, giggling a little.

“What did you do over there?” I asked.

“Oh, things. We read each other's stuff.”

“What else?”

“You'd have to know us to understand, Brother,” she said. “It was a group. Not like encounter or anything, we were all beyond that. We were into other things, I don't know. It had a lot to do with the poems.”

“Did it get pretty sexy too?”

“Yeah,” she said, smiling, “sometimes it used to get pretty sexy too.”

“What about drugs?”

She raised her eyebrows at me like I couldn't have been born yesterday.

“Sure,” she said. “What would you expect? Did you ever know a poet who wasn't spaced out?”

Somehow I didn't want to tell her that I'd never known a poet.

“Was Karie into that?”

“Sometimes.”

“Were you?”

“Well, you could say I've been there.”

That sly knowing smile.

“What do you really think?” I said. “Do you think she jumped?”

She shrugged, an indifferent, I've-seen-it-all gesture.

“I wasn't around. Like I hadn't seen much of her lately.”

“Where were you?”

“Me? Oh, around. Places. The fuzz've got my alibi, if that's what you mean.”

“But do you think she could have?”

“You mean jumped?” The Cupid's mouth made a moue. “Sure she could have. I wouldn't've put it past her. It was the kind of thing she would have done.”

“You didn't tell the fuzz that.”

“I didn't tell the fuzz a lot of things.”

“Why me?” I said.

“You're nicer.”

She was grinning at me suggestively through the willows. I grinned back at her. With the grin you could still see the little brat in the sandbox, but when the grin went away the fat stayed, pasty, and it wasn't any harder to imagine her hustling the action in Pershing Square, before they turned it into a garage. Then her face went a long way off again, soulful or what she thought was soulful, as though if she listened hard enough she could hear the angels singing behind the secrets that were Robin Fletcher's and no one else's.