Double Solitaire

by Craig Nova

  Terry had to make sure that no identification was left on the girl, and maybe, although Farrell wasn’t sure about this, since the clothes the girl was wearing might have come from Charlene or Portia, they might have even helped dress her before he took her to “the doctor.” Was that right? Terry could have said that the girls didn’t want to be involved, and so was the British girl wearing any of their clothing now? Was that why the girls were so frightened? Or, would it be just Terry who would take the girl’s clothes off and throw her naked into the brush? Then it would just be a matter of finding a dumpster to get rid of the clothing, shoes, a handbag. Terry knew that a case of underage sex was one thing, but that a dead girl was another. The way Terry saw it, Farrell knew with absolute certainty, is that if the girl wasn’t around, the problem was solved.

  Farrell knew these were just guesses. In fact, Farrell knew that any combination of details could be involved, since at any moment that night Terry could have panicked, left the job only partially done, or hardly done at all. This was the problem with panicky people who got frightened halfway through what needed to be done. Nothing was less trustworthy than a terrified man. Or less predictable.

  What was that quality that hung like still, ominous air?

  Farrell was not a religious man, but he realized, as he stopped and waded into the brush, that he was praying that he wouldn’t find her. Maybe it was just his contempt for Terry, for the unseemly aspect of the people he helped, but he knew, too, beneath it all, precisely what he would do if he found the girl.

  The canyons were mostly a deep V, lined on each side with brush and manzanita, with some eucalyptus here and there, which had that Musterole-like miasma. That medicinal trace left Farrell with a momentary and still-precious sense of innocence.

  The Department of Water and Power sign on the dashboard was his excuse for being here, and if anyone asked he’d say he was making a survey to upgrade power lines so that they would resist even earthquakes, which everyone up here would be glad to have done. The fires had always burned here, but since houses were built in new places that naturally burned, it was just more anxiety for LA. Not the city of Angels, but La Ciudad del Miedo, the city of fear. The fires and a hard earthquake were just a matter of time. Farrell had grown up not far from here, and the sound of a eucalyptus exploding was like the memory of some recurring nightmare.

  More brush, some game trails, more heat, and the cloying effect of working his way through plants that curved over his head, not like a romantic bower, but something else altogether. Then, when he came out to the shoulder of the road, where cars had parked and shoes had left marks, he realized he was up against a new variety of loneliness. A surprise, since he thought he had been knowledgeable about this, but the scale of the unknown for what he felt or could feel and for what he would find left him with the sense that every object, whether distant or close, highway, tree, car, road, grid of streets in the valley was now illuminated by fear. Hadn’t he learned how to handle that? No, he realized. Not anymore.

  By six in the evening, rush hour had begun. Farrell thought it wasn’t good to be seen looking along the side of the road. What happened if someone else found her first? There was a guy, someone might say, in a gray Camry poking around. . . . The risk was personal, since if someone identified him, or if the cops came to him, what was he supposed to say? He was taking a leak? Admiring the view? I see, a cop would say. Bladder problems, huh? What about this dead girl?

  The roses in the arbor around the door of his house were the last of the fall flowers, and this made the perfume all the more intense. Isn’t the end always the most memorable? Isn’t that why we pay attention to a man’s last words?

  He took a shower.

  Rose Marie called and said, “How are you doing?”

  “Fine, g-g-great,” he said.

  “Tell me another,” she said. She waited a minute. “What are you doing tomorrow?”

  “Work in the afternoon, but in the morning when it’s foggy, I’ve got nothing to do.”

  “Good, good,” she said. “Will you come tomorrow? I need help.”

  “Okay,” he said. “In the morning.”

  “Sure,” said Rose Marie. “When it’s foggy.”

  Alone in his bed, the scent of eucalyptus lingered, and the rustle of the sheets, as he turned one way and then another, was a dim reminder of the crackle of a distant fire, and then keen memory of a eucalyptus exploding, the top with a red and yellow and red shape like the flame at the top of a candle. Then the sound, Bang.

  In the morning, the clothes in his closet hung like different versions of himself. To be an inspector for the Department of Water and Power, he had dressed like someone who worked there. The same outfit would be right, he guessed, for visiting with Rose Marie’s kids.

  The postcard with the picture of the bear was stuck on the refrigerator by a magnet, a little trout. Farrell put the trout aside, with a click, and turned the card over. The writing seemed loopy with its smiley faces and hearts for the dots above each i. It said, “All right, Big T-ster, I made it back in one piece, so you don’t have to worry anymore. Warm weather here. Love, Mary Jones.” Farrell flipped the corner of it with his thumb and put it in the pocket of his Patagonia jacket.

  8

  ROSE MARIE DROVE HER RED Subaru, and Farrell sat in the passenger seat. He didn’t want to stutter in front of the kids, and so he swallowed once and then again. Still, he took the card from his pocket and looked at the bear and then the message.

  “What’s that?” said Rose Marie.

  “A postcard,” said Farrell. “How old are your kids? Teenagers, right?”

  “That’s right,” said Rose Marie. “What’s on your mind?”

  He put the card back in his pocket. He rolled a shoulder.

  “I don’t want to stutter,” he said.

  “They won’t mind,” she said. “They’ve got other things to worry about.”

  * * *

  And, she considered her own worries. Or at least she confronted a mysterious sensation, which was that the edges of her sense of self had become a little fuzzy, and at the same time, in that haziness, she discovered a desire or maybe it was already a fact that this was a matter of blending with the warm understanding of the man who sat next to her. How could there be any awakening, since she had thought she was beyond anything like that. She didn’t know if the need for that warm comfort and the fact of melding with someone else was more surprising or terrifying. Or the terror came from not being sure that he felt it, too.

  * * *

  In her warm, inquisitive glance, Farrell considered the search for the British girl, the trash he saw at the side of the road, used condoms and their foil packages, empty pints of vodka, candy bar wrappers, cigarette butts, and empty baggies that had still had the dust of marijuana inside.

  The sprawl of the UCLA medical center had the appearance of all such vast institutions, not quite as ominous as prisons, but not completely reassuring. The clutter of buildings made Farrell aware of how alone he was. Their haphazard arrangement suggested the unleashed forces behind such things, the arrival of money, the advancement of technology, as though these developments were alive and not necessarily interested in specific people. Things that you couldn’t control, or that just happened to you. LA all over, Farrell thought.

  One building with a flat roof, boxlike and made of aluminum, already pitted by the salt air from the Pacific, had taken a hard to define but still noticeable hit from an earthquake. Still usable but not perfect, as though something weighed on it.

  A new parking lot was in front of the buildings, the lot surrounded by orange netting as a temporary fence, and at the entrance sat a guard in booth who issued parking tickets and took money. He wore dark glasses and reminded Farrell of the scent of formaldehyde. Beyond the booth sat a backhoe with the teeth of its bucket against a new pile of dirt. Rose Marie licked her lips, checked her makeup in the rearview mirror, then kept her eyes on the distance. Outside the car they stoo
d in air that had a hint of the Pacific, which was only a few miles away.

  “So, it’s glamour you work with,” Rose Marie said.

  “Not glamour, no, not exactly,” he said.

  “But fame, the movies, things like that,” she said.

  “It may not seem like it, but Hollywood is still like a mill town. A lot of people in town work there. From electricians to seamstresses to hairdressers.”

  “But that’s not your part, right?”

  “No, that’s not my part,” he said.

  In the parking lot she was so quiet that she seemed to be a sponge for sound. Farrell took her hand, and she squeezed back. Something new. They were holding hands. She said, “I’m counting on you.”

  “I get it,” he said.

  “I bet you do,” she said. “That’s what’s strange.”

  The revolving door of the hospital moved a visitor into the lobby with a mechanical shove. This way, my friend, it seemed to say. Here you are.

  “You’re going to have to perform,” said Rose Marie.

  He nodded.

  “Okay,” he said.

  He swallowed.

  The room, on the fifth floor, was a school of sorts. A window looked over the clutter of the medical center, the buildings for surgery, oncology, tropical disease research, brain research (Farrell thought he could hear the banging of MRI machines), chronic pain management, and others.

  The kids’ room had a whiteboard, and on it earlier in the day a teacher had drawn shapes for geometric theorems, side angle side, angle side angle, and a right triangle with boxes at each leg and the hypotenuse.

  “What?” said Rose Marie.

  Trigonometry… Hubcap, humbug, lemon…tight fit…tight.

  “Trigonometry,” he said.

  “You can leave, if you want,” said Rose Marie.

  “No,” he said. “I’ll stay.”

  The classroom had the lingering odor of a place where kids got sick, like dirty socks mixed with Lysol.

  “Do the kids get sick here?” he said.

  “Sometimes,” she said. “Not just throwing up, but they can have a seizure, too. Have you ever seen one?”

  “I’ve dealt with epilepsy,” said Farrell.

  They walked into the middle of the room.

  “Gerry, Catherine, Ann, and Jack,” Farrell said. “Are they coming soon?”

  “You’ve got a good memory,” said Rose Marie.

  Like tracks left in the dirt of the shoulder off Mulholland. Something left under some brush.

  “I wish I had a surprise for them,” Farrell said.

  “That’s one of the things these kids never get. They know what’s coming. They’ve given up on surprises.” She kept her eyes on his. “I guess you’ll be all right. You don’t look like you scare easily.”

  Not until recently, he thought.

  “Just charm the kids,” said Rose Marie.

  The kids hung at the door for a moment, dressed in street clothes, jeans and shirts and flip-flops, Gerry with red hair and freckles, like an advertisement Farrell thought for Boy Scouts and merit badges. Although here, close up, Gerry’s eyes swept over Farrell with a piercing awareness. And just like that, Farrell thought, What the fuck is wrong with me? Why so vulnerable? Why on the verge of tears?

  He smiled.

  Catherine was a little more thin than in the pictures, far along in the heroin chic look, and when she came in she gave Farrell that same knowing glance, as though she had an advanced understanding of what people really struggled against, or that she had spent time in some demanding discipline, as in a monastery where residents take a vow of silence. It’s not that she knew anything about what he had been looking for off the shoulder of Mulholland, but she recognized the mood that came from it. Hope mixed with terror and anger. Farrell was more certain about the need to find the British girl than ever.

  Jack wore a baseball cap to the side, just like the young men in South Central LA. He glanced at Farrell and came in with a sort of swagger, as though he was going to be able to bluff his way out of glioblastoma multiforme by sheer attitude and defiance, which, Farrell guessed, was about all he had. Ann was on edge, and the least friendly of the lot. Her dark eyes didn’t greet him.

  “This is my friend Quinn Farrell,” said Rose Marie. “I thought he might talk to us about the movie business.”

  The kids nodded, although Catherine dared him to look into her eyes. It wasn’t so much that she was distant as above Farrell in some way. If you made a fool of yourself in front of a kid this sick it’s not something you were likely to forget.

  Catherine seemed to exist with pure awareness. Farrell was comforted by this, since at the moment, in the presence of the mood here, fatigue seemed to drop on him like a net. It came from lies, distortion, and nonsense that he had to deal with. Here, at least, there would be none of that.

  “Let’s sit down,” said Rose Marie.

  The classroom chairs had been arranged in a sort of semicircle with two in the middle, one for Farrell and one for her. She got some boxes of juice out of the small refrigerator and passed them out, giving one to Farrell with a straw sticking out of it. He thought this was the kind of straw they probably used around the mirror at Terry Peregrine’s house.

  Rose Marie glanced at Farrell as though to say, All right. You’re on. Charm them.

  “So,” said Catherine. “I know something about Hollywood. My parents had a neighbor in Woodland Hills. Before they dumped me here.”

  “What did the neighbor do?” Farrell said.

  “Pretty sketchy stuff, it seemed to me,” she said.

  “Like what?” he said.

  “He was a kind of host for people who came to town, you know, a new actress from Germany, a director from Poland, a film distributor from Argentina. He showed them the sights.”

  “Sights?” he said.

  “Yeah, you know. Do I have to spell it out?”

  “No,” he said. “No. You really don’t.”

  “So, you know,” she said.

  “Yeah,” said Farrell. “You can say that. What was the neighbor’s name?”

  “You think you know him? Gerald Stiller. Ring a bell?”

  He shook his head.

  “So, is that kind of thing you do?” she said.

  “No,” he said. “Other things.”

  “Like what?”

  Her eyes were violet and blue, and Farrell recalled the eyes of Mary Jones.

  “Let’s get to know one another,” he said.

  “Sure,” said Catherine. “Let’s get to know each other. But don’t think we are going to let you off the hook about it.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Give him a chance,” said Rose Marie.

  “We’ll give him a chance,” said Jack. A scar, as though made of pink bubble gum, ran below his turned around baseball cap.

  “Turn on the charm,” said Ann.

  “Do you think you can charm us?” said Catherine. “Go ahead.”

  “Try,” said Gerry. “Yeah. See what you can do.”

  “You’re double teaming me,” said Farrell.

  “We do it all the time,” Catherine said.

  “Let’s talk about animal sounds,” Farrell said.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” said Catherine. “You want to talk about that?”

  “Yes,” Farrell said.

  “So, what about animal sounds?” said Gerry.

  “I knew a woman who spoke Russian,” Farrell said.

  “Who was that?” asked Catherine.

  Rose Marie kept her eyes on him. After all, they hadn’t known each other for very long. But to Farrell the time didn’t seem brief at all.

  “Just a friend,” Farrell said. “So, I asked her what sounds animals make in Russian.”

  “Aren’t they the same?” said Ann, her golden curls bouncing a little as she turned from the window and looked at Farrell.

  “Well, in America, what noise does a pig make?”

  “
Oink, oink, oink,” she said. “Isn’t it the same?”

  “In Russia, it goes, khriu, khriu, khriu.”

  “What about donkeys?” said Catherine. “Here they go eee-ah, eee-ah.”

  “Not in Russia,” Farrell said. “In Russia it goes ooah, ooah.”

  “Seriously,” said Ann.

  “Yes,” Farrell said. “That’s what they say.”

  “How about ducks?” said Catherine. “Don’t they go quack, quack, quack?”

  Rose Marie kept her eyes on him.

  “In Russia, a duck goes krya, kyra, kyra.”

  “Krya, kyra, kyra? Not quack, quack, quack . . . ?”

  A man in green scrubs went by the open door, and he glanced at Rose Marie as though to say, If you need help, I’ll be right down the hall.

  “Are you making this up? I bet you make a lot of stuff up,” said Catherine.

  “What about a rooster?” Farrell said.

  “Everyone knows that,” said Gerry. “It goes cock-a-doodle-do.”

  “In Russia it goes ku ka ryeh ku.”

  They laughed, and Rose Marie’s gaze finally came across. Just wait, it said, until I get you alone.

  Jack had been quiet, but the animals in the barnyard pulled him in, too.

  “All right,” he said. He looked right at Farrell, as though he had him dead to rights.

  “I’ve got you. What about a cow. It goes moo, moo, right?”

  “You’re right,” Farrell said. “The same.”

  Jack looked around as though he had just set things right. See, he seemed to be saying. Just listen to me. But all of them laughed, and then they laughed harder because they were laughing, and Rose Marie was so glad to see them laughing she laughed, and then Farrell did, too.

  “Krya, kyra, kyra,” said Ann. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “What about a coyote?” said Catherine.

  “Like when?” said Farrell. “They make different sounds.”

  “How about when they are searching for something?”