Double Solitaire

by Craig Nova

“Would you help me?” said Farrell.

  “A few motorcycles are one thing, but . . .” She shrugged. “If you think I don’t know a lot about what you do, you are mistaken. Not everything, but I could go to work.”

  “So you want something, too?” said Farrell. “It can’t be money, can it? Not that.”

  “No, not money. Just remember me. If something comes up.”

  She smiled again.

  He wrote Terry Peregrine on a napkin and passed it over.

  “Karicek and this guy,” said Farrell. “You already have a sample from Terry. In some database somewhere.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Maybe I can do that. But you have to remember me. A reliable tip is always useful. A moment where two birds can be killed with one stone.”

  “They aren’t birds,” he said.

  “I know,” she said.

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were dangerous,” he said.

  She expertly and with exquisite delicacy picked up her last piece of tuna, which she put into her mouth. It wasn’t so much eating as something like a promise. Yes, he thought. She really is dangerous.

  “You want to know the secret of police work?” she said. “You don’t chase someone down. You just wait for them to do the same stupid thing a second or a third time . . . You know, Farrell, after all these years, the least I can say is that I warned you.”

  “Well, that makes me feel a lot better,” he said.

  The waiter put the check on the table. Farrell picked it up, glanced at it, and took some cash out of his pocket, and put the bills in the little tray.

  She slipped her card under his fingers.

  “That,” she said, pointing to a hand-printed number, “is my cell, which you’ve got. The other is a landline at my house.”

  The silver film on the ocean made the surface appear burnished.

  “Thanks,” he said. “It’s always nice to see you.”

  “Don’t be too sure,” she said. That same smile. “Don’t worry about the dead. They’ve been taken care of. It’s the living you have to worry about.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” said Farrell.

  “So, you believe in ghosts now?” said Shirushi.

  “In LA, you’d have to be crazy not to.”

  10

  ON LAUREL CANYON ON THE way to Mulholland the flow of traffic was steady. Rusted clunkers trailing smoke like a black feather boa, trucks, Porches, a vintage Rolls. And of course, lots of Camrys.

  He widened his search this time. It seemed to Farrell that he had underestimated the desperation. Maybe Terry had more guts than he had given him credit for, but then maybe it wasn’t guts so much as the realm were deviousness turned into obsession. Terry could just blink at you and tell you, “That girl? No problem. Everything’s going to be all right.” Not batting an eye. Was it the lying or the coldness that was the worst?

  Farrell pulled up Terry’s address on his iPad and examined the terrain within a half-mile radius. Then a mile. The landscape near Terry’s house didn’t have that many places, and he’d already searched them and come up empty. Or, was that wrong? Had he hidden the British girl in his house and then waited to move her? Farrell thought this was unlikely, but then with this scale of liar, anything was possible.

  The sky was clear and there weren’t any birds circling over anything. Then he thought of Catherine, and that glance in her eyes. Still, Farrell didn’t want to go out as far as Sumatra Drive, and if he didn’t go that far, he was left with the small streets that went toward the Valley, on the north side, or toward Hollywood, on the south side. Would Terry have taken one of those? More houses there, but more privacy, too, since there were places with a lot of brush.

  Maybe it wasn’t guts, but cunning. Guts would mean he could drive almost to Malibu on Mulholland, but cunning meant he could have gone a half mile and stopped behind someone’s swimming pool. Cunning meant he knew the girl would be found. Guts meant he hoped that she would disappear. So, which was it? And why hadn’t Farrell asked the obvious? How long had the girls had to wait for Terry to get back?

  At the side of the road, in front of a wall of that brownish scrub, the dust of the shoulder, Farrell stopped and considered the possibility that Mary Jones was out here, too. How long had it been? Three weeks or so, maybe more. And how could she be identified? Farrell wasn’t even sure she really came from Alaska, and then, if he tried to find out about her, he’d have to face any number of young women in Alaska who ran away to the Lower Forty-eight every year. And that supposed a missing person report was filed for each one. This, surely, was not the way it worked. So how many just slipped away, unnoticed or unreported?

  Farrell had a box of latex gloves on the passenger seat. He put them in the glove box. If he was stopped, he didn’t want to explain them.

  From Mulholland, the Valley was obscured by the smoke that hung in the Los Angeles Basin, and it often seemed that the mood of the place was shown in the air. Farrell knew the job at hand was to bear down, to stop imagining things, but the difficulty was that imagining things was precisely how he worked, and without that he was lost. He had to imagine how desperation appeared in all its forms, and these were almost infinite. Lost in the labyrinth.

  When he had looked for a place for those throwaway papers, he had wanted a canyon where he could dump the bales without being seen. Now the uneasiness seemed to rise from the pale dirt, since when Farrell had searched for a place to dump papers, he never thought it would come in handy to find a dead girl who had been pushed into the bushes. He understood, with a sweaty rush of claustrophobic anger, what he had lost between then and now.

  The Valley didn’t look inviting, and the hillsides didn’t either. The brush at this time of the year was brown, and the eucalyptus trees made the landscape appear like the African savannah or the Australian outback, at once familiar and still foreign. The sky had a profound indifference. The Universal back lot, which was down below, made Farrell uneasy, since it could be molded into appearing like anything, the steppes of Asia, the plains of Africa, or anything else. The sets were built to appear like a backstreet in Paris, Rome, Prague, or any place at all. Nothing definite in that piece of land: just the possibility of a million illusions.

  The pullout at the side of the road was along the top of a slope too steep to build on, and Farrell walked along the brush and kept his eyes on the soft shoulder, just beyond the blacktop. Had anything been dragged across it? Did Terry have the presence of mind to brush out any track? In the middle of the night and high as a weather balloon, Terry wouldn’t stop to worry about leaving tracks. Farrell’s shoes went around the fast-food wrappers, beer cans, glassine envelopes, and small squares of paper that looked like origami but were the small sheets that had been folded into cocaine bindles. The creases looked like a piece of newspaper that had been folded into a kid’s hat. Empty now, left along with the other junk.

  An animal had left footprints in the dust. Not that large, probably a medium size dog? Something like that. Of course, Farrell knew someone could bring a dog up here to let it run around and not have to clean up after it. That could explain it. The difficulty was that everything people did left marks, tracks, signs. But it was hard to pick out one that meant something beyond just clutter.

  Another possibility presented itself. This search might not turn up what Terry had left, but something else. Something that other people had to hide, or someone to hide, and so there was a possibility of finding, say, the dead husband of a woman who had decided to cash in on his life insurance and had given him a hot shot of insulin and pushed the body into the brush up here.

  If something like that was around, what could be done? Call the cops? Farrell didn’t think so. What was he doing looking around in the brush? Well, ah, I was just. . . . No. He couldn’t say a word. And this realization, no matter what or who had been found, that he wouldn’t say a thing, only added to the sense of being in some downward suction. As though what was in the air was in the landsc
ape, the soil, too, and that it exercised a gravitation that worked against what everyone knew was the right thing to do. As the reddish mist thickened, he realized the essential fact of being alone. He considered Catherine, and he imagined talking to her, or saying, “I’d like to ask you something. What do you do when you’re feeling alone?”

  “Why, nothing,” she’d say. “You wait.”

  “You mean, you pick your chances?”

  “Yeah,” she’d said. “If you can.”

  “And the right thing is vengeance?”

  The dog tracks went into the brush, which had to be pushed out of the way. Nothing sounds like that buzz of a rattlesnake, sort of similar to a toaster on the fritz. Or some timer that is meant to wake you from the deepest sleep. Sometimes, after pulling the brush one way and then another, after spreading it, the branches snapped into his face. The slight trickle of blood was like an ant crawling on his cheek or the side of his face, and when he wiped it away and then put his finger in his mouth, the sea-like taste of blood lingered. The taste fit the brush, the dust, the valley in the distance.

  The silence was of a particular variety, not of malice, but of indifference. No animal was here, just that hiss or that emptiness after the last drops of water flow out of a pitcher. To Farrell this keen lack of sound had a visual element, like a clear piece of plastic that covered everything. Or maybe it had a slight, reddish tint.

  He faced the tracks of dogs, coyote, fox, or something else. Who knew what species were moving into the hills?

  He looked around where the tracks disappeared into nothing, then moved through the brush back toward the road, got into his car, went another hundred yards, pulled over, and examined the yellow brownish dirt of the shoulder.

  11

  AFTER THE DUST OF THE canyons, the shoulder of the road, the streets that went toward the Valley from Mulholland, after Farrell sat in his car and listened to the ticking of the engine as it cooled, he went into the house and took a bath. The tub was upstairs, a deep one like those in Japan, where you sat with the water up to your neck. It had a shape more like a refrigerator than a tub. He waited as though the water had some clue, some hint, some suggestion, but Farrell knew this was delusion and superstition. Superstition is the poor man’s religion.

  Then he made pasta puttanesca, named for whores in Rome who prepared it for their regular clients as a post-trick snack. Anchovies, oil, garlic, black olives, parsley. Puttanesca. The whore’s dinner. Who says, thought Farrell, that the unconscious doesn’t do its work?

  What was he doing? He shook his head, went to the bookshelf, and took down a hardback edition, the dust jacket a little torn at the top and bottom, since the book had been read so often. It fell open to the right place, the page he was looking for. Just a fragment, “That wild longing for clarity . . .”

  He put the book and sat down, head in his hands.

  That wild longing for clarity. . . .

  After midnight, the air was the temperature of human skin, and the warmth had the same smoothness. Indian summer in California is a few weeks of exquisite pleasantness, as though the climate had the perfume of sweet peas. The scent from the hedge, from the roses was mixed with the whiff of the hillside, the brush, and the pleasant scent of the earth and warm pavement.

  Farrell’s footsteps on the gravel path in front Rose Marie’s house made a sound like walking on crushed ice. Her door was unlocked, but as he touched it, pushed against it, he guessed she had a reason for leaving it unlocked.

  Rose Marie said, “I’m in the living room.”

  She sat on her leather sofa, and on the wall behind her she’d hung a quilt with a red and white geometric pattern. The effect was at once cheerful and precise. Rose Marie had a bottle of vodka on the cardboard box she was using for a table. Some ice, too, and two glasses. She poured the water-colored liquor into two glasses and sat there, not drinking, just staring at Farrell. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and the slight freckles showed on her nose. Her fingers were shaking when she reached for her glass, although she kept her eyes on Farrell’s.

  “Why are you here?” she said. “I didn’t ask you to come.”

  Something lingered in the air, a charge, as when humid air and heat let you know that a flash of electricity is just about to reveal itself.

  “Now that you’re here, why don’t you sit down?”

  He sat down next to her. Her scent, from her hair and skin, was a mixture of the ocean and something else, that dark scent of the hillside. She turned her gray eyes on him. Then she tried to reach for her glass again but couldn’t do it. She blinked and looked away.

  She said, “I didn’t ask you . . . I didn’t . . .”

  He tried not to move.

  “Goddamn you,” she said. “You piece of shit, you fucking idiot.”

  She put her face next to his, the texture of her lips so close that the lines were obvious.

  “Fuck,” she said. “Fuck you.”

  She leaned closer. Her blouse was a sleeveless one, and when she raised her arm, as though to hit him, there was a slight shadow there where she hadn’t shaved. She started crying, leaning across him as though to embrace him, when she did the stubble of the underarm ran like an electric thrill against his lips. She turned back to her glass on the cardboard box, but still she couldn’t pick it up with her trembling fingers. Instead, she ripped his shirt open, the buttons flying through the air like bits from an explosion.

  “Which one was it?” he said.

  She had been alone with the effect of the children and she had gotten used to it, as though it was a shield, and now much to her dismay, her previously unacknowledged loneliness revealed itself in a complexity she hadn’t ever imagined, haziness filled with desire, and with a suddenly apparent need for someone else. In the moment, she didn’t have time to consider the desire mixed with need and with an intensity that left her trembling. She was left in a new circumstance, which was an awareness of how much vitality she had taken from the children, and when it was gone, she was desperate for a replacement, or a quality that soothed her as she trembled with the effect of death and desire. And the opportunity that came from the sudden appearance, out of nowhere, of the man who sat next to her.

  Her palm made a loud slap on his cheek and he tasted blood, the same as when he had scratched himself looking for the British girl and had tasted the blood on his fingers. Rose Marie leaned forward, her scent, her smooth skin, the crush of a breast against him, the ripping sound as she tore at her jeans. Smooth skin, her heaving against him, and her breath on his cheek as she said, “So, so . . . ?” She took his hand and they went upstairs to her bed, which wasn’t made and had the scent of her sleep on the sheets, and there, as she ripped her underwear, her sheer panties, she pulled him down and said, here, here, here, don’t move, just stay, just comfort, comfort. The scent of the ocean, or the hillside, the roses all seem to linger in the room, and the rustle of the sheets blended with the gravelly rush of an occasional car as it went up the canyon. Out the window, above the hillside, the red glow of the city lingered, and even then, the light of an occasional star penetrated the mist. As the warm air outside cooled, the first hint of fog began to appear, and then she started to cry again, pulling him closer.

  She said, “Just stay here for a while. Don’t say a word. Not a word. Or, I will kill you.”

  The sound, or the hush of the hillside, a wild dog or coyote or something moved in the undergrowth, and then another car came along, the dust from the road filling the air and making a cloud of bright points in the headlights of the car that followed. So, they just waited, breathing, feeling the damp places get cold.

  “It happens so fast with the kids,” she said.

  “Which one?” he said.

  “Oh, shit,” she said.

  “A favorite?” he said.

  “They are all favorites,” she said.

  “Catherine?” he said.

  “No,” said Rose Marie. “It wasn’t Catherine. It was a girl
too sick to come to meet you. But I don’t think Catherine has too much time. Either.”

  “What was the girl’s name?”

  “Janey,” she said. “The girl just vanished . . . just like that.”

  Rose Marie put her hand on Farrell’s face, then went downstairs to the kitchen for ice, which she brought in a cloth napkin. The ice in a napkin felt cool on his cheek.

  She said, “I didn’t hurt you, did I? I was just so . . .”

  She pushed the napkin harder against his cheek.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  “More rough trade, huh?” she said.

  “No,” he said. “It just doesn’t matter.”

  “Don’t you dare say you are sorry,” she said. “About my kid. About Janey.”

  Rose Marie glanced down as she trembled.

  “By the way,” she said, when she glanced up again, “Catherine really likes you. She sent me a text. I think she even has a crush on you.”

  “She’s lovely,” he said. “She’d grow into a lovely woman.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And you know what? She knows I have a crush on you, too.” Rose Marie swallowed.

  “I’m sorry I was like that,” she said. “That I slapped you.”

  “It takes more than that to hurt me,” he said.

  She scrambled some eggs and they sat at her kitchen table and ate them, not saying a word. Then she was able to have a drink and looked at him.

  “Catherine wants you to do the right thing. I do, too.”

  “I know,” he said. “I’m working on it.”

  “The kids really liked you. And they want to know about Terry Peregrine.”

  “He’s weak and scared,” he said. “That’s the most dangerous man there is.”

  “They don’t have to know that, do they?”

  He shrugged.

  “Just let me stay for a while,” he said. “So, I can think things over.”

  “I’m going to take a shower,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “No. Just lie down with me. Let’s go back upstairs.”