“She’ll get busted and point right to you.”
“My fingerprints aren’t on that bill, and she tells people she flies to Jupiter in a round spaceship once a month. Who’s going to believe her about anything?”
They slowly cruised along the empty damp streets until Bill stopped his car in front of Maggie’s driveway.
“So what now? Do you think you can find Patty?”
“Finding a transient is not an easy thing to do. Plus, I don’t think we need her anyway. She either threw your clock away or unloaded it. The fact that she paid twenty bucks for it tells me it’s still around town. I’ll check some secondhand stores, and I’ve got a couple of other things I might look in to.”
“So what you are telling me is we have nothing. That we are basically back to where we started.”
“No, that isn’t what I’m saying, but if I come up with something I’ll call and let you know. And if you hear something useful, or if you come up with another idea you call me first, okay? I told you before you did it that putting up posters was a lousy idea. For more reasons than you could imagine.”
“You know about those, huh?”
“Of course I know. I’m a trained detective. Did you really think something like that would slip past me?”
Maggie caught MJ as the latter was halfway up the stairs to the little garage apartment. “So what’s up, dearie? I saw Bill’s car, any good news?”
“Not as far as I’m concerned.” Mary Jean thought for a few seconds before she continued. “You know, Maggie, I don’t want to seem ungrateful, and I hate to rag on your friends, but you kept telling me how smart Bill is, and to be brutally honest, he doesn’t seem to be the brightest light.”
“Don’t let his gruff appearance fool you, sweetie. Sometimes people are so complicated that they just seem simple.”
Mary Jean carried that thought with her as she entered the apartment where Nadine was intently focused on The Price is Right.
“Did I hear you talking to Maggie?”
“Yeah, and if what she told me is true, you should go apply to help design the next Space Shuttle.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. I’m going to bed. If someone calls about my clock wake me, otherwise don’t.”
Monday and Tuesday night, work for Mary Jean was almost pleasurable, at least the regimented chaos of cocktailing kept her mind off other things. During the day she did laundry, cleaned the apartment, shopped for food and cooked, basically trying to force her life into a normal stable pattern. But while she went through the motions with these errands she wasn’t totally there. Part of her was still obsessing, searching for a solution, a new clue, a new angle, something, anything that would help with the seemingly futile search for her wayward timepiece.
By Wednesday afternoon, with no new news, she had just about had it. She was deciding whether to go out and get pathetically drunk or just throw in the towel on her clock search, or both, when the phone rang.
“Hello.”
“Mary Jean?”
“Yes.”
“This is Dick Hartoonian from Uncle Tom’s, you were in here a couple of weeks ago looking for Red Hat Patty. I called to tell you she left town.”
“Yes, I heard that, Dick.” Mary Jean’s suddenly charged hopes were now quickly oozing away like the air in a punctured tire. “Thanks for calling though.”
“Well, that’s not all. You see I matched up your number to the one on these posters I seen all over the neighborhood. You the one looking for that ugly pyramid-shaped clock?”
“Yes, I mean no it’s not ugly, well actually it is kind of ugly but…. Dick you wouldn’t know where it is would you? I mean I can’t pay a big reward or anything but…”
“Well, actually no, but I thought about you looking for Patty, and you looking for that clock, and well, I put two and two together with something I overheard Patty saying to somebody in here Sunday morning.”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t know if it will help ya, but she said she couldn’t leave town until ‘she unloaded the pyramid on the ‘Pyramid Guy’.”
“That’s it?”
“My eavesdropping is not as good as it use to be. But if it can help you I’m not really looking for a reward, but if ”
“Good, thanks.” MJ slammed down the receiver, jumped up, and began to frantically search around the room for Bill’s business card. She found it and tried his number. He answered on the second ring, and she filled him in on her recent conversation.
“Pyramid Guy? Does that tell you anything?” MJ asked.
“It just might. In fact it gives me some ideas. Let me follow this up, and I’ll get back to you.”
“No, no, no. If this lead leads to a lead I want to go with you, please, please, I’m going nuts sitting around here.”
Bill paused, and MJ could hear him expelling a large breath. “Okay, I’ll be by there in fifteen or twenty minutes. Be out in front of your place or I’m not stopping. Now get off the line I’ve got a couple of calls to make.”
MJ was at her post in ten minutes patiently waiting for her ride. When Bill pulled up she opened the door and jumped into the Buick.
“See, I told you my posters would pay off.”
“Don’t count your chickens yet, Queenie. This lead might lead to something, but it’s still just a shot in the dark.”
“So where to?”
“I’ve got an appointment to talk to a guy at Channel 37.”
“Great, first we take care of your business, and then we’ll get around to mine. Well, that’s okay. I guess when you are working for nothing ”
“This is all about your business, Queenie.” Bill glanced at MJ for just a second. “Think about it, ‘Pyramid Guy’. Now who around these parts is so queer for pyramids he puts one on the letterhead of his newspaper, radio and TV stations, and who bought an overpriced dilapidated theater just because it had a pyramid on top, and who shucked his marriage and whole business so he can move to the foothills where he can sit under a pyramid meditating all the livelong day?”
“Hoyt Bringham? He moved to the foothills?”
“That’s what I hear.”
“And he owns Channel 37. So you’ve got an appointment with him? All right.”
“Not exactly. His son runs the station. Hoyt turned everything over to his kids about a year ago so he could become a recluse. His son is going to call him to see if he’ll meet with us.”
“Yeah, it all makes sense. Pyramid Man, who else could that seedy little bitch have been talking about? I think we’re really on to something, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know. Think about it, I’ve got to scramble to get hold of him and I know the guy. How could Patty get hold of him? It’s a long shot, but if that’s all you got, you got to go with it.”
“You know him? You’re like friends?”
“Not really friends. I did some work for him several years back. I got some really nice photos of his wife getting it on with the neighbor from down the street. They saved Hoyt a ton of money in the divorce.”
“But his wife got the theater?”
“That was his third wife. The pictures I got were of his second wife. The kid we are on the way to met is from his first. Old Hoyt is quite a piece of work.”
“Tell me about it. I’ve waited on him dozens of times at different restaurants over the years. He’s usually drunk and is always arrogant, demanding and cruel.” She paused, “But he did tip well.”
“Like I was saying, even if Patty somehow found out where he lived, how could she peddle her ass all the way up to the foothills to see him?” Bill looked over at MJ beginning to frown and slump. “Oh, don’t give up yet, Queenie, these street people seem to find a way to get things done if they have a mind to. I just didn’t want you getting your hopes too high until we see what’s what.”
Fifteen minutes later MJ and Bill were seated in a small room watching Jeffery Bringham watching a videotape of a woman seated behind a
desk reading a news report about a broken sewer line in Indio. “Isn’t she great? She starts here in two weeks. I locked her up to a five-year deal. Look at that complexion, that hair, those cheekbones. Is this woman made for journalism or what?” Smiling, Jeffery stared at the screen for another full thirty seconds before he forced himself to turn off the tape. He rolled his chair back until he was facing Bill and Mary Jean. “My dad said to come up anytime this afternoon, which was real surprising. He doesn’t see too many people.” Bringham took a piece of paper from his desk, and handed it to Bill. “He’s about twenty-five miles outside town. It’s not hard to find. This map will show you how to get there.”
“I’m a little leery about what to expect. I mean a workaholic like him retiring so suddenly. Is it really true?”
Jeffery nodded his head. “Yep, he turned the station over to me. My older sister got the newspaper, and my younger brother the radio station. The little bitch he just divorced got the theater, but she can have it. It’s always been more of a burden than anything else.”
“With most people his age retirement is a good thing, but rumor has it that Hoyt’s gone a bit off the deep end, that he’s secluded himself up in the foothills, drinking carrot juice and sitting around meditating inside a wooden pyramid. I mean, just between you and me, Jeff, did he take this last divorce hard or what?”
Jeffery laughed. “He’s changed since his heart attack. You’ll see that, but he’s not nuts. He’s still real intense. I just suppose he’s channeled his energy and time more fully into the whole Egyptology thing. You know the great Pyramids are still quite a mystery, how they were built and why, and he’s always been fascinated by it all I suppose. Like that damn theater, I remember I was about ten when he bought it. We’d drive down there and just sit in his Cadillac for what seemed like hours while he’d stare at that big ugly thing, obsessed, like Richard Dreyfus and the mashed potatoes in Close Encounters. But instead of getting it out of his system, his interest in the whole pyramid power stuff just gradually grew over the years, I guess. I don’t know all that’s going on with him. Hey, he’s always done whatever he’s wanted, and believe me nobody is going to change him. We’re on good terms, and he leaves me alone to run the station. That’s all I care about.”
The map was crude but detailed enough that Bill could tell Bringham lived in the short hills behind Little Town Lake, a huge reservoir behind Friar Dam twenty miles north of town.
Once they were off the short mid-city freeway, past the newest sprawl of suburbia, and into the wide-open area of farming and grazing land, the road changed to a two-lane road of long gently rising curves. Bill, listening to Mozart performed by a string quartet, kept the Buick at a smooth pace, several miles below the speed limit. Mary Jean, staring through the windshield, trying to appear calm, was in fact a silent raging mass of anxiety. She didn’t talk for fear the distraction would slow Bill even more, but she wished she had something she could say that would light a fire under his ass and get him to speed up. Every time they came around a curve or up a rise, and she could see the huge dam towering in the distance, she felt like leaning over and stomping on the accelerator pedal to help shoot them to their destination, to dissolve the morbid anticipation, to find out if this trip was another dead-end or a lucky detour to pure happiness.
Finally they went through the tiny town of Friar then past the dam and the entrance to the lake, continuing on and up toward the short vacant hills which surrounded the backside of the reservoir.
Bill checked the map then made a sharp left onto a narrow road so steep it seemed almost vertical for over a mile. Once the road leveled it began a series of treacherous turns, which Bill navigated with one eye on the road and one on the map. He slowed to a stop.
“I think it’s back there,” he said. After backing up about fifty yards, he turned into a dirt driveway and past a raised electronic gate. He stopped and checked the address, posted on the top railing of a weary, wooden corral fence, against his written directions. “This is it, but I don’t believe it.”
“What?”
“Well look. That’s the only thing here. I find it hard to believe one of the richest guys in the whole valley is living in an old, beat-up, single-wide trailer.”
“They say he’s eccentric.”
“Because he’s rich. If you’re poor they just call you crazy.”
Bill slowly drove the Buick toward the trailer then stopped as they were quickly surrounded by half a dozen yapping dogs, all different makes, sizes and models. Mary Jean began to freak. Her arms and legs tightened towards her chest as she slid away from the door to the middle of the bench seat.
“Let me guess. You are afraid of dogs.”
“Terrified!”
Bill shook his head as he switched off the engine. “Why is it whenever I take you anywhere there always comes a time when I wished I hadn’t?”
“How was I supposed to know he had a goddamn zoo up here?” Mary Jean said, and just as she finished, she noticed Hoyt Bringham exiting his trailer, advancing toward the car. She recognized him, the same white hair and thin build but something seemed different. At first she thought it was the black sweat suit and white sneakers he was wearing instead of the tailored suits she had always seen him in before. But that wasn’t all of it. She didn’t remember him seeming so loose and athletic, and the bright generous smile he wore seemed as alien to him as the planet Neptune.
Bill got out and met Bringham just in front of the Buick where they shook hands while the pack of dogs circled them. After a short conversation, Bringham looked straight through the windshield at Mary Jean. His smile widened. He said something else to Bill then came around to the passenger side of the car and motioned for MJ to roll down the window. She couldn’t; power windows with the engine cut. Bringham opened her door just a crack, and Mary Jean slid closer to the steering wheel.
“Young lady, I understand you have a fear of dogs,” he said to MJ who nodded like a wounded mute. “I want you to realize this is the perfect time to conquer that fear. These mutts wouldn’t hurt a fly. They are probably more afraid of you biting them than you should be of them biting you.” He opened the car door wider, reached in and offered his hand. “Come on young lady, let’s take that first big step. I guarantee you’ll be glad you did.”
After a little hesitation she took his hand. After another little pause she began to slide across the seat to exit the car, unsure of her sudden surge of courage, unsure of the sudden feeling of trust she felt, other than she was somehow automatically drawn to this man with the bright smile and exuberant stare from the same blue eyes she remembered being terse and sinister enough to make her, the most hard-core, seen-it-all waitress in all of Ashland, nervous.
“Leave her alone,” Bringham said to his pack of hounds, and they did, and soon MJ and Bill were inside the trailer, seated next to each other on a large, soft, leather sofa, which seemed to take up half the small room.
Bringham sat near them in a comfortable-looking overstuffed chair angled to face a small television next to the leather couch.
Bill introduced Mary Jean to Bringham.
“It’s my pleasure young lady.” Bringham stared at her. “But I have the feeling we have met before.”
“I waitressed at the Blue Lantern for two years and at Lugi’s for three. I’ve served you many times.”
“Not the most pleasant experience, I’m sure.”
“Well, ahhh…”
“No need to be kind. Back then I was a mean, vengeful, and very demanding person. I don’t think I really wanted to be, I just was. But I tipped well, didn’t I?”
“Not bad.”
“Well.” He smiled. “At least that’s something. And you Bill, how long since we did business together? Five? Six years?”
“More like seven or eight.”
Bringham leaned back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling. “That was back when I still was convinced the world revolved around me. When I was entrenched in my empire and surroun
ded by all the commotion and chaos.” He looked at the pair on the couch. “Controlled chaos, which I thought sustained me, which I thought I loved.” He smiled. “Until I came to realize I was just very, very afraid.”
“You? Afraid? You certainly never seemed that way to me,” Bill said. “Afraid of what?”
“Of not having the chaos.” As Bringham smiled broader his eyes seemed to sparkle. “I was afraid of having to face up to peace and serenity. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was very afraid, and I’m sure it was that fear that drove me to be such a madman, such a manic achiever, and such a son of a bitch.”
Bringham looked at Bill, at MJ, then back at Bill. “Oh, I know what you are probably thinking. I know what people are asking, ‘has he gone completely crazy?’, ‘is this Howard Hughes all over again?’, ‘has he turned into a Bible thumping Jesus freak?’. Well, no, no, no, would be the answers. But I see now that I have always been very spiritual but not the ‘leave your mind at the door and pick up your crayons’ type of devotee. My problem with religious fundamentals of any type—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, whatever—besides the fact that their narrow-minded bigotry shuts them off from other doctrines, is they aren’t seeking answers, they’re seeking peace from having to ask questions. But what is life about except questions? Questions, and answers which breed more questions.”
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