No Cure for Love

by Peter Robinson

  Arvo shook his head in sympathy.

  “And that was just for starters,” Martha went on. “As if that wasn’t enough he hits the guy flush in the face and breaks his nose. Blood all over the place. Then he starts banging the guy’s head on the table.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Do? Well, luckily for us the guy was playing away from home—some asshole at a weedkiller convention or something—and he didn’t want his wife and kids to know he’d been sniffing around strange pussy. So we got him to the hospital, told them he’d been mugged, and got him taken care of. It wasn’t too hard to dissuade him from bringing the cops in. I got rid of Mitch.”

  The music stopped and the dancer took a bow, almost falling off the stage as she did so. Martha pulled a face of disgust at the girl but said nothing. Arvo guessed the poor anemic dancer didn’t have much longer in this job.

  Martha laughed.

  “What?” Arvo asked.

  “Just remembering. The girl, the dancer the asshole was grabbing. I think she and Mitch had a thing going. She kind of liked the attention, anyway. I think it excited her. Mitch was her hero for the night.”

  So the girl had been impressed by Mitch’s use of violence. Enough, Arvo wondered, to make him think, as his mind became more unbalanced, that the way to a woman’s heart was to kill for her? “Do you remember her name?” he asked.

  “Candi, I think. With an ‘i.’”

  Arvo made a note of it. Hadn’t Carl Buxton mentioned a Candi, too? “Would you happen to have her address anywhere?”

  Martha shook her head. “Sorry, honey. Candi’s ancient history. She was only with us a couple of weeks, as I remember, and we never did get around to the paperwork.”

  “How did Mitch react to being fired?” Arvo asked.

  “Pretty well. Admitted he got out of line. Begged for another chance, of course. Who doesn’t? When he saw he wasn’t going to get it, he said he’d got a better job lined up anyway and then he up and left.”

  “Was there a job?”

  “Search me.”

  “Did he make any threats of revenge?”

  “Nope.”

  “And there were no unusual incidents afterwards?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know anything about him?” Arvo asked. “His private life, his background? That sort of thing.”

  Martha shook her head. “Sorry. I never socialize with the hired help.”

  “Do you know if he’d ever been in trouble with the police?”

  “I’d say he’d be hard-pressed not to have been, wouldn’t you? But I can’t say for certain. He sure as hell didn’t put it in his résumé.”

  “What about a mental institution?”

  She shook her head. “He always seemed in control to me, even when he broke the guy’s arm. Cool as anything. But I suppose there are all kinds of mental illness. He was very manipulative, but that’s hardly a mental illness, is it, or most of our politicians would be in the crazy house.” She shook her head. “Again, I can’t say I know anything about it. Sorry.”

  “Parents? Family?”

  “No—Oh, wait a minute. One of the girls had been talking to him and she said she felt sorry for him because his parents died when he was young and he’d been raised by foster- parents. He had a brother and a sister, too, but I never saw them. Something wrong with the brother, some sort of disability.”

  “A mental disability?”

  “No. Physical. Blind or something. Sorry, I can’t remember.”

  The music blared up again as another dancer hit the stage.

  “You must have had some personal details?” Arvo said. “Maybe from his employment application?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you still have it?”

  “I think so. In the office.”

  “May I—”

  But Martha was already on her feet. “Wait here,” she said. Then she turned and added to the bartender, “Give him a shot of bourbon while he’s waiting. On the house.”

  Arvo accepted his drink, thanked the bartender and swiveled his stool to watch the show.

  She was a bouncy blond with a bright toothpaste smile, very large and impossibly firm breasts, and a perky, energetic dancing style. She certainly looked healthy enough, and Arvo found her act about as sexy as watching an aerobics class. But then, he reflected, some people found aerobics classes sexy. Hadn’t most of the people who watched that “20-Minute Workout’ years ago been men? It took all sorts.

  Martha came back with a sheet of paper in her hand. She handed it to Arvo and he looked over the scant information. She was right; it didn’t say much. It did, however, give a Social Security number, a reference address, from another bar by the looks of it, and an address and telephone number on Collingwood.

  Arvo pointed to the address. “Where is that?” he asked.

  “He’s not there any more,” said Martha. “I can save you the trouble of going there. We mailed a couple of forms to him, Internal Revenue stuff, but they came back return to sender.”

  Arvo nodded. “Can you remember exactly when that was?”

  Martha frowned. “Not exactly, no. But I’d guess it was about six, maybe nine, months ago.”

  “Where is Collingwood, anyway?” he asked.

  “It’s down past the end of Market Street. In the Castro.”

  Arvo looked up from his notebook with wide eyes. “The Castro? Isn’t that—”

  Martha waggled her left wrist. “Sure is, honey.”

  34

  SARAH DIDN’T GET ARVO’S MESSAGE BECAUSE stars simply don’t get most of the messages people leave for them. Given that they are protected by a gauntlet of secretaries, bureaucrats, gofers, security guards and highly guarded phone numbers, it isn’t surprising. Sometimes it seems the only people who can get through to them are the crazies.

  So Sarah wasn’t thinking about Mitch when shooting finished for the day and everyone disappeared into the night. Had she been thinking about him, it is doubtful that she would have remembered much anyway, as she had hardly noticed him; to her, he had been just another vague shape in the haze, someone to hold open a car door while she smiled, stumbled in and fell over the seat.

  It was almost nine, and Stuart should be waiting for her over in his office. At night, the lot was well lit and there were enough people still coming and going, some of them security, that Sarah didn’t feel especially afraid.

  It had been a frustrating evening spent filming a short, simple scene over and over again until Sarah got sick to death of saying, “Please, Mrs. Sanchez, you must understand we’re not here to cause you any trouble.”

  She blamed herself for not concentrating hard enough, as she had told Stuart at lunch, but if truth be told, everyone was so stunned by Jack’s murder that no one was firing on all cylinders. But, as Stuart had said, the series goes on, and you’re either on the bus or you’re off it.

  Sarah sighed. Sometimes she wished she were back in rep performing old chestnuts by the likes of Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan, with the occasional Restoration comedy thrown in for good measure. There were times when she almost missed the poky digs with the peeling wallpaper, the toilet next door flushing loudly at all hours of the night, the hot water that never worked, the cold toast and runny egg for breakfast and the overcooked roast beef and soggy sprouts for dinner.

  Instead, she spent her days surrounded by union technicians in fake courtrooms and precinct offices with computer-produced backdrops for views, speaking trite, witless dialogue.

  Still, she told herself, the money was good, and instead of the poky digs she had the beach house. Or used to have.

  As she turned a corner by a row of trailers, she heard the hum of a studio cart come up behind her and slow down. She suddenly felt exposed, found herself looking for the best direction in which to run. A group of technicians stood outside one of the sound stages having a smoke, and she knew she could make a break and dash over to them if she had to.

  She tense
d as the cart drew up alongside her, but it was only Geoff, one of the lighting technicians, a fellow Brit from Newcastle, slowing down to ask if she wanted a ride. Gratefully, she took him up on his offer. But even then she found herself wondering if he could be the one. He dropped her off at the administration block and waited outside until she had gone through the door.

  She checked in with the security guard at reception, who told her nobody would get past him. Stuart wasn’t back yet, so she waited in his office, watching Murphy Brown.

  She turned the TV off when Murphy Brown finished at nine-thirty and looked out into the long corridor to see if Stuart were coming. Though there were still some people working, most of the office workers had gone home and the place had that eerie, deserted feel of the Marie Celeste. It even looked like a long deck on an ocean liner with cabin doors on either side.

  She checked her watch again. Quarter to ten and still no sign of Stuart. What the hell could be keeping him?

  At ten o’clock, she started pacing the office, looking out the door every few minutes. At a quarter past ten she finally saw Stuart turn into the corridor from the stairwell.

  He was out of breath when he got to the office. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “Hope you weren’t worried.”

  “What happened? Long meeting?”

  “Accident on the freeway, is what. I tried to call you here, but the fucking car phone’s gone kaput.”

  Sarah smiled. “Not to mind. Ready?”

  “Let’s go.”

  They got into Stuart’s Caddy out front and waved to the guard at the gate as they left the lot. Because Sarah was regarded as being safe at the studio, and her friends were in danger, Zak the bodyguard had kept an eye on Stuart during his trip to Hollywood and his meeting there. Now he would have driven on before them to check out Stuart’s house.

  The freeway was busy, but not unusually so, and before long they were coasting Sunset heading into Brentwood.

  Flat-roofed, all white stucco, plate-glass, and sharp angles, Stuart’s house was a modernist monstrosity, at least to Sarah’s taste. Though she would never tell him so, she thought it looked like a dental clinic.

  On a slight incline, the house was reached by a semicircular driveway that turned off a residential street, ran past the front door, then rejoined the road again.

  Zak’s gray Toyota was already in the carport just off the driveway. The motion-detecting lights came on as Stuart pulled to a halt outside the front door. Inside the house, some of the lamps were lit, all synchronized by a complicated system of timers to make it always seem as if there were someone at home.

  Sarah turned her back on Stuart to get out of the car and immediately became aware of a sudden flurry of activity behind her. The next thing she knew, Stuart had slumped back in over the front seat, groaning.

  She was on her feet by the passenger door, which she hadn’t closed behind her yet, and now she saw the figure standing back in the shadows near the trunk of the car, simply beckoning for her to come, crooking his finger.

  She screamed for Zak, but nobody came.

  She jumped back in the car as quickly as she could, pulled Stuart all the way in and locked the doors. When she looked through the back window, the figure was still there, all in black, standing completely motionless, as if rooted to the spot, waiting for her to get her purse or something.

  Sarah could feel her heart pounding so hard she thought it would burst. Christ, how she wished that she could drive. She had to do something; she couldn’t just fall apart. Stuart was groaning beside her clutching his stomach, maybe dying, and she was sitting there like a fool waiting for the cavalry to come.

  There was no cavalry. Where the hell was Zak?

  And still the dark figure stood there behind the car, watching. All she could make out was that he was medium height, fairly muscular, and blond-haired. Christ, she thought, could it even be Zak?

  The car doors were locked; the phone didn’t work; the key was still in the ignition. There was only one thing she could do.

  Turning sideways, she dragged Stuart over toward the passenger side. It took all her strength, but there was a lot of room to maneuver inside the Caddy, and she finally did it. When Stuart was half on the passenger seat and half on the floor, she climbed over the back and into the driver’s seat.

  Her hand slipped on the leather and when she saw the whole seat was glossy and slippery with blood, she almost lost control.

  She pounded the wheel and screamed, shutting her eyes and praying all the horror would go away and she would wake up to the sun on the Pacific. But Stuart was groaning on the floor, curled in the fetal position. She had to do something now.

  Then Sarah looked out of the window to the passenger side and saw the face of her tormentor staring back at her. She couldn’t make out his features clearly because they were superimposed on her own reflection in the glass, but she could have sworn he was smiling at her. He looked pleased with himself.

  He tapped on the window.

  Sarah took a deep breath and turned the key in the ignition.

  35

  ARVO WAITED FOR THE STOPLIGHT AT BROADWAY and Columbus, breathing out plumes of fog and holding his jacket collar closed around his throat to keep out the chill.

  There was an Italian restaurant near here, he remembered, where he had dined with Nyreen on their one and only weekend in San Francisco last March. What a weekend it had been: glorious sunshine, walking, eating, shopping, making love, a ferry ride to Sausalito and deli sandwiches and wine on the beach looking back over at the San Francisco skyline.

  No, he mustn’t get caught up in those memories again. While cops can enjoy beauty as much as the next person, given the right circumstances, the job often alters their perceptions, and they don’t always see things the same way other people do.

  Cop vision, Arvo had often thought, compares more to those heat-sensitive photographs that describe the world in reds and greens and oranges, the way he remembered seeing the city spread out on the monitor during a night ride in one of the LAPD helicopters. In vivid, shifting primary colors, they see the dark side, the predators and prey, losers, grifters, the starving and the desperate, the con men, the lost souls and the psychos.

  Finally, Arvo was able to cross. He started down Columbus, passed the City Lights Bookstore and found Vesuvio’s, directly across the garbage-strewn Jack Kerouac Alley.

  Inside was almost as colorful as the mosaic-like stained-glass and tile exterior, with local artworks on the walls, along with a framed set of W. C. Fields playing cards, each with a photo and a legendary saying from the old curmudgeon himself. The place was crowded and noisy, but at some of the tables, people were ignoring the clamor all around them and sitting hunched forward, hands over their ears, concentrating on chess games. Around the top was a gallery with more tables looking down on the bar’s main floor. Dress styles and ages varied, Arvo noticed, but there was a general air of youth and artiness.

  The small area behind the bar was cluttered, too, and most of the stools were taken. A small canvas screen hung high on the wall above the ranged bottles, and a slide show of old Victorian nudes and music-hall personalities flickered over its surface.

  When he had got his glass of Anchor Steam beer, Arvo asked the woman behind the bar if she had ever heard of Mitch Cameron, and gave as good a description as he had. She said he sounded vaguely familiar but it would be better to ask Cal over there, because Cal had been around forever and knew everyone.

  Cal was a modern beatnik of about fifty, with a beard and wispy gray hair poking out of a black beret cocked at a rakish angle. He was sitting at the bar reading a book of poetry written in lower-case letters with lines of wildly differing lengths. Beside it was a notebook and a chewed yellow HB pencil stub.

  When Arvo tapped him on the shoulder, he turned his head slowly. His eyes were as gray as his beard and attempted—but didn’t quite manage, in Arvo’s estimation—a look of infinite wisdom and compassion.

  “I’m l
ooking for someone who knows a guy called Mitch Cameron,” Arvo said, without introducing himself as a cop. “The bartender said you know everyone.”

  Cal smiled. “Guess that’s true. Mitch Cameron, you say?” His face darkened a little. “Sure, I know him. He hasn’t been around here for a year or more.”

  “Any idea where he might be?”

  “No. And I can’t say I care, either. I didn’t really know him well. What happened was, one day he showed me his poems and asked me what I thought.”

  “What did you think?”

  “They rhymed, for Chrissake!”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That they were full of clichés and pious platitudes masquerading as philosophy, and that he should send them to those greeting-card people. What’s their name? Hallmark?”

  “How did he respond?”

  “Punched me in the face, picked up his folder and walked away. Why are you asking? You a cop or something?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Arvo.

  “I knew it. I can spot cops a mile away, man.”

  Good for you, Arvo thought. “Some people say he’s a scary character.”

  “Maybe they should’ve told me that before I said what I thought of his poetry. He damn near broke my jaw. That’s scary enough for me. The man’s crazy.”

  “Know where he might be right now?”

  “Nope. Sorry, man, I can’t help you, but there’s one of the chicks used to run with his crowd upstairs. Can’t miss her. Ditzy looking brunette, strictly space cadet, nobody home.” He tapped his skull. It didn’t echo, but Arvo got the point. “Hangs out in the lady psychiatrists’ booth.” And he turned back to his poetry book, scribbling something illegible in the margin.