An hour later, I'd resigned myself to the latter. I felt like I was writing somebody else's novel, like a literary medium doing automatic typing for some second-rate mystery writer in the sky. I had no idea how it was going to turn out.
With a resigned sigh I turned on the printer and churned out what I'd written so far. After several minutes of irritating zipping sounds, five pages lay in the tray. Reading over them, I realized that I'd left somebody out.
Back to the keyboard. I'd never learn to handle it the way Morris did. For him it was a musical instrument, full of mysterious chords and unexpected progressions, modulations, and tone clusters. For me it was an expensive alternative to the ball-point pen. For approximately the thousandth time I wondered why I'd bought the damn thing.
Then, partway through a word, I stopped and stared at the screen. I was writing about Birdie, and the word I was writing was secretary. The first six letters were a word in themselves, and the word was secret.
A secretary, in the original meaning of the word, was one who kept someone else's secrets. Birdie, with his terrible hairdo, his Philippine shirt, and his brutal forearms, materialized front and center in my mind's eye and grinned at me. Birdie knew the secrets of the data base. Birdie kept the day-to-day secrets of Mrs. Brussels' appointment book. What other secrets did Birdie keep?
Without thinking about what I was doing, I got up and poured another cup of coffee. It tasted like battery acid; the pot had been on the warmer for hours. I spit it out and rinsed the pot. I even washed my cup, something I usually don't do until all six cups have been used up. I would really, I thought, like to take a look inside Birdie's house.
But, as usual, there was a problem or, rather, two problems. The first problem was that it might endanger Aimee. Playing by the rules, I should have waited until the next day, and that was the second problem. The next day was Saturday, and on Saturday Birdie would probably be home. There's a very good reason why most domestic burglaries, particularly in this age of two-family paychecks, happen on weekdays. Victims observe the work ethic. Burglars don't. There are almost no burglaries during the daylight hours on weekends.
As usual, when faced with something I wanted to do and a good reason not to do it, I rationalized. It's one of the patterns of my life. On a different level, it was the mental trait that had allowed me to talk myself into being unfaithful to Eleanor: she'd never find out about it, I told myself, and it couldn't really hurt her as long as I was clear about whom I actually loved. And, of course, she always found out about it and it always hurt her. Eventually it hurt her to the point where she decided it would be less painful to live without me. And now she was in China investigating extended families and I was floundering around L.A. looking for lost children.
My rationalization about Birdie's house was simple. Don't touch anything, and no one will know. Leave no traces. Just look around and come home. It'll be a head start, I said to myself in my most convincing interior-monologue tone, something I'll have to do anyway when Mrs. Sorrell calls to say that Aimee hasn't been returned. If I didn't do it on Friday, I'd have to wait until Monday. Three lost days, days that might either kill Aimee or save her life. At the time, it seemed like a powerful argument.
Powerful or not, I had the self-control to wait until afternoon. For all I knew, Birdie went home for lunch. I didn't want to walk in on him while he was forking his quiche or gnawing on his cigars or whatever it was that had stunted his growth.
In the meantime, I didn't know where he lived. I didn't even know his last name. I went back to the pad on which I'd written everything I'd learned about the numbers on his auto-redial buttons.
“Doggies Do,” said the same peevish voice. He had to do that five days a week. It was a miracle that he wasn't in a straitjacket.
“I want to make an appointment for a perm,” I said flutingly. I made airy little hand gestures to get into the mode. “And a nail clip too. You should see what she's doing to the shantung on my couch.”
“Your name?”
“Dorfenbecker,” I said, gambling that there wasn't another one.
“Hmmmm,” he said. Pages flapped. “Have you been in before, Mr. Dorfenbecker?”
“No. It's my very first time.”
“How did you learn about us? Yellow Pages? One of our ads in the Times or the HeraldExaminer or DogDigest?”
“Oh, no, no, no. A very sweet man on my block recommended you. He said you were just marvelous. Birdie something; I'm afraid I don't remember his last name.”
“That would be Mr. Skinker.”
“Yes, of course, Mr. Skinker.”
“Such a cute nickname, Birdie. When would you like to come in?”
“Tuesday?” By Tuesday it would be over one way or the other.
“Fine. And what kind of a dog is it, Mr. Dorfenbecker?”
I tried to think of a breed. “A Shetland,” I said.
There was a pause. I could hear a pencil tapping on a desk. “A Shetland is a pony,” he said. “We don't do horses.”
“Well, of course you don't,” I said. “And Shetlands don't claw couches, at least not unless you keep them in the house. I didn't say Shetland. I said sheltie.”
“Silly me,” he said. “Tuesday at two?”
“Peachy.”
“Your phone number?”
I gave him Roxanne's. Roxanne was never home and she didn't have an answering machine. And if he did get her and she said she'd never heard of Mr. Dorfenbecker, he'd just think he'd transposed a digit.
“See you Tuesday at two,” he said. “Ciao.”
“Ciao yourself,” I said, hanging up and going back to my pad.
“Holistic Pet Clinic,” said the next voice on the third ring. “A holistically healthy pet is a happy pet.” The voice belonged to a female.
“This is Mr. Simon, Animal Regulation,” I said.
“Mr. Simon,” she said, all business. “What can we do for you?”
“I've got an application for license renewal in front of me,” I said, “and the man who filled it out neglected to give us his address. You're listed as the veterinarian who gave his dog her booster shots.”
“Yes?” she said.
“Well, I can't send him his license tags without an address,” I said. Dogs whooped in the background.
“How thoughtful of you,” she said. To someone else she said, “Your dog is really terrorizing that kitty. Could you keep him closer to you, please?”
Another job I was glad I didn't have. “His name is Skinker. The dog is a Yorkshire terrier, it says here.”
“Just a moment.” She dropped the phone to the counter, and I listened to various quadrupeds making their trademark noises as I regretted pouring the battery acid down the sink. A little battery acid was just what I needed.
“Bertram Skinker,” she said, “1310 Janet Drive, West Hollywood 90068.”
“Thank you,” I said, writing it down.
“Don't mention it. Ah, ah,” she said, “not on the floor.”
At two o'clock I was driving Alice up and down Janet Drive. Janet was a quiet, curving street just barely on the wrong side of Doheny, within envy distance of Beverly Hills. West of Doheny was the Land of Oz, distinguished by desirable zip codes and real-estate values that were accelerating at the speed of light.
Janet Drive was short and almost unpleasantly sweet. There were only twelve houses on each side, mostly small one-story affairs hiding behind privacy walls and growths of nitrogen-rich bougainvillea. They probably cost five thousand dollars to build in the forties, and they were now going in the high threes, as in three hundred thousand. All the houses were painted one of the two current decorator colors, either clamshell white or industrial gray. Thirteen-ten was out of sight behind the full battlement, both an eight-foot-high privacy wall and a flourishing hedge of champagne-colored bougainvillea. I parked, climbed out, and wished for cheap locks.
Inside the privacy wall, one glance at the door reaffirmed my worst fears. Birdie knew about locks. T
here were three, and only one of them was junk. The one that worried me most was a Medeco double dead bolt, anchored both in the wall to the left of the door and in the concrete slab on which the house had been built. It worried me so much that I walked around the house to check out the back door.
I couldn't get to the back door. Both sides of the house were surrounded by yet another wall, this one more than ten feet tall, and on the right the wall was gated. The gate was as tall as the wall and secured by a heavy combination lock. I knew nothing about combination locks.
So I went back to the front door. Something, presumably Woofers, yapped in a dog version of Morris Gurstein's voice as I worked on the first two locks. They went without too much trouble, leaving me confronted with the Medeco. The Medeco took me almost forty minutes, while Woofers shrilled at me and I wondered whether Birdie worked banker's hours on Fridays. If he did, if he came home and caught me, I might literally be killing Aimee. That is, if she weren't already dead and buried.
Finally the lock groaned and turned to the right, and the arms of the dead bolt shuddered out of position. I realized that I was perspiring profusely. I pushed the door inward and looked down, braced for Woofers' onslaught. Even a little dog can lacerate an ankle, and I didn't want to leave blood on Birdie's floor.
What I was looking at was expensive fuchsia-colored wall-to-wall carpet. Woofers, once the door had creaked open, had beaten a hasty retreat. I went in with new courage and closed the door behind me.
“Whoooo,” I said in a falsetto that rose and fell like a graph of the Doppler effect. “Whoo-oo, Woofers.”
Woofers declined to appear. Instead, something that sounded like a fly being unzipped issued from the room at the end of the entrance hall. It took me a moment to place it as an attempt at a growl. I mustered up my courage and looked around.
Mounted high on the walls, antique masks from Bali or someplace else in Indonesia stuck faded tongues out at me. All the other art in sight was Japanese, mostly celebrating the suicidal spirit of the samurai. In between the bloody prints-decapitations and Japanese swords being swung against invincible ghosts-the walls were covered in a rough, nubby silk of a neutral beige that brought into bright relief the colors of the silk flowers, perfectly arranged, that sprouted from hammered brass vases on the long mahogany table against the right-hand wall. To the left was a door that led into a yellow kitchen with accents of blue in the tiles above the sink, accents that were picked up by the decorator rug on the floor.
The little zipper sound came from underneath a white sectional couch in the living room. Its sections were arranged artfully around a beveled-glass-and-wrought-iron coffee table, and in the center of the coffee table was a beautifully carved wooden head from Java, a graceful girl, or perhaps a boy, wearing an ornate headdress. Her/his features were round and smooth and as impassive as a diplomat's. There was no way to know what that face had seen.
I sat on the couch, and the growling stopped. Propping my feet on top of the coffee table as ankle insurance, I said, “Woofers. Hello, Woofers. Good doggie.” The growling began again, but it sounded questioning. “Good old Woofers,” I said, “the guardian of the castle. Best dog in the world. What a good dog.”
Now there was a tiny thumping against the bottom of the couch. She'd traded ends, going from the larynx to the tail, always a positive sign. Still talking, I got up and headed for the kitchen, stepping around an area rug from China that must have cost two thousand dollars, and the tempo of the thumping accelerated.
When I opened the refrigerator the thumping turned into a positive thwacking. Birdie lived on bran, celery, and wheat germ, but there were three speckled brown eggs standing in line in a military fashion inside the refrigerator door. I found a saucer in one of the immaculate cupboards and broke an egg into it, and put the saucer on the floor. “Woofers,” I said, “food for the good dog.”
I held my breath, and then she trotted in, her nails clicking on the tile like a tiny parody of Yoshino's high heels. She was a perfect Yorkie, her hair shampooed and polished and layered and cut, two little fuchsia ribbons tied in bows through the fur above her ears. She stopped and cocked her head at me with a last twinge of uncertainty. At a certain point, the only thing to do with dogs is to stop trying. “Up to you,” I said negligently, going back into the entrance hall. The sound of a lapping tongue followed me.
Birdie's bedroom was virginally perfect. The plum-colored sheets on his queen-size bed were linen, and a dust ruffle shimmered to the floor. The floor in here was bleached oak. Scattered here and there was an occasional area rug, each the result of a year's work in some third-world country. A Yoshitoshi print of a would-be shogun having his head lopped off faced a David Hockney of a boy diving into a pool that was bluer than Paul Newman's eyes. By the time I'd looked at it closely enough to realize that the Hockney was an original, Woofers was at my heels. There was a small Sam Francis over the bed, also an original. For a secretary, Birdie was doing okay.
Entrance hall, kitchen, living room, two little bathrooms, the bedroom. A dining nook off the kitchen. A tiny library with a computer on a pine desk just beyond the bedroom. That seemed to be it. Woofers followed me slavishly from room to room, a hummingbird's tongue hanging out one side of her mouth. The house, the decorations, the dog: everything was perfect. And yet, that couldn't be the whole story, not unless I was radically wrong about everything. I went through the drawers in the kitchen and then the ones in the bedroom, discovering only that Birdie preferred Henckel cutlery and silk underwear, and then I sat on the bed. I'd been sitting there a minute or more when I realized that I was looking at the door to his closet.
Birdie had a great many Philippine shirts, all of them smaller than the rag I use to polish Alice once a year, and more shoes than a millipede. There were also some antique Japanese kimonos. His clothes hung in color-coordinated glory, like customized color bars on some tailor's television screen. I was reluctant to disturb anything, which was why it took me so long to push the clothing aside and find the door on the other side of the closet. The outside of the door, the side facing me, was extravagantly bolted and barred, but all the bolts and bars were open.
I reached for the doorknob. Behind me, Woofers whimpered.
The door opened inward, away from me, revealing a dim and narrow flight of stairs. They led down. I reached inside and found a light switch.
It was very cool, almost cold, going down. The stairs were oddly proportioned, narrow and awkwardly deep, with a curve to the left. The walls were unpainted plaster, slightly damp to the touch. When I rounded the curve, I saw a small door that might have been taken from a submarine. It was rounded and seemed to be made of iron, and it had a tiny window in it. A sliding metal bar, sufficient to lock it from outside, was pushed to one side.
From some rarely visited corner of my memory an image floated up. Something from first grade, something that brought back a sense of pressure on my knees and something hard over my head, a memory that was full of fear and also a kind of excitement. I reached for the iron door and pulled it open, and as it creaked on its hinges I remembered that the thing under my knees was the floor and the thing above my head was a school desk, and the memory was the vestige of a “drop” drill. What I was entering was a bomb shelter.
You still find them here and there in California, underground temples to the nuclear paranoia of the fifties. Absolutely secure, absolutely soundproof. And even before I found the light switch and looked at the blank white walls, I knew where I was. I was in obedience school.
The room was little, as it would have to have been: its whitewashed walls were concrete, at least four feet thick, and it had been built inside what had originally been a not-very-large basement. The floor was a cold concrete slab. The temperature couldn't have been more than fifty. It was colder than the morgue.
Woofers let out a questioning whine above me. “Come on,” I said, suddenly wanting company. After a moment I heard her nails on the stairs.
The room was
close to empty. There was a long cheap Formica table against one wall, entirely bare. Each of its four metal legs stood in the center of one-half of a pair of handcuffs. The cuffs circling the table legs were snapped shut but the other cuff in each pair was open. The table was certainly the podium on which Birdie held his graduation ceremonies. Near the opposite wall stood a Polaroid Spectra System camera on an expensive tripod. Aside from the table there was no furniture.
Set into the wall next to the door were three sets of recessed shelves, probably originally intended to hold canned goods and bottled water but now stacked with cardboard cartons full of odds and ends. One of them held Christmas decorations, little lights to make Birdie's house twinkle, and wrapping paper and ribbons. There were also old athletic shoes, garden supplies, extra detergent, and other homely junk that Birdie had stowed down here now that most people acknowledged that the threat of atomic attack was less pressing than the need to wrap presents, wash dishes, and prune roses.
There were also two doors.
The first led to a closet, no more than four feet by four feet. There were no shelves in it; it was just a tiny room. The door had the same kind of metal bar across its outside, and a small grate had been positioned just above the floor, probably to let in air. A perfect place to lock people in the dark. The children had usually been naked, Marco had said. Naked and freezing in a lightless, comfortless concrete room.
The second door opened into a small bathroom with the kind of awkward plastic toilet they put on boats, and a tiled shower. This was where Aimee had hit high C for the tape recorder while scalding water flowed over her body.
I reclosed the bathroom door and the door to the closet and took a long last look at the room, trying to remember whether I'd moved or changed anything else. Woofers, who had been trembling slightly and keeping very close to me, sat on my right foot. She looked up at me anxiously, ready to go back upstairs.
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