He had a polite smile for me as I came up to the counter. The neutral variety, without any of the disdain of the guy on the security desk. Point in his favor.
“Help you, sir?”
“You can if you’re Trevor Smith.”
“Guilty. Don’t believe I’ve seen you here before.” Friendly, cheerful, no signs of either arrogance or conceit. Another point in his favor.
“I’ve never been here before,” I said. When he’d had a look at the card I handed him, I added. “I represent Intercoastal Insurance—”
That was as far as I got. His smile vanished, his face set hard and tight, and he said with a kind of simmering anger, “So you’re the one. Who told you to come sucking around here?”
“Could be the same person who told you about me.”
“No way. Whoever it was, I don’t care what they said. Sheila Hunter and I are friends, that’s all.”
“Then maybe you have some idea why she’s so dead set against capitalizing on her husband’s insurance policy.”
“If I did, I wouldn’t tell you. It’s her business.”
“And her daughter’s.”
“Not yours or the insurance company’s, that’s the point. Why don’t you leave her alone? Her husband’s been dead less than two weeks, for Christ’s sake.”
“I’m sorry about her loss,” I said. “But it doesn’t explain why she’s so afraid.”
“Afraid? What’re you talking about?”
“I think you know what I’m talking about, Mr. Smith. If you’ve seen her lately you couldn’t help but know.”
He knew, all right, and it was bothering him; I could see it in his eyes. More between Sheila Hunter and him than a casual friendship, a casual affair?
“She doesn’t want her past investigated,” I said. “Why? What’s she afraid I’ll find out?”
“That’s bull,” Smith said. “You can’t make me believe she’s hiding anything about her past.”
“I won’t try. But I believe she is. She’s been living a lie the past ten years, she and her husband both.”
“What does that mean, a lie?”
“She ever say anything to you about her life before they came to Greenwood? Where they lived, what they did?”
No answer. But his silence was eloquent.
“Does the word crazybone mean anything to you?”
“Crazy— Now what the hell?”
“It means something to her, something bad. Ask her about it. Ask her about her past.”
“Why should I? Listen—”
“I might be able to help her. I already know some of the truth and if I keep digging I’ll find out the rest. It’s going to come out one way or another.”
He leaned forward across the counter so that his face was close to mine. I let him do it without giving ground. “Blackmail?” he said. “Is that your damn game?”
“No, and don’t use that word to me again. I don’t like it.”
“I don’t like you or what you’re doing to Sheila.”
“Your prerogative. But all I’m trying to do, all I’m going to do, is my job. And all I want out of it is the fee I’m being paid by Intercoastal Insurance. The truth is my game. Smith. The only other thing I’m interested in is Emily Hunter’s welfare.”
“Now you’re saying Sheila is an unfit mother, is that it?”
“No. I’m saying whatever she’s hiding, whatever she and her husband were mixed up in before they came to Greenwood, may be putting the child’s future in jeopardy. I don’t want to see that happen. Do you?”
Smith’s eyes held on mine a few seconds longer. Then the anger went out of him and he backed off. Worry and dismay were what I was looking at then.
“She won’t talk to me,” he said. “I’ve tried... she just walls herself off.”
“It might be different when you tell her what I’ve told you.”
“I don’t know. If it’s bad enough, the thing she’s so scared of...”
“It may not be as bad as she thinks it is. Even if it’s a police matter, it may not be.”
A muscle jumped on Smith’s cheek; it pulled one side of his mouth up in a puckery rictus. “Christ,” he said.
“Will you try to get her to talk to me?”
“I don’t know...”
“At her house, some public place, whatever. You can be there, too, if she wants it that way.”
Long pause. Then, “All right, I’ll try. But you better be on the level about helping her. If you’re not—”
“I can give you a dozen references.”
His eyes probed mine, for ten seconds or so this time. Then he shook his head: a gesture of silent acceptance.
“My home and office numbers are on the card,” I said. “Any time, day or night.”
“All right.” And then, almost plaintively, “She really is scared. Like a kid in the dark.”
“I know.”
“I can’t stand to see her like that. It makes me—”
He broke off and swung away, quickly, as if there was something in his face he didn’t want me to see. I had a pretty good idea what it was. Maybe he’d been a trophy collector in the past, what Tamara would call an “ass bandit,” and maybe he wasn’t that type at all, but in any event there was more to Trevor Smith than just a hunk’s body and a pretty face.
He was in love with Sheila Hunter. About as deeply in love as a man can be with a woman.
Thursday evening. No call from Emily Hunter, or Sheila Hunter, or Trevor Smith, or Dale Cooney.
Friday morning. Nothing from any of them.
Friday afternoon. Nothing.
All the silence worried me. Not so much Mrs. Cooney’s; boozers are unpredictable drunk or sober, and she figured to have the least amount of information for me. But why hadn’t Emily kept our appointment and why hadn’t she gotten in touch again? And had I scared her mother even more by taking the risk of confiding in Smith? For all I knew, whatever had caused the Hunters to change their identity ten years ago was a felony of major proportions, and in that case aiming Smith at her might’ve been the same as aiming a loaded gun. The last thing I wanted was to panic her, but I could have done just that. What would she do then? And how would it affect her daughter?
At four o’clock, just before I left the office to meet Kerry at Bates and Carpenter, I called the Emerald Hills Country Club and asked for the pro shop. The operator said it was closed today. No, Trevor Smith wasn’t at the club; he had called in ill. And no, she would not give me his home number, no matter what kind of emergency I said it was. I had Tamara look him up in the San Mateo and Santa Clara county phone directories while I tried the Hunters’ number. No answer there. And no listing for Trevor Smith.
“Goddamn it!” I said.
Tamara said, “Easy, boss. Remember what you always tell me about jumping to conclusions?”
“Yeah.” But suppose the conclusion I was jumping to was the right one? Suppose I’d screwed up the Hunter situation big time?
7
If there is one thing I’m not, it’s a party animal.
I do not deal well with large gatherings in enclosed spaces. Give me a job to do and a one-on-one or even a small-group circumstance and I relate well enough; I’m able to think on my feet and hold my own in a conversation. But plunk me down in the midst of a cocktail party where social interaction with strangers is required, and I curl up inside like a worm in a bottle. I’m no good at small talk. And not much of a drinker; too much alcohol in a party atmosphere has the opposite effect on me than it does on most people, making me withdraw even more. The bigger the crowd, the worse I feel. Crush of bodies, too-loud voices, the constant strain... I start out edgy and if I’m trapped long enough I tend to become claustrophobic. Not enough space or air to breathe.
So I knew going in to the party at Bates and Carpenter that it would be a two-hour ordeal. And the agitated mood I was in would only make it worse. But I’d promised Kerry, and if I got through the cocktail party, the dinner afterward wo
uld be a piece of cake by comparison. So on the way over to the ad agency I played a little self-psyching game, blocking out the Hunter case and reminding myself that this evening was a small price to pay for all that Kerry had done for me and promising myself rewards for being a good boy and making the best of what, after all, was only a couple of hours out of the rest of my life. The trick seemed to work at first: I was calmly resigned and wearing a half-hearty facade when I met Kerry in her office. She seemed relieved, as if she’d expected me to come in looking like a man attending his own funeral. She even commented on my “upbeat mood” as we went upstairs — Bates and Carpenter had two floors in an old building on lower Geary downtown — to the big conference room where the party was being held.
The psych job, though, began to develop cracks once we arrived. Twenty-five or so people were already there, most of them clustered around a full-service bar and a table of hors d’oeuvres at one end, chattering and laughing noisily. On a quick scan I saw several of Kerry’s co-workers, Jim Carpenter prominent among them, naturally, and two other faces I recognized: Kerry’s crazy friend Paula Hanley, who owned an interior design company and was a B&C client, and her tubby chiropractor husband, Andrew. Terrific. Paula was a magnet for every screwball fad that came along, had a passion for “improving” other people’s lives through prosleytism, and managed to set my teeth on edge in the best of circumstances. In a party atmosphere she might well be lethal.
Carpenter came over first, towing his latest conquest, a sloe-eyed blonde half his age. Handsome bastard, with his silver mane and dark (probably dyed) mustache. He shook my hand and asked how I was in his vaguely condescending fashion. He’d had a thing for Kerry once and his attitude toward her was still irritatingly proprietary; he kissed her — on the mouth, no less — as if he hadn’t seen her in weeks and let his hand linger on her arm. I stood by and watched this and smiled and thought about what his neck would feel like in a circle of my fingers.
Then came Mr. and Mrs. Anthony DiGrazia of DiGrazia’s Old-Fashioned Italian Sausages. They were both in their mid-sixties, both short and very round and very red-faced; the only physical difference between them, in fact, seemed to be that he was bald and she had a pile of expensively coiffed blue hair. Their personalities, however, were total opposites, like a photograph and its negative. He was smiling, outgoing, voluable, and prone to punctuating his words with hand and arm gestures in the classic Italian manner. She was silent, stiff, and wore an expression that said her shoes pinched her feet, her girdle was too tight, her stomach was upset, and she didn’t approve of occasions like this one or much of anything except maybe the diamonds and rubies on her fingers and at her throat. Dragon lady. And ruler of the DiGrazia roost, I had no doubt.
Mr. DiGrazia pumped my hand in an iron grip and asked in Italian after my health. I said, “Benissimo. Come sano uno cavallino.” He liked that; he laughed and slapped me on the back.
“So, paisan,” he said, “you eat plenty of sausage and salami, eh?”
“Sure. Plenty.”
“My sausage and salami?”
“I wouldn’t eat any other kind, Mr. DiGrazia,” I lied again.
“Tony. I’m Tony, you’re Phil.” For some reason he’d got it into his head that my first name was Phil and no attempt by Kerry or me or anybody else during the evening convinced him otherwise. “New world elegance, old world taste. What you think, Phil?”
“About what?”
“New world elegance, old world taste.”
He was looking at me expectantly. I said, “I’m not sure I—”
“What, Kerry, you don’t talk to your husband? Tell him what good ideas you got?”
“I only came up with the slogan today,” she said, and nudged my arm. “DiGrazia’s Old-Fashioned Italian Sausages. New world elegance, old world taste.”
“Oh,” I said. “Slogan.”
“You like it, huh. Phil?”
“I like it.”
“I like it, too. You like it, Roseanna?”
“No,” Mrs. DiGrazia said.
This nonplussed Kerry. “Well, you know, it’s only a preliminary working—”
“Sure, sure,” Tony said. “Kerry’s good, she’s the best, I’m not worried.” He clapped rue on the back again. “Listen, Phil, they got a whole table of my sausage and salami over there, plenty of wine, anything else you want to drink. You and me, we go over and eat some sausage, drink some wine, let the wives get better acquainted.”
We went and he ordered two glasses of Chianti without consulting me and then loaded up a couple of plates. He said, “Salute,” and clinked his glass against mine, after which he tossed off half his wine at a gulp. “So, Phil, tell me about the detective business.”
“There’s not much to tell. It’s a job like any other—”
“Nah, come on. Pretty exciting, eh? I see your name in the papers sometimes, you don’t get your name in the papers if you got a job like any other job.”
“Well, once in a while there’s some excitement. Mostly, though—”
“You meet plenty good-looking women, eh?”
“Well...”
“Sexy young blondes with big tits. Few of those, eh?”
“Well...”
He leaned close to me; his eyes were very bright. “How many times you screw one on your desk?”
“What? Uh, I’ve never—”
“Big tits, little tits, you never screwed one in your office? Desk, floor, how about a couch you got in there?”
“No. Look, Tony—”
“I always wanted to do that,” he said wistfully. He finished his wine in another swallow-. “Screw a sexy young blonde, bada boom, bada bing, right there in my office. Once I had a chance, this secretary I had, but she was too old, too fat, fatter than Roseanna. Gotta be worth it, you take a risk like that. You know what I mean, Phil?”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.”
“You ever screw somebody in your office, you make sure it’s worth it, make sure she’s some sexy young blonde with big tits. And don’t let Kerry find out. I like Kerry, I don’t want to see her unhappy.”
Jim Carpenter saved me from any more of this by bringing up somebody he wanted DiGrazia to meet. I wandered back to where Kerry had extricated herself from the dragon lady. She said, “You seem to be getting along pretty well with Tony. He’s a sweet old guy, isn’t he?”
This was not the time or the place to tell her about Tony’s favorite fantasy. I said, “That’s one way to describe him,” and let it go at that.
Kerry dragged me around and introduced me to some people. That wasn’t so bad because she was right there beside me, but the room was filling up, spilling over into the smaller one adjacent, the noise level was up into the high-decibel range, and it was inevitable the shifting tide of bodies would pull us apart and I’d be on my own. The guy who wrote that no man is an island must never have been lost in the stormy sea of an overblown cocktail party.
The last thing Kerry said to me before we got separated was, “You’ll be fine. Just go ahead and mingle.” Right. I was mingling by myself in a corner, hanging on to a fresh glass of red wine with both hands, when a woman I’d never seen before came sidling up. Sexy young blonde with a well-developed chest — if DiGrazia saw her, he’d probably try to hire her on the spot.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello,” I said.
“Are you anybody?” she asked.
“...I’m sorry?”
“Anybody. You know, in the advertising business.”
“I’m not in the advertising business.”
“Oh. Well, are you anybody in any other business?”
“I don’t know what you mean by anybody.”
“You know, important. Are you important?”
“Only to myself and my wife, and then not all the time.”
“Does that mean no?”
“Yes. I mean, no.”
“Well, which is it?”
“No,” I said.
“I thought so,” she said, and walked away.
I was standing there wondering what had just happened when another woman’s voice said, “There you are.” Talking to me — and I wished she wasn’t. Paula Hanley, with Andrew in tow.
“We’ve been looking all over for you,” she said in her shrill, breathless voice. “Haven’t we, Andrew?”
“Oh, sure,” Andrew said.
“Isn’t this a fun party?”
“I can think of better words for it,” I said.
As usual Paula was a vision — the kind an acidhead might have on a bad trip. Lemon-yellow hair, pumpkin-colored lipstick, a sea-green outfit topped off by three or four scarves in violent shades of purple and orange. One of the most expensive interior designers in the city and she looked like the survivor of a paint factory explosion. Go figure.
“It’s been months since we’ve seen you,” she said. “Hasn’t it been months, Andrew?”
“Months,” Andrew agreed. He took a sip from a very large glass of what I guessed was gin. That and the mixture of boredom and annoyance in his expression said he didn’t want to be here any more than I did.
“How’re things on the god and goddess front?” I asked Paula. It was the only conversational gambit I could come up with.
“The what?”
“New Age tantra. The Holy Sexual Communion.” That had been her grand passion the last time I’d seen her — a sexual enhancement fad based on a 1500-year-old tradition that involved chanting, massages with scented oil, beating on elkskin drums, and providing private parts with names like Wand of Light and Valley of Bliss.
“Oh,” Paula said, “we’re not into that anymore.”
Big surprise; she changed fads as often as she changed underwear. “Didn’t work out, huh?”
“Oh, no, it was a wonderful few months. Spiritual love in which orgasm is truly nonessential. Wasn’t it wonderful, Andrew?”
Andrew took another large sip from his large glass. “One of the crowning experiences of my life,” he said.
She gave him a look, decided he wasn’t being sarcastic, and said to me, “We’ve progressed into other areas of intimacy, with even greater satisfaction. Of course I can’t discuss them in an atmosphere like this, but if you and Kerry are interested...”
Crazybone Page 6