“No,” I said quickly. “We’re just fine in the intimacy department. Everything working the way it should.”
Andrew snickered.
Paula asked me, “Have you tried acupuncture?”
“What, as a sexual aid?”
“No, no. As a method of healing.”
“I don’t like needles.”
“I don’t, either. You hardly feel the ones they use. And they’re the disposable ones, of course, so you don’t have to worry about disease.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“Acupuncture is marvelous,” Paula said, in the ecstatic tone she reserves for brand-new fads and follies. “It cures all kinds of ailments — arthritis, bursitis, insomnia, allergies—”
“It doesn’t cure anything,” Andrew said. “It’s quack medicine.”
She turned on him. “How can you say that?”
“I can say it because it’s true. It’s in the same class with massage, herbal treatments, and spiritual healing.”
“Alternative therapies, every one,” Paula said with acid sweetness. “Isn’t chiropractic considered alternative therapy?”
Red splotches appeared on Andrew’s puffy cheeks. “Just because the goddamn A.M. A. refuses to recognize the benefits of chiropractic medicine—”
“Or the benefits of acupuncture.” She swiveled my way again. “It really does work. For a while I had serious digestive problems, and they vanished, I mean completely vanished, after only three sessions with Dr. Dong. And what he did for my sciatica—”
“Dr. Dong. My God!”
“Andrew, the man can’t help the name he was born with. Besides, Dong is a perfectly common Chinese name—”
“And he’s a perfectly common Chinese quack.”
“He is not a quack! He has been in business twenty-five years, he’s a graduate of the Shanghai Chinese Medical School and diplomate of the National Board of Acupuncture Orthopedics—”
“Diplomate. What the hell is a diplomate?”
“It’s the same thing as a diplomat, isn’t it? Well, never mind. Dr. Dong has all sorts of degrees and testimonials—”
“Bought and paid for, no doubt.”
“—from satisfied patients like myself. He cured my digestive problems and he did wonders for my sciatica. You couldn’t do anything about my sciatica, could you?”
“I could have if you’d let me use proper chiropractic techniques. But no, you screamed every time I tried to—”
“You were hurting me. The pain doubled every time you poked and twisted—”
“You’re a double pain sometimes,” Andrew muttered. “And not in my sciatica.”
She skewered him with the famous Hanley glare. “How dare you talk to me like that in public. You’re drunk, aren’t you? Gin on an empty stomach. How many times have I told you—”
“Let me count the number.”
“I’m warning you. Andrew...”
I edged away from them — they didn’t even notice — and joined the party flow. Anything was better than listening to the Hanleys imitate that old radio couple, the Bickersons.
I was now a floating island, but nobody paid any attention to me. I looked around for another corner in which to drop anchor, spotted one, and was on my way when two things gave me pause. Both were part of the same individual, a skinny, ascetic type in tinted glasses and a polka-dot bowtie. The bowtie was one of the things that stopped me; it made him even more of a dinosaur than me. The other was his voice, which he was using loudly to an audience of two older women.
“The advertising racket,” he was declaiming, “is a prime example of what’s wrong with modern society. Strip away the fancy veneer and what have you got except hype and bullshit? Same bottom line for the federal government, state and local governments, big business, the media, the entertainment industry, pretty much anything you can name. Hype and bullshit, that’s what the country runs on nowadays. We’re bombarded by it, it shapes everything we see and hear and do. There’s no truth anymore, no sincerity, humility, honesty. All there is exaggeration, distortion, out and out lies. Hype, hype, hype, crap, crap, crap. You remember the Peter Finch character in Network? Saying he was sick and tired of all the bullshit? Well, that’s exactly what I’m saying. I’m sick and tired of all the deceiving, loudmouth, self-aggrandizing bullshit. I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. Every chance I get I’m going to stand up and shout it like it is. You remember the John Goodman character in The Big Lebowski? How he kept telling the Steve Buscemi character, ‘Shut the fuck up, Donnie,’ every time he opened his stupid yap? Well, every time I hear somebody shovel up another load of hype and bullshit I’m going to stand up and say—”
“Shut the fuck up, Harlan,” one of the women said.
“We’re sick and tired of all the bullshit,” the other woman said. “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore.”
The two of them left Bowtie standing there with his mouth open. It was one of those pristine little moments, made all the more satisfying by the fact that he seemed to have no idea whatsoever of how thoroughly he’d been squelched.
I took up residence in the new corner, feeling slightly better than I had before Harlan got his. No one bothered me at first, which allowed me to pretend I was a hidden observer, like a spy camera in a potted plant. I spotted Kerry twice; she tried to make her way over to me and was accosted and sidetracked both times. Then Anthony DiGrazia found me and spoiled my peaceful illusion. He bent my ear about the sausage business, then launched into a diatribe on capital punishment. He was in favor of it; in fact, he seemed to believe that all felons, including pickpockets and hubcap thieves, ought to be subjected to lethal injection for their transgressions.
His ten-minute harangue was winding down when we were suddenly confronted by an intense young woman — not, thank God, a sexy blonde but a too-thin individual with brown hair that looked as if it had been cut with a weed-whacker. She fixed each of us with a glazed eye and said, “Which one of you is Anthony DiGrazia?”
“That’s me, little lady. You like my party?”
“No,” she said.
“No?”
“No. I just want you to know I think it’s disgusting.”
“What, my party?”
“That stuff you make. That sausage.”
“My sausage is disgusting?”
“Absolutely.” She tapped his clavicle with a bony forefinger. “Made out of dead animals. Poor defenseless pigs and cows and goats.”
“Goats? Hey, we don’t use—”
“Blood, ground-up bones, strands of hair—”
“What? In my sausage? Hair?”
“—and all sorts of disgusting organs. Fat, cholesterol, sodium, malonaldehyde, aflaxtons... don’t you know you’re giving people heart attacks and cancer?”
“Cacchio! Heart attacks, cancer? Listen, lady, all I give people is good meat, the best meat. My sausage is so pure you can feed it to a baby.”
“What a horrible thing to say. Isn’t it bad enough you feed your poison to adults? A feast of bacteria! Germ warfare!”
“By God, we don’t allow no germs in my factory—”
“Why don’t you manufacture food that’s healthy and nutritious? Soybeans, tofu—”
“Gaah!” DiGrazia said.
“Soybeans and tofu are healthy foods.”
“You say food, I say crap.”
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
“Hah. You, you’re for shame, you crazy food nazi.”
“Better a food nazi than a mass murderer,” the woman said, and made it her exit line.
DiGrazia watched her stalk off into the throng. “Pazzo,” he said, tapping his temple. “All those vegetarian animal rights food nazis, crazy in the head. Germs, heart attacks, cancer — you know how many times I heard crap like that. Phil? Ten thousand times, I heard it once. It don’t even bother me much anymore. Life’s too short, you got to take the bad with the good. So what
’d you think of her ass, eh?”
The non sequitur made me blink. “What?”
“Her ass. Not bad for a skinny cogliona. Not much in the tit department, but a nice ass and plenty of fire. Fire in the mouth, fire in the ass — you know what I mean. Phil?”
“Is that all you ever think about?”
The words were out before I could bite them back, but he didn’t seem to notice my annoyance. Or to be offended by it if he did. “Sure,” he said. “Roseanna, she says I got sausage on the brain. ‘That’s all you ever think about,’ she says, ‘your sausage.’ She don’t know how right she is, eh? I see a good-looking woman, nice ass, plenty of fire, that’s just what I’m thinking about. DiGrazia’s sausage.” He laughed and winked. “I think I go find that food nazi, talk to her some more. Don’t hurt to try, eh. Phil? You never know. Cogliona like that, hates you one minute, you talk to her right and the next minute maybe she changes her mind. Bada boom, bada bing, maybe she ends up sampling my sausage after all.”
He winked again and waddled off, leaving me mercifully alone and wishing I were in Fresno or even wandering in the middle of Death Valley. I moved over against the nearest wall and looked at my watch, with hope at first and then in disbelief and dull dread.
It was only twenty til six. I’d been here less than forty-five minutes.
And the party swirled on.
And on.
And on...
8
In the morning I woke up with a headache, a fuzzy taste in my mouth, a sour stomach, and enough gas to power a modern version of the Hindenburg. Hangover supreme, courtesy of Anthony DiGrazia. Not so much red wine- or party-induced as the product of a heaping plateful of fried peppers, garlic, and DiGrazia’s Old-Fashioned Italian Sausage. He’d insisted we have dinner at a North Beach restaurant owned by a friend of his, and then insisted we all have the chef’s house special. With garlic bread, naturally, and three or maybe six bottles of vintage Rubbino Chianti. In addition to having a heart full of unrequited lust and a head full of reactionary ideas on crime and punishment, the man was of the same breed, different genus, as the intense young woman with the weed-whacked hair — a food nazi.
Kerry stirred beside me. I looked over at her, and she muttered a good morning without making eye contact. “You feel as bad as I do?” I asked her.
“Worse. And don’t you dare say you’re glad.”
“I want a divorce.”
“What?”
“I thought you should know what the words sound like. You’ll hear them again if you ever try talking me into another evening like the last one.”
“I wouldn’t try to talk myself into another evening like the last one.”
I got up, drank an Alka-Seltzer, brushed my teeth, took a shower, swallowed another Alka-Seltzer, brushed my teeth again, and put clothes on. When I came back into the bedroom, Kerry was still lying in bed looking miserable.
“Rise and shine,” I said. “Lunch with Cybil at noon.”
“Oh, Lord, that’s right.”
“Maybe she’ll fix us something with Italian sausage.”
Kerry groaned and pulled the covers over her head.
After I made coffee I checked the answering machine again. There hadn’t been a message from anybody in Greenwood last night and none had magically appeared this morning. I called the office and accessed the machine there. No message. An e-mail, maybe? My business cards now had the office e-mail address, the result of Tamara’s urging. I thought about calling her, decided it was too early on a Saturday morning, and that in my condition I couldn’t stand being yelled at for interrupting the rising of Mr. Sun, and waited for Kerry to get up. She keeps a pc in her study and she had the good sense not to chide me, as she sometimes does, about being too stubborn to learn even rudimentary computer skills. She accessed the office e-mail for me. And that was a bust, too.
One more day, I thought bleakly. If I don’t hear from somebody by this time tomorrow. I’ll go down there and shake a few trees until something falls out.
Cybil said, “You smell like garlic and stale wine. Both of you.”
“Oh, God,” Kerry said, “and I gargled three times and brushed my teeth twice this morning.”
“It gets into the pores, dear.”
“You have any Alka-Seltzer?” I asked her.
“No. Out carousing last night, were you?”
“Carousing isn’t the word for it.”
“A business dinner that didn’t turn out well,” Kerry explained briefly. “Is that chicken pot pie I smell?”
“It is. Very soothing to an alcohol-ravaged stomach.”
“Hah,” I said. “As if you didn’t take a drink yourself now and then.”
“Always in moderation.”
“Sure, moderation. I know all about those drunken orgies you and Russ Dancer and your other pulp-writer pals used to indulge in.”
“Scurrilous lies. I have never been to an orgy in my life.”
“That you can remember.”
“Oh, I remember all of my escapades.”
“And there’ve been some doozies, I’ll bet.”
“You’ll never know.”
Cybil wasn’t ready yet to talk about Archie Todd; she bustled around her tiny kitchen getting lunch ready, while Kerry and I took up space in the living room. The bungalow was a small two-bedroom, one half of a duplex with a shared back patio; she used the second bedroom as her office. This and Redwood Village’s other duplex cottages were surrounded by well-tended lawns and flower beds and shaded by redwoods. Among other amenities on the five acres were rec room, dining hall, swimming pool, and putting green. Nice, quiet little enclave in the nice, quiet little town of Larkspur. And Cybil had thrived in it. When Kerry’s father. Ivan, died a couple of years back, and Cybil sold their L.A. house and moved in with Kerry, she had been lost and dying by degrees herself. The move to Redwood Village had literally saved her life. Not only had it allowed her to regain her independence, it had given her back her zest for living and her desire to write fiction.
A copy of her recently published first novel. Dead Eye, was prominently displayed on the end table next to where I was sitting. Her brag copy, she called it. I’d already read the book, but I picked up the copy and glanced through it again. A remarkably smooth and polished period piece, set in L.A. during the Communist witch hunts of the early 1950s. It was as though there had been no more of a gap than a few months between Samuel Leatherman’s last pulp-magazine adventure, published in those same early fifties, and his first full-length ease. She was something, Cybil was. No woman who bad produced both a tough-as-nails hero like I weatherman and a daughter like Kerry, and put up with a contentious anal retentive like Ivan Wade for fifty years, could be anything but special.
She was troubled now, though. The sharp wit and cheerful demeanor were like the clothes she’d donned for the occasion: dress-up facade. There were gloomy depths in her tawny eyes. Kerry noticed it, too: I could tell by the concerned look she gave me when Cybil left us alone.
Over lunch the talk was superficial dead-air filler. I kept waiting for Cybil to bring up Archie Todd’s name and it kept not happening. Kerry toed me under the table once and I toed her back and went on eating. The pot pie was very good. Soothing, too, as Cybil had said. And I deal better with family and professional matters on a full stomach.
Kerry delivered another not-so-gentle nudge as I finished my second helping. Okay, time for me to prime the pump. I said to Cybil, “Kerry tells me Captain Archie passed away recently. I was sorry to hear it.”
“Passed away,” she said. “Such a silly euphemism.”
“What would you prefer? Croaked?”
That earned me another poke, but Cybil said, “Rubbed out would do better. It’s old-fashioned but accurate.”
“You’re not saying he was murdered?”
“No, I’m not, because I have no proof he was. But it’s what I suspect.”
“You’re serious,” I said.
“Of course
I’m serious. Would I make a joke about a thing like that?”
“What makes you suspect foul play?”
She pressed her lips together and stared out through the window. From where she was sitting she could look across tree-shadowed lawn and the street out front to where other cottages were spaced at intervals. Looking at the one Captain Archie had occupied, maybe.
“Cybil, how did he die?”
“Congestive heart failure,” she said. “He died in his bed sometime during the night.”
“Well, if that’s the case, it’s the best way any of us can go.”
“It would be if that was all there was to it. Dr. Lengel thinks so, because Archie had CHF disease — that’s a reduction in the ability of the heart to pump blood. CHF patients often die from ventricular fibrillation, a sudden heart attack.”
“Lengel’s the resident physician here?” Redwood Village had a small clinic with a doctor and nurse on call twenty-four hours.
“Yes. He signed the death certificate.”
“So if Captain Archie had a bad heart and there’s no question of how he died...?”
“Congestive heart failure can be induced by an overdose of digitoxin, the medication he was taking to regulate his heartbeat. His maintainence dose was 0.05 milligrams per day. His prescription — from his own physician, Dr. Johannsen — was for pills of exactly that dosage, to be taken one every evening at bedtime. But the night he died he was given or forced to swallow a larger dosage.”
“How can you know that?”
“Well, to begin with, I’m the one who found him.”
Kerry blinked at her. “How did you—”
“We were friends, good friends. Archie had been depressed and I went over early that morning to see if I could cheer him up.”
“How did you get in? Was his door unlocked?”
“I have a key. And it’s none of your business why.”
“What about this digitoxin overdose?” I asked.
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