“You’re a widower, right?”
“That’s right. My wife died six years ago come September. ‘‘
“And you’re an architect, retired?”
“I still design an occasional gazebo. How come you know so much about me?”
“Neighbors.”
“You mean my neighbors know that much about me? My God, even loggias have ears.”
Detective Arthur jotted down a couple of notes. Then he said, “I understand you’re undergoing analysis.”
“Isn’t everybody?”
“Can you tell me why?”
Jerry sipped his drink and looked at Detective Arthur over the rim of his glass.
“You’re not trying to prove that I’m crazy, I hope?”
“I have to be thorough, Mr. Sennett.”
“Yes,” said Jerry, “I guess you do.”
He stood up and walked across to the windows. He parted the drapes, so that a bright triangle of sunshine fell across the worn-out rug. “I had a bad experience during the war,’’ he said quietly.
‘‘It didn’t make me crazy, but it left a lasting impression that sometimes makes me wonder if it’s really worth carrying on.”
“Suicidal?”
“No, not exactly. Despairing, if you can call it anything.”
“Can you give me the name of your analyst?”
“Doctor Grunwald. His office is on El Camino Drive.”
“Expensive, huh?” asked Detective Arthur.
Jerry turned away from the window. “With analysis, like everything else, you get what you pay for.”
“What sort of progress arc you making? I’m going to have to check that out with Doctor Grunwald in any case.’’
“Progress? Some, I guess. I’m keeping happy. But I don’t expect to get over it completely. When you’ve seen what men are really capable of doing to other men–well, that’s an experience it’s hard to live with.”
Detective Arthur said, “If that’s the way you feel, it’s probably just as well you didn’t sec Sherry Cantor this morning.’’
Jerry finished his drink. “Yes. It probably is.”
“You didn’t hear anything? Any shouting? Any breaking glass?”
“Not a thing.”
“You didn’t hear any cars? Maybe an engine revving up?”
“I’m sorry. I woke up at nine, or maybe a few minutes after. I fixed breakfast for David and me, and then I took him straight down to the Whartons’ house on Rosewood. You can check the time I got there. After that, I drove over to Bevcrly Hills.” Detective Arthur read back his notes to himself. Then he said, “I guess that’s going to be all for the time being. Sergeant Skrolnik may want to come around and ask you a few more questions, so I’d appreciate it if you stayed around.”
“I wasn’t planning on going anyplace,” said Jerry.
Jerry escorted Detective Arthur to the door. They walked down the driveway together to the sidewalk and stood for a moment by the gate. Most of the police cars had left now, and the crowd had dwindled down to a few teenagers sitting on the curb drinking Coke and a couple of elderly women with nothing better to do.
It was grillingly hot.
Detective Arthur said, “Well, thanks for your help,” and walked off.
Jerry stayed where he was for a while, feeling emotionally empty and upset. The men in sunglasses were still in Sherry Cantor’s garden, searching the flowering bushes, and occasionally calling out to one another when they thought that might have come across something interesting.
On the low stone wall that Jerry’s house shared with Sherry’s bungalow, a lizard basked between the two numerals that made up the number 11.
After a few minutes, Jerry climbed back up his driveway and into the house. He went into the living room and fixed himself another whiskey and he stood by the liquor cabinet drinking it and thinking. The air conditioning whirred and gurgled, and he thought, without much conviction, that he ought to have it serviced.
He remembered the day that Rhoda had died, of cancer. It had been as hot as this. He had taken a walk in Hancock Park, and then sat on a bench in the shade of a tree and wondered how everything could be so damned normal, how traffic could come and go, how people could laugh and talk as if nothing had happened. Today, at eight o’clock, Sherry Cantor had died, and yet the sun was still shining, and the supermarkets were still open, and you could still take a drive to the ocean and paddle your toes.
Even Our Family Jones would go on without her. The scriptwriters would simply think of some reasonable excuse for writing Lindsay Jones out. They were probably thinking about it right now. She had already vanished, as if she had never been.
Jerry checked his watch. It was almost time to go fetch David. Quite honestly, he would be glad of the company. He sometimes thought that he was spending too much time alone these days.
He wondered if David would like to take a drive out to Griffith Park this afternoon, and practice his pitching.
Doctor Grunwald had told him this morning, just as he’d told him dozens of times before, that he ought to stop feeling so guilty about what had happened. It hadn’t been his fault, after all. But when the sun was shining like this, and when a pretty girl had died, the same way all those others had died, for no apparent reason–well, it was difficult not to feel responsible. Even now, all these years later.
‘‘You didn’t know what they were going to do,’’ Doctor Grunwald had insisted. “You didn’t know.”
“No,” Jerry had told him. “But I didn’t question it, either. My sin was that I didn’t even question it.”
He went into the kitchen. It was narrow, tiled in blue, and it bore all the hallmarks of a man living alone. The catsup bottles were still on the table after this morning’s breakfast, the counter beneath the toaster was strewn with crumbs, and the pans that hung underneath the wall cupboards had only been scoured in the middle, where it was essential. He opened the huge refrigerator and took out a pack of bologna sausage. He didn’t really feel hungry after hearing about Sherry Cantor, but he knew that he would need the energy if he was going to take David out this afternoon.
He started to build himself a sandwich, with bologna and sliced pickle. He tried not to think about that hot day, thirty-four years ago, when he had first realized the enormity of what he had done. A radio was playing “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” somewhere outside, and he raised his eyes and looked out of the kitchen window toward the street.
A man in a white wide-brimmed hat and a white suit was standing not far away from Jerry’s gate.
Spanish, maybe, or Mexican. Although the shadow of the midday sun obscured his face, the man appeared to be looking up toward the house. His hands were pushed deeply into the pockets of his coat, and he was smoking a cigarette. There was something about him that was oddly unsettling, as if he were a leftover from some black-and-white private-eye movie of the 1950’s.
Jerry watched him for a minute or two. He couldn’t understand why the man’s appearance disturbed him so much. The man stood quite still, his cigarette between his lips. Then he crossed the street and walked downhill toward the corner of La Sonoma Avenue. In a moment, he was gone.
Jerry looked down at his hands. His fists were clenched so tightly that his knuckles showed white through the tan.
CHAPTER SEVEN
By four that afternoon, Eva Crowley was quite drunk. She was lying on the white leather couch of her tenth-floor apartment in the better part of West Los Angeles, wearing nothing but her black silk underwear, her hair tousled into a fright wig and her face flushed.
A bottle of Tanqueray gin stood on the glass-topped Italian table beside her, and it was two fingers away from empty. Eva’s black maid Matilda had put her head around the door at about two o’clock that afternoon, but Eva had sent her away. This particular pain she wanted to nurse on her own. She wanted no sympathy, no help. She was determined to fight for Gerard, and she was determined to win him back. But just for a few self-indulgent hours, she needed to wallow i
n her own sense of loss.
She sat up. Her head felt like a hot-air balloon. All around her, the stylish living room tilted and swayed. She picked up the gin bottle, frowned at it, and then emptied the last dregs into her lipstick-smeared highball glass. She wished she didn’t feel so suffocated and sick.
After this morning’s row, the opulent decor of their apartment seemed even colder than ever.
She had always thought Gerard’s taste was sterile. He chose tables made of chrome and gray smoked glass, tapestries woven in bland abstract patterns, and chairs upholstered in neutral-colored leather. There was no emotional commitment in Gerard’s surroundings. No warmth. He was an empty man with an empty mind.
She wondered, as she swallowed the oily-smelling gin, why she loved him at all. She only knew that she did, and that she didn’t want to lose him. To lose Gerard would mean the loss of her dignity, her femininity, and her pride.
To lose Gerard would mean that her mother had been right all along, that Eva was “born to be unlovable.”
She climbed unsteadily to her feet and balanced her way across the polished parquet floor to the liquor cabinet. There didn’t seem to be very much left. A bottle of tequila. A bottle of strega.
Quarter of a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Maybe she ought to mix herself a combined cocktail out of all of them and drink herself into total unconsciousness.
She was just trying to focus her eyes and her brain when there was a soft chime at the door. She stood up straight, one hand on the cabinet for support. It must be the twins, back from school.
She stared at her Cartier wristwatch. They were at least twenty minutes early.
“Coming!” she said, in a husky, high-pitched voice. She made her way out into the cream-painted hall with its bonsai plants and Spanish rugs, and unlocked the safety chain on the door.
‘‘You’re early,’’ she said, opening the door and turning back into the hall. “How did you...”
She paused. Something was wrong. It wasn’t the twins at all. Standing in the cool darkness of the hall was a swarthy, smartly dressed man in a white suit and striped maroon tie. He took off his hat and inclined his head slightly. He didn’t attempt to come in.
“You must be Mrs. Crowley,” he said, in a cultured South American accent. He emphasized Mrs. as if he was already well acquainted with Mr. Crowley. “I’m sorry if I...”
Eva clutched her hands over her breasts. Until the man had apologized, she’d forgotten that she was wearing nothing but a black transparent bra, black panties, and a black garterbelt and stockings. Her face felt suddenly hot, and she said, flustered: “Please–please wait there–I’ll just get my robe...”
“Of course,” smiled the man. But he didn’t avert his eyes.
She retreated into the bedroom, colliding with the doorframe in her drunkenness and bruising her upper arm. She found her robe on the floor where she had left it that morning and struggled into it. She tried to remember where she had taken off her gray suit, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t even remember driving back from Gerard’s office.
There were only fragments. Pushing past Francesca. Slamming the office door. Standing in the crowded elevator trying not to sob out loud.
She belted her robe and went back to the front door. The man was still politely waiting there, his hat in his hand, a small enigmatic smile on his face. He was short and lightly built, and the shoes that peeped out from under his unfashionably wide-bottomed pants were made of white kid, and as small as a tightrope walker’s. His hair was oiled back into curls over his ears, and he wore a thin clipped mustache.
“Your husband isn’t here?” he asked her.
“Gerard? He doesn’t usually get back until late. Sometimes he doesn’t get back at all.”
“He hasn’t called you? We had an appointment, you see. I was supposed to meet him at the office, but when 1 went there, his secretary told me that he’d already left for the day. I thought he might have come home.”
Eva shook her head. There was an awkward pause.
“Do you think there’s any point in my waiting for him?” asked the man, raising his hat as if he wanted to hang it up somewhere.
“Well,” said Eva, “I don’t know. He may be coming back. He may not. He hasn’t told me.”
“I’m very impertinent,” said the man. “Here I am pushing myself on you like this, and I haven’t even introduced myself.” He inclined his head once again, like a respectable parrot. “My name is Esmeralda. I am a business acquaintance of Mr. Crowley. We are almost friends.”
“Almost?” asked Eva.
The man smiled. “Nobody in business can really afford to have friends. Friends are a luxury.”
Eva swayed a little. “Well, Mr. Esmeralda, since you’re almost a friend of Gerard’s, I guess it wouldn’t do any harm to invite you in.”
“You don’t have to. I may be a robber. Or a rapist.”
Eva took a deep breath. “The way I feel right now, Mr. Esmeralda, that’ll be your lookout.
Please come in.”
She led the way into the living room, and Mr. Esmeralda closed the front door behind him. He hesitated in the hall for a moment, and then hung his white hat on top of Gerard’s golf clubs. He followed Eva into the pale Italian-styled room, shooting his strartlingly white cuffs and adjusting his necktie. Eva clumsily collected her empty gin bottle and smeary glass, but Mr. Esmeralda seemed to take that in his stride.
“Would you care for a cocktail?” asked Eva, blurrily. “I’m afraid I only have tequila or strega. Or maybe some bourbon, if you feel like it.”
“I don’t drink, as a rule,” smiled Mr. Esmeralda. He paced over to the window with mesmerically precise steps and stood for a while admiring the Crowlcys’ two-thousand-dollar-a-month view of the Rancho golf courses. “You have a pleasant apartment here.”
“Thank you,” said Eva, sitting on the far end of the couch and tugging her wrap around her knees. “Actually, it’s all Gerard’s taste, not mine.” She paused. “If I’d had my way, we would have furnished it in elegant Colonial.”
Mr. Esmeralda smiled briefly. His smiles came and went like shadows on a cloudy day.
“I feel that you’re not happy with the world today,” he told her.
She frowned at him. Then she ran her hand through her hair. “I don’t know what makes you feel that. Happiness is only relative, after all. At least I have a roof over my head, and enough to eat.
And nearly enough to drink.”
“You mustn’t think that I’m being inquisitive,” said Mr. Esmeralda.
Eva gave a dismisive wave of her hand. “I don’t mind. I don’t even know why I went to all the trouble of getting drunk. It hasn’t made anything better, and it hasn’t made anything worse.
Getting drunk, Mr. Esmeralda, is only a way of deferring the pain until tomorrow.
Mr. Esmeralda turned and faced her. “No pain can be deferred without paying interest, Mrs.
Crowley. Tomorrow, you will pay for these hours of forgetfulness with your hangover. Life is a business, like any other.”
Eva thought about that, and then nodded. “Some business,” she said, not particularly to her unexpected guest. Not even to herself.
There was another pause. Mr. Esmeralda walked across the living room, his tiny shoes clicking on the floor. He picked up a nautilus shell from a side table, and turned it over and over in his hands.
“Did you know something?” he asked quietly. “The first sailors who found these shells said that if you put your ear against them, you would hear the cries of every sailor who had ever drowned.”
He inclined his head toward the open shell and listened. Then he set it down on the table again.
“Did you hear anything?” asked Eva.
He shook his head. “Only the sound of a woman in distress.”
Eva looked away. “It’s really not very interesting, you know.”
“Your husband?”
She gave a humorless laugh, which turned into a co
ugh. “Of course. What other kind of problems do women of my age and background ever have? We’re too trusting to take lovers.
We’re certainly too conventional to fall in love with other women. Or dogs. Or whatever.”
Mr. Esmeralda nodded. “You wait patiently at home, hoping that your spouses will have sufficient loyalty to keep away from pretty young receptionists.”
Eva stared at him. “You know about Francesca?”
“Of course. I have taken your husband and Francesca to dinner on several occasions.”
“I don’t believe it,” Eva whispered.
“Oh, I’m afraid it’s true,” Mr. Esmeralda told her. “But you don’t have very much to fear. At the end of the day, Francesca is far more interested in disco music and fashionable clothes than she is in your husband. In time, their relationship will collapse of its own accord.”
Eva licked her lips nervously. Mr. Esmeralda paced around the couch, this way and that, around and around, and he kept appearing on one side or the other, and disappearing again, as if there were three of him, three dapper triplets, all with maroon ties.
“Are you in tobacco, Mr. Esmeralda?” asked Eva, in a much higher voice than she’d meant to. “I was once,” said Mr. Esmeralda. “But times change, you know how it is. These days, I’m in this and that.”
“I see,” said Eva faintly. “Mr. Esmeralda...”
“Yes?”
“Well, I hope you don’t mind, but–would you care to sit down? You’re making me rather confused. Rather giddy.”
Mr. Esmeralda stopped pacing. Then he said: “My dear Mrs. Crowley, of course,” and sat down on the opposite end of the couch with all the grace of a settling butterfly. He laced his fingers together and smiled at her. He wore no rings.
“Gerard has never mentioned you,” said Eva.
“No,” said Mr. Esmeralda, “I don’t suppose he has.”
“You’re very...”
She stopped what she was saying. She wasn’t at all sure what she had been going to say anyway.
She wanted to tell Mr. Esmeralda that she thought he was very soigne, very together, and really very clean. She had never seen such clean cuffs and fingernails before. But you couldn’t say that to a total stranger.
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