“Sorry to bother you,” he said.
“Yes.” Her voice was chilly, impatient. “The answer to your question is yes. They were very close friends. They attended art school together. The Provence School.”
“And didn’t you say Sawyer was a flier in the war?”
She sighed. “And was killed on a bombing mission over Europe, yes. But I don’t see what this can possibly—”
He cut across her annoyance. “Doug Sawyer is alive, Mrs. Olson. He was here in Pima only two weeks ago. Your husband talked to him at the Pima Motor Inn.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“The registration card is here with his name on it. Your husband was seen going into his unit.”
“But . . .” Her voice climbed a step. “He would have told me. Fox worshiped Doug Sawyer. Why, if he had . . .”
“Yes?”
Her tone hardened. “Is this supposed to have some connection with Fox’s death?”
“Disappearance,” Dave said. “I don’t know. When I do, I’ll bother you again.” He hung up and looked at Ito. “I’m checking out.” He turned for the door.
“You think you’ll find Mr. Olson?”
“Maybe.” The brown boy was reflected in the thick beveled glass of the door. Dave told the reflection, “One living dead man ought to be able to lead me to another.”
And he went out and shut the door.
10
Three hours later, at San Fernando, he caught up with the rain again. It hissed under the tires as he curved along the freeway into Hollywood. He hadn’t eaten and he needed to. He had lost too much weight. Traffic on Sunset was heavy and slow. When he reached Romano’s it was late. There were only a couple of cars left in the parking lot. Reflecting neon signs, the puddles he stepped through were like paintings drowning in ink. The familiar stained-glass windows smiled welcome. He pushed into steamy warmth, good smells of cheese and garlic. Fat Max was there to take his coat. Big smile full of gold fillings.
“Mr. Brandstetter. You’re a stranger. Where you been? Where’s Mr. Fleming?”
“Dead, Max. Cancer.” And when the old Italian’s good-natured face crumpled with shock and pity, Dave turned fast for the bar. “Make it lasagne with sausages tonight. Garlic toast. Big salad. Vino. Give me twenty minutes.”
“I’m-a so sorry about Mr. Fleming. We’ll miss him.”
“Thanks.” The bar, dark woods and leathers, stained-glass lanterns, was not big but it was nearly empty. Rain could do that to business in L.A. There was only one other customer. A woman. He noticed her without looking at her. The bartender he didn’t know. That was good. He wouldn’t have to say it again, about Rod. It wasn’t martini weather but that was what he ordered, hoping it would make him hungry. He started a cigarette and went to work on the drink.
Then the woman slid onto the stool next to his. This could happen at Romano’s? Still, he’d never sat here alone before. Rod had always been with him. He picked up the martini and had one foot on the floor when he smelled her perfume and knew who she was. The scent was Russia Leather, had been for twenty years. The woman was Madge Dunstan, had been for forty-five years. Old friend. She had introduced him and Rod to Romano’s in 1948. He turned back. “Madge,” he said.
Her smile was gently reproachful. “I’ve been worried about you. I phoned every day as I said I would.” At the funeral she’d told him she didn’t expect him to answer. She’d rung the bell to let him know she was there and caring. “Then I thought I’d better look at you in the flesh and I drove to your house and your car was gone and I started worrying.”
“I should have told you. That was rude as hell. I went back to work.” A cigarette hung in the corner of her wide humorous mouth. He lit it for her. “A policyholder disappeared up in San Joaquin Valley. I’m only down here now to follow up a lead.”
Freckled and bony, her hand squeezed his. “I’m glad you’re all right.”
“I’m not all right,” he said. “I’m working at it but I’m a long way from it.”
“You’re terribly thin,” she said.
“I’m counting on Max to cure that.” He drank and looked at her. “What are you doing here so late? And alone. Where’s the golden girl?” He didn’t remember the girl’s name. She was sun-toasted and had smooth boy features and muscular legs and strong white teeth and a loud laugh. But so did most of Madge’s girls. He had watched maybe a score of them come and go.
She took away her hand and poked at the ashtray with her cigarette. Her mouth tried for a wry smile. “Gone. Not with the wind. With the rain. And I?” She had a husky laugh that often turned to a cough. It did so now. She shook her head ruefully. “I’m sitting here going through the motions of feeling sorry for myself and lonely and forsaken. Repeating a ritual I began too many years ago to count, and perfected through a number of farewell performances. But actors wear out roles. I’ve worn out this one. I can’t do it anymore. The sketch wasn’t hard when I understood it was fifty percent fake. When I was young enough to know at the back of my mind there’d be another girl soon and, if that one left, another . . . I don’t know that anymore. So the fun’s gone out of mourning.” She glanced at him quickly. “Sorry. Wrong word.”
“Don’t apologize.” He gave her a crooked smile. “If you’re shrewd, you’re shrewd. Come on. Sit with me while I eat.” He got off his stool and handed her off hers. In tailored slacks and an expensive duffle coat, she looked young, her gauntness passed for slimness. The soft lights helped. She’d been putting booze away and walked a little unsteadily. It was all right. He respected her excuse. “I’m sorry you’re hurting.” He held a chair for her at a corner table that was lit by a fat amber candle. “But I’m glad I found you here.”
“So am I.” She picked up a smile and discarded it. “Funny thing . . . I have that feeling whenever I see you. Always have.” She cocked her head, blinking. “Actually, I don’t know anybody else I can say that about.”
“The girl, whoever she is, when she’s new.”
Her mouth tightened at one corner. “The new wears off.”
Max waddled over. “Will Miss Dunstan eat now?”
Dave stared. “You mean she hasn’t?”
“Miss Dunstan,” Madge said, “will steal some of Mr. Brandstetter’s garlic toast. And that will be enough for Miss Dunstan, thanks, Max.”
Max shook his head in worried disapproval but he never argued. He went away. Somewhere he had a record player hidden. Now he made it work. Songs from a Neapolitan street organ. Verdi, jangling and off key. To Dave it was like a blow in the stomach. He half stood. Startled, alarmed, Madge caught his sleeve. “What’s wrong?”
“The stupid music. I wish he hadn’t done that. Jesus! Italians!” But it wasn’t Max’s fault. Dave raked a hand through his hair and dropped into the chair again. “Funny.” His laugh was bleak. “Many’s the time I’ve sat here and sworn at Rod under the cover of that beautiful, awful record. Now he’s not here, it breaks my heart.” Tears blurred his eyes. He looked away quickly, across the muted room to where the steel doors of pizza ovens gleamed beyond a high brick counter. “But Verdi’s going to be around for a long time, isn’t he? Traviata’s going to keep dying. I’m going to have to learn to ignore it.” Madge’s face was scribbled with sympathy. He smiled. “Did you know she was a terrible liar, said lying kept her teeth white?”
Madge squinted. “Who?”
“Marguerite Gautier. Camille. Traviata.” The salad came. He busied his hands with the oil, the vinegar, the pepper mill. Watching him, she mused aloud:
“Maybe it does. I’ve always been wedded to the truth. You should see my dentist bill. Whereas Cuff”—that was the sunburned girl’s improbable name—“Cuff could lie from dawn till dark and ‘Look, Ma, no cavities!’” Her expression hardened abruptly. “You know, Davey, I’m sick of liars. I’m sick of kids. I’m sick of pretty girls who trade on their prettiness. I am F-E-D, fed, U-P, up.”
He spoke with a mouth full of salad. “Pick an
ugly one next time.” He dabbed olive oil from his chin with his napkin. “Find some lonely, simplehearted plain Jane of forty. I’ve told you that before.”
“And I’ve told you a relationship without sex isn’t worth having.”
It was an old debate. It came up regularly. Every time Madge was reassembling the broken pieces after an affair. They were always that with Madge. None of them lasted more than a few months. He always gave her the same advice. Find somebody your own age and mentality and background. She always ignored it. Next week, next month, another junior-grade design student, paint-smeared helper in the silk-screen shop, would-be actress, swimmer, model, tennis player, singer . . .
Madge was herself a successful and well-heeled designer of textiles and wallpapers. Hard-working, clever, an achiever, somebody with a lot to give. Easy, amusing, informed, none of the usual lesbian paranoia. Decent too, down to the ground. But the nice girls she found to bed could give no more than sweetness, which you can’t live on. And the rest, the majority, were simply takers. It had been a sad pageant to watch.
He asked, “Why should it have to be without sex?”
“Because you can’t make yourself want sex with somebody. It happens or it doesn’t happen.” She gave a sour, soundless laugh. “For me it always happens wrong. You just know Keats died young. Beauty is not truth and truth is not beauty. The two words don’t even belong in the same dictionary.”
The wine came, the garlic toast, the steaming lasagne. The waiter brought two glasses. Madge began work on hers right away. There was salad left in the big wooden bowl. She attacked that too, and tore into the garlic toast. They ate in silence for a few minutes. Then, when he’d filled her glass again, she picked it up and studied him over its rim. Very grave.
“I’m through chasing beauty. Cuff was the last.”
Dave told her, “There was a guy in the army. Name of George Starkovich. One of the ugliest men I ever saw. Squat. Hairy. But inside he was beautiful. He was one of the nicest things that ever happened to me in my life.”
She shut her eyes a second and nodded. “I remember. You’ve told me. Any number of times. The point is lost on me, Davey. Sorry. If it can’t be beautiful I don’t want it. And if it is beautiful, it’s not worth having.” She drank from the glass, set it down businesslike, and her tone was brisk. “Granted, it took me a long time to figure it out. Figure it out I have done. And things are going to be different from now on.”
The lasagne was as good as ever. Maybe better. He had a mouthful of it and could only raise his eyebrows to ask her to go on.
“Sex and companionship are mutually exclusive. Too bad. But a fact. Anyway a fact for me. However . . . one gets more important as the other gets less. Right?”
He held out his hands and shrugged.
“I’m getting old, Davey. O-L-D, old.”
He swallowed. “You, Madge? Never.”
“Me most of all,” she said. “When the thought of merry girlish chatter is enough to send you pawing through the medicine chest for that old set of ear plugs, you’ve had it. You’re old. You begin wanting some nice, quiet, grown-up company. Somebody restful. Sex? You dimly remember something about it. A game for kids. Strenuous. You want to stretch limp in your easy chair and listen to Mozart quartets.”
“You’re getting at something,” he said. “Sideways. That’s not like you, Madge.”
“I know it.” She looked away. Her fingers turned the wineglass by its stem. It tipped and she righted it clumsily and fussed for longer than needful with the red splash on the cloth. Then she looked up at him and her eyes were little-girl wide. “I’m talking about living with you.”
He could only stare.
“You’re alone. Nobody’s ever going to take Rod’s place. You’ve got to leave that house. You know you do. And I’m alone too. And I’ve got lots of space.” She had—big white rooms full of sunlight and the sea gleaming blue beyond. “We’ve been friends since man descended from the trees. We’re comfortable together. . . .” She lowered her head but her eyes were still on him, anxious. “Aren’t we?”
She meant this. In dead earnest. And he was sorry. Because she was wrong. About herself, for openers. Cuff had left scars but they would heal. About him, because somebody would take Rod’s place. Who, he couldn’t say. But he would find somebody. Until this minute he hadn’t known that. He knew it now. He half rose, leaned across the table and kissed her forehead. Solemn and brotherly. Then he sat down again and took hold of her skinny hands.
“Do you know these lines, Madge? The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction, the weight, the weight we carry is love. . . .”
She stared at him for a moment. Then tears brimmed her eyes and started down her face. She groped in her big over-the-shoulder handbag for Kleenex. She blotted the tears, blew her nose. Her mouth quivered. Her voice was thin and sad and wobbly.
“I wanted to set the weight down,” she said.
He shook his head and gave her a small regretful smile. “Not bloody likely,” he said.
11
The snapshot was dog-eared and faded and had lost its gloss. In bright sunlight a blond boy in ragged swim trunks, and a smaller, dark boy in Levi’s, shirt open and flapping in the wind, grinned at the camera, side by side. They stood easy, hipshot, arms thrown over each other’s shoulders, on a pier. A gull swung above them. Beyond them, through strong scaffolding, the ocean glinted. He had seen scaffolding like that lately. Where?
“That was 1941. Twenty-six years ago. It doesn’t seem possible.” The little pet-shop woman in her flowered smock peered up at Dave. Her glasses were thick, a circle of white cloth pasted inside one of the lenses. The visible eye was black and bird-bright. Birds surrounded her in shiny cages. Canaries, parakeets, finches. Noisy flowers. “They spent the whole summer at Bell Beach. One of them—I don’t even remember now if it was Fox or Doug—sold a dozen silly, schoolboy cartoons to some pulp paper magazine, and so they had a few dollars.” Her smile was fond, remembering. “How excited they were.”
“It had to be a long time ago.” Dave studied the photo. “Kids today don’t grin like that.”
“No, they don’t, do they?” She nodded, troubled. “It’s as if they understand already that there isn’t much in life to smile about.” She sighed. “And that’s a shame. They ought to be like birds.”
Like a bird in trouble, a kettle shrieked in the back room. She led him there. The place was dim under forty-watt bulbs. It smelled of seed, alfalfa, sawdust—bird food, rabbit pellets, cage litter. Paper barrels, bulging sacks, unopened cartons, dusty unsold aquariums, cages in swaths of brown paper. Behind chicken wire, guinea pigs hopped over the backs of tortoises. A taffy-colored cocker spaniel nursed wriggling pups. A sick monkey hunched by a rain-gray window.
The hot plate stood on a shelf beside a scarred refrigerator. There was an open pound paper box of sugar on the shelf, a jar of powdered cream substitute. She fixed mugs of instant coffee and cracked open a cellophane box to get him a little red plastic spoon to stir his with. They went into the shop again. Hard, bright surfaces under glaring fluorescents. Bouquets of loud plastic flowers. A bubbling green fish tank. Dave lit a cigarette and picked up the photo.
“Doug looks smaller than Fox. Was he younger?”
“Only four months. Fox’s birthday was July, Doug’s was November. But Doug was never strong. He had rheumatic fever when he was seven. He was delicate. We had to be careful with him always.”
“But he ended up in the Air Force,” Dave said.
Her laugh was brief and mirthless. “It was a shock. The doctor had sworn his heart was damaged and it’d never be right again. Course, we didn’t keep running back and back to the doctor. Couldn’t afford it, in the first place. And after all, he never had spells or anything. Just colds and little stomach upsets—the usual. And I watched him to be sure he never overdid. He was naturally quiet, anyway. Never cared for sports.”
“And
his heart mended.”
She snorted. “Doctors! There probably wasn’t anything wrong with it in the first place.” A myna bird by the front window threw back its head and laughed. It sounded human. She called, “That’s right, Rudyard,” blew at her coffee, frowned. “It upset Fox something awful. He wasn’t taken, you know. Into the service, I mean. Can’t say why. And neither of them expected Doug would qualify. Nobody did. Fox went over to the enlistment place with him. When they came home you’ve never seen such long faces.”
She sipped gingerly at the coffee, set the mug down and blinked at Dave. “Do you know . . . I never knew two people as close as those two boys. Not in my whole life.” She gave a little thoughtful headshake. “And when Doug came home from Europe and saw that story in the Times —it was just a paragraph, you know, about this radio entertainer going to run for mayor of some little ranch town—he yelled. Really. Right out loud. Jumped out of his chair and came running into the kitchen, flapping the paper, and threw his arms around me, and I swear I don’t know whether he was laughing or crying.”
There was a long ash on Dave’s cigarette. She poked among the litter on the counter, cuttlebone, plastic-wrapped dog toys, catnip mice, and found an oval milk-glass bird-bath and pushed it at him. “Of course,” she went on, “I’d long ago lost track of Fox. He just dropped out of sight when Doug was reported killed. He’d stayed on at the art school, you know, but he left after that. When Doug turned up alive in a prison camp at the end of the war, I tried to find Fox, but he wasn’t in the phone book. The aunt who raised him, church organist, she was dead, come to find out. So that was where my search ended. Didn’t have time to look for him right then. Mr. Sawyer was in the hospital and I had my hands full with the shop. . . .”
Her face set, abused. “Then, when Doug didn’t come home, decided to stay on in Europe and take the occupation job the government offered him”—her mouth pinched up and there was an edge of spite honed on self-pity to her voice—“I guess I decided Fox didn’t matter anymore. Any more than I mattered. Alone here.”
Fadeout: A Dave Brandstetter Mystery (Dave Brandstetter Mysteries (University of Wisconsin Press)) Page 8