“I saw the way you were treated at the museum Wednesday night,” McGuire said. “Like a queen. They respect you. They like you. And as for the men, well . . .”
“You’re missing the point,” she said impatiently. She set her glass on the tiled floor. “Just how much have I told you about myself?”
“That you’re a small-town California girl,” McGuire said.
Her eyebrows rose. “That’s all?”
“And you did what thousands of small-town girls do every year. You went to Los Angeles looking for a career. And you found a husband. This one was foreign and wealthy. I’d say you did pretty well compared with most small-town girls who head for Hollywood.”
“Only because of Grams.”
“Grams?”
She smiled a sad, sweet smile and leaned back on the love seat again, reaching up to finger a hanging bougainvillea branch as she talked.
“I was following my mother’s footsteps, in a way. But with a much different result. You see, my mother went to Los Angeles with ideas of being discovered in Schwabb’s drugstore, like Lana Turner. Well, she was discovered all right. She returned home a year later, pregnant with me. No husband, no money, nothing. Just Grams, her mother, waiting for her. After I was born, she stayed around for a few months, trying to put her life together. But you couldn’t do that in a small town back then. Everyone thought she was a whore. Me, I was just a little bastard. So she left one day with nothing but a suitcase. No one ever saw or heard from her again.”
There was no self-pity in her voice. No dramatics. No hints that she was telling anything but the truth.
“So Grams raised me. She was such a character. My grandfather had died in an accident, working the silver mines during the war. Grams took charge of everything. When the people in Barstow—that’s where I was born—when they became too cruel and unforgiving, and it was clear my mother was never returning, Grams said ‘Who needs them?’ or something like that. So we moved to Shoshone on the edge of Death Valley, and that’s where Grams raised me.”
She looked into the courtyard and fixed her gaze on the patch of blue sky visible above the fountain. “Grams told me it’s better to have roses on your table than diamonds on your neck. But then she would always wink and add, ‘Of course, if you can have both, why not?’”
“Is she still alive?” McGuire asked.
“She died a few years after Getti and I were married. From a stroke. Sometimes I still miss her so terribly. It was Grams who introduced me to music and art. She came from a good family back east and graduated from Radcliffe with a degree in fine arts. Then she ran off with a good-looking man who had no interest in her money. He wanted to earn his fortune in the western mines and she followed him here. You can imagine her family’s response.”
Glynnis drained the iced tea from her crystal glass.
“Would you pour me another glass please?” she smiled across to McGuire.
He rose and walked to the table. As he filled her glass, he was aware of her eyes on him, a fragile smile playing on her face.
“Is there a story behind that scar?” she asked.
“Nothing worth talking about.” McGuire handed her the drink and returned to the other love seat. “You were telling me about growing up with your grandmother,” he prompted.
Glynnis Vargas began running the tip of her finger around the rim of her glass. “She never abandoned her love of culture. It was part of her and became part of me too. Her husband was killed in a mine accident when my mother was still a young child. Soon after that, Grams’s father died. He never really forgave her for running off to California, but he left her a bequest in his will. That’s what she survived on for the rest of her life. By the time I came along, it was just enough to support us, her and me. With a little left over to purchase classical music records and a few prints.”
She smiled that same secret smile again and watched her finger trace the rim of the glass, around and around.
“Grams always said that if you took two identical rooms and played Mozart in one continuously for a week, she could enter both rooms a year later and tell which one was still resonating with the music. When she died. . . .” She swallowed, turned away, blinked twice, and continued. “When she died, I looked after the burial arrangements myself. In a special place . . . where I knew she wanted to be.” She smiled, embarrassed. “Isn’t it strange how meticulous we can be with the wishes of the dead and how careless we are with the needs of the living?” Lifting her finger from the glass, she looked across at McGuire. “Tell me how you got that scar,” she pleaded.
McGuire prided himself on his resistance to manipulation, especially the manipulations of available women. Available, willing and beautiful women.
“Your grandmother,” he replied, “sounds like quite a woman.”
Glynnis dropped her eyes to her glass again. “An amazing woman. I could never measure up to all that she was. In some ways, I never even tried. She was cultured and liberated, proud of her heritage, and yet she despised authority.”
“Sounds like a female John Wayne,” McGuire offered.
Her eyes flew at McGuire and narrowed with anger. “No, not a bit!” she responded. “She wasn’t a jingoist or a flag-waver. None of those things. She hated the idea of blind obedience and dying for a piece of cloth that was called your flag. During the Vietnam War she sat and watched protesters burn the flag on the television news. Do you know what she said? She said ‘They’re fools. They shouldn’t be burning the flag. They should be washing it.’”
She sat upright and placed her glass on the side table. “You know what?” she said, brightening. “I think I’d like to go for a drive in the desert.”
She collected her purse, spoke briefly to the maid and led McGuire through the house to the garage. A silver Cadillac Seville, white Ferrari and red Mercedes roadster waited in the dim light until Glynnis tripped the automatic door behind the Mercedes and it opened to flood the garage with sunshine.
“I love driving in the desert,” she said as she slipped behind the wheel of the Mercedes. “Usually I drive alone. It will be different to have someone with me.”
Following Chula Vista through Palm Springs to the interstate, she turned south to bypass the city, driving at the limit. Soon they were lost in the openness of the California desert, the sky a hemisphere of unblemished blue over a table of sand. Beyond Indio she turned west on a side-road, which stretched like a taut rope to distant low, misty mountains. “The Orocopias,” she replied to McGuire’s question of their name. “I often come out here to listen.”
“Listen to what?” McGuire asked.
“Music.” She opened the centre armrest of the Mercedes and withdrew a tape cassette at random. “God, what would we have if we didn’t have music?”
They were sitting in the car, poised at the rim of a steep bluff just off the roadway. Below them, the valley swept away to the mountains. They watched a car approach from the west, its progress painfully slow across the flat tableland. High above, the white contrails of a jet made a scalpel-cut across the skin of the sky. The Mercedes idled and whispered cool air while melancholy orchestral music played on the car stereo.
“Do you like that?” Glynnis asked.
“I don’t recognize it.”
“It’s Fauré. A French composer. He wrote such lovely music.”
“The man who called me,” McGuire said, taking his eyes from the view and turning to look at Glynnis. “I think he broke the figurine at the museum Wednesday night.”
She closed her eyes and began humming with the music.
“He knows you, he knew Crawford, and he said he had Lafaro with him,” McGuire continued.
She began to speak, then resumed humming again. Her voice was melodic and in perfect pitch.
“Mrs. Vargas, I think you know more than you’re telling me. For your sake and mine, talk to me about it
.”
“About what?” Her eyes were still closed, and she was smiling like a child with a secret.
“About whatever you haven’t told me. About why Bunker Crawford would kill a man, then appear on your doorstep in the middle of the night, firing a gun.”
The humming ceased and she opened her eyes. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“No,” McGuire said slowly. “It is not obvious.”
“The man was clearly insane.”
She backed the car away from the bluff and drove back to the interstate highway in silence, turning south to Desert Center.
“Are you hungry?” she asked, pulling in front of a small restaurant set well back from the road. “This little place sells the best burritos north of Guadalajara. If my neighbours ever knew I passed up beluga caviar and champagne to go slumming here, they would drum me off all the committees they keep asking me to join. Which might not be a bad idea. Let’s go in.”
“I’m sorry if I seem uncooperative,” she said when they were seated. She reached up and removed her gold earrings, each sculptured in the shape of a weathered tree with diamond chips scattered among its branches.
McGuire watched with fascination. He was always captivated by the mundane rituals of a beautiful woman. Removing earrings. Applying lipstick. Unfastening a brassiere. “I thought you wanted this solved,” he said.
“I want it ended.” She set the jewellery in front of her and leaned toward McGuire. “This has nothing to do with me. It has never had anything to do with me. All I want is to be left alone to enjoy the things I love. My art collection, my music, my opportunity to lose myself in the desert.”
“Most people would have added something else to that list,” McGuire said. He inhaled her perfume deeply.
They were the only patrons in the restaurant, whose interior was furnished with artifacts and collectibles considered junk a few hundred miles further south. A restored PeMex gasoline pump, cracked pottery, bullfight posters, a weathered mileage sign to Ensenada, rusting farm implements, oversized sombreros, cracked mariachi instruments.
A waiter arrived with two margaritas, and Glynnis Vargas waited until he’d returned to the bar before replying. “And what would that be? What else would be added?”
“Companionship.”
She raised the glass to her lips and held it there, speaking over it. “A man?”
“Probably.” McGuire sipped his drink and licked the salt from his lips. “Mrs. Vargas . . .”
“Glynnis.” An order, not a request.
“Glynnis, so far you’ve shown me about three, maybe four different women in the past couple of days.”
She formed a rosebud with her lips and sampled her drink, her eyes locked on his. She was amused, enjoying the moment.
“One is a wealthy art patron who bought her way into a crowd of multimillionaires, billionaires for all I know. She fits in with them like flowers at a wedding. Another is this strong-willed woman who knows what she wants and won’t let anybody stand in her way. To hell with elegance, this is a tough broad. Then there’s the young orphan girl who set out for Hollywood full of innocence and her granny’s wisdom.”
She set the glass down, smiling broadly. “I count three,” she said. “You said four.”
“I said maybe four. I can’t tell. Because there’s always another one in a shadow somewhere. But I can see enough of the other three to know they all have one thing in common besides being beautiful and wealthy.”
“And what’s that?” she asked, punctuating it with a small laugh.
“They all love men. They love to attract men, tease men, toy with them and maybe even marry them. Which makes me wonder if your marriage to the Brazilian gem king was as full of tickles and giggles as you say it was.”
Storm clouds gathered behind her eyes and she sat back in the booth, staring at her glass as she rotated it slowly on the table. “I should slap your face for that,” she said, speaking each word as though it might shatter with the wrong inflection. “And leave you here in this hell-hole to find your own way home. But I won’t. Because you have no idea how happy I was back in Brazil. Because you can never fathom just how devastated I was by my husband’s death. And because you cannot understand how much I loathe these people around me in Palm Springs, the way they stumble and fawn over me when I bring them a crumb of culture, a snippet of the only kind of wealth that even aims to be immortal.”
Their food arrived, and they began eating in silence.
“Do you know,” she said, patting her mouth delicately with a table napkin, “why I invited you to the museum the other night?”
McGuire had finished his meal. “I’ve asked myself that a few times.”
“Because you would be an antidote to all the phoniness I expected to encounter there. And you were.” She raised her fork as though to continue eating, hesitated, and set it aside.
“Your neighbour seems interested in your happiness,” McGuire offered.
“Donald? He’s interested in his own status. He doesn’t even need my money. He needs somebody to add a little class to his life. God, all that money and all that power, and their lives are so empty.”
“And yours?” McGuire asked.
She was fingering her earrings. “Do you wish to explain that?” she asked.
“You live with a maid, an art collection and the memories of your husband,” McGuire said. “That can’t be enough for a woman like you.”
She lifted her hands to one ear and inserted the earring. “Why don’t you be more direct, Joe?”
“That’s as direct as I get. Sorry.”
“And don’t apologize. Apologies are admissions of failure.” She began fastening the second earring. “No one should admit failure. . . .”
“Aw, goddamn it, lady!” McGuire’s voice was like the crack of a whip.
The waiter glanced across the room at them, turning away when caught in McGuire’s glare.
Glynnis Vargas smiled. “Why, Joseph,” she said. “I do believe you’re finally showing me another side of you.”
“Cut the intellectual crap,” McGuire said with mounting impatience. “When I met you the other night, I saw a woman who loves to play roles, whether it’s art patron, philosophical guru or society cockteaser. Well, play all the roles you want, but two men are dead and one of them was my prisoner. What’s more, my partner was so badly shot up he’ll never totally recover, and it’s only dumb luck that my head wasn’t opened like a watermelon by one of those bullets. On top of that, I’ve been kidnapped by a couple of flag-waving Feds who’d make Ronald Reagan look like a hippie, some schizophrenic nut calls me at all hours of the night to talk gibberish, and the Palm Springs captain of detectives would like to ride my ass out of town on a lame donkey or whatever you people do with riff-raff around here. So I don’t have time for role-playing. Because, Mrs. Vargas,” biting her name off in two sharp syllables, “if somebody decides to kill you like they killed Bunker Crawford, you’ll be dead no matter what role you were playing. Art patron, philosopher or whore.”
He leaned back in the booth and folded his arms, awaiting her response.
Her face was flushed with anger, and her small hands formed fists like stones on the table in front of her, the veins and tendons in sharp relief. Her eyes burned into McGuire’s before she turned her head to face the wall and bring a hand to her brow. Her shoulders heaved, but when she turned to look at McGuire there were no tears in her eyes. She was laughing, a light and high laugh, like wind chimes.
“McGuire, you must value honesty more than anything else in life. Certainly at least as much as my friendship with you.”
McGuire waited for her to continue.
She sat upright, still giggling quietly, dabbing at her eyes with a silk handkerchief from her purse. “No one I come in contact with any more is ever so honest. Or so abrasive. Except with their domestic he
lp, of course. Honesty, impulsiveness—that’s all considered bad form, you see.” She set the handkerchief aside and stared into his eyes. “A whore, McGuire? Why, I’ve known men who would kill you for calling me that.”
“I didn’t . . .” McGuire began, but she reached across the table to place the tip of her finger against his lips.
“No more,” she said in a near-whisper. “Not anymore.” Her finger moved up the line of the scar, and she laughed again. “Did you notice anything about the people in Palm Springs, McGuire? Beyond their wealth, I mean. There’s something else that makes them unique compared with other people. Do you know what it is? They don’t have scars. Or wrinkles. Next to golf, plastic surgery is the biggest industry the town has. It’s true. There are more plastic surgeons per capita in Palm Springs than dentists. Or teachers. Imagine a whole industry based on removing wrinkles, or reshaping noses, or making breasts larger. Isn’t it silly, McGuire?” Her face began to crumble. “While the rest of the world is making medicines or refrigerators or computers or other things vital to life, Palm Springs devotes its energy to avoiding the semblance of aging. Not death. Not even six plastic surgeons for every hundred residents can prevent that. Just the semblance of dying, McGuire. That’s what it all comes down to. Appearances. And another lie. That’s all. Just another goddamned lie.”
Her eyes were wet with tears and her hands were shaking. McGuire took them in his and squeezed them.
“I’m . . . I don’t mean to appear so mysterious,” she said haltingly, staring down at her unfinished meal. “Especially with someone who is so brutally honest. Painfully honest.” She laughed briefly through her tears.
“Just tell me the truth,” McGuire responded.
She raised her eyes to his and stared into them, searching for something hidden. “Drive me home, please,” she said. “Drive me home and I promise to be honest with you.”
Chapter Twelve
It was almost midnight.
Through the skylight over the bed, McGuire watched the moon suspended like a peach in the darkness above him. He rolled on his side to draw a hand lightly along the bare, bronzed back of Glynnis Vargas and trace the line of her spine down, down, until she rose out of sleep long enough to laugh softly and roll away from him.
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