Ask for Me Tomorrow

by Margaret Millar

  “And how is Mr. Decker?”

  “The same.”

  “There is still no hope?”

  “Well, my housekeeper prayed for him last night at church. That’s something, I suppose, when you’re as hard up for hope as I am.”

  It had been three months or so since Smedler had seen her and she had aged considerably in such a short time. The results weren’t all negative, though. There seemed to be a new strength in her face and more assurance in her manner. She’d also lost quite a lot of weight. Smedler had always admired her sense of style—no matter what costume she wore, it was difficult to imagine it suiting anyone else—and the weight loss emphasized her individuality.

  “About your call yesterday,” Smedler said. “It was rather enigmatic.”

  “It was meant to be, in case anyone was listening in on my phone or yours.”

  “Don’t worry about mine. I have no secrets from Charity.”

  “I have.”

  “She’s very discreet.”

  “As my housekeeper would say, discretion is in the eye of the beholder.”

  “Yes. Well.”

  “Tell me about the young man.”

  “His name’s Aragon. Tom Aragon. He’s twenty-five, bright, personable, speaks Spanish like a native, graduated from law school last spring. I find him a bit pedantic, though that could be simply his manner with me, since I’m the boss. Technically, anyway.”

  “How much do I pay him?”

  “That depends entirely on what you want him to do. We estimate the time of a recent graduate to be worth so much an hour.”

  “Paying by the hour would be too complicated in this case. I’ll need his total services for—well, two or three weeks, perhaps longer. What’s Aragon’s monthly salary?”

  “I don’t know for sure. Let’s call Charity and—”

  “No. Negative no.”

  “I think you may be doing Charity an injustice.”

  “More likely I’m doing her a justice,” Gilly said. “Suppose I pay your office the amount of his salary plus a commission for the use of his services. Then I’ll make separate financial arrangements with Aragon. They’ll be strictly between him and me.”

  “Why all the secrecy, my dear?”

  “If I told you anything further, you’d try and talk me out of it.”

  “Perhaps not. Give me a chance.”

  “No.”

  They stared at each other for a minute in silence, not hostile, but not friendly either. Then Smedler, sighing, got up and walked over to the main window. Clouds were parading across the sky like a procession of spaceships. On the earthbound street below, traffic remained sparse and sluggish. Smedler didn’t look either up or down. This is a damn stubborn woman. Okay, I can be a damn stubborn man.

  “You were B. J.’s friend,” Gilly said. “But you always had a pretty low opinion of him. You treated him like a nice jolly little fellow without a brain in his head.”

  “Now what in hell—I mean, what brought that on? What’s it got to do with anything? Even if it were true, which it isn’t—”

  “Oh, it’s true. You made it quite obvious and it hurt. I guess it hurt me worse than it did B. J. because he never had any more faith in himself and his ability than you did. I did. I was full of faith.”

  “Dammit, Gilly. Get to the point.”

  “It’s simple. If I told you what I want Aragon to do, you’d just call me a fool.”

  “Try me.”

  “No.”

  “Negative no?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “By God,” Smedler said. “I need a drink.”

  Tom Aragon closed the iron-grilled elevator door behind him and approached Charity’s desk. He was a tall thin young man with horn-rimmed glasses that gave him a look of continual surprise. He’d come to Smedler’s firm straight out of law school, so most of the time he was in fact surprised. The jobs assigned to him so far didn’t often involve the third floor or the woman who ran it. There was a rumor, though, that she had a sense of humor if it could be found and excavated.

  She must have heard the elevator door clank open and shut, but Charity didn’t look up from the papers on her desk or indicate in any way that she was aware of someone else in the room.

  “Hey,” Aragon said. “Remember me?”

  She raised her head. “Ah so. The new boy from the bottom of the bottom floor. Rather cute. Well, don’t try any of the cutes on me. What do you want?”

  “The boss said you’d clue me in.”

  “On the world in general or did you have something specific in mind?”

  “This Mrs. Decker, what’s she like?”

  “You’d better not ask my opinion. She just called me a smartass. What do you think of that?”

  “I think that’s a leading question which in a court of law I wouldn’t be required to answer.”

  “This isn’t a court of law. It’s a nice cozy little office with only two people in it, and one of them just asked a question and the other is going to answer.”

  “Very well. Mrs. Decker could be right. You and I haven’t been acquainted long enough for me to judge.”

  Charity pushed aside her wig and scratched the lobe of her left ear in a contemplative way. “The junior members of this firm, especially the junior juniors, are usually careful to show me some respect, even a little hard homage around Christmas.”

  “Christmas is a long way off. Maybe I’ll work up to it by then.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Now back to Mrs. Decker.”

  “Gilda. Gilda Grace Lockwood Decker. Lockwood was her first husband, a funny little man, looked like a drunken cherub even when he was cold sober. She married him for his money, of course, though Smedler doesn’t think so. Smedler’s an incurable romantic, considering the business he’s in and the number of marriages he’s had. Anyway, Lockwood’s long gone . . .

  Gilly did a lot of traveling after her divorce and there was talk of various affairs in different parts of the world. Nothing really serious until she met this guy Marco Decker in Paris. Then it was clang clang, wedding bells again. She wired Smedler to send her money in care of American Express for her trousseau. Some trousseau. She must have bought half the nightgowns and perfume in France. I guess it was too much for poor old Decker. He had a stroke while they were honeymooning at Saint-Tropez. So there was Gilly, stuck with a paralyzed bridegroom in the midst of all those lovely naked young Frenchmen.”

  “Why were the Frenchmen naked?”

  “My dear boy, it was Saint-Tropez. That’s why people visit there, to see other people naked.”

  “It seems like a long way to go to see somebody naked.”

  “Well, of course only the ‘in’ people go to Saint-Tropez. The ‘out’ people like you and me, we just take off our clothes and stand in front of a mirror . . . Well, that’s the sad story of Gilly. She brought Decker home, installed a lot of expensive equipment so she could keep him there and hired a male nurse to help look after him. Et cetera.”

  “What’s included in the et cetera?”

  “You can bet your life she’s not wasting all those Paris nightgowns. Any more questions?”

  “One,” Aragon said.

  “Okay, shoot.”

  “What joker gave you the name Charity?”

  3

  The swimming pool in the middle of the patio was larger than the one at the YMCA where Aragon had learned to swim as a boy. At the bottom lay a ceramic mermaid which no YMCA would have tolerated. She wore nothing but a smirk.

  A dark-haired good-looking man in very brief tight swim trunks was cleaning the pool with a vacuum. His movements were tense and angry. He pushed the vacuum back and forth across the mermaid’s face as though trying to obliterate her smirk. At the same time he was conducting a monologue which Aragon assumed w
as aimed at him.

  “Nobody manages this place. It’s simply not managed. Take a look around, just look. Disgusting.”

  Aragon looked. The early-morning wind from the desert had thrown a film of dust across the water and littered it with pine needles and the petals of roses and jacarandas and cypress twigs and eucalyptus pods, all the leaves and loves and leavings of plants.

  “We have two daily gardeners, a cleaning woman, a day maid, a pool boy who comes twice a week and a handyman living over the garage. So what happens? The handyman has arthritis, the gardeners say it’s not their job, the day maid and cleaning woman can’t be trusted with anything more complicated than a broom, and the pool boy has a term paper in biology due this week. Guess who’s left? Reed. Good old Reed. That’s me.”

  “Hello, good old Reed.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Tom Aragon. I have an appointment with Mrs. Decker.”

  “Aragon. There was a fighter named Aragon once. Remember him?”

  “No.”

  “Too young, eh? Actually, so am I. My mother told me about him. She was a fight fan. I’ll never forget her actually, really—can you beat it?—putting on the gloves with me when I was six or seven years old. She was one weird old lady.”

  He thrust the vacuum across the mermaid’s face again, then suddenly dropped it in the pool and continued his monologue. “It’s only the middle of October. How could the kid have a term paper due the second week of school? And the handyman with his arthritis—hell, I’m a registered nurse, I know an arthritis case when I see it. There are over eighty different kinds and he hasn’t got any of them. What he’s got is a hangover, same as he had yesterday and the day before and last month and last year. If this place were managed, he’d be kicked out. What’s behind the whole thing is this—I’m the one who uses the pool most, so if I want it clean I better bloody well clean it myself.”

  He was beginning to sound like a querulous old man. Aragon guessed that he was no more than thirty-five. He also guessed that Reed’s bad mood hadn’t much connection with merely cleaning the pool. Reed confirmed this indirectly: “Gilly told me to stick around till you got here. I had to give up my five o’clock cooking class. I was going to do beef Wellington with spinach soufflé orien-tale. The food around here is vile. If you’re invited for dinner, split fast. Gilly hired this crazy cook who keeps getting hyped on various diets. We haven’t been served any decent red meat for a week . . . I don’t know what Gilly expects me to do, size you up, maybe. She can be so obscure.”

  “Well, size me up.”

  Reed stared. He had green murky eyes like dirty little ponds. “You look okay.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Of course, it’s hard to tell nowadays. I had my wallet lifted last Thursday by two of the most innocent-faced chicks you ever saw . . . Go right across the patio to the glass door and shake the wind chimes good and hard. She’s in Marco’s room. If I hurry, maybe I can catch at least the soufflé part of my class.”

  “Good luck.”

  “A soufflé is more a matter of correct temperature and timing than luck. Do you cook?”

  “Peanut butter sandwiches.”

  “You might enjoy the food around here,” Reed said and disappeared around the side of the house.

  It wasn’t necessary for Aragon to shake the wind chimes. Gilly was waiting for him inside the door of what seemed to be a family recreation room. Its focus was a round barbecue pit level with the floor and made of used brick. The steel grill in the pit was spotless, and underneath it there were no ashes from yesterday’s fire and no charcoal for tomorrow’s. Only a few stains indicated the pit had been used. Above it was a huge copper hood which reflected everything in the room distorted in various degrees, much like the convex mirrors utilized in stores to spot shoplifters.

  Aragon saw himself in the copper hood, a bit taller and thinner and a great deal more mysterious than he looked in the mirror of the men’s room at the office. The lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses seemed almost opaque, as though they’d been designed to disguise his appearance rather than to improve his vision. He might have been a college professor who did a little spying on the side, or a spy who taught a few classes as a cover.

  Gilly, too, looked different. Instead of the beige suit she’d worn earlier she had on a pink cotton dress a couple of sizes too large and espadrilles with frayed rope soles. Only the faintest coating of make-up remained on her face. The rest had disappeared, the mascara blinked off, the blushes rubbed off, the lipstick smiled or talked off. Or perhaps it had all simply been washed away in a deluge of tears. She was carrying a large manila envelope with some letters hand-printed across the front in black ink.

  “Your name’s Tom, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I suppose you’re curious about why I dragged you all the way out here.”

  “It’s not far.”

  “Now, that’s a nice evasive response. You should make a fine lawyer.”

  “Well, okay. I am curious.”

  “I couldn’t talk to you freely this morning because I didn’t want Smedler or that witch in his office to overhear.” A smile swept across her face like a summer storm, leaving it refreshed, softer. “The old devil has the place bugged, you know. What did he tell you about me?”

  “Very little.” Go along with her, Smedler had said. I’m sure she won’t ask you to do anything too indiscreet. And whatever it is, you’11 get some money and some experience out of it and we hang on to her business. She’s one of our golden oldies. “I don’t think he has his office bugged, by the way.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “It wouldn’t be ethical.”

  “Tell that to Smedler sometime when I’m around. I’d love to watch his face come unglued.” She put the manila envelope on a leather-topped table. Then she sat down in one of the four matching chairs and motioned for him to sit opposite her. “I’ve played a lot of games at this table, bridge, Scrabble, backgammon, Monopoly. This one will be new.”

  “What’s the name of it?”

  “See for yourself.” She turned the manila envelope so he could read the letters, printed on the front: B. J. Photographs. Certificates, Et cetera. “Let’s just call it B. J., for short.”

  “And the rules?”

  “We make them up as we go along . . . Did Smedler tell you about B. J.?”

  “No.”

  “Did anyone?”

  “Charity mentioned him.”

  “I have to watch you, you really are evasive. What did she say?”

  “That he was your first husband, B. J. Lockwood, and that he was long gone.”

  “Long gone. Yes, he’s long gone,” she repeated, almost as if she were tasting the words to identify their flavor. Spinach soufflé? Peanut butter sandwiches? Sour grapes? It was impossible for an observer to judge from her expression. “Eight years, to be precise. We’d been married five years and things were going along fine. Maybe not storybook peachy keen—we weren’t kids, he’d been married before and I’d been around here and there—but certainly a whole lot better than average. At least, I thought so.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  “He did. He took off with one of the servants, a Mexican girl no more than fifteen years old. She was pregnant. B. J. always wanted a child and I refused for a number of reasons. His family had a history of diabetes and frankly my side of it wasn’t too hot either. Besides, you don’t start having kids when you’re in your late thirties, not unless your maternal instincts are a hell of a lot stronger than mine.”

  “What was the girl’s name?”

  “Tula Lopez. Whether B. J. was the father of her child or not, she persuaded him he was and he did the honorable thing. B. J. always did honorable things, impulsive, stupid, absurd, but honorable. So off the two of them rode into the sunset. It was what they rode in that
burns me up—the brand-new motor home I’d just bought for us to go on a vacation to British Columbia. I was crazy about that thing. Dreamboat, I called it. On the first night it was delivered here to the house B. J. and I actually slept in it, and the next morning I made our breakfast in the little kitchen, orange juice and Grapenuts. A week later it was goodbye Dreamboat, B. J., Tula and the rest of the box of Grapenuts.”

  “What do you want me to do, get back the rest of the Grapenuts?”

  She didn’t smile. She merely looked pensive as if she was seriously considering the proposition. “It’s hard for me to make you understand the position I’m in. How can you?—You’re young, you have choices ahead of you, alternatives. Nothing’s final. You get sick, you get well again. You lose a job or a girl, okay, you find another job, another girl. Right?”

  “In a general way, yes.”

  “Well, I’m fifty. That’s not very old, of course, but it cuts down on your alternatives, narrows your choices. There are more goodbyes and not so many hellos. Too many of the goodbyes are final. And the hellos—well, they’ve become more and more casual . . . I’ve lost one husband and I’m about to lose another. I’m depressed, scared, sitting in that room with Marco, listening to his breathing and waiting for it to stop. When it does stop, I’ll be alone. Alone, period. I have no relatives and no friends I haven’t bought.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Good. It will help motivate you.”

  “To do what?”

  She ran her fingers across the letters on the manila envelope as if it had turned into a Ouija board and she were receiving a message. “I’d like to see B. J. again. I think—I have this strong feeling he’d like to see me, too.”

  “And my job is to go looking for him?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t even know if he’s still alive.”

  “No.”

  “Or whether he’d want to contact you if he is alive.”