“Tell her to stop. Tell her to go someplace where no one will be looking at her and take a picture of every two-page spread with her phone. Give her my phone number and tell her to send the pictures to me. If there are no page numbers, she needs to put a little piece of paper with the page number on it in the upper left-hand corner of each left-facing page. That way she doesn’t have to stand around at a big machine with this thing in her hand and maybe get caught, and also I’ll get it faster. Tell her every ten, twelve pages, send me two-page spreads of what she’s done.”
“Wow,” Louie said. “You just think of that?”
The rain had built to a sparse spatter, not a lot of drops but they were all whoppers. “No. It’s been done ad infinitum. Can you phone her?”
“They don’t like those things going off in the library. Might make somebody forget his colon, which sounds kind of messy. She’s on airport mode or something. Anyway—”
“Airplane. Does she check it regularly?”
“Regular as anybody that age does, which is like all the time, but the problem—”
“Call her or text her, leave a message to change the approach and text the first batch to me as fast as she can.”
“Problem is her camera’s busted. Did you really think I didn’t think of that? The camera?”
“Then why did you—”
“You seemed to be having a good time. I sent her a text, asked her to get hold of somebody with—”
“Good. How we doing on the will?”
“I got somebody downtown. He’s a law student, so he’s supposed to know how things work, but you know, you got civil servants down there. Can’t get fired, can’t get demoted. Worse than crooks, almost as bad as the DMV.”
“Well, let me know.”
“Where you going now?”
I started the car and turned on the wipers. “Toward you, to pick up the papers, and then to see a talent agent.”
“Well, I mean, jeez, you’re a nice-looking guy, but—”
“Bye, Louie,”
“Wait a minute. Where you at?”
“Reseda.”
“And your agent is where?”
“North Hollywood.”
“I’m like a zigzag out of your way. Tell you what. I’ll meet you at Du-par’s, save you a little—”
“I was just there.”
“It’s not a date, it’s a hand-off, okay? Save you a little time.”
“Great, thanks. Ummm . . . it’s going to take me longer than it’ll take you, so please call the person who’s waiting for the will and tell him to get there, too. Tell him we’re going to bribe the civil servant. He can go up to five hundred. I’ll give him cash at Du-par’s, but he needs to get out of there right now. That way, he can get back to the clerk’s office today. He’s got to haul ass because it’s starting to rain.”
“Moving fast, huh?”
I turned on the lights and checked the mirrors, then swung into sparse traffic. That would end soon: people in Los Angeles pay the same kind of attention to a little rain as Noah did to the Deluge, and a sprinkle can bring the town to a dead stop. “I have to move fast,” I said. “I hate this thing. I want it over.”
“He’s my next call.”
“Have the lemon meringue,” I said. “And don’t tell me I’ve got a spot on my shirt.”
“Are you all moved in?” I asked Ronnie.
“Yes, and we’ve got a bed big enough to lose a state capital on. Mouse count, zero. It’s heaven. Although I miss our place.”
“Me, too. Not for long, I hope.”
“And there’s this huge theme park down below.”
“It’s raining.”
“Not here, it isn’t. Not yet, anyway. And I’ve been wet before, and it didn’t do anything permanent to me. How’s your day coming?”
“I’m going very, very fast, and it’s going very, very slowly.” I turned south on Reseda Boulevard, heading for the 101.
Ronnie said, “You ever think about a tree’s perspective?”
“No,” I said. “In all honesty, I can’t say I have.”
“It’s doing its thing at what must seem like the only correct pace in the world, and we’re probably going so fast it can’t even see us. Or maybe we’re blurs or streaks. They must pity us, all that herky-jerky movement for nothing. We live, all frantic, we want something, we die, and the tree adds a couple of rings.”
“Well, let’s hope none of them writes a book, it’d be longer than Ulysses. Although it’d have to be an ebook, wouldn’t it? Be kind of awful to print a tree’s book on paper. Makes the tree an accessory.”
“You’re pretty quippy for someone who’s barely slept.” The rain turned up its volume.
“It’s talking to you,” I said, and it was true. I felt almost completely awake.
“You shouldn’t talk while you’re driving. Some cop—”
“You’re right. I’ll check in with you during the occasional pause in my day.”
“Nothing dangerous, right?”
“I laugh at danger.”
“As I said, nothing dangerous?”
“Not so far as I can tell.”
She said, “I’ve been thinking about that teeter-totter.”
“Me, too,” I said. A guy in a black matte muscle car swerved in front of me, throwing a tsunami of muddy water with a little gravel in it across my windshield. I got even with him in a manly fashion by blinking my brights for a nanosecond. “But you go first.”
“If there’s another kid there,” she said. “If he’s got, you know, a friend, it kind of changes things. He might be . . . attached to someone.”
I wanted to hug her hard enough to make her squeak. “We don’t know enough yet to come to a conclusion. Let’s park it and think about it.”
“Maybe we could get some images from the daytime.”
The freeway onramp was coming up, two lanes wide. I pulled my little Camry next to the muscle car and got an almost audible snort of disdain from the hormone at the wheel, who had a cleft in his chin so deep I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn it went all the way through to the back of his head. When the light changed I goosed the enormous old Detroit engine that one of Louie’s guys had shoehorned under the Toyota’s hood and left him with the ever-welcome fumes of exhaust and burnt rubber, plus, out of the window, a popular traditional gesture that goes all the way back to rude old Ancient Rome, where it was called the digitus impudicus, or “unchaste finger.” He received my gesture in the appropriate spirit, with a loud bray on his horn, and I waved goodbye with the impudicus and slalomed across three lanes to the center, which was moving right along.
“Where’d you go?” Ronnie said.
“Participating in an age-old ritual,” I said. “Guy stuff. Honor and all that. We can ask Francie about what you just said, but I’m not sure she’ll be able to find someone who’ll be willing to put a drone in that backyard in full daylight. I think maybe first you need to take all the precautions you can, go to Iowa City or someplace like that, see what you can find out from whoever it is. I’ll fly with you once I’m finished with the current situation. Think of it. Just you and me and Iowa City.”
“I didn’t know there even was an Iowa City.”
“It was the capital before they moved it to Des Moines.”
“Why did they do that?”
“Because they wanted something harder to pronounce. I mean, I’m kind of honored that you assume I’d know the answer, but I don’t.”
“I thought that was your specialty.”
“What was?”
“Useless and unrelated bits of information,” she said. “You unwrap one all the time. Mickey’s fingers, for example.”
“Here’s something I’ve never told anyone. When I was fourteen, which is the same as saying sex-obsessed, I once looked up
esoteric in the dictionary because I had confused it with erotic. I read the definition of esoteric, and it was like a bolt of lightning. I thought, Oh, my God, there’s a name for it. Whoops.”
“Whoops what?”
“Truck won’t share the road.”
“A truck? Where are you?”
“On the 101, heading for North Hollywood.”
“The freeway? And you’re talking to me? Goodbye. I mean, I love you, but goodbye.” And she was gone.
I scanned the rearview for the muscle car but didn’t see it. With the cheer Ronnie had given me evaporating, I settled simultaneously into driving mode and a deep funk.
The lack of new threats from the Bride of Plastic Man was unnerving me. Why wasn’t she coming after me? I could only think of two reasons, neither of them comforting: first, she had something else on her mind; and second, she didn’t need to come after me. For some reason she felt she could reach out and touch me whenever she wanted. In some ways I might have felt more secure if the threat were more evident. I knew what she had done to Lumia, and I’d seen what she’d done to Lumia’s apartment. Not a lot of apparent remorse.
That was enough of a prod to get me to an off-ramp and down to a surface street where I could park for a moment. I checked out the app Anime had installed and looked at my entrance hall. Nothing. No one in camera range, no broken door. Same lights on. Why was she leaving me alone?
A new thought: somehow she’d gotten her hands on whatever she’d sent me and Lumia to find. I had been rendered superfluous. I sat there, listening to the engine tick as it cooled, and trying to find a perspective. After murdering Lumia, she’d gone and tossed Lumia’s place to get her fifteen K back. She’d paid me almost double that and hadn’t tried to recoup it. Yet. So, one theory: she had what she wanted, she no longer cared about the advance, and she didn’t actually know where I lived.
Another theory: she had whatever she had wanted, and she knew exactly where I lived and had it under surveillance so she could pick up her money and kill me at the same time. At her convenience, so to speak.
Either way, my priority still had to be to figure out who she was so I could say hi to her before she could say hi to me. I worked the cash out of my pocket, pulled thirty hundreds off, and popped open the glove compartment. And almost kicked myself.
There it was, the little notebook I’d taken from the kitchen drawer at Horton House. I’d tucked it into my pants in the kitchen and then forgotten about it as I ransacked the library in the living room. After I put the bags of books into the trunk and went to sit behind the wheel, the notebook had announced itself by cutting into the tops of my legs. Without thinking, I’d tugged it free and tossed it precisely where it now lay and closed the door on it. I pulled it out, doing a vigorous mental self-critique in language that would have tightened my mother’s mouth, put the money into the compartment, and snapped it shut again. Then I sat, turning the little book over in my hands.
It was at least fifty, maybe even sixty, years old. The paper was brittle enough to have broken, so cleanly it might have been cut, along several diagonals where a corner had been dog-eared. I flipped through it as the rain drummed down and the world went wavy with the water flowing over my windshield. It made me think, for a moment, of the old glass in the windows of Horton House that had looked out at a rippling world as it changed over more than a century, or at least until Miss Daisy had turned her back on it forever and insisted on her ficus hedge and the paper-covered windows.
What had she hated so much that she refused to let any impression of the world outside the house leak into her vision? Was it really just a neighborhood that, from her perspective, was going downhill? It felt as though there had to have been something more. Maybe it was a symbolic gesture; maybe she had turned her back, once and for all, on something or someone in her life, something she couldn’t control. So she’d banished it or him or her forever from her sight.
The notebook had been used in the conventional way, front to back, although clumps of empty pages had been skipped over as though rejected for flaws I couldn’t see. Here and there, a slender cluster had been torn out, reasonably neatly, probably someone putting a ruler near the margin and pressing down on it as she ripped the pages upward. The entries, in faded ink or pencil, comprised a sort of chronological flip chart of the various approaches to teaching handwriting in the public schools, which meant that the earlier entries were much better spelled and easier to read than the later ones. The earliest handwriting, in fountain-pen ink now faded almost to a pastel, was nearly as tidy and obedient as Laney Profitt’s had been. The most recent were in prosaic ball point and the occasional Sharpie, in a haphazard chicken-track printing.
A car splashed by me, bringing me back to myself. How long had I been sitting here? I called Louie, who accused me of misleading him on the pie, which tasted like it was made from a sugar-free lemonade mix, and said that Walter—the guy who’d been waiting for the will at the registrar’s bureau—wasn’t there yet, and where the hell was I, anyways?
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I can’t be more than ten, fifteen minutes away. What about the book-copying thing?”
“She’s got somebody coming.”
“It’s taking long enough.”
“I knew you’d be happy that we’d solved it.”
I noticed something in the book and looked at it more closely. Louie said, “What, you’ve stopped speaking to me?”
“Be there in a bit.” I hung up.
The majority of the book’s individual pages had been written in only one hand, with only one kind of writing implement; it was rare to see two hands on any single page. But here, right under my nose, was one entry in at least four hands and possibly five: a name and a list of phone numbers. And it was relatively early in the book.
Eduardo, the first line said, and then there was a string of five phone numbers, all but one of them with a line through it, each number different. The name and two of the numbers—the first two—were in an early hand, written in fountain pen. The other three were clearly written by three different people. The last, and certainly the most recent, was the chicken-scratch hand, written with a black Sharpie.
In all, there were nine people, first-name only, listed on that page, Some of them had only one number, some of them had two or three, and two were followed by a chain of numbers—written, if my assumptions were right, over a period of many years. But only Eduardo spanned so many hands, only Eduardo had five phone numbers.
Who has only a first name? The help. Why the chain of numbers? Obviously because the people to whom they belong had moved over a period of years, or the phone company changed prefixes or, who knows, they got too many junk calls.
I felt like I was looking at a wall in Pompeii that someone had scribbled a grocery list on. It was the most vivid glimpse I’d caught of the actual life of that frozen, stillborn house. All these people, coming and going, all these phone numbers that rang somewhere else, maybe someplace where people laughed every now and then.
Eduardo, I figured, would be in his eighties or nineties by now if he still ate, drank, and slept. There was no way on earth I could prevent myself from dialing that number.
A man said, “Hello?” in a gruff voice that didn’t sound like it got a lot of use. After a moment, he cleared his throat and said, “Dígame?”
“Eduardo?” I said
He said, “Yes. Who is—”
I hung up. I could feel my heart pounding. I had a living link with Miss Daisy’s past.
22
Dead for a Century
The wanna-be lawyer who’d been downtown at the registrar’s office was skinny and severe, with a pursed, disapproving little mouth like a puckered buttonhole, pale, red-rimmed eyes, and bloodless-looking papery skin that flaked freely wherever it was exposed. If you’d put him into a snow globe and shaken it, you’d have had a blizzard. At first sigh
t, he was a Dickensian drudge who seemed to regard everything apprehensively, as though he doubted his eyes and was waiting for the real, and much worse, form of whatever it was to present itself. Louie had two sticky-looking pie plates in front of him, and the flaking man had a cup of herbal tea, his third, judging from the little foil envelopes in which the teabags had been brought to him. They had been lined up in tight formation on the place mat to his right, their edges precisely parallel with the edge of the mat.
“This is Walter,” Louie said, sounding apologetic.
I said, “Hey, Walter,” sliding in next to Louie and looking for Glinda. She wasn’t there, and I realized it would have been a pretty long shift if she were. Still, with her in it, the place had felt a little less like an artifact of history, an amusement-park curiosity frozen in time.
Louie said, “Walter doesn’t eat pie,” speaking the sentence with the kind of precision one might use for the code phrase that will prompt an identifying and equally meaningless response from a fellow spy, “It’s sunny in Oslo” or some other non sequitur.
“Pie is full of sugar,” Walter said, with the weight of someone who had studied the issue long and hard and felt it needed wide dissemination. “And you are?”
Ignoring him, Louie handed me the driver’s license and business card, saying, “By the edges. It’s still a little sticky.”
I took them as directed, gave them a critical glance, fanned them in the air a little to hurry the drying process, and said to the flaking man, “I’m your employer. You may call me Dwight Sykes.”
Louie said to me, “Did you know there was sugar in pie, Dwight?”
“My mother warned me about it,” I said. “Or maybe it was something else. Swimming right after eating, maybe. Or while eating.”
“You’re joking,” Walter said, sounding like a lifelong member of the Brotherhood of Far-Off Laughter.
“You’re right,” I said. I put down the cards so I could reach into my shirt pocket. “It’s a bad habit. Here. Five hundred. Just tell the clerk you’re in a hurry.”
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