The fronts of the houses further down were landscaped with sand, rocks, and cactus. Poles with telephone and electric lines hovered over the houses and connected them down the road.
At the end of the road touching the desert was a yellow adobe house with a mission bell on the roof and a Joshua in the yard. I parked at the rough wooden gate and went up the sandy path. The Joshua was in bloom.
The Joshua isn’t a real tree, just a California imitation, a kind of yucca, named by early Mormon settlers, who remembered the book of Joshua: “Thou shalt follow the way pointing for thee by the tree.”
The Joshua starts out life branchless, standing like a pole on the desert, then starts putting out clumsy limbs pointing out and up with green bristles on the end like bayonets. The leaves die, turn gray-brown and lie back along the branches giving the plant a weird shaggy outline. Blossoms appear on the end of each branch from March to June, clusters of waxy cream white flowers. They smell like mushrooms.
My old man, when he had a spare afternoon, used to like to drive out and look at the Joshua trees. He remembered the time the London Daily Telegraph had sent out crews of Chinese to cut down trees to make paper pulp. But, he said, God had intervened, spoiled the first shipment back to England, and a terrible rainstorm had routed the Chinese cutting crew.
I moved on to the front door shaded by a small porch. On either side of the door were wooden lounge chairs so that Grayson could sit in the evening and watch his town go to sleep.
I knocked and knocked again-nothing but a faint sound inside the house that might have been someone moving around or could have been the normal aches and groans of a late afternoon. I walked around to the side of the house, loosening my jacket, and popped the button that had been threatening to depart for a month. I knelt to retrieve it among the stones and sand and felt a shadow over me.
“What are you doing?”
The voice was a woman’s. The age was unclear. I squinted up into the sun and saw her outline. She seemed to be naked.
“I lost my button,” I said, spotting it and stuffing it into my pocket. I got up and could see that she wasn’t naked but wearing a white bathing suit.
“I meant, what are you doing here, sneaking around our house?”
“Mrs. Grayson?” I said, stepping to the side to get a look at her.
“Miss Ressner,” she said. “Delores Ressner. What are you doing here?”
She was tall, maybe even taller than I, with a good, trim figure, short brown hair, and blue eyes. She seemed to be about thirty.
“I want to talk to your mother,” I said, trying not to finger the threads on my jacket, which had just given up their responsibility for holding that button. I was sweating and uncomfortable. She was tall and demanding.
“What about?” she said without moving.
“Your father.”
“Harold Grayson isn’t my father,” she said flatly.
“I know. It’s Jeffrey Ressner I want to talk about.”
Something fell in her face and facade. A shudder or shiver ran through her tan body. She turned and walked slowly to the back of the house. I followed her. The swimming pool there was small and filled with blue water, not the product from the local spring.
Delores Ressner picked up a towel from a lounge chair near the pool and began to dry herself, giving her time to think, which was all right with me. I had no place to go, and I didn’t mind looking at her. When she was through toweling, she slipped into a blue robe. Finished, she turned toward me, folded her arms, and asked: “What do you want to know about my father?”
“I want to know where he is.”
“Who are you?” Her eyes had narrowed, and she shook her hair to rid it of a few remaining drops of water or to let it hang loose. It was a nice gesture.
“I’m a private detective. Name’s Toby Peters. I’ve been hired by Dr. Winning of the Winning Institute to find your father. He broke out of the institute four days ago.”
“And Dr. Winning thinks he might come here?” Her hands tightened and turned white as they clutched her arms. I couldn’t tell if there was an undercurrent of fear or disbelief in her voice.
“No,” I said, looking at the house for signs of life before turning back to her. “It’s a place to start. Dr. Winning doesn’t want him hurt and doesn’t want him to hurt anybody.”
“My father never hurt anybody,” she fired back.
“Maybe,” I said. “I think we met the other night, and he expressed something more than verbal hostility.”
“I never wanted him in that place,” she said. “That was my mother and her husband’s idea.”
“Maybe I could talk to your mother and …” I said, taking a step toward the house.
She unfolded her hands and stepped in front of me.
“My mother isn’t here. She went to San Diego to visit her sister. My stepfather is in the house sleeping. He hasn’t been feeling well and doesn’t want to be disturbed.”
We stared at each for two or three minutes, waiting for a break. She didn’t give me one, so I tried, “I’ve got a warm carton of milk and some Wheaties in my car. Maybe we can share a bowl and watch the sun go down while we wait for stepdaddy to wake up.”
She couldn’t stop the corners of her mouth from curling up from her full lips in a near smile, so I went on.
“I could sew on my button while we laugh at my clothes and you show me the family album. I’d like to see a picture of your father.”
She thawed a little and let her palms up.
“There are no decent photographs of my father. There used to be when he was acting, but when he grew … when he began to have problems, he tore them all up and refused to have another one taken. We’ve got one of him dressed as King Lear, but you can’t really recognize him in it.”
“He played Lear?” I said, taking another step toward the house.
“No.” Her head bent and shook sadly. “He dressed as Lear but never played him. Knew the part. I remember when I was a little girl he did scenes for me in our kitchen back in Ventura. He was really good.”
“So I’ve heard,” I said. “Can I put my milk in your refrigerator?”
Her head came up cocked to one side quizzically.
“O.K., but let’s keep it quiet. Harold can be a bit difficult, especially when he’s disturbed during his nap or when my father’s name comes up.”
She led the way in through the back door. The kitchen was large, pine, and modern with shining steel and a double sink. The refrigerator in the corner made self-satisfied gurgling sounds, and we sat at a kitchen table made of redwood. My milk could wait. I’d drink it on the way back to L.A. Through the side window on the opposite side of the house I could see a big blue car, probably a Packard.
Delores Ressner was tight and edgy as she turned the coffeepot on and sat. She scratched at a bothersome cuticle and bit her lower lip before looking up at me.
“What do you do?” I said. “Besides swimming.”
She shrugged. “Some acting. Nothing much. A few small parts at Twentieth Century-Fox. I was in Blood and Sand. One of the ladies-in-waiting. Things like that. A little modeling, mostly for mail-order catalogs. Now”-she looked out the window-“Now I’m resting before I go back into the jungle.”
“Have you heard from your father in the last four days?”
She looked down at a knot in the wooden table. Behind us the coffeepot bubbled.
Somewhere deeper in the house the floor creaked. It wasn’t the creak of weather and sundown, but the creak of a human moving.
“He needs help,” she said. “Not the kind of help Dr. Winning gives, imprisoning him. My stepfather, if you want the simple truth, pays to keep my father locked up and out of the way. My mother goes along with it because she can’t bear the idea of facing my father again. It wasn’t easy for her.”
“Or you either,” I said.
Her eyes were a little moist.
“I think I hear Grayson getting up,” I said.
; She touched her cheek nervously and stood.
“Let’s have coffee. He can find us here.”
“Your father,” I repeated, turning toward her. “You’ve heard from him. I don’t want to hurt him. I just want to keep him from hurting you and your mother, other people, maybe even himself.”
“Maybe even you?” she said, turning to me from the stove with the coffeepot in her hand.
“Maybe. And maybe I’m doing it for my fee and for a friend. But maybe or no maybes, your old man will be a lot better off if I find him before he gets in more trouble. Delores, believe me, he is in trouble, but not in it so far that he can’t be eased out of it with some help from you and me.”
It was warm in the kitchen, but Delores pulled her robe across her chest with her free hand and shivered as she stepped forward to pour me a cup and one for herself. Then she sat down again, placing the pot on a wooden trivet. She was working herself up to say something, and I wanted to give her room.
I poured a few spoons of sugar in my cup, put my open palm over the cup to feel the moist warmth, and took a sip.
“He’s here,” she said softly, so softly that I didn’t hear it the first time, or maybe I didn’t believe what I heard.
“What?” I said, leaning forward.
“Here. He’s here in the other room. In the living room. We were waiting for my mother to come back to decide what we’d do. Harold’s not sick or napping. He and my father are trying to work things out, see what …”
I got up slowly, very slowly.
“I think I’ll just go in and join the conversation,” I said gently. “No trouble. Why don’t you just sit there and finish your coffee. I’ll introduce myself to Grayson. Your father and I have already met, I believe.”
She nodded in resigned agreement, her shoulders slumping down as if she had done a day of hard labor.
I walked to the doorway leading into the house from the kitchen and considered taking off my shoes to keep from making noise, but every time I have removed my shoes on a case things have got worse instead of better. I moved on. There were no voices ahead of me, but something was creaking. The hallway I found myself in carried on the lacquered dark wood motif. A print on the wall showed the driving of the golden spike. Leland Stanford glared down on me and the future of the West. To my right I found the living room, but no one was in it. There were two sofas, both oversize and masculine brown, a grand piano, and a rocking chair. The rug was an Indian design with a pattern in the center that looked to me like a snarling demon.
Across the hall opposite the living room were three doors, all closed. Still no voices. I tried the first door. It opened and showed me a bedroom, bright and orange, a woman’s room, probably Delores’s. There was a faint pleasant odor of scented soap or perfume.
The next door was partly open. I stepped in. It was a much larger bedroom than Delores’s. In one corner stood a desk. In another a dresser and twin beds beyond which was a view of the town through a big floor-to-ceiling window. The beds were made up with brown Indian spreads. I could see the design clearly on one bed. The other was obscured by the body of the man on top of it.
The man was gray-haired, around sixty, wearing a heavy blue flannel robe and a long knife in his chest. His arms were spread out and his eyes were wide and surprised. Something creaked from the hall, and I grabbed for a portable radio on the dresser. I swung around, ready to clip Jeffrey Ressner with the white Philco, and stopped just short of clobbering Delores, whose mouth went open in fear.
“Back up,” I said, putting my free hand out and placing the radio back on the dresser.
“Where is …” she began and saw the body on the bed. I put out both hands to catch her if she fell, but kept my eyes on the doorway. Ressner was almost certainly still in the house.
“God,” she whispered.
“That’s Grayson?” I whispered, pushing her gently out of the room.
Her eyes were still fixed on the body, but she nodded her confirmation. When I had her around the corner into the living room, her eyes met mine and her head shook a dumb no no no no of disbelief.
“Get on the phone and call the local police,” I said very quietly. “Can you do that?”
She didn’t answer but kept scanning my face for understanding.
“Can you do that? I’m going to find your father and keep him from any other trouble. Now make that call. O.K.?”
She agreed with her eyes and looked around the familiar room, wondering where the phone was.
“He’s dead?”
“Dead,” I agreed and went for the front door. I was after my.38. Maybe I’d also grab the bronze Alcatraz and my bag of groceries. Ressner was not my run-of-the-dice killer. If he was the same guy I’d tangled with at Mae West’s and it looked as if he were, I wasn’t sure what it would take to stop him.
Before I could get to my car, the sound of an engine firing up came from behind me. The dark Packard parked at the side of the house came to life and kicked dust and sand as it shot in front of me. I didn’t see the driver clearly, but his shape was about what I remembered and expected of Ressner.
I ran around the side of my Buick, climbed in, closed the door, and took off. Ressner took the road I’d come on, the only road, and he really hit the floorboard. He came close to running down an old couple holding floppy hats on with one hand and drinking murky Poodle piss with the other.
At the main road, he turned toward Palmdale on two wheels and took off, wobbling. On the open road, my old Buick couldn’t keep up with the Packard, not even close, but I dogged him. If I could stay within a mile or two, he wouldn’t be able to stop, and if he hit civilization, driving that fast he’d pick up a surly cop or two. By now Delores, if she had found the phone, had called what passed for police in Plaza Del Lago. I had no idea of what they might do, but I didn’t count on their moving quickly. I dogged on, shoving my.38 in my jacket pocket, where it knocked against my hip until I had to take it out and put it on the seat next to me. Ressner was still in sight, going seventy or eighty down the road. My.38 flew up in the air when I hit a rock or a prairie rat and almost took my right eye. I grabbed the gun in midair and put it in my grocery bag.
We were in sight of Dot’s Dixie Gas Station when my Buick died a terrible death. It chugged, gurgled, and belched something that sounded like “The hell with it.” Metal dropped out of the front of the car and skidded with the undercarriage shooting sparks into the dusk. I lost control. The carton of milk flew out of the bag to see what was happening and exploded against the front windshield, spraying me and ending any chance I had of coming to a reasonable halt. The car barreled off the road and hit something solid.
I flew into the backseat and agreed with the car. We had been through a lot together. The hell with it. I shut my eyes and waited for my dream companion, Koko the Clown, to lead me out of nowhere, but he didn’t come.
When my eyes opened, I was looking into the pale face of Dot’s mongrel dog, which was neither stuffed nor dead. He had rotten breath, like all dogs.
The room was small and filled with spare auto parts and small animal cages. The cages contained newts, snakes, and a few field mice. There was a small window in the corner, and beyond it was darkness.
“You ain’t dead,” said Dot, his hands in his pockets looking down at me.
“Thanks,” I answered sitting up.
“Car’s dead though,” he said, handing me a bottle of Pepsi, which was just what I needed. I sat up, sipped it, and wondered what I had broken this time, but nothing hurt very much. In fact, my back felt better than it had before the crash.
I looked at the flannel shirt and torn pants Dot had put on me and said, “Thanks.”
“Trade,” Dot said, filling a pipe that appeared magically from his fist. “Those duds, the Pepsi, a meal, and a phone call for the wreck.”
I gurgled the Pepsi and thought about it.
“You can keep the Wheaties, the gun, and the statue of Alcatraz,” he said.
“A deal
,” I agreed, toasting him with the Pepsi.
The deal completed, Dot lit his pipe, patted the mongrel, who panted appreciatively, and went to the hot plate in the corner, where something was cooking. He came over with a bowl of chili and some Wonder Bread. I spooned down the chili, sopped up what was left with the bread, and downed the last of my Pepsi before trying to stand. I did a pretty good job and found that I was thinking again.
“My suit,” I said. “And your phone.”
“Suit’s in a box by the front door with the gun, Alcatraz, and Wheaties. Suit’s not dry. Needs some cleaning, though Thomas licked some of the milk from it when I pulled you out.”
“Thanks,” I said, going for the phone.
He waved his pipe at me and said, “Used to know Sergeant York, Alvin York back in the last war.”
“That a fact?” I said, trying to raise the operator.
“Fact,” he said with satisfaction as he took the empty chili bowl away.
Shelly had left the office. No answer. I could have called him at home, but that would have meant the possibility of talking to his wife, Mildred, who, when we were at our best, refused to speak to or about me. I was definitely a bad influence on Shelly. Jeremy owned no car. I could have called Phil, but that would mean driving all the way back to Hollywood with him. I didn’t think I could take my brother for that long, and I knew from experience that he couldn’t take me.
So I called Mrs. Plaut’s boardinghouse and prayed that Mrs. Plaut would not answer. She did.
“Mrs. Plaut,” I shouted. “This is Toby, Toby Peters. Is Mr. Wherthman there. Gunther Wherthman.”
“Plaut’s Boardinghouse,” she said patiently. It was a subject of intense debate at the boardinghouse. Since Mrs. Plaut could hear practically nothing, we wondered why she insisted on answering the phone and, in fact, fought off anyone who tried to take it from her. We also wondered how she heard it ringing. Perhaps it was the vibrations or a sixth sense given only to the ancient and feisty.
He Done Her Wrong tp-8 Page 6