When I delivered my load to Traheame’s room, he was sleeping like a grizzly gone under for the winter, curled on his unwounded hip, spitting out snores that seemed to curse his sleep, great phlegm-strangled, whiskey-soaked, cigar-smoked, window-rattling roars. I wondered how he slept in all that racket, how his wives, past and present, ever got any sleep. I hid his afternoon ration of vodka between something called The Towers of Gallisfried and a thin Western, Stalkahole, then tiptoed out quietly, trying not to awaken the monster.
At the nearest pay telephone, I found the high school drama teacher’s number listed. When I called Mr. Gleeson and told him why I wanted to talk to him, he sounded vaguely amused rather than surprised. He didn’t have to thumb through his memory to recognize the name, though, which was a good sign. He agreed to talk to me as soon as I could drive out to his house, but only for a short time, since he had a student appointment later that afternoon. Then he proceeded to give me a set of directions so confusing that it took me thirty minutes to drive the ten miles out to his house at the base of the Oakville Grade. By the time I found it, I had stopped myself twice from driving on over the Grade into the Napa Valley and a wine tour.
Charles Gleeson lived in a cottage in a live oak glade, a small place that looked as if it had been a summer retreat once, with a shake roof and unpainted walls that had tastefully weathered to a silver gray. Some sort of massive vine screened his front porch and clambered like crazy over the roof, as if it feared it might drown among the large flowering shrubs that cluttered the yard. He came to the screen door before I could knock, a small man with a painfully erect posture, a huge head, and a voice so theatrically deep and resonant that he sounded like a bad imitation of Richard Burton on a drunken Shakespearean lark. Unfortunately, his noble head was as bald as a baby’s butt, except for a stylishly long fringe of fine, graying hair that cuffed the back of his head from ear to ear. He must have splashed a buck’s worth of aftershave lotion across his face, and he was wearing white ducks, a knit polo shirt, and about five pounds of silver and turquoise.
“You must be the gentleman who telephoned about Betty Sue Flowers,” he emoted as he opened the door. A cruising fly, hovering like a tiny hawk, banked in front of me and sped for the kitchen. Gleeson swatted at it with a pale, ineffectual hand and muttered a mild curse.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” I said.
“The directions, right? I must apologize, but my conception of spatial relationships is severely limited.
Except on stage, of course. My god, I can block out a monster like Morning Becomes Electra in my head but I can’t seem to tell anyone how to find my little cottage in the woods,” he prattled as he twisted the heavy bracelet on his wrist. Then we shook hands, and he patted my forearm affectionately and drew me into his Danish Modern, Neo-Navajo living room. “It’s lovely out,” he suggested, touching the squash-blossom necklace, “so why don’t we sit on the sun deck? I fear the house is a disaster area—I’m a bachelor, you see, and housekeeping seems to elude me.” He waved his hand aimlessly at some invisible mess. We could have lunched off the waxed oak floorboards or performed an appendectomy on the driftwood coffee table. I didn’t mind going outside though. His sort of house always made me check my boots for cowshit. Unfortunately, this time they were innocently clean.
The sun deck, built out of the same silvered planks as the house and threatened by the same heavy vine, was done in wrought iron and gay orange canvas. At least it was outside. With a deep, throbbing sigh, Gleeson collapsed into a director’s chair and genteelly offered me the one facing him.
“It’s a bit early for me, but would you care for a cerveza?” he said, idly swirling the ice cubes in the blown Mexican glass he had picked up from the neat little table that matched his little chair. “A beer?” he added, just in case I hadn’t understood.
“Right,” I growled, “it’s never too early for me.” Then I chuckled like Aldo Ray. If I had to endure his l’homme du monde act, he had to suffer my jaded, alcoholic private eye.
“Of course,” he murmured, then reached into a small refrigerator on the other side of his chair and came out with a can of Tecate, a perfect pinch of rock salt, and a wedge of lime already gracing the top of the can. He had prepared, the devil. “Do you like Mexican beer?”
“I like beer,” I said, “just like Tom T. Hall.”
“I see,” he said, trying to hide a superior smile with a supercilious eyebrow. “Mexican beer is quite superb. Perhaps the best in the world. I’m quite fond of it myself. I summer in Mexico, you see, San Miguel de Allende, every year. Takes me away from the mundane world of high school,” he said as he handed me the beer.
“Must be fun,” I said, guessing that he spent his summers wearing a three-hundred-dollar toupee which looked like a dead possum and boring hell out of everybody for forty miles in every direction.
“A lovely country,” he sighed, meaning to sound wistful and longingly resigned to a life unworthy of his talents. Then he glanced up and said, “A touch of salt on the tongue, then sip the beer, and bite the lime.”
“Right,” I said, then gobbled the salt, chug-a-lugged the whole beer, ate the lime wedge, rind and all, and tossed the empty can onto the lawn. Gleeson looked ready to weep, and when I belched, he flinched. “Got ‘nother wunna them Mexican beers?” I said cheerfully. “That weren’t half bad.”
“Of course,” he said, the perfect host, then doled me another can as if it were rationed. Before I had to destroy that one too, I was saved by the bell. Or the chirp. His telephone chirped like a baby bird. “Oh damn,” he said. “Please excuse me.”
After he went back inside, I stood up to let the heavy beer lie down. Out of an old nosy habit, I checked Gleeson’s glass. Cranberry juice and a ton of vodka. He was either a secret tippler, a pathological liar, or more nervous about my visit than he cared for me to know. I sidled up to the kitchen window but I couldn’t hear anything except the distant throb of his voice and
the insane buzz of a frustrated fly. I opened the back door to let the poor starving devil out, then sat down to watch a hummingbird suck sugar water from Gleeson’s feeder. I couldn’t believe the little bastard had come all the way from South America for that. Or that I had come all this way to talk about a girl who had run away ten years before.
Gleeson came back muttering gracefully about the foibles of his simply, simply lovely students. “Now,” he said as he leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands around his knee with a soft clink of silver rings. “What can I do for you?”
“Betty Sue Flowers.”
“Quite.” A brief frown wrinkled his forehead up toward the fragrant, glistening expanse of his scalp. “Betty Sue Flowers,” he sighed, then shook his head and smiled ruefully. “I haven’t thought about her in years.”
“What comes to mind?”
“Such a gauche name for such a lovely, talented child,” he said. “When it became apparent that she was more than just a good amateur actress, I advised her to change her name immediately, discard it like so much childhood rubbish.”
“I sort of like the name,” I said. I didn’t like women who changed their names. Or men who wore jewelry before sundown.
“Quite,” he said. “What exactly was it you wanted to know? I haven’t seen or heard of her since the Friday before she ran away. What was that? Six, seven years
ago?” “Ten.”
“How time does fly,” he whispered with a dreamy lilt, mouthing the cliche like a man who knew what it meant.
“Quite,” I said.
He glanced up, narrowed his eyes as if he was seeing 47
me for the first time. “It isn’t polite to mock me,” he suggested politely. He sounded half pleased, though, that I had taken the trouble.
“Sorry,” I said. “A bad habit I have. What did she talk about that day?”
“I’m afraid I don’t have the slightest notion,” he said, then held up a finger. “Wait, I seem to remember that she stopped by my office to tell m
e that she had tickets at the ACT for the next night.” He started to explain the initials, then stopped. “I’m afraid I don’t remember what they were doing. It has been quite some time, you understand.”
“Too long,” I admitted for the tenth time.
“Do you mind if I inquire into your motives in this matter?”
“Her mother asked me to look for her,” I said. “Do you do this for a living? Or are you a member of the family?”
“Both,” I said. “I’m a cousin on her mother’s side and a licensed private investigator.”
“Would you be insulted ifI asked for some identification?”
“Nope,” I said, and took out my photostat.
“I would have thought, from your accent,” he said as he handed it back, “that you were from the Texas or Oklahoma branch of the family.”
“Texas,” I said. “But they let us live just about anywhere we want to nowadays.”
“I see,” he said. “Has there been some new information about Betty Sue that prompted her mother to hire
you?”
“Nope,” I said. “I was just handy. Down here on another case. And both Mrs. Flowers’ sons are dead now, and she just thought she’d like to see her baby girl again.”
“I don’t imagine she’s a baby anymore,” he said, smiling at his own joke. “But if I were you I would get in touch with her father. For reasons I don’t quite understand—perhaps because he withheld his affection from her—Betty Sue had an unhealthy fixation on him. I would think she would have been in touch with him. Yes, I would look for the father,” he said, then leaned back in his chair, sipped his drink, and sighed heavily, like a detective who had just broken a big, sadly corrupt case in an existential movie.
My temper and my mouth had always gotten me in trouble. And occasionally prevented me from picking up the information I needed. I wanted to tell Gleeson to stuff his stupid advice. I also wanted to tell him to stuff his Time magazine analysis, and to explain what fixation meant, but instead of carping, I kept my mouth shut, my temper in hand.
“I never had a chance to meet Betty Sue when she was growing up,” I said, changing directions. “What sort of girl was she?”
“One in a million,” he answered, quickly but softly, then paused abruptly as if he had confessed to something. I knew I had him now.
“Why?”
“Why?” he whispered. “When I first saw her, she was playing in a grade school production of Cinderella, which I had to attend for reasons I don’t even want to think about now. A simply dreadful production, even for grade school, and Betty Sue had been wasted in the fairy godmother role, but let me tell you, my friend, when that little girl, that mere child, was onstage, all the other children seemed like creatures of a lesser race. She had the best natural stage presence I had ever seen. Offstage, she wasn’t anything special, a pleasant-looking child, no more, but onstage she was in charge. Such presence. Such a natural sense of character, too.” He paused to chuckle. “Her fairy godmother was a queen, her gifts bestowed grandly on her inferiors. And even then, she had a frighteningly sexual presence. You could almost hear the middle-aged libidos in the audience whimpering to be unleashed.
“After the production, I went backstage to talk to her,” he continued, “and found her staring with such awful longing eyes at the little girl who had played Cinderella that I gave her a lecture then and there about how good she had been. I’m afraid I quite lost control for a bit. When I finished, she looked up at me and said, ‘It’s just a prettier dress than mine, that’s all. I wouldn’t be Cinderella, anyway. I wouldn’t stand for it.’ She was nine, my friend, nine years old.
“After that, of course, I took her in hand, and whenever possible I arranged my high school and Little Theatre productions with a role for her in mind. I also tried to get that horrid mother of hers to allow me to enroll her in an acting class in the city—even offered to pay all the expenses out of my own pocket. Of course, she refused. ‘Buncha damn foolishness,’ I believe were her exact words.” He paused again and clasped his hands together. “Her damned mother foxed me at every turn. I suppose she had been considered good-looking in her youth—though the idea escapes me now—and she resented Betty Sue. And who wouldn’t, stuck on that horrid trailer house behind that sordid beer joint. Once, when Betty Sue was fifteen, I had a friend—a professional photographer—take a portfolio of photographs of her. They were lovely. Later, when I asked Betty Sue what she had done with it, she told me that it had been lost, but I remain convinced that her mother destroyed it.
“So sad,” he said, sipped his drink, and hurried on. “At fifteen, she played Antigone in Anouilh’s version, and at sixteen, Mother Courage. I wouldn’t have believed it possible.”
“Pretty heavy stuff for high school,” I said.
“Little Theatre productions,” he said. “We had a great company then. Even the San Francisco papers reviewed our productions favorably. She was so wonderful.” He sounded like a man remembering heroics in an ancient war. “With a bit of luck, she might have made it on Broadway or in Hollywood. With a bit of luck,” he repeated like a man who had had none. “The luck is nearly as essential as the talent, you know.” Then he gazed into his empty glass.
I broke into his reverie. “How old was she when you seduced her?”
Gleeson laughed lightly without hesitation, his capped teeth gleeming in the sunlight. The hummingbird buzzed the sun deck like a gentle blue blur, pausing to check Gleeson’s fragrance. But he wasn’t a flower, so the bird flicked away. Gleeson rattled his ice cubes and stood up.
“I think I’ll have that drink now,” he said pleasantly. “Would you care for another Tecate?”
“I’d rather have an answer to my question,” I said.
“My good fellow,” he said as he fixed a drink, “you’ve been the victim of sordid rumors and vicious gossip.”
“I got your name from Mrs. Flowers,” I said, “and that’s all. Except that I understand now why she gritted her teeth when she said it. Otherwise, I don’t know a thing about you that you didn’t tell me.”
“Or that you surmised?”
“Guessed.”
“You do the country bumpkin very well, my friend,” he said as he handed me another beer. “But you slipped up when you didn’t ask me to explain what ACT stood for, and you didn’t learn about Brecht and Anouilh in the police academy or in a correspondence course for private investigators.”
“I’m supposed to be the detective.”
“I imagine you play that role quite well, too,” he said, “and I suspect that it isn’t in my best interest to continue this conversation.”
“I don’t live here,” I said. “I couldn’t care less how many adolescent hymens you have hanging in your trophy room. Better you here with candlelight and good wine than some pimpled punk in the back seat of a car with a six-pack of Coors.”
“I’m not that easily flattered,” he said, but I could see smutty little fires glowing in the depths of his eyes. “However, I do occasionally indulge myself,” he added, smiling wetly. “Most of the simple folk in town think I’m a faggot, and I let them. A very nice protective coloration, don’t you think?” I nodded. “But Betty Sue and I never had that sort of relationship. Not that I wasn’t sorely tempted, mind you—she had a fierce sexuality about her—and not that she might not have been willing. Certainly, if I had known _ … known how things were going to work out, known that she wouldn’t pursue a career in the theatre, I would have snatched her up in a moment. But I was afraid that a sexual relationship might interfere with our professional relationship.”
“Professional?”
“That’s right,” he said. “I may be only a high school drama teacher now, but I have worked off-Broadway and in television, even taught in college, and I know the business. Betty Sue might have made it. And I confess that I intended to use her if she did.” He sighed again. “Athletic coaches often rise on the legs of their star players, and I saw no reason why I shouldn�
��t have the same chance. So I abstained. Betty Sue, as young girls so often do, might have grown bored with the older man in her life, and confused the sexual relationship with the professional one. So, my friend, I kept my hands off her,” he said with just the right touch of remorse mixed with pride.
“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to see his face behind the wistful mask. “You must still have friends in the theatre,” I said, “and I assume that you have asked them about Betty Sue over the years.”
“So often that I’ve become an object of some derision,” he said ruefully. “But no one has ever seen or heard of her. That’s a dead end, I’m afraid.”
“Could she have been pregnant?”
“She could have, yes,” he said. “I assumed that she wasn’t a virgin much past her fourteenth birthday. But, of course, I had no way of knowing.”
“You know,” I said, still bothered about the earlier lie about his drink, “sometimes people confess a little thing—like your selfish intentions about her career—to cover up something larger.”
“What could I possibly have to hide?” he said blandly.
“I don’t know,” I said, then leaned forward until our hands nearly touched. “I’ve got a little education,” I said, “but I’m particularly sophisticated—”
“Still a country boy at heart?” he interrupted.
“Right. And, like you said, you’re a professional— you know all about acting and lying, wearing masks,” I said, “and if I find out that you’ve been lying to me, old buddy, I’ll damn sure be back to discuss it with you.” I crushed my empty beer can in my fist. An old-fashioned steel can.
Gleeson laughed nervously. “You’re a terrible fraud,” he said as cheerfully as he could. “You couldn’t fool a child with that act.”
The Last Good Kiss Page 5