by Peter Israel
All in all, he said, it was a terrible blow.
I saw him again the next morning, at the funeral. He still had the vest on, but a tweed jacket over it and a tie held his cowboy shirt together. He looked right through me as though I marred his vista.
As California funerals go it was a pretty modest affair. There was the usual caravan of limousines on the freeway with CHPs on motorcycles opening the lanes, and the cemetery was theoretically open to the public, and there were enough flowers around the grave to build a good-sized float, but the guards outside the Diehl Ranch sign looked as if they meant business and I didn’t spot a camera the last five miles. The Diehls, you see, don’t belong to the Forest Lawn set. They’ve got their own graveyard back in the hills on a winding two-lane road, and to judge from the headstones every Diehl who’d died in over a hundred years had been planted there, including Nancy Diehl Beydon. It was a pretty place to be dead if that kind of thing’s important to you: a view of the jagged mountains in the east and those low humpy hills off to the west, and not a hint of Diehl, California, from where we stood. The sunsets must’ve been spectacular.
I guess, though, that a funeral’s the worst place in the world to judge other people’s grief. Oh there were tears all right, glistening under the veil, and some handkerchiefs came out, and the stony expressions of the men, and the preacher adding heavy words of his own to those of the Lord, but I couldn’t help but think there was something stagy about it, put on, like in church. Maybe it needed some keeners, a little wailing and tearing of hair, a dirge. Or a bottle or, God knows, a rock band. Instead I saw people starting to peek when the preacher’s prayer went on too long, like they too wanted to check out who else was looking and who else praying.
Hell, give me a tearjerker movie any day.
The University contingent was there, my Vice Chancellor among them and a batch of kids looking young and uncomfortable. From their newspaper pictures I recognized the Diehl brothers, two of them anyway, who’d agreed to talk to me later that day, and their women and children. I saw the George S. Curies, III and IV, and maybe the partners who fitted in between, and a whole host of faceless faces who probably served the Diehl-Beydon enterprises in one capacity or another. My friend Miss Plager wore black, with gloves and a broad-brimmed hat, and Gomez and Garcia were in black suits which fitted them like sandwich boards. I tried to figure out what was going on inside their impassive heads and came up with a blank.
And there was my employer of the moment, closest to the grave and towering over the assembly, looking more stern than bereaved, his hair white where the sun hit it and yellowing in the shade. God knows what he was thinking.
And yours truly, a little to the side and behind, watching without seeing because there was no color, no sound, no movement, and nothing inside but that heavy cloudy space between the ears where I was supposed to be solving a crime. If there’d been a crime. Opinions were divided. But when they lowered Karen Beydon into the ground, I realized that I knew her less than I had reading my morning newspaper the day after she hit the pavement. Whereas if there was a murderer in that crowd, he didn’t raise his hand and say, “I did it.”
People began to stir. All of a sudden there was a crush toward Twink Beydon, as though everybody decided at once to get their condolence calls out of the way. If you’d only just dropped in and didn’t notice the gravestones, you’d’ve thought he’d just won something, like an election. A lot of voices were mouthing a lot of platitudes in a lot of decibels, and I decided it was no time for me to salute and report in. Instead I turned toward the younger generation walking slowly away toward where the cars were parked, and a little apart from them, glancing my way, Sister Robin Fletcher.
She’d had a bath, at least one, and if it would have taken a scrub brush and lye soap to put her next to godliness, you could almost call her presentable. She had on one of those long figured Indian skirts, sandals underneath, and a cream-colored Mexican blouse fastened at the neck with a cameo pin. Her hair had been washed too, not that the color was any different but it glinted in the sun, and a bow at the neck held back the frizz. But there were things about her no soap and water could help. That pasty look for one. Her skin was pale, puffed, doughy—unnatural in a girl that age. Her eyes were puffy too, and bloodshot, though she hadn’t seemed the type for tears, and she was staring at me with that dreamy see-through expression I’d noticed before.
“Hey!” I said to her. “Remember me? The man from Time? Now what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this, I’d like to know?”
Not particularly funny, and it seemed to make no dent at all.
“You were going to read me some poems, remember?” I went on. “What’s wrong with like right now?”
By way of reply she started to walk away from me. I touched her arm, but she jerked loose.
“Hey,” I said, “now that’s a hell of a way to treat a friend in distress.”
“I didn’t know you were either,” she answered dully.
“All right,” I said, “so I don’t work for True Confessions or the Ladies’ Home Journal, but you can’t blame a guy for trying. We’ve all got to eat. Hell, what would you do in my place?”
She stopped again.
“You really want to know?” she said.
She turned to me, and now there was some glisten in her eyes which didn’t come from makeup or the sun.
“Sure, why not? I’m always open to suggestions.”
“O.K., she said harshly. “Then get out, Brother. Hang it up, cash it in. It’s none of your business, it’s got nothing to do with you.”
“What’s got nothing to do with me? Karen?”
“Karen, everything. The whole bit.”
“Well, maybe you’re right,” I said, “but twenty-four hours ago you were acting like you had a whole hell of a lot more to tell, given the right circumstances. Who got to you in between? Gainsterne?”
It was a shot in the dark, and a pretty wild one to judge.
She burst out laughing.
“You’re not much of a Dick Tracy, are you, Brother.”
“Well,” I said, “they signed me up for the part, but somewhere along the way the picture got shelved.”
Which drew another laugh. At least her face worked better that way.
I touched her again, and this time she didn’t jump.
“Look,” I said, “couldn’t we go somewhere and talk things over? Read some poems, for instance?”
She shook her head.
“I’ve already told you more than I’m …”
She hesitated.
“… more than I should have,” she finished.
“You mean, more than you’re supposed to?”
Another shot in the dark.
“I mean what I said,” she answered. “And about you too, Mr. Cage. Haven’t enough people gotten hurt without another one getting his?”
Which was another of her opaque remarks I couldn’t get her to explain.
“Who else has gotten hurt besides Karen?” I tried.
No response.
“What was it you weren’t supposed to tell me? Was it what you said about Twink? Well if it was, you can forget about it, I already knew that.”
Nothing again.
By this time most of the cars had already gone off to wherever it is people go after funerals. It felt pretty awkward, our just standing there, with no one for company but dead Diehls.
“All right,” I said. “I guess you’ve got your reasons and that’s good enough for me. If you change your mind though, here’s where you get hold of me.” I gave her a card and wrote the phone number on it. “Chances are you’ll get an answering service, but the biddy there’ll know where I am. Meanwhile, maybe you could save me a little trouble if you’d tell me where I can locate Andy Ford.”
Only this time it struck closer to home, either that or graveyards made her cheeks shiver.
“Who, Andy?” she said in that other innocent tone.
“Tha
t’s right, Andy Ford, Karie’s longlost non-poet lover, you were telling me about him yesterday, remember? I wasted one whole afternoon trying to track him down and it’s too nice a day to do it again.”
“Where’d you look?” she said.
I gave her the rundown, which included his pad and just about the whole damn campus.
She laughed again.
“You just didn’t look under the right rock,” she said.
“Where’s that?”
And she told me.
Anyone who’s been around the California surfing scene will know where I mean. It’s the best beach left for the board-and-wet-suit set that isn’t government or private property, unless you’re masochist enough to go for the Wedge at Newport. Not the most famous because it’s small and in a hard-to-get-to cove and technically you’re trespassing whenever you touch the sand, but when you can make bigger waves in your bathtub than what you’ll find anywhere between Oxnard and San Diego, there the rollers will still be coming in, a long way in, as big as you want and smooth like blue silk.
The only reason I don’t mention the name is that I’ve got a sentimental interest of my own in the trade secrets.
I thanked her for the tip. She bit at a non-existent nail and looked at me anxiously again, as though she had something to add but didn’t know whether she should. Apparently she decided against it. I blew her a kiss goodby from the Mustang, and we went our separate ways.
I drove back to the motel, changed my clothes and poured myself a couple of Chivas Regals from the bottle I carry along for just such gala occasions. I’m not much of a day time boozer, but I guess I needed to wash the taste of mourning out of my mouth. Then I headed over to the Coast Highway, stopped for gas, and drove south along what used to be one of the prettiest deserted stretches of coast anywhere. And still is, largely. And won’t be, once the Diehl Corporation is finished with it.
I was feeling pretty loose—for one thing, I was going down the road of more than one happy memory—too loose in any case to pay much attention to what was going on around me. I was just moseying along, an even sixty-five, with a tape in the deck and singing at just the right off-key …
Which is when the bastards always jump you.
I was almost through the empty stretch and going up the first of the steep hills where the town starts. A few hills later the town ends and the coast goes wild again, then another town, and so on, clear to Baja California.
Up near the top of the hill, they’d cut the lanes down from four to two. It was a hell of a dumb idea, but there’d been some kind of roadwork going on and those orange highway cones had it marked off for you way in advance. I’d half-noticed a cream-colored van coming along like gangbusters in the outer lane, and out of reflex I opened the Mustang up a notch to give him room to tuck in behind me. Hell, no van is going to take me on a hill. But this guy had another notion and at that he must have had more than a coffee grinder underneath.
Only not enough. The driver was up too high for me to see him when he went by, but I saw the orange cones forcing him over, and I saw him swerve to cut me off. I saw curtains on his side and rear windows and I jammed on the brakes just as his ass end slammed into my left front fender north of the door.
There was an awful tearing sound like the twisted fingers of two tin forks pulled apart.
The van jumped like a goosed cat. It shimmied, danced along on two wheels and by some miracle which isn’t supposed to happen, landed back on all fours and disappeared over the top of the hill, bumper stickers and all.
Whereas for me and the Mustang, we wound up in a ditch, also on all fours, our nose about two feet short of the hibiscused brick wall of another Diehl enterprise called Turquoise Estates.
6
“I don’t believe in accidents,” Twink Beydon had said.
Neither do I.
The motor was still turning over, and the dull ache in my forehead would take a while to turn into a full-fledged bruise. I backed out with a crunch and a spinning of rubber that didn’t do the iceplant growing in the ditch any good, and I went after him.
Laguna’s a picturesque little town in a freaked-out artsy-craftsy way, narrow streets winding up over the hills and houses tucked in every whichway, a lot of them perched on stilts, but I didn’t do much sightseeing. Which isn’t to say I wasn’t on a good half of those streets in the next twenty minutes. I glimpsed him as I came over the second hill. Way down at the bottom a traffic light had stopped him. It went green just as I caught sight of him, and he disappeared down a side street into the center of town. I made the light on the yellow, veered down the side street, a second side street, a third, a fourth, burning a couple of stop signs en route and raising havoc with the Hare Krishnas on the corners. A couple of times I thought I had him, once when I was about ten cars back at a light, but each time he did the vanishing act. I went by half a dozen vans painted every hue of the rainbow, but none cream-colored. Maybe he’d done an instant paint job or maybe, like in the bankrobber movies, he’d rolled up the ramp of a moving truck and was laughing at me as I went by.
Finally I thought I had him cornered up a No Through street. I let out a whoop, squealed rubber on a curve, went up a hill, around a corner where the macadam ended in a fence on the side of a canyon, and almost ran smack into the ass end of a J. C. Penney delivery truck.
That’s where I gave up.
“And I thought we were pretty good,” I said to the Mustang.
The Mustang didn’t answer.
I got out and lit up a Murad to calm my nerves. I admired the view, which was composed half of the rocky coast, cut into coves and inlets by the sea, and half of a good-sized accordion pleat in my left front fender. I’d been hearing an unhealthy scrunching noise on the corners, which turned out to be a piece of bent fender rubbing against the tire. This I managed to straighten out with my bare hands, which goes to show how thick they’re rolling the metal in Detroit these days. I also rearranged the bumper a little. The headlights still looked crosseyed, but they and the rest of the damage could wait for the insurance company.
I drove slowly back to the Coast Highway and south again over the rollercoaster hills. The area had been built up a lot since I’d last been that way, but what hasn’t, and if you didn’t look too close it made you think of Monterey and points north. In any case the Pacific was never far from view, and whenever that’s true in California you can’t go very wrong.
The hills started to decline. A few miles further down the coast would go flat again, but I wasn’t going that far. I turned off onto a narrow dirt road which seemed to go nowhere and did, past a paint-peeled No Trespassing sign belonging to a beach club long since defunct. None of this had changed, nor had the circle of dirt where the road ended and the jagged rocks began, still some seventy yards’ climb down to the beach. A developer’s paradise, and how the Diehl Corporation and its competitors had passed it up I’ve no idea.
There were maybe a dozen cars parked in the circle, but I saw only one of them. It was a cream-colored van with black curtains across the windows, California license plate ZNV 218, and a right ass end which looked like the Jolly Green Giant had tried to take a bite out of it.
A surfer was standing on the other side of it in a black wet suit, looking busy over his board. But the suit was dry, and there wasn’t another soul in sight.
I got out and walked up behind him.
“Is this your heap?” I said.
“Nope.”
“Whose is it, do you know?”
“Nope.”
“You know, it isn’t very nice to go around side-swiping people in broad daylight, particularly in a piece of shit like this.”
“Like I don’t know what you’re talking about, Brother, this is … Hey, man! What the hell?”
I’d grabbed his rubber shoulder and pulled. The rest of him came up with it. He jerked loose, looking indignant, and fingered the rubber like it was 100 percent worsted.
“I don’t like people calling me B
rother, Brother, who aren’t my brothers. I also don’t like people running me off the road. Somebody’s likely to get hurt.”
He’d driven it all right. I’d have bet my last buck on it, and he looked like he knew I’d win. He glanced uncertainly toward the water, then at me, then at his feet.
“Are you Ford?” I said.
He fit the description more or less, him and a thousand other self-styled easy riders: the sun-bleached hair down to their shoulders, the tanned skin, the slouch, the blue I-don’t-give-a-shit eyes.
“Me? No, like I’m Chrysler, man, I’m …”
I slapped him just once, open-handed, hard enough to bring a wince of tears out of his ducts but not enough to leave any marks on his pretty cheek.
“Hey …!” he started.
“I’m looking for Ford,” I said. “Andy Ford. Is he down there?”
“He might be,” he said, holding his cheek. “Who wants to know?”
“I’m a friend of Robin Fletcher’s.”
“Oh Robin, yeah, how’s old Robin?” he began, but then he backed off, saying, “O.K., yeah he’s down there, Brother, all you got to do is ask.”
“Is that his van?”
“It might be, yeah, I dunno.”
I had a yen to make a pretzel out of his rubber suit with him in it, another to take a look inside the black curtains, but I squelched both and started down the rocks to the beach.
After the buildup I’ve given it, it’s a shame to admit it was a bad day at the cove, but so it was. The sun was glinting off the water, making all those sparkles the hopheads like to stare at, and there was a fair breeze chopping up the surface, but maybe the rollers had gone up to Santa Monica for the day. Some ten or twelve surfers were waiting it out near the breaker line like black ducks on a pond. I knew the feeling. It doesn’t take as much patience as you’d think. Sometimes you could almost fall asleep out there, rocking along in the sun with your legs going slowly numb from the cold.
There were some numbers stretched out on towels on the sand who seemed to belong to the action. They weren’t a bad harem at that. Robin Fletcher, I thought, wouldn’t have had much going for her in that company. I asked the pick of them to point out Ford to me, and she did, and I sat down next to her to watch his form.