Sammy looked handsome in a light blue cashmere sweater and dark gray slacks. Beside him, Didier was wearing one of his native African numbers over pajama-like trousers and suede sandals. Charlie looked, as usual, like he had slept in his clothes—a creased linen jacket, a long-sleeve polo, and a pair of unpressed jeans over cut-rate Italian loafers.
She felt a sudden surge of unexpected pleasure. She felt good, better than she had for a while. Okay, maybe she was just a sixty-seven-year-old woman living in Palm Springs, but at her table sat three men, two of whom wanted to sleep with her.
Charlie Berns told stories about his days producing movies in Hollywood. It brought back memories of her long, intermittently rewarding career on the periphery of the movie business. Thirty years of incarnating various damaged women.
Now, she thought, she was no longer playing a damaged woman; she was one. As soon as the thought occurred to her, she banished it. No matter what happened, she wouldn’t allow herself to sink into self-pity. She was healthy—more or less—and had a dachshund who loved her and two men who wanted her. She closed her eyes and silently gave thanks.
And prayed that somebody, somewhere, would keep her from being a bag lady. If she had to be bag lady, she would at least be an attractive one. She pictured herself standing at a Freeway onramp with Klaus, a Brazilian, and a cardboard sign reading: WILL ACT FOR MONEY.
A couple of days after Thanksgiving, Marcy found herself across the street from Didier’s art gallery—a storefront, painted bright green and orange. Colors, she assumed, that were quintessentially African. She had been shopping for shoes, saw the AFRIQUE OUEST sign, and decided to pop in and say hello.
The place was deserted, except for a bored-looking, middle-aged gay man sitting at a desk, talking on his cell. He didn’t bother getting off the phone—barely even looked at her, for that matter—as she walked around examining the pieces of art displayed haphazardly around the place.
The man was speaking loudly enough for her not to be able to avoid overhearing.
“. . . Bruno, it’s not like he even looked at me. He was spending the whole evening talking to Malcolm. What he sees in him is beyond me, frankly. The man hasn’t been near a gym in years. Besides, I think he’s sleeping with Arthur . . .”
Gay dishing. She had heard enough of it in all the makeup trailers she had spent time in during her acting years, when her makeup artist and hair dresser would wittily assassinate their friends’ characters while making her into whatever version of a damaged woman she was playing that day.
Eventually, the man got off the phone and, without getting up, called across to her, “Help you?” There was no sincerity in his invitation.
“No, thanks,” she said. “Just browsing.”
He nodded and was about to dial another number when she asked if Didier happened to be around. He put his phone down and looked more closely at her. “You a friend?”
“A neighbor.”
“He’s in a meeting. I can tell him you’re here.”
“That’s okay,” she said, and meant it. But just as she was turning to leave, the door to an inner office opened and Didier emerged, accompanied by a man in a braided ponytail and moccasins. The man was wearing sunglasses and had a manila envelope in his hand.
“Marcee?” Didier seemed surprised to see her.
“Hi. I just happened to be across the street, looking at shoes, and figured I’d say hi. But if you’re busy . . .”
“No, no. George was just leaving. George Kajika, meet Marcy Gray. The Marcy Gray.”
The Native American showed no recognition of her name, or her face, for that matter. He merely nodded, minimally, and walked out of the gallery.
“I didn’t know that Indians went in for African art.”
“Au contraire, cherie. They are good customers. They appreciate the primitive in art. Do you know what Kajika means in Choctaw? Walks Without Sound. Formidable, n’est-ce pas? His family must have been stalkers.”
And he let go with one of his high-pitched volleys of laughter that Marcy, quite frankly, was getting a little tired of.
There was a Starbucks on the corner, and she accepted his invitation for a latte. It was three in the afternoon; too late for lunch, too early for dinner. They sat outside, under an awning in the spraying mist, watching air-conditioned cars drive by, occupied by refrigerated senior citizens on anti-depressants.
“It’s not quite Paris, is it?” she remarked ruefully.
“Alas, no. Perhaps you would allow me to take you there one day. For a holiday?”
“That would be lovely.”
“We should go in spring. April in Paris. Chestnuts in blossom . . .”
That was still four months away. Anything could happen before then. Still, she liked the idea of it, the promise. She would put it in Didier’s plus column, even if he didn’t really mean it. He seemed as if he meant to mean it. Which, these days, might have to be enough.
Things became murkier when Evelyn Duboff called with an update. Marcy, who felt guilty that the woman was now working pro bono for her, offered to take her to lunch, but the detective said that they could talk on the phone.
“Your phone’s not bugged, is it?”
“Not that I know of. But some weird stuff’s happening around here. Someone’s cat was poisoned, and the cops think it could have been that they were actually trying to kill someone in the complex.”
“No kidding? Who?”
“Nobody knows. It’s scary. We organized a community watch.”
“Well, hmmn . . . I wonder if there’s some connection . . .”
“Some connection with what?”
“How was the cat poisoned?”
“Take-out pizza.”
“Hmmn. . . .”
Evelyn Duboff took a moment, as if she were putting something together in her mind. Marcy could hear her heavy breathing over the line.
“I have some more information. And I’m wondering how this fits in.”
“How what fits in?”
“I called in a favor with an old friend who lives in France. Asked him to do a little snooping around on your African. And he came up with some stuff. After he was in the shmata business, he went into the art business. He had a gallery in Nice, in the high-rent district near the big hotels, and was selling to rich tourists. Anyway, my guy is plugged into the gendarmerie, and he made a few phone calls. Apparently there was a warrant for his arrest in process when he left the country.”
“Arrest warrant? For what?”
“Drug dealing. Heroin.”
“Oh, my God. Really?”
“No one ever presented any evidence, and apparently there wasn’t enough to start extradition proceedings, but the police believed that the art gallery could have been a money laundering operation. The dossier, as they call it over there, is closed.”
“You think it’s true?”
“I don’t know, but when you told me about the poisoned cat, I thought about the connection. You see, if he had crossed someone, they could have put a hit out on him. Poison is a favorite contract killing method. Leaves no fingerprints or powder stains. The Russians put it in borscht. It disguises the taste.”
“So maybe he’s still dealing drugs, and this African art business he’s doing now is just a front?”
“I don’t know. But it’s a hypothesis.”
“Oh, wow . . .”
“Hey, I could be entirely wrong here. And the Frogs could’ve been wrong too. That happens a lot—they set up some guy to roll over on someone else, and he implicates an innocent guy to get himself off the hook.”
Marcy had trouble visualizing the jovial African dealing drugs. On TV, the drug lords were Colombian. Then she started thinking about the African art and wondering if the narcotics were smuggled inside the statues. And then about the Indian, George Walks Without Sound, and his manila envelope. Had the man just dropped off a shipment of cocaine?
“Here’s what I don’t get,” Evelyn Duboff said, interruptin
g Marcy’s paranoid scenario. “If he was in the drug business, why would he be living in a middle-market condo in Palm Springs? You want to make a living with drugs in this community, you deal Lipitor or Viagra. There aren’t a whole lot of people shooting heroin around here.”
“I think you’re right.” Marcy decided to indulge in wishful thinking, not ready to eliminate Didier from her short list.
“Yeah, probably. It’s a long shot. Just doing my due diligence.”
“Anything new on Sammy?”
“Nope. I can’t even get a flicker. He’s really covered his tracks.”
“You know, maybe he really is who he says he is—just a retired cement guy with no family,” Marcy said, deciding to extend her wishful thinking to the other name on the short list.
“Hey, why not? Give him the benefit of the doubt.”
Then, a few days after that conversation, Sammy’s car got blown up in the Vons supermarket lot. And things really got weird.
VI
DIDIER
When Didier Onyekachukwu called the telephone number he had heard through Charlie Berns’s open window, he wasn’t expecting to hear a message requesting that he leave his name and mailing address. Rattled, he hung up. Did he really want to leave evidence of his desire to kill Sammy Dee on an answering machine? The whole thing could be a sting operation. Or a joke.
But when the Italian started consolidating his position with Marcy Gray, inviting her to dinner, taking her to the movies, Didier realized that he would have to do something if he didn’t want to watch the man walk off with the actress, right under his nose. It was, quite simply, unacceptable.
He had been through it in his mind and decided that he really didn’t have a choice. With Afrique Ouest sinking slowly and the Indians putting a tomahawk to his head for more money, he’d be broke before spring. And then what? Find some rich old woman who was looking for something a little défendu in her declining years? Go back to Burkina Faso and live off the charity of his children, if he could find them? Go back into the drug business and spend the duration of his life in a federal prison, with the worst type of Africans—African Americans?
No. One way or the other, Marcy Gray was his lifeboat. If it sunk, he would go down with the ship. And there wasn’t room in the boat for Sammy Dee. He would have to be disposed of.
So he called back the number and left the information. A week later, he got in the mail a questionnaire about his vermin problem, along with an application for a rebuilt patio deck, with a lot of questions—social security number, place of birth, previous residences. Didier had been very careful about disclosing details of the identity he had assumed in Geneva years ago, fearful that the gendarmerie nationale would learn of his whereabouts and try to extradite him.
A patio deck? His own patio deck was a naked slab of concrete. Since he bought the unit, he hadn’t done a thing to it. Other tenants had put in gardens, barbecue pits, flower boxes, but Didier’s patio had remained forlorn and neglected. Sammy Dee had recently had his patio deck redone. Maybe Marcy paid attention to these types of things.
Well, he rationalized, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to improve his position with Marcy, as well as his property, while he was getting Sammy Dee disposed of. Two stones with one bird, as the Americans like to say. He filled out the form with all the fictitious information he had been using and waited. This time it took two weeks to get a response. It was a note on Acme Exterminating and Patio Deck letterhead that said: TOMORROW, 6:45 A.M., TAHQUITZ CREEK LEGEND GOLF COURSE, PAY GREENS FEE FOR THREE, MEET AT FIRST TEE BOX.
Didier had never picked up a golf club in his life. He hadn’t even seen a golf course until he’d moved to Nice, where he occasionally met clients at a restaurant overlooking the Club de Golf Côte d’Azur. It always seemed to him a sport for people with too much time on their hands. And from what he had observed, playing the game never made anyone happy.
What was he going to do about golf clubs? The only person he knew who played the game was the Italian. Wouldn’t it be lovely if Didier went to the meeting with clubs belonging to the man he was arranging to kill? It would make Sammy Dee an accessory to his own murder.
“Samee, comment allez-vous?”
“What is it, Didier?” Sammy growled into the phone.
“Would you be good enough to lend me your golf clubs?”
There was a long pause, during which Didier could almost hear the man’s thinking.
“I didn’t know you played.”
“I am taking the game up. Good for business, no?”
“You ever play before?”
“Here and there. I am, how do you say, a duffer.”
Didier laughed at his own joke and waited for a response.
“These are pretty good clubs—Cleveland driver, Titleist irons.”
“I shall take exemplary care of them.”
“You know, you can rent golf clubs . . .”
“It makes a bad impression on potential clients, n’est-ce pas?”
“All right,” Sammy said, after another long pause. “When do you need them?”
“I shall collect them this afternoon. I have an early time to tee up.”
“Where you playing?”
“Tahquitz Creek. You know it?”
“Yeah. Fast greens.”
“I am indebted to you, mon ami.”
The Italian didn’t know just how indebted. When he was safely out of the way, Didier would have the leisure to take up golf while he was courting Marcy Gray. They would spend leisurely afternoons swatting the ball around the manicured grass and then . . . a bottle of chilled Pouilly-Fumé and a little siesta. . . .
Appropriate golf attire presented another problem. Didier did not possess anything remotely suitable for a golf course. In addition to not having a T-shirt with a collar, he had nothing for his feet besides sandals and a couple of pairs of Aubercy shoes, which he had bought in Paris during the fat years.
He went to the Big Five Sporting Goods store and spent a couple hundred more dollars on the eradication of Sammy Dee, walking out with a beige Nike Banlon golf T-shirt, a pair of Footjoy brown and white shoes with adjustable cleats, and, per the Italian’s suggestion, a Slazenger large left-handed glove, a dozen Titleist golf balls, and a bag of multicolored tees. At the register he took a free copy of OFFICIAL GOLF RULES AND REGULATIONS.
That night he fell asleep trying to decipher the abstruse peculiarities of the game. The Catholic catechism was easier to understand than the rules of golf. He set the alarm for five thirty, ordered a cab for six fifteen, and slept soundly.
Nevertheless, in the cab on the way to the golf course at dawn, he began to experience the first pangs of remorse since he had decided to rid himself of his rival. But they didn’t last long. Just as he had learned to quash any guilt he had felt in enriching the junta that plundered Upper Volta, he was able to compartmentalize his feelings about having Sammy Dee removed. The man was not only an obstacle to Didier’s own survival, but he was the instrument of misery for the woman he, Didier, loved. The thought of Marcy Gray throwing her life away with this man was unthinkable. À la limite, he was performing an act of altruism. Someone had to sacrifice himself to save her. It was the very least he could do. Le moindre des choses.
He checked in at the pro shop, where he spent another $375 on greens fees and a cart. Didier hadn’t been behind the wheel of a moving vehicle since his days tooling around Ouagadougou in his Mercedes. Fortunately, the thing didn’t go very fast, and he was able to proceed jerkily to the first tee box, where he found two men waiting for him. They were well dressed, with short hair and clean-shaven faces. To Didier, they looked like narcotics agents, causing an involuntary tremor of nostalgic anxiety until he realized that he wasn’t dealing drugs any more. Just phony African art.
They introduced themselves as Walt and Biff—or Bill, he didn’t quite catch the younger one’s name—and everyone shook hands.
“Go ahead. You got the honors, Deedeeyay,” the older o
ne said.
“I am a little, how do you say, rustee,” Didier said, as he took a club, at random, out of Sammy Dee’s golf bag, and approached the tee.
“I wouldn’t use a wedge on this hole,” the younger one said. “It’s four-seventy to the pin, with a head wind.”
“But of course.” Didier returned to the bag and selected the biggest club he could find. He stuck a tee in the ground, put the ball on it, making several attempts before it stayed there, then looked down the fairway to a tiny flag waving in the distance, took a deep breath and a whack, missing the ball entirely.
“Warm-up swing,” one of them said.
On the next swing, Didier managed to hit the ball, or at least a fraction of the surface, and it rolled off the tee and twenty yards to the left.
“Mulligan,” said the other one, cheerfully.
At their suggestion, Didier picked up his ball when after twelve strokes he still wasn’t on the green. Two holes later, it was decided he would just putt the ball. Meanwhile the two of them continued to play the game with proficiency, and no mention was made of either patio decks or the elimination of Sammy Dee.
They finally got down to business at the tenth hole, where Didier was invited into the W.C. and told to take his clothes off.
“Certainly, you are joking,” he protested.
“Not in the least.”
“And why, may I ask, do you require this?”
“Do the math,” Walt said.
“I see,” said Didier, “You are concerned that I am a policeman?”
“Duh,” the younger one replied.
“I assure you I am not.”
“We’ll be the judge of that.”
“Must I really?”
“Only if you want your patio deck redone.”
Sighing, Didier removed his beige Nike golf shirt and then was told to take everything else off. He suffered the indignity of having his private parts probed, as if he had been arrested in Upper Volta.
“Surely, you don’t think . . . ?”
“We think of everything, Deedeeyay. You can’t be too careful in the patio deck business these days.”
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