Although the footpath through the canyon provided a shorter route to the Smiths’ house, the Bortons decided to go more formally, by car, and to take Cathy with them. Cathy, told to comb her hair and wash her face, protested: “I don’t want to go over there.”
“Why not?” Paul said. “You were so anxious to spend time with them that you played hooky for two days. Why don’t you want to see them now?”
“Because they’re not there.”
“How do you know?”
“Mrs. Smith told me this morning that they wouldn’t be home tonight because she’s putting on a show.”
“Indeed?” Paul said grim-faced. “Just where does she put on these shows of hers?”
“And Mr. Smith has to play baseball. And after that they’re going to see a friend in the hospital who has leukemia.”
“Leukemia, eh?” He didn’t have to ask how Cathy had found out about such a thing; he’d watched a semidocumentary dealing with it a couple of nights ago. Cathy was supposed to have been sleeping.
“I wonder,” he said to Marion when Cathy went to comb her hair, “just how many ‘facts’ about the Smiths have been borrowed from television.”
“Well, I know for myself that they drive a sports car, and Mr. Smith was wearing a baseball cap. And they’re both young and good-looking. Young and good-looking enough,” she added wryly, “to make me feel—well, a little jealous.”
“Jealous?”
“Cathy would rather belong to them than to us. It makes me wonder if it’s something the Smiths have or something the Bortons don’t have.”
“Ask her.”
“I can’t very well—”
“Then I will, dammit,” Paul said. And he did.
Cathy merely looked at him innocently. “I don’t know. I don’t know what you mean.”
“Then listen again. Why did you pretend that you were the Smiths’ little girl?”
“They asked me to be. They asked me to go with them.”
“They actually said, Cathy, will you be our little girl?”
“Yes.”
“Well, by heaven, I’ll put an end to this nonsense,” Paul said, and strode out to the car.
It was twilight when they reached the Smiths’ house by way of the narrow, hilly road. The moon, just appearing above the horizon, was on the wane, a chunk bitten out of its side by some giant jaw. A warm dry wind, blowing down the mountain from the desert beyond, carried the sweet scent of pittosporum.
The Smiths’ house was dark, and both the front door and the garage were locked. Out of defiance or desperation, Paul pressed the door chime anyway, several times. All three of them could hear it ringing inside, and it seemed to Marion to echo very curiously—as if the carpets and drapes were too thin to muffle the sound vibrations. She would have liked to peer in through the windows and see for herself, but the Venetian blinds were closed.
“What’s their furniture like?” she asked Cathy.
“Like everybody’s.”
“I mean, is it new? Does Mrs. Smith tell you not to put your feet on it?”
“No, she never tells me that,” Cathy said truthfully. “I want to go home now. I’m tired.”
It was while she was putting Cathy to bed that Marion heard Paul call to her from the living room in an urgent voice, “Marion, come here a minute.”
She found him standing motionless in the middle of the room, staring across the canyon at the Smiths’ place. The rectangular light of the Smiths’ television set was shining in the picture window of the room that opened onto the patio at the back of the Smiths’ house.
“Either they’ve come home within the past few minutes,” he said, “or they were there all the time. My guess is that they were home when we went over, but they didn’t want to see us, so they just doused the lights and pretended to be out. Well, it won’t work! Come on, we’re going back.”
“I can’t leave Cathy alone. She’s already got her pajamas on.”
“Put a bathrobe on her and bring her along. This has gone beyond the point of observing such niceties as correct attire.”
“Don’t you think we should wait until tomorrow?”
“Hurry up and stop arguing with me.”
Cathy, protesting that she was tired and that the Smiths weren’t home anyway, was bundled into a bathrobe and carried to the car.
“They’re home all right,” Paul said. “And by heaven they’d better answer the door this time or I’ll break it down.”
“That’s an absurd way to talk in front of a child,” Marion said coldly. “She has enough ideas without hearing—”
“Absurd is it? Wait and see.”
Cathy, listening from the backseat, smiled sleepily. She knew how to get in without breaking anything: ever since the house had been built, the real estate man who’d been trying to sell it always hid the key on a nail underneath the window box.
The second trip seemed a nightmarish imitation of the first: the same moon hung in the sky but it looked smaller now, and paler. The scent of pittosporum was funereally sweet, and the hollow sound of the chimes from inside the house was like the echo in an empty tomb.
“They must be crazy to think they can get away with a trick like this twice in one night!” Paul shouted. “Come on, we’re going around to the back.”
Marion looked a little frightened. “I don’t like trespassing on someone else’s property.”
“They trespassed on our property first.”
He glanced down at Cathy. Her eyes were half closed and her face was pearly in the moonlight. He pressed her hand to reassure her that everything was going to be all right and that his anger wasn’t directed at her, but she drew away from him and started down the path that led to the back of the house.
Paul clicked on his flashlight and followed her, moving slowly along the unfamiliar terrain. By the time he turned the corner of the house and reached the patio, Cathy was out of sight.
“Cathy,” he called. “Where are you? Come back here!”
Marion was looking at him accusingly. “You upset her with that silly threat about breaking down the door. She’s probably on her way home through the canyon.”
“I’d better go after her.”
“She’s less likely to get hurt than you are. She knows every inch of the way. Besides, you came here to break down the doors. All right, start breaking.”
But there was no need to break down anything. The back door opened as soon as Paul rapped on it with his knuckles, and he almost fell into the room.
It was empty except for a small girl wearing a blue bathrobe that matched her eyes.
Paul said, “Cathy. Cathy, what are you doing here?”
Marion stood with her hand pressed to her mouth to stifle the scream that was rising in her throat. There were no Smiths. The people in the sports car whom Cathy had waved at were just strangers responding to the friendly greeting of a child—had Cathy seen them before, on a previous trip to town? The television set was no more than a contraption rigged up by Cathy herself—an orange crate and an old mirror that caught and reflected the rays of the moon.
In front of it Cathy was standing, facing her own image. “Hello, Mrs. Smith. Here I am, all ready to go.”
“Cathy,” Marion said in a voice that sounded torn by claws, “what do you see in that mirror?”
“It’s not a mirror. It’s a television set.”
“What—what program are you watching?”
“It’s not a program, silly. It’s real. It’s the Smiths. I’m going away with them to dance and play baseball.”
“There are no Smiths,” Paul bellowed. “Will you get that through your head? There are no Smiths!”
“Yes, there are. I see them.”
Marion knelt on the floor beside the child. “Listen to me, Cathy. This is a mirror—only a mirror. It came from Daddy’s old bureau and I had it put away in the storage room. That’s where you found it, isn’t it? And you brought it here and decided to pretend it was a television
set, isn’t that right? But it’s really just a mirror, and the people in it are us—you and Mommy and Daddy.”
But even as she looked at her own reflection, Marion saw it beginning to change. She was growing younger, prettier; her hair was becoming lighter and her cotton suit was changing into a dancing dress. And beside her in the mirror, Paul was turning into a stranger, a laughing-eyed young man wearing a baseball cap.
“I’m ready to go now, Mr. Smith,” Cathy said, and suddenly all three of them, the Smiths and their little girl, began walking away in the mirror. In a few moments they were no bigger than matchsticks—and then the three of them disappeared, and there was only the moonlight in the glass.
“Cathy,” Marion cried. “Come back, Cathy! Please come back!”
Propped up against the door like a dummy, Paul imagined he could hear above his wife’s cries the mocking muted roar of a sports car.
SURF
BY JOSEPH HANSEN
Venice
(Originally published in 1976)
Lieutenant Ken Barker of the L.A.P.D. shared a gray-green office with too many other men, too many gray-green metal desks and file cabinets, too many phones that kept crying for attention like new life in a sad maternity ward. He had a broken nose. Under his eyes were bruises. He wore beard stubble. His teeth were smoky. He scowled across a sprawl of papers and spent styrofoam cups.
He said: “Yes, Robinson was murdered. On the deck of his apartment. In that slum by the sea called Surf. Shot clean through the head. He went over the rail, was dead when he hit the sand. There’s nothing wrong with the case. The DA is happy. What do you want to mess it up for?”
“I don’t.” Dave shed a wet trench coat, hung it over a chairback, sat on another chair. “I just want to know why Robinson made Bruce K. Shevel the beneficiary of his life insurance policy. Didn’t he have a wife, a mother, a girlfriend?”
“He had a boyfriend, and the boyfriend killed him. Edward Earl Lily, by name. With a deer rifle, a thirty-thirty. Probably Robinson’s. He owned one.” Barker blinked. “It’s weird, Dave. I mean, what have you got—an instinct for this kind of case?”
“Coincidence,” Dave said. “What does probably mean—Robinson was ‘probably’ killed with his own gun.”
Barker found a bent cigarette. “Haven’t located it.”
“Where does Lily say it is?”
“Claims he never saw it.” Barker shuffled papers, hunting a match. “But it’ll be in the surf someplace along there. Or buried in the sand. We’re raking for it.” Dave leaned forward and snapped a thin steel gas lighter. Barker said thanks and asked through smoke, “You don’t like it? Why not? What’s wrong with it?”
Dave put the lighter away. “Ten years ago, Bruce K. Shevel jacked up his car on one of those trails in Topanga Canyon to change a tire, and the car rolled over on him and cost him the use of his legs. He was insured with us. We paid. We still pay. Total disability. I’d forgotten him. But I remembered him today when I checked Robinson’s policy. Shevel looked to me like someone who’d tried self-mutilation to collect on his accident policy.”
“Happens, doesn’t it?” Barker said.
“People won’t do anything for money.” Dave’s smile was thin. “But they will hack off a foot or a hand for it. I sized Shevel up for one of those. His business was in trouble. The policy was a fat one. I don’t think paralysis was in his plans. But it paid better. The son of a bitch grinned at me from that hospital bed. He knew I knew and there was no way to prove it.”
“And there still isn’t,” Barker said. “Otherwise you could stop paying and put him in the slams. And it pisses you off that he took you. And now you see a chance to get him.” Barker looked into one of the empty plastic cups, made a face, stood up. “You’d like him to have killed Robinson.”
He edged between desks to a coffee urn at the window end of the room, the glass wall end. Dave followed. Through vertical metal sun slats outside, gray rain showed itself like movie grief. “I’d like Robinson to have died peacefully in bed of advanced old age.” Dave pulled a cup from a chrome tube bolted to a window strut and held the cup while Barker filled it. “And since he didn’t, I’d sure as hell like him to have left his money to someone else.”
“We interviewed Shevel.” Next to the hot plate that held the coffee urn was cream substitute in a widemouth brown bottle and sugar in little cellophane packets. Barker used a yellow plastic spoon to stir some of each into his coffee. “We interviewed everybody in Robinson’s little black book.” He led the way back to his desk, sat down, twisted out his cigarette in a big glass ashtray glutted with butts. “And Shevel is a wheelchair case.”
Dave tasted his coffee. Weak and tepid. “A wheelchair case can shoot a gun.”
Barker snorted. “Have you seen where Robinson lived?”
“I’ll go look. But first tell me about Lily.” Dave sat down, then eyed the desk. “Or do I need to take your time? Shall I just read the file?”
“My time? I’d only waste it sleeping. And I’m out of practice. I wouldn’t do it well.” Barker glanced sourly at the folders, forms, photographs on his desk, then hung another cigarette from his mouth and leaned forward so Dave could light it. “Lily is a trick Robinson picked up at the Billy Budd. You know the place?”
Dave nodded. “Ocean Front Walk.”
“Robinson tended bar there. The kid’s a hustler but way out of Robinson’s league. A hundred bucks a night and/or a part in your next TV segment, sir. But somehow Robinson managed to keep him. Eight, ten weeks, anyway—” The phone on Barker’s desk jangled. He lifted the receiver, listened, grunted, cradled the receiver. “—till he was dead. Lily ran, but not far and not clever. He was better at crying. You know the type. Muscles, but a real girl. Kept sobbing that he loved Robinson and why would he kill him?”
“And why would he?” Dave lit a cigarette.
Barker shrugged. “Probably hysteria. Toward the end they were fighting a lot. About money. Robinson had bought him fancy clothes, an Omega watch, a custom surfboard. They’d been pricing Porsches and Aston-Martins on the lots. But Robinson was broke. He’d hocked his stereo, camera, projector. He was borrowing from friends.”
“What friends?” Dave asked. “Shevel?”
“Among others,” Barker said. “Which kind of louses up your theory, doesn’t it? Shevel didn’t need to shoot anybody for their insurance money. He’s loaded.”
The boy who opened the door had dressed fast. He still hadn’t buttoned his white coverall with L.A. Marina stitched on the pocket. Under the coverall his jockeys were on inside out and backward. Below the nick of navel in his flat brown belly a label read Pilgrim. He was Chicano and wore his hair long. He looked confused. “He thought it would be the layouts.”
“It isn’t,” Dave said. “Brandstetter is my name. Death claims investigator, Medallion Life. I’m looking for Bruce K. Shevel. Is he here?”
“Brand—what?” the boy said.
At his back a dense jungle of philodendrons climbed a trellis to the ceiling. From beyond it a voice said, “Wait a minute, Manuel.” A pair of chrome-spoked wheels glittered into view, a pair of wasted legs under a lap robe, a pair of no color eyes that had never forgiven anyone anything. “I remember you. What do you want?”
“Arthur Thomas Robinson is dead,” Dave said.
“I’ve already told the police what I know.”
“Not all of it.” Wind blew cold rain across the back of Dave’s neck. He turned up the trench coat collar. “You left out the part that interests me—that you’re the beneficiary of his life insurance.”
Shevel stared. There was no way for his face to grow any paler. It was parchment. But his jaw dropped. When he shut it, his dentures clicked. “You must be joking. There’s got to be some mistake.”
“There’s not.” Dave glanced at the rain. “Can I come in and talk about it?”
Shevel’s mouth twitched. “Did you bring the check?”
Dave shook his head. “Murder ha
s a way of slowing down the routine.”
“Then there’s nothing to talk about.” The wheelchair was motorized. It started to turn away.
“Why would he name you?” Dave asked.
Shrug. “We were old friends.”
Dave studied the Chicano boy who was watching them with something frantic in his eyes. “Friends?”
“Oh, come in, come in,” Shevel snarled, and wheeled out of sight. Dave stepped onto deep beige carpeting and the door closed behind him. But when he turned to hand the trench coat over, there was no one to take it. Manuel had buttoned up and left. Dave laid the coat over his arm and went around the leafy screen. A long, handsome room stretched to sliding glass doors at its far end that looked down on a marina where little white boats waited row on row like children’s coffins in the rain. Shevel rattled ice and glasses at a low bar. “I met Robbie in the hospital,” he said, “ten years ago.” He came wheeling at Dave, holding out a squat studded glass in which dark whiskey islanded an ice cube. “Just as I met you.” His smile was crooked. “He worked there. An orderly.”
“And you brought him along to look after you when the hospital let you go.” Dave took the drink. “Thanks.”
“Robbie had good hands.” Shevel aimed the chair at the planter. From under it somewhere he took a small green plastic watering can. He tilted it carefully into the mulch under the climbing vines. “And patience.”
“Who took his place?”
“No one. No one could. This apartment is arranged so that I don’t need day-to-day help.” Shevel set the watering can back. “The market sends in food and liquor.” He drank from his glass. “I can cook my own meals. I’m able to bathe myself and so on. A cleaning woman comes in twice a week. I have a masseur on call.”
“Manuel?” Dave wondered.
“Not Manuel,” Shevel said shortly and drank again.
“You publish a lot of magazines,” Dave said. “How do you get to your office? Specially equipped car?”
“No car,” Shevel said. “Cars are the enemy.” He purred past Dave and touched a wall switch. A panel slid back. Beyond gleamed white wet-look furniture, a highgloss white desk stacked with papers, a white electric typewriter, a photocopy machine. Blow up color photos of naked girls muraled the walls. “I don’t go to the office. My work comes to me. And there’s the telephone.” He swallowed more whiskey. “You remember the telephone?” He touched the switch and the panel slid closed.
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