The Tin Horse: A Novel

by Janice Steinberg

  On September 12, 1940, exactly one year after the last time I’d seen Barbara, I was on edge all day. All of us were, privately, unable to bear mentioning it. Surely, wherever she’d gone and whatever filled her day, she was thinking of us. And her persistence in our thoughts, in our yearning, was so intense, I felt as if we could will her into physical presence, at the very least that we could summon her voice on the phone. Magical thinking. Of course, there was nothing. Then the day ended, and it was September 13, then September 14, and so on and on.

  LIFE STUBBORNLY CONTINUED.

  I completed my sophomore year at USC, making the dean’s list as I had the year before. Paul and I broke up after one of our spats exploded, and for those moments I loathed him—and loathed knowing I’d given him power to hurt me. But the fight also made me realize how much Paul meant to me. And by the time we got back together a week later, with fevered makeup sex, I couldn’t remember the specifics of the fight. (During our marriage, we used to joke that neither of us ever thought of divorce, but we often contemplated murder.)

  The war spread. Germany attacked Yugoslavia, Greece, and even the Soviet Union, to the anguish of our leftist group. There was constant debate about whether the United States should get into the fight, and more Boyle Heights boys went to enlist in the Canadian army, two of them immediately after the terrible news that Burt Weber had been killed fighting in North Africa.

  In my house, there were just five places at the dinner table; no one made a mistake and set six anymore. I knew from Audrey that Mama still went out a couple of days a week, and I assumed she was going to Hollywood, but she no longer acted as if she were sleepwalking; she seemed herself again.

  I hated anniversaries, those false markers on the calendar that raised a flutter of anticipation I couldn’t suppress. The following March 28 was Barbara’s twentieth birthday, March 29 mine. I stayed out late both of those nights, refusing to wait at home for a letter or call that wasn’t going to come. And both nights I got drunk, which in my case didn’t involve dancing on tables; when I drank, I really did get “tight”—wound up, archly funny, and, according to Paul, sexy in a sort of dangerous way, as if I might have a switchblade concealed in my bra. When the next September 12 came along—two years—I did the same.

  It was 1941. I was an adult, a junior at USC, and no longer a virgin. A boy I knew had died in battle. If there were times when I ached to share a story with Barbara or hear her laugh—if, alone in our bedroom, I opened the lid of my treasure box and held her note, or found a scarf she’d left behind and pressed it to my nose to catch a whiff of her—the next morning I was brisk and cool again: Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story, Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, Bette Davis in anything.

  I felt as if I were in a movie, delivering lines that surprised me with their sophisticated bite, the first time I spoke to Philip Marlowe. I guess he brought that out in me.

  It happened that October at Leo’s bookstore. I was working alone that afternoon. An ominous sky and thunder growling in the foothills had discouraged paying customers, leaving just a handful of regulars, people who would read entire books as they stood in the aisle—and whom I trusted not to steal anything. It was enough to glance at them occasionally from the office, where I was studying for a pre-law class.

  I looked up, alerted by the bell over the door, when Philip came in. I kept looking because he didn’t belong. Not because he was handsome in the rough-hewn style of movie thugs; we got customers who looked like that. But those men entered the store like every other book lover—even as their feet carried them forward, their eyes kept darting toward the shelves on either side, and after a few steps, they paused, enticed by a title or the look of a binding. This man headed straight toward me, and though he was polite as he elbowed his way down the narrow aisle, I sensed a contained violence in him that put me on alert and intrigued me.

  He opened his wallet and flashed a star at me. Apart from chatting with the beat cops who stopped by the store, my only experiences with the police had involved helping Mollie hide from them and having them call Papa to look at girls in the morgue. I said nothing, collecting my thoughts. And I took off my glasses, distancing myself; though a moment later I realized it was the gesture I’d adopted as a teenager around boys. Well, the cop was good-looking; more than that, his eyes hinted at intelligence and humor.

  He asked if I’d do him a favor.

  “What kind of favor?” Whoever this cop was chasing, I figured I might be on their side.

  But he wanted to know about Arthur Gwynn Geiger. And he asked as if he wanted something bad to happen to Geiger, which made me inclined to help him in any way I could. I hated Geiger for ruining Barbara, even though blaming him wasn’t rational. He had only sold the photos; I should have turned my wrath toward Alan Yardley for taking and peddling them, or the capitalist system for turning girls into commodities, or why not Barbara herself for being such a little fool? But no matter; it was Geiger who repelled me.

  Still, I didn’t know what the cop wanted with Geiger. And was this man really a cop? Anyone could make up a badge with a star, and something about the man felt slightly off. Stalling as I debated whether to trust him, I parried his questions. And flirted a little. He parried back. I had never met a cop with such an agile mind. I’d been right about the intelligence in his eyes.

  He asked for an 1860 edition of Ben-Hur with a specific erratum. I looked it up and saw that Ben-Hur hadn’t been published until 1880.

  “There isn’t one,” I said.

  “Right. The girl in Geiger’s store didn’t know that.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me.” I had seen the girl who worked for Geiger, a slithery sexpot; I questioned whether she even knew how to read.

  Then the man told me he was a private detective, and the things that had seemed wrong about him fell into place. I gave him my impression of Geiger, not saying a word about Barbara, of course. And not mentioning Geiger’s business in smut—clearly he already knew about that.

  Two days later, every bookseller on the boulevard buzzed with the news that Geiger had been shot. Murdered.

  The next week, the detective returned to Leo’s bookstore. He introduced himself this time—Philip Marlowe—and asked if he could buy me dinner when I got off work.

  “Did you shoot Arthur Geiger?” I asked. I would have cheered to hear about Geiger’s public disgrace or financial ruin. I wouldn’t have minded in the least if he’d been beaten to a bloody pulp. But murder …

  “Didn’t you see the newspapers?” he said. “He was killed by a business associate. A falling-out among thieves.”

  “Do you believe everything you read in the papers?”

  He laughed. It was a good laugh, with nothing mean in it. When he finished laughing, he regarded me seriously. “I didn’t kill Geiger. But I killed another man. I was protecting someone. Maybe you wouldn’t see it that way, though, and you might not want to have dinner with me.”

  I considered it. Not just his having killed someone but the dangerous, tantalizing spark I felt with him.

  “On the other hand,” he drawled, “you might want to tell me what your beef was with Geiger, and if it’s settled now.”

  How had he guessed I had my own reasons for hating Geiger? “Is this just an invitation for hamburgers?” I said. “Or will you buy me a steak?”

  Dinner turned out to be steak, although it bore no resemblance to anything I knew as “steak”—the cheap cuts that Mama cooked on rare occasions and parceled out among us. At the dimly lit Hollywood dive to which Philip took me, the waiter placed a slab of porterhouse in front of me. It was the most mouthwatering meat I had ever tasted.

  I hadn’t planned to say anything about Barbara. But I’d had a glass of Scotch, and the place was smoky and intimate, and Philip listened with such deep attention, his surprisingly gentle eyes offering understanding but not, thank God, pity. I ended up telling him everything over dinner that night, about the dirty photographs and Arthur Gei
ger and Yardley, whom I suspected of having lied to me, but how could I have forced him to talk? I even shared the awful moment in which I found Barbara with Danny. I’m sure that getting people to open up was one of Marlowe’s professional skills, but what really made me trust him was that he reminded me of Paul. He had the same essential … Goodness is an old-fashioned word, and it seems an odd choice for a man who’d just told me he had killed someone. But in Philip, as in Paul, I saw a good man—fair, generous, compassionate, a man of principle who would choose his battles wisely but, once he decided to fight, wouldn’t back down.

  After I told him about Barbara, he made a proposal. He’d do a bit of sleuthing and see if he could find out anything about her. In exchange, would I help him with occasional library research, things like that?

  I didn’t say yes right away. I’d gotten my hopes up too many times already, only to have them crushed. And after two years there seemed even less chance of success. But I decided it was wrong not to tell Mama and Papa about his offer. They insisted on meeting him. Mama, especially, adored him. In my mother’s living room, the muscular detective came across like a big, gentle dog, albeit one who was extremely well-spoken. He listened with respectful kindness when she talked about leaving her village as a girl and never seeing her parents again, and he asked for a second piece of her apple cake. And so our agreement began.

  He called a few days later with my first “assignment”—going to the library and perusing the newspaper society pages for the past six months, looking for connections between a society matron and a handsome young man who I figured was a con artist. It was a tedious task that cured any illusions I might have about detective work being exciting. He had me give him the results over dinner, his treat at the dive with the fantastic steaks. He had news for me, too. He had gone to Alan Yardley’s studio in Hollywood but discovered Yardley had closed his business nearly two years ago; he’d moved to Twentynine Palms, near Joshua Tree National Monument, according to the dentist who had an office next door.

  “He wanted to be an artist,” Philip sneered. “You must have scared him. Sounds like he ran a few months later … What’s the matter?”

  “I’m thinking what an idiot I was. I liked Alan Yardley.”

  “Why?”

  “I suppose because he was good at feeding me a line, and I was naive enough to believe him.”

  To my surprise, Philip said, “You’re smarter than that. Tell me what you liked about him.” He listened intently when I explained about Yardley’s gentleness and said that his quietly beautiful photographs made me feel as if the earth possessed a deep, inherent order that would outlast all of the chaos that humans unleashed upon it.

  He wouldn’t be able to follow up right away, Philip said, but he sometimes got jobs that took him out Yardley’s way, and he’d drop in on the photographer then.

  A few weeks later, I got another assignment and another dinner, though no new information. Philip had a job coming up, however, that would take him to Palm Springs, and he should be able to make a side trip to Twentynine Palms to talk to Yardley.

  That dinner took place during the first week in December.

  On that Sunday, December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. All of Los Angeles, all of the country, went into turmoil. On Monday the United States declared war on Japan; declarations of war against Germany and Italy followed three days later. Many of the boys I knew enlisted immediately; there were long lines outside every recruiting center.

  Paul resisted the rush to war. Like a number of my male classmates, he planned to wait until the end of the semester, which was just six weeks away; there’d still be plenty of war left to fight, he said. I understood that after fighting in Spain, Paul had no boyish illusions of glory, and he hardly needed to prove his courage; that was one of the things I loved about him, that he was an adult, a man. And the thought of him going to war and risking his life filled me with anguish. Yet I had caught war fever, too; how could I not? Every time another Boyle Heights boy enlisted or a former classmate strode across campus in his uniform, I felt a thrill of pride. I was filled with urgency to act now, not to schedule the war after exams. I never said any of this to Paul, because I understood that he was acting rationally while the rest of us danced to a primal drumbeat, but his coolheadedness enraged me. I was furious at myself, too: how dared I judge him when no one expected me to put on a uniform and be willing to die?

  Constantly on edge, I woke up every morning tense and snarly after disturbing dreams, and I threw inflammatory adjectives into papers I wrote. At least when school was in session, I could sit in my private funk in classes. Over Christmas break, I worked full-time at the bookstore, and I had to act pleasant all day.

  With so much craziness going on, it wasn’t until a few days after Christmas that I saw Philip again. We got off on the wrong foot from the start. He was carrying a large, flat parcel wrapped in white paper under his arm—had he gotten me a Christmas gift? I didn’t have anything for him, but was I supposed to? It was one of those awkward moments when I felt as clueless about American culture as a greenhorn just off the boat. Then he made it worse. We were walking from his car to the steak place, and he said, “Do you know him?”

  “Who?”

  “That Jew.” He nodded toward Rosen’s Jewelers, where an olive-skinned man with wavy hair about the color of mine lounged in the doorway. Wearing no coat despite the chilly evening, the man looked as if he worked in the store and had stepped out to take a break. Perhaps he was Rosen himself.

  “No,” I said. “Of course not.”

  It was nothing, a stray comment from a man who’d asked me about Boyle Heights as if it were on another planet. But I suppose it made me even testier than I was already, quicker to take offense.

  In the restaurant, after we got our drinks, he said, “You’d make a good cop.”

  “Is that a compliment?” I shot back.

  “Take it easy, sugar.”

  “Well, you don’t have the highest opinion of cops.”

  “A good cop, was what I said. Would you like to hear why? Or would you prefer to take that steak knife and stick it through me?”

  “Sorry. It’s … everything.” I took a sip of my drink and stopped glaring at him.

  “Phew! I can see why Alan Yardley repented of his evil ways and went off to have visions in the desert.”

  I had no idea what his cryptic comment meant, but the important news was that he knew something about Yardley. “Did you see him?”

  “Yup. You were on the money about him. He’s okay.”

  “What did he say about Barbara?”

  “As you suspected, she went to Yardley after you caught her with the boyfriend. Seems she felt safe with him. Good instincts, like you. They did, as he so delicately put it, another modeling session; she wanted the money. Then he and his wife put her up that night at their house. Maybe I’m getting all schoolgirlish and gullible, but I think he was on the level, no hanky-panky.”

  I nodded. “I’ve met his wife.”

  “Next day, he drove her to her bank downtown and then to the train station in Riverside.”

  “Why all the way out there?” Riverside was a good fifty miles from Los Angeles. If she was going to get on a train anyway, why not catch it in the city?

  “Apparently she was worried that your family might show her picture around the train stations. She didn’t want anyone coming after her.”

  Even though I’d accepted by now that Barbara had been planning her escape, it stunned me to understand how thoroughly she’d anticipated our moves and preemptively foiled them. Had she been that desperate to get away?

  “Eat your steak,” Philip said. “It’s good for you.”

  I’d barely noticed that a steaming T-bone had been placed in front of me. I dutifully ate a couple of bites.

  “I suppose Yardley lied about helping her leave because he’d promised her?” I said.

  He nodded. “Can’t say I hold his former profession in high reg
ard, but I’d say he was a man of his word.”

  “Then why did he tell you now?”

  “Funny thing,” he said with a wolfish grin. “I’m told I’m the kind of fellow people can’t stop themselves from confiding in. And by this time, who at the Riverside train station is going to remember her?”

  “Did your persuasive powers extend to getting him to divulge where she went?”

  “He said he didn’t know.”

  “Didn’t know or wouldn’t say?”

  He chuckled. “I should have brought you with me. You got him to quit taking dirty pictures and dedicate his life to art. Maybe you could have—”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It was that visit from you that made him decide to get out of the smut business.” He raised an amused eyebrow, and my volatile, touchy mood returned.

  “Are you making fun of me?”

  “I wouldn’t do that. According to Yardley, meeting you changed his life. Taking a hard look at what he did through your eyes. In fact, he asked me to give you this. To thank you.”

  He handed me the parcel he’d brought into the restaurant. I unwrapped it. It was one of Yardley’s desert photographs: sand, scrub, and sky exquisitely etched in black and white.

  “Does he think that makes what he did all right? I don’t want it,” I said, even as I imagined how beautiful the photograph would be on my wall, and something in me felt glad that Yardley was living in the desert he loved. But I was wretched that night, on the verge of either tears or rage, and I chose rage.

  “Well, it doesn’t really go with my décor,” Philip said. “Keep it, anyway. It might be worth something one day. So Yardley’s story was, your sister told him she was going to stick a pin in a train schedule and decide that way.”

  “How could he let her do that? She was only eighteen.”

  “He figured she had enough money—and enough moxie—to take care of herself.”