At nine forty-five the Cadillac rolled up in front of Perino’s. Small airplanes could land on its hood; in case of war all of Liechtenstein could escape in it. The maitre d‘ opened the front door and acted solicitous, and Candy came out ahead of Brewster. She had chosen a bright green tuxedo-looking suit and a beaded something-or-other with no straps for a blouse and very high-heeled silver shoes. The light from the open restaurant door made her blond hair gleam.
She carried a small silver purse and in it, I knew, was the Colt .32 I had taken from the late Bubba. We’d had a brief weapons drill about five o’clock, just before she started getting ready to go out. She hadn’t been too keen on it. It was heavy and made a lump in her purse.
“Why will I need it at Perino’s?” she had said.
“The soup may be cold,” I had said. And we had argued until she was in such a rush to start getting ready that she had given in.
She was laughing when she came out, her head thrown back a little toward Iirewster behind her. Apparently she hadn’t had to use the gun yet. She was holding his hand. The driver got out and held the door of the Caddy open for them, and they got in. The driver went around and got in and drove west on Wilshire. I U-turned and followed them. At ten o’clock on a Wednesday evening Wilshire Boulevard was so empty of traffic, you could have U-turned a nuclear Submarine without a problem. That made trailing them a little harder because there wasn’t much traffic to hide in. I dropped a long way back until a third car pulled in between us from a side street, and then I closed behind the third car.
Brewster lived on Roxbury Drive between Lomitas and Sunset in a big stucco and frame house with an arched portico on one side over the driveway. The Caddy went up through the portico, and I drove on past. I parked at the corner of Sunset and watched in the mirror. The Caddy didn’t reappear. I cruised back down Roxbury Drive and looked in under the portico. There was no sign of the Caddy. Must be around back. Probably had its own hangar.
I drove on down to Lomitas and parked around the corner and looked back at Brewster’s house.
I had a problem. Maybe several. This wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where a strange car can park for hours without a cop stopping by and looking in on you. And God only knew what would happen if the Bel-Air Patrol caught me. I could try to slip in and get a look at what was happening in Brewster’s house, but in this kind of neighborhood, and Brewster being that kind of guy, the place would be burglar-alarmed and electronically protected. Probably dragons in the moat.
I went around the block again. Three doors down from Brewster was a house with a flat-white front that looked like a pumping station for the Guadalajara Water District. It had several days worth of newspapers scattered on the front lawn. I pulled into the driveway and parked. There was no activity in the house. The newspapers were a giveaway. If there was somebody in the house, it was probably a burglar. I got out of the car and walked back toward Brewster’s. There were no lights showing in front. I walked briskly up the driveway, under the portico, and around back. The Caddy was parked on a brick turnaround near a garage that was built to look like a stable. It was empty. There was a second story to the garage, and in one of the windows a light shone. Chauffeur’s quarters. The vard rolled away to my left. No wider than a football-field, but at least as long. Down toward the other end zone was a swimming pool and some tennis courts and a cabana beyond them. Closer to me in the bright moonlight was a croquet lawn. At the far end of the house, on my right, a light shone in a corner room. I walked down toward it, trying to look like 1 was supposed to be there. I needed a clipboard. If you have a clipboard and three pens in your shirt pocket you can go anywhere and do anything and no one will bother you.
There were some flowery shrubs around that corner of the house. I slipped inside them and looked in the window. Candy and Brewster were on the couch. On a coffee table in front of them was a bottle of Gourvoisier, a siphon of seltzer, a bowl of ice, and two glasses. Candy and Brewster weren’t drinking. They were necking. On the couch. I blushed. The. necking got heavier. Inelegant. Not classy, like dancng on a hotel balcony. I looked away and leaned against the house. Now what? Candy didn’t seem to be in real danger unless Brewster was planning to feel her to death. But what about later? I looked back in the window. Candy was partially undressed. I felt like the photo editor at Hustler. I looked up at the moon. On the couch? I thought. Jesus Christ! The sophisticated superrich. I looked once more. They were naked. Making love. On the couch.
I had a full file of Dick Tracy crime-stoppers at home, but none of them that I could remember covered this. What would Allan Pinkerton do? What would I tell the Bel-Air Patrol if they put the arm on me here in the bushes? My palms felt a little sweaty. I squinted a little to blur things and took a quick peek. They were still at it. Private eye was one thing, Peeping Tom was another. I headed for the car.
I was still sitting in it in the driveway of the empty house at twenty minutes of four when the Caddy pulled out of the driveway and turned right. It turned right again at Sunset, and I could see it heading east on Sunset when I turned the corner as far behind it as I could get without losing sight. I couldn’t see who was in it, and it could have been a fake to lead me away, but the best guess was that it was taking Candy home. It was also the right guess.
I waited up on Sunset while the chauffeur opened the door and escorted Candy in. He came back out, got in the Caddy, went on down Wetherly, and disappeared around the corner on Phyllis. Then I pulled up in front of Candy’s house and parked.
Candy let me in on the first knock. “Were you behind me all the way?” she said.
“All the way,” I said. She looked about as she had when she left nine hours ago. Her lipstick was fresh. Her clothes were neat. Her hair was smooth. She smelled wonderfully of perfume and good brandy, and her eyes sparkled.
“I didn’t dare look for you. I saw you outside Perino’s but that’s all. It’s a funny feeling being shadowed.”
“That’s me,” I said. “The shadow. The weed of crime bears bitter fruit.”
“He’s a really charming man,” Candy said. I nodded.
“He’s very sure, if you know what I mean. Very in-charge. He seems to have been everywhere. He seems to know everyone.”
“Who knows,” I said, “what evil lurks in the hearts of men.”
“I can’t even remember that program. I’ve just heard nostalgia records.”
I said, “So you like old Peter, do you?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t like him at all. But he likes me and he thinks I like him, and I’m going to let him keep thinking so until I can nail him right to the floor.” As she spoke her face looked very flat and tight, and the cheekbones seemed more prominent.
I found a beer in the refrigerator and draped myself in Candy’s armchair and let one foot hang over the arm and drank some beer.
“Did you get a sense of what he was after?” Nice phrasing.
Candy nodded. “I think he’s trying to find out what I know.”
“He any good at it?”
“Not bad,” Candy said, “but I’ve been hustled by people who were better. Although most of them were just after my body.”
I nodded.
“I’m sorry you had to sit around outside until four in the morning,” Candy said.
I shrugged.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what I did in there until four in the morning?”
“I know already,” I said.
She raised her eyebrows at me. “I peeked in the window,” I said.
Candy turned red. “You watched?”
“Briefly,” I said.
She was very flushed now, “Did you see us… ?”
“Yeah,” I said. “For a minute.”
She was silent for a moment, “Well,” she said, “you didn’t see anything you hadn’t already seen, did you?”
“The angle was different,” I said.
Her, face got hard again, the way it had when she spoke of nailing Brewster.<
br />
“Turn you on?” she said.
I shook my head. “No. Embarrassed me. I didn’t want to lose sight of you and I didn’t want to watch. I settled for sitting in the car.”
Her face was still hard. “Disapprove?”
“I don’t know. I might,” I said. “I don’t disapprove of you screwing somebody. I might disapprove of you screwing somebody in order to nail him to the floor.”
“You make me laugh,” she said. “All of you.”
“All of me?” I drank the rest of the beer.
“Men,” she said. “It’s not women who are silly about sex. It’s men. You think it ought to be important.” She stretched the word into three spaced and portentous syllables. “Women don’t. Women know it’s useful.”
I went to the kitchen for another beer. “Sounds sexist to me,” I said from the refrigerator.
“Why? If I use what I’ve got to exploit men and further my interests, why is that sexist? They have strength, we have sex. They don’t hesitate to use strength.”
I sat back in the chair. “Okay,” I said. “Want a sip of my beer?”
She shook her head. “You haven’t got an argument, have you? So you just change the subject.”
“I’m a romantic,” I said. “Arguments are useless with romantics. You want a sip?”
“No,” she said. She stood staring at me. I drank my beer. “You still disapprove, don’t you?”
“I do the best I can to approve and disapprove only of my own behavior. I don’t always succeed, but I try. I’m trying now and I’m going to keep at it, How about a whole can for yourself?”
“I don’t like beer,” she said.
Chapter 22
CANDY HAD TO be at work at noon. I went with her. Since she was convinced that Brewster was trying to find out what she knew, there was reason to suppose she might still need protection. Especially if he figured out that, while he was trying to find out what she knew, she was trying to find out what he knew.
We spent the first hour of the afternoon walking along Broadway, Candy walking with the wife of a Mexican-American congressional candidate, talking or pretending to while the cameras cranked. Candy asked several questions while the cameras zoomed in. I was lurking around, out of. camera range, alert in case a captain of industry lunged from the crowd and hurled Candy on a couch. The candidate’s wife didn’t bother to answer the questions. She’d done this before and she knew the real interview would take place someplace else and would then be dubbed over the pictures of them walking. Then we all drove back to KNI3S studios, where Candy taped the interview and they shot some reverses, and then a car took the candidate’s wife home.
At eight o’clock Brewster and his driver and his Caddy came by the studio and took her to a Dodger game, where they sat in his private box. Or I assumed they sat in his private box. He was the type. But I had to way to know, because I never got into the game. I sat in the MG in the parking lot listening on the radio, and at about eleven followed them back to his place and then went back to Candy’s and let myself in with her key and went to sleep. We had agreed before we started out that morning that there was no point in me hanging around in the bushes at Brewster’s house. If he was going to do her damage, I’d be no use to her there anyway. At least here she could phone me.
She didn’t come home that night at all. I felt like somebody’s worried father until she came home at seven fifteen in the morning amid the chirping birds.
That day I hung around while Candy interviewed a rape victim, talked to the chairwoman of an educational-reform group, did a stand-up in front of a new boutique that had opened in Beverly Hills, and interviewed a glossy-looking kid who had just finished shooting the pilot for a TV series that was coincidentally going to be carried locally on KNBS-TV. Then I hung around the studio while Candy did some film editing and taped some narration over some of the edited film, and spent maybe a half hour in conference with Frederics, the news director.
That evening I finished up my book on Edmund Spenser while Brewster took Candy to the revival of a Broadway musical at the Music Center.
The next day Candy covered a blood shortage at the L.A. Red Cross blood bank, a Right to Life protest outside an abortion clinic in El Monte, a benefit fashion show staged by the wives of the California Angels, and the finals of a baton-twirling contest in Pasadena.
That evening she went with Brewster to a party at Marina del Rey. I stopped at a drugstore on La Brea near Melrose and bought a copy of The Great Gatsby off the paperback rack. I hadn’t read it in about five years, and it was time again. I picked up some tomatoes, lettuce, bacon, and bread at Ralph’s, along with a six-pack of Coors and a jar of mayonnaise, and went back to Candy’s apartment to an orgy of B.L.T.‘s. And elegant prose. And beer.
Candy called from the station the next morning around nine to tell me that she’d be at the station most of the day, and there was no need for me to hang around there. Station security was enough protection.
“I’ll be home this evening, though,” she said. “Brewster’s out of town until Thursday.”
I told her I’d pick her up when it was time. And she said she’d call. And I hung up. I had finished GatsUy in a sitting. With breakfast I’d read the L.A. Times. I was irritated, bored, restless, edgy, useless, frustrated, bewitched, bothered, and bewildered. I wasn’t making any money. I wasn’t solving a crime. I wasn’t saving a widow or an orphan. I was sleeping on a couch and my back was getting stiff. I thought about packing it in and going home. I could be having dinner with Susan this evening. I looked at my suitcase, tucked in between the couch and the wall. Ten minutes to pack, ten minutes to get a cab, half hour to the airport. I could make the noon flight easy. I shook my head. Not yet. There was something besides coitus happening in the Sloan-Brewster romance, and I had to stay around until I found out what.
But in the meantime I had to get rid of the feeling that my gears were grinding to a halt. I put on my running stuff and did about ten minutes of stretching and then went up to Sunset and headed west at an easy pace. You run out of sidewalk on Sunset, and the traffic is too ugly to run in the street, so I shifted down a block to Lomitas and went along amid the affluence to Whittier Drive, down Whittier to the place where it joins Wilshire by the Beverly Hilton Hotel. I went along Wilshire to Beverly Glen, up Beverly Glen, and started cruising among the neighborhoods of Westwood until I ended up on Le Conte Avenue in front of UCLA Medical Center. The sun was hot, and the sweat had soaked pleasingly through my T-shirt. The hills in Westwood were just right. You’d barely notice them in a car, but it was a good varied workout running. I took it easy, ten twelve-minute miles, sightseeing. I U-turned at Westwood Boulevard and jogged back east along Le Conte. There were orange trees, ripe with fruit in people’s front yards, and lemon trees, and now and then an olive tree with small black fruit on it. The roofs of the houses were mostly red tile, the siding often white stucco, the yards immaculate. There was no residue of sand and salt from the winter’s snow. The driveways often slanted up, without fear of ice. “He sent us this eternal spring,/Which here enamels everything.” Who had written that? Not Peter Brewster. I jogged along just fast enough to pass someone walking. Except, like everywhere else in Tinsel Town, no one was walking. Somewhere I heard two dogs barking. Probably a recording. “He hangs in shades the orange bright,/Like golden lamps in a green light.” The houses were close together. i never figured out why. There was space abounding out here at the fag end of the way west. Why did everyone huddle together? Why didn’t they ever come out on the street? How could they produce something as silly as Rodeo Drive? Would Candy elope with Peter Brewster?
It was early afternoon when I got back to Candy’s. I’d done about fifteen miles and I felt better. I spent a long time in Candy’s shower. Then I got dressed and took Candy’s car and went out for a drive. I had read that morning in the L.A. Times that traffic congestion was a leading tourist complaint in L.A. They were obviously not tourists from the East. Compared to Bosto
n and New York, driving in L.A. was like driving in Biddeford, Maine. The freeways were bad, but I never had occasion to use them. I drove east on Hollywood Boulevard, slowly, past Vermont Avenue, where Hollywood fuses with Sunset, and on along Sunset toward downtown L.A. I got off by the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and drove around downtown a little and then headed back on Third Street. I’d been a lot of places and there were usually resemblances. Boston and San Francisco had points of comparison, and they were both not unlike New York, only smaller, and New York was not unlike London, only newer. But L.A. was like nothing I’d ever seen. I didn’t know any place like it for sprawl, for the apparently idiosyncratic mix of homes and businesses and shopping malls. There was no center, no fixed point for taking bearings. It ambled and sprawled and disarrayed all over the peculiar landscape-garish and fascinating and imprecise and silly, smelling richly of bougainvillea and engine emissions, full of trees and grass and flowers and neon and pretense. And off to the northeast, beyond the Hollywood Hills, above the smog, and far from Disneyland were the mountains with snow on their peaks. I wondered if there was a leopard frozen up there anywhere.
The top was down and the wind was warm on my face. I turned down La Brea and parked and walked along Wilshire to the La Brea Tar Pits with their huge plastic statues half sunk in the tar. There was a museum there, and I went in and looked at the relics and the dioramas and the graphics until about four. Then I went back outside. A young man wearing Frye boots and a cowboy hat who had never seen a cow was playing banjo loudly and not well. He had the banjo case open on the ground near him for contributions. It wasn’t very full. In fact what was in there was probably what he’d seeded it with. Some kids hung around while he played “Camptown Races” and then drifted off. The banjo player didn’t seem to mind.
I got back in the MG and drove back to Candy’s apartment feeling friendly toward L.A. It was a big sunny buffoon of a city; corny and ornate and disorganized but kind of fun. The last hallucination, the I dwindled fragment of-what had Fitzgerald called it? -“the last and greatest of all human dreams.” It was where we’d run out of room, where the dream had run up against the ocean, and human voices woke us. Los Angeles was the butt end, where we’d spat it out with our mouths tasting of ashes, but a genial failure of a place for all of that.
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