Against the Day (204 page)

“Quite
a presentable young woman, Mr. LeStreet.”

The musician took off his sunglasses
and pretended to study the picture for a minute. “Guess so. Before my time, of
course.”

“Some of your colleagues around there
may still remember her. I’ll drop by one of these evenings. First I guess I’ll
motor up to Santa Barbara. She say where she was staying?”

   
“Royal
Jacaranda Courts, just off the Coast Highway.”

   
“
Oh
yeah, the ol’ RJ
. . . .
well, thanks, and tell the Greek
not to worry.”

It was in the
days
just before the
earthquake, and Santa Barbara still reflected a lot less light than it was
about to under the stuccoandbeam philosophy of the rebuilding to follow. The
place for the moment lay dreaming in a darkness of overwatered vegetation,
ivyshrouded suburban ascents into ratinfested pockets of old California money,
a relentlessly unacknowledged past. Because of the rightangled piece of local
coastline known as the Rincón, the ocean lay to the south of town instead of
west, so you had to rotate ninety degrees from everybody else in Southern
California to catch the sunset. This angle, according to Scylla, an astrologer
of Lew’s acquaintance, was the worst of all possible aspects, and doomed the
town to reenact endlessly the same cycles of greed and betrayal as in the days
of the earliest Barbareños.

The
Royal Jacaranda was even more of a wreck than Lew remembered it, and under
different management, natch.

A
kid who must have been on summer vacation sat painstakingly waxing a tenfoot
surfboard which took up most of the space in the office.

   
“Jardine
Maraca. You know when she checked out?”

   
He
looked at the register. “It must’ve been before I came on.”

   
“Have
a gander in the room, if you don’t mind.”

   
“For
sure.” Back to his board. Nice piece of redwood.

At the far end of the courtyard was a
Mexican with a hose, chatting with one of the housekeepers. Jardine’s room
hadn’t been made up yet. The bed had been slept on, but not in. Lew made his
way through the place, hoping, and not hoping, for surprises. The small
chifferobe held only a couple of hairpins and a price tag from the hat
department at Capwell’s. The shelf over the sink in the bathroom had an empty
facecream jar on it. Lew could see nothing out of the ordinary in either the
bowl or the tank of the toilet. But he got an idea. He went down to the office
again, flipped a bright new fiftycent piece to the kid, and asked to use the
phone. There was a Filipino hop

dealer he knew down on lower State
who could gaze into the depths of a toilet bowl the way other servers might a
crystal ball or teacup, and learn the

damnedest things, most of them useless, but now and then so
illuminative of secrets a subject might think he or she had kept perfectly
hidden that there was no way this side of the supernatural to explain it. Cops
here and in L.A. respected Emilio’s gift enough to allow him discounts on the
payoffs required to pursue his career in agricultural goods unmolested.

Emilio picked up on the first ring,
but Lew could hardly make him out over the uproar in the background. Lew knew
it was probably the missus, but it sounded like an angry mob. Today she and
Emilio had been going round and round since about sunrise, and at this point he
was more than happy to get out of the house for a while. He showed up at the
Royal Jacaranda on an old bicycle, trailed by a nimbus of reefer smoke.

   
“Thought
I’d never have to see
this
place again.”

   
“Oh?
Let me guess, some dope delivery went sour
.
. . .
”

“No, this is where we stayed on our
honeymoon. Cursed, as far as I’m concerned.”

The minute he entered the room,
Emilio went all peculiar. “Do me a favor, Lew, take that bedspread and cover up
the mirror, O.K.?” He found a towel in the bathroom and did the same with the
little mirror over the sink. “They’re like fleas sometimes,” he muttered,
getting down on one knee and carefully lifting the lid of the toilet, “like to
jump around. This way it stays focused in one place
. . . .
”

Lew knew better than to hover. He
went outside, leaned against the sunlit stucco, and smoked a Fatima and watched
the housekeepers work their way down the line of rooms toward him. Sort of
keeping an ear out for Emilio, who had looked—hard to say, nervous or
something.

He was at Lew’s elbow. “See one of
your civilian cigarettes there?”

They stood and smoked and listened to
the morning losing its early promise. “Here,” Emilio handing over an L.A.
address he’d scribbled in some agitation on a picture postcard of the Royal
Jacaranda. “That’s all that kept showing.”

   
“You’re
sure.”

“Overwhelming, caballero. Don’t ask
me to go back in and confirm it. And better think twice yourself, Lew.”

   
“Bad,
huh?”

“Bad, big
. . .
many bodies.” He threw the cigarette butt into a puddle of
hose water the sun hadn’t got to yet. “Makes a man appreciate arguing with his
old lady, I tell you that.”

   
“Thanks,
Emilio. Bill me.”

“
Tu
mamá.
I’ll take cash, right now—I want to start forgetting this
soon as I can.”

Back at the
office
, Lew found Thetis
in a dither. “You’ve been getting calls from a crazy person, total panic in his
voice, every ten minutes, like he’s using an egg timer. Fact, he’s due to call
again,” looking dramatically at her wristwatch, “Just. . . about. . .”

The phone rang. Lew, avuncularly
patting Thetis on the shoulder, picked up the receiver.

The panicked voice belonged to Merle
Rideout, who lived out at the beach and described himself as an inventor. “Like
to come in to your office, but I’m being followed, so any meeting will have to
look accidental. You know Sycamore Grove, out on North Figueroa?”

   
“Used
to be a nice place for Iowa girls.”

   
“Still
is. Glad we can agree on somethin.”

   
Lew
checked out a little 6.35 mm Beretta, just in case.

“Looks like some aggravation in the
works, chief,” said Shalimar. “You need any muscle along?”

“Nah, just two quick stops to make.
But—” He copied the address he’d got from Emilio onto her appointment
pad. “In case I don’t call in before quitting time, maybe one of you could
drive by and have a look. Bring the tommy gun.”

Merle had been
out here
since before
the War, and realized at some point that he’d been slowly mutating into a
hybrid citrus with no commercial value. One day shortly before the War began
over in Europe, he happened to run into Luca Zombini in an electrical shop in
Santa Monica. Luca was working up at one of the studios in something called
“special photographic effects,” mostly glass mattes and so forth, and learning
all he could about sound recording.

“Come on over, we’ll cook something.
Erlys will want to see you, and you can meet all the kids—except for
Bria, she’s back east pursuing an international banking career, not to mention
a number of international bankers.”

Erlys’s hair was a lot shorter, he
noticed, right in style as near as he could tell, with curls falling softly
over her forehead. “You’re looking about the same as always.”

   
“Better
quit flirting with me, I’ll have to scream for my husband.”

   
“Whoops.”

   
Trying
not to regard Merle as an aging obsessive who didn’t smile as much as he
should, she filled him in on what she knew of Dally, who was living in London
and actually wrote from time to time.

Nunzi
came screeching up after a while in a roadster that had seen some determined
use, and one by one Merle met the other kids as they drifted in from school.

   
“You
never got married, Merle?”

“Damn,” snapping his fingers, “I knew
there was somethin I was supposed to do.”

She looked down at her toes, brightly
revealed in beach sandals. Hummingbirds darted in and out of the bougainvillea.
“When we—”

“No, no, no, ’Lys, that would’ve went
on to been a disaster. You know that. Front page, banner headlines,
ain’titawful followups for years. You got a bargain there with old whatsizname,
right place at the right time. Those kids are just aces too, every one. That
Nunzi—just get to thinking I know everything there is to know, and . . .”
He was smiling, some, finally.

“They’re starting to give me a little
time off these days,” she said. “I get a minute to look in the mirror, it’s
like meeting somebody I almost know. But,” he knew what was coming, “I really
miss Dahlia.”

“Yeahp. Same here. Me, she needed to
get away right when she did, timing couldn’t be beat, but still—”

   
“I
don’t know how to thank you Merle, she turned out just so—”

“Oh hell she’s still only, what,
twentysomethin, got plenty of time yet to git into some extensive evildoin, ’f
that’s what she wants.”

“She’s a star of the London stage.”
Erlys brought out a velveteen album with clippings from English newspapers and
magazines, theater programs and publicity photos.

He
sat nodding before the images of Miss Dahlia Rideout, surprised she’d kept the
name, squeezing his eyes very small, as if in careful scrutiny. “Well, look
out, Olga Nethersole,” he said in a low voice. “Back away, Mrs. Fiske.”

Luca came in with a bag of groceries.

   
“Evenin
Professor,” Merle with a quick social smile.

“Somebody’d told me you were coming
I’d’ve let you do the cooking,” said Luca.

   
“I
could peel somethin. Carve it up?”

“Most of it’s growing out back, come
on.” They went out the back door and into a sizable garden, full of long green
frying peppers, bushsize basil plants, zucchini running all over the place,
artichokes with their feathery tops blowing in a wind in today from the desert,
eggplants glowing ultraviolet in the shadows, tomatoes looking like the
fourcolor illustrations of themselves that

showed up on lugs down at the market. There was a pomegranate
tree, and a fig tree, and a lemon tree, all bearing. Luca found the hose and
gave everything an evening spray, with his thumb sending a broad fan of water
over the whole plot. They got tomatoes and peppers and oregano and some garlic
and brought everything back in a straw basket to the kitchen, where Merle found
a knife and set about prepping.

   
“Where’s
Cici?” Erlys said.

“Had
a late call up at the studio.” Cici it turned out was playing one of the Li’l
Jailbirds, characters in a popular series of onereel comedies about a gang of
reformschool escapees who go around doing good deeds, which at first are always
misunderstood as criminal acts by the comical policemen who relentlessly pursue
the kids. Cici played the part not of an Italian but a Chinese kid named Dou
Ya. The Italian kid, Pippo, was played by a Negro. And so forth. Something to
do with orthochromatic film. Cici had developed this private “Chinese” style of
jabbering which drove everybody in the house crazy. “Cici, it’s a silent movie,
you don’t have to—”

   
“Just
getting in character, Pop!”

Cici became
Merle’s favorite
of all
the kids, though over the years he tried to keep his visits to a considerate
level. Didn’t want to be anybody’s Uncle Merle, and it wasn’t really as if time
was hanging heavy—though work these days had become more a source of
danger than income, which is why he and Roswell finally gave in and decided to
hire a private eye.

Never having felt like that he was a
citizen of any state in particular, Merle just tended to show up at any state
picnic he happened to hear about. No matter which part of the country anybody
he met was from, he and his wagon had been through it at least once. Some
people even remembered him, or said they did. It was all home.

He wandered now beneath the
sycamores, through the cooking smoke, attending calmly to each midAmerican
face, shrugging on like some old cardigan a nostalgia not his own but in some
murky way of use to him. They’d be drinking birch beer and orange juice, eating
stuffed peppers they liked to call “mangoes,” casseroles of baked beans or
macaroni and rat cheese, pineapple upsidedown cakes, bread just out of ovens at
home and covered in checkered towels. Out here at the Grove, they’d be cooking
franks, hamburgers, steaks, and sides of beef over wood fires, slopping on
barbecue sauce from time to time, tapping beer kegs, playing horseshoes,
shouting at their kids, at each other, at nobody, just to be shouting,
particularly if it wasn’t raining, which it never seemed to be, and that was
one of the big