From the Corner of His Eye (31 page)

Chapter 51

PERRI’S POLIO-WHITTLED
body did not test the strength of her pallbearers. The minister prayed for her soul, her friends mourned her loss, and the earth received her.

Paul Damascus had gotten numerous invitations to dinner. No one thought that he should be alone on this difficult night.

Solitude, however, was his preference. He found the sympathy of friends unbearable, a constant reminder that Perri was gone.

Having ridden from the church to the cemetery with Hanna, his housekeeper, Paul chose to walk home. The distance between Perri’s new bed and her old was only three miles, and the afternoon was mild.

He no longer had any reason to follow an exercise regimen. For twenty-three years, he’d needed to maintain good health in order to meet his responsibilities, but all the responsibilities that mattered to him had been lifted from his shoulders.

Walking rather than riding was now nothing more than a matter of habit. And by walking, he could delay his arrival at a house that had grown strange to him, a house in which every noise he made, since Monday, seemed to echo as if through vast caverns.

When he noticed that twilight had come and gone, he realized also that he’d walked through Bright Beach, along Pacific Coast Highway, and south into the neighboring town. Perhaps ten miles.

He had only the vaguest recollections of the journey.

This didn’t seem strange to him. Among the many things that no longer mattered were the concepts of distance and time.

He turned around, walked back to Bright Beach, and went home.

The house was empty, silent. Hanna worked only days. Nellie Oatis, Perri’s companion, was not employed here anymore.

The living room no longer doubled as sleeping quarters. Perri’s hospital bed had been taken away. Paul’s bed had been moved to a room upstairs, where for the past three nights, he had tried to sleep.

He went upstairs to change out of his dark blue suit and badly scuffed black shoes.

On his nightstand, he found an envelope evidently placed there by Hanna, after she’d taken it from his pharmacy smock, which he had given her to launder. The envelope contained the letter about Agnes Lampion that Paul had written to Reverend White in Oregon.

He’d never had a chance to read this to Perri or to benefit from her opinion. Now, as he scanned the lines of his calligraphic handwriting, his words seemed foolish, inappropriate, confused.

Although he considered tearing up the letter and throwing it away, he knew that his perceptions were clouded by grief and that what he’d written might seem fine if he reviewed it in a less dark state of mind. He returned the letter to the envelope and put it in the drawer of his nightstand.

Also in the drawer was a pistol that he kept for home defense. He stared at it, trying to decide whether to go downstairs and make a sandwich or kill himself.

Paul withdrew the pistol from the drawer. The weapon didn’t feel as good to him as guns always felt in the hands of pulp heroes.

He feared that suicide was a ticket to Hell, and he knew that sinless Perri was not waiting for him in those lower realms.

Clinging to the desperate hope of an ultimate reunion, he put the gun away, went to the kitchen, and made a grilled-cheese sandwich: cheddar, with dill pickles on the side.

Chapter 52

NOLLY WULFSTAN,
private detective, had the teeth of a god and a face so unfortunate that it argued convincingly against the existence of a benign deity.

White as a Viking winter, these magnificent choppers, and as straight as the kernel rows in the corn on Odin’s high table. Superb occlusal surfaces. Exquisite incisor ledges. Bicuspids of textbook formation nestled in perfect alignment between molars and canines.

Before Junior had become a physical therapist, he had considered studying to be a dentist. A low tolerance for the stench of halitosis born of gum disease had decided him against dentistry, but he still could appreciate a set of teeth as exceptional as these.

Nolly’s gums were in great shape, too: firm, pink, no sign of recession, snug to the neck of each tooth.

This brilliant mouthful was not nature’s work alone. With what Nolly must have spent to obtain this smile, some fortunate dentist had kept a mistress in jewelry through her most nubile years.

Regrettably, his radiant smile only emphasized, by contrast, the dire shortcomings of the face from which it beamed. Lumpish, pocked, wart-stippled, darkened by a permanent beard shadow with a bluish cast, this countenance was beyond the powers of redemption possessed by the best plastic surgeons in the world, which was no doubt why Nolly applied his resources strictly to dental work.

Five days ago, reasoning that an unscrupulous attorney would know how to find an equally unscrupulous private detective, even across state borders, Junior had phoned Simon Magusson, in Spruce Hills, for a confidential recommendation. Apparently, there also existed a brotherhood of the terminally ugly, the members of which sent business to one another. Magusson—he of the large head, small ears, and protuberant eyes—had referred Junior to Nolly Wulfstan.

Hunched over his desk, leaning forward conspiratorially, his piggy eyes glittering like those of an ogre discussing his favorite recipe for cooking children, Nolly said, “I’ve been able to confirm your suspicions.”

Junior had come to the gumshoe four days ago, with business that might have made a reputable investigator uncomfortable. He needed to discover whether Seraphim White had given birth at a San Francisco hospital earlier this month and where the baby might be found. Since he wasn’t prepared to reveal any relationship to Seraphim, and since he resisted devising a cover story on the assumption that a competent private detective would at once see through it, his interest in this baby inevitably seemed sinister.

“Miss White was admitted to St. Mary’s late January fifth,” said Nolly, “with dangerous hypertension, a complication of pregnancy.”

The moment he had seen the building in which Nolly maintained an office—an aged three-story brick structure in the North Beach district, a seedy strip club occupying the ground floor—Junior knew he’d found the breed of snoop he needed. The detective was at the top of six flights of narrow stairs—no elevator—at the end of a dreary hallway with worn linoleum and with walls mottled by stains of an origin best left unconsidered. The air smelled of cheap disinfectant, stale cigarette smoke, stale beer, and dead hopes.

“In the early hours of January seventh,” Nolly continued, “Miss White died in childbirth, as you figured.”

The investigator’s suite—a minuscule waiting room and a small office—lacked a secretary but surely harbored all manner of vermin.

Sitting in the client’s chair, across the cigarette-scarred desk from Nolly, Junior heard or imagined that he heard the scurry of tiny rodent feet behind him, and something chewing on paper inside a pair of rust-spotted filing cabinets. Repeatedly, he wiped at the back of his neck or reached down to rub a hand over his ankles, convinced that insects were crawling on him.

“The girl’s baby,” said Nolly, “was placed with Catholic Family Services for adoption.”

“She’s a Baptist.”

“Yes, but it’s a Catholic hospital, and they offer this option to all unwed mothers—doesn’t matter what their religion.”

“So where’s the kid now?”

When Nolly sighed and frowned, his lumpish face seemed in danger of sliding off his skull, like oatmeal oozing off a spoon. “Mr. Cain, much as I regret it, I’m afraid I’m going to have to return half of the retainer you gave me.”

“Huh? Why?”

“By law, adoption records are sealed and so closely guarded that you’d have an easier time acquiring a complete roster of the CIA’s deep-cover agents worldwide than finding this one baby.”

“But you obviously got into hospital records—”

“No. The information I gave you came from the coroner’s office, which issued the death certificate. But even if I got into St. Mary’s records, there wouldn’t be a hint of where Catholic Family Services placed this baby.”

Having anticipated a problem of one kind or another, Junior withdrew a packet of crisp new hundred-dollar bills from an inside jacket pocket. The bank band still wrapped the stack, and on it was printed
$10,000.

Junior put the money on the desk. “Then get into the records of Family Services.”

The detective gazed at the cash as longingly as a glutton might stare at a custard pie, as intensely as a satyr might ogle a naked blonde. “Impossible. Too damn much integrity in their system. You might as well ask me to go to Buckingham Palace and fetch you a pair of the queen’s undies.”

Junior leaned forward and slid the packet of cash across the desk, toward the detective. “There’s more where this came from.”

Nolly shook his head, setting a cotillion of warts and moles adance on his pendulous cheeks. “Ask any adoptee who, as an adult, has tried to learn the names of his real parents. Easier to drag a freight train up a mountain by your teeth.”

You have the teeth to do it,
Junior thought, but he restrained himself from saying it. “This can’t be a dead end.”

“It is.” From a desk drawer, Nolly withdrew an envelope and put it on top of the offered cash. “I’m returning five hundred of your thousand retainer.” He pushed everything back toward Junior.

“Why didn’t you say it was impossible up front?”

The detective shrugged. “The girl might’ve had her baby at a third-rate hospital, one with poor control of patients’ records and a less professional staff. Or the kid might have been placed for adoption through some baby brokerage in it strictly for the money. Then there would’ve been opportunities to learn something. But as soon as I discovered it was St. Mary’s, I knew we were screwed.”

“If records exist, they can be gotten.”

“I’m not a burglar, Mr. Cain. No client has enough money to make me risk prison. Besides, even if you could steal their files, you would probably discover that the babies’ identities are coded, and without the code, you’d still be nowhere.”

“This is most incommensurate,” Junior said, recalling the word from a vocabulary-improvement course, without need of ice applied to the genitals.

“It’s what?” asked the detective, for with the exception of his teeth, he was not a self-improved individual.

“Inadequate,” Junior explained.

“I know what you mean. Mr. Cain, I’d
never
turn my back on that much money if there was any damn way at all I could earn it.”

In spite of its dazzle, the detective’s smile was nonetheless melancholy, proof that he was sincere when he said that Seraphim’s baby was beyond their reach.

When Junior walked the cracked-linoleum corridor and descended the six flights of stairs to the street, he discovered that a thin drizzle was falling. The afternoon grew darker even as he turned his face to the sky, and the cold, dripping city, which swaddled Bartholomew somewhere in its concrete folds, appeared not to be a beacon of culture and sophistication anymore, but a forbidding and dangerous empire, as it had never seemed to him before.

By comparison, the strip club—neon aglow, theater lights twinkling—looked warm, cozy. Welcoming.

The sign promised topless dancers. Although Junior had been in San Francisco for over a week, he had not yet sampled this avant-garde art form.

He was tempted to go inside.

One problem: Nolly Wulfstan, Quasimodo without a hump, probably repaired to this convenient club after work, to down a few beers, because this was surely as close as he would ever get to a halfway attractive woman. The detective would think that he and Junior were here for the same reason—to gawk at nearly naked babes and store up enough images of bobbling breasts to get through the night—and he would not be able to comprehend that for Junior the attraction was the
dance,
the intellectual thrill of experiencing a new cultural phenomenon.

Frustrated on many levels, Junior hurried to a parking lot one block from the detective’s office, where he’d left his new Chevrolet Impala convertible. This Chinese-red machine was even more beautiful when wet with rain than it had looked polished and pristine on the showroom floor.

In spite of its dazzle and power and comfort, however, the car was not able to lift his spirits as he cruised the hills of the city. Somewhere along these darkly glistening streets, in these houses and high-rises clinging to steep slopes awaiting seismic sundering, the boy was sheltered: half Negro, half white, full doom to Junior Cain.

Chapter 53

NOLLY FELT A
little silly, walking the mean streets of North Beach under a white umbrella with red polka dots. It kept him dry, however, and with Nolly, practical considerations always triumphed over matters of image and style.

A forgetful client had left the bumbershoot in the office six months ago. Otherwise, Nolly wouldn’t have had any umbrella at all.

He was a pretty good detective, but as regarded the minutiae of daily life, he wasn’t as organized as he would like to be. He never remembered to set aside his holey socks for darning; and once he had worn a hat with a bullet hole in it for nearly a year before he’d at last thought to buy a new one.

Not many men wore hats these days. Since his teenage years, Nolly had favored a porkpie model. San Francisco was often chilly, and he began losing his hair when still young.

The bullet had been fired by a renegade cop who was every bit as lousy a marksman as he was a corrupt scumball. He’d been aiming for Nolly’s crotch.

That happened ten years ago, the first and last time anyone shot at Nolly. The real work of a private eye had nothing in common with the glamorous stuff depicted on television and in books. This was a low-risk profession full of dull routine, as long as you chose your cases wisely—which meant staying away from clients like Enoch Cain.

Four blocks from his office, on a street more upscale than his own, Nolly came to the Tollman Building. Built in the 1930s, it had an Art Deco flair. The public areas featured travertine floors, and a WPA-era mural extolling the machine age brightened a lobby wall.

On the fourth floor, at Dr. Klerkle’s suite, the hall door stood ajar. Past office hours, the small waiting room was deserted.

Three equally modest rooms opened off this lounge. Two housed complete dental units, and the third provided cramped office space shared by the receptionist and the doctor.

Had Kathleen Klerkle been a man, she would have enjoyed larger quarters in a newer building in a better part of town. She was more gentle and respectful of the patient’s comfort than any male dentist Nolly had ever known, but prejudice hampered women in her profession.

As Nolly hung his raincoat and his porkpie hat on a rack by the hall door, Kathleen Klerkle appeared in the entrance to the nearest of the two treatment rooms. “Are you ready to suffer?”

“I was born human, wasn’t I?”

He settled in the chair with no trepidation.

“I can do this with just a very little Novocain,” she said, “so your mouth won’t be numb for dinner.”

“How does it feel to be part of such an historical moment?”

“Lindbergh landing in France was nothing compared to this.”

She removed a temporary cap from the second bicuspid on the lower left side and replaced it with the porcelain cap that had been delivered by the lab that morning.

Nolly liked to watch her hands while she worked. They were slim, graceful, the hands of an adolescent girl.

He liked her face, too. She wore no makeup, and pulled her brown hair back in a bun. Some might say she was mousy, but the only things mousy that Nolly saw about her were a piquant tilt to her nose and a certain cuteness.

Finished, she gave him a mirror, so he could admire his new bicuspid cap. After five years of dentistry, paced so as not to tax Nolly’s tolerance, Kathleen had done well what nature had done poorly, giving him a perfect bite and a supernatural smile. This final cap was the last of the reconstruction.

She loosened her hair and brushed it out, and Nolly took her to dinner at their favorite place, which had the decor of a classy saloon and a bay view suitable for God’s table. They came here often enough that the maître d’ greeted them by name, as did their waiter.

Nolly was, as usual, “Nolly” to everyone, but here Kathleen was “Mrs. Wulfstan.”

They ordered martinis, and when Kathleen, perusing a menu, asked her husband what looked good for dinner, he suggested, “Oysters?”

“Yeah, you’ll need ’em.” Her smile wasn’t the least mouselike.

As they savored the icy martinis, she asked about the client, and Nolly said, “He bought the story. I won’t be seeing him again.”

The adoption records on Seraphim White’s baby weren’t sealed by law, because custody of the child was being retained by family.

“What if he finds out the truth?” Kathleen worried.

“He’ll just think I’m an incompetent detective. If he comes around wanting his five hundred bucks back, I’ll give it to him.”

A table candle glowed in an amber glass. To Nolly, in this glimmering light, Kathleen’s face was more radiant than the flame.

A mutual interest in ballroom dancing had resulted in their introduction when each needed a new partner for a fox-trot and swing competition. Nolly had started taking lessons five years before he had met Kathleen.

“Did the creep finally say why he wants to find this baby?” she asked.

“No. But I’m sure as can be, the kid is better off undiscovered by the likes of him.”

“Why’s he so sure it’s a boy?” she asked.

“Search me. But I didn’t tell him different. The less he knows, the better. I can’t figure his motivation, but if you were tracking this guy by his spoor, you’d want to look for the imprint of cloven hooves.”

“Be careful, Sherlock.”

“He doesn’t scare me,” Nolly said.

“Nobody does. But a good porkpie hat isn’t cheap.”

“He offered me ten thousand bucks to burglarize Catholic Family Services.”

“So you told him your going rate was twenty?”

Later, at home in bed, after Nolly proved the value of oysters, he and Kathleen lay holding hands. Following a companionable silence, he said, “It’s a mystery.”

“What’s that?”

“Why you’re with me.”

“Kindness, gentleness, humility, strength.”

“That’s enough?”

“Silly man.”

“Cain looks like a movie star.”

“Does he have nice teeth?” she asked.

“They’re good. Not perfect.”

“So kiss me, Mr. Perfect.”