Golden Orange (17 page)

“You stay there and rest that back. I want my boy in the pink tomorrow.”

“We're not going riding again!”

“Maybe in the hammock,” she said, not looking back, as she clicked across the rusty red Mexican tiles. “If you're up to it.”

When Tess came back it was with a vodka for him and what looked like Scotch for herself. She sat down in Warner Stillwell's leather chair and sipped from a glass. It was a four-ouncer, with very little ice.

The vodka emboldened him. He said, “Kinda … unusual for an employee to end up inheriting the estate, isn't it?”

She smiled ironically.

“You're too good a detective for that,” she said. “Why don't you just come out and ask?”

“They were lovers, huh?”

“Take a look at their rooms,” she said. “Daddy's pictures are plastered all over Warner's room and vice versa. It started before Mother died. They must've been like an old married couple at the end.”

Winnie glanced down at the arms of the leather chairs. They were shiny, a patina like polished walnut. Thirty years of use. An aging married couple, as comfortable together as a pair of old boots. “You, uh, said your dad was kinda tough on you. How did Warner treat you?”

“Don't misunderstand. Daddy was demanding. On me. On Mother. On everyone who worked for him at his bank. Mostly on himself. On everyone except Warner. Warner had the dominant role in their relationship at the end, but Warner was never that way with me. He tried to be more of a father to me than Daddy did. He tried too hard. He was always just Warner to me. I never could forget that at one time he was our
houseman.
”

“Did that make such a difference?”

She glanced at Winnie sharply and said, “To me it did. It might be hard for you to understand. When I graduated from Stanford and came back home, Warner was completely in charge of the Newport property
and
this one. Oh, he
tried
to spoil me, always giving me money and gifts, but I never forgot that he was giving me Daddy's money.
My
money, if our family was like every other one I knew about. Warner was giving me my own money. My future inheritance. I came to hate it.”

“So what happened?”

“To whom?”

“To all of you. How'd it come about that
your
inheritance went to
him
?”

“When Daddy turned sixty-two he sold the bank and liquidated all his stock. I was on my second miserable marriage by then. Daddy hated my second husband worse than the first, but not as much as he came to hate Ralph Cunningham, my last one. Anyway, Daddy and Warner decided to live here permanently. Oh, they traveled a hell of a lot. They loved cruise ships. Must've made ten crossings on the
QE Two
, not to mention two voyages around the world. They spent a whole lot of money, those two, while they grew old together.”

“Can't take it with you,” Winnie said. “Not a bad idea.”

“When you have a daughter you can
leave
some,” Tess said. Then she looked at her glass and said, “God! I feel like Guppy from Spoon's Landing. Who took my drink?” She got up and clicked across the tiles to the kitchen. When she returned she wasn't fooling around. She'd brought a bowl of ice cubes and both bottles: Scotch and Russian vodka. She filled his glass first.

When Tess sat back down she said, “I was
shocked
to find out how little they had in the bank after Daddy died. Those old men had gone through everything, apparently. I was left two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which had been kept in trust, and Warner got this place. And that was all there was. I used part of the money to continue living on Linda Isle after Ralph abandoned me. Ralph gave me the furniture that's in the house.” She paused a moment and said, “Men are such generous and compassionate creatures.”

“Some are,” Winnie said.

“Well, there you are,” she said. “I'm an abandoned orphan with a net worth of whatever I can get out of the Linda Isle house. I assume I can get back my down payment of one-fifty, less commissions. You see, I'm buying it from Ralph. At a price
he
could live with.”

“A hundred and fifty,” Winnie said. “You're not so rich. I know cops worth more than that.”

She laughed out loud, then said, “Does this mean you're going to abandon me too? Will I be left on the beach by yet another man?”

“I'll
never
dump you, lady,” Winnie said, reaching for her hand across the arm of the leather chair. “I'll hang around long as you want me.”

Tess Binder looked at Winnie, at his hand, back into his eyes. Then she removed her glasses, and put them on the table. She knelt down on the Navajo carpet, knelt at his feet and put her cheek on his thigh. Her face was turned toward the fireplace and her shoulders started to heave as though she were crying.

“I always find a way to make you sad,” he said. “Without meaning to.”

She sniffled and said, “You make me very
happy
, old son.”

“You're tired,” Winnie said. “Me too. Let's go to bed.”

He finished the drink and Tess helped him up. She put her arm around his waist as they climbed the staircase to the guest room.

“We can sleep together in Warner's bed,” Tess said. “After all, he shared it with my father and I'm my father's child.”

“No,” Winnie said. “I don't think I'd like that. Much as I wanna feel you next to me. No, somehow that wouldn't be right. Let's go to our room.”

“Right as usual,” she said, kissing his cheek.

Tess allowed Winnie to undress her and tuck her into one of the twin beds. She looked very sleepy when he kissed her once on the forehead, then on both cheeks, and said, “I think you should go right to sleep. You had quite a day.”

“See you in the morning, old son,” she said gratefully. Then she added, “Oh, by the way, I found an old book downstairs. All about the Coachella Valley and the inland sea in prehistoric times. I put it in the bathroom on the counter.”

“Would the light bother you if I read?”

“I'm gone off already,” she said, closing her eyes.

“Tess,” Winnie said, just before he undressed. “One more thing. What did your dad die of?”

She didn't turn over. With her back to him and only a little of her sunstreaked, butterscotch hair showing from under the blanket, she said, “Suicide. My father shot himself with a pistol.”

11

The Hotline

S
he was up long before Winnie. He'd drunk so little the night before (by his standards), he'd received no three o'clock visitors. Could it be that Tess Binder kept the buzzards away? In fact, he'd slept for ten hours without waking. The book about the Coachella Valley was open on the table beside the bed where he'd fallen asleep after reading the chapter dealing with freshwater shells, like the ones Tess had put in his pocket.

He put on his swimsuit, a black knit shirt, and deck shoes. When he came down to breakfast he was carrying the book and the little shells. Tess had just come in from the stables and greeted him with a kiss.

“Want breakfast or lunch?”

“I
never
sleep this late,” he lied. “I can't believe it.”

“Breakfast, I think. How about an omelet? I make killer omelets.”

Winnie sat in the kitchen at an oak table that must have been a hundred years old. The table had been cut, gouged, scraped and rubbed shiny from thousands of meals prepared on it. Winnie read, and drank his coffee, occasionally pointing out something in the book while Tess made breakfast.

“Listen to this,” he said. “It says here that ancient fish traps and oyster shell beds and marine fossils
way
above sea level are all around these parts. And you know that high tide line on the cliffs? That's from the last freshwater lake about five hundred or a thousand years ago.”

“You're quite a little tourist, aren't you?”

“Definitely. My old cop friends know all about that. I used to go on fishing trips with the guys to Baja and they'd be drinking and I'd be off checking out the local scenery, looking for artifacts and stuff. Buster Wiles always called me Winnie the Explorer.”

“You didn't drink with the guys?”

“Not much then. Not like I do since I left the job. You know, I offered to sign a waiver with the city to release them against any medical claim if they'd just let me stay on. But the city attorney didn't think a waiver'd hold up if my herniated disks
really
blew out later. So I had to retire.”

“And the pension isn't enough?”

“I could squeak by, living the way I do. Driving a ragtop VW that runs like the Beirut post office. But I owe a few more years a child support to my adopted daughters. My wife's second ex-husband told me those little monsters caused his triple bypass. Nearly died a blood complications. They had to change his oil about six times, seventy-eight pints a blood. I donated two, myself. Tammy couldn't 'cause her nail polish wasn't dry.”

“A lot of men might fight it, the spousal support.”

“I made the deal with my eyes open. I signed the marriage certificate. I signed the adoption papers. A deal's a deal.” He paused and said, “I'm sadder than a country song, huh? Guess you feel like giving me a telethon.”

“No, just one killer omelet.”

While Winnie ate his omelet and drank more coffee, Tess sat and glanced through the book. “I've never been much interested in the history of this valley,” she said.

Winnie washed down a mouthful of omelet spiced with jalapeño chilis, and said, “Earliest evidence of Indians goes back about twenty-five hundred years. The really old camps were probably wiped out by earlier lakes. The prehistoric lake was over a hundred miles long.”

“Did you learn any more about the little shells?” Tess asked, picking one up and holding it below her earlobe.

“Cute,” Winnie said. “They'd make cute earrings on your tiny ears. Might look nice as a necklace too, couple hundred strung together.”

“They
are
freshwater clam shells, aren't they?”

“Some a them. Some a the others …” He took the book and turned the page. “The thin pearly shells are clam. The one you got in your hand, that's called a univalve. From mollusks. They were pretty new to the scientists about a hundred years ago.”

Winnie took five white shells from his pocket, each no larger than a button. “Like baby sea snails,” he said.

“Save them,” Tess said. “Souvenirs of our desert holiday.”

“I don't need shells to help me remember
this
,” Winnie said, but Tess smiled and put the shells back in the pocket of his black knit shirt.

“You should've been some sort of scientist.”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Can't you jist see me all blissed out over a new study on slime molds? But I shoulda gone to college. My dad always told me he'd support me all the way through if I wanted to go. And I was a Nam vet, so I did have options for an education. But no, I had to become a cop. Took some junior college classes over the years, police science mostly.”

“You're an orphan,” she said. “Like me.”

“My mom's still alive. Lives with my sister and brother-in-law up in Tustin. I'm jist a half-orphan. Talking about not going to college reminds me, you know the song I hate worse than any in the world? ‘My Way.' You know: ‘Regrets I had a
few
…' Well, I had a few thousand in my life. I got a few new ones every single day.”

Tess got up from the chair and cleared the table, popping a chili into her mouth like it was a grape. When she took his coffee cup, he thought she was going to refill it, but she put it on the tile counter by the sink. Then she took off her glasses and pulled her loose cotton blouse over her head. She stepped out of her sandals and was wearing only her khaki shorts.

“
What
the hell?”

Tess walked over to him and sat astride his lap. She kissed and licked him with a tongue hot from jalapeño.

“Here?” he said, between kisses.

“Here, on
this
table.”

“Real old table.”

“It might not hold us. There's the danger.”

“I got myself a daredevil here,” Winnie Farlowe said. “Hope I got enough nerve for you, lady.”

When he stood up with Tess Binder clinging to his neck and her legs wrapped around his hips, he didn't feel any pain. His back started hurting an hour later when he climbed into the hammock.

Winnie asked Tess if they could stay home again that night, and she said she wouldn't have it any other way.

They made the ride back the following day before the late afternoon traffic was heaviest, not talking very much during the drive. Winnie spent the two hours wondering if someone like Tess Binder had satisfied her curiosity, or whatever it was, and wouldn't need to go slumming at Spoon's Landing. Wondering if, when he kissed her good-bye, it would be his last closeup of the opaque gray eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses.