Long Shot (19 page)

She stared at him fixedly, almost as if she hadn't heard a word. In fact, she had a very clear picture of it—him and Max, huddled in a booth in a fast-food joint. Max would have finally told him that he knew what Jasper meant to do. They probably made a deal, right on the spot. So the power was shifting quicker than she thought—quicker than she could make a move to leave. Already, it seemed she had to try so hard to pretend that things were the same as ever. They couldn't even get off a proper gasp of relief, to think they hadn't collided.

“I'm going out to get magazines,” she said. “I just realized—I don't have any idea how I look this week.”

“Wait a while, Viv. Don't leave town. We should have the money settled in a few months' time. Then maybe you and me and Artie can get away together. Why not, huh? We'll hire a boat of our own.”

“But Carl—
why?
It seems like we've been together half our lives already. We haven't had a good time yet.”

She remembered the night Jasper died. When they left the house, there was this same pitch of darkness. The shafts of their headlights swept the trees. And Carl had said: “I've been in New York these past five days.” They were just as far out of the world as now, except here there were no lilies.

“It's irresponsible, that's what it is,” said Carl in a truculent temper. “You're acting just like Jasper. You do what you damn well please, and the rest of us can go fuck ourselves.”

“Is that what I want, do you think?” she asked. “A month on the coast of Mexico, with Erika and Felix?” She was angry now, but it came out sad. She couldn't seem to hate him. Crazy, huh? She'd never had the slightest trouble hating him before. “Why do I bother with magazines, when I've got you?”

She went into reverse and came away from the blasted tree. Then into first, with her foot very light on the brake and rolling forward. She glanced at him now to say goodbye. He looked as if he'd caught a chill.

“Remind me to tell you some day what I really want,” she said. “It'll restore your faith in simple things.”

“You know I'm right,” he seethed in answer, hugging his arms against his chest as if he thought he would burst. “You won't go now. I'll bet you money.”

“Bet your ass,” she said with a smile. “It's cheaper.”

She rolled away like somebody caught on a current, so she never caught the final look she left to twist his face. She swung the last loop to the Steepside gate, which opened automatically. On an impulse, feeling ornery, she hung a left at the boulevard and headed up instead of down.

She climbed a mile up into the mountains, as far as the light at Mulholland Drive. From there, she could see out onto the plain of lights that spread below in the Valley. She veered to the shoulder to take the view. Because the April night was clear, she saw to what seemed like ten or fifteen miles on either hand—as if the whole expanse were one vast printed circuit, or an endless airport where a thousand routes touched down. It was really nowhere at all, of course—just suburb on suburb, flung wide on the desert floor.

She started down the steep and hairpin route. A Willis, she thought, could spend a lifetime in the mountains high above L.A., without ever once descending here to the inland side. She couldn't recall the last time she had been this way—unless to hook up to Route 134, going out to Pasadena, but who knew anyone there anymore? She could have sworn she'd never passed this stretch of hillside lots before. Two bedrooms, two baths, and a carport, cheek by jowl the whole way down the mountain. Each one worth about as much as the powder-blue Rolls she rode in.

Who lives here?
she thought dreamily, as if she'd found the cleft in a wall of solid rock, passing into a great lost city. She realized no one would ever think to look for her anywhere here. She felt an instant sense of relaxation, as if someone had laid a downer on her. She drove like a woman bent on winning, risking more at every curve. The Rolls was fleet as a racehorse. Never the slightest screech, and all the lights were green.

When at last she reached the level ground, she turned east on Ventura Boulevard, through the heart of Sherman Oaks. Hunching up to the wheel, she read the neon left and right. The chicken stands, the bargain banks and raw motels, the flash-on time and temp. She felt like getting lost in it, though she knew she had other things to do. She tried to focus on murder and nothing else. Like a drunk trying to walk a straight line, she affected a kind of inner squint and lasered in on Carl. She tried not to feel so happy to find herself free in a foreign clime.

Had Greg been right? He swore she'd have it easier, once she could pin it on someone else. Perhaps she was just perverse, she thought, but she wasn't a bit convinced. Between Carl and Jasper, killer and corpse, it struck her the deal was exclusive. No less so than the deal it seemed to supersede, between Jasper and Harry Dawes. Either way, she didn't see that she came into it at all.

It was no one else's business but the duellists'. She wasn't caught up by a rage of justice. She didn't think death was wandering loose to seek more victims. Whatever it was was over with. There was no one in any peril, was there? After all, it could have gone the other way, with Carl as dead as Jasper. Jasper would never have been so dumb as not to know a duel was on. He could have struck first.

She turned into the Tower of Pizza's parking lot. Needless to say, this whole line of argument wasn't allowed. The widow, she knew, didn't have the leeway to settle the matter out of court. She could see how the press would distort it, if they knew how she really felt. She sat staring in at the glare of fluorescent light, momentarily paralyzed. The hardness that had gripped her was as true to Jasper as all the decorous sentiments of his fans. But how could she ever explain it?

She slid out and locked the car and wished she didn't look so overdressed. Worst of all, she thought, she wasn't even sure that
Greg
would understand. Perhaps, from here on in, she'd better keep her feelings to herself—the way she'd always done before.

She knew she must have tried a pizza. Everyone had them all the time. But she honestly couldn't recall. She had no associations, to this or anything else, since the moment she started down the back side of the mountains. As she walked in now to a place that traded in nothing but, she shied at the blinding light reflecting off a dozen cuts of plastic. She'd figured on taking a hint from the people in line in front of her, but she saw she was quite alone. She tried to read a snatch of menu, painted in red on the upper wall, but the yellow-wigged woman in the turquoise smock did not appear to countenance indecision. Vivien stepped up to the counter.

“Pizza,” she said succinctly, the one word coming off her tongue like a minor breakthrough.

“Suits me fine,” said the waitress, giving a friendly crack of her gum by way of punctuation. She pulled a pencil out of her hair. “How do you like it?”

How will I know till I taste it?
thought Vivien puckishly. “Oh, I don't know,” she said. “Surprise me.”

“Combination Florentine,” retorted the other, writing it down. “I wouldn't warn you, honey, except you look so pretty in that red scarf—that's with the anchovy. Makes some people gag. You want me to hold it?”

“No, no,” she said. The anchovy struck her as comforting.

“To drink?”

“Just coffee.”

The scarf in question was, in fact, the color of highly polished saddle leather—russet, perhaps, with perhaps a touch of the tile roofs of Siena. In any case, it would have given Pucci hives to hear that it was red. Yet Vivien couldn't help but like this woman. The garish air about her hadn't got her down. The country cheer that she gave off was tied up with an urban case of irony.

“I'm Kay, I'm here to help you” was how the Tower of Pizza put it, on her plastic pizza badge.

When was the last time someone told Vivien she looked pretty? The press was always quick to tick off what she wore, but the point they were usually trying to make was that no one deserved a change of clothes for every day of the year. The people she knew wouldn't dream of liking a scarf out loud. It would have been unseemly, somehow, now that she was sainted in the Best-Dressed Hall of Fame. Of
course
it was a pretty scarf. Didn't that go without saying?

She strolled about the room, uncertain how to pass the time. She supposed it would be unmannerly to watch Kay work from too close up, though she dearly would have loved to see a pizza made from scratch. She loitered at the jukebox long enough to read the listings, but made no move to play. She had no flair for plucking the theme of her present mood from the ranks of the top forty. Still less could she summon up the English for a proper go at pinball. Thus, she made her way around the room, rejecting all machines.

At last she reached the raft of attractions clustered around the register. Devon mints and Jersey City taffy. A rack of postcards variously depicting all the Southland's flash points, Griffith Park to Disneyland. Whistles and jars of preserves and dry cigars. But what caught her eye was the newspaper stand. Especially an inky rag called
Hollywood Midnite
, splashed with a foot-high picture of herself. She sat there weeping, head in hand, and the headline, sixty-point or better, shouted out:
I LOST MY HUSBAND TO A HUNDRED MEN
!

It had to be a trick. When had she ever cried on camera? Her hair hadn't been that straight in years, and the fur that wrapped her shoulders looked like housing insulation.
God
, she thought as she squinted close,
where am I
?

It came to her in a rush. This was the summer of her debut. Nineteen and totally out of it—here, at a ball in San Mateo, where someone had filled the living room with topiary shrubs. Well, she thought, at least there was visible proof that she could cry.

They took a line close to the bone, these scandal weeklies. The implication was that she let a man walk all over her. She'd ended up alone in bed, surrounded by an overload of things a normal person did without. Was any further proof required of what a rich girl came to? It seemed so oddly Puritan a view. But then, she probably wasn't the one to ask, considering she was the moral of the story.

She'd been staring back at herself for as long as she could remember. At a newsstand sometimes, she felt as if she were in a hall of mirrors. And the more she saw, the more it made no sense to her. Wasn't she dull? The whole thing should have petered out for want of real material. This part of her life they took pictures of was the dreary part. She wondered if she didn't affect her famous vacant smile to prove to the world there was nothing there.

But even nothing was news, if she was in it.
Hollywood Midnite
and its ilk were always prepared to say that she had cancer. They swore she broke up this one's marriage and aborted that one's child—both in a single week, sometimes. Clearly, it was easier to make it up than tie it to what she was doing in fact.
Oh, well
, she thought, with no more urge than usual to turn to page three for the gory details. They certainly had the goods on Steepside now. Perhaps, after all, they were smart to stick so close to her all these years. It meant they were there at the scene, so to speak, when the mine at last hit paydirt.

“Three eighty-five with the tax,” said Kay.

Vivien looked up startled, to find they were barely a couple of feet apart. The pizza was boxed between them on the counter. Where was she supposed to eat it? In the car?

“All I have is a twenty,” she said apologetically.

As the register digested it, she wondered if she ought to leave a tip. She didn't like to offend. She held the pizza cradled in one arm and brooded about it, as sixteen dollars and fifteen cents was counted out into her other hand.

“Listen, I wouldn't worry about the papers. Not if
I
was you.”

“What?” asked Vivien vaguely. Just then, she was weighing the cash in the flat of her hand, undecided what to do. She came in a moment late. She saw that Kay was glancing down at
Hollywood Midnite
.

“Everyone knows it's lies, what they say about you. It don't matter. People don't believe a thing they read.”

“They don't?” she murmured quietly, gazing at her weeping face like a picture in an album. So as not to seem so spooked, she raised her voice. “You think it's true, what they say about sticks and stones?”

“Listen, I'm real sorry about your husband. I lost somebody once.”

Vivien thought:
Should I ask her who?
But she didn't really want to. It would only make her sad.

“It makes you numb for the longest time,” said Kay. “Nobody knows.”

Vivien looked her in the eye. There were no demands at all. She remembered the fans last week, on the boulevard by the gate. They were after a very specific thing—some single glimpse to take away, sharp as a Kodachrome snap.
She shook her finger at me. She tried to grab my camera. She pleaded with us to go
. They wanted a piece of her. This one didn't.

“But I feel nothing,” Vivien said, with a hairline crack of irony. It came out like an answer to a question no one asked. But she had to give the acid test. Check this woman's existential fingerprints. Just as she had the other day, on the mission set with Greg.

Kay nodded briefly and looked away, transported for a moment by a nothing of her own. In any case, she seemed to pass the test. When they said goodbye, it was unadorned with the hope they would meet again. They didn't say anything cheery, not “Take care,” not “Have a nice night.” They left all that to the wheel of time. They stuck to the one word only. Just goodbye.

As Vivien walked away, she balled up the money and stuffed it in her bag. When she got to the car, she opened the box on the seat beside her. The suitcase served as her table. She sat and ate the pizza wedge by wedge, trying to distinguish what was what in the chaos of ingredients. Now and then, they glanced at each other through a double shield of windows. Never in phase, so they didn't lock eyes. For a moment, Vivien had a spell of thinking she ought to do more. She could have a color TV sent out: “To Kay at the Tower, with all my thanks.” Maybe arrange to have her children put through college.