Spider’s Cage (15 page)

After a while, they heard appreciative voices in the hallway and a loud wolf whistle. The door moved behind Gleason, and he stepped aside to let in Sister Opium Jade, Marlene and Candy, the three prostitutes who worked the entrance to the grocery store across Folsom Street. Michael, the coroner's assistant straightened his glasses and cleared his throat. At Bdeniowitz' direction Gleason closed the door on Johnson and the reporters beyond, who fired a lot of bulbs and yelled a lot of inquiries.

The three women came in with their faces set to weather whatever the police had in mind, but none of them was prepared to look at a corpse. They all gasped and became noticeably upset. Sister Opium Jade looked helplessly from the sheeted form on the floor to Windrow, her eyes begging him to get her out of there. Windrow, seated behind his desk again, said nothing.

“Well, ladies,” Bdeniowitz began, sitting on his heels and raising a corner of the sheet. “Any of you seen this woman before?”

Candy hid her face, sobbed, and refused to look. Sister Opium Jade stared in silent horror. Marlene nodded slowly, her mouth open, then shook her head.

“That means yes or no?” Bdeniowitz asked her.

“N-no,” the woman stuttered. “I mean, she could have
been the one came in the building tonight, couple hours ago.” She tore her eyes from the corpse and looked at Windrow.

“Tell the man what he wants to know.”

“That's all there is. A couple of hours ago. She was the only person I noticed since five o'clock, coming in. Everybody else was coming out, and there wasn't anybody at all since about six. Other than that, it was just the usual cowboys and leather freaks up and down this goddam street.”

Windrow frowned.

“Got dark around six, didn't it?” he observed.

“Yeah,” Marlene agreed bleakly. “Getting late in the year.” She shivered visibly and wrapped her thigh-high squirrel coat tighter around her. As she half turned away from the corpse on the floor, she looked old and tired. In her coat, big earrings, makeup, mini-skirt, nylon encased legs and stacked heels, she also looked ridiculous.

Bdeniowitz dropped the corner of the sheet and stood up. “Anybody else?”

Sister Opium Jade, who had also turned away from the grisly sight, shook her head. “I got here about half an hour before you guys showed up.” She jerked her head toward Windrow, started to say something, changed her mind.

Bdeniowitz caught it. He looked from Opium Jade to Windrow and back again. “Yeah?” he snarled.

“Tell him.” Windrow said, “where you were.”

“I was with him.” She shrugged, “and I was too drunk to sep across the street.”

Gleason clucked his tongue.

“Where?” said Bdeniowitz. “When? How?”

She told him the rest of the story, leaving out most of the violence.

When she finished, Candy whirled on her and said, “You told me he pounded Lobe into the floor and left him for dead!”

Sister Opium Jade looked daggers at her and said nothing.

“Dead, eh?” Bdeniowitz said.

Windrow smiled at Opium Jade behind Bdeniowitz' back.

“I told you that cause I knew you wanted to hear it,” Opium Jade said, not too comfortably. She looked at Bdeniowitz. Bdeniowitz looked at her. “Candy used to work for Lobe,” she explained. “Secretary.”

“Hah!” Gleason said.

“He was a louse and she hates the guy. Marty only had to hit Lobe once after he threw him through the door…” she stopped and bit her lip. Bdeniowitz looked at Windrow, who wiped the grin off his face, and back to Opium Jade. “Go on,” he said. “Fill in the blanks.”

“Well, I knew that just wouldn't be enough for Candy in the straight telling of it. You just had to've been there.” She cranked her hand around her wrist a couple of times. “It was OK live, but I just kind of jazzed the replay up for her, make her feel good.”

“Shit,” said Candy.

“Well,” Opium Jade shrugged. “You get bored standing on the lousy corner, and it's cold, too. All those creeps driving by looking to do weird things to you, a girl wants a little conversation to keep her nerve up…”

“You told me he creamed that jerk like hot black coffee!” Candy screamed. “You told me—”

“Sometimes it's like talking to yourself out there, goddamn company's so goddamn stupid…”

“—Lobe'd never walk or talk or fuck again your lousy dick friend crippled that scum for—”

“ … discussing wigs and genitalia for godsakes…”

They went on like that for a while, being good at it. Bdeniowitz, however, had seen it more times than they'd
performed it and patiently ignored them. Everybody in the room knew the two women were arguing just to avoid discussing anything factual. Finally he jerked the office door open and pushed Candy and Marlene past Johnson into the hallway. Flashbulbs popped and questions filled the air.

“Hey,” said Marlene, backing out of the door behind Candy, “doncha wanta take a statement or nothing?”

“We'll be in touch,” said Bdeniowitz, pushing her into the hall. “Johnson.”

“But what about my important material evidence?” she said, smoothing her dress over her hip.

Bdeniowitz ignored her. “Johnson. Escort these ladies to their side of the street.”

“Not you,” Bdeniowitz said, stepping between the door and Sister Opium Jade. “You stick with us for a while longer.”

A reporter had backed Candy up against the far wall of the hallway, leaning his elbow on the wall, and was explaining his research for a big feature on prostitution, in low not to say furtive tones, as Bdeniowitz closed the door.

Bdeniowitz quickly established that Sister Opium Jade had been with Windrow for most of the afternoon and evening, until he'd left her in front of the grocery across the street at about eight thirty. He tried a few angles, mostly veiled threats, but couldn't shake her. The coroner's assistant allowed as how he thought the deceased had been that way since at least eight, possibly earlier. Bdeniowitz finally ordered him to remove the body.

The two coroner's assistants produced a black rubber bag and zipped the body into it. Then they strapped it onto a stretcher, and departed with it through the crowd stacked up against the office door. Flashbulbs popped in the hall. Nobody said much until after the door had closed again.
Then Gleason said, “Hey.” He walked over to the front of Windrow's desk and picked up a light blue three by five card that lay within the chalked perimeter marking where the body had been. He handled the card by its edges.

“This yours?” he said, and showed the card over the desk to Windrow.

One side of the blue card was blank, the other had two lines Windrow recognized as Greek, though he had no idea of what they said, carefully hand-lettered in white.

Gleason stepped, behind the desk to look at the card over Windrow's shoulder. “It must have been under the girl's body.”

Windrow studied the card for a few seconds, then shook his head. He looked at Sister Opium Jade who, with Bdeniowitz, was looking at him. He took the card from Gleason, holding its edges between his finger tips, and showed it to Sister Opium Jade. “Greek,” she said.
Tou gar douloua technae archei tou desnotou.
—
Diogenes
.

Everybody except Windrow came on surprised.

Gleason swiveled his head from Sister Opium Jade to Windrow and back again. “Easy for you to say, Sister,” he muttered.

“What's it mean, goddamit,” said Bdeniowitz, exasperated.

“ ‘The art of being a slave is to rule one's master.' ” She handed the card to Gleason. “Diogenes was the name of the guy who said it.”

Everybody stared at the educated streetwalker.

Windrow stared at her too, but he was also recalling a bit of pillow talk with Jodie Ryan.

“You know,” Opium Jade coaxed, “the guy with the lantern?” She held one hand over her head and looked from one blank face to another.

“Skip it,” she muttered, lowering her hand.

“The art of being a slave is to rule the master,” Gleason repeated, as if to himself. “What the hell does that mean?”

“Right now, this Alvarez girl is looking pretty artless,” Bdeniowitz adduced bitterly, staring at the outline chalked on the bare floorboards in front of Windrow's desk. “No matter what it means.”

T
HE SPEEDOMETER ON THE RED FORD SHIMMIED AROUND
110. The motor seemed to like it, and Highway 5 unreeled like a hallucinated ribbon behind him. The front end floated a bit at that speed, like a small boat working its way against a mild swell, but the steering still worked when he passed the slower traffic. And all the traffic was slower, with one exception. This was a black Ferrari that passed him just south of the Los Banos turnoff. Doing perhaps twenty or thirty miles an hour better than his car, it used the visible fifteen miles bisected by Windrow's mirror and windshield in a little over six minutes, threading its nocturnal trace among the San Francisco-to-L.A. freight and produce trucks as if it were a sleek, gravityless wedge mysteriously propelled by its own lights through so much cubist furniture. Some of the trucks, illuminated in red, green and amber, like carnival booths, twinkled their lights appreciatively at the Ferrari and even Windrow's Ford, as they flashed in turn down the fast lane. Shortly after the Ferrari passed him a Highway Patrol car also passed him, all its lights going, a thin plume of smoke spiralling out of one of its two exhaust pipes. At that moment, going slightly uphill, Windrow's speedometer read over 100.

Though he accelerated to 110, the CHP cruiser left him behind.

After everybody had departed his office, a few telephone calls provided Windrow with a few hard facts.

Though she was a little drunk when he finally found her at a Malibu number, Jodie Ryan's mother, Kitty Larkin, happily answered everything Windrow cared to ask her. Yes, though she wasn't aware of the specific terms of O'Ryan's will, she knew he'd left her out of it entirely. But, she'd cheerfully pointed out, that was OK by her. She and her father hadn't spoken since she had married her third husband, because her third husband was in the movie business, Jewish, and rich. Toward the first two categories O'Ryan had begun to manifest an unreasonable animosity in his later years, and that her present husband's money made Kitty Larkin—who had grown to expect a ‘minimum standard of excess,' as she put it, assuring Windrow he understood these things—independent of O'Ryan's influence, had further irked Sweet Jesus to the point that he wrote her out of his will.

Kitty Larkin, she explained to Windrow, the ice in her glass tinkling near the mouthpiece of the telephone, had not resented her father's behavior toward her, which she described as ‘peevish,' but merely reduced her direct communications with him to annual Christmas and birthday cards since ‘at least ten years ago.'

Their excision from the will, Windrow thought at the time, might explain why Kitty Larkin and her husband had experienced no unusual activities in their lives since O'Ryan's death. They had received no threatening telephone calls, there had been no burglary, no violence… “Just the usual small arms fire,” Mrs. Larkin had observed, “down on the beach at night.” The ice clicked again. “Marijuana smugglers you know, landing bales in the quiet residential areas, only to encounter pirates waiting for them. Not a damn one of them over seventeen.”

The smugglers or the pirates?

“Neither. Both. Whatever. Jodie… You know, Mr. Windrow, Jodie has told me quite a lot about you, and, although you're not really of our circle, socially I mean, I must say you seem an interesting man.” She laughed, a full, deep laugh. “Please don't be offended, that wasn't what I meant to say at all… Heavens, I think I'm getting tipsy. No, what I meant to tell you was that Jodie named herself for the old man's first wife, you know. The one who left him when he went broke the first time, Jodie Dweem. She went back to Philadelphia. Broke his heart. He never forgot her. Named his damned oil wells after her, and tried to get his second wife, my mother, to name
me
after her. Of course, for all she cared, he could have named those marvelous oil wells after the saints and the Holy Family if he'd wanted to, but as for naming her own flesh and blood after that woman, well: momma absolutely wouldn't stand for it, poor thing. He sprung it on her when she was still in the hospital, with me in the incubator—I was born a tad early, it
must
explain my absolutely smashing figure, knock on wood.”

He heard the tap of her glass against the tabletop.

“Of course she wouldn't stand for it. Can you imagine? Right in the damned hospital. She finally left him after they bought a mansion in Beverly Hills and he tried to call it Jodieland, or something. Absolutely the last straw. Of course,” she added, with a chuckle, “she got the mansion in the settlement, lock, stock and barrel-chested chauffeur, and raised all of us lovely neurotic children there, and called it Tara. Does that answer your question?”