Whitey got out of the truck they come down in and walked over and stood awhile with him. “Whose idea was this?” he said finally.
She looked around, scratching at her fanny. Not going to answer that one for anything.
It turned out to be the last they saw of the Mexicans, though. It turned out one way to get them to leave was to set the ground on fire under their truck.
Two weeks passed and the fire spread. There was smoke all over the back nine, and Train found one of the snappers— one of the huge old ones— dead over by the pond on number five. When Train lifted it up the shell broke in two. The old investors backed out, and Mr. Cooper begun to bring in new ones, had different ones out three Fridays in a row, but they all seen developers before, and knew what they looked like going broke.
Meanwhile, Mr. Cooper quit talking to Whitey, walked past her like she wasn’t there. And she quit talking to Train. Then he saw her sitting in the cab of her truck one afternoon, smoking a cigarette, crying. It never occurred to him until that moment that such a thing was possible.
21
BEVERLY HILLS
S
HE WAS IN THE POOL EVERY MORNING THAT week, and twice Mrs. Moffit had walked out into the yard next door, seen her there, and walked right back into her house. Once it seemed funny, the next time she almost cried. Both of those things made her want to eat. And that’s how it was all the time. Her moods blew in from six directions a day, independent of outside events. She was happier and sadder than she’d been in a long time.
Packard noticed the change, and began taking her to lunch, showing up early in the afternoon two or three days a week, taking her each time to a new restaurant and watching her eat, transfixed at the piles of food she was putting into her mouth.
After lunch sometimes they would make love, and he was so tender, but he never asked if she had been back to the doctor. It was one more thing he didn’t want to talk about, and because of that, in some way, she didn’t want to talk about it either. It seemed like too much work and maneuvering even to bring it up.
They had just pulled into the driveway Wednesday afternoon— she was stuffed with Chinese food, craving sherbet— and another car, a white-and-pink four-holer Buick, pulled in right behind them. Packard stopped his car, looked in the mirror a moment, then got out.
A woman got out of the Buick, and one way or another, everything she had on matched her shoes. Her breasts were pointy and ridiculous, like somebody had thrown a sheet over a gun turret. She hurried up the driveway to Packard, holding out her hand. “Dixie Finnity,” she said. “I’ve just been sitting over there, admiring your house,” and she indicated the other side of the street.
The woman held on to Packard’s hand a second too long, and then squinted across the hood of the car into the front seat and smiled at Norah, too. “You have a lovely home,” she said. You couldn’t tell who she was talking to.
“I’m sure you do too,” Packard said, and she stumbled a moment over that.
“I wonder if I could have a little of your time this afternoon,” she said. “I have something to show you that I believe you’ll be very interested in seeing.” Then she winked at Packard, as if she’d forgotten Norah was there.
“She winked at me,” Packard said. Norah opened her door and got out, feeling heavy and tired.
The woman patted his hand. “Oh, you,” she said, and then winked at Norah too.
Norah saw that Packard was smiling back at the woman now, curious where this would go. She took a step closer, looking at her more closely, and the closer you got, the more you saw, and none of it could be good news in the mirror. She was pitiful in a way, but not in a way that Norah pitied.
They walked to the house. Packard held the door for the woman, and then gave Norah a shiver before they followed her in. The woman went into the living room and turned in a small, girlish circle, taking it all in at once. She made a noise that seemed to go with the circle she’d just turned, and covered her mouth with her hand. The place was just too much for her.
“My goodness,” she said, a vaguely southern accent now, “this is spectacular. Even better than from the outside. It’s just spectacular. I can see why they want it so badly.”
Packard went to a chair and sat down. The woman did not know what to make of that, and turned to Norah. “You have a lovely home,” she said again.
“Thank you,” Norah said. “Would you like some sherbet?”
The woman began to say yes— thinking she was offering coffee— then heard the question and stopped. She patted her stomach, pulling her blouse tight against her chest. “I’d love some, but I just can’t,” she said, and had another quick look at Packard, her hand still holding the blouse tight. He sat where he was, smiling in that not quite finished way he had of smiling. He looked at the business card she’d given him, and then read it out loud. “ ‘Dixie Finnity, Exclusive Properties.’ ”
“May I sit down?” she said.
“Certainly,” he said, but did not indicate a spot.
She took a seat on the davenport, in front of the coffee table. Trying to look confident, which was probably important in real estate. She tugged at her skirt, trying to get it to cover more of her legs. Norah went into the kitchen, got a quart container of sherbet out of the freezer, and picked up a spoon off the counter. She went back into the living room and sat cross-legged on the floor, and ate out of the carton.
“Well, you’re wondering who I am,” the woman said.
“No,” he said, “this happens all the time.”
She couldn’t get started. “To get right to the point,” she said, “but first let me assure you this is really quite unusual, almost unprecedented, but I have a client who would like to make you a cash offer on your property.” Packard dropped her business card on the table in front of him, leaned back farther into his chair and closed his eyes. A moment passed. She waited for him to open his eyes. It seemed like he might be napping.
She turned to Norah then. “Now, before you say anything,” she said, “let me just add that my agency is not in the habit of making blind offers for properties that are not on the market. As I said, I realize this is unusual, but the offer is extremely generous, and that was the only reason I agreed to represent the parties.”
“Somebody wants to buy the house,” Packard said without opening his eyes.
“Exactly.”
“Who?”
She winked again at Norah and leaned forward, as if this were a secret. “I’ll bet you mean how much,” she said.
Packard didn’t answer. She looked through her purse, which was about a yard deep, and finally found a notepad and a pen. She opened the pad and wrote “$500,000” in large numerals across the page, and then underlined it twice. Hearing the sounds of a figure being underlined, Packard opened his eyes to see what it was. Then he turned to look at Norah.
“Half a million,” he said. “Are places around here going for half a million these days?”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
He turned back to the real estate woman. “Who wants to buy it?” There were no houses in this part of Beverly Hills selling for half a million dollars. Some of the mansions where the movie stars lived might be worth that, or more, but this was not a mansion. Five bedrooms, four baths, the pool, a guest house. A beautiful house, but not a mansion.
“This is the most unusual part of all,” the woman said. “The buyers, for now at least, wish to remain anonymous.”
Norah pulled the spoon slowly out of her mouth, upside down. The woman looked fondly at the figure she had written on the pad.
“This is a very generous offer,” the woman said. “Unheard of, really . . .”
Packard sat looking at her, stared until her thumbnail went to her mouth, checking for food or lipstick on her front teeth.
“Of course, it’s always possible they might go a little higher,” the woman said. “They love the house.”
Packard looked at Norah again and said, “I don’t think we could consider any offer without knowing who was making it. It could be Mickey Cohen.”
“Oh no,” the woman said. “Nothing like that. These are excellent people. Excellent people, really.”
“The neighborhood has very high standards,” he said.
The woman began to nod. “The buyers are very well acquainted with the area. It wouldn’t be a problem, I can assure you of that.”
Packard seemed to think it over, then shook his head. “No, we couldn’t do it. Not without knowing who it was. We owe it to our neighbors.” He let the room go silent for a moment and then said, “Unless, you know, you told us and it could stay right here in this room, just between the three of us.” And he left that hanging. He seemed good at this, and Norah wondered if it was something he did at work to make people confess.
The woman was still smiling, but she couldn’t make up her mind. For a long time she didn’t answer, and then, finally, she leaned forward and said, “Cross your heart?”
After the woman left, Norah and Packard sat in the living room while Norah finished the sherbet. She was puzzled at his expression. “What are you thinking?” she said.
“Our neighbors are trying to get rid of us,” he said.
“And?”
“I don’t know. I was sort of thinking of going outside and fucking you on the front lawn.”
22
PARADISE DEVELOPMENTS
F
RIDAY NIGHT, MR. COOPER COME IN SWEATING and out of breath, announced they had a mistake at the bank with the payroll. That they have to wait for their envelopes until Monday, when they straightened it out. Mr. Cooper was wearing a green suit, looked like something his mother bought, expecting him to grow into it. His wife was waiting outside in the car for him to take her to the big art opening.
Train looked out the window and saw her sitting in the front seat with the door open, fanning herself with one hand, smoking with the other. Blowing the smoke up and away from her face. It was still hot outside, and he guessed she was trying not to sweat. She looked up once and seemed to find him in the window. She held on point a moment and then looked away, annoyed. Nervous about her show, he thought.
23
HOLLYWOOD
T
HE OPENING WAS ON SUNSET, WHERE ALL the galleries were, a photography exhibit called “Men Working,” by a young artist who did not use a last name. susan.
All the big galleries, in fact, were on the same block of buildings, and all of them, as far as Packard could tell, were operated by people who owned only black clothes. Packard drove her to the exhibit in the Jaguar, which they’d just gotten back from the body shop, quiet all the way there. He didn’t like these things, didn’t like the people.
The centerpiece of the show was a sequence of photographs, two Negroes hacking each other to death with farm implements. Fourteen pictures in all, hanging from the ceiling, beginning in a barn of some kind and then leading up a weedy path as the men died in stages, the camera registering their looks of shock as they realized what was happening, how far it had gone, and then the other kind of shock, as they bled out, and even then they kept after each other with their tools.
The first twelve photographs were framed in black and of slightly different sizes and led, as you walked through the gallery’s main room, to the last two— of the bodies— which hung in identical frames, side by side at the end of the room. Beneath them stood the photographer herself.
She had packed herself into a small black dress and was standing inside a circle of admirers, pale makeup and a stab of red lipstick. Pretty in a doughy way, faintly Asian eyes. Remarkable, the men said. The pictures were remarkable. The place was smoky; everyone was smoking something. Patrons and art dealers and poets and beatniks. An older man seemed to be there with the photographer, but she was ignoring him and turned away whenever he moved in her direction. Ashamed of him, it looked like.
