Mr. Packard sat on the trunk of the gamblers’ car while they counted out the bills. The wind had come up and it was getting cold, and the car shook him as the engine warmed up. Train saw the lace ends of his shoes dancing against the leather. Then the money changed hands— looked to him like fifteen thousand— but Otto Stiles didn’t see it. He was over to himself, staring at the ground, thinking, How could this happen? The boy was blinking tears.
“Tomorrow?” Mr. Packard said, putting the money away. He always give them a chance to play again. Train seen Otto Stiles hunch up at that, but then it could have been just the cold wind.
The man who paid him the money checked the college boy, like he had a delicate situation on his hands. “I don’t think so,” he said.
“We don’t have to play for anything,” Mr. Packard said. “You want to, we can just play for dinner. Whatever you want.” Then he looked over at Otto Stiles. “He’s a nice golfer,” he said. Otto Stiles had fell apart at the turn, gone nine over the last four holes after he seen how far the game had got away from him.
“I think he might need some time off,” the man said.
In the diner that night, Mr. Packard counted out fifteen one-hundred-dollar bills and handed them to Train. Train put the money in his shirt pocket without checking it himself, which was how Mr. Packard had did it when the gamblers gave it to him.
36
BEVERLY HILLS
I
T TOOK ALL DAY TO GET BACK TO L.A., AND THE closer they got, the faster Mr. Packard ordered his drinks, and about ten minutes after Mr. Packard went into the house, Train heard them arguing upstairs, him and Mrs. Packard. Something wrong, but she wouldn’t tell him what. One minute, she shouted for him to leave her alone, the next minute, she went quiet, and Train knew somehow that was harder on him than when she yelled. A door slammed and he called her, but there wasn’t no answer. He called her again and again, sounded injured and impatient at the same time, like she caught his peeder in the door.
Train and Plural was sitting outside by the pool. The night was hot and windy, and Train been telling Plural about the owls, and the snow in the mountains. Plural been to Denver himself, he said, didn’t remember no owls. It wasn’t much of a story, but mostly he was talking now to overcome the embarrassedment of what was going on inside. The only time lately that Train wanted to hear him talk, to cover up the sounds in the other house.
“I knocked out a local boy name Milton Hopper in Denver,” Plural said. “They call him ‘Little Rhino,’ the boy trying to butt me all night, and then the crowd threw pennies when I left the ring. Shouting, ‘Don’t come back here, boy.’ ” He smiled at that, a memory of his life in the ring.
He ruminated on it awhile and got a little sad. He said, “Then I come to find out they was only six rounds in the tank.”
He turned in the direction of the house. “She come out to take the car somewheres, and I try to open the car door to help her out like Mr. Packard said, but that woman see me around and run back in the house. Once she yelled
‘Stop it!’
and another time she get in the car and gone squealing down the driveway like she just rob the First National.”
They sat still, listening to Mr. Packard’s voice coming from inside. Lights went on in a different room, went on and then went off. Like he was hunting for her now. The wind rattled the trees, and then they heard the flamingos settling in for the night next door. Sounded like a yard full of pigs.
“The man gave you money again?” Plural said.
“Some,” Train said.
Plural shook his head and spoke almost in a whisper. “What do he want?”
Train didn’t answer— he didn’t know— and in the quiet, they heard Mr. Packard upstairs, begging her to tell him that same thing.
37
BEVERLY HILLS
T
HE BEVERLY HILLS POLICE ARRIVED LATE IN the afternoon; the sun coming through the windows flat and rich. Packard and the boy were still out at the golf course. The police knocked at the front door and waited.
She cracked the door, still in her housecoat, and noticed some of the neighborhood had already collected across the street. Cigars and sandals, an old woman in blue hair and curlers.
One of the policemen was young, and he took as much of her in as he could through the crack. There had been a complaint that someone was menacing the neighbors’ flamingos, he said. She heard in his voice that he was enjoying the novelty of police work.
Alec’s double-barrel Parker twelve-gauge shotgun leaned against the wall, a foot from her hand. On bad days now, she hauled it around with her, room to room, always knew where it was. It was useless, of course— even if she’d known how to shoot it, the barrels were so heavy, she could barely lift it to a shooting position. On good days, she thought of donating it to the Boy Scouts or whatever charity took shotguns. This day, like a lot of them, had started bright and turned black later in the afternoon. It was all the waiting and worrying about the baby and Packard. Too much had happened in too little time. Sometimes she felt like there was no room left inside her. And the baby continued to grow.
Both of the policemen were polite, held their hats under their arms. Sunglasses. She saw the shine of scalp under their crew cuts.
“Ma’am?” he said.
“I’ll get my purse,” she said. There were more people on the sidewalk across the street now, an older couple with a white poodle. She didn’t like having the police around her house, and was about to offer a donation for the rodeo. Wait— that was the sheriff’s department. This was the city police. They had a yearly drive for the widows and orphans, although she didn’t think there had been a policeman killed in Beverly Hills since the war. It seemed like one had been injured by a limousine at a big Hollywood funeral, but she couldn’t remember whose funeral it was. She thought of offering them the shotgun.
“It isn’t necessary to get your purse, ma’am,” the young policeman said. “We were just wondering if we might speak to your guests.”
The way he said
guests,
he knew what they were. She smiled at him, trying to think of something to say, trying to get something to come out, then trying to remember whose funeral it was where the policeman was hurt, and then she couldn’t see that any of it was worth the effort. Any of it. Everything was too hard.
“Ma’am,” the young one said, “if you could do me a personal favor, it could make my life a lot easier. What I’d like to do, I’d like to just go back and have a word with your guests.”
Oh, he was charming her.
She closed the door. The policemen stayed where they were awhile, perhaps thinking that she was getting dressed. Five minutes passed, then ten. She watched from upstairs, sitting behind a window screen.
“You know, Dick,” the younger one said, “you might not of noticed, but that was some nice leg there, she put some makeup on and wash her hair.” And she touched her hair to see if it felt stringy, and he started up the driveway alone, toward the backyard.
And sixty seconds later he was unconscious.
The older cop was still out in front of the house, sitting in the patrol car, when Packard and Train came in from the golf course. It was getting dark.
Packard set the parking brake and got out, ignoring the neighbors standing across the street, and headed straight for the cruiser. The policeman watched him come, and then took his time before he rolled down the window to talk, not caring for the way the man came at him across the lawn.
“Problem?” Packard said. Nothing friendly about it, but nothing puffed up, either. The policeman understood instantly that this was not an ordinary citizen of Beverly Hills at his window, that this one probably never threatened anybody in his life. He would skip that step. A certain fright stabbed him, something like falling, something like little monkey hands all over his balls.
“We’re just checking out a neighborhood complaint,” he said, hearing the change in his own voice. Packard waited, and the policeman turned away to light a cigarette. To regroup. “Something about flamingos. My partner’s in the back.”
Packard gazed down through the window, and the policeman said, “He didn’t think you’d mind if he went back there and talked to them. Just a talk, a conversation about flamingos. The missus came to the door, but she didn’t appear responsive.”
“He went back there alone?”
“Just for a conversation, chief. A little talk.”
Train was still waiting by the car, and Mr. Packard came past him hurried and worried, and Train fell in behind, as he always did.
The other policeman was laying on his side next to the pool, moths flying orbits in the light around his head. Looked like the tweety birds after somebody been knocked out in the comics. Plural was on a lawn chair not far away, rocking up and back. Could of been somebody’s grandmother, baby-sitting a sleeping child.
Plural looked up at the sound of the footsteps, recognized who it was. “The golfers,” he said, and broke into a smile. Like he’d forgot he spilled a policeman on the patio.
The policeman lay still, looked to be pretending to be dead. Thinking, as it develop, that he could be shot. Mr. Packard checked him over and then picked him up, like he was no weight at all, and sat him into a chair not far from Plural’s. A swelling covered the side of his head and disappeared into his hair, looked like a half a potato.
The policeman put his face in his hands, trying to get his bearings. His pistol was still in his holster and his hat floated in the pool. The frames of his sunglasses was still on his nose, but the glass part themself was back where he’d been laying, spaced about like they were when they was connected. Train seen Plural hit people before, but it was hard to understand how he knocked the glass out of his glasses.
Mr. Packard got the pool strainer and fished out the hat. The policeman took it without looking up, without seeming to notice it was wet. He held it on his lap and kept his head down, sick and sweating and waiting for all this badness to pass.
“What are you doing back here?” Mr. Packard said.
Train froze at that question, and for a second it felt like Mayflower was laying on the patio where the police was. That everything was out in the open. Wished in that second that he never met Plural in the first place. Wished all this trouble was with somebody else.
Without looking up, the policeman made a gesture of some sort into empty space and said, “Am I shot?”
“No,” Mr. Packard said, “you’re all right.”
“You fine,” Plural said. The policeman reached down to make sure his weapon was still in his holster. “I think I’m going to be sick,” he said.
“Here we go,” Plural said, and lifted his feet.
The feeling passed though, and the policeman dropped his face back into his hands and looked through his fingers at his feet. Shiny black shoes, white socks. He put his fingers through the empty glass frames. It stopped him a moment, trying to figure out what was wrong. “Shit,” he said, “I can’t remember where I am.”
His hat dropped on the ground and rolled a foot or two, and he pulled at the skin on his face, like he would liked to take his head in his hands and hold it out where he could see it for himself.
