F is for FUGITIVE Page 15

  Somebody snagged my arm from behind. The desk clerk was hanging on to me, screaming incoherently. My left hand was still knotted in Elva’s shirt. She tried to backstroke out of range, arms flailing as she yodeled with fear, eyes wide.

  My self-control reasserted itself and I lowered my fist. She fairly crowed with relief, staring at me with astonishment. I don’t know what she’d seen in my face, but I knew what I’d seen in hers. I felt giddy with power, happiness surging through me like pure oxygen. There’s something about physical battle that energizes and liberates, infusing the body with an ancient chemistry ��� a cheap high with a sometimes deadly effect. A blow to the face is as insulting as you can get, and there’s no predicting what you’ll garner in return. I’ve seen petty barroom disputes end in death over a slap on the cheek.

  Her mouth was already puffy, her teeth washed with blood. Exhilaration peaked and drained at the sight. Now I could feel pain throb in my arm and I bent with the pulse of it, panting hard. The bruise was a sharp blue vertical line, red welt spreading its blood cloud under the skin. I would swear I could see a raised line where the gut had been strung along the edge of the racket. Set upon by an evil-tempered tennis buff. It was all so damn dumb. Lucky I hadn’t interrupted her at a round of golf. She’d have pounded me to a pulp with her pitching wedge. My knuckles were stinging where the skin had ripped. I hoped her rabies vaccinations were up to date.

  Elva began to cry piteously, adopting the victim stance when it was she who had tried to savage me! I felt something stir and I yearned to go after her again, but the truth was I hurt, and the need to tend to myself took precedence. Dr. Dunne shepherded his wife into his office. The desk clerk in the orange blazer scurried after them while I leaned against the wall, trying to catch my breath. He might have been calling the sheriff’s department, but I didn’t much care.

  In a moment the doctor returned, full of soothing apologies and solicitous advice. All I wanted was to get the hell out of there, but he insisted on examining my arm, assuring me it wasn’t broken. God, did the man think I was an idiot? Of course it wasn’t broken. He steered me into the hotel infirmary where he cleaned my battered hand. He was clearly worried, and that interested me more than anything that had transpired so far.

  “I’m sorry you and Elva had a falling-out.” He dabbed a stinging disinfectant on my hand, his gaze flicking quickly to my face to see if I’d react.

  I said, “You know women. We get into these little tiffs.” The irony was apparently lost on him.

  “She’s protective. I’m sure she didn’t mean to offend. She was so upset, I had to give her a sedative.”

  “I hope you’ve got all your hand tools locked up. I’d hate to see the lady with a crescent wrench.”

  He began to put his first-aid supplies away. “I think we should try to forget the incident.”

  “Easy for you to say,” I said. I was flexing my right hand, admiring the way the butterfly Band-Aid closed the cleft in my knuckle formed by Elva’s front teeth. “I take it you still won’t give me information on Jean Timberlake.”

  He had crossed the room to the sink, where he was washing his hands, his back turned. “I saw her that day,” he said tonelessly. “I explained as much to the police at the time.”

  “The day she was killed?”

  “That’s right. She came to my office when she got the results of her pregnancy test.”

  “Why not have you run the test to begin with?”

  “I couldn’t tell you that. Perhaps she was embarrassed about the predicament she was in. She said she’d pleaded with the Lompoc doctor to abort her. He’d turned her down and I was next on her list.”

  He dried his hands thoroughly and hung the towel on the rack.

  “And you refused?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why ‘of course’?”

  “Aside from the fact that back then abortion was illegal, it’s something I would never do. Her mother survived an illegitimate pregnancy. No reason this girl couldn’t have done the same. The world doesn’t end, though she didn’t seem to see it that way. She said it would ruin her life, but that simply wasn’t true.”

  While he talked, he unlocked a cabinet and took out a big jar of pills. He shook five into a small white envelope, which he handed to me.

  “What are these?”

  “Tylenol with codeine.”

  I couldn’t believe I’d need painkillers, but I tucked the envelope in my handbag. In my line of work, I get bashed around a lot. “Did you tell Jean’s mother what was going on?”

  “Unfortunately, no. Jean was a minor and I should have informed her mother, but I agreed to keep the matter confidential. I wish now I’d spoken up. Maybe things would have turned out differently.”

  “And you have no idea who Jean’s father was?”

  “I’d try ice on that arm,” he said. “If the swelling persists, come back and see me. At the office, if you don’t mind. There’ll be no charge.”

  “Did she give you any indication who she was involved with?”

  Dr. Dunne left the room without another word.

  I scrounged a long-sleeved shirt out of the backseat of my car and pulled it on over my T-shirt so the rainbow of bruises on my arm wouldn’t show. I sat there for a moment, leaning my head back against the seat, trying to marshal my forces for whatever was coming next. I was done in. It was only four o’clock and I felt as if the day had gone on forever. So many things bothered me. Tap with his shotgun shells loaded with rock salt. The $42,000 unaccounted for. Someone was maneuvering, slipping in and out like a dim figure in the fog. I had caught glimpses, but there was no way to identify the face. I pulled myself upright and started the car, heading into town again so I could talk to Royce.

  I found the hospital on Johnson, just a few blocks from the high school, the architecture chunky and nondescript. No design awards for this one.

  Royce was on the medical-surgical floor. The soles of my boots squeaked faintly against the highly polished vinyl tiles. I passed the nurses’ station, following the room numbers. Nobody paid any attention to me as I made my way down the hall, averting my eyes when I passed an open door. The sick, the injured, and the dying have very little privacy as it is. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that most of them lay abed in a cluster of flower arrangements, get-well cards propped open, their television sets on. I could smell green beans. Hospitals always smell like canned vegetables to me.

  I came to Royce’s room. I paused just outside the door and disconnected my feelings. I went in. Royce was asleep. He looked like a captive, sides pulled up around his bed, an IV like a tether connecting him to a pole. A clear blue plastic oxygen cone covered his nose. The only sound was the breath whiffling through his lips in an intermittent snore. His teeth had been “taken away from him, lest he bite himself to death. I stood by the bed and watched him.

  He’d been sweating and his white hair was lank, plastered in long strands across his forehead. His hands lay palms-up on the covers, large and raw, fingers twitching now and then. Was he dreaming, like a dog, of his hunting days? In a month he’d be gone, this ornery mass of protoplasm driven by countless irritations, by dreams, by desires unfulfilled. I wondered if he’d live long enough to have what he wanted most ��� his son, Bailey, whose fate he’d entrusted to my care.

  Chapter 18

  *

  At five-thirty I was knocking on Shana Timberlake’s door, already convinced there was no one home. Her battered green Plymouth was no longer in the drive. The cottage windows were dark and the drawn front curtains had that blank look of no occupancy. I tried the knob without luck, always interested in the notion of an unsupervised inspection of the premises, a specialty of mine. I did a quick detour around to the back, checking the rear door. She’d put a second bag of trash out, but I could see through the kitchen window that the dirty dishes were piling up again and the bed was unmade. The place looked like a flophouse.

  I went back to the mot
el. What I wanted most in the world was to lay my little head down and go to sleep, but I couldn’t see a way to pull that off. I had too much work to do, too many troubling questions yet to ask. I stepped into the office. As usual, the desk was unmanned, but I could hear Ori on the telephone in the family living room. I slipped under the counter and knocked politely on the door frame. She glanced up, catching sight of me, and motioned me in.

  She was taking reservations for a family of five, negotiating a sofa bed, a crib, and a cot with variations in the room rate. Maxine, the cleaning lady, had come and gone with very little evidence of her effectiveness. All she’d done, as far as I could see, was to clear off a few surfaces, leaving a residue of furniture oil in which dust was settling. The counterpane on Ori’s hospital bed was now littered with junk mail, news clippings, and old magazines, along with that mysterious collection of coupons and fliers that seems to accumulate on end tables everywhere. The wastebasket beside the bed was already spilling over. Ori was idly sorting and discarding as she talked. She concluded her business and set the telephone aside, fanning herself with a windowed envelope.

  “Aw, Kinsey. What a day it’s been. I think I’m comin’ down with something. Lord only knows what. Everybody I talk to has the twenty-four-hour flu. I feel so achy all over and my head’s about to bust.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “Is Ann around?”

  “She’s inspecting some rooms. Every time we get a new maid we have to check and double-check, makin’ sure the job’s done right. Of course, the minute one’s trained, off she goes again and you have to start from scratch. Well, look at you. What’d you do to your hand there, poke it through a winda screen?”

  I glanced at my knuckles, trying to think of a convincing fib. I didn’t think I’d been hired to punch out the local doctor’s wife. Bad form, and I was embarrassed now that I’d lost control of myself. Fortunately, my ills were of only passing interest, and before I could answer, she was back to her own.

  She scratched at her arm. “I got this rash,” she said, mystified. “Can you see them little bumps? Itch? It’s like to drove me insane. I never heard of any kind of flu like that, but I don’t know what else it could be, do you?”

  She held her arm up. I peered dutifully, but all I could see were the marks she’d made while clawing at herself. She was the kind of woman who would launch, any minute, into a long monologue about her bowels, thinking perhaps that her flatulence had some power to fascinate. How Ann Fowler survived in this atmosphere of medical narcissism was beyond me.

  I glanced at my watch. “Oh gee, I better get upstairs.”

  “Well, I’m not gonna let you do that. You sit right down here and visit,” Ori said. “With Royce gone, and my arthritis acting up, I don’t know where my manners have went. We never had a chance to get to know one another.” She patted the side of the bed as if I might be a lucky pup, allowed at last on the furniture.

  “I wish I could, Ori, but you know I have to ���”

  “Oh no, you don’t. It’s after five o’clock and not even suppertime yet. Why would you have to run off at this hour?”

  My mind went blank. I stared at her mutely, unable to think of any plausible excuse. I have a friend named Leo who became phobic about old ladies after one wrapped a turd in waxed paper and put it in his trick-or-treat bag. He was twelve at the time and said that aside from spoiling Halloween for him, it ruined all his candy corn. He never could trust old folks after that. I’d always been fond of the elderly, but now I was developing much the same distaste.

  Ann appeared in the doorway, a clipboard in hand. She shot me a distracted look. “Oh, hello, Kinsey. How are you?”

  Ori launched right in, not wanting to let anybody else establish a conversational beachhead. She held her arm out again. “Ann, honey, look at this here. Kinsey says she’s never seen anything like this in her life.”

  Ann gave her mother a look. “Could you just wait a minute, please.”

  Ori didn’t seem to pick up on the prickliness. “You’re going to have to go to the bank first thing in the morning. I paid Maxine out of petty cash and there’s hardly anything left.”

  “What happened to the fifty I gave you yesterday?”

  “I just told you. I paid Maxine with that.”

  “You paid her fifty dollars? How long was she here?”

  “Well, you needn’t take that tone. She come at ten and didn’t leave till four and she never set down once except to eat her lunch.”

  “I bet she ate everything in sight.”

  Ori seemed offended. “I hope you don’t begrudge the poor woman a little bite of lunch.”

  “Mother, she worked six hours. What are you paying her?”

  Ori, uneasy on this point, began to pluck at the covers. “You know her son has been sick, and she says she doesn’t see how she can keep cleaning for six dollars an hour. I told her we could go to seven.”

  “You gave her a raise?”

  “Well, I couldn’t very well tell her no.”

  “Why not? That’s ridiculous. She’s slow as molasses and she does shitty work.”

  “Well, pardon me, I’m sure. What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing’s wrong! I’ve got problems enough. The rooms upstairs were a mess, and I had to do two of them again ���”

  Ori cut in. “That’s no reason to snap at me. I told you not to hire the girl. She looked like some kind of foreigner with that black hair braided down the back.”

  “Why do you do this? The minute I walk in the door, you’re all over me. I’ve asked you and asked you to give me time to catch my breath! But oh no… whatever you want is the most important thing in the world.”

  Ori shot me a look. This was the kind of treatment a sick old woman was subjected to. “I was just trying to help,” she said, her voice quavering.

  “Oh stop that!” Ann said. She left the room in exasperation. A moment later, we could hear her in the kitchen banging drawers and cabinet doors. Ori wiped at her eyes, making certain I noticed how upset she was.

  “I have to make a phone call,” I murmured, and eased out of the room before she could enlist my support.

  I went upstairs, feeling out of sorts. I had never worked for such unpleasant people in my life. I locked myself in my room and lay down on the bed, too exhausted to move and too unsettled to sleep. The tensions of the day were piling up, and I could feel my head begin to pound from the lack of sleep. Belatedly, I realized I’d never eaten lunch. I was starving. “God,” I said aloud.

  I got out of bed, stripped, and headed for the shower. Fifteen minutes later, I was dressed in fresh clothes and on my way out. Maybe a decent dinner would help get me back on track. It was absurdly early, but I never eat at a fashionable hour anyway, and in this town the concept would be wasted.

  Floral Beach has a choice of restaurants. There’s the pizza parlor on Palm Street, and on Ocean, there’s the Breakwater, the Galleon, and the Ocean Street Cafe, which is open for breakfast only. A line was already forming outside the Galleon. I gathered the Early Bird Special drew crowds from as far away as two blocks. The sign indicated “Family-Style Dining,” which means no booze is served and there are shrieking kids on booster seats banging spoons.

  I pushed into the Breakwater, heartened by the notion of a full bar. The interior was a mix of nautical and Early American: maple captain’s chairs, blue-and-white-checked cloths on the tables, candles in fat red jars encased in the kind of plastic webbing it’s fun to fiddle with while you talk. Above the bar, fishing nets were draped across the wooden spokes of a ship’s wheel. The hostess was dressed in a mock pilgrim’s costume, which consisted of a long skirt and a tight bodice with a low-cut neckline. She had apparently donned an Early American push-up bra because her perky little breasts were forced together like two pattypan squash. If she leaned over too far, one was going to pop right out. A couple of guys at the bar kept an eye on her, hoping against hope.

  Aside from those two, the pl
ace was nearly deserted and she seemed relieved to have some business. She seated me in the no-smoking section, which is to say between the kitchen and the pay phone. The menu she handed me was oversized, bound with a tasseled cord, and featured steak and beef. Everything else was deep-fried. I was wrestling with the choice of ‘plump shrimp, litely battered & served with our chef’s own secret sause,’ or ‘tender sea scallops, batter-coated, litely saut��ed and served with a zesty sweet ‘n’ sour dip,’ when Dwight Shales materialized at my table. He looked as if he’d showered and changed clothes, too, in preparation for a big, hot night on the town.

  “I thought that was you,” he said. “Mind if I sit down?”

  “Be my guest,” I said, indicating the empty seat. “What’s the story here? Should I have eaten at the Galleon?”

  He pulled out a chair and sat down. “The same people own both.”

  “Well, then, how come the line’s so long over there, and this place is empty?”

  “Because it’s Thursday and the Galleon offers free barbecued ribs as an appetizer. The service is always lousy, so you’re not missing anything.”

  I surveyed the menu again. “What’s good here?”

  “Not much. All the seafood is frozen and the chowder comes out of cans. The steak is passable. I order the same thing every time I come. Filet mignon, medium rare, with a baked potato, tossed salad with bleu cheese, and apple pie for dessert. If you have two martinis up front, you’ll think it’s the fourth best meal you ever ate. Up from that is any quarter pounder with cheese.”

  I smiled. He was flirting, a hitherto unsuspected aspect of his personality. “You’re joining me, I hope.”

  “Thanks. I’d like that. I hate to eat alone.”

  “Me, too.”

  The waitress appeared and we ordered drinks. I confess I was curing my fatigue with a martini on the rocks, but it was quick and efficient and I enjoyed every minute of it. While we talked, I did a covert assessment of him. It interests me how people’s looks change as you get to know them. The first flash is probably the most accurate, but there are occasions when a face undergoes a transformation that seems almost magical. With Dwight Shales, there seemed to be a more youthful persona submerged in a fifty-five-year-old shell. His hidden self was becoming more visible to me as he talked.