“Thank you. Thank you very much. I can’t tell you how...”
“Then please don’t. Good-bye.”
He hung up quickly. He didn’t like the sound of Miss Clarvoe’s gratitude spilling out of the telephone, harsh and discordant, like dimes spilling out of a slot machine. The jackpot of Miss Clarvoe’s emotions — thank you very much.
What a graceless woman she was, Blackshear thought, hoarding herself like a miser, spending only what she had to, to keep alive.
Although they communicated quite frequently by letter, he hadn’t seen her since her father’s funeral the previous year. Tall, pale, tearless, she had stood apart from the others at the grave; her only display of feeling had been an occasional sour glance at the weeping widow, Verna Clarvoe, leaning on the arm of her son Douglas. The more tears her mother shed, the more rigid Helen Clarvoe’s back had become, and the tighter her lips.
When the services were over, Blackshear had approached Miss Clarvoe, aware of her mute suffering.
“I’m sorry, Helen.”
She had turned her face away. “Yes. So am I.”
“I know how fond you and your father were of each other.”
“That’s not entirely accurate.”
“No?”
“No. I was fond of him, Mr. Blackshear, not he of me.”
The last time he saw her she was climbing stiffly into the back of the long black Cadillac that was used to transport the chief mourners, Mrs. Clarvoe, Helen and Douglas. They made a strange trio.
A week later Blackshear received a letter from Miss Clarvoe stating that she had moved, permanently, to the Monica Hotel and wished him to handle her investments.
The Monica was the last place in the world he would have expected Miss Clarvoe to choose. It was a small hotel on a busy boulevard in the heart of Hollywood, and it catered not to the quiet solitary women like Miss Clarvoe, but to transients who stayed a night or two and moved on, minor executives and their wives conducting business with pleasure, salesmen with their sample cases, advertising men seeking new accounts, discreet ladies whose names were on file with the bellhops, and tourists in town to do the studios and see the television shows. All the kinds of people Miss Clarvoe would ordinarily dislike and avoid. Yet she chose to live in their midst, like a visitor from another planet.
Blackshear left his car in a parking lot and crossed the street to the Monica Hotel.
The desk clerk, whose name-plate identified him as G. O. Horner, was a thin, elderly man with protuberant eyes that gave him an expression of intense interest and curiosity. The expression was false. After thirty years in the business, people meant no more to him than individual bees do to a beekeeper. Their differences were lost in a welter of statistics, eradicated by sheer weight of numbers. They came and went; ate, drank, were happy, sad, thin, fat; stole towels and left behind toothbrushes, books, girdles, jewelry; burned holes in the furniture, slipped in bathtubs, jumped out of windows. They were all alike, swarming around the hive, and Mr. Horner wore a protective net of indifference over his head and shoulders.
The only thing that mattered was the prompt payment of bills. Blackshear looked solvent. He was smiled at.
“Is there anything I can do for you, sir?”
“I believe Miss Clarvoe is expecting me.”
“Your name, please.”
“Paul Blackshear.”
“Just a moment, sir, and I’ll check.”
Horner approached the switchboard, walking softly and carefully, as if one of his old enemies had scattered tacks on the floor. He talked briefly to the girl on duty, hardly moving his mouth. The girl looked over her shoulder at Blackshear with sullen curiosity and Blackshear wondered if this was the June Sullivan Miss Clarvoe had mentioned in her letter.
Blackshear returned her stare. She was an emaciated blonde with trembling hands and a strained, white face, as if the black leech of the earphones had already drawn too much blood.
Horner bent over her, but the girl leaned as far away from him as she could and started to yawn. Three or four times she yawned and her eyes began to water and redden along the upper lids. It was impossible to guess her age. She could have been a malnourished twenty or an underdeveloped forty.
Horner returned, his fingers plucking irritably at the lapels of his black suit. “Miss Clarvoe didn’t leave any message down here, sir, and her room doesn’t answer.”
“I know she’s expecting me.”
“Oh, certainly, sir, no offense intended, I assure you. Miss Clarvoe frequently doesn’t answer her telephone. She wears earplugs. On account of the traffic noises, a great many of our guests wear...”
“What is the number of her suite?”
“Four twenty-five.”
“I’ll go up.”
“Certainly, sir. The lifts are to your right.”
While he was waiting for a lift, Blackshear glanced back at the desk and saw that Horner was watching him; he had lifted his protective veil of indifference for a moment and was peering out like an old woman from behind a lace curtain.
Blackshear disappeared into the lifts and Mr. Horner lowered his net again, and let the lace curtain fall over his thoughts: that suit must have cost a hundred and fifty dollars... these con men always put up a good appearance... I wonder how he’s going to take her and for how much...
Miss Clarvoe must have been waiting behind the door. It opened almost simultaneously with Blackshear’s knock, and Miss Clarvoe said in a hurried whisper, “Please come in.”
She locked the door behind him, and for a few moments they stood looking at each other in silence across a gully of time. Then Miss Clarvoe stretched out her hand and Blackshear took it.
Her skin was cool and dry and stiff like parchment, and there was no pressure of friendliness, or even of interest, in her clasp. She shook hands because she’d been brought up to shake hands as a gesture of politeness. Blackshear felt that she disliked the personal contact. Skin on skin offended her; she was a private person. The private I, Blackshear thought, always looking through a single keyhole.
The day was warm for November, and Blackshear’s own hands were moist with sweat. It gave him a kind of petty satisfaction to realize that he must have left some of his moisture on her.
He waited for her to wipe her hand, surreptitiously, even unconsciously, but she didn’t. She merely took a step backward and two spots of color appeared on her high cheekbones.
“It was kind of you to go to all this trouble, Mr. Blackshear.”
“No trouble at all.”
“Please sit down. The wing chair is very comfortable.”
He sat down. The wing chair was comfortable enough but he couldn’t help noticing that it, like all the other furniture in the room, was cheap and poorly made. He thought of the Clarvoe house in Beverly Hills, the hand-carved chairs and the immense drawing-room where the rug had been especially woven to match a pattern in the Gauguin above the mantel, and he wondered for the dozenth time why Miss Clarvoe had left it so abruptly and isolated herself in a small suite in a second-rate hotel.
“You haven’t changed much,” Blackshear lied politely.
She gave him a long, direct stare. “Do you mean that as a compliment, Mr. Blackshear?”
“Yes, I did.”
“It is no compliment to me to be told that I haven’t changed. Because I wish I had.”
Damn the woman, Blackshear thought. You couldn’t afford to be nice to her. She was unable to accept a compliment, a gift of any kind; they seemed to burn her like flaming arrows and she had to pluck them out and fling them back with vicious accuracy, still aflame.
He said coldly, “How is your mother?”
“Quite well, as far as I know.”
“And Douglas?”