“Who the hell’re you?” he growled.
“I’m Rush Limbaugh. Who the hell’re you?”
“I don’t know you.”
“I’m taking a poll to see who’s listening to the Asshole Radio Network. Maybe you’d better get out of my way.”
“Maybe what I’ll do is come down there and kick your ass.”
“Maybe what you’ll do is shit, if you eat enough.”
He started to launch himself off the porch. He balked, almost slipped, and stood tottering at the top.
Then he came, with too little too late. His pal yelled, “Look out, Coleman, he’s got a gun!” and he balked again, missed his step, and splashed face-first in the mud.
I went around him in a wide circle. “So far you boys are terrifying as hell,” I said. He struggled to one knee. I asked if he could sing “April Showers.” I hate to waste a line like that, but I know he didn’t get it. I walked past him, close enough for him to grab my leg, but he didn’t. I knew he wouldn’t. By the time I got Amy to open the door, they were gone.
Amy stood at the window and watched them go. It was the last vestige of her childhood, the beginning of a long and wonderful and fearsome journey.
“ C’est la vie ,” she said to the fading day.
I thought about the woman in Irwin Shaw’s great story of the eighty-yard run. I told Amy to read it sometime and take heart.
She had never heard of Shaw. I felt a twinge of sadness, not only for the fleeting nature of fame but of life itself. I told her what a powerhouse Shaw had been when he was young, and how the critics had come to hate him and had made him the most underrated writer of his day. She didn’t understand why people would do that, so I explained it to her. Shaw made a lot of money and they never forgive you for that. She asked what the story was about and I said, “It’s about you and the damn fool you married, when you were too young to know better.” I didn’t want to diminish it by telling her any more than that.
We gathered ourselves for the trip to town. I’d be leaving fourteen boxes under Selena Harper’s roof for one more night.
“I don’t think we made much headway,” Amy said.
“We didn’t find Eleanor. Maybe we found you, though.”
She didn’t say anything. She gave me the key and I locked the house. She sank back in the car and closed her eyes, a picture of sudden weariness.
I told her what I had in mind as we drove. “I’m going to call a man who knows all there is to know about this stuff. If I’m right, he’ll want to fly up from Los Angeles and look at it.”
“It’s in your hands. I trust your judgment and I won’t go back on you, whatever you decide to do.”
I pointed out the motel where I’d made the stash. She gave it a polite look and we swung west with the night, into the freeway, into the driving rain.
39
The night was full of surprises. The first came when I called Leith Kenney from Amy’s room at the Hilton. She sat behind me, discreetly nursing her child while I punched in the call.
It rang three times in L.A. and a woman answered.
“Mr. Kenney, please.”
“I’m sorry, he’s not here.”
“Do you know when he’ll be back?”
“I really can’t say.” There was an awkward pause. “He’s gone in to a meeting tonight and it’ll probably run late. Then he’s going out of town.”
I blinked at the phone but recovered quickly. “I’m calling from Seattle.”
“That’s where he’s going. Is this Mr. Pruitt?”
I felt my heart trip. I looked at Amy in the mirror, but she was busy changing breasts and didn’t notice anything.
“Yes,” I said, thinking on my feet. “Yes, it is.”
“Has there been a change of plan? This is Mrs. Kenney. Lee will be calling me when he gets there. I could give him a message.”
“I don’t know…I might have to change things.”
There was a brief silence. It would really help, I thought, if I had the slightest idea what the hell I was talking about.
“Well,” she said, “would you like to leave a message with me?”
“I’ll catch him here. Is he staying at the same hotel?”
“Yes, the Four Seasons. They should get in early tomorrow morning.”
“Is Scofield coming with him?”
“I don’t think you could keep him away, Mr. Pruitt.”
“I’ll see them then. Thanks.”
I hung up and stared at the floor. Pruitt stared back at me.
Amy was looking at me in the glass.
“Something wrong?”
“No,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”
She went across the room and put her children down. I headed for the door and got the second surprise of the night.
“I remembered something today,” she said. “I thought of the man who came and looked in the attic just after Mamma died. His name popped right into my head. I knew I’d forget it again, so I wrote it down.”
She fished in her jeans and came up with a paper. “His name was Otto.”
Again I walked through that cluttered bookstore. I held a bag of Ayn Rand and wondered why the man wasn’t there. I looked up a dark stairwell leading to…what?
“Otto Murdock.”
She looked at me hard. “How’d you know that?”
40
I headed north on the freeway and hoped I’d remember where Murdock’s was. I found it after twenty minutes of trial and error. I arrived on a wave of deja vu. It looked exactly as I’d last seen it—the same dim light shone from deep in the building, the same open sign was propped in the window and tilted at the same slight angle—even the rain was the same, as if the world had turned back on its axis and erased the last seventy-two hours. I pushed open the door and called his name. There was no sound. If any customers had come in since last Friday night, they had left no evidence of their presence. They had come, looked, and left as we had, perhaps with a slight sense of unease. Those who knew Murdock would figure it as another bout with demon rum: the others would mind their own business.
I crossed the store and looked in the back room. Everything was the same…the dim light in the corner…the rolltop desk with its piles of magazines and papers…the canvas briefcase pushed off to one side with my note still taped to the handle…the rickety stacks of books and the thick carpet of dust, undisturbed where we hadn’t walked and already filming over where we had. I followed our three-day trail across the room and into the stairwell. I looked up into the black hole and called him, but I knew he wasn’t going to be inviting me up. My voice felt heavy, like a man shouting into a pillow.
I touched the bottom of the stair with my foot. I leaned into it, took a deep breath, got a firm hold on my gun, and started up. The light faded quickly: there was none at all after the fifth step and I had to go by feel, knowing only that the next step would be onward and upward. I had a sense of movement coming from somewhere… music! . . . and now the feeling that it had all happened before was as sharp as a scream. I planted each foot, letting my fingers slip along the inner edge of the wooden banister and guide me up. Don’t screw up again , I was thinking: don’t make the same mistake twice .
Now I could hear the melody, some classical piece on a radio. I saw a thin line of light…the crack at the bottom of a door. It dropped below eye level as I climbed higher, and a kind of sour dampness lay over the top. And I knew that smell, better than the people of Seattle knew the rain. In my old world it came with the smell of Vicks, the stuff homicide cops use to help them get through the bad ones.