They went outside the front doors, turned east on Bryant, away from the bright sun. A cool wind was up off the Bay. They went two blocks before Hardy said he did know what it was to be alone.
Celine took that with no response. Then: ‘You must think I’m crazy.’
He grinned tightly. ‘People do crazy things. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re crazy.’
‘It doesn’t?’
Hardy walked a couple more steps. ‘I don’t know, maybe it does.’
It was a little Cuban coffee shop, unnamed, dark as a cave. The table was of finished plywood – there were seven such tables, four with people at them. A Spanish television station whispered from the back corner. The good smell had stopped their walk and brought them inside. They were drinking café con leche made with heated Carnation evaporated milk, sweet.
If you walked in and saw them sitting across from one another, aside from knowing they didn’t belong here in their Anglo clothes and complexions, you would assume many true things about them. Though they didn’t know each other very well, there was a powerful attraction between them. They had to control it by putting the table between them. They weren’t lovers; if they were they’d have moved together. Well, maybe they were in the middle of a fight, but they weren’t acting angry. No, the first call was right. They were getting to something.
The man was leaning forward, hands clenched around the wide, deep coffee cup. He was more than leaning, in fact, more like hunched over, rapt, mesmerized?
She seemed more controlled, but there were giveaways, invitations. She sat sideways to him, very well put together. Her dark suit was muted but a lot of her excellent legs showed, tightly crossed and curled back under her chair. She held her cup lightly in one hand -her other extended out, subtle enough, toward him, there if he wanted it, if he dared take it.
She was doing most of the talking. You would think this might be the day they would do it. From here they’d go to one of their places, or maybe a motel. You could feel it, even halfway across the room.
28
After Dorothy had gone, Jeff Elliot called Parker Whitelaw at the Chronicle and told him his sight had returned -he’d be back at work the next day.
This wasn’t completely true, but Parker wouldn’t have to know it. Most people were ignorant about how MS worked. They could see the results – the weakened limbs, weight loss, lack of coordination – but they had no clue about the way the disease progressed. Jeff thought this was just as well. It was actually to his advantage if Parker thought that whatever had laid him up for a day had now completely passed and he could go back to being the ace reporter he’d been before.
In reality, his sight was still very poor. Yesterday, which had begun in total blackness, had heartened him as some sight, then quite a bit, had returned. But, testing it, he found the left eye still all but worthless, the brown smudge blotting all but its extreme periphery. The right eye was a little better – the range of vision was wider, though all of it was fuzzy. But he thought that he could get by. He didn’t particularly think it would be wise to try and drive, but he could fake the rest.
The doctor had told him that since there had been some almost immediate remission in the total blindness, there was a small chance he could expect gradual improvement with continual steroid treatment. He might even regain normal sight. Maybe.
This morning he called Maury Carter’s office and told Dorothy he really had to go in to work, but he would like to see her tonight as they’d planned.
‘Well, how are you getting to work?’
‘I’ll just take a cab.’
She wouldn’t hear of him taking a cab. She told him she could take some time off – ‘Maury feels terrible about this, too. He’s a nice man underneath’ – and be down there by lunchtime. Would he please wait for her?
‘You don’t have to do this.’
‘Of course, I don’t. Who said I did?’
They let him take a shower and shave. He still had his clothes from two days before, but they were okay, better by far than the gown. Dorothy was there by twelve-thirty and pushed him in a wheelchair out to her car. The morning fog out in the Avenues hadn’t burned off, and the daylight glared. She put his crutches in the trunk and he got himself settled on the passenger side in the front seat. His legs weren’t completely dead yet.
They had sandwiches at Tommy’s Joynt and he got to the office close to four. She left him at the Chronicle’s front door and said she’d be back at six, he’d better be there. She’d kissed him again.
He had a message from an Elizabeth Pullios at the district attorney’s office and the memo line said it was regarding Owen Nash. It brought everything back – the bail question, Hardy and Glitsky, Freeman’s strategy. He hoped he hadn’t missed much in his day away. He returned the call to Pullios and scanned the last two days’ newspapers, turning up his desk light, squinting at the blurry print. After the little blurb on page nine that May had made bail, the story disappeared.
Of course they’d dropped it. Nothing had happened. The court’s decision to schedule the prelim at the end of the summer had taken the wind out of those sails. It was frustrating. Unless he found something about the Freeman/Shinn connection he was going to have to get himself another story, another scoop.
He loved being on a hot story. It changed his whole view of the job, the world. People cared about him, asked his opinion, included him in their jokes. He wasn’t just that crippled guy anymore.
The phone rang and it was Pullios – she didn’t know if he’d heard from Hardy or anyone else, but the grand jury had just indicted May Shinn. The case was going to Superior Court. She just thought he’d like to know.
The grand-jury story was written and submitted. Parker had come by, impressed by the line on the grand jury. Parker said it was good to see a reporter hustling, working his connections. It might be old-fashioned reporting, but it got the best results. By the way, how were the eyes?
Fine. The eyes were fine.
Dorothy was at the curb at six sharp, the door opened and waiting for him. He saw flowers in the backseat, a brown grocery bag with a loaf of French bread sticking out the top.
He lived in a first-floor studio apartment on Gough Street, where it leveled off at the top of one of San Francisco’s famous hills.
‘My, isn’t this cheery,’ she said. The room featured sconced lighting, hardwood floors and a mattress on the floor in one corner. In the other corner there was a stack of old San Francisco Chronicles about three feet high. The white walls were bare except for one black-and-white poster of Albert Einstein, daily reminding Jeff that great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The rest of the furniture consisted of a stool pushed under the overhang of the bar that separated the cooking area from the rest of the room.
Dorothy picked up the mail that was lying on the floor and put it on the bar along with her bag of groceries. She held up the flowers. ‘Any old vase will do,’ she said. ‘Don’t break out the Steuben.’
He loved the way she talked. Not mean, but squeezing out the drop of humor in situations. Like his apartment. He hadn’t wanted to come here, but she’d teased him into it. ‘Didn’t get time to call your girlfriend, huh? Afraid she’ll be mad?’
There’s no girlfriend, Dorothy.‘
‘We’ll see about that.’
Now here they were. She cut the top off a milk carton and poured out the four ounces of sour milk that was left in it – ‘It’s so neat you make your own yogurt’ – and arranged the flowers, a mixed bouquet of daisies, California poppies and daffodils, sitting them at the end of the bar.
She made him chicken breasts with onions and peppers and mushrooms and some kind of wine sauce that they poured over rice. They ate on the floor, their places laid on a blanket from the bed, folded over. When they’d finished, Dorothy pulled herself up and leaned against the wall. She patted her lap.