“My birthday? Last August. August ninth. I turned thirty. How’d you feel when you turned thirty?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I think it was just another day.”
“How about forty?”
“Forty. Well, forty wasn’t so hot.”
“Where were you?”
“In jail. In Africa.”
“What’d you do?”
“On my fortieth birthday?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I think I cried,” he said. “In fact, I’m pretty sure I did.”
“Did you do that much? Cry, I mean.”
“No,” Citron said. “Only that once.”
They drove in silence for nearly a minute until she broke it with a question. “Did he say anything about me?”
“Your father?”
Velveeta Keats nodded as she stared straight ahead, her jaw clenched, her hands wrapped tightly around the wheel. Her sudden tension was almost palpable, and Citron at first thought it might be because she feared the car, but then he realized she wasn’t a good enough driver to be afraid of the car. His answer was really what she feared. He answered carefully.
“We talked about you quite a lot, your father and I.”
“He tell you I made all that up about me and Cash, you know, going to bed together?”
“He said your brother died when you were seven and he was, I think, nine.”
“My old man,” she said slowly, choosing each word with care, “is a fucking liar.”
“I see.”
“Jimmy — I told you about him — he was my husband?”
“Right. Maneras, wasn’t it? Jaime Maneras, the one whose family used to own all the milk in Cuba.”
Nodding again, she said, “Well, it was just like I told you. Jimmy caught us in bed and shot Cash dead. With a pistol. Then Papa killed Jimmy, or had him killed, I reckon, and they shipped me off out here to be a widow woman.”
“When was all this?” Citron said. “I don’t think you said.”
“Last spring. June. The first part of June.”
“Did you ever know anyone else called Maneras whose first name started with an R?”
She gave her head a small hard shake. “The only other Maneras I ever knew was Jimmy’s brother, Bobby.”
“Roberto, maybe?”
She took her eyes off the road to look at him. “Yeah, that would be his real name, wouldn’t it? But nobody I ever knew called him that. Everybody always calls him Bobby.”
“What did Bobby do?”
“He did coke with Jimmy and Papa. I told you about all that, didn’t I?”
“Not about Bobby.”
“He’s older’n Jimmy was. Five, maybe six years older.”
“Where is he now?”
“In Miami, I reckon. At least, he was the last I heard. Why?”
“Somebody mentioned his name to me.”
“Papa?”
“No, not him.”
“Did he, Papa, I mean, did he, well, say anything else about me — anything at all?”
“He said for me to tell you hello,” Citron paused only briefly before deciding to embellish the father’s sketchy greeting to his exiled daughter. “And to give you his love.”
Again, Velveeta turned to stare at him, disbelief on her face and in her tone. “He really say that?”
“Watch the road,” Citron said, and added, “He really did.”
They had dinner in the front parlor at Vickie’s, which was the name of an expensive restaurant on the south edge of Santa Monica. The menu claimed, in a small italic note, that Vickie’s was named for the Victorian mansion in which it was housed, a sixteen-room structure built in 1910 and painstakingly moved in 1977 from Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles to its present location, where it had been, according to the note, “lovingly restored.”
Velveeta Keats read all this to Citron as they waited for the waiter to return and take their order.
“If it was built in nineteen-ten,” she said, “then it really couldn’t be Victorian, could it? She died before that, didn’t she? Queen Victoria, I mean.”
“Nineteen-oh-one, I think.”
“Then it’s Edwardian, isn’t it? And instead of Vickie’s they oughta be calling it Eddie’s.”
Velveeta Keats’s small attempt at humor, the first that Citron could recall, transformed her. She smiled broadly and her eyes half closed into arcs through which something merry slyly peeped. She even laughed, although it was really no more than a chuckle that sounded seldom used, but not at all rusty. Gone was the somber poor-thing look, as Citron thought of it, and in its place appeared a look of near radiance that was not too far from beauty.
Still smiling, she looked at him and said, “You know what I used to do a lot? I used to giggle a lot.”
He smiled back. “You should take it up again.”
Her smile went away, but slowly, as she picked up the menu again and studied it. “Maybe I will,” she said, looked up, smiled again, and asked, “Would it be okay if I had the sole?”
The sole proved to be excellent, as did Citron’s steak, and between them they finished off a bottle and a half of wine. When the coffee came, she declined a brandy and, bare tanned elbows on the table, leaned toward Citron. The wine, or perhaps the evening, had given her face a higher color that was more glow than flush. Her eyes also shined with something, either pleasure or excitement or possibly anticipation. Citron felt it might even be all three.
“Can I talk to you about something?” she said. “Something I maybe should’ve talked to you about before?”
“Sure.”
“It’s about last night when you came with the flowers and those two men were there.” She paused. “Can I talk to you about that?”
“I don’t see why not — if you want to.”
“Well, they came up over the balcony from the beach and in through the sliding doors. They had those wet suits on and their masks and they had the gun, of course. Well, they didn’t say anything.”
“Nothing?”
“Not to me — not a word. One of them just pointed the gun at me and the other one, he just kept looking at his watch like, well, you know, like he was waiting for somebody.”
“Then I knocked.”
She nodded. “Then you knocked and came in and threw the flowers at them. They could’ve shot you.”
“I know.”
“But they didn’t. All they did was leave. Then I got real scared and you were so great and everything, and I just never said anything about them just — you know — waiting for you. I reckon I should’ve, shouldn’t I — said something?”
Citron smiled. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe. But then again, maybe not.”
“Well, I’ve said something now. Does that make it all right?”
“That makes it perfect,” Citron lied, trying to determine what it was that caused the cold prickling on the back of his neck. Apprehension? he wondered. Dread? And then he realized it was neither. It was something far simpler, far more elemental, and so familiar that Citron almost said hello. It was fear.
Chapter 20
It had taken two men from Bekins Moving and Storage to carry the thing up the stairs and into Draper Haere’s enormous room. The men, irritated because they had to work so late, were gone now, mollified by the twin $20 bills that had been thrust into their hands by the white-haired man in the $800 suit who watched, grinning broadly, as Draper Haere slowly circled the seven-foot-tall hatrack.
It was made from black cherry with two deep dishlike cast-iron weights at the bottom where the tips of wet umbrellas could be left to drain. Two beveled arms reached out and curved in on themselves. The curved arms were there to embrace the umbrellas. The main support, all scalloped and nicely carved, held an oval mirror. Surrounding the mirror were six protruding twisted steel pegs that ended in china knobs. On these, coats and hats could be hung. It was an imposing, even dominating piece of furniture, completely ugly, and Draper Haere found it magnificent.