That evening while Rosemary talked enthusiastically about art, especially Belle’s, Chris just sat there looking at her with a wry smile. Later, more booze, and Chris confessed his disdain for most of the Laguna artists. He said they were worse than he’d feared. He said they could learn a lot from Belle, and from Art 101. He would consider her for a group show. You can imagine what that meant to her-it would be a huge leap in her career.
Starting then, Christopher began flirting with Belle more openly, as if he’d purchased her attention. He continued to treat Rosemary like something stuck to his shoe. I observed and tolerated this. For a while.
A month later, Chris came down without Rosemary and arranged to take Belle to dinner at a hot new restaurant in Newport Beach. Hip to this play, Belle and I decided she should go anyway. She did. Dinner was good. After, he said they should have port at the Four Seasons because they had a good list, so she followed him across town in her car. Of course after the port he invited her to his suite. Belle said she was spoken for and I wasn’t a half-bad guy, which, to tell the truth, was a higher opinion than I deserved. He blushed and smiled. After dessert he walked her across that nice lobby toward the valet and put an arm around her and whispered in her ear that her talent was nothing compared to her tits and ass, and she’d be better off selling trinket paintings to tourists in Laguna than having her work blown off the walls of the McFall by painters a thousand times better than she was, and he squeezed her butt and left her at the valet stand.
She told me all this when she came home that night, humiliated and furious.
I drove up to the Four Seasons and called Chris on the hotel phone, said I was Rudy the valet, and it looked as if somebody had keyed his Jag. Chris said, so what, it’s just a fuckin’ rental car, and I said, suit yourself, sir, but we either have to file a report with Newport Beach PD or get a sign-off from you so the rental agency won’t-
So Christopher Thomas, a take-charge guy, slammed down the room phone in my ear.
I bet myself it would take him less than two minutes to make the concierge desk. It took him a minute and a half. By the time he saw me, it was too late-I snagged him by his ear like a five-year-old and dragged him outside. Must have looked funny, a guy in a $2,000 cream silk suit led by the ear through the Four Seasons lobby, bent over, hands waving, whining about lawyers and damages and having me put back in prison for the rest of my life.
Outside, past the valet stand, I tripped him onto his back and held him there with my foot while I got Belle on the cell. I could feel his heart beating through my boot. I gave Chris the phone and told him he might want to apologize to my wife. On impulse I grabbed one of his ankles and dragged him through the flower bed that runs along the Four Seasons entryway, through the peonies and Iceland poppies and ranunculus and God knows what else that was planted there that week, Chris bouncing along, babbling away to Belle. I could hear her pleading with me to stop, but I wouldn’t. He made a fairly convincing apology. Security was there by then so I dropped his leg and grabbed my phone and backed away to my car with the rent-a-goon yapping on his walkie-talkie, his voice high and his eyes big, not much of an intimidator, and half an hour later I was home with Belle.
I should have felt a little bit better about the world but I didn’t.
So, you can imagine that the cops had some questions for me a year later when Chris’s body showed up in an iron maiden torture device housed in a Berlin museum.
Such as, where was I on the night he disappeared? (Twenty miles off the coast of San Francisco, coincidentally, hanging out with a friend.)
Such as, why had I assaulted Chris at the Four Seasons? (It seemed like the right thing to do.)
Such as, tell us about your time in Corcoran State Prison (a deuce for forgery and resisting arrest).
And who were my friends? And what about my job as a bouncer at a Laguna nightclub? And my relationship with Belle. That was the hardest thing for them to understand. How a con like me could win the heart of a woman like Belle-beautiful and kind and talented and hotly pursued. I told them the truth: I had no idea how.
That was true back then. Still is.
But Belle had a secret: a commitment she’d made to Rosemary. I knew that much. She told me it was better I didn’t know, and I didn’t push, I respected her wishes.
“It’s up to you, Belle,” I said. “You want to go to the memorial, pay your respects to Rosie, that’s good. The downside is the art-world phonies. But I’ll be your escort. I’ll be your man. I’ll mind my manners and dress real sharp. I’ll throw my coat over the San Francisco mud holes for you, and I’ll take you to good restaurants and I’ll make love to you any chance I get.”
“Business as usual.” She tried to smile but I could see the worry in her eyes.
“I’d rather stay home and spearfish. I missed a thirty-six-inch halibut yesterday, but I’ll go.”
“You’ve been brooding over that fish for about twenty-four hours, Don.” She smiled and shook her head. You look up beautiful smile in the dictionary, they show you a picture of Belle’s. “I need to go,” she said. “I made a promise. And I don’t have any trouble at all with Tony Olsen.”
I said nothing, tamping down my envy of a handsome billionaire my wife didn’t have any trouble with at all. I’m a jealous husband and I admit it. There was no real reason for me to humiliate Chris Thomas all those years ago, other than to smooth my ego, which had commanded me to make things right for Belle, to get her art shown, to make this McFall thing happen. When Chris rejected her, he became my enemy. So I escalated. It’s a prison thing. You escalate before you get escalated upon. My only regret when I got home that night from the Four Seasons was that I hadn’t escalated enough.
“We’ll take the truck,” I said.
“So you can dive Morro Bay and Point Arena.”
“That thought comes to mind.”
“And the Farallons?”
“I did that for Rusty.”
The Farallon Islands off San Francisco are the most dangerous place on earth to dive. They’re crawling with white sharks, the water is cold, the visibility is poor. Death can get its teeth into you before you even know what’s happening. If the sharks don’t get you, the currents will. The rocks are sharp as razors and there’s not even a place to moor a boat for landing. It reminded me of what I’d seen in the fucking art world-sharks and teeth.
Rusty was an old friend, a brave and sometimes crazy man who was still making his meager living diving for urchins in that lethal water. He saved my life at Corcoran, and I will do almost anything to save his. He is stuck with me for life, and I with him.
I went to the South Farallons with Rusty the day Christopher Thomas went missing. Rusty and I made the rugged crossing that night and dove for urchin in the morning. I was forty feet down when a white shark emerged from the unfathomable darkness, came at me, and veered back into the darkness. I remember his teeth, the swatch of underside white. I realized, again, that miracles happen daily. We got six hundred pounds that day, not too bad, better quality than the Japanese can find, top dollar for Rusty.
The cops found this story hard to believe. A felon’s alibi is rarely considered airtight, especially when corroborated by another felon.
“If you can survive the art snobs,” I said, “I can survive the Farallons.”
She looked at me, then went back to work on the canvas, a troubled look clouding her beautiful face.
We ate dinner outside that night in honor of the first day of summer, even though the clouds had deepened and brought a chill to the night. We’ve got an old picnic table in the backyard, set up under a coral tree. There’s a barbecue and a hammock. The kids, Jimmy and Elsa, were already inside working on the dishes and feeding scraps to the dogs. They don’t know about me yet. There will be a time for that. I could see them through the windows, standing in front of the kitchen sink in the yellow light, innocent, full of life and promise.