“Sure. Sure.” She seemed distracted.
“Is there anybody else in the house?”
“No, no. Just me. Just us.”
“You want coffee?”
“Sounds good.”
So I went downstairs and primed Mister Coffee and then went into the living room to look at the place I’d last seen on videotape. I don’t know why I thought there should be some sign, some evidence of what had happened. It had been three months, and of course there was no reminder at all. I went down on one knee, patting the shag rug where Delia’s drink had fallen when the imitation Ross punched her. It had been washed, naturally.
“Lose a contact lens?”
I looked up, and Doreen was coming down the stairs, wearing the blouse and jeans from the bed. She looked fragile but tough-minded, the spunky girl in the sentimental movie about horses, or orphans. “Just patting the rug,” I told her, rising. “I think the coffee’s ready.”
She frowned at the rug, but tacitly agreed not to make a point of it. We went into the kitchen and I poured the coffee while she got milk from the refrigerator. “Let’s sit on the deck,” she said.
We did. On this side of the house one was almost alone. Tall wooden fences echoing the style of the fence out by the road marched down the property lines on both sides, extending nearly to the sea. The traffic noise of Route 1 was either muffled by distance or absorbed within the constant shuffle and slush of the surf. Ross’s boat, the Go Project, bobbed in the sunlight off shore. The dinghy was pulled up almost to the house and tied by a long rope to one of the deck supports.
Doreen was like Ross’s women, and at the same time not like them. Physically, she was correct, being quite tall and thin, and she’d demonstrated earlier that she could curl her lip with the best of them. But her hair was brown instead of blond and she was somewhat younger than his usual style, probably under twenty-five. Most of Ross’s women look like producers’ ex-wives or the writers of best-selling sex novels, but this one looked like a UCLA student; possibly the daughter of a Santa Barbara dentist.
We sat together on the low wide chairs, half-facing each other and half-facing the sea, and I said, “I’m looking for Ross.”
“I figured that out,” she said. “What do you want him for?”
“I think he’s in trouble,” I said, “and I think his trouble is making trouble for me.”
She almost said something, but then decided not to. I waited, giving her a chance to say it after all, then pushed a little. “Why were you hiding in the closet?”
She brooded at me. “Are you a good friend of his?”
“Ross? I think so. Why?”
She considered her coffee, but didn’t drink any. “I think he’s at his house.”
“I called and got the service. I went there, and got no answer.”
“Something’s going on,” she said.
“Sure. What?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know a thing about it, Mr. — Do I call you Packard, or what?”
“Sam. Why were you hiding in the closet?”
She thought that over very hard, wanting to talk and yet not wanting to talk. Her manner was that of the hip unaffected urban kid, and it was impossible to guess what was underneath; maybe even more of the same. Finally she shrugged, and in a low voice said, “I thought it might be those guys back.”
“What guys?”
She heaved a long sigh, shaking her head, staring out at the sea. “Shit,” she commented. “Ross told me not to say anything to anybody. Shit, I don’t even know anything.”
“What happened?”
“What mostly happened,” she said, “Ross threw me out of the house for a while. Not a fight or anything, he just said I should come live here for a couple of weeks, don’t talk to anybody about it, and he’ll give me a call when I should come back.”
“And then some guys showed up. Who were they?”
“I don’t know, some kind of foreigners. Arabs or Greeks or something. They talked some other language with each other.”
I immediately thought of the guys in the two Impalas. “Tell me about them,” I said.
“They came here night before last. Just walked right in, around ten o’clock. I was watching Channel Five news.”
“Just walked in like me? They knew where the key was?”
“No, they came in this way,” she said, gesturing at the ocean. “They had some kind of boat, I saw it when they left.”
“They came and then they left?”
“There was more to it than that,” she said, and grimaced at some annoying or painful memory. “They came in — I think they thought the house was going to be empty. They were mad that I was here, they argued about it a lot with each other. I yelled at them to get out, I’d call the cops, all the normal stuff, so they slapped me around a little bit and I shut up.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. What she was telling me here with this laconic narration was that until the three guys had come in from the sea, she had always thought she was as tough as her pose, or thought it wasn’t actually a pose but the real Doreen. The three invaders had taken away her belief in her own unflinchable hipness, but hadn’t given her any new mode to replace it. So now she was doing a Hemingway, being stronger in the broken places, except she was trying to do it before the broken places healed. My function then was to pretend she was successful.
She went on, not meeting my eyes directly, in the same flip unemotional style. “They asked a lot of questions, who was I, what was I doing here, when did I last see Ross, all of that, and then two of them stayed down in the living room with me while the third one went upstairs. I heard him on the phone up there.”
“Calling Ross,” I suggested.
“That’s right. Because after a while he hollered down I should get on the extension. I did, and it was Ross.”
“How did he sound?”
“Very scared and very happy. You’re his friend, right? You know how he gets when he doesn’t know what’s gonna happen next.”
“Tap-dancing on the tightrope.”
“That’s right.” She grinned a little. “I like that image. I can see him; that’s perfect for Ross. Tap-dancing on the tightrope.”
“What did he say to you?”
“He said the guys were all right, they were just looking for some stuff he needed, they were helping him in the research on some project.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Sure uh-huh. If those guys were research assistants, Colonel Qadhafi’s a band leader.”
“What else did Ross say?”
“Stay stay stay. Keep my mouth shut. Only a few days more. Lova ya, honey, keep a tight asshole.” She grimaced. “That was good advice anyway.”
“Oh, yeah?”
She looked at me. “What do you think? Wherever those guys come from, there’s two kinds of women, and the good kind stay under lock and key with their whole bodies wrapped in black cloth, maybe even their faces. I’m some Jewish-American tramp in shorts, not married, not a virgin, living with a guy old enough to play golf with my father. Are they going to pass this up? A chance to make a brief male statement about bad girls?”
“Okay,” I said.
“After they finished searching the house, they ran me through a little basic repertoire, nothing kinky, and the only question is, at the end of it are they gonna let me live?”
“I can see how that would be on your mind.”
She picked up her coffee cup, noticed that her hand was shaking, and put it down again. Watching herself do so, she said, “I kept thinking, if I show some response, do they kill me because I’m a whore, or if I show no response, do they kill me because I didn’t give them a good time? I figured I’d rather go out a bitch than a whore, so what they got was already dead. And then they left.”