“I’ve talked with him,” I said. “Only a week or so ago.”
“He’s dead,” she screamed at me. “Goddamn it, my father is dead. He died when I was little and he left me with my mother.”
She drank off the rest of her drink as the echoes of her scream were rattling around the hotel room, and then she pitched suddenly forward and passed out, facedown on the floor. I reached down and took the burning cigarette from her hand and put it out in an ashtray. Chollo came around the bar, and he and I picked her up and carried her into the bedroom. We put her on her back, on her bed. I put the spread over her and we left her there and carne back out into the living room.
“Lushes,” Chollo said. “Lushes are crazy.”
Del Rio was where we had left him, sitting still with his hands clasped behind his head.
“Know anything about her father?” I said.
“She told me he left when she was a kid. Coulda meant he died. I took it to mean he just left,” del Rio said. “Who’s this guy you talked to?”
“Guy named Bill Zabriskie, her agent put me onto him.”
“She sure threw a wingding when you said he was alive,” del Rio said.
“Yeah,” I said. “You got someone to run an errand?”
Del Rio nodded. “Chollo,” he said, “tell Bobby Horse to come here.”
Chapter 37
WHEN Jill woke up it was late, nearly midnight. She must have felt like someone’s leftover meal when she stumbled out of the bedroom. Chollo had black coffee and a carafe of orange juice sent up. Jill drank both and smoked a cigarette before she said a word. Her face was pale, and her hair was matted from sleeping on it, and there was a wrinkle grooved into her cheek by a fold in the pillow cover.
“Got some brandy?” she said. Chollo came around the bar and poured some into her coffee. She sipped it.
“Ahh,” she said. “Hair of the dog that bit you.” Del Rio was still there, and so was I. Chollo was in place behind the bar.
“Want something to eat?” del Rio said in his clear voice.
Jill shivered.
“God, no,” she said. She looked at her reflection in the now-dark window. “Jesus,” she said. “Am I a mess.”
“Somebody here to see you,” I said.
“Like this?” Jill said. Her hand shook as she lifted her coffee cup, and she slopped a little of the brandy laced coffee onto her lap. She brushed absently at it with her free hand.
“Be all right,” I said. “You look fine.” Del Rio raised his voice only slightly. “Bobby Horse,” he said.
The Indian opened the door to the other bedroom and came out with Bill Zabriskie. Zabriskie had on the same woven sandals as I’d seen him in. He also had on tan polyester pants and a white Western-style shirt, hanging loose, with one of those little strings held by a silver clasp at the neck.
He squinted a little, as if the light were too bright, and then went and sat carefully down on the edge of one of the armchairs. He looked slowly at Jill without reaction. Jill looked at him the same way.
“Who’s this?” she said.
“What’s your name?” I said to him.
“William Zabriskie.”
“You ever married to a woman named Vera Zabriskie?” I said.
Jill had frozen in her chair, the half-drunk coffee in her right hand. There was stiffness in the outline of her shoulders.
“Sure,” Zabriskie said. He looked at his watch, which he wore on his right wrist. It was a cheap black plastic one, the kind where the wristband is built into the watch, and if you want, you can set lap times in the stopwatch mode. “Are you police?”
“You have a daughter?” I said.
“Yes. A famous TV star, her name is Jill Joyce now.”
“What was her name?”
“Jillian. Jillian Zabriskie,” he said. “Why do you keep asking me these things?”
Jill dropped the coffee cup. It broke on the floor and coffee stained the rug. No one paid any attention.
“You see her in the room anywhere?” I said.
Zabriskie looked at Jill, as if he hadn’t noticed her before. He squinted even though the light was good. “That looks like her.”
I turned to Jill. She had shrunk back into her chair, her knees drawn up toward her chest, her arms hugging her elbows in against her. Her skin seemed drawn tight over the bones of her face. Her breath rasped in and out as if her windpipe had rusted.
“It’s Him, ” she gasped. Her voice was very hoarse. “You’re dead. You have to be dead.”
Zabriskie looked puzzled. “I’m not dead,” he said.
Jill shrank deeper in on herself.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t.” She looked at me. “Don’t let him,” she said. “I don’t want to.” Her voice got a sing-song in it, and the hoarseness faded and it sounded young. “I don’t want to. I don’t want you to do that to me. I don’t like it. Please, Daddy, please. Please.” She began to cry again. “Please.” Zabriskie stared at her blankly.
“Why did you never give me money?” he said. “You are my daughter and you are rich and you never give me money.”
Jill was now in a ball, as tightly coiled in on herself as she could get. She wasn’t crying so much as whimpering, in on herself, like a small child, entirely alone, in terrible trouble. I went over and put my hand on her shoulder and she shrank, if possible, a bit tighter, and then tentatively put up one hand and placed it on mine. Everyone was quiet; the only sound was of Jill’s small whimper.
The Indian said, “Jesus.”
Zabriskie seemed unmoved, in fact he seemed unaware of Jill’s response.
Jill raised her eyes toward me. “It’s Him, ”she said. “He’s the one.”
I nodded and squeezed her shoulder a little. “You need money,” I said to Zabriskie.
“Twenty-five years I worked there, and they let me go, when I got old.”
“Where’d you work?”
“Weldon Oil, night security.”
“Carry a gun?”
“Certainly.”
I nodded.
“What’d Jill do when you asked her for money?”
“Never a chance to ask. Miss Movie Star wouldn’t see me.”
“You write her?”
“Yes. ”
“Go to see her agent?”
“Yes. She’s rich. Yet she won’t give her own father anything?”
I nodded again.
“Go to Boston to try and see her?”
“Went right to the set. Sent her a note. She never answered it.”
“Tough,” I said, “to be that desperate and that close.”
“Miss Movie Star,” he said.
“Maybe when she dies you’ll collect,” I said. “There don’t seem to be a lot of heirs.”
“At my age?” he said.
“Oh,” I said.
“Right.”
“You fly to Boston?” I said.
“Bus,” he said. As if the idea that he could afford to fly was as insane as suggesting he could fly there by flapping his arms.
“Long ride?”
“Three days,” he said.
“Pack the gun in your luggage or carry it on?”
“Packed… what gun?” His empty eyes got smaller. “Why you asking me this?”
“No reason,” I shrugged. “Just knew you’d brought a three fifty-seven with you and wondered if it was a problem getting it cross country.”
“No,” he said.
I could feel a great sadness settling in on me. “You left-handed?” I said.
His eyes were very beady now, shrunk to suspicious points of hostility. I could feel Jill’s hand press down on mine. She had stopped whimpering. Chollo behind the bar, the Indian, del Rio, all were motionless, some kind of frozen tapestry, silent witness to something awful being dragged into the light.
“What about it,” he said.
“Nothing, just noticed you wore your watch on the right wrist, and I wondered. Once a detective, always a detective.” I smiled my big friendly smile, old Pop Spenser, just a chatty guy, making small talk with an old man. How charming.
“I got a license for that gun,” Zabriskie said. He was in trouble and dimly he knew it. He should have shut up, but the really stupid ones don’t.