“You’ll sort of halfway resent that, be just a little mite jealous and be waiting for an opportunity to get me off to one side and alone whenever you have a chance. You think the thing over a little bit and look at it from my viewpoint. Then you’ll see what I mean. I can’t afford to let anyone think I’m holding down another job on the side.”
“Who runs the place?” I asked.
“Shirley Gage,” she said. “She’s the widow of Leroy Willard Gage. She inherited the place and is making more money out of running it than she could by selling it, investing the money and collecting interest. Furthermore, she likes the life. She’ll let the older ones— Well, any of the—”
“Go on and say it,” I said.
“Well, I take care of the younger ones and act as hostess and see that everyone has a good time and gets together, but Shirley gives the older customers a little more of a play.”
“Meaning she’s lonely and looking for companionship?” I asked.
Dolores laughed and said, “Come on, here’s where you turn in to get the cocktails. They usually limit the cocktails to about two to a customer. It depends on the customer and how he can take them. The cocktails aren’t strong but they are free and they’re not too bad. You can have either Manhattans or Martinis.
“Come on, Donald, in we go.”
The room was well lighted with showcases containing Indian artifacts, paintings of the desert, Navajo rugs on the floor, a distinctive Western atmosphere.
There were some twenty people having cocktails, some of them in groups, some of them in twosomes.
Dolores clapped her hands and said, “Attention, everybody, here’s our newest tenderfoot, Donald Lam of Los Angeles.”
She took me by the hand and said, “Come on, Donald.”
It was a remarkable performance. Some of these people she couldn’t have known for more than twenty-four or forty-eight hours, but she was never at a loss for a name. She presented me to each person, went over to the bar with me, saw that I had a cocktail and then started mingling with the others.
It was quite evident that she was a great favorite with the guests, and she was an expert at the job of making them feel good. She’d join a group, enter into the conversation, then manage to leave without appearing to be breaking away, join some other group with a little pleasantry and always with a musical, sexy laugh.
Her dress was tight, her hips were smoothly streamlined and she used just exactly the right amount of slow, swaying motion as she walked. Nothing stiff or rigid; nothing exaggerated, but something about the motion that would arrest a man’s attention.
Now and then some married man would break away from his wife to join the group where Dolores was talking. Whenever that happened, Dolores would find some excuse to leave within a matter of seconds, join some other group, or perhaps gravitate back to the group the man had left and chat naturally and animatedly with the wife.
People talked with me, they asked me about how long I intended to stay and they made guarded inquiries about my background. They weren’t exactly personal to the point of being persistent but they had a mild curiosity.
For the most part, the people were between thirty-five and sixty. The men wore Pendletons, and here and there a face that was an angry red proclaimed a newcomer who had spent too much time in the sunlight.
The talk was largely about climate.
Some of the people came from the Middle West and talked about snowstorms; some of them came from the Coast and talked about smog and cloudiness.
I had my second cocktail, a bell rang and we filed in to dinner.
Dolores had a place for me at a table occupied by a broker from Kansas City, his wife, and a woman artist somewhere in her middle thirties.
We had a substantial dinner, prime ribs of beef, baked potatoes, onion rings, salad, dessert and hot rolls.
After dinner they started card games — bridge, gin rummy and poker. The poker game was a marathon affair, played for low stakes, where each player was trying to demonstrate his superiority.
It was a nice crowd.
Drinks could be ordered and charged on chits.
The artist who had been at the table with me monopolized my evening. She wanted to talk about colors, about creative art, about the menace of modern art, the deterioration of all types of artistic standards and the beauties of Western scenery.
She was lonely, widowed, wealthy and frustrated. She might have made good bait for a malingerer but her approach was too intellectual.
Motion pictures of the man with the whiplash injury diving off a springboard into a swimming pool in order to impress a young thing in a bathing suit would be valuable for a jury, but motion pictures of a guy sitting in a chair by the pool and discussing art with a woman wouldn’t mean a damned thing.
I studied her carefully and decided Dolores was right in saying there was nothing presently available.
The artist’s name was Faith Callison. She told me she did her sketching with a camera and colored films. She had a collection of slides which she would process into paintings later on in the winter in her studio, where she wouldn’t be disturbed or distracted by other people.
“Ever sell your pictures as well as your paintings?” I asked.
She looked at me with sudden sharp interest. “Why do you ask that?”
Actually I had only been making conversation, but there was something in her manner which caused me to make a reappraisal of the situation.
“From what you said,” I told her. “I gathered you took huge quantities of film. I like to take pictures myself, but the cost of the film is a factor I have to consider.”
She gave a quick glance around the room, leaned closer to me, and said, “You know, Mr. Lam, that’s the strangest thing that ever happened, having you put your finger on things that way. Actually I do sell my films — at times.
“You take last season, for instance. I had my eight-millimeter motion-picture camera with the zoom lens. I took pictures of people enjoying themselves and then afterwards I’d ask people if they wanted copies. Of course, I wasn’t peddling films or anything like that. I made it appear that it was just a matter of accommodation from one shutterbug to another. But I did sell quite a bit of film.”
“To people who didn’t have their own cameras?” I asked.
“No,” she said, “most of the sales were made to people who did bring their own cameras. In a place like this, a person who brings a motion-picture camera does so because of a desire to take home impressions of the place. He wants to show the folks back East what a real Western guest ranch looks like.
“Well, of course, if they’re always taking pictures, they naturally can’t appear in the pictures they take. So they love to get a few feet of film showing them against a colorful background.”
“I see,” I said thoughtfully. “I see that you’ve given quite a bit of thought to it.”
She nodded.
“Any big sales?” I asked.
Again she looked at me curiously. “Well... yes. There were two big sales. One was to an insurance company that wanted pictures of a certain man jumping off the diving board, and the other was one of the most peculiar orders I ever had. It was from a lawyer in Dallas. He wanted a copy of every foot of film I had taken on my vacation here on the ranch — just every single foot.
“That’s why I’m here this year. I made enough out of that one sale to more than pay all my expenses this season.”
“Well, my gosh, aren’t you smart!” I said.
Then abruptly she changed the subject and went on to talk about art. I could see that she had become a little afraid she’d told me too much on too short acquaintance.
She told me she was taking up portrait painting and said I had an interesting face. She wanted to know something about my background. I told her I was a bachelor, that I had been too busy to get married, that I had had a long, hard day, excused myself and went to bed.