Almost subliminally, I heard the squeaking of my front gate and I looked up from the paper. The arrow on my inner sensor whipped into the red zone. I set the paper aside and went to the front door, where I flipped on the porch light and looked out through the porthole. Marvin Striker appeared on my doorstep, looking impish and ill at ease.
I opened the door. “What are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“How’d you know where I lived?”
“I asked Diana Alvarez. She knows everything. You might keep that in mind in case something comes up. May I come in?”
“Why not?” I said. I stepped aside, allowing him to enter.
“Mind if I sit down?”
I gestured at the seating in my wee living room. His choices were the sofabed or one of my two royal blue director’s chairs. He choose one chair and I sat down in the other, which caused both our canvas seats to make embarrassing noises.
I wasn’t feeling cranky with the man, but I didn’t think I should act like we were still the same good buddies we’d been before he’d tried to fire my ass. “What can I do for you?”
“I owe you an apology.”
“Really.”
He reached into his inner suit-coat pocket and pulled out a windowed envelope with a yellow strip across the bottom. The return address in the upper left-hand corner of the envelope was the Wells Fargo Bank in San Luis Obispo, complete with a tiny stagecoach. I took the envelope and read the name of the recipient. Audrey Vance. The yellow strip indicated a change of address from the little house in San Luis to Marvin’s in Santa Teresa. Vivian Hewitt had apparently filled out a form at the post office, forwarding Audrey’s mail to him as I’d asked her to do. He’d already torn open the envelope.
I said, “May I look?”
“That’s why I brought it. Help yourself.”
The statement was subdivided into numerous blocks of information, some in bold print, including phone numbers available for those who wanted to conduct a conversation in English, Spanish, or Chinese. Other nationalities were screwed. There were also columns giving dollar figures for total assets, total liabilities, available credit, interest, dividends, and other income. All of Audrey’s transactions had been itemized, deposits going back to the first of the year. To date, she had $4,000,944.44 in her account. No withdrawals. I was impressed by how quickly the minimal interest on four million added up.
“I don’t think she got that much money managing wholesale accounts,” he remarked.
“Probably not.”
“I wondered if you’d consider taking up your investigation where you left off?”
“Well, now, Marvin, that presents a problem, and I’ll tell you what it is. Your good friend and confidant Len Priddy threatened to hurt me very badly if I pursued the case.”
A flicker of a smile played across his mouth as though he was waiting for the punch line to a joke. “What do you mean, he threatened you?”
“He said he’d kill me.”
“But not literally. He didn’t actually say the words…”
“He did.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a wash of light slide across the windows looking out on the street. I’d closed the lower set of shutters, which were hinged and had a little stick in the middle that adjusted the slats at an up slant, a down slant, or completely closed. The bottom bank was fully closed, but I’d left the uppers open. A car had come to a stop outside, double-parked by my reckoning since I could hear the engine idle.
While Marvin and I explored the subtleties of language, I was wondering if a brick was going to come flying through the glass. Perhaps a Molotov cocktail refuting Marvin’s point about my misunderstanding Len’s comment, which Marvin swore was made in jest. I assured him of the seriousness of Len’s intent and moved on to my definition of common sense, which was to cease and desist behavior that might result in bodily harm. He derided my being so easily intimidated whereas I felt the promise of death was sufficient to dash any residual bravery on my part. It was when I caught the tiny squeak of my gate that I excused myself, saying, “Would you excuse me?”
“No problem.”
I left him sitting in my living room while I grabbed Henry’s key and headed out the door and across the patio to his place. The timer in his living room caused the lights to wink off and two seconds later, his bedroom light winked on. This was intended to persuade folks that he was in residence and on his way to bed. I let myself into the darkened kitchen and crossed the room in three long strides. I opened the door to the hall. “Pinky?”
His picnic tray was pushed to one side and I noticed he’d eaten everything. He hadn’t yet made up his homely pallet on the floor. Instead, he’d pulled the telephone from the kitchen into the hall, stretching the spiral cord to its full extension. This permitted him to close the hall door and thus keep himself judiciously confined to the inner recesses of Henry’s house. The bathroom door was shut. I knocked, not wanting to surprise him if he was settled on the toilet with his trousers down around his ankles.
I leaned my head against the door. “Pinky, are you in there?”
I opened the door to an empty bathroom. I turned and took two steps, reaching for the knob on the door between the hall and the darkened living room. This allowed me a clear view through the front windows where a taxi cab was pulling away, a brightly lighted yellow blur against the dark outside, as it moved out of my view. The passenger silhouetted in the rear seat looked very much like Pinky to me.
28
I backed the Mustang out of the driveway, shifted from reverse into drive, and peeled out with a screech of tires that sounded like I’d just run over a cat. Marvin stood on the street and watched me with disbelief. I’d hustled him out of my studio with only the briefest of excuses. Poor, sweet man. He’d come, hat in hand, humbling himself in order to persuade me to go back on the job, but I was anxious about Pinky’s disappearance and I couldn’t afford to stop and renegotiate. By my calculation, Pinky had a five-minute head start on me, and I’d have been willing to bet he was heading for home. Dodie couldn’t have called him because she didn’t know where he was. If the two had been in contact, he’d have had to call her. Given the total population of the Earth at that time, there were other possibilities. He might have contacted any one of the millions of other human beings who were stretched around the globe, but since he’d been so insistent on touching base with her, my supposition made sense. Why he’d called a cab and dashed off without telling me, I hoped to find out when I caught up with him. Whatever his motivation, he must have believed I wouldn’t buy into it and therefore he hadn’t wanted to risk informing me.
My apartment near the beach was approximately twelve blocks from Pinky’s duplex on Paseo, a mile and a half at most. The speed limit on most residential streets was thirty-five miles an hour. I didn’t want to think about stop signs and red lights and other automotive impediments that would slow my progress. I kept a heavy foot on the gas pedal, checking cross streets for approaching vehicles before I sailed through each intersection. I didn’t run any red lights but I came close. I was acutely tuned to the risk of black-and-whites in the area, being not that far away from the police department.
I headed north on Chapel, which at that hour didn’t have much traffic, so I was making good time. I didn’t see the problem until I was right up on it, preparing to turn left on Paseo. A barrier had been erected. A row of orange cones was neatly set out in front of six sections of portable fence, replete with a sign that said ROAD CLOSED TO THROUGH TRAFFIC. I debated an act of civil disobedience. Instead, I continued up Chapel, thinking to turn left at the next cross street, which was also blocked. This felt like a cruel hoax, but was more likely part of a public-works rehabilitation project relegated to off-hours instead of a plot cooked up specifically to inconvenience me. At the next block up, the street was open but marked one-way, the arrow urging me most emphatically to the right when I wanted to turn left. I said to hell with it and turned left anyway, driving the wrong way down a one-way street. At the back of my mind, I was aware that I wasn’t exactly stone-cold sober. Less than an hour before, I’d had a glass of wine-six ounces by my guess, but possibly eight-with my sandwich. At my height and body weight, I was flirting with the legal limit for blood alcohol content. I was probably under the.08 threshold, but if a cop stopped me for a moving violation, I might well be required to go through a whole song-and-dance routine. Even if I wasn’t compelled to submit breath or body fluids, a traffic ticket would take more time than I could spare.