“No questions,” he said, annoyed. “But it remains Thursday.”
“Very well. Shall I come here to your office?”
“I’ll meet you at three o’clock at the front door of the Monitor-Press building, if that suits you.”
“Isn’t that rather a — conspicuous place to meet?”
“I didn’t know this was to be undercover stuff.”
“It isn’t really. But why advertise it?”
“Wait a minute, Mrs. Harker,” Pinata said, leaning across the desk. “Let’s get this straight. Do you intend to tell your husband and family that you’ve hired me?”
“I hadn’t thought about it. I hadn’t even thought about hiring you or anyone else until I noticed the sign on your door. It seemed like fate, in a way.”
“Oh, Mrs. Harker,” Pinata said very sadly.
“It did, it does. It’s as if I were guided here.”
“Misguided might be a better word.”
Her gaze was cool and stubborn. “You’ve done everything possible to talk yourself out of a job. Why?”
“Because I think you’re making a mistake. You can’t just reconstruct one day, Mrs. Harker. It may turn out to be a whole life.”
“Well?”
“You’ll be kicking over quite a few stones. Maybe you won’t like what you find underneath them.” He stood up, as if he were the one who intended to leave. “Well, it’s your funeral.”
“Wrong tense,” she said. “It was my funeral.”
He went with her to the door and opened it. The long, dim hallway smelled of new rain and old wax.
“By the way,” Daisy added casually, as if she hadn’t been thinking about it at all, “did my father give you his Los Angeles address?”
“He gave the police an address when he was arrested. I copied it off the blotter.” He had it written on the inside of a match folder, which he took out of his pocket and handed to Daisy. “1074 Delaney Avenue West. I wouldn’t bother trying to reach him there, though, if I were you.”
“Why not?”
“There is no Delaney Avenue in Los Angeles.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“But what reason would he have to lie about it?”
“I don’t read minds, palms, or tea leaves. Just street maps. There is no Delaney Avenue in L.A., east or west.”
She was looking at him as if she believed he could have located the missing street if he’d only tried a little harder. “I’ll take your word for it, of course.”
“No need to. Any gas station in town will be happy to supply you with a map of Los Angeles so you can check for yourself. While you’re at it, you might look up the Harris Electrical Supply warehouse on Figueroa Street. Fielding claims to be working there.”
“Claims?”
“Well, there’s no reason to believe he was telling the truth about that, either. I got the impression he’s the kind of man who prefers to be left alone except when he needs help.”
“You sound as though you don’t like him.”
“I like him fine,” Pinata said with some truth. “But he could be hard to take in big doses.”
“Is he — drinking very heavily?”
“He’s drinking, I don’t know how much. He told me some news about himself which he may or may not have intended me to pass on to you.”
“What kind of news?”
“He’s married again.”
She stared in silence toward the end of the long, dim hall, as if she saw dark, half-familiar shapes moving in the shadows. “Married. Well, he’s not an old man, I have no reason to be surprised. But I am. It doesn’t seem real.”
“I’m pretty sure he was telling the truth.”
“Who is the woman?”
“He didn’t say anything about her.”
“Not even her name?”
“I presume,” Pinata said dryly, “that her name is Mrs. Fielding.”
“I meant — oh, it doesn’t matter. I’m glad he’s married again. I hope she’s a good woman.” She sounded not too glad, even less hopeful. “At least someone else is responsible for him now. Some stranger has lifted the load off my shoulders, and I’m grateful to her. I wish them both good luck. If you see him or hear from him, please tell him that for me, will you?”
“I don’t expect to see or hear from him.”
“My father does some rather unexpected things.”
So do you, Daisy baby, Pinata thought. Maybe you and Daddy have more in common than you’d like to admit.
He walked her down the hall.
The rain had seeped under the front door of the building, and the welcome mat made a squishing sound when Daisy stepped out on it.
She told Jim that night all about her father’s surprise appearance in town: the Sunday night phone call from the jail which Mrs. Fielding had deliberately kept secret, the second call the next afternoon from Pinata’s office, the meeting which hadn’t taken place because Fielding had run away. She gave Jim every detail except the one he would have been most interested in, the fact that she’d hired an investigator about whom she knew nothing more than his name.
“So your father got married again,” Jim said, lighting his pipe. “Well, you can’t quarrel with that, surely. It may be the best thing that ever happened to him. You should be very pleased.”
“I am.”
“It will be much better for him, having a life of his own.”
“When has he ever had anything else?”
“Don’t be bitter about it,” Jim said, forcing patience into his voice. Daisy’s combination of loyalty and resentment toward her father irritated him. He himself didn’t think much or care much about Fielding, not even to the extent of begrudging him the money he cost. He considered, in fact, that the money was well spent if it kept Fielding at a distance. Los Angeles was a hundred miles away, not much of a distance. He hoped, for Daisy’s sake, that Fielding would take a dislike to the city, the smog, the traffic, or living conditions, and head back to the East Coast or the Middle West. Jim knew, better than Daisy, how difficult it was to handle old family knots when they no longer held anything together and were too frayed to be retied.
The last time he’d seen his father-in-law was five years ago, when he’d gone to Chicago on a business trip. The two men met at the Town House, and the evening started well, with Fielding going out of his way to be charming and Jim out of his to be charmed. But by ten o’clock Fielding was drunk and blubbering about how Daisy baby had never had a real father: “You take good care of my little girl, you hear? Poor little Daisy baby. You take good care of her, you goddamn stuffed shirt.” Later, Fielding was poured into a taxicab by a couple of waiters, and Jim put three twenty-dollar bills in the pocket of his understuffed shirt.
Well, I’ve taken good care of her, Jim thought now, within my limits anyway. I haven’t made a move without first thinking of her welfare. And sometimes the decisions have been almost impossibly difficult, like the business about Juanita. She never mentions Juanita. The corner of her mind where the girl lies has been sealed off like a tomb.
His pipe had gone out. He relit it, and its hoarse wheezing brought back the memory of Fielding’s voice: “You take good care of my little girl... you goddamn stuffed shirt.”