Curt poured tea, was pleased that it was very strong and black. Adding his usual milk and sugar, he was reminded of Alice’s mad tea party. Their polite sparring over whether he would, or would not, get to speak with Jimmy Anderson observed the social amenities — like colonial administrators dressing for dinner in the bush while their empires crashed in ruins about their ears — but did little to relax tensions.
He said mildly, “Could we make that ‘Curt’?”
After a moment’s hesitation she nodded. “All right. And Barbara. And you still haven’t answered any of my questions, Curt.”
“I’ll have to start by asking another. Do you remember, last April, when a man named Rockwell was attacked by a teen-age gang?”
“I don’t really... Oh, of course!” she suddenly exclaimed. “I wasn’t working up here at County General then, but...” A look of disquiet darkened her face. “Wasn’t he disfigured or... or blinded?”
“Blinded. By accident, I think, I’ll give them that much. Anyway, my wife had been up to the San Francisco Spring Opera and so had Rockwell. They got off the bus together and...” By the time he led her up to Matthews’ call that afternoon, Curt was sweating. The necessity of putting the whole sequence together in logical order had evoked memories more bitter than he had been prepared for. Barbara’s face was ashen when he stopped talking and reached for his teacup.
“So if Jimmy could identify those men he saw...” She shook her head. “And of course that explains the terrible phone call I got. When my husband and I were divorced, two years ago, I went back to work at the Los Feliz Med Center — just a few blocks from home. After the phone call I made Jimmy quit his paper route, and got a job up here at County General because I couldn’t get a shift at the Med Center that would let me pick Jimmy up after school. When you came around asking questions, I was afraid you were one of them, so I put the house up for sale and got this apartment right close to County General Hospital.”
“I should think I’d be pretty hard to mistake for a teen-ager.”
“The one who called sounded like a mature man, not a boy. Except for what he said...” She paused, and a shudder ran through her, raising gooseflesh on her bare arms. “My dad was a longshoreman on the San Francisco docks, and I’ve been a nurse for years — I thought I’d heard all the obscenities. But that call... It was a Tuesday — May twenty-seventh. The call was worse than obscene, it was... moronic.”
“Do you think he was serious, or just... fantasizing?”
A look of true revulsion made her face momentarily ugly. “He meant them.” She gave a rueful little laugh, half-giggle, that Curt found somehow enchanting. “That’s why, when you rang the bell here...”
Curt thought back over the long weeks of careful chipping — like a paleontologist chipping stone from the fossil of a pithecoid jawbone — that had brought him to this place at this moment in time.
“I don’t think you have to worry about the predators finding you,” he said.
“Predators?”
Curt heard his voice become slightly defensive. “It’s... just a tag I’ve used for them, the gang, in my own mind.”
“It’s a good one. It... They sound so dangerous, and sick, and totally vicious. Are you sure you want to...”
The doorbell rang. She looked at her watch, and stood up. “That’ll be Jimmy; he’s been down by the pool.”
Then her clear jade eyes sought Curt’s brown ones; their gazes, their wills met and locked. They stared at one another wordlessly. Curt cursed himself, his weakness, silently. He shouldn’t have seen her first, shouldn’t have talked it all through with her. Now he knew he really couldn’t ask her to let him question the boy; she had been through too much already, too much fear, too many sleepless nights. And Curt knew himself too soft to question the boy without telling her.
Barbara finally lowered her gaze. The bell rang again. She said, “I’d like you to stay for supper, Curt. Just pot luck, but then you can bring up that night casually, in conversation — which might make him remember something he forgot to tell the sheriff’s deputies.”
Curt released an unconsciously long-pent breath, and wondered if his silly fatuous relief and gratitude showed on his face.
The supper was indeed potluck: the end of a canned ham butt, eggs scrambled with canned mushrooms, fried potatoes. But Curt hadn’t enjoyed a meal so thoroughly in months; in fact, since...
Jimmy was a slender boy with straight dark hair always in his eyes, his mother’s enchanting smile, and fey, slightly tilted eyes of the same greenish color as hers. He had come in with the rush and flurry which belongs so peculiarly to youth, had gone shy at the presence of a stranger, then had expanded, during supper, under the male attention. Curt introduced the four men by the golf course casually, easily.
“Those guys?” Jimmy was scornful. “I wasn’t scared of ’em, not really. I just said I was, ’cause... ’cause...” His voice slowed as he realized where his tongue was leading him, and he cast a quick sideways glance at his mother.
“Go right ahead, young man,” Barbara said. “I know perfectly well that you wanted to make me think that they had made you late.”
“Ma can’t spank hard enough to hurt me anyway,” Jimmy bragged, recovering. “I didn’t see anything, really, ’cept the Chevy wagon.”
That was all until dessert, which was ice cream and the freshly baked brownies. Curt described the “Mexican-looking” boy who had been seen on Edgewood Drive, but Jimmy didn’t react. Worden had been right; it was hopeless. They went into the living room, leaving Barbara to stack the dishes, and Jimmy leaned forward confidentially.
“I was gonna call Ma from that phone booth there by the golf course an’ tell her my bike had a flat tire,” he admitted. “You won’t tell her, will ya? I know that woulda been lyin’, but I didn’t really do it...”
“Between us men, strictly,” said Curt with a straight face. The phone booth, he decided, must have been the one across Linda Vista, where he had found his lucky dime. “Why didn’t you call, Jimmy?”
Barbara called from the kitchen, “Dish washer or dish dryer, Curt?”
“Uh? Washer, I guess.” He stood up.
Jimmy was going on. “I couldn’t call ’cause there was this girl sittin’ in the booth.”
Something in what the boy said stopped Curt dead; he felt the hairs prickle on the back of his neck. But what? What was so odd about a girl making a phone call? Then he realized that the oddness was in Jimmy’s phrase. Not making a phone call; sitting in a phone booth.
“You mean that the girl was using the phone, Jimmy?”
The boy shook his head. “She didn’t even have the receiver off the hook or nothing. Just sittin’ in there with the door open an’ her feet sorta stickin’ out—”
“But it was dark, Jimmy. How could you see that clearly?”
“I’d walked right up to the booth, see, wheeling my bike, and this car was coming by and I seen — saw her, plain as anything.”
“And you didn’t tell the man from the sheriff’s office about her?”
“Him? He acted like I was eight years old or somethin’,” the boy said scornfully.
Eight. Instead of ten. That figured; boys straining for those fabulous teens resented being called younger than they were. And Curt had his fact that Worden didn’t have. Why would a girl be merely sitting in that particular phonebooth on that particular night, in the dark, not using the phone, not doing anything? Like a lookout, or something.