“Trick or treat,” she said, smiling very tentatively.
“Go away, Casey,” Wes Goodhill told her. “Scram, hit the road.” He tried to shut the door on her but found that, somehow, he couldn’t.
“After all, Wes, I don’t have the hide of an ostrich, and when you talk to me like—”
“Rhinoceros.”
“Hum?”
“It’s a rhino that’s noted for its thick hide.” He made another unsuccessful attempt to make himself close her out.
“You’re making my efforts to deliver a sincere apology awfully darn difficult, Wes.”
“Sincere? You’re incapable of sincerity.”
“Okay, I admit that I fudged the truth about my relationship with Thor Swanson, yet—”
“Who in the name of god is Thor Swanson?”
“The Scandinavian Cheapskate Gourmet on cable,” answered Casey McLeod. “I remember telling you that I wasn’t dating him while you and I were living together, but actually I was. Because of my fear of an outburst of your terrible temper, though, I refrained from admitting it at the time.”
“I don’t have a terrible temper!”
“Oh, so? And yet you’re standing here on your doorstep howling like a chimpanzee at me.
“Banshee. It’s a banshee that howls.”
“Well, at least you admit you’re howling at me,” she said. “Anyhow, you might at least invite me in.”
“Wait now,” he said. “Didn’t you move out on me two years ago and declare that you’d never return?”
“Was it that recently? Seems longer ago.”
“Two years, five months, three weeks, but who’s counting? Go away now, quit darkening my door.”
“I can’t.
“Certainly you can. Simply hop back in your car and drive on home.”
“For one thing, I don’t have a car.”
Frowning, he squinted out at the curving street and the slanting night beach beyond. The dark Pacific was choppy tonight, and there was no sign of a car in the immediate vicinity. “How the hell’d you get here?”
“A very nice truck driver named... oh, you know, he has the same name as the man with the birds.”
“No, I don’t know. Somebody gave you a lift here? What happened to your Isuzu?”
“It exploded. Rasmussen.”
“What?”
“The man who was so sweet and drove me all the way from Maravilla Canyon was named Rasmussen.”
Wes took a slow, deep breath. “Why were you in Maravilla Canyon?”
“Well, as it turned out, I wish I hadn’t been,” she said and shrugged her left shoulder. “Can I set this darn portfolio down?”
“Sure, but outside my house.”
She leaned it against the doorjamb. “You see, and I thought you knew this, I was housesitting for Carlos and—”
“Who’s Carlos?”
“Well, Carlos Miranda, obviously.”
“Never heard of him.”
“You’ve certainly gone to seed in the — what did you say it was, two years? — in the two years since I saw you last. Working in animation at Sparey Art Studios has dumbed you down considerably, Wes,” she told him. “Carlos Miranda, as any literate human being knows, is a famous Latin American novelist. Just three years ago he won the Argentinean equivalent of the Pulitzer.”
“Congratulations. And you’ve been shacking up with this guy?”
“No, pay attention. I was housesitting for him and Carmelita, his lovely wife, while they did that publicity tour of Central America and then decided to spend a few weeks in Guatemala. I just don’t know how I’m going to tell them.”
“Tell them what?”
“About their lovely mansion in Maravilla Canyon — it burned to the ground, along with my car and their twin Mercedes cars and Ruffy.”
“Ruffy?”
“He was, you know, one of those frizzy little dogs. Poor dear thing.”
“What you’re claiming, Casey, is that the house you were looking after got caught in the canyon blaze? Leaving you homeless, without car or clothes?”
“I’m not claiming, damn it, I happen to be stating the absolute unblemished truth.”
“Unvarnished,” he corrected.
“So here I stand, a waif, an orphan of the storm, turning to my one and only true friend in all Greater Los Angeles, or in the whole darn entire state, for that matter, and you force me to stand outside with the fierce Santa Ana winds whistling through my BVD’s and accuse me, for gosh sake, of fibbing.”
“Fibbing? Holy moley, Casey, you are, as I know from long and painful experience, a champion liar and falsifier,” he told her. “For example, I still recall the time you persuaded me to hock your Grandmother Elsie’s pearl necklace, and then it turned out the thing actually belonged to a fading character actress in Santa Monica. You, how shall I politely state this, you borrowed the—”
“She gave it to me, the old biddy, to settle a bill for some artwork I did for her. Then she up and tried—”
“The bottom line is — I really and truly don’t trust you. We spent an interesting and entertaining couple of years together, Casey, but as the bards of long ago sang, ‘Them days is gone forever.’ ”
“Wes, please. I honestly don’t have any place else to go. Only for tonight, please, if you can put me up, I’ll be eternally grateful.”
“How long’s eternity with you? About a week and a half tops.”
She looked him up and down slowly. “I get it,” she said finally. “You really and truly were in love with me back then, and when I had to leave, for perfectly sensible reasons, it hurt you.”
“You’re very perceptive.” He stood there, watching the vast inscrutable ocean, uncertain whether to yell some more or start crying a little. Sighing, Wes moved back. “Okay, come on in.”
“Can you bring my portfolio? With my sprained wrist, it’s tough.”
“Sure.” He let her step over the threshold, then brought in the thick portfolio of artwork and shut the door. “How’d you hurt your wrist?”
“Trying to save Fluffy.”
“Who’s Fluffy?”
“I just told you, that poor little dog.”
“You said his name was Ruffy.”
“No, I wouldn’t have said a dumb thing like that, since the poor creature’s name was Fluffy. I ought to know because I used to take him for a walk through the wooded hills of the canyon every darn night.” She walked into his small, cluttered living room. “New television, same old sofa, more books piled up on everything. Why don’t you ever throw out those piles of comic books?”
He ignored her interior decorating suggestions and asked, “What are you working at these days?”
“Don’t you keep up with my career either?” She sat down in a fat armchair and let her pajamaed legs go wide.
“Wasn’t aware you had a career.”
“Hey, we’re friends again,” she reminded him. “I am, as I was when you and I were together, a first-rate cartoonist and—”
“First-rate isn’t how I’d rank your—”
“I’m still drawing my Bertha the Biker comic book for Roy Pomeroy’s Beachcomb Comics Press,” she continued. “I’ve also been doing a little modeling again and some acting.”
“What sort of acting?”
“Well, not in porno epics, if that’s what that goofy expression you’ve assumed is meant to imply, Wes. Honestly, now.” She shook her head, then leaned back. “I’ve been doing a few small parts on TV. Most recently on a show called Fat Cops, but it got canceled.”
“Fat Cops, huh? Mike wrote that. Or at least two of the four episodes they shot before it flopped.”
“Mike who?”
“Mike Filchock, my best friend. You remember him, don’t you?”