“I have to give it a try. There’s always a place to start.”
“Where will you start?”
I just smiled.
Diane pouted. “Trusting, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“What clippings, Diane?”
“Hush.” She turned her face and I could see it out of the corner of my eye — a very rare thing, fine bones and full, curved cheeks and clear creamy skin. No bumps, no marks. Small white teeth. “Well,” she said, “if I was going to be the detective I know where I’d go first.”
“Oh, you do?” Her good spirits were beginning to warm me.
She smiled smugly. “Yes. First of all I’d want to know about the child who didn’t die. Then I’d want to find... relatives, friends. Persons like that. Maybe one of them has carried a grudge all these years.”
“It’s possible.”
She hit me sharply on the leg. “You’re hopeless.”
“How has Macy felt about these newspaper stories?”
“Diane, what stories?”
“Now, we’re talking about something — grown-up. Very stuffy.”
Aimee bounced once on the rich leather seat cover and was still. We passed a parrot jungle and her eyes were large as she turned her head, catching glimpses of the bright-feathered birds. I slowed down so she could look.
“Can we go there sometime?” She bounced on the seat again.
“Sometime,” Diane said. To me she said, “He’s sort of acted like it was a joke. You know, the kind of joke somebody thinks is funny to make again and again but really isn’t, only you laugh so people won’t know you’re irritated by it. He doesn’t think anything can happen to him.”
She looked away, not liking the questioning to be reversed. Her fingers reached out to the radio and she turned it on.
“Do you think you’ll find this killer, Pete?” she asked, then, when Aimee looked curiously at her, apparently wished she hadn’t said killer.
“I don’t know.” I slowed down, looked down the road, sped past a wobbly truck smoking like a clogged fireplace. “Maybe.”
“You must be pretty good,” Diane said. “I’ve heard Macy talk about you. He doesn’t understand you, but he likes you. Maybe for the same reason I like you. Because you’re not so easy to understand. You’ve a hard shiny surface around something that might be very good to know.”
A guitar whanged furiously from the radio. An astonishing voice cried: “... Down at the end of Lonely Street, that’s — Heartbreak Hotel.” Diane made a face and changed stations.
“Easy, lady,” I said, half-kidding, half-warning. I remembered the beach scene the night before, the long lush body, the touch of her fingertips.
She dug in her purse for cigarettes, found one and lit it. She offered a drag to me and I took it, passed the cigarette back.
“You married, Pete?”
“No. Engaged.”
She smoked for a while, silently. Breeze from the rolled-down windows lifted her hair away from her neck. She smoothed it absently. “Why did you leave her to come back?”
“That’s kind of a stupid question, coming from you. It wasn’t because I wanted to.”
“Let up on me, mister. The tone hurts.”
“Sorry. I’m hurting, too.” I wished she hadn’t spoken. Thinking about Elaine wasn’t so good. It took my thoughts away from the job I had to do, so Macy could go on living. I wondered how Elaine would explain to her parents why I wasn’t around, why I had to leave so suddenly for Castile. For a moment I regretted I hadn’t told her everything. But it would only have caused her to worry more. My fingers ached from the tightness of my grip on the wheel. I knew now how others had felt when Macy’s kind of pressure was applied. Like the city official who committed suicide. I could hate Macy now, where once there was only dislike.
“What has he got on you, Pete?” Diane asked.
“You know everything else,” I said. “You should know that.”
“That’s not fair,” she murmured, and turned from me to look out the window.
I wondered about her. By her own admission she wasn’t normal. But nothing she had said or done in the brief time I had known her indicated any irrationality. She seemed shrewd and well-bred, with a spark of fun in her. From a purely physical standpoint, she was breathtaking. She could have been twenty-five or thirty. She was something of a mystery herself, and there were questions I wanted to ask her, and would, at a better time. I wanted to know why she was with Macy, why she had let herself be handed around like a piece of furniture.
Diane was very quiet now, and her face had a way of becoming smooth and still, without a flicker of animation, until it was like something painted with the greatest delicacy and closest attention to detail, but painted still. I knew that when the time would be right for the questions I would find her protective coating as hard to crack as she claimed mine to be. I wondered what it would be like to make love to her, to hold the remarkable body captive, feel all its strength and softness and fire. I squelched the thought harshly. I recalled what Macy had said about her that morning. He had done nothing with her. But maybe she was a woman who chose her men as carefully as she chose fine clothes.
Yet Stan Maxine had had her for a while. When I had known him he was a young, ruthless hood with a dark unsavory look that many women had been dumbly, helplessly attracted to. I wondered how Diane had treated Stan, a greedy and avaricious lover.
“You worked for Stan Maxine a while, didn’t you?” I asked her.
I thought for a moment she would ignore me. Then she said, “Yes. I was a cashier in his restaurant for a few months. Stan’s restaurant is one of the favorites in Castile. Then I worked in the supply house for a while. Stan owns a firm that supplies linen to hotels and restaurants and bars.”
It sounded like a nice front, and undoubtedly was a financially sound enterprise. I wondered how much rough work was necessary before hotel owners saw the advantages of Stan’s service.
“Did you ever know Stan?”
“I knew him. A long time ago.”
“I’ll bet you didn’t get along,” she said.
“How did you get along with him?”
She finished the cigarette and tucked it into the dashboard ashtray. “I liked him,” she said simply. “I still like him.”
Castile’s southernmost suburbs began to cluster beside the wide highway and traffic slowed. At Balmar I cut across town to the Mulloy Freeway and went into the city by way of the airport. Diane gave me the address of a clinic on Shrader Boulevard. I left her and Aimee there, and drove downtown to the Sun-Express building.
Chapter Ten
In the file room of the Sun-Express I found follow-up stories on the fire. One of them told me the lone survivor was a six-year-old named Carla Kennedy. She was the oldest of the three children. No mention was made of how she escaped the fire. The little girl had been badly burned and was recovering in Good Shepherd Hospital. None of the stories mentioned any relatives of the Kennedys.
The four clippings about the fire that Macy had received had been taken from the noon edition of the Castile Sun, dated May 19, 1932. The issues of the newspaper were preserved on microfilm.
At Good Shepherd Hospital I spent three quarters of an hour looking through boxes of old ledgers and records before I found out that Carla Kennedy had been discharged from the hospital thirty-one days after the fire in the care of an uncle, Victor Clare. There was an address, so faded it couldn’t be read. The child’s medical record was stored somewhere else, so I didn’t bother looking for it. Next stop: Southern Bell.