‘Which you took to heart,’ Walt said dryly.
‘I guess so.’
He drove a mile and then said, ‘And now you’re so good at it that they beat you up. What do you think about things when that happens?’
‘That there’s a big fish coming down the pipeline and they want me out of the way.’
‘So you look all the harder.’ A statement, not a question.
‘You might say so. Yes.’
‘They’ll kill you one of these days.’
I didn’t answer. Walt flicked a glance sideways and sighed. ‘I suppose you don’t care.’
‘There are a lot of others in the department.’
Walt drove into Santa Barbara without another word, where we joined Eunice and Lynnie in the terrace restaurant for lunch. They had, they said, bought that morning the big bright dangling earrings which swung with every turn of their heads. Lynnie’s were scarlet, Eunice’s acid green; otherwise identical. Still friends, I thought in some relief. Still in harmony. Whether Eunice would do a small chore for me was, however, another matter.
We had clam chowder with shrimp to follow, and Lynnie said with all this seafood she’d be growing fins. During coffee, when she stood up restlessly and said she was going down to the sea, it was Walt, after a pause, who said he would go with her. She looked at me questioningly, worriedly, and then turned and walked quickly off with him, talking a good deal too brightly.
‘Don’t you hurt that child,’ Eunice said fiercely.
‘I don’t want to.’
‘You’re too bloody attractive.’
‘Yeah. Charm the birds off the trees,’ I agreed sardonically. ‘Little wives spill their husbands’ secrets into my bloody attractive ears.’
She looked shocked. Quite a change, I thought, from dishing it out.
‘You mean you... use it?’
‘Like a can opener. And as a catalyst. Who doesn’t? Salesmen, politicians, actors, women, all using it like mad.’
‘For God’s sake...’ Her voice was faint, but she was also laughing.
‘But not on Lynnie,’ I added wryly.
‘You didn’t need to, I guess. Dragging Dave out of the Thames was a lot more effective.’
I watched Lynnie’s and Walt’s backs as they reached the tide line.
‘So that’s why...?’ I said, almost to myself.
‘Hero worship,’ Eunice said with barbs. ‘Does it give you a kick?’
‘Like a mule’s in the stomach...’
She laughed. ‘It’s not that you’re so madly handsome in any obvious way.’
‘No,’ I agreed with truth, ‘I’m not.’
She looked as if she were going to say more and then thought better of it. I jumped straight in while her mind was still half flirting, knowing, and despising the knowledge, that in that mood she was more likely to do what I asked.
‘Has Lynnie still got those photographs of me?’
‘Don’t worry,’ she said sarcastically. ‘In a fire, she’d save them first.’
‘I’d like Culham James Offen to see them.’
‘You’d like what? What are you talking about?’
‘About you and Lynnie driving over to pay a neighbourly call on Culham James this afternoon, and easily, dearest Eunice, you could tell him about me pulling Dave out of the Thames, and Lynnie could show him my photograph. Especially the one of me sitting by a table outside a pub. That group of all of us.’
She gaped and gasped, and then started thinking.
‘You really can’t be as pleased with yourself as all that... so for God’s sake, why?’
‘An experiment.’
‘That’s no answer.’
‘Earning my keep at The Vacationer.’
A look of disgust turned down her mouth.
‘Finding that bloody horse?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘You don’t mean... surely you can’t mean that Offen has anything to do with it?’
‘I’d like to make sure he hasn’t.’
‘Oh, I see. Well, I guess that’s not much to ask. Sure. I’ll get Lynnie to come with me.’
‘And tell him I’m looking for Allyx.’
She gave me a straight assessing stare, and said, ‘How about Chrysalis?’
‘Whatever you like. Say that Dave employed me to get him back.’
‘I don’t know why I’m doing it.’
‘More interesting than golf?’ I suggested.
‘Is it a game?’ She was sceptical.
‘Well... like hunting bears,’ I smiled.
‘Oh, yes.’ She nodded sardonically. ‘A sport.’
Chapter Thirteen
I parked a hired car in some scrub off the road leading to Orpheus Farm, and smoked a rare cigarette. The fierce afternoon sun roasted through the metal roof and a water mirage hung in a streak over the dry road. A day for lizards to look for shade. They’d run out of air-conditioned heaps at the hire firms: I’d had to take one of those old fashioned jobs where you breathed fresh air by opening the window. The air in question was as fresh as last week’s news and as hot as tomorrow’s.
At five past four Eunice and Lynnie passed unseeingly across my bows, heading back to Santa Barbara. I finished the cigarette and stubbed it out carefully in the flaked chromium ashtray. I looked at my fingernails for ten minutes. No special inspiration. At half past four I started the car, pointed its nose towards Orpheus, and went to call on Uncle Bark.
This time I drove straight up to the house and rang the ornate bell. A houseboy came: all on the same scale as at Jeff Roots’s. When he went to find Culham James I followed quietly on his heels, so my host, even if he had meant to, had no chance to say he was out. The houseboy opened the door on to a square comfortable office — sitting room and Culham James was revealed sitting at his desk with a green telephone receiver to his ear.
He gave the houseboy and myself a murderous glare between us which changed to reasonable affability once he’d got control of it. ‘I’ll call you later,’ he said to the telephone. ‘A Mr Hawkins has this minute arrived... that’s right... later then.’ He put down the receiver and raised his eyebrows.
‘Did you miss something this morning?’ he asked.
‘No... should we have done?’
He shook his head in mild annoyance. ‘I am merely asking the purpose of this return visit.’
‘My colleague and I wanted answers to one or two extra questions about the precautions you take against fire, especially as regards those two exceptionally valuable stallions... er... Moviemaker and Centigrade.’
Under his suntanned face, behind the white bracket of eyebrows, Culham James Offen was beginning to enjoy a huge joke. It fizzed like soda water in his pale blue eyes and bubbled in his throat. He was even having difficulty in preventing himself from sharing it: but after a struggle he had it nailed down under hatches, and calm with a touch of severity took over. We went solemnly through the farce of fire precautions, me leaning on his desk and checking off Walt’s solid sounding inventions one by one. They mostly had to deal with the amount of supervision in the stallions’ barn at night. Whether there were any regular patrols, any dogs loose on watch, any photoelectric apparatus for detecting opacity, such as heavy smoke?
Offen cleared his throat and answered no to the lot.
‘We have the extremely expensive and reliable sprinkler system which you saw this morning,’ he pointed out. ‘It is thoroughly tested every three months, as I told you earlier.’
‘Yes. Thank you, then. I guess that’s all.’ I shut my notebook. ‘You’ve been most helpful, Mr Offen.’
‘You’re welcome,’ he said. The joke rumbled in his voice, but was coloured now with unmistakable malice. High time to go, I thought: and went.
When I got back to The Vacationer some while later I found Eunice and Lynnie and Walt sitting in a glum row behind empty glasses. I flopped into a chair opposite them and said, ‘Why the mass depression?’