I asked, “How about Rafael Vega? He come in today?”
“No,” she said. “He’s still sick with the flu.”
* * * *
When Kerry arrived for our four o’clock date I was in the bedroom straightening up. She made a small joke about being honored by clean sheets and the absence of dust mites, but neither of us laughed much. She asked for a glass of wine, and I had a Diet Pepsi so she wouldn’t have to drink alone. We sat in the living room and made conversation for a few minutes, none of it about Cybil. There was a small awkwardness between us, as between new lovers, that we could not seem to banish. It was there even when we went to bed.
We needed each other now more than ever, but for me, at least, our lovemaking was no better than it had been the last time. Part of it was the circumstances; part of it was that Kerry’s passion was tainted with a kind of desperation, as if she were trying too hard to please both of us, too hard to feel good and carefree again … and failing on all counts. All she got out of it, and all I got out of it, was physical release. And we both knew it.
For a long while we didn’t speak. It was a dark silence, as dark as the dying day outside.
“It’s hurting us, isn’t it,” she said finally. Statement, not question.
“We’ll get through it, babe.”
“Not this way. Not with Cybil living with me and shutting you out, not with us sneaking around and screwing in the afternoon like a couple of high-school kids. I hate this, damn it. Ihate it.”
“Don’t blame Cybil-”
“I don’t, any more than I blame Ivan for dying. It’s the situation that’s intolerable. I’m going to see somebody, right away … no more waffling.”
“Geriatric specialist?”
“Somebody like that. I’ll check into it first thing tomorrow.”
“You want me to come along when you go?”
“No. It’s something I’d better do alone.”
“Well, if you need me, for any reason …”
“I know,” she said.
She burrowed closer to me. And pretty soon I felt wetness against my arm and chest: She was crying without sound.
“Why?” she asked then, as a child might-rhetorically and with great sadness. “Why do people have to get old?”
* * * *
At the Hideaway that night, there was plenty of lip service paid to Thomas Lujack’s murder and Nick Pendarves’s disappearance. Even Max was stirred up enough to offer a comment now and then. In the lives of most if not all of the regulars, it was the most exciting and shocking thing to happen in years, and they were having a ghoulish fling with it.
They did not want to believe Pendarves was guilty, but that was because he was one of them. It made them uncomfortable to think that a man capable of cold-blooded murder might have been part of their close-knit little group. More importantly, it constituted a threat to their sanctuary and, by implication, to each of them individually. If Pendarves had killed a stranger, he might just as well have decided, to their way of thinking, to dispose of one of them. And if they weren’t safe here in the Hideaway, then they weren’t safe anywhere.
The irony in that was their willingness to talk freely in my presence, as if circumstances had made me one of them now. The truth was, they didn’t know me any more than they knew Nick Pendarves … than they knew each other. Does anybody ever really know another person, even someone close? No, but we need to believe that we do. That’s one of the necessary illusions we live by: that we are always safe in the company of friends and loved ones.
So I sat observing the regulars work like busy spiders at repairing the torn strands of their illusion. Nick Pendarves a murderer? Ridiculous! Why, there had to be some mistake, some other explanation. Somebody else must have murdered that bum Thomas Lujack. Or else it was some kind of crazy accident. Either way, Nick had gotten scared and run off. Hell, who wouldn’t run? Cops would say he did it, he’d known that. Damn cops. They’d as soon railroad an innocent man as go out and hunt down the guilty one….
There was only one mildly dissenting voice-Bob Johnson’s-and it didn’t take much to get him to relent and come around to the group position. At first he said, “Well, I don’t know … Nick could have done it. He’s got a temper, you know that.”
“You ever see him raise a hand to anybody?” Kate Johnson asked.
“No, I never did. But I heard him yell plenty of times….”
“I’ve heard you yell plenty of times, Bob Johnson. You never raised a hand to me or anybody else.”
“Me and Nick are two different people.”
“Not so different.”
“What about that wife of his? What’s her name?”
“Jenna,” somebody said.
“Yeah, Jenna. She divorced him for abuse, didn’t she?”
“She said he abused her. Nick said it was BS.”
“Well, sure. What’d you expect him to say?”
“Nick doesn’t seem like the sort to beat up a woman,” I said.
“Didn’t beat her up,” Ed McBee said. “Wasn’t that kind of abuse. She claimed he bullied her, threatened her, made her do for him all the time like a slave. Claimed she didn’t have a life of her own.”
Annie Stanhope snorted, aimed one of her knitting needles at McBee. “Jellyfish, that’s what Jenna is. No backbone. Let him wear the pants for years, did everything he told her without a whimper, and then decided she was tired of it and wanted a divorce. It was that high-hat sister of hers talked her into it. The one in Chico she went to live with.”
“That sister’s a real ballbuster, all right,” Charlie Neale said. “Came in here once, made some smart remark about my crippled leg. Right to my face.”
“What’d you do about it?” McBee asked.
“Showed her my crutch. Said if she made another smart remark, she’d need a proctologist to remove it from her backside.”
“The hell you did.”
“The hell I didn’t. You know a good proctologist, Ed?”
Everybody laughed. And that was the end of the dissent.
A little later I managed to steer the conversation to possible places Pendarves might have gone to hole up. There were plenty of opinions but none that had any basis in fact. He didn’t have any relatives that the regulars knew about. Nor friends out of state or even out of the city. Nor property other than his house. Nor special places that he liked to visit; he didn’t fish or hunt and when he took his yearly vacation, McBee said, all he ever did was putter around his house or sit here in the Hideaway drinking beer.
I asked if he was seeing a particular woman, or if he had seen one at any time since his divorce. Frank Parigli said, “Nah, he was all through with women after Jenna,” which prompted Lyda Isherwood to laugh her big, booming laugh.
“That’s what you think,” she said.
“What’s that supposed to mean, Lyda?”
“What do you think it means?”
“Whores?” Parigli was incredulous. “You trying to tell us he paid for it?”
“Plenty of men do. Haven’t you, Frank?”
“No, by God.”
“Not even once in your life?”
“No!”
“Well, Nick did. More than once.”
“How in hell do you know?”
“He told me so.”
“Bull.”
“Maybe he paid Lyda for it,” Neale said slyly.
“Not me,” she said. “When I retired from the business I retired for good.”
“You ought to retire that madam story,” McBee said. “You never ran a house in Nevada or anywheres else. Only thing you ever ran besides your mouth was that lunchroom down at China Basin.”
Unruffled, Lyda winked at him. “That’s what you think, honey.”
“What kind of hooker did Nick go for?” I asked her.
“Call-girl kind. Not the cheapies, either. Hundred-dollar girls.”