“Yeah,” she said. “But that bitch Alicia got the choicest chunk.”
“Probably use it to buy a company that makes dildos,” Dessault said, and they both laughed.
“What does that mean?” I asked him.
He didn’t answer. So I asked Melanie the same question.
“She collects men,” the girl said. “She’ll fuck anything in pants.”
“Or out of pants,” Dessault said. They both laughed again.
“Was that the case while your father was alive?”
“Well, sure,” she said. “What’d you think, she was a faithful wife or something?”
“Did your father know about her affairs?”
“Sure. He didn’t care. Had plenty of his own.”
“His own affairs?”
“That’s right.”
Nice family. The more I found out about them, the more all-American they looked. “Any woman in particular?”
“Not that I knew about.”
“How about Alicia? Any particular man?”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
“I probably will. You were at the party the night your father died, weren’t you?”
“For a while. I left about eight.”
“Why so early?”
“Those friends of his, those rich pigs, bore me out of my skull.”
“Then why go in the first place?”
“I needed some bread so Richie and I could split for Hawaii. We know some people on the Big Island.” Dessault smirked when she said that. Which probably meant that they had been planning some kind of drug buy; a lot of marijuana is grown in the back-country of Hawaii’s Big Island. “Kenneth wanted me to come to the party, see some snuff box he’d bought, so I went. He wasn’t too hard to deal with when he was in a good mood and you did what he wanted.”
“Why didn’t he invite your boyfriend here?” Dessault’s name had not been on the guest list.
“He didn’t like Richie,” she said. “Didn’t understand him or his poetry.”
Score one for Kenneth.
I said, “You get your money that night?”
“Damn right.”
“So he was in good spirits.”
“Sure he was,” Dessault said. “Kind that come out of a bottle.”
Melanie snickered. I didn’t say anything.
The girl said, “I told you, he’d got this snuff box. One of a kind or something, worth a lot of money. Crap like that made him happy.”
“Did he say where he got the box?”
“No.”
“Do you know anybody who speaks with a Latin accent?”
The abrupt shift in questions seemed to confuse her, throw her off balance. “Latin? You mean Mexican?”
“Mexican, South American-like that.”
Dessault had come away from the wall again and was scowling at me. “How come you want to know that? What does that have to do with anything?”
I ignored him. “Well?” I asked Melanie. “Anybody?”
“No,” she said. “The only person I know with an accent is Alex Ozimas.”
“Who’s he?”
“Filipino fag. He and Kenneth had some business deals.”
“What kind of business?”
“Who knows? I never asked.”
“I thought your father didn’t like homosexuals.”
“He didn’t. But he’d do business with anybody. Alex was at the house a couple of times while I was there. He was there that night, come to think of it.”
“The night Kenneth died?”
“Yeah.”
“His name isn’t on the guest list.”
“Well, he was just leaving when I got there.”
“What time was that?”
“After five. Five-thirty, about.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“No.”
“Your father mention him?”
“No.”
“So you don’t know why he was there.”
“No.”
“You have any idea where he lives?”
“In the city someplace, I think.”
“Anything else you can tell me about him?”
“No.”
Dessault punched out his cigarette in an abalone shell ashtray and moved up to stand alongside the girl. He put one hand on the back of her neck, began to rub it, and she shivered visibly and leaned against him. She had it bad, all right. But then, maybe he was what she deserved.
He said, “Listen, we’ve had about enough of this. We’ve got things to do. Haven’t we, Mel?”
She looked up at him; but with the cockeye, it seemed as if she were still looking at me. “Yes,” she said. “Lots of things to do.”
“So why don’t you just get out of here,” he said to me. “Right now.”
I could have pushed it; I felt like pushing it. These two had put me in a foul mood. But I had run out of questions to ask, and besides, the atmosphere of the place was oppressive and I was as sick of them as they were of me.
“Okay,” I said. “But maybe I’ll be back.”
“You’ll talk to yourself if you do. You won’t get in.”
There was nothing more to say. I put my back to them and went to the door. But Dessault followed me, so that when I turned coming out on deck, he was about two feet away.
I couldn’t resist the impulse; I said, “ ‘Gold in the hills and valleys of my mind, the big gold rush.’ That’s real good stuff, Richie. Ferlinghetti would love it.”
“Fuck you,” he said, like the poet he wasn’t, and for the second time in twenty minutes he shut the door in my face.
Chapter Seven
Back in the car, I used my new mobile phone to call Directory Assistance. No listing for Alex Ozimas or anybody named Ozimas. I called the office, to ask Eberhardt to check our copy of the reverse directory of city addresses-but all I got was the answering machine. So then I rang up the Hall of Justice, to see if Ben Klein was familiar with Ozimas-and he was out, too, and there wasn’t anybody else around who knew anything about the Purcell case.
I made a U-turn and drove across the Fourth Street drawbridge and uptown to Union Square, where I deposited the car in the underground garage. Powell Street was jammed with tourists, as it almost always was these days: there are several good hotels along its length and it contains the main cable car line between downtown and Fisherman’s Wharf. I made my way up to Post Street, and along there until I found the Summerhayes Gallery-one of dozens of art galleries of different types in the area.
It didn’t look like much from outside, just a narrow storefront with drapery covering its one window and discreet gold lettering on the glass; but you only needed one good look around the interior to know that this was a high-class place. The floor was parquet, polished to a high gloss, and there was nothing on it except half a dozen Plexiglas cubes, a couple of the smaller ones on pedestals, and glass-fronted and — topped display cases along two walls. The other wall, on my right, had a closed door in its middle. The only decoration was a big tapestry-Turkish, maybe — that hung above the display case directly opposite the entrance. There weren’t any paintings in sight; it was not that kind of gallery. There weren’t any people in sight, either, but I doubted if I would be allowed to remain alone for very long. A little tinkly bell had announced my arrival.
I wandered a little, looking at what was in the cubes and display cases. Antique boxes, some enameled and some bejeweled and some fashioned of mother-of-pearl. Carved ivory flower arrangements. Exotic paperweights made out of crystal, ivory, intricate patterned glass. Porcelain eggs. A small selection of snuff bottles and boxes, all of curious design, some that looked hand-painted and some that had scenes engraved on their surfaces. Much of the stuff appeared to be Oriental or Far Eastern in origin, with China being the predominant supplier.
I was peering at something I took to be an incense burner-a big bronze elephant that seemed to have a camel’s hump on its back and that also seemed to be trying to goose itself with its trunk — when the woman’s voice said, “May I help you?” about two feet away.
It made me jump a little because I hadn’t heard her approach; she walked softly for a big woman. And big she was: a fiftyish gray-blonde at least six feet tall, with wide hips and a substantial chest encased in a cream-colored designer suit and a mauve blouse. She was smiling politely, but there was a wariness in her gray eyes. I was not the sort of person she was used to seeing in here.