“No.”
“Did you notice his shoes?”
“They were black leather, with rubber soles.”
“Was there anything else that was distinctive about him?”
“He had a gun. It was big, an automatic. Kind of a dull gray color.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“He hit me a couple of times with his hand, but I think I’m okay.”
“Was there a sexual assault?”
“Not exactly.” Emily looked for Dewey Burns, feeling embarrassed to talk in front of him, then realizing she was being ridiculous. “He made me take my clothes off, but he didn’t do anything to me. I think he was just trying to make me scared and keep me from making trouble. He didn’t-you know-touch me that way.”
She saw Dewey Burns slip in through the sliding door again. Something began to work in her mind; an idea began to form. Dewey Burns met her gaze, shrugged, and shook his head to tell her that the man was gone.
The woman said, “Can you give me your full name, please?”
“Emily Jean Kramer, with a K.”
“That’s K-R-A-M-E-R.”
“Yes.”
“And the address is 9553 Sunnyland Avenue in Van Nuys.”
“Yes.”
“Your phone number?”
She gave the woman the information she asked for and stood waiting in the foyer while Dewey went from room to room with his gun in his hand checking doors and windows. He went into the kitchen, turned toward her with the dim predawn glow behind him, and the idea that had been forming in Emily’s mind suddenly became clear. She said, “Miss, please tell the officers the man seems to be gone, and my friend is here with me. I’ve got to go now.” She disconnected the call and walked into the kitchen. She watched Dewey Burns as she walked, never moving her eyes from him as he tested the back door, then went to the door of the laundry room to turn on the light, then came back.
He saw that there was something odd about the way she was staring at him. “What?”
“I see it now.”
“What do you mean? Who?”
“You. Just now when I was on the phone and I was so scared and confused that I must have been half crazy, I saw you come in from outside, and I thought I was having a hallucination. When you pushed that sliding door open and kind of leaned to the side to close it after you were in, it was just like seeing Phil do it. It was exactly like him. You move just like him.”
Dewey avoided her stare, and appeared to ignore what she was saying. He stepped past her into the dining room, but she followed. “Maybe it was because you held me when you came in and untied me, and it felt familiar. At first I thought it was just that you were both big and tall, but it wasn’t just that, was it? You’re his son.”
He showed no reaction, no surprise or denial. He kept moving, checking the French doors that led from the dining room into the garden.
She said, “I don’t know why I never noticed, it’s so obvious to me now. Maybe even letting myself notice a slight resemblance would have been too dangerous. It would have made me think of the possibility that he was with other women.”
He stood still. “Are you expecting me to say whether you’re right or wrong?”
“I’m sorry, Dewey. No, I’m not. I just realized the truth, and I blurted it out because-I don’t know. I’ve just been through something horrible, and I wasn’t thinking at all, and then looked at you and I knew, and I said it. I honestly never knew until yesterday afternoon that Phil hadn’t been faithful.”
She sat down at the kitchen table. After a moment she realized that she was shivering. Dewey sat down across from her and put his hand on hers. “Can you tell me what happened to you?”
“He scared me. He hit me a couple of times, and I thought he was going to rape me. But what he wants is some kind of information. He thinks Phil had some information-maybe papers or something-that some powerful man wants. He thought I would know about it and he could scare me or hurt me enough so I would give it to him. And all this time, I’ve been trying every day to find something like that-anything that would explain why Phil isn’t here with me.” She paused, then looked into Dewey’s eyes.
“I don’t know what it is,” he said. “He didn’t confide in me. All we had was that one secret.”
They could both hear the sound of the police cars moving fast up the street, then stopping. There were a couple of door slams, then the noise of the police radios.
15
Ted Forrest stood at the eighteenth tee and adjusted the brim of his cap to shade his eyes as he stared at the long strip of deep green fairway. He had played this course as a child. He knew the five hundred and sixty yards, the dogleg to the right that began about two hundred and fifty yards out, and the stand of tall eucalyptus trees that made a straight drive to the right across the curve an illusion. He knew he must try to place the ball in the center of the fairway as far out as possible so he would be able to see the green for his second shot. All day he had noticed the fact that there wasn’t much roll on the fairway because the liberal watering had caused a lush growth of grass.
Forrest planted his feet, riveted his eyes on the ball, and began his backswing. At the top of it, his left arm was straight and his hands in a firm, comfortable grip. Then he swung. There was his fluid hip motion, and he caught a glimpse of the perfect silver whip-flash of the shaft coming around. The clean clop when the head hit made the ball whistle off straight into the distance like something fired from a launcher.
Forrest didn’t really have to look because he could tell from the feel and the sound that the ball was on its way to the spot he had chosen, but he watched because he loved the sight. The trajectory was low, straight and accurate, the ball retaining its momentum for second after second, the air finally slowing it enough to make it drop. He had been right about the roll. The ball bounced once, then dribbled and rolled a short distance. But he could tell it had cleared the eucalyptus woods.
“Perfect,” Cameron Powers said. “We might as well pay you now.”
Forrest held out his hand. “I’m perfectly willing to save you the trouble of paying me in front of the club, if you’d prefer to give me this hole.”
“Very kind,” Dave Collier said. “But paying gambling losses in public builds a reputation as a good sport and a gentleman. So go fuck yourself.”
“Said like a true sport and gentleman. Good luck with that reputation.” Forrest turned to the others in the foursome. “Anyone else want to take advantage of my thoughtful offer? You won’t even have to humiliate yourselves by teeing off.”
Owen Rowland said, “Thank you, but no.”
Cameron Powers merely shook his head without speaking because Collier was taking a practice swing. They all watched in silence as he smacked the ball and it flew with perverse intelligence straight to the woods, caromed off a tall tree to the ground, and caused a small explosion of dry eucalyptus leaves and shredded bark. His companions guffawed, but he said, “What? That was the tree I was aiming at.”
The others took their turns. No drive was as good as Forrest’s or as bad as Collier’s. This was as it had been all morning, and as it had been for most of the past forty years. It was always Ted Forrest who hit the best drive, or, when they were in high school together, threw the pass for the touchdown, or won the race. It was the natural order of things. The others competed hard, but when one of them won, there was always the same agreement among them that it was an oddity, that the story of the game wasn’t what had worked for the winner, but what had kept Ted Forrest from winning.
The four friends were nearly the same age-all in the last few seasons of their prime. They had already turned fifty, but still looked like hard-worn forty, and each of them felt the poignancy of these games they played together, but expressed it only in jibes and self-deprecating humor. They had all been born to the class who found open sincerity between men to be in poor taste except on the battlefield or in a hospital, but somehow jokes about age had come up more than once in this game, and had dampened some of the group’s exuberance.