That did it. Fin thought he might as well take her home. Served him right, developing a case of vapors over a child.
“Getting late,” he said, looking at his watch.
“Okay,” she said, “but it’s still early for me.”
“Wanna go somewhere else?”
“My ex-boyfriend used to like to take me to this place in La Jolla where they got some pretty good sounds.”
“Live music?”
“It ain’t dead.”
“Hard rock?”
“Semi-hard.”
Was that a double entendre directed at him? Was she laughing at this pathetic geezer, as old as Bill Clinton? How did he get in this soap opera anyway?
“I don’t like La Jolla nightclubs,” he said. “All those rich gentlemen from sand-covered countries get on my nerves.”
“They don’t bother me,” she said. “They start slobbering down my neck I just say, ‘Shove off, mate, and salaam aleikum.’ I was in Saudi Arabia so I know how to handle ’em.”
He decided to stop the charade, to show her who he really was, to see if she bolted.
“Could I take you to an old person’s bar in south Mission Beach?” he asked. “They have music there too. Dead music of course. Could you stand it with the over-forty crowd?”
She took a good hard look at Fin. The over-forty crowd? She’d always been curious, hadn’t she? He was more or less as good-looking as her ex-boyfriend, but of course Fin was even older. Over forty. Could he be the one to satisfy her curiosity?
“Okay, if I can buy you one a those brandy drinks, I forget what you call em. They’re sweet?”
“B and B?”
“Can we still try to solve the case tonight?”
“You got a one-track mind.”
“I buy the drinks, okay?”
“Buy me a drink, sailor? You bet,” Fin said.
“That was a pretty sneaky trick,” Bobbie said, when they were in his Vette heading for south Mission Beach. “Paying the bill when I was in the head.”
“I told you I’d let you buy the after-dinner booze.”
“We make good money in the navy nowadays. I can afford to pay my way.”
“I know you can, but I can’t help it. I’m an old-fashioned guy. My sisters made me do it.”
Bobbie leaned back on the headrest, loosened the seat belt and scooted around. The streetlights glistened off her teeth when he turned to look at her. She said, “You really are a gentleman, know that? I got a lotta experience with sailors, even a little bit with the officers when they’re not scared a getting caught fraternizing with enlisted personnel. Officers’re not necessarily gentlemen, I can tell you.”
“I was an enlisted man myself,” he said. “I shoulda stayed in.”
“Don’t you like police work?”
“It’s a living,” he said, “but the theater’s where I belong. I just did an important audition. In fact, the only reason I’m dressed like this is for the role of a dork in wingtips. Next time I get a stage gig I’ll send you a ticket and you can come see me.”
“I’d like to go see some plays,” she said. “My boyfriend, before he went back to his wife, he was gonna take me to L.A. to see Phantom of the Opera.”
“I’ll take you. It’s really good.”
“You’ll take me? Okay, but I’ll pay for the tickets.”
Fin was feeling woozy. The streetlights started swimming. His face felt hot and his pulse was up to a hundred, at least. And it was only partly because of the booze. The last time he felt like this he married the babe in the passenger seat!
A moment of panic, then he blurted, “I’m forty-five!”
“Yeah?”
“Does that shock you?”
“Why would it?”
“Take my word for it, Bobbie. Normal people get real goofy when they turn forty-five, but actors? We jump off buildings!”
“I thought you were about forty,” she said. “Forty … forty-five, what’s the difference?”
What’s the difference? What’s the use! He felt lonely for a moment, very lonely. He wished someone Nell Salter’s age was sitting next to him. What’s the difference?
“No difference,” he said. “It’s all the same.”
She put her hand on his arm then, the first time they’d touched. She said, “I don’t care if you wore wingtip baby shoes. I just wish you could forget about age. Is this what a mid-life crisis is all about?”
“No, this’s what a mid-life calamity is all about.”
“Well, just stop it,” she said; then she unhooked her seat belt. “Speaking a forty-five,” she said, “I gotta get this sidearm off.”
“We’ll lock it in the car.”
“Are you packing?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think we’re gonna need a gun in the joint I’m taking you to. When their customers get in a brawl it’s about as dangerous as two clowns smacking each other with pig bladders. I did Shakespeare once, when that’s what we did. Hit each other with fake pig bladders.”
Fin took the scenic route, driving past the Santa Fe Depot, a handsome train station in the Mission Revival style. It had been done well, so that the wood framing and stucco created the illusion of eighteenth-century adobe walls. Then Fin drove along the bay front, slowing for the nighttime tourist traffic. There was one cruise ship in port, and the three masts of the Star of India were outlined in white lights. Probably the oldest ship still sailing, the Star was christened on the Isle of Man in 1863, and had made numerous trips to and from Australia with other iron sailing ships of the era.
By the Star of India was a ferryboat that had done rescue work in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Across from the harbor side was the County Administration Center, Fin’s favorite building, a 1930’s beaux-arts landmark aglow with shafts of vertical light.
Fin was thinking how he was doomed to love everything old about his city and to scorn the new, when Bobbie interrupted his reverie to say, “It’s a shame the Portuguese and Italians couldn’ta hung on to their fishing industry the way it used to be.”
“I was just thinking how I like all that old stuff!” Fin said. “You read my thoughts.”
“See, we got a lot in common,” Bobbie said. “More than you think.”
Fin crossed the San Diego River Floodway, driving past Sea World, and then across the Mission Bay Channel, that allows small pleasure craft to penetrate the 4,800-acre aqua park from the ocean side.
Bobbie said, “I think this is one a the most excellent things about this town. A huge water park right in the middle a the city!”
“Not like where you come from, huh?”
“Wisconsin? Not even!”
“Do you sit around in winter and ice-fish, or what?”
“Yeah, and we stay in saunas mostly, and talk with funny Scandinavian accents and whack each other with birch switches. In our spare time we shiver. Believe me, I’ve heard all the snowbird put-downs.”
“So maybe you should stay in California when you leave the navy,” Fin said, turning onto Mission Boulevard toward south Mission Beach.
The old roller coaster was lit up and operational since the. recent restoration. In Fin’s youth, there was a ballroom next to it where his sisters danced to the big bands. He was feeling nostalgic, and would’ve talked about those golden days in Mission Beach if the woman next to him was Nell Salter, or someone not younger than his handcuffs.
When they got to Fin’s favorite gin mill they were lucky to grab a parking space only half a block away.
“You aren’t expecting a trendy bistro, I hope,” he said, after they’d locked up Bobbie’s sidearm.
“I’ve spent a little time in Mission Beach,” she said, “but mostly on the north side.”
“Nothing up there but kids and derelicts,” Fin said. “Down here any derelicts you meet won’t be kids, just old geezers that sit around telling knock-knock jokes.”