‘Terrific’, I said.
‘That’s what Vin thought.’
‘Good man is he?’
‘Was.’
‘And you are…?’
‘Percy Holmes.’ He flexed a bicep and jutted his jaw. ‘More Holmes than Percy, if you take my meaning.’
‘I do. You know Vin well?’
He scratched his chin and stayed in the squatting position, giving the thighs a work-out. ‘Just because you whipped me doesn’t mean I’ll spill my guts to you. What’s the problem?’
‘I’m not sure.’ I drank some more of the beer and decided it was very good. ‘Diane Holt’s father hired me to find her. You know her?’
He nodded. ‘Sure, a young fox. She was around when Vin came back and pulled outa here. And gave up beer. He was different, like weird.’
I’d seen a photograph of Harvey, courtesy of Raymond Evans. He had dark hair, a short beard and what you might call brooding eyes, but he didn’t look weird.
‘This is nothing heavy’, I said. I waved the nearly empty beer can and tried a smile. ‘Di’s dad seems like a man of the world to me, know what I mean?’
His dark brown brow furrowed. ‘No’, he said.
‘I want to find out if the girl’s okay and what’s happening. I won’t touch Vin or even speak to him in a loud voice unless he’s making her do what she doesn’t want to do.’
He seemed to find that very funny. He let out a short laugh and then a longer one. He reached into the fridge, got out two cans of Coors, tossed one to me and popped the other himself.
‘You got it round the wrong way man. That Di, she’s got him here.’ He gripped his crotch.
We both drank some beer and I started to put together an easy scenario for myself: Australian-raised girl with fantasies about America grabs the first chance she gets to take the trip, rages for a while, gets sick of it and is happy to come back to good old Sydney University with dinkum detective. Then he had to go and complicate it.
‘She wanted to go to Santa Cruz’, Holmes said. ‘That was the place for her, “dreamland”, she called it. They had the biggest fight right here.’
‘Santa Cruz-what’s that?’
‘UC campus-south of here, funky place.’
‘Harvey can’t transfer his PhD there can he?’
He shook his head. ‘No way. Look, I roomed a while with Vin, he’s okay. You sure that’s all straight-just findin’ the chick and all?’
‘Yes.’ I finished the beer to prove it.
‘Okay. Vin, he’s through with the PhD, he says. He says it’s meaningless, I’m not sure why. He’s pretty freaked out, that’s why he put Santa Cruz down so hard. A cop-out he says. He’s into, like anarchy, you know? And the chick wants to hang out in Santa Cruz, shit.’
He seemed to remember that he wasn’t exercising anything at the moment while sitting on the floor. He did some squats, it was time to go before he started shadow-boxing in the confined space.
‘So where did they go?’ I said.
‘San Francisco-where else?’
‘Driving what, Percy? Living where?’
He grinned. ‘Drives a Volkswagen van. Ah’m sorry suh, ah don’t know the number.’
‘Okay, okay, sorry. Do you happen to know where he lives in San Francisco, Mr Holmes?’
‘No, Mr Hardy, I don’t; but you’re in luck, he’s going to be right here tonight.’ He got up and rummaged among papers on top of the bookcase. He handed me a roughly printed notice which said that Harvey would be giving a lecture entitled ‘Owning the Air’ on the subject of the media and politics. The lecture was sponsored by the Stanford Committee for Responsible Social Science and was scheduled for that evening at eight p.m.
‘Will you be there?’
‘Not me. I’ll be playing basketball.’
‘Are you tall enough for basketball?’
‘No, I play for fun.’
I drove back to Palo Alto and found a place called a Creamery in which you could eat and drink and read. I ate a salad, drank a beer and read the San Francisco Chronicle. The food and drink were better than the paper but I did learn that Michael Spinks was defending his cruiserweight title against nobody that afternoon on TV. I asked the kid behind the counter if I could watch it and he nodded and turned on the set mounted high on the wall.
‘Who’s Michael Spinks?’ he said.
‘Brother of Leon.’
I let him bring me another beer while I watched the fight. The beer was fine but Spinks wasn’t so good. His opponent was a dark, chunky guy who looked like a blown-up middleweight and Spinks took about three rounds longer than he should to put him away.
I did the crossword in the paper, had another beer, walked around for a while and filled up with gas. I drove very cautiously; all the cops I’d seen so far wore black uniforms with big guns tucked up high, wicked-looking nightsticks and discontented expressions. Cops have a way of spotting men who are in a similar line of work, and of being nasty to them. I wasn’t licenced to blow my nose in California and I knew what one of those nightsticks in sweaty hands could do to a sensitive man like me.
I gave a boy and his girlfriend a ride to the campus because they looked so forlorn walking. Everyone else was in a car or on a ten-speed cycle. I asked the kid if he was going to the media lecture.
‘Naw’, he said.
‘Freaks’, the girl said
A campus patrol car came alongside and the boy waved insolently at the driver. I swore silently at him but the cop just gunned his motor and cruised past.
‘Pigs’, the girl said. I wondered if they limited themselves to one-word statements. I dropped them near one of the student dormitories; the boy waved, he was a good waver; the girl said ‘Thanks.’
I was a bit late finding the lecture room and I wasn’t ready for Vin Harvey. Evans’ photograph was the sort that would let you recognise someone in the street and not much more. Harvey appeared a dark-haired young man with a heavyish face and a short beard; his eyes were said to be blue and his build was said to be light, but all that did was distinguish him from brown-eyed truck drivers. The man addressing the crowd in the room might have been dark with blue eyes and slight build, but why hadn’t anyone said anything about charisma? He had it. He was tall unless he was standing on a high box and his beard-framed face didn’t look heavy.
He worked at talking-his voice was pleasing with a mid-Pacific accent and he moved his shoulders a little for emphasis. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt and his arms and hands moved like an orchestra conductor’s. I took a seat up at the back of the steeply sloped room and listened.
‘They are not faceless’, Harvey said, ‘never think that. You can see their faces in the business magazines and newspapers they own. Their faces are on the screens, coming at you from the TV stations they own. Then there are the faces of the men and women they own-the lawyers, politicians and newsreaders.’ He suddenly stood quite still and the movement dramatically underlined his words. ‘But more important than the faces are the words.’ His voice went a bit deeper as if concern were forcing it down. ‘Last year, there was a meeting. It was held in Sydney, Australia. All the media corporations had representatives there, the political people, a few of the union people. You’d recognise some of the names if I mentioned them. For public consumption the meeting was to organise aid for the under-privileged of the Pacific. That’s a hell of a lot of people and for all I know they might get some water to villages in the Philippines. But the real talks, the ones the journalists didn’t get in on, weren’t about water-they were about direct access to your minds.’
The room was very quiet and still, everyone was listening and I had to jerk my attention away to check the audience. When I’d been bored rigid in my law lectures twenty years before I used to count all the people in the room. That’s why I’d sit up the back with the widest view I could command. Then I’d split them up into groups: sex, rebels, conformists. It passed the time, and I sometimes did bad sketches of people who took my eye. The old habit re-surfaced and, as Harvey went on, I found myself sketching.