“Since when did you ever let that worry you, Joe? I’m being funny, of course, ha ha.”
“Ha ha, sure you are,” Quinn said. “I’ve got your I.O.U. for three hundred dollars. I want the money now.”
“I don’t have it. This is damned embarrassing, old boy, but I just don’t have it. If you’d settle for a boat, I’ve got a nice little sea mew, 300-pound keel, Watts sails, gaff rig—”
“Just what I need to get around Venice. Only I’m not going to Venice.”
“Keep your shirt on, it was just a suggestion. I suppose you already have a car?”
“Bad supposing, Tom.”
“Well, there’s this crate—this dandy little’ 54 Ford Victoria my wife’s been driving. She’ll put up a terrible squawk if I take it away from her but what can I do? It’s worth at least three hundred. Two-tone blue and cream, white-walls, heater, radio.”
“I could do better than that on a’ 54 Ford in Reno.”
“You’re not in Reno like you’re not in Venice,” Jurgensen said. “It’s the best I can do for you right now. Either take the car in full payment or use it until I can scrape up your money. It will suit me better if you just borrow it. That way Helen will be a little easier to handle.”
“It’s a deal. Where’s the car?”
“Parked in the garage behind my house, 631 Gaviota Road. It hasn’t been used for a week—Helen’s visiting her mother in Denver—so you might have a little trouble starting it. Here are the keys. You going to be in town for a while, Joe?”
“In and out, I expect.”
“Call me in a couple of weeks. I may have your money then. And take care of the crate or Helen will accuse me of losing it in a poker game. She may anyway, but—” Jurgensen spread his hands and shrugged. “You’re looking pretty good, Joe.”
“Early to bed and early to rise puts color in the cheeks and sparkle in the eyes. Like they say.”
“Like who says?”
“The Brothers and Sisters of the Tower of Heaven.”
Jurgensen raised his eyebrows. “You taken up religion or something?”
“Something,” Quinn said. “Thanks for the car and I’ll see you later.”
Quinn had no trouble starting the car. He drove to a gas station, filled up the tank, added a quart of oil and parted with the first of Sister Blessing’s twenty-dollar bills.
He asked the attendant the best way to get to Chicote.
“If it was me now, I’d follow 101 to Ventura, then cut over to 99. It’s longer that way but you don’t get stuck on 150, which hasn’t half a mile of straightaway from one end to the other. You save trading stamps, sir?”
“I guess I could start.”
As soon as he turned inland, at Ventura, he began to regret not waiting until night to make the trip. The bare hills, alternating with lemon and walnut groves, shimmered in the relentless sun, and the air was so dry that the cigarettes he’d bought in San Felice snapped in two in his fingers. He tried to cool off by thinking of San Felice, the breeze from the ocean and the harbor dotted with sails, but the contrast only made him more uncomfortable and he stopped thinking entirely for a while, surrendering himself to the heat.
He reached Chicote at noon. Since his last visit the small city had changed, grown bigger but not up and certainly not better. Fringed by oil wells and inhabited by the people who lived off them, it lay flat and brown and hard like something a cook had forgotten to take out of the oven. Underprivileged trees grew stunted along streets dividing new housing tracts from old slums. Small children played in the dust and weeds of vacant lots, looking just as contented as the children playing in the clean white sand of the San Felice beaches. It was in the teen-agers that Quinn saw the uneasiness caused by a too quick and easy prosperity. They cruised aimlessly up and down the streets in brand new convertibles and ranch wagons. They stopped only at drive-in movies and drive-in malt shops and restaurants, keeping to their cars the way soldiers in enemy territory kept to their tanks.
Quinn bought what he needed at a drugstore and checked in at a motel near the center of town. Then he ate lunch in an air-conditioned café that was so cold he had to turn up the collar of his tweed jacket while he ate.
When he had finished he went to the phone booth at the rear of the café. Patrick O’Gorman was listed in the directory as living at 702 Olive Street.
So that’s all there is to it, Quinn thought with a mixture of pleasure and disappointment. O’Gorman’s still in Chicote and I’ve made a quick hundred and twenty dollars. I’ll drive back to the Tower in the morning, give Sister Blessing the information, and then head for Reno.
It seemed very simple, and yet the simplicity of it worried Quinn. If this was all there was to it, why had Sister Blessing played it so close to the chest? Why hadn’t she just asked Brother Crown to call O’Gorman from San Felice or look up his address in the out-of-town phone books stocked both by the public library and the main telephone office? Quinn couldn’t believe that she hadn’t thought of both these possibilities. She was, in her own words and by Quinn’s own observation, no fool. Yet she had paid a hundred and twenty dollars for information she could have got from a two-dollar phone call.
He put a dime in the slot and dialed O’Gorman’s number.
A girl answered, breathlessly, as if she had raced somebody else to the phone. “This is the O’Gorman residence.”
“Is Mr. O’Gorman there, please?”
“Richard’s not a mister,” the girl said with a giggle. “He’s only twelve.”
“I meant your father.”
“My fath—? Just a minute.”
There was a scurry at the other end of the line, then a woman’s voice, stilted and self-conscious: “To whom did you wish to speak?”
“Mr. Patrick O’Gorman.”
“I’m sorry, he’s not—not here.”
“When do you expect him back?”
“I don’t expect him back at all.”
“Perhaps you could tell me where I can reach him?”
“Mr. O’Gorman died five years ago,” the woman said and hung up.
Three
Olive Street was in a section of town that was beginning to show its age but still trying to preserve appearances. Seven-o-two was flanked by patches of well-kept lawn. In the middle of one a white oleander bloomed, and in the middle of the other stood an orange tree bearing both fruit and blossoms at the same time. A boy’s bicycle leaned carelessly against the tree as if its owner had suddenly found something more interesting to do. The windows of the small stucco house were closed and the blinds drawn. Someone had recently hosed off the sidewalk and the porch. Little puddles steamed in the sun and disappeared even as Quinn watched.
The front door had an old-fashioned lion’s-head knocker made of brass, newly polished. Reflected in it Quinn could see a tiny crooked reflection of himself. In a way it matched his own self-image.
The woman who answered the door was, like the house, small and neat and no longer young. Although her features were pretty and her figure still good, her face lacked any spark of interest or animation. It was as if, at some time during her life, she had stepped outside and had never been able to find her way back in.
Quinn said, “Mrs. O’Gorman?”
“Yes. But I’m not buying anything.”
She’s not selling either, Quinn thought. “I’m Joe Quinn. I used to know your husband.”
She didn’t exactly unbend but she seemed faintly interested. “That was you on the telephone?”
“Yes. It was kind of a shock to me, suddenly hearing that he was dead. I came by to offer my condolences and apologize if my call upset you in any way.”
“Thank you. I’m sorry I hung up so abruptly. I wasn’t sure whether it was a joke or not, or a piece of malice, having someone ask for Patrick after all these years. Everyone in Chicote knows that Patrick’s gone.”