Having purchased his territorial loyalty for one more night, I sat at the plywood breakfast counter and used a pair of needlenose pliers to work the bells out of the wind chimes. I only pinched myself twice. The pliers doubled as wire cutters, so I took them outside as I strung the piano wire back and forth across the driveway and through the brush on the hillsides surrounding the house. Each wire or pair of wires ultimately passed through one of the many holes in the screen over my bedroom window, where I passed it under a bent nail driven into the wall and then tied it off through one of the metal rings that had held the bells in place in the wind chimes. The entire bouquet of bells dangled about twelve inches above where my nose would be when I was asleep. I was outside, tugging wires and listening to bells, when the phone rang again.
“Yeah?”
“Hello, Simeon,” Eleanor said.
“Oh, Lord,” I said, feeling as though I’d broken into a blush. “Let me get a beer.”
I grabbed a bottle of Singha from the refrigerator and plopped down on the floor. “So hi,” I said.
“How are you?”
“Everybody’s asking. I’m not well done yet, and that’s something.”
“Have you got any protection?”
“Bravo Corrigan’s here. I’ve put in an alarm system.” I could hear a television in the background. “And you?”
“Getting tired of hotels.”
“Call room service.”
“I do,” she said. “Continuously.”
“How’s good old Burt?”
“In New York.”
“He’s a New York type of guy. He should really move to New York. I bet he’d be happy as hell in New York.”
“Well,” Eleanor said. It was beginning to get dark.
I didn’t want her to hang up. “Have you seen Hammond?”
“He’s with me four hours a day. He’s in terrible shape, Simeon. I think he’s drunk all night long. He’s got so much fluid under his eyes I’m surprised he can blink.”
“Tough,” I said. “He’s a big boy. Time for him to stop feeling sorry for himself.”
“She’s going to take everything. She’s got proof that he committed adultery.”
“ Al? ” I asked in mock disbelief.
“Oh, stop it. He’s your friend.”
“I am now the One Musketeer,” I said.
“Well,” she said again. “He misses you.”
I drank again. “He does?”
“I miss you, too.”
“Eleanor,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Me, too,” she said after a moment. “How did things get so complicated?”
“Maybe I’m not the best guy in the world. But I could get better.” I felt like I was talking Tourist’s English.
The television on her end of the line went bang-bang. “It would be good for you if you did,” she said. “You can’t run away from love forever.”
“It’s how I keep in shape,” I said. “Stupid. Sorry, that was stupid.”
“Well, it was certainly Simeon. Do you want me to come over?”
“No,” I said quickly. “We’re in Wilton’s time zone here.”
“Do you want to come here, then?”
There was nothing in the world I wanted more. “I’m afraid to leave.”
“I’d think you’d be afraid to stay.”
“That, too.”
“And you think you can change,” she said. “Well. When it’s over, then. Promise?”
“I promise.” I searched my brain for words that would prove I meant it.
“Please take care of yourself. For me, if not for you.”
“I will.” I drank half the bottle in a series of long, heart-clutchingly cold swallows.
“See you, then.”
“See you.” She hung up, and I finished the bottle and thought about the conversation we hadn’t had.
When in doubt, Dreiser. Since I’d totaled An American Tragedy, I took a shovel to The Titan for an hour or two, then gave up once again and reread the first part of Trollope’s richly venal The Way We Live Now. At about eleven I turned off the light and got into bed. Two minutes later, the phone rang. I pushed Bravo Corrigan off my feet, where he was already twitching his feet, chasing some dream cat, and went to answer it.
“Hello?” I said, hoping it was Eleanor again.
Silence.
“Oh, fuck you, Wilton,” I said, slamming the phone down. I went back to bed. Ten minutes later, Bravo raised his head and growled. I picked up the flashlight I’d put on the table by the bed and pointed it out the bedroom window. I lay down again.
All the bells went off.
19
All told, the bells went off three times that night. The third time, I went all the way to the kitchen, clutching Billy’s rabbi, and old Bravo barreled out the door, and two seconds later a bunch of coyotes exploded past me and down the hill in a mad scrabble of claws on granite. There was no way to know about the first two times, so I went to bed and spent a couple of hours watching a big reddish fire moon sink itself below the hills, waiting for peal number four.
Another great night’s sleep.
At ten in the morning, blinking and sneezing against the sunlight, I stumbled down the driveway and found the three-number note and sent it off to Schultz via the mailbox, in accordance with his instructions on the phone. My arms and legs behaved as though they’d never been introduced. I triggered one of my own wires carrying it back down. A bell in my bedroom rang derisively.
At eleven-thirty, Schultz called to tell me that the big Boy Scouts homesteading up in Happiness Hills had radioed in to say they hadn’t seen anyone around my house all night. They’d been using infrared binoculars.
“The nightlife in your neighborhood,” he said, “mostly has four legs.”
“What about that piece of paper?” I said. My teeth felt as if I’d been eating sand all night.
“It’s paper,” he said. “We got it three minutes ago, okay?”
I said okay and brushed my teeth for the third time.
At noon precisely, the phone rang again.
“You really should watch your language,” Wilton Hoxley said. Then he hung up. I sat on the floor and thought about shaving. I’d absolutely almost decided against it some fifteen minutes later, when the phone rang. It sounded as if it were getting a sore throat.
“I forgot to ask if you got it,” Wilton Hoxley said.
“I got it. What does it mean?”
“Don’t be silly. You’re the detective. You got it, well, goody. One down, two to go.” He hung up again, but this time I stayed on the line and heard a second disconnect, the coin-drop click a pay phone makes.
Scratching my chin seemed as good a way as any to pass the time. I’d run out of action the day before. After I’d scratched my chin really thoroughly, using no half-measures, I went into the bedroom and tried on my special survival outfit. It looked pretty silly.
Schultz phoned at one-fifteen to say that the bit of paper was eighty-pound coated Royal Roto stock, whatever that meant, and that it was clean of prints. The ink was carbon-based black, and the numbers were in a typeface called Bodoni, commonly used by IBM for its advertisements and manuals. Wilton was going high tech.
I hung up. There was literally nothing to do except wait for Wilton. Wilton came through at two on the dot.
“Do we have pencil in hand?” he asked.
“Do you want me to have a pencil in my hand, Wilton?”
“If you don’t, you’re going to miss something really, really important.”
I picked up a pen; he’d never know. “Shoot,” I said.
“ C! ” Wilton Hoxley shrieked into the phone.
I blinked. “See what?”