She slams the can down on the counter and wheels to face him with virulent wrath. That much isn’t feigned; but nor is it uncalculated. She knows she’s got to take control and hold it.
“Listen to me. I’ll try to do this in simple language that even you can understand. I’m subletting to a friend and she’s out of town and I just stopped in to pick up the mail and check things out.”
She moves toward the door. “So much for your mystery. Now if you’re all through sniffing around in that closet—”
He shouts at her: “Where do you live then, ducky? Where do you hang your pretty little hat that you’re too bashful to use it as your legal address?”
“Where and how I live is none of your business.”
He continues to shout, trying by sheer volume to intimidate her. “Who’s paying your rent? What’s the guy’s name? I can see him—the thousand-dollar suits and the Rolls-Royce—some honcho with a society wife at home and a ten-million-dollar image to protect. Tell me the bastard’s name, ducky. Tell me his fucking name!”
The very question pegs him: now she understands. He smells a profit in this. He sees his chance to blackmail someone.
Well then—why not let him think it? Let him go right on assuming she’s the well-kept mistress of a politician or movie mogul. Let him put his nose to the ground and follow that lead as far as he’d like: let him outsmart himself.
She says: “I owe you nothing—least of all information. I know the law. Would you like me to tell you the penalty for breaking and entering? It’s a felony, you know.”
He’s not meeting her glance. She puts her hand on the doorknob and goes on, driving it in: “You’re slime. I can’t stand the sight of you. I don’t want to see you ever again. I don’t want to hear from you. If you want to hang around with Doyle and Marian, do it when I’m not there.”
“Your name doesn’t even need to come into it. You’re a confidential source. Nobody’ll pry your name out of me, not even with a writ. Now all I want to know is who he is.”
“Believe me, you can’t afford to know the answer to that question. It could kill you.”
“Don’t be melo—”
“Get out now, Graeme—or I call a cop.”
His mouth begins to assume a disgusted expression of defeat; he even slouches a few paces toward her—toward the door. But then cunning returns.
His mouth curls into a smile that is more like a snarclass="underline"
“Go ahead and phone. I shouldn’t be surprised if they’re just as interested as I am to find out how come Jennifer Hartman was born two months ago. How come there isn’t a trace of her in existence before that. No credit rating, no Social Security account, no driver’s license in California or Illinois. You did say you came out here from Illinois, didn’t you, ducky?”
He leans forward to peer furiously at her. “I think there’s a story in you. Quite possibly a big story.”
She manages somehow to give him a slow cool smile. “Even if your ridiculous suspicions were true, there’s no crime in any of that. On the other hand you broke in here and I ordered you out but you’re still here …”
She walks wide around him, making her way to the telephone, watching him, knowing she’s got to carry the bluff all the way.
He pivots on his heels to keep her in front of him. She picks up the receiver and dials the operator and meets his eyes icily while she listens to it ring.
“Operator? Get me the police, please. It’s an emergency.”
“Put it down,” he says. “I’m leaving.”
But she holds it to her ear. A voice comes on the line: “Police Department. May I help you?”
“I’d like to report a breaking and entering in progress. The address is fifty-one sixty-sev—”
By now he’s got the door open and he’s gone through it and she watches it slam behind him. She hangs up the phone and realizes she’s hyperventilating but she has the presence of mind to walk unsteadily across to the window and pry the blind back.
He’s halfway down the stairs. He doesn’t look up.
He descends out of sight. A few moments later she hears the slam of a car door and the belch of a sports car muffler.
Oh dear God. What am I going to do now?
33 She drives west on Chandler. The street is divided by railroad tracks and trees. It’s after midnight; there’s no traffic.
No evidence of headlights behind her but she feels a crucial need to be certain and so she makes three right turns in succession, switches off the lights and coasts to a stop at the corner, keeping her foot off the brake because she doesn’t want the taillights to flash.
She waits at the corner with the engine idling, watching Chandler in both directions, watching the narrow street behind her—watching everything.
A few cars pass under the street lights. None of them is Graeme’s Datsun.
An instinct compels her away from her natural course; she turns south on Van Nuys Boulevard and drives up into the canyons, up Beverly Glen all the way to the top of the rugged spine that divides Beverly Hills and Bel Air from the Valley. She runs west on the ridge, hairpinning slowly along the tight twists of Mulholland Drive, here and there glimpsing a startling thirty-mile panorama of urban lights; up here on the thin strip of road corkscrewing through rocks and brush she has the atavistic feeling she’s been flung back into primordial wilderness.
The road swoops across a graceful bridge span, crossing above the freeway in Sepulveda Pass, and she continues to pursue the westering half moon, concentrating on her driving, putting everything else out of her mind except steering wheel and brakes and accelerator: the car and the road and the constantly shifting sliver of the world that is illuminated by her headlights.
There’s a clump of buildings on the left—a posh private school—and just beyond it is a wide graded pull-out where half a dozen cars are parked facing the sparkling view of the Valley. She comes slowly through the bend; her headlights sweep across the parked cars and she catches a sign of movement as two heads duck down behind a car seat. Lover’s lane.
Soon Mulholland Drive peters out. She wonders whether to take the steeply descending road to the right or turn around and retrace her course.
What the hell. Why not explore.
Down to the right. The road keeps curving back on itself; it becomes a residential street—one of those high canyon suburbs, houses perched on land-fill outcrops so that each site commands a view. You pay for the houses by the square foot; for the views by the square mile.
The streets intersect one another without pattern or reason. She keeps turning from one into another, always choosing the street that leads downhill. Now and then she finds herself in a cul-de-sac and has to turn back and try another turning; but you can’t really get lost up here—you can see the entire Valley asprawl below and you know you only need to keep going downhill until eventually, like a tributary rivulet seeking its main stream, you’re bound to flow into Ventura Boulevard.
She needs this sort of distraction right now: she needs to clear her mind.
A sudden bend makes her brake. The lights traverse a dark thicket and now there’s an animal caught in the blaze. It stands frozen, its eyes radiating phosphoric yellow. She stops the car.
Dog? Fox?
Then she realizes: coyote.
It stares at her, pinned by the headlights, ears up and bushy tail down, an emaciated grey yellow creature with bony spine and a swollen abdomen and its mouth peeled back in a proud smile.