“No reason people can’t be both.”
“I know. But still—”
He glanced at his watch. Tucked a frown into the corner of his mouth again. “It’s time.”
“Yeah.”
I thought of Jane and her parents. Their panic. Fear.
“I’ll do it as easy as I can.”
“I know.”
He stood up, dropped two singles on the Formica. “You find out anything about the mystery woman, let me know.”
He was being nice again. I appreciated it.
“Take care, Dwyer,” he said.
Then he was gone.
27
I didn’t need that particular call that morning, but it was there nonetheless. My talent agency. I was among the finalists for the daddy in the pizza commercial. “You got a cardigan sweater?” My agent asked.
“Yeah. I got a cardigan sweater.”
“Put it on and get your ass over there. The guy from the pizza company’s there and he’s waiting for you.”
The president of Good Times pizza turned out to be a Santa Claus of a man in a three-piece suit. He even had the downy white hair. All the people from the production company hovered around him as if he were about to dispense a map giving the whereabouts of the world’s biggest uranium strike. All except the director. He was an arty type I’d worked with once in stock. He liked to give the impression that he hated everybody and everything he worked with. Hell, he’d convinced me of his sincerity a long time ago.
“Daddy Number One,” the production assistant announced. This was a blond guy. Troy Donahue twenty years and a heavy beer habit later. The Good Times president kept looking at the guy’s belly. Not happily.
When they said “Daddy Number Three” I got up and walked toward the table where four guys, including the prez, took notes.
“Hi, there. James Todd,” the prez said, and we endured a pasty handshake.
He asked each daddy different questions. Kind of a verbal shell game.
“You like Good Times pizza?”
“Really,” I said, shamelessly, “it’s my favorite.”
“What’s your favorite topping?”
“Sausage.”
He smiled. “Then you should sue us, young man.”
“How’s that?”
“Good Times is meatless pizza.”
I was waiting for the other three guys to turn their thumbs down. Then somebody would open the gate for the lion.
“I see,” I said.
He shook his head. “You got eight points out of ten until you opened your mouth, young man.”
“I must’ve been thinking of some other kind of pizza.”
One of the production people said, “Daddy Number Four just came in, Mr. Todd.”
I took my cardigan sweater and left.
I tried Donna’s office several times, but there was no answer. I needed some friendship, so I swung by Malley’s bar, where he can usually be seen having a microwave sandwich for lunch, which is just what he was doing today.
He was also watching the noon news. “Reagan, man, he’s made a big difference in this country.”
“Yeah. Most of us are starving to death.”
“Crap — he’s the best thing that’s happened to us.”
“I’d hate to see the worst.”
He glowered and went back to watching the tube. The local newsman was of the hair-spray, Ken doll type. With his big hairy paw, he gestured at the screen. “Lookit that bastard. So pretty.” He minced his voice. “I seen this Sid Caesar routine once. Had a guy like this newscaster, right? Only when the camera went around his back, there was this windup key. The guy was like a prop or something.”
For some reason Malley’s image made me laugh out loud. Maybe I needed relief from knowing that Jane Branigan was being booked, from knowing that my detective days seemed far behind me. Thus far I’d proven myself to be pretty inept.
“Good to hear you laugh,” Malley said. “You had me worried the other night. You were really down.”
I kept watching the screen. I suspected that there was indeed a windup key sticking out of the news anchor’s back.
“Now all I got to do is get you fixed up with the right broad,” Malley said.
“I think I met her.”
“What’s her name?”
“Donna.”
He thought about it. Apparently if her name had been Polly or Sheena, he would have complained.
“Not bad,” he said. “College grad?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“You’re making a mistake.”
“Why?”
“When you think about it, we all had good mothers, right?”
“Right.”
“And not one of them was a college grad.”
“Yeah. I guess so.”
“Well.”
“Well, what?”
“So how come you’re so unhappy with broads all the time?”
“Maybe because I’m a jerk. Maybe I make myself unhappy.”
“Uh-uh. It’s because you go out with college grads. I mean, look at the fucking record. Your wife was a college grad, right?”
“Right.”
“Then Jane Branigan. College grad?”
I nodded.
“And now this Donna. Do I have to predict how it’s going to end up?”
Malley always pursued his ideas with the passion, if not the panache, of an Oxford don in a debating society. He banged his fist and jabbed the air. He was a frustrated prosecuting attorney.
“So what’m I supposed to do, walk up to a woman on the street and ask her IQ?”
“Right,” he said, “and if it’s below sixty, jump ’er.”
I didn’t know which was funnier — his image of the windup newsman or his theory about the women in my life.
“Actually, I’d better go back and call her,” I said.
“Cruisin’ for a bruisin’, Dwyer, that’s you.”
An Alabama song accompanied my phone call to Donna.
“I’ve been wondering about you,” I said. “How’s it going?”
Something was odd, wrong, in her voice. “Oh, pretty good.”
“You sound really thrilled about hearing from me.”
“Things are just a little screwed up, is all.”
“Are you all right?”
“Oh, nothing’s really wrong. Chad’s just asked me to marry him.”
I thought of Malley’s theory. Maybe he was right. Maybe I should go out looking for a woman who liked “Gilligan’s Island” reruns and thought Liberace was a concert pianist.
“You still there?” she said.
“Yeah.” A frog the size of a Shetland pony had jumped down my throat.
“It’s a bummer.”
“There’s an expression I haven’t heard in fifteen years,” I said. I tried to be light. Lead pancakes.
“I don’t know what to do.”
That line worked on me like surgery. Implicit in it was that she was at least thinking it over.
A familiar panic rose up in me, a mild form of hyperventilation. Damn, but I liked this woman and I didn’t want to see her—
“How about going for a ride with me?” I said.
“Where?”
The idea was ridiculous and unnecessary and I knew she wouldn’t go for it — but I also had the hope that she would say yes and be alone with me for a few hours and let my modest charms work on her.
“Tanrow.”
“Where?”
“I told you. The other day. Those flowers being delivered.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
“There could be,” I said, flinging my voice like a pair of doomed dice, “something important to the case there.”
For the first time she sounded at least a tad less than suicidal.
“You really think so?”
“Yeah.”
“You going now?”
“I thought I would.”
I wanted her alone in my car.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“This could be the break we’ve been waiting for.”
“Really?”