She had no clear sense of the passing time. It could have been a moment or two, it could have been hours. She checked the gas gauge. She was chewing her fifth piece of nicotine gum when Burnett turned the corner and went down the ramp to the garage under his building. She parked a half-block away, shut off the engine, threw the gum out the window.
Frankie closed her eyes and pressed on her lids with her fingertips. She opened her eyes. It was the last instant of twilight before nightfall and the beauty of it gave her the idea taking in a lungful of air. The air was like sweet syrup going into her mouth and nostrils. She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. She saw a light and Burnett’s silhouette behind the Venetian blinds in his study. She noted in the log the time that she witnessed the subject was at home.
She looked up from it and saw a pedestrian running down the middle of the street after a dog, and they were shadows running in a direction away from her in the night, shadows that looked like they weren’t really there. An oncoming car didn’t see them. It bore down on them and was going to knock them down. A woman ran out of a phone booth and into the street waving her arms and shouting at them. Frankie flashed her headlights at the oncoming car and its headlights switched to high beams and the car swerved around the man and the dog.
The bright headlights burned through her lids, and she kept her eyes shut until the car had gone past. She opened her eyes, checked her watch against the clock in the dashboard, opened the agency notebook and ran her finger down the lines indicating the alternating time schedule. Eto was on his way to replace her. She was going to knock off and go straight home the minute he got there.
[ 20 ]
Pohl sighed into the telephone, then said goodnight. Shimura listened to the click of the receiver, an emptiness, then hung up. Pohl had wanted to hear something but he didn’t have anything new to tell him because he hadn’t had much time to spend checking on the man that Pohl had seen in Angela’s apartment. Shimura glanced at the clock on the wall. It was eleven-twenty.
He went to the kitchen to have something to eat. He couldn’t decide what he wanted, it was late, and there weren’t lot of things to choose from in the refrigerator. There was leftover pheasant, eggs, tortillas, yogurt, strawberries. A recipe came to his mind.
Stir-fry pheasant breasts in extra virgin olive oil with two crushed cloves of garlic.
Blend in tomato paste while frying.
Toast tortillas lightly.
While he was thinking about the pheasant tortillas something jumped up in his memory, got in the way of his appetite, made a sideways movement, hopping up and down, then faded out to make room again for the hunger in his stomach. He stared at the contents of the refrigerator, then looked in one of the kitchen cabinets. He didn’t have all the ingredients for fresh salsa. He peeled the aluminum foil from the leftover pheasant, smelled the cooked flesh, smiled. He lit the stove. A nearly perfect quarter moon shone through the kitchen window.
Shimura finished the pheasant tortillas, wiped his mouth with a napkin, then fixed a cup of instant coffee, black. He sat at the kitchen table, manipulating a toothpick in the spaces between his teeth. He looked down at the empty plate without moving more than the fingers using the toothpick to find and dislodge particles of pheasant and corn tortilla. What was left of the pheasant tortillas stared back at him.
Then he saw the picture of Burnett as if it were in front of him, the one he’d given to Frankie, and he compared it with the poorly sketched counterpart Pohl had given him in the Casino Club, a portrait of the man he’d seen at Angela’s apartment. Something clicked in his head, it wasn’t a big noise but he heard it clearly. It didn’t hurt and it didn’t seem real but it made one whole thing out of two separate things and that one thing forced him out of his chair at the same time as he stabbed his gums with the toothpick.
Until now it was a crackpot idea. It wasn’t even a complete idea now, but it was more than it had been a few minutes ago. He sat down and finished his cup of coffee. The realization swelled like a massive wave and it crashed against him and he rubbed his chin with his hand and grinned.
[ 21 ]
Violet got out of the taxi. She wasn’t far from Burnett’s apartment. She walked slowly along the sidewalk on East Olive Street, almost daydreaming, and went past the entrance of Burnett’s building to the corner, crossed the street and turned around and went back the way she’d come until she stopped at the public phone. She stood in front of it without opening the doors. The sky was dark and the street was busy with a steady flow of traffic in both directions. Now and then someone hurried along the sidewalk.
Violet looked up, and her anger at Burnett made the sky look like an endless field of dark ice. There was nothing left in it of the sunset. Just stars that looked like sparkling chips of ice or pinpoints of light embedded in an ice block. The darkness in the expression on her face went up into the sky and bounced back down straight into her heart.
She swung the phone booth doors open and let them shut behind her, leaning against the glass with her shoulder. She raised her head a little and saw the glow of lamplight behind the Venetian blinds. Burnett was there, and she was going to talk to him.
She dropped some change into the phone, started to press the numbers, then she saw a man running down the middle of the street chasing a dog. A car was coming at them, and she saw that if it went on the way it was going the driver wouldn’t see the man or the dog in the faded light and there was going to be a terrible accident. She put the receiver back on the hook, the change tumbled down into the receptacle, ringing in her ears.
She ran out of the phone booth and into the street and waved her arms and shouted at the man chasing the dog to warn him against the danger of the car. She was about to shut her eyes when something made her open them wide instead.
A woman behind the wheel of a car parked a few feet away from the phone booth under the outstretched branches of an elm tree must have seen the potential disaster because all at once the headlights flashed on and went straight into the eyes of the driver bearing down on the man and dog, and the driver switched the headlights to high beams, and together the warning from one and illumination of the other made the driver swerve out of the way at the last instant, and the man and dog were safe and sound in the last breath of twilight. Violet’s arms fell to her sides.
Breathing hard, she went back to the phone booth, lifted the receiver, scooped the coins out and dropped them back into the phone and pushed Burnett’s number. She waited for him to answer. The telephone rang a dozen times.
She didn’t really want to talk to him, she wanted to let off steam. She wanted to tell him to fuck himself. “You might as well bury your money somewhere even a dog couldn’t find it because I’m going to take every last cent you’ve got and leave you with nothing which is what you deserve.” The phone went on ringing, no one answered. She didn’t say a word. Violet hung up and went home.
[ 22 ]
Shimura looked at the empty coffee cup, dropped the toothpick in it, then smiled at the remains of his meal of pheasant tortillas. He got up from the table and went to the phone on the wall next to the sink, picked up the receiver and dialed Rand Hadley’s number. Burnett’s face kept jumping into the blank spot that was the face of the man Pohl had seen at Angela’s apartment. If he didn’t get it off his chest it was going to drive him nuts.