On the pier I drove slowly past the old merry-go-round, which seemed strangely familiar to me until I remembered that it was the one that had been used in The Sting, although the film was supposedly laid in Chicago. Past the merry-go-round on the pier’s left-hand side was a series of hamburger and hot dog stands, a shooting gallery, some souvenir shops, a fishmonger, and maybe a double handful of strollers, mostly young, who wandered up and down in search of amusement.
When I got to Moby’s Dock, which turned out to be a modest-looking restaurant and bar, I stopped the car next to a No Parking sign and got out. I crossed the pier and, starting at the west edge of Moby’s Dock, began walking toward the end of the pier, counting my paces. When I got to ninety-nine I stopped.
The pier’s grey metal railing jutted out in a shallow U-shape to form a railed-in area. It was about wide enough and deep enough for four people to stand in. An elderly black man was standing in it, a fishing pole in his hand, a look of patience on his face.
I moved up next to the black man and peered over the railing. The sea, a soiled grey, lapped at the wooden pilings about thirty feet below. As I turned to go the black man nodded to me. “Catch anything?” I said.
“Just fishin’,” he said and grinned. I grinned back and returned to the Ford. I drove on down the pier until it ended at a group of small buildings that housed a bait shop and the pier’s maintenance office. There was a turn-around place that I used, and started driving slowly back toward the beginning of the pier.
When I got to the railed-in enclosure that jutted out from the edge of the pier, the old black man was putting some fresh bait on his hook. He looked up and saw me and gave me a wry smile. I waved at him and drove on, looking carefully at all the nooks and crannies and doorways and recesses that, once it grew dark, somebody could hide in. There were a lot of them.
I left the pier thinking that I didn’t much like what I had seen. I didn’t like it because it had no emergency exit. There was only one way on and one way off and there were too many places that somebody with a gun or a knife or just a very large rock could hide. From the point of view of whoever had the stolen book the pier was perfect. From my point of view it was awful.
From Ocean Avenue I cut down to the Pacific Coast Highway and headed toward Malibu. It was almost seven o’clock and I got to drive into a sunset that had to be called spectacular, for lack of a better word. It had bands of hot reds and angry oranges and at its center was the glowing yellow ball of the sun that seemed to be plunging into a crimson sea.
The sun had almost gone down by the time I reached Maude Goodwater’s house on Malibu Road. I took the gun from my jacket pocket and locked it in the glove compartment. Carrying the flowers and the bottle of wine I went around to the trunk and took out the attaché case.
She opened the door to my ring and accepted the wine and the flowers gracefully, as if they were a complete surprise. She was wearing a long, loose gown of a thin creamy material that was gathered at her waist with a golden cord. As she arranged the flowers in a vase I watched her body move beneath the dress. I found it an extremely erotic sight.
“What would you call it?” she said, turning to watch the sun as it dropped down behind two low hills of a point of land that edged out into the sea.
“I was thinking of ‘spectacular’ on the way out,” I said. “But that’s not really a very good word.”
“It’s different every night,” she said. “Sometimes it’s so beautiful that the only way I can react to it is to sit down and cry. That’s sort of dumb, isn’t it?”
“No,” I said. “Not really. Funny, but I thought that the sun was supposed to set in the west. Isn’t that west?” I pointed at the ocean.
She shook her head. “That’s south. The coast curves out here and the house faces due south. It mixes everybody up.”
“You’ll miss it, won’t you?” I said. “The beach and the house and the sea. I know I would.”
She nodded slowly, as if she were trying to decide just how much she would miss it. “I’m really hooked on it and it’s got so that it’s hard to imagine living anywhere else. Maybe if I get the book back, I can sell that and maybe stay on for a while longer. Do you think I really will get it back?”
“I think so,” I said. “After I pay them the hundred thousand tonight, or this morning, I guess, they’ll have milked it for all that it’s worth.”
“Let’s have a drink,” she said, “and then you can tell me about it. What would you like, a martini?”
“I’d like a martini, but I think I’d better have Scotch.”
She went over to the bar and came back after a minute or two with the drinks. She handed me mine and then sank gracefully onto the couch. I joined her.
“They called me at three o’clock this afternoon,” I said. “I say ‘they’ because I have to assume that there’s still more than one person involved. Anyway, it’s the same voice that I talked to in Washington. It’s so distorted that it’s hard to tell whether it belongs to a man or a woman. Whoever it belongs to offered to sell the book back for a hundred thousand dollars. I checked with Max Spivey and his boss at the insurance company, Ronnie Saperstein. They agreed to pay it. The switch will take place at three o’clock this morning on the Santa Monica pier. That’s about it.”
She nodded thoughtfully and then took a sip of her drink. “The insurance company is going to be out an awful lot of money, isn’t it?”
“Three hundred and fifty thousand.”
“But I’ll get the book back? I mean, if I sell it, they won’t get part of that, will they?”
“No. It’s insured for five hundred thousand. That’s what they’d have to pay you, if they didn’t get it back. This way they’ll only have to pay three hundred and fifty thousand.”
“They must not be very happy,” she said.
“They’re realists,” I said. “Unhappy realists, I suppose.”
She leaned back on the couch and looked at me. The thin white material of her dress pressed against the nipples of her breasts, outlining them perfectly. I stared at them for a moment. Then I reached out and touched the one that was closest to me. She looked down at my hand.
“It’s hard, isn’t it?” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “It is.”
“How does it make you feel?” she said.
“Excited.”
She took my hand and moved it to her other breast. I caressed the nipple with my fingers. “I don’t mean this,” she said. “I mean how do you feel about doing what you’re going to have to do?”
“Excited,” I said. “Nervous, maybe.”
She ran her tongue over her upper lip. “Is there a chance that something might happen?”
“Yes.”
She pressed my hand harder against her breast. I could feel her heart beating. “Tell me what might happen,” she said, her breathing fast and shallow. “Tell me what they might do to you, even if you have to make it up.”
So I put down my drink and told her. And as I told her my hand went from her breast to the smoothness of her thighs. I kept on talking because it seemed to be what she wanted — or needed. I was next to her now, her body pressed tightly against mine, my fingers moving deep into her wet warmness. Her head was back, her mouth open, and her tongue seemed to be tasting the things that I told her.
There was a quick, frantic period as we stripped off our clothes and then she was down on her knees in front of me and her mouth and tongue were doing incredible things and I quit talking because there really wasn’t anything left to say and besides, she wanted to talk. She didn’t really talk, of course. She made strange little cries and once she moaned from far down in her throat. And then she was on the couch and I was over her and then I went inside her and her mouth opened wide, as if she were going to scream, but she didn’t. The frenzy mounted as we lunged at each other and she started making those strange little cries again, interrupting them to whisper, “Hurt me, hurt me a little, please.” So I hurt her a little, but not very much, and she screamed this time, and then there was one more long series of frantic lunges and counter-lunges that led us up to the silent explosion, which was what it was all about.