Frank wondered which pleats would persist longer, the ones outside Mrs. Hiller or the ones inside. “Is this your first job?”
“In a way. I don’t have to work. I’ve got a husband; he’s a cook in the army, stationed at Fort Ord. He supports me. And Jack — Mr. Goodfield pays me very well.”
Frank didn’t have to ask what for.
He said goodbye to Mrs. Hiller and she responded very pleasantly. It was clear that she thought she had given a good account of herself, that she had, in her own fashion, bitten the leg of the social worker who’d come to check up on the milk; and having administered the bite, she felt no further resentment.
Outside, the sheets of fog had coagulated into a flabby grey wall. Moisture condensed on Frank’s forehead and ran down his cheeks like cold griefless tears.
Charley’s chair stood by the gate looking empty and forlorn.
Frank let himself out through the gate and walked down the driveway, the wall of fog moving always a little ahead of him in a tantalizing way. Before he reached the street, a man’s figure appeared suddenly out of the fog.
It was Charley. He was shivering with cold and his leather jacket and peaked cap were dripping wet, but he had a funny little grin on his face.
“You find Mr. Jack, buddy?”
“No.”
“Want to know why not? He ain’t there.”
“So I found out.”
“He took a powder. Jumped into that convertible of his and beat it like he was shot out of a cannon. Which it’s too bad he wasn’t. Now I just wonder why he left so sudden-like, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“While you were inside there I gave you a little figuring-out in my head. You’re a policeman, aren’t you?”
Frank was vaguely flattered. He had no idea that he looked in the least authoritative or official. “No, I’m not.”
Charley seemed disappointed. “I was hoping maybe you’d come to pick up Evangeline and take her to a detention home. Evangeline. Say, how do you like that for the name of a slut. Evangeline.” He spit on the sidewalk vigorously. “Wiggles her hips in and out that gate twenty times a day. Gotta go down to the drugstore for coffee, she says. Or gotta have her hair done. Or gotta go shopping. If Mrs. Goodfield knew what was going on, she’d have a stroke. She’s real strict about things.”
Frank wondered. From what Greer had told him about the old lady, he gathered that she wasn’t quite as strict as she pretended.
“The girl’s married,” Frank said.
“Since when does being married keep a slut from slutting? Since never. To tell you confidential, I got a sneaking sympathy for Mr. Jack. He’ll never be the same, mark my words. Well, I gotta go now. It’s been nice talking to you.” Charley held out his gnarled hand and Frank shook it. “Soon as you came up to the gate I said to myself, now that’s a nice open face.”
“Thank you.”
“You come back again. Maybe by that time I’ll have Sweetheart all fixed up pretty like she used to be.”
“I may be back.”
“You do that.”
“Goodbye, Charley,” Frank said.
He turned and headed for his car. Sweetheart witnessed his departure without interest.
12
The noon traffic was heavy, slowed by fog and lunch-hour pedestrians, and cable cars that moved up and down the impossibly steep and narrow streets with slow, staggering dignity like drunken duchesses.
Frank drove up Powell Street. With each hill the traffic lessened and the street changed. Cigar and candy shops gave way to hotels and nightclubs and finally apartment houses jammed so close together that they seemed to be one continuous building. There were no lawns, no flowers. Land was too scarce and expensive to use for anything but shelter. People stepped down directly from their vestibules or parlors to the sidewalk, and stepped back up again with no contact with the growing things that were buried under concrete.
What Charley had called the old Goodfield mansion was at the top of the last hill. It may have been a mansion once but now it was curiously dwarfed by the apartment houses that towered above it on each side. It still had its distinction, though — two patches of lawn like green scatter rugs, and, flanking the sidewalk and front steps, a hundred or more potted plants of all colors and all sizes. They lent an air of welcome to the forbidding Gothic door. There was no chime or bell at the door, only a little silver Buddha with jeweled eyes. Frank raised the Buddha’s folded arms and let them fall again. They fell with a soft musical twinkle and the little jeweled eyes flashed as if in anger at this invasion of his privacy.
The heavy door opened inward two or three inches and a woman spoke through the crack: “Who is it, please?”
“Miss Goodfield?”
The woman laughed. In contrast to her voice, which sounded tired, her laugh was gay and full of genuine amusement. “Heavens, I almost said yes. That’s what comes of returning to the old homestead.”
“Sorry I don’t know your married name. I’m Frank Clyde.”
“I’m Shirley Gunnison, the Miss-Goodfield-that-was, as a maid of ours used to say.” She mentioned the maid with intentional casualness as if to make it clear that she hadn’t always had to answer the door herself. “If you’re working your way through college, don’t count on me to help.”
“I worked my way through college some time ago.”
“Selling subscriptions?”
“Diving for abalone.”
There was a pause. Then, “Well, that’s different, I must say. I don’t want to buy any old abalones, however.”
But she opened the door wider as if her curiosity, or her desire to talk to someone, had overridden her judgment.
She turned out to be a short stockily built woman in her late twenties. Though there were lines of strain and weariness around her eyes, she seemed essentially a cheerful and gregarious person. Her features were too large for prettiness, but her face and body had a vital quality. Even in the way she stood, with one arm resting on the doorjamb, there was a subtle air of victory, an inconclusive victory after a battle of guerrillas.
She said, “Since you’re not selling anything and I’m not buying anything, won’t you come in?”
“Thank you.”
She stood aside to let him enter. As he passed her Frank was aware of her very careful scrutiny. It didn’t fit in with the rather casual way she talked and her informal manners. He wondered whether she frequently invited strangers into her home, or whether he was an exception; if he was, why?
The hall was vast and cold. Its high, narrow windows didn’t let in enough sun to dispel the dampness from the corners. It was more like a museum than a place where people lived. Horace’s “valuables and antiques” lined the room; everything from a huge bronze statue of the goddess of plenty to tiny coins and medallions in glass cases, and silk prints in lacquered frames on the walls.
“Junk,” Shirley said. “Most of it.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“I wouldn’t either. But Mother had an appraiser from Gump’s up one day and he wasn’t very enthusiastic. Come in here, won’t you?”
She led him into a small library with a wood fire burning in the grate. There was nothing Chinese or Eastern in the room except a pair of backscratchers lying on a table, tiny ivory hands with sharp, carved fingernails on the ends of two long sticks.
Shirley picked them up with a disdainful glance and put them away in a drawer.
“I don’t mind Chinese people but they certainly have some macabre ideas.” She sat down on a low, leather hassock in front of the fire. “The children are at a movie today. It’s lonesome around here. I’ve got to the point where I can’t stand silence anymore.”