Her apartment was on the second floor, and there was nobody home in the other apartment across the hall. I went upstairs and talked to a chubby woman with her hair in curlers, who didn’t know Dolan at all, or claimed not to, and who thought I was either trying to sell her something or bent on raping her; she kept edging the door closed as we talked, until her nose and mouth were all that were visible beyond an inch-wide crack. Then her face vanished altogether and I heard a couple of locks snap into place. She was definitely not a trusting person.
The second apartment on that floor belonged to a heavy-set bearded guy with long bristly hair and a mashed-in snout, all of which features combined to make him look like a hairy pig. When he opened the door and breathed on me I smelled the odor of sour red wine. Sure, he said, he knew Bernice Dolan. She was a terrific lay, Bernice was; they’d got it on together on Christmas Eve, after a party. Small tits, though, he said. Very small. No, he hadn’t seen her recently. Maybe she’d found herself a sugar daddy somewhere, he said, and winked at me. Wouldn’t surprise him if she had. She really was a terrific lay, despite her small tits. It was too bad about those tits, he said. Otherwise she would really be a fox.
I left him to his wine and his anatomical hangups and went downstairs again. It was my intention to go all the way down to the first floor, to talk to the occupants of the sixth apartment, but when I got to the second floor I saw a woman with a bag of groceries unlocking the door across from Dolan’s. I got over to her just as she popped the door open.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I’d like to talk to you for a moment, if I may.”
She hadn’t seen or heard me coming, and at the sound of my voice she jumped half a foot and almost dropped the bag of groceries. She was about forty, and she had nice brown eyes. That was about all you could say for her in the way of looks; she was so plain and frumpy that I found myself feeling sorry for her. But it was probably just as well, under the circumstances. At least she didn’t think I was there to rape her.
“My God,” she said, “you scared the life out of me.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”
“Well. You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that.” She gave me an appraising look. “What did you want?”
“I’m trying to locate Bernice Dolan,” I said. “I thought you might know what’s become of her.”
“Why do you want to locate Bernice?”
“A small business matter.”
“She’s not in trouble, is she?”
“Not that I know of. Why do you think she might be?”
“Oh, well, she’s a little wild, you know.”
“How do you mean?”
“Men,” she said. “Bernice is crazy about men.” She paused. “You’re not one of them, are you?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Good. Don’t misunderstand: I like Bernice. It’s just that she’s irresponsible. Men and money and fancy possessions, that’s all she ever talks about.”
“Do you know her well?”
“Not really. We’ve talked a few times. I think-” She stopped, and then shrugged and smiled a faint sad smile. “I think she likes to talk to me because I’m not a threat to her. With her men friends, you see. Attractive women often feel that way about plain women.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.
She shrugged again. “Bernice went to Xanadu,” she said.
“Ma’am?”
“That’s what she said, anyway, the last time I saw her. That was about three weeks ago. I came home from shopping and she was just coming down the front steps with two suitcases. I asked her if she was going on vacation and she said not exactly. Then she said she was going to Xanadu.”
“Is that all she said?”
“Yes. There was a taxi waiting for her.”
“Do you know what Xanadu is? Or where?”
“No. The only Xanadu I know is that newspaper tycoon’s estate in Citizen Kane. You know-the Orson Welles movie.”
I nodded.
“Maybe it’s a town or something,” the woman said. “Whatever it is, there’s one thing it’s bound to have plenty of.”
“What’s that?”
“Men,” she said. “Plenty of eligible men.”
I thanked her and headed out to my car. Xanadu, I thought. What the hell is Xanadu?
There was a service station two blocks up; I pulled in there and went into their phone booth and looked up Xanadu, just to see what I would find. I didn’t find much. The only listing was for some sort of art gallery on Union Street. I thought about driving over there, since Union was only a short distance away, but there didn’t seem to be much point in it. A woman doesn’t pack two suitcases and call a taxi to go to an art gallery a few blocks from where she lives.
I found a dime in my pocket, dropped it into the coin slot, and rang up the guy I know on the Examiner. The first thing he said was, “Another favor, I suppose?” in cynical tones.
I said, “What’s Xanadu?”
He said, “Huh?”
“Xanadu. X-a-n-a-d-u.”
“What about it?”
“I want to know what it is.”
“It’s a mythical principality. ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree.’ You’ve heard that before, haven’t you? It’s from Kubla Khan, the Coleridge poem.”
“I suppose so,” I said. “But that’s not the Xanadu I’m looking for. The one I want is a place of some kind.”
“Well, there’s the old tyrant’s estate in Citizen Kane. Welles patterned him after Willie Hearst, you know-”
“That’s not it, either. It’s a real place somebody I’m trying to find went to about three weeks ago.”
“If you say so.”
“No bells ringing?”
“Dead silence,” he said.
“Will you check into it for me?”
“Look, I’m pretty busy-”
“I’ll buy you a steak dinner.”
“When?”
“Next week. You name the night.”
He sighed. “All right-but we go to Grisson’s.”
Grisson’s was the most expensive steak restaurant in the city. I wondered if I could get away with putting his dinner on my expense account bill to Adam Brister, decided I would damned well try, and said, “Deal. I’ll be back in my office inside an hour. Call me there if you come up with anything.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
On the way back to Drumm Street I stopped at a McDonald’s and bought a Big Mac and a bag of fries. Kerry had accused me of being a junk-food addict, and she was probably right. But what the hell. You have to eat, and you might as well eat what you like. The way I figured it, nobody had ever died from eating a Big Mac and a bag of fries for lunch.
My answering machine had one message on it, from Edna Hornback. She’d called, she wanted me to call back-very terse, very nasty. More abuse, I thought. And up yours, Mrs. Hornback. I erased her voice from the machine, erased her name from my thoughts, and started typing up a report for Adam Brister on the Speers investigation thus far.
I was in the middle of that when Kerry called.
“I was hoping you’d be in,” she said. “I’m worried about you.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think? You’re all over the afternoon paper; I just saw it a little while ago. How come you didn’t call to tell me what happened last night?”
“I got home too late,” I said. “And I had to go in early this morning to talk to Eberhardt. You’d already gone to lunch when I did get a chance to call.”
“I still wish you’d let me know. It was a shock to pick up the paper and see you mixed up in another murder.”
“Yeah, I guess it was.”
“Have the police found out anything yet?”
“No. But they’ll get to the bottom of it eventually.” I paused. And then I said, “So did you just get back from lunch?”