“I have an idea there’s more to Rose Breen’s story than you’ve let on. Do you want to tell me the rest of it? It might save time and trouble.”
“There is no rest of it. All I want is for you to locate her, see. When you do find her, I don’t want you talking to her or telling her anything. Just pass the word to me, and I’ll make my own pitch. You got that?”
“Yes.” But I didn’t say that that was what I would do.
He hoisted his roll out of his hip pocket and turned his back on me, crouching over the money like a dog over a red bone. I could smell burning, and it triggered a fantasy: Barr was a dead man who had climbed up out of hell to look for Rose, drag her back down with him into the fire. I was his little helper.
I didn’t like the role. But I took his money, five fifties, and put it away in my wallet. He sniffed:
“Do you smell something burning?”
“It smells like woodsmoke.”
“Damn them!”
He opened one of the glass doors and stepped out onto the balcony. Wisps of smoke were rising past it, yellowish gray against the blue sky. Leaning over the railing, I could see half a dozen boys huddled around a small fire. Most of them were bare-backed; one or two were wearing black rubber shirts. Their surfboards lay around them on the sand.
“Get out of here!” Barr cried. “This is private property.”
The boys looked up in unison. “It isn’t, below the mean high tide line,” one of them said. “We’re below the tide line.”
“Don’t you talk back to me. Scram! Beat it! I pay rent for this place. I don’t pay it so a gang of beach bums can set fire to the property.”
“It’s perfectly safe,” their spokesman said.
“Safe? You must be crazy!”
“Somebody is,” one of the boys muttered. He made the ancient gesture, rotating forefinger pointed at his temple.
Barr picked up a red clay flowerpot containing a dead plant and threw it down at him. It chunked harmlessly into the sand, but the boys began to disperse. Picking up their long boards and carrying them on their heads, they marched off along the beach. The one who had spoken first lingered behind to kick sand on the fire. He didn’t look up again, but Barr stood watching him until he had gone.
He had seemed very large for a minute, larger than he was. Like a rubber figure losing air, he dwindled till he seemed smaller than he was.
“This is the second day in a row,” he said. “They’re trying to make me blow my top. They’re deliberately out to get me.”
“That I doubt.”
“Oh yes.” He grasped my arm. “If it wasn’t planned, they wouldn’t torment me like this. They hate me, see.”
“Do you know them?”
“No, but they know me. You can tell by the way they act, the way they look at me.”
His grip was like a tourniquet on my arm. I shook it off, and peered into his eyes. They were shallow and glazed, with no inner light behind them. His mouth was working. His entire body trembled with sincerity.
“I wouldn’t pay any attention to them,” I said. “They’re just a bunch of kids having fun on the beach.”
“That’s what you think.”
“I know it. Pay no attention to them.”
“How can I help it, when they come torturing me?”
“I’m sure they won’t be back.”
“They better not!”
“If they do come back, I wouldn’t throw any more flowerpots. One of those could kill a man, or a boy.”
“Yeah. You’re right.” He hung on the railing like a seasick passenger on a ship, wagging his head slowly from side to side. “I blew my top. I got to learn not to blow my top.”
The boys were far up the beach, some of them on the sand and some in the water. Barr’s flat pale gaze was following them, the way the dead watch the living, if they do.
“You’ve been alone too much, Mr. Barr.”
“Yeah. Tell it to Rosie.”
“I don’t think I will. I won’t be seeing Rosie.”
“I gave you money to find her, didn’t I? You took it, didn’t you?”
“I’m giving it back.” I removed the five bills from my wallet and held them out to him, spread like a poker hand.
“What the hell for? The money is good. You think it’s counterfeit?”
“The money may be good, but the story isn’t. I’m not buying it.”
“You calling me a liar?”
“I’m giving you a chance to change your story.”
“To hell with you. If you don’t like my story you can shove it.” He snatched the money and waved it in my face. “I’ll hire another boy, or run her down myself.”
“Then what?”
“We get married, me and Rosie.”
“You’re sure you’re not planning a funeral instead of a wedding?”
He crumpled the bills and pulled his fist back to his shoulder. He was shaking, and his eyes were almost white. He braced himself with his other hand on the railing.
“I wouldn’t throw that punch, old man. I’ve got at least ten years on you, at least twenty pounds. And your face has already had it.”
I was up on my toes, ready to move in or away. But my words held him, long enough for me to move sideways through the door, across the dim room and out.
“Yellow-bellied coward!” he yelled after me.
A flowerpot smashed on the door as I slammed it shut.
The years since the war hadn’t affected Santa Teresa as much as some other places in California, where people moved on the average every three years. In spite of the housing tracts and the smokeless industries proliferating around it, the older parts of the city had a changeless quality. Settled old families lived in well-kept old houses behind mortised fieldstone walls that had resisted earthquakes, or cypress hedges that had outlived generations of gardeners.
Except for its palm trees and the brown hills rising behind them, Foothill Drive was like an English lane where you could feel the cool shadow of the past. J. Cavendish-Baring was one of the names I read off the rural mailboxes. I noticed the name because J. Cavendish-Baring had a couple of does and a fawn browsing under the oaks in his front yard. Birds were singing, with a faint English accent.
Dwight Maclish, another mailbox announced, and a hundred yards farther on, F. Mark Leverett. I turned up the gravel drive. The house was wide and low, with an overhanging roof and a deep verandah.
A woman in a wide straw hat was kneeling shoulder-deep among the roses with a pair of clippers in her gloved hand. They snicked in the silence when my engine died. I got out and shut the car door. After a while the woman rose to her feet and came towards me, stepping carefully among the bushes. Her body, concealed in a loose blue smock, moved with a kind of heavy certainty, as if she knew that she was beautiful, or had been.
She was. She took off her hat as she came up to me, and fanned herself with it. She was past forty and showed it, but the lines in her face had not destroyed its beauty. Her smiling blue eyes were wide-spaced under level brows. Her heartbreaking heartbroken mouth was as red as any of her roses. Passion or something resembling it had left bittersweet marks at its corners.
“What can I do for you, sir?” If there was a lilt of coquetry in the question, I didn’t think that it was meant for me. It was simply there, a surplus from her youth.
“You’re Mrs. Leverett?”
“Yes. If you’re hoping to catch the doctor, he isn’t home for lunch yet. I am expecting him.”
“It’s you I’d like to speak to.”
“What on earth about?”
I had my story ready: the plain truth, with a little varnish on the rough spots. “I’m in a bit of a dilemma, Mrs. Leverett. A man named Joseph Barr visited here the day before yesterday, he tells me. He didn’t tell me that he made a nuisance of himself, but I suspect he did.”