“Can you give me her name?”
“What do you take me for?” asked the photographer loftily.
Mervyn bade John Viviano farewell.
He drove slowly back across the bridge to Berkeley. At a San Pablo Avenue drive-in he ordered a cheeseburger, and gloomily chewed it and the events of the day. They added up to zero. Evasions from John Boce, polite obstinacy from John Thompson, mock-gallantry from John Viviano. Leaving John Pilgrim.
Recalling the empty wine bottles in Pilgrim’s cottage, Mervyn crossed the street to a liquor store and bought a bottle of cheap sherry. Then he drove back to 1909½-A Milton Street.
There was a battered Lambretta motorcycle parked outside, and he could hear guitar chords in a plaintive random progression. He was in luck. Mervyn knocked, and the door opened.
“John Pilgrim?” Mervyn said eagerly.
“I’m Pilgrim. Yes?” John Pilgrim was a big, lean, lithe young man with a formidable face, broken-nosed and jut-jawed and intent as an animal’s. His skin was sallow and there was a little gray in his short black bristly hair. He wore coffee-colored corduroys, much stained, a shirt that had once been maroon, and scuffed black moccasins. While Mervyn was ready to concede him a certain virile magnetism, he found it hard to understand Mary Hazelwood’s interest.
“I’m Mervyn Gray. Friend of Mary Hazelwood’s?”
“Are you the guy who telephoned the other night?” Pilgrim growled.
“Which other night?”
“Saturday. Around twelve.”
Mervyn remembered; John Boce had called Pilgrim from Oleg Malinski’s. “That was somebody else.”
“This sudden popularity,” Pilgrim said, still growling. “Why?”
Mervyn was suddenly tired and disgusted. But he managed to say patiently, “Mary took off for parts unknown Friday night with a fellow named John. There was some speculation it might have been you.”
The intent eyes looked Mervyn over, apparently decided he was harmless. “That’s one speculation you can kiss good-bye.”
“I just wanted to make sure,” Mervyn said. He glanced down at his paper sack. “Say, I’ve got a bottle of sherry here. Do you imbibe?”
Pilgrim said promptly, “Come on in.”
Mervyn followed him into the living room. On the studio couch sat a young woman, with Mother Earth hips and a narrow waist; she wore her hair in bangs. She glanced at Mervyn once, then bent over her guitar. The chords resumed sadly.
John Pilgrim fetched two glasses from the kitchen; he paid no attention to the woman guitarist. Mervyn snapped the cap off the sherry bottle and poured. Pilgrim sipped. “Your name is what again?”
“Mervyn Gray.”
He nodded reflectively. “Mary’s mentioned you. Said I ought to talk to you.”
“Oh? What about?”
“Poetry. I call myself a poet.” He grunted. “Nowadays the word means nothing. Not a damned thing.”
“It’s an obsolete art,” Mervyn agreed.
Pilgrim scowled into his glass. “I kind of feel that way myself. Yet there’s never been a greater need for it.”
“Yes, there’s still the gap in the mind that poetry used to fill.”
Pilgrim replenished his glass. “Mary said you were a poet.”
“Hardly. I translate medieval troubadour songs.”
“You don’t look the type,” Pilgrim said critically. “I took you for an egg-slicer salesman.”
“You don’t exactly look like a librarian,” Mervyn said, stung. “More like a bouncer in a barroom.”
Pilgrim waved the glass. “That library job was just a fill-in for afternoons. I’ve got a night job. As soon as I get enough loot, I’m going to Japan. In Japan poetry is big. Even the Emperor writes haiku.”
“You know Japanese?”
“Not enough to read haiku. Not yet, anyway.”
The level in the bottle diminished. Suddenly the woman on the couch rose, carrying the guitar, and without a word went out. She shut the front door very softly. Pilgrim did not even look around.
Mervyn steered the conversation back into the channel of his more immediate interest. “A strange business, that thing about Mary. Not one of the Johns she knows will admit having seen her Friday night. You had a thing going with her, too, didn’t you?”
John Pilgrim’s battered lips curled in a sneer. “An ice-cream cone jumping up and down to be licked.”
If that’s a sample of your poetic talent, Mervyn thought, I’ll stick to the twelfth century. “Oh, then it was you she phoned Friday night?”
“Me? Friday night? Say.” Pilgrim drained the glass and set it down powerfully. “What are you, Mervyn, the fuzz? Why all the questions?”
“I told you. Mary arranged to meet somebody named John last Friday night. I’m trying to find out which John it was.”
“What did he do, rape her?”
“Don’t be common,” Mervyn said coldly.
“Common!” Pilgrim gave him an entomological look. “You a square or something? Since when is rape common? It’s the height of individual expression, like you thumb your nose at the fat-asses. But if you’re thinking it was Pilgrim, forget it. Old Johnny’s life is an open book.”
“The freshness of your metaphor o’erwhelms me,” Mervyn said. “I take your last remark to mean that you didn’t see Mary Friday night?”
“What did the other Johns tell you?”
“Not a bloody thing,” said Mervyn bitterly. “They all laughed when I sat down and made like a detective.”
“I was a detective once,” the poet said, refilling his glass only. “Bellhopping, and a shamus slipped me a finif to tip him off when this fatcat from Waukegan staggers in with his fluff and beds down for the night. Big deal. They didn’t even have the covers off. What are you playing dick-dick for, man?”
Mervyn braced himself against the rising tide. “I — want — to know — where Mary went and whom she’s with!!!!”
Pilgrim chuckled. “She ain’t with me. You can see that.”
“Why don’t you just tell me,” Mervyn shouted, “where the hell you were Friday night?”
“Go back to dick-dick school,” said John Pilgrim calmly. “You got a lot to learn, Mervyn.” And, eliminating the intermediate step, he picked up the sherry bottle and partook of its contents directly.
In berserk fury, Mervyn dashed from John Pilgrim’s pad. He drove to the Yerba Buena Garden Apartments like Ben Hur, blundered directly to his apartment, flung himself on the bed, breathing hard...
He awoke at midnight stiff as a corpse. His tongue felt like a newly skinned skunk pelt and his head filled the room. He limped to the bathroom, brushed his teeth, dosed himself with aspirin; then he undressed and crept under the covers.
At dawn’s early light he was still thrashing about in pursuit of Morpheus. Finally he gave up the chase, swung his shaky legs to the floor, kneaded his aching back and tried to face the challenge of another day. He showered, shaved, dressed, made coffee, scrambled eggs, burned the toast. While he was munching away, the mailman entered the court and began to move along the honor guard of mailboxes like a visiting VIP. Mervyn pushed his chair back and went out, feeling a great dread, for his mail.
There was only one letter in his box. It was a plain cheap white envelope; his name and address were in typescript; there was no return address. Mervyn hurried back to his apartment, locked the door, laid the envelope beside his plate, and stared at it.
But it was just a cheap envelope.
Well, Mervyn thought, there’s no sense stalling any longer.
He slit the envelope open with his fork, getting the slit rather eggy, and looked in. A single folded sheet of plain white paper. Like the last time.