"Maybe," I said. The wipers made another slow pass. "And then again, maybe not."
"Another one?"
"Could be."
"Holy smoke," Eleanor said. "She was just a little girl. Who'd want to kill a little girl? I know this sounds gruesome, Simeon, but there could be a mini-series here."
"Sooner or later," I said, "there could also be a man with a gun in his hand. As your friend Peppi said, this isn't television."
"Why do you assume it's a man?"
"Good point," I said grudgingly. "The Church is riddled with women."
"That's a pleasant way to put it. But you're probably right. The bigwigs all seem to be men."
"It was ever thus."
A big-rig, a twelve-wheeler at least, howled past us on the left, throwing off sheets of water from its tires. The light in the cab was on, and I watched in fascination as the driver tossed back a couple of pills.
"Anything else?" she said.
"Yeah. Hold off on Merryman and Angel for the moment, if you don't mind. Let's talk to the people who don't know me first, okay? A straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but it's also the place where you're most likely to walk into an ambush."
"You're so masculine," she said. It didn't sound like a compliment.
"Then why do I have to sleep on the couch?"
"Because it would complicate things. We've got days of talking to do before we sleep together again, if we ever do. Anyway, you've always got Roxy."
"Roxanne," I said. "You know her name, so why pretend to get it wrong?"
"Little heavier than you usually like them, isn't she?"
"It doesn't matter," I said offensively. "I'm usually on top."
"That must be novel," she said.
There was no way to win.
At her place, she waited for a moment for the rain to subside. When it didn't, she opened the passenger door anyway. "You're not coming in?"
"For what?"
"Okay," she said. "See you tomorrow." There was a moment of silence. Then she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. "Don't be a lunk," she said. "Anyway, you've got a long drive." The instant she got out of the car, the rain stopped. It started again as she closed the front door behind her.
To get from Santa Monica to Topanga Canyon without going up the Pacific Coast Highway you have to track east, all the way into the San Fernando Valley, and then head north until you can pick up Topanga, turn left, and go most of the way west again. It's a meandering, basically U-shaped route, all freeways and blue-white light at night, a charmless drive under the best of circumstances. In a downpour, it always reminds me of Shelly Berman's famous definition of flying: hours of boredom relieved by moments of stark terror.
Between the yawns and the occasional red accident flares, I thought about Eleanor. We'd met at UCLA, where I was pursuing one of my long string of semi-useless degrees in lieu of doing anything better. She was the most wastefully beautiful human being I'd ever seen in my life, attractive way beyond the demands of natural selection. Two weeks after she moved in she had me kicking a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit that I'd thought was as permanent as a tattoo. A week later, to my infinite surprise, I was running along next to her on San Vicente Boulevard: wheezy, labored quarter-miles at first, then miles, then l0K's, finally marathons.
In spite of the fact that she couldn't get me to stop drinking beer, the pounds began to fall away. I'd been a shamefaced, sedentary 237 pounds when we met; six months later I weighed 175, and I was stopping to look for my reflection in store windows on Westwood Boulevard. It wasn't vanity; I just couldn't find myself. Until I learned to recognize my new silhouette, I'd had an eerie feeling that I was invisible on the street.
My blood pressure, which had been higher than the federal deficit, plummeted to textbook normal and stayed there. Several cups of nicotine-based goop gradually cleared from my lungs. I no longer woke up each morning to the sound of my respiratory system squeaking.
And then a cocaine-fried subhuman made a natural mistake, considering the state of his consciousness, and threw an inoffensive young woman named Jennie Chu off the top of one of the UCLA dormitories. Jennie Chu had been one of Eleanor's closest friends, a shy math student, gymnast, and part-time classical pianist from Taiwan who had never really mastered American English and who'd had the misfortune to wear eyeglasses that resembled those worn by the woman the coke freak had really intended to kill. The doctors said she had died instantly, but, as Eleanor said at the time, "What's instantly? It must have taken her a month to hit the ground."
A few days later I delivered the man who killed Jennie Chu to the LAPD with both his elbows broken, and I had found a career. I had learned that I enjoyed righting wrongs. I had also learned that, under the right circumstances, I enjoyed breaking someone's elbows. I'd been keeping tabs on the latter discovery in the two years since. I'd broken a couple of hands, hands that belonged to a man who'd come up with an interesting new use for pliers, but no elbows.
Topanga Canyon Boulevard stretched uphill in front of me, empty and wet. As empty, I thought, with several drams of self-pity, as the house I lived in, the house I'd shared with Eleanor until I'd fooled around one too many times and she'd stopped telling me it was okay and packed up and moved to Venice.
It's so easy to break things that it seems like it should be easier to put them back together. Once, when I was a kid, I was showing one of my mother's prize Irish crystal vases to a pretty classmate, feeding her wide-eyed awe by making up stories about the craftsmen who cut every facet by hand and died prematurely from inhaling glass. In my eagerness to get to the punch line, I dropped the vase. It broke into only three pieces, but I spent the entire afternoon sitting on the floor with a tube of glue, and the cracks were the first thing my mother saw when she got home that evening. The lesson didn't take. I'd broken a lot of things since.
Alice sputtered resentfully when I cut the engine at the bottom of the driveway. The rain drummed giant fingers on the thin Detroit tin of Alice's roof. It was like sitting in a big beer can.
Rain stopped for Eleanor, but I was too much of a realist to expect it to stop for me. I opened the door and hunched over, reducing the surface area vulnerable to the wet.
The smell hit me even before I got out of the car. It rolled at me out of the sagebrush, a concentration of corruption so vile that it should have been incandescent, like swamp gas. Its source, whatever it was, was dead beyond the resurrection dreams of even the most fervent born-again Christian. I forgot the rain altogether and clawed my way up the muddy driveway. At the top of the hill I realized that I'd been holding my breath and drew several shuddering breaths of clean, rainwashed air. Against my better judgment I raised my arm to my nose and sniffed my sleeve. The smell had impregnated the cloth.
Then I noticed that the kitchen light was on.
I hadn't left it on.
One of the design quirks of the shack I rent from Mrs. Yount is that there are absolutely no windows you can look through from the outside. They're all about eight feet above ground level. That's charming when you want privacy, which I usually did. Now, standing in the downpour, I considered the drawbacks. The one that immediately occurred to me was sudden death.
The house is heated by a wood-burning stove, and a wood-burning stove requires a woodpile. I went to the woodpile and selected a sodden piece of oak, about the length of my arm and just slender enough to wrap my hand around. The rain had become an ally: it muffled the sound of my approach. Even the sucking sounds I made as I pulled my shoes out of the mud were probably inaudible to anyone inside.
A foot at a time, I reached the door. I stood in front of it for what seemed like an hour. Just as I was about to convince myself that I had left the kitchen light on, I heard footsteps on the wooden floor inside. A shadow passed in front of the opaque glass in the door, heading for the kitchen.