“He’s doing adultery,” Mrs. Rhine repeated.
She elaborated on her husband’s history of infidelity. He noticed that her fingers were stained with what looked like ink from a black Magic Marker.
“If you had proof your husband was seeing another woman again, what would you do?” Foy asked.
“M.Y.O.B.,” Mrs. Rhine replied. “You just find out where he does it and who he is doing it with.”
Foy hated working for fruitcakes, but he got out a client form for her to sign. Suddenly, he noticed the Great Dane staring at him with such intense concentration that Foy felt like he was floating across the rug, moving closer and closer to the animal’s face. He was conscious of a hollow space the size of an egg growing in the middle of his skull. He found himself loping across a field of wet grass, his ears perked up and snout pointed straight.
Then Mrs. Rhine started shaking his arm. He rubbed his eyes and said, “Do you have a photograph of your husband?”
As he heard her rummage in her purse, he looked at the dog sleeping on the floor and waited for the space inside his head to close up. Foy occasionally had what he called “out of the body” experiences. The best thing to do when they ended was concentrate on the business at hand. Mrs. Rhine handed him a Polaroid that had been taken at a wedding. The groom looked like a thug despite his tuxedo. Mrs. Rhine had been a slender bride and would have looked pretty except her lips were stretched in a lurid grimace. Based on her hairdo, Foy estimated they had been married about seven years.
“I’ll start working on Tuesday.”
“Start now,” she whined.
“Your husband does driving on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Today is Friday.”
She started to pout, so Foy told her how much two days of investigation would cost. She fished for her checkbook. Her purse was filled with black Magic Markers and a large notepad covered with scrawled hieroglyphics. The only word Foy could make out was “Jesus,” and it appeared several times.
She gave him a check, then left, dragging the Great Dane behind her. The air in the office smelled like unwashed dog. Foy turned off the air conditioner and opened the windows. He saw Mrs. Rhine driving away in a station wagon filled with dogs. As she ran a red light, Foy wondered why Mr. Rhine walked down the aisle with her in the first place.
Foy made several phone calls. He found out that Mr. Rhine (Rocky Jay to his friends) was, in fact, a thug. He had been indicted on a narcotics charge, beat the rap at trial, but had served six months for possession of a sawed-off shotgun.
He opened a file drawer filled with road maps and pulled one out at random. He needed to relax, so he studied the forks of the freeways. Foy believed if a client was worried enough about his or her spouse to come to a private investigator, the odds were 99.9 percent in favor of adultery. The chances were good that Foy would hand Mrs. Rhine a report that reflected poorly on her husband’s fidelity. She would tell Rocky Jay that she had hired a private investigator. Rocky Jay might then try to fix Foy’s wagon.
Foy felt nervous but decided to live with the feeling until he knew what Rocky Jay was up to. He had been involved in a violent confrontation only once in his career. One night, Foy was photographing a couple dancing to the radio on the woman’s patio. When she went into the house for more beer, the man heard Foy in the bushes and came running up holding a garden hoe over his head. Foy ducked, then grabbed the man by the collar and waltzed him in circles through the backyard, slapping the guy’s face until he heard the crack of jawbone. The guy crawled away and Foy sat on the picnic table hyperventilating. Never before had Foy had such a sense of his own physical presence. He summoned up this courage whenever any redneck was giving him a hard time and they always backed down.
Foy folded up the road map and turned the air conditioner back on.
On Tuesday morning Foy ate breakfast at the counter of a Lil’ Chicken. He was across the street from Rocky Jay’s office at the Hi-Ho Dogfood Company — a two-story factory building underneath a dull green water tower. He made small talk with the countergirls. They couldn’t have been older than seventeen. When Foy rolled up his sleeves they asked where they could get tattoos like his. Foy thought that was cute, until he realized they weren’t putting him on.
A little before noon, Rocky Jay stepped out of the building. Foy paid his tab and trotted to his car. Rocky got into a maroon Impala and drove out of the parking lot.
Foy turned his tape player on and it immediately started eating the tape. His radio had been stolen, so he had to content himself with just humming as he followed the Impala. Rocky Jay drove past the truck depots where the curbs were filled with rotted vegetables, then turned onto the interstate which cut through the immense cabbage farms that surrounded the city. Soon he was driving past Bible billboards and gas stations that sold bait, ice, and ammo.
Foy figured if Rocky drove 120 miles every Tuesday afternoon, they’d be stopping soon. They were heading for hill country when Foy saw the spire of a rocket ship on the horizon. Small bucket seats were twirling around the nose cone. Rocky Jay pulled into the huge gravel parking lot of Tornado County Amusement Park.
It was late August and the parking lot was jammed. After Foy parked, he sat until Rocky walked to the front gate, then he followed. The cars at the far end of the lot shimmered in the heat waves.
Foy paid the admission and got his hand stamped with orange ink. He waded through a swarm of waist-high kids, their fathers all bare chested with T-shirts tucked into waistbands. Foy noted some interesting knife scars.
Foy had been to Disneyland, so he was spoiled as far as amusement parks were concerned. He went there with his ex-wife and his stepkids and never had so much fun in his life. They rode a train and saw dinosaurs. He whipped down an artificial white mountain so fast he felt pulled inside out.
Foy pushed through the line for the Tilt-o-Whirl that snaked around the garbage cans and followed Rocky to a second ticket booth under a sign that said “To Enter You Must Be 21 or Over AND PROVE IT.” Rocky Jay paid and entered. Foy reached the gate and got his hand stamped again, this time with green ink.
Inside, he walked past trailers covered with billboard-sized paintings that looked as if they were painted by giant psychotic children. He passed the “House of Human Reptiles” and “The Sleeping Nubian Princess.” He passed an open-air tent where a sickly dwarf with no teeth sat at a miniature drum set and muttered. Foy figured any second now he would bump into a bearded lady.
Rocky Jay walked to a cinder-block bunker with a sign outside that said “The Pussykat Klub.” Foy paused. The place was small and he didn’t want to blow his cover, but he took a chance and entered.
The dim room smelled of bug spray. Foy almost tripped over the folding chairs. There was a wooden platform at the rear where a cone of cigarette smoke drifted under the single spotlight. The only other illumination came from a Coke machine.
The room could hold maybe fifty people; about twenty-five seats were taken. Rocky sat off to the side, stage right. Foy sat in the back row. Nothing happened for a while. Then a jaundiced man in a T-shirt brought a boom box up to the stage and turned it on. Incoherent funk blared for several minutes. When it was over, the yellowed man returned to the stage and said, “Gentlemen, please welcome Wanda Laneer!”
Foy Laneer jerked up. This was a county with a lot of Laneers in the phone book, and many of them were kin. He racked his brain but couldn’t think of a relative named Wanda.
She was slim with heavy breasts, bouncing up to the stage wearing an Aladdin’s Lamp getup of baby blue chiffon — the kind of pajamas a girl would pack for her honeymoon. Wanda ceremoniously placed an ivory box the size of a Kleenex dispenser on a card table, then bent over and stuck a cassette in the tape recorder.