“It wasn’t my intention to inconvenience anyone,” she said.
I looked at my watch. “I’d better get back to the hotel. I have to make some calls.”
“Will you have lunch with us?” she said.
“Let me see what Clete is doing.”
“Clete Purcel is here?” she said.
“He gets around,” I said.
“Well, I’m happy he was able to come out,” she said.
I didn’t know what else to say. I felt disappointed in Bailey and in myself. “Thanks for having me here, Des. I’ll see you later.”
I walked away, feeling foolish and inadequate, as though I were starting to lose part of myself.
“Don’t you want a lift?” Wexler said.
I had forgotten I’d ridden to the set with him and Alafair. “I’ll hitch a ride,” I said.
Three miles down the road, a man driving a chicken truck with glassless windows picked me up, and we drove across the state line into Arizona and a dust storm that turned the sun to grit.
At the hotel I called Helen and apologized for leaving her shorthanded.
“Forget it,” she said. “I’m going to have a talk with Bailey when she gets back.”
“Why’d you let her come out here?”
“I figured what’s the harm? What are the things you regret most in your life, bwana?”
“Constantly taking my own inventory.”
“You know what I’m talking about. We regret the things we didn’t do, not the things we did. All the romances we didn’t have, the music we didn’t dance to, the children we didn’t parent. So I let her have her fling with Lotusland. Then I got mad at myself about it. By the way, I got a phone call from a federal agent regarding Hugo Tillinger.”
Of all the subjects she could bring up, Tillinger was the one I least wanted to hear about.
“This agent grew up with him,” she said. “He believes Tillinger may have killed a biker in the Aryan Brotherhood about ten years ago. The biker raped and broke the neck of an old woman in Corsicana. She belonged to the same church Tillinger did. Somebody tore the biker apart with a mattock.”
I felt my stomach constrict. “What’s the evidence?”
“None. The crime remains unsolved. Some fellow church members asked Tillinger about it. His answer was ‘I, the Lord, love justice.’ It’s from Isaiah.”
My head was coming off my shoulders.
“Are you there?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I’ll let Clete tell you.”
This time she went silent. Then she said, “Dave, did Clete see Tillinger again?”
“He saw him save a little girl’s life at a filling station in Lafayette. Clete followed him to a motel north of Four Corners but cut him loose.”
“Son of a bitch,” she said. “How long have you known this?”
“A couple of days.”
“Why didn’t you report it?”
“I thought no good would come out of it.”
“No, you thought you’d write your own rules. You put your friendship with Clete ahead of the job. I’m pulling your ticket, Pops. I’m not going to take this shit.”
“I’m on the desk?”
“You’re on leave without pay. I’m referring this to Internal Affairs.”
“What about Clete?”
“He’d better get his fat ass back to New Orleans and stay there for a long time.”
“I made a mistake. So did Clete. We didn’t know about the biker murder.”
“You made your bed,” she said. “Dave, you use a nail gun on the people who love you most. You don’t know how much you hurt me.”
At midday, Alafair was still at the set. I ate lunch by myself and then lay down in my room and fell asleep. An hour later, I woke from a disturbing dream about a mountainous desert that was not a testimony to the curative beauty of the natural world but instead a crumbling artifice inhabited only by the wind. I sat on the side of the bed, gripping my knees, my head filled with a warm fuzziness that felt like the beginning of malarial delusions, a condition I’ve dealt with since childhood.
Perhaps I fell asleep again. I can’t remember. Then I went downstairs and sat for a long time by the entrance to the lounge and took a table in the dining room by the big window that gave onto the swimming pool and a vista like the long trail disappearing into the buttes in the final scene of My Darling Clementine. The waitress asked if I would like anything from the bar.
“A glass of iced tea,” I said.
She was pretty and young and had thick soft brown hair and an innocent pixie face. “Sure thing.”
She walked away, yawning slightly, looking through the window at the swimmers in the pool. I wondered if she dreamed about being among them. Many of them were celebrities, or the children or the lovers of celebrities, and those who were not celebrities were obviously well-to-do and carefree and, like the celebrities, enjoying the coolness and turquoise brilliance of the water and the heat of the sun on their bodies, as though all of it had been invented for them, as though the wind-carved shapes to the north had no connection to their lives.
The waitress put the tea and a coaster by my hand. “Are you with the film crew?”
“Afraid not. I’m just a tourist,” I said.
“Must be nice, huh?”
“What must be nice?”
“To live like that. To make movies and not have to worry about anything.”
“Could be,” I said.
“Let me know if you want anything.”
I watched her walk away and tried not to look below the level of her waist, then put the charge on my room and left a five-dollar bill under my glass, even though that was more than my personal budget allowed. I used the stairs rather than the elevator to reach my floor and spent the rest of the afternoon in my room. A faucet was ticking in the bathroom as loudly as a mechanical clock, with the same sense of urgency and waste. I tried to tighten the faucet but to no avail. I lay down and put a pillow over my head, the afternoon sun as red as fire behind my eyelids.
Alafair was late getting back from the set. I had dinner with Clete in a Mexican restaurant and told him about my phone call to Helen and the information I had given her about Clete’s decision to let Hugo Tillinger go. I also told him about the penalty she had imposed on me, as well as her feelings about Clete’s cutting Tillinger slack a second time.
“A fed says he tore up somebody in the AB with a mattock?” Clete said.
“Which means maybe he put the baton down Axel Devereaux’s throat.”
“Why didn’t the fed do something about it?” Clete said. “Why’s he dropping this on us?”
“Nobody is dropping anything on us. You made a choice, and so did I. It was the wrong choice.”
“Dave, I don’t have the legal power to arrest anyone. I can take skips into custody because they’re considered property, but that’s it. Helen is wrong on this.”
“No, she isn’t.”
“I’m sorry you got your ticket pulled, big mon.”
“Like you say, we’re getting too old for this crap.”
“Come in with me. We’ll put the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide back in business.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“No, you won’t. You’ll sit around and suffer,” he said.
“Lay off it, Cletus. I don’t feel too well right now.”
“You really believe Tillinger would take out a guy with a mattock?” he asked.
“I think Tillinger and a few like him could found a new religion that would make radical Islam look like the teachings of Saint Francis.”
The tailings of the monsoon season moved across the sun that evening, darkening and wetting the land and lighting the sky with electricity that quivered and disappeared between the buttes and the clouds. It was Desmond Cormier’s birthday. The party began on the terrace, under canopies hung with Japanese lanterns. As the storm dissipated, the celebrants moved down the slope into a picnic area that had a wood dance floor and kiva fireplaces. A band featuring conga drums and horns and a marimba and oversize mariachi guitars played inside a gazebo. Desmond was soused to the eyes and dancing by himself with a bottle of champagne, dressed in tight cutoffs and a T-shirt scissored across the midriff, the smooth firmness of his physique and his wide-set washed-out eyes and his tombstone teeth and the bulge in his shorts and the solipsistic glaze on his face a study in sensuality.