He studied his thumbnail. He bit a small piece out of the corner of it and got up and went to the steel window and teetered back and forth, heel to toe.
“You say she seems happy there at the Island?”
“She has friends there. And the illusion of freedom.”
Without turning, he said, “And this deterioration you mention. It is progressive?”
“From all indications.”
“I imagine that if I footed the bill for additional care for… say another six months, by the end of that time she…”
“Let’s say eighteen months.”
“I’ll take my chances on a year. No more.”
“I will so inform Mr. Burley.”
He looked at his watch. “Elaine gets nervous if I leave her in there too long. Uh… thanks for the report. Goodby.” He walked out without looking directly at either of us.
On the way down in the elevator, Dana looked at me and slowly shook her head. “You are very damn good, Trav. You are better than I realized. You are shameless. You are a bastard, Trav. You know very damn well he thinks you are going to split the increase with Mr. Burley. He thinks you are going to bring suit in her name if he doesn’t play. And you sat there, so righteous and kindly. Oh boy, oh boy”
“A man like that can’t believe anything that doesn’t sound crooked.”
“A man like that makes me want to go scrub. They better not leave him alone with dear Dad. He’s impatient.”
Before I started the car I turned to her and said, “Itemize.”
“What? Oh. He didn’t have the pictures taken. The man who took them or had them taken has a cheap British accent. M’Gruder knew about the pictures. And something else. Let me think. Oh, the M’Gruder marriage was annulled. Did I miss anything?”
“You are very good too.”
“I am afflicted with an orderly mind.”
And so we drove back to the heart of the city. San Francisco is the most depressing city in America. The come-latelys might not think so. They may be enchanted by the steep streets up Nob and Russian and Telegraph, by the sea mystery of the Bridge over to redwood country on a foggy night, by the urban compartmentalization of Chinese, Spanish, Greek, Japanese, by the smartness of the women and the city’s iron clutch on culture. It might look just fine to the new ones.
But there are too many of us who used to love her. She was like a wild classy kook of a gal, one of those rain-walkers, laughing gray eyes, tousle of dark hair-sea misty, a lithe and lively lady, who could laugh at you or with you, and at herself when needs be. A sayer of strange and lovely things. A girl to be in love with, with love like a heady magic.
But she had lost it, boy. She used to give it away, and now she sells it to the tourists. She imitates herself. Her figure has thickened. The things she says now are mechanical and memorized. She overcharges for cynical services.
Maybe if you are from Dayton or Amarillo or Wheeling or Scranton or Camden she can look like magic to you because you have not had a chance to see what a city can be. This one had her chance to go straight and she lost it somehow, and it has been downhill for her ever since. That’s why she is so depressing to those of us who knew her when. We all know what she could have been, and we all know the lousy choice she made. She has driven away the ones who loved her best. A few keep trying. Herb Caen. A few others. But the love words have a hollow tone these days.
Eight
INVESTIGATING A cold cold trail can be deadly dull and very discouraging. This one worked pretty well, perhaps because there were two of us, two sets of hunches, two sets of ideas, two methods of approach.
We found Caswell Edgars in Sausalito. He looked twenty pounds heavier than in the pictures. He was living in a pigpen litter in the expensive home of a skinny drift-wood blonde on the far side of fifty. She was there too, in extremely tight pants and a high girlish giggle. Any minute now Cassie was going to start working hard getting ready for a one-man show she was going to arrange for him.
They had a music system that would have blown the walls out of a less substantial structure. She had soiled ankles, a grubby neck, and a black eye which had faded to saffron. They were hooked on something. From the way they acted, I suspect one of the hypnotics. The house smelled like old laundry.
There was a loose and dangerous and desperate flavor about the alliance, and it was easy to imagine that in their blundering they would sooner or later manage to set fire to the place and scream with laughter until they found all exits blocked. She kept talking about poor little ole Henry, who seemed to be a husband, but I could not determine if he was living or dead. If dead, it was conceivable he was buried in the yard, under the weeds.
Edgars knew absolutely nothing about any pictures. But he had no difficulty remembering the occasion. He had musician talk which he didn’t do too well. “Man, that was a bash. That little movie piece was pure stone fox. The boss fox of all time. Somebody trying to scuffle her with the pics? You never said, man.”
“No. I never said.”
“Sonny traded the waitress for the tall brunette, and then he burned. It’s a harsh way to make bread, man, that chance of burning. I read it someplace.”
“Put on my records, Cassie doll baby bug, huh?”
I don’t think either of them noticed we’d left, or cared particularly. Though it was warm in the car, Dana shuddered.
“Scratch one more contestant, Dana doll baby bug.”
“Please don’t,” she said in a thin voice.
“Like they say, lives of quiet desperation.”
“Trav?”
“Yes?”
“I think that terrace was a damned unlucky place to be. Sonny Catton, Nancy Abbott, Carl Abelle… and Caswell Edgars.”
“Punishment from on high?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe it can happen, Trav.”
She took care of Carmel with some phone calls. The M’Gruder place had been sold almost a year ago. We had less luck with newspaper accounts. I did dig up some background on M’Gruder. There had been an elder brother, killed in a war. M’Gruder’s father had invented a little gadget. Every cracking plant in the world had to have one or two of them. Vance M’Gruder had married one Patricia Gedley-Davies some three years ago in California, after apparently importing her from London. She had crewed for him in smaller sailboats. There was no social prominence, nor any attempt apparently to achieve any. But there was money, and so one would think the annulment would be more than a six-line paragraph on page 36. It had happened about two months after the house party.
Dana Holtzer sat in my hotel room with her shoes off and her feet up, frowning thoughtfully after having made a Sunday afternoon call to Lysa Dean.
“This annulment thing,” she said. “What you think of, in a state with a community property law, it’s the cheap way out.”
“Yes indeed.”
“And this was a closed session or closed hearing or whatever you call it, just the judge and them and a lawyer, and everybody agreeing to everything, and a declaration by the judge that the marriage had never existed in fact or something. And this wasn’t a humble woman, Trav. Sort of noisy and bossy. Let’s say she came from nothing, and she married a rich man. Would she give up without a battle? What made her give up without a battle?”
“And where is she?”
We couldn’t answer our questions, but we could look for answers. I decided we would split up on Monday, to save time. I would pursue a small idea of my own. She would use Lloyd’s Register as her guide book, and work the boaty people, the ocean sailing types, with appropriate cover story, and see what she could get in the way of gossip.
It rained all day, matching the mood of the offices I visited. Investigation agencies have very little need for decor. They like to keep the overhead down. Their usual customer does not shop around, looking for better draperies. Most of them are sad, soft, pale, meaty people. They operate with about the same verve as do the people who come to spray your home with bug juice.