“What about the annulment?”
“This is where it gets pretty untidy, Travis.” I got tired of the way she was roving around. I got her wrists and pushed her gently back until the backs of her legs hit the edge of a chair. She sat down and looked up at me, startled.
“Let me tell you something, Miss Holtzer. This whole deal is untidy. The stupendous glamor of Lysa Dean did not suck me into this. You were the item that swayed me.”
“What? What?”
“If she’d sent anyone else, the answer would have been no, You looked so staunch and loyal and unyielding and severe. So damned decent. You made me feel like an unwashed opportunist. I have emotional reactions to people, Dana, no matter how much I try to deny it. I wanted to prove to you that I am good at what I do.”
“But that’s absurd!”
I backed away and sat on her bed. “It certainly is. Now, how untidy does this situation get?”
She shrugged. “Squeakie doesn’t know for sure. Just second-hand and third-hand gossip. But Nancy Abbott came into it. Apparently, among Squeakie’s set, the favorite theory is that Patty M’Gruder had Nancy as a house guest in Carmel, and practically held her a prisoner there, because she… Patty… had fallen in love with Nancy. The theory is that Vance went along with it because it gave him a chance to get the proof he wanted that Patty had entered into the marriage contract under false pretenses, concealing her real inclinations. Vance used Nancy… Squeakie kept calling her ‘that poor poor sick child’… to get the proof, and once he had it, there was no way in the world for Patty to fight his action to annul. It was all handled very quietly.”
“That would explain what Nancy yelled at me, about Patty keeping her locked up.”
“I suppose so. Patty left. Squeakie’s phrase for it was that she slunk away. Somebody saw her several weeks ago, in Las Vegas. Not in one of the big places out on the Strip. Down in town, working at something called The Four Treys. Making change, I think. Some kind of a small job. There certainly wouldn’t be many old friends seeing her there. Anyway Mrs. T. Madison Devlaney didn’t know anything about… or at least say anything about any pictures. I was lucky to catch her. She and her husband and another couple are flying to Hawaii this week. That whole group seems to be very big for Hawaii. The Devlaneys keep a boat out there.”
“You did very well, Dana.”
“Thank you. They have a beautiful home. She really got terribly drunk. Did you learn anything at all?”
“I don’t know. I traced a man who could have taken the pictures. But he lived three hundred miles away. It looks as if M’Gruder had the pictures taken. I think we can assume that, at least for now. But I can’t prove any contact between M’Gruder and the photographer. One thing makes me think I located the right man. He’s dead.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Let’s say that just for kicks or souvenirs or something he kept one set of prints for himself. He died. Those files got into the hands of somebody who…”
“Of course.”
“His name was D. C. Ives, possibly. And he lived in Santa Rosita, possibly. We check him out for a vulgar limey accent, and if so it will look a lot more certain.”
“Is that what we do next?”
“With one stop on the way I think.”
Nine
ON A bright clear cold Tuesday morning, I climbed the back slope of the ridge. Surf tumbled in, making a continuous roar against the rock. I reached and grasped the small trunk of a wind-dwarfed tree and pulled myself up to where I could look over the top. In my surprise I nearly ducked back out of sight. I had not expected the Chipmann sun deck to be so close. I looked down into it at about a thirty-degree angle. Perhaps that made it seem closer. But it was, I judged, three hundred feet away.
It was a special irony that there should be a nude woman on the sun terrace. She was prone on a faded blue sun pad. The wall shielded her from some of the west wind, and she had set up an additional wind screen, one of those made of a shining metal to intensify the heat of the sun.
She was of heroic dimension, a redoubtable female, body brown as coffee beans, hair bleached to hemp, thighs like beer kegs, shoulders like Sonny Liston. I assumed she had to be Mrs. Chipmann, the dear friend who loaned Carl their house for celebrity assignation. It seemed odd to see the sun terrace in such vivid colors after seeing it so many times in black and white. Her face was turned toward me. She wore sunglasses. There was a half glass of tomato juice on the cement next to the sun pad.
There was absolutely no other place from which the terrace could be watched. She had every reason to think herself unobserved. I eased back, out of sight and turned and looked down. I could see part of the rear end of our pale gray Avis car parked in the cut where I had left it. I looked around at the immediate area.
It was nonsensical to expect to find anything, after a year and a half. But find something I did. It was tucked down into a cleft of stone as if someone had wadded it and wedged it there, a small crumpled cardboard container, once yellow, now bleached pulpy white by sun and rain and weather. I could make out ghost writing on it, white on white. Kodak-Plus-X Pan.
I took it down with me and handed it to Dana as I got behind the wheel. She frowned at it, then saw what it was. She looked at me with a strange expression. “Why should this make it more real? God, could anything be more real than those pictures? But this is… like archeology, sort of. It’s more… first hand.”
“Don’t get hooked on the feeling, Dana. Investigation can be a disease.”
“It’s a spooky feeling. I don’t think I like it. It’s unfair in a way, Travis. People get so exposed. It dwarfs people, doesn’t it? By dwarfing them, it makes you feel bigger. Is that the fascination?”
“I don’t know.”
“But it does fulfill you in some way, doesn’t it?”
“Let’s drop it, shall we?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it was a sore…”
“Shall we?”
“Alright!”
I drove swiftly southward with the sulks and with a silent woman. Ever since the popularization of the Freud-Fraud, we are all addicted to fingering ourselves to see where it hurts, Mommy. With no one to kiss and make well.
So what if I am hooked on the hunt? All it does is make an orderly life untenable. You trade the kiddies and fireside and regular promotions and appointment to the house committee or the greens committee for a few, a very few, clear clean moments of a savage satisfaction akin to joy. And maybe in the process you keep a little essential privacy.
Our dear Uncle owns over 23,000 polygraphs. Lie detectors. God alone knows how many industry owns. Not satisfied anymore with giving you the whole series of Multiphasic Personality Inventory tests, they want to make damn well certain you are not merely giving them the answers you think they want. They want to nail you into your permanent box right now, brother. Get in and lie still, and forty years from now we’ll bury you.