“Damn it, you’re being unreasonable …”
“I don’t think so. I thought it all out very carefully today, and I don’t think I am.”
“Erika, you know how I feel about you. Isn’t that enough? What the hell do you wantfrom a man?”
“That’s just it: I want a man. Not a stubborn and self-deluding adolescent trying to live the life of a fictional hero.”
“That’s a plain bunch of crap!”
“No it isn’t,” she said. “You’d better resign yourself to the fact that you can’t have that job of yours and me both. You’re going to have to choose between us, one or the other.”
“That’s a hell of an ultimatum to offer a man!”
“I’m sorry, that’s the way it has to be. I don’t want to see you for a while, until you make up your mind. When you bring my car back, you can just park it in the driveway and put the key in my mailbox.”
“Just like that, huh? Cold and reasonable, huh?”
“Yes.”
“What about this bastard you’re going out with tonight? Is that supposed to help me make up my mind, knowing you’re out with somebody else?”
“He’s not a bastard, and I’m going out with him because I don’t intend to sit home and wait for your decision-not when I’m pretty sure I know how you’ll choose.”
“All right then!” I yelled at her. “All right then, go out with whoever you want and go to bed with him, too, for all I care, get yourself good and laid, goddamn it, I hope you-”
“Goodbye, old bear, I’m sorry,” she said, and then she was gone and I stood there holding the phone like a dummy, panting, my face flushed and the nourishment I had just taken souring in my stomach. What was the matter with her, what the hell was the matter with her? Why couldn’t she understand, why couldn’t she empathize, didn’t she know how it was with a man and the work he had to do? For Christ’s sake, I loved her! I loved her, why wasn’t that enough?
I slammed the phone back in its cradle and went out of the booth and threw some money on the counter. Outside, the wind blew cool and soft along the street and the black robe of the night sky was sequined with coldly bright stars. I began walking, just walking, letting the anger build, the frustration, letting it spiral inside me, and I thought: Well, all right, Erika, I’m glad to find out now the way it really is with you, how you really feel about me. I came within a couple of inches of dying the other day, and instead of coming to me like a woman with love and compassion in your words and in your eyes, you rub acid in the wound, you jump on me with your claws unsheathed like a predatory cat, “Goodbye, old bear, I’m sorry.” Some succor, some understanding, some love- well, all right then, Erika, all right if that’s the way you want it that’s the way it will be, all right.
I kept on walking, and there was a cigar store on the opposite corner. I went over there and bought a package of cigarettes before I knew what I was doing, trancelike, but when I came out again with the pack in my hands, the spiraling had ascended to an ultimate zenith and there was nowhere else for it to go then but sharply downward. The anger vanished, and suddenly there was only a harsh, vacuous depression, a loneliness at the core of my soul that was almost painful in its fervor. But I did not want to be where people were, for it was not that kind of loneliness; it was, instead, the loneliness of rejection, the deep bleeding hurt of frustrated denial that only a woman can inflict upon a man.
There was nowhere for me to go. Home-the sanctuary? No, because home was the symbol of loneliness now, and the fragile lingering aura of Erika would be there and I did not want to be anywhere that reminded me of her, I did not want her car or her words whispering echolike in my mind and the remembered feel of her softness beneath my hands and beneath my body.
I looked at the cigarettes and I did not want one at all, and I wondered fleetingly if I had bought them as a subconscious defiance of Erika. I dropped the package into my overcoat pocket and started walking again.
I walked for blocks and crossed streets blindly and walked, and finally my legs began to ache and my belly began to ache and I knew that I could not walk much longer. I needed something tangible to hang on to, something to do, someone to talk to, perhaps, something, anything, to take my mind off Erika. I started along an unfamiliar block, cutting back to the main street off which I had somehow strayed, and in the middle of it I passed a storefront with a wide display window illuminated by a single large-wattage night light. Black letters printed on the glass read Books.
I stopped. Inside the window, hanging from twine strung between pegs the width of the display, overlooking the pocketbooks and encyclopedias and other dusty second-hand items like tired and aged sentries on sagging battlements, was a series of pulp magazines-something tangible, something immediate, a second and fittingly ironic defiance of Erika because of her strong contempt for them.
I went up to the window and peered in at the magazines. You did not find many stores that had pulps any more, and I could see immediately why this one was an exception. There were some strips of paper clipped to the upper corners of the front covers, and on them were prices; the cheapest of the ones displayed was ten dollars and that was too much for anything except a vintageBlack Mask or a Volume One, Number 1.
There were a couple of Weird Tales up there from the early forties, and an Argosy for 1936 and two copies of The Shadow from the late 1940’s. I was not particularly interested in any of those, but there was a rare, fairly good edition ofDetective Fiction Weeklyfor March 14, 1931, that caught and held my eye.
The distinctive dark blue-and-yellow cover depicted a detective who looked a little like Jimmy Stewart, throwing down on a heavy with a vial of something in his hand. Midway below the title, on the left-hand side, was a caption for the issue’s feature story, The Candy Kid, a Lester Leith novelette by Erie Stanley Gardner.
The Lester Leith stories, about one of Gardner’s earliest and most flamboyant detectives, were hard to come by these days in their original magazine appearance. They had been some of the best work of a master craftsman who had learned his trade in the pulps; Gardner had had a reputation in the old days
Gardner had had Gardner
Gardner.
Gardener.
Oh Jesus, gardener-the gardener!
The impact of the connection was strong and sharp in my mind, and suddenly I had something else to grasp, something potentially important, something pushing Erika and the hurt and the depressing loneliness away.
Burlingame Landscaping and Gardening Service.
Very clearly, then, I could see the green panel truck behind which I had parked that first afternoon on Tamarack Drive-the words stenciled across its rear doors. And I could see the young T-shirted guy kneeling on the strip of canvas, weeding the lawn, when I first entered the grounds-the gardener, one other person who could have known about the kidnapping of Gary Martinetti the day it happened, who could even be the hypothetical silent partner acquainted with the Martinettis well enough to set up things for Lockridge-the gardener, the damned gardener.
I turned away from the window and hurried up the street, thinking that I had to get in touch with Donleavy, wondering if he was still up in San Francisco at the Hall of Justice-but before I reached Broadway, I slowed down and some of the urgency left me. It was nothing, for God’s sake, but a shot in the dark, a fat straw, a possibility that was no better than any or all of the other possibilities. For all I knew, Donleavy or one of the other investigators from the District Attorney’s Office had already questioned the gardener and eliminated him as a suspect; Donleavy would not necessarily have mentioned it in my presence. Even if they had not questioned him, I had no evidence against the gardener, nothing to link him with the kidnapping or the hijacking, nothing at all which would induce