He held the picture out at the full length of his arm. “She Mrs. Wycherly’s daughter?”
“Yes. Have you seen her, Jerry?”
“Can’t say that I have. ’Course I’m not on duty all the time. I can see the resemblance, though. Add on twenty years and twenty pounds – she’s her mother’s daughter all right. I got an eye for resemblances.” The half-pint of beer had made him loquacious. His eyes came up to mine like an old hound’s. “Your daughter took off on you, too, eh? You got family trouble for sure.”
“I know it.” I was glad I wasn’t Wycherly. But I was beginning to feel his load of grief, as if I’d assumed it magically with his name. “You’re certain you’ve never seen this girl?”
“Certain as I can be. The only people that come to see your lady was the two men – the old one she wouldn’t let in, and Firstest with the Mostest.”
“And the one she left with tonight?”
“Yeah. Him.” He got up wagging his head. “Don’t you go using that gun on him, mister. Take Jerry Dingman’s advice.”
“Thanks for the advice. And thanks for the beer.”
When he had shuffled out, I got out the gun, which was in a shoulder holster, and put it on.
Chapter 11
Money flowed through the state capital like an alluvial river, and the Hacienda Inn was one of the places where the golden silt was deposited. It lay off the highway to the north of the city, sprawled on its golf course like a separate village. A Potemkin village, maybe, or the kind the French kings built near Versailles so they could play at being peasants on sunny afternoons.
On this late night with its lowering moon, some of the paisanos who frequented the Inn were still awake. Light and laughter spilled from scattered massive bungalows, and from the big main building: a Spanish ranch-house with delusions of grandeur. I found a parking place in the dark lot beside it, and went in.
The elegant vacuous youth at the registration desk said that Mrs. Wycherly was not registered.
“She may be using her maiden name.” I went on before he could ask me what it was: “She’s a big platinum blonde wearing dark glasses, and she’s supposed to have checked in here within the last couple of hours.”
“You must mean Miss Smith–”
“That’s right. Her maiden name is Smith. I have an important message from her family.”
“It’s pretty late to call her bungalow,” he said doubtfully.
“She’d want you to. It’s urgent.”
“What did you say your name was?”
“Archer. I represent the family.”
He made the call. No answer.
“I’m sure she’s in the hotel.” He glanced up at the electric clock on the walclass="underline" it was nearly one-thirty. “You may find her in the Cantina. She asked me where it was when she registered.”
The Cantina was on the far side of a great flagstone courtyard. Twenty or so late-night revellers sat or leaned at the bar – an old carved mahogany monstrosity with a pitted brass rail which had probably been salvaged from some Mother Lode ghost town. Behind it a white-jacketed Filipino moved with speed and precision against a big mirror.
His customers were a mixed batch: a trio of beefy types wearing white Stetsons and Gower Gulch clothes; two men who looked like a legislator and a lobbyist sitting on either side of a redhead who looked like a bribe; a noisy party of businessmen and their wives; a pair of honeymooners gazing at each other with rapturous circles under their eyes. And beyond them, at the end of the bar, a blonde woman in dark glasses sitting alone with an empty stool beside her.
I slid onto the stool. She didn’t seem to notice. She was staring into the glass in her fist like a fortuneteller studying her crystal. She rotated the glass in her fingers, and flakes of gold swirled in the colorless liquid.
I searched out the reflection of her face in the mirror. She was heavily made up. Under the paint, her flesh seemed swollen and bruised, not just by violence, but by the padded blows of sorrow and shame. Even so, I could see that she had once been attractive.
She was dressed and groomed like a woman who knew she wasn’t attractive any more. Her hair, bleached the color of tin, was tangled as if her fingers had been busy in it. Her dark purple dress didn’t go with her hair. She wasn’t a thin woman, but the dress bagged on her as if she’d been losing weight.
The Filipino bartender broke in on my observations: “What will you have to drink, sir?”
“The stuff the lady’s drinking looks interesting. With the gold in it.”
“Goldwater? It’s okay if you like a sweet drink. Isn’t that right, ma’am?”
She grunted noncommittally. I said to her: “I’ve never tried goldwater. How does it taste?”
Her masked eyes swung towards me. “Lousy. But go ahead and try it. Everything tastes lousy to me.” Her voice was fairly cultivated, but it had undertones of ugliness and despair.
One of the Stetsons rapped on the bar with a Reno dollar.
“Sir?” the bartender said impatiently. “You want the goldwater?”
I went on making a production out of it. “I don’t know.” I said to the woman: “Doesn’t the gold get stuck in your throat?”
“It’s very thin gold leaf. You don’t even know it’s there.”
“All right, I’ll try it,” I said, as though she’d talked me into it. “Anything for kicks.”
The bartender poured my drink from a bottle labelled “Danziger Goldwasser.”
“That’s what I used to think,” the woman said.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that.”
She leaned towards me, half in earnestness and half in the pull of gravity that exerts itself at the end of a long evening. I caught a glimpse of the eyes behind her glasses. In their depths was a lost and struggling spirit asking wordlessly for help.
“Anything for kicks,” she said. “That used to be my philosophy of life. It doesn’t work out the way you expect it to. Kicks include getting kicked in the head by a horse.”
“Is that what happened to you?”
“You might say so. A horse of another color. A dark horse.” Her heavy red mouth twisted mirthlessly.
She pulled herself upright and held herself that way. She wasn’t drunk, or if she was she was able to carry it. Whatever was the matter with her went deeper than drink. She seemed to be holding herself still in the middle of vertigo; it tugged at my sympathy like the turning edge of a whirlpool.
I had a counterimpulse to walk out of the bar and away from the Hacienda and her. She was trouble looking for somebody to happen to.
And succeeding. I raised my drink and said with false cheer: “Luck to the gold drinkers.”
She sipped at hers. “You didn’t say what kind of luck, good or bad. Not that it matters, people don’t get their wishes. Wishing-wells are to drown in. But I mustn’t go on like that. I’m always pitying myself, and that’s neurotic.”
She made a visible effort, and focused her attention on me: “Speaking of luck, you don’t look as if you had too much luck in your life. Some of those kicks you say you go for were kicks in the head, I bet.”
“I’ve had my share.”
“I knew it. I have a feeling for faces – people’s faces. I always did have, since I was a young kid. Especially men.”
“You’re not so old now,” I said. What I was hoping for was a personal relationship with Mrs. Wycherly, the kind of relationship in which she would talk freely without knowing she was being questioned. “How old are you?”
“I never tell my age. On account of I’m a hundred. Like Lord Byron when he was thirty-five or so and he was asked his age when he registered at some hotel, I think it was in Italy. He told them he was a hundred. I know how he felt. He died the following year at Missolonghi. Lovely story, isn’t it, with a happy ending and all. You like my story?”