"And when has he been coming back?"
"Late Sunday afternoon."
"Any particular time?"
"No. Between five and eight, about"
"Does he drive?"
"Yes."
"What kind of car?"
"A dark-blue Cutlass."
"Do you know the license number?"
"Well, I wrote that down. I thought you'd need to have it." She opened a suede purse and looked at a piece of paper from inside. "It's TTD-six-seven-nine."
I wrote the number on the contract margin. I could not think of anything more to ask her. What was there to ask in a case like this? They give you the barest details, because that's all they know themselves; you get an idea of what time he leaves her, and then you go out to where they live and camp on the street and follow him until you're sure one way or the other. Usually you don't have to drive more than ten miles; maybe I would have to drive two hundred, and maybe I would not have to. If Paige had another woman, she could live right here in San Francisco, and they could have gone to the beach last weekend to play their games-or to the mountains or any damned place at all. It had always seemed rather pointless to me that they would go anywhere, even though they sometimes do; the beds in San Francisco motels or apartments are no different from those at the beach or in the mountains.
I said, "Well, I guess that's about all I'll need, Mrs. Paige. I'll be on the job early in the morning. Try to act natural tonight and tomorrow-and don't check out the door or window for me before he leaves."
She nodded once, convulsively, and her hands were restless on the suede bag. "You won't let him know you're following him, will you? I mean, if I'm wrong and Walter is just… working, I wouldn't want him to know what I've done.
"I’ll be as careful as I can."
"Thank you," she said, and her lower lip trembled slightly. There were more tears building in her eyes, but she would not let them get out until she was alone; they were the kind of tears a woman cries only when she is alone. "Will you call me as soon as you find out anything?"
"Right away."
"Shall I give you a check now?"
"I can bill you."
"Well, I'd like to give you something."
"All right."
"Twenty-five dollars?"
"That would be fine, Mrs. Paige."
I looked away while she made out the check. Through the window I could see the rising spans of the Bay Bridge in the distance. Somewhere out there, on the bay itself, a ship's whistle sounded. I thought: Freighter going out, down to Panama, maybe, or off to the Far East. God, how nice it must be out there on the sea! Wind and spray washing over you, washing you clean. You can't get clean in the city; there's too much dirt, tangible and intangible, literal and figurative…
She put the check on my blotter, and I got it into the center drawer without looking at it. Then I stood up and she stood up, and there was nothing for either of us to say in the way of parting. I went with her to the door, and held it for her, and she gave me her shy, wistful little smile and went out hugging the suede jacket tightly around her, as if she were very cold.
When she was gone, I closed the door and went back to my desk and opened the center drawer and looked at her check lying within. Twenty-five dollars advance. Seventy-five total, plus expenses, if the job lasted just the one day. Seventy-five bucks to become a part of the private life and private emotions of a nice young girl. How does it make you feel, guy? Like a gigolo, maybe? Like a goddamned heel?
I closed the drawer again and got my hat and my lightweight overcoat from the office alcove and locked the door behind me and went out into the sunshine. It seemed faintly gray somehow, even though the sky was cloudless, and there was no warmth in it. The young girls in their spring fashions reminded me of Judith Paige, and there was no warmth in that either.
Two
I left my flat in Pacific Heights at seven-fifteen the following morning, and drove out to the address Judith Paige had given me-on Sussex Street, in Glen Park. It was one of those borderline neighborhoods that never seem to be able to make up their minds which way to go. The streets ran in twisting confusion-climbing sharply, dropping sharply, dead-ending with no warning at all-and on each of them you saw fairly nice, if old, middle-class homes, and shabby unpainted tenements, and new low-rent apartment buildings, and old low-rent duplexes. The business district, off Monterey Boulevard, was comprised of grim-visaged shops and buildings that gave you the odd feeling of having regressed thirty or forty years into the dim, Depression past.
The Paige’s lived in one of the apartment dwellings on upper Sussex-a two-story, four-unit thing with an ocher-colored plaster facade and tiny balconies railed in black iron. On the street in front, parked facing downhill, was a dark-blue Cutlass with the license number TTD-679. I drove up to the top of Sussex, turned around in somebody’s driveway, and came down to park on the upper edge of a convex hook in the street, sixty yards or so above the Cutlass. I could see the entrance to the apartment building from there as well. My watch said that it was seven-fifty.
I got my cigarettes out and looked at them and put them away again. My chest felt tight and hot, and I had coughed up a wad of gray-flecked phlegm over my breakfast coffee. Bronchial trouble, created and nurtured by the consumption of too many cigarettes-or maybe it was the other thing, the dark thing you don't like to think about. No. Bronchial trouble, that's all it was. What was the point in wasting money on a doctor to confirm it? Bronchial trouble. Sure.
The simple truth is, you don't want to know.
The simple truth is, you're afraid to find out.
So the hell with it.
A guy and his family came out of a stucco-fronted house on my side of the street, carrying picnic baskets, and got into a vintage Ford and drove off down the hill. The front door banged in the house next door to that one, and a woman with ankles like a heron's legs and a body as thin as a wafer began hunting for her morning paper; she found it after a while, used it to scratch herself in an intimate place, and shuffled back inside again. An elderly lady with too much rouge on her cheeks struggled up the hill with a lean poodle on a red leash; the poodle made a pass for my right front tire, and the elderly lady jerked him away, smiling at me in a self-consciously apologetic way. When I glanced up into my rear-view mirror a moment later, the poodle was washing off the right front tire on the car parked behind mine, while she looked on; that car was empty. Three kids came flying down the opposite sidewalk on roller skates, laughing and shouting. One of them took a header down by the Cutlass-a fat kid in baggy pants-and rolled over in the gutter and began to cry; the other two sailed on down the hill, taunting over their shoulders, and the fat one sat there in the gutter and watched them forlornly with the tears running down his cheeks. Then he got up and took off his skates and began to trudge slowly up the hill. I was sorry for him, because I knew, a little, how he felt.
Eight-fifteen.
There had been a high, early-morning fog, but it was lifting off now and the sky was a faded indigo to the east. Sunlight, the universal cleanser, washed the street and the houses in pale gold, and the neighborhood looked a little nicer, a little friendlier, and a little more hopeful. The smell of spring was thick and fresh in the air.
Across the street a woman with reddish-gold hair that shone like distant fire came out of her house and went into a side garden; she carried a trowel and a pair of gardening gloves. For a brief instant the flaming hair reminded me of Cheryl Rosmond. I looked away and got out my cigarettes and lit one-the hell with my chest.
Cheryl Rosmond. A memory now-still vivid, still immediate, but a memory nonetheless. She was something that might have been for me, something that should have been, something which now could never be. The attraction, the rapport, we had had, had died before it had really lived-the result of a tragedy which neither of us could have foreseen in the beginning, and which, bitterly, neither of us could have prevented even if we had.