Keats and the General's Wife

Finalist in St. Martin's First Best Private Eye Novel contest two separate years in mid-90's.

ONE

(Tuesday morning)

The one about the old right wing general and his young blond wife who was having an affair with the liberal reporter happened about thirty years ago, so I may be a little foggy on some of the details, but I know it started for me one morning when I was hungover, having spent most of the night before drinking with a friend of mine who was in medical school, and who now, or so I’ve heard, lives in Minnesota and earns his living studying crawdad nerves.  That night, though, while we drank a lot of beer and ate only a little pizza, he talked about handing out pills and setting broken bones in remote villages in Bolivia, and then we went back to his place and found some Scotch, which was what really did me in.

I think the question of the night was whether helping people in Bolivia really helped them, and I was probably inclined to think it didn’t, if memory serves, but it’s safe to say that as I lay in bed with my butt stuck up in the air and the top of my head buried in a pillow, I didn’t much care anymore.  I didn’t want to do or think anything except concentrate real hard on not hurting, and when Leo called and said he had a job for me, it was all I could do to not groan out loud. 

Still, I was awake and sober enough to remember that I was broke, that it was near the end of the month, and that I had to do something about the rent, even if it was wrong.  And too, and this is the solemn truth, I never let Leo down when he needed me. 

I not only said okay, that I’d be right over, but sensing that it was probably the middle of the morning, a time when all decent people should be up and about, I tried to sound like I’d been awake for hours.   When I hung up, though, I had a feeling that I shouldn’t try to stand up, so I crawled to the shower.  All the way on my hands and knees.  That’s how bad it was.

The guy who lived in my apartment before me had scratched a message at about eye level in the tile of the shower that said, “I swear to God I will never get drunk again.”  It was right there in front of my face every morning when I leaned forward to rest my head on the tile.  Misery loves company, I guess.  It always made me feel better. 

Not that I was hungover every morning.  Not that hungover, at any rate, but I was in my twenties and I have to admit that altered states of consciousness and women were my top two priorities back then, by a long shot, and I should also admit that some people don’t think they’ve changed much, which is not exactly true.  I still like to have a good time, but I think I’ve learned a little bit about moderation, by which I mean I don’t get drunk and chase women as often as I used to, so it’s just like Leo thought it would be, assuming I lived this long.

It was about eleven when he called, so when I got to his office, a small suite over a flower shop and across the hall from a dentist, in what was then one of the classier shopping centers in our part of town, he was having lunch at his desk, a ritual you could set your watch by, and which usually consisted of either a box of fried chicken or a hamburger from a little lunch stand down the street.

“It’s Johnny, Mr. White,” said Pam, his receptionist, as she let me into the dark, cool inner sanctum, the blinds drawn against the August sun and the window air conditioner chugging steadily.  That day he was having chicken.  As I looked for a place to sit, he was gnawing on a leg and picking at some limp French fries, which he’d covered with honey, and reading something that looked legal and official.  He leaned over the lunch box so as not to get grease on his white shirt and bow tie, and licked his pudgy fingers before turning the page. 

I know my eyes were bloodshot and I still looked as bad as I felt, despite the shower, but Leo was too busy eating, reading, and telling me what I was supposed to do to notice at first.  Without looking up, he greeted me by saying, “John Keats, Esquire.”  Adding the “esquire” to my name was a joke, one he never got tired of, and one I was never sure I quite understood. 

After dropping the chicken leg in the box and picking up a breast, he asked, “You think you can climb up on a balcony, John Keats, Esquire, take pictures through a window, not get caught, and at the same time get something that won’t look like abstract art?”  

He turned a page of the official looking document, and I sat down in one of the three leather arm chairs that were arranged in a semi-circle around the front of his desk,  perching on the edge of the one with the shortest stack of papers on it.  He washed down his last bite of chicken with a sip of coffee. 

“I guess I can try,” I said, “but am I liable to get shot if I get caught?”

Thinking about it now, I’m not sure why I wasn’t more surprised, not to mention more cautious, than I was, and the only explanation I have is that besides being hungover and maybe even still a little drunk, I was broke.  Was Leo asking me to take pictures of people screwing?  I took it for granted that he was, even though it would be the first time and about the last thing I’d expect of him.  But I couldn’t imagine why else I’d have to climb up on a balcony and peek through a window. 

“Shot?  I doubt it,” he said. “When’s the last time you heard of a reporter shooting somebody?” 

“Do I know him?”

“His name’s Peter Norris.  He writes for the morning paper.  Mostly stories about old people who make Christmas gifts for orphans out of popsicle sticks, or raccoons coming down chimneys and chasing housewives around the living room.” 

“Doesn’t ring a bell,” I said. 

“Why would it?” he asked, licking the grease off of one of his fingers.  “You have to read the paper to know what’s in it.” 

Even though Leo still hadn’t looked up, and I wasn’t in a particularly good mood, I grinned good-naturedly.  He never got tired of commenting on my ignorance of what was going on in the world.

“And the lady?” I asked.

 He put down the chicken breast, closed the lunch box, and finally looked at me over his round, old-fashioned reading glasses as he rubbed the bald spot on the back of his head.  Something was wrong.  I knew Leo pretty well.  His attitude was normal, but I could tell from his eyes that something was bothering him.  I’d never seen even a trace of doubt in them before.

“What happened to you?” he asked, “Get in a train wreck?” 

“I’m okay,” I said, and he grinned. 

“She’s the wife of somebody else you probably never heard of,” he said.  “General Burke.” He picked his pipe up from an ashtray that was partly hidden under a law journal.

“The general’s pretty old, isn’t he?” 

“Even older than me, believe it or not, but she’s not.  Mid-twenties, about your age, and a fetching young woman, or so I’ve heard.” 

He lit his pipe. 

“And why is it necessary to literally catch them in the act?” I asked, “assuming that it is.” 

He never exactly answered me.  He pulled a legal pad out of the clutter on his desk, pushed his glasses up on his nose and adjusted his bow tie.  “It is,” he said, finally, “and he drives a ‘54 Chevy, two-toned, black and white, and if it’s at this address, which apparently it is most afternoons, you can count on being able to see them from a balcony at the back of the house.  There’s a diagram and more details on here.”  He tore the page off, handed it to me, and added, “It won’t hurt my feelings if you don’t want to do it.” 

I wondered what that meant, but I didn’t ask.  I needed a job.  I could trust Leo, and he didn’t give me a chance to look at his eyes again.  He turned his chair sideways and leaned back to stare at the pattern the blinds made on the ceiling and puff on his pipe as he waited for my answer. 

“I’ll do it,” I said, after a minute, “but I have a couple of questions.” 

“Shoot.” 

“Where’s the general every afternoon?” 

“He has his own place now, or so I hear.” 

“And this has to do with a divorce?  That you’re handling?” 

“No divorce, that I know of, and all the money, by the way, is yours.  A hundred bucks.  C.O.D.” 

I moved even closer to the edge of my chair.  That was real money back then.  It would not only cover the rent, but buy a couple of weeks of groceries.  Or maybe a week of groceries and a bottle of booze.  In any case, it was an upfront guarantee and quick cash.  As a rule, I billed the attorneys I worked for and had to wait a while for my money.  It sounded so good that it drove my next question, which should have been my first one, right out of my head. 

I know now that I should have asked why he’d take such a job.  And I should have insisted on an answer.  Leo wasn’t the only lawyer I worked for, but he was by far the most respectable.  Basically, he was a family lawyer.  He handled the estates and business affairs of a few men of means he’d known most of his adult life, and he took divorce and criminal cases only as favors or for a change of pace.  Much of the work I did for him, as opposed to what I tended to get from the other attorneys, was what a law clerk would do, like looking up precedents in law books and records in the court house.  I’d also questioned witnesses for him in criminal cases, and I’d spied on people and even taken some pictures, but his clients had always been satisfied with seeing their errant spouses holding hands in a restaurant or walking out of a motel room arm in arm.  Nobody wanted the details.  At least nobody Leo represented.

“Be careful,” he said to my back as I headed for the door, my mind on the hundred dollars.  I turned around, my hand on the door knob, and wondered whether to make something of a caution he’d never found it necessary to express before.  When I looked back, though, he was already settling in for his after lunch nap.  Whatever was on his mind, I thought, at least it wasn’t bad enough to make him lose any sleep.  He’d put his pipe down, taken off his glasses, folded his arms over his chest, and closed his eyes.  Leo in repose. 

I looked at him for a minute and then shut the door quietly behind me.

(Tuesday afternoon)

Since I already had my camera and film with me, and had fortified myself before I’d left the house with some of my landlady’s cold chicken and potato salad, on top of as many aspirin as I thought my stomach could take, I figured I was feeling about as good as I was going to that day and might as well go ahead and get it over with.  And too, I might have been afraid that if I thought about it too much I’d get cold feet.  As it was, as soon as I got in the car, I started having second thoughts.  Not only would Leo, ordinarily, have had nothing to do with literally peeking into bedrooms, but I didn’t have to be told to be careful to know that this was dangerous, no matter how wimpy reporters were.  On the other hand, as I said, I trusted Leo, and I told myself not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

The general’s house was more or less on the way home, not more than five minutes from both Leo’s office and my apartment, which means that if either the general or I had decided to stand on tiptoe at the highest points in our yards and look to the southwest, we could’ve seen the top of the new downtown skyscraper, which everyone said looked like crumpled tinfoil, and which was about twice as tall as the next tallest building.  Now, of course, you can see a whole cluster of skyscrapers, which is probably the least of the ways it’s not the same here anymore.

I mention that, though, the proximity of downtown, because once I got there, the whole area immediately around where the general lived looked like it should have been out in the country. Before making the last turn on Leo’s map, I was in the middle of a pretty typical and very affluent neighborhood of large brick homes, and I wouldn’t have believed that one turn would put me on a winding country road with nothing visible but a handful of rural mailboxes, bar ditches full of weeds, and about ten acres or more of woods and pasture.  No houses could be seen from the road, and I wouldn’t have been too surprised if I’d seen a deer.

All of which meant, among other things, that I’d stand out like a sore thumb if I parked anywhere near the place, so after I turned around in the general’s driveway, I drove back to the brick houses and looked for a place to park that wouldn’t attract too much attention.  Even back then, when people weren’t nearly as suspicious as they are now, suburbs could be bad that way. Especially in the middle of the day in the summer, when everyone with any sense is hunkered down under an air conditioner.      

  I’d expected something you could call grounds, the grounds of an estate, but what I got when I left the road was thick brush that scratched my arms, high grass with stickers that got all over my jeans and shoes, and hoards of gnats that had a field day trying to get in my mouth and up my nose.  It was miserable.  Sweating like a pig was probably good for my hangover, though, to look on the bright side. 

When I got near the house, I started to see signs that at some time in the past, the place had been a garden.  Had been “grounds,” and not just woods.  Under all the weeds and vines and fallen branches and dry leaves were traces of brick-lined stone paths and flower beds and several groups of bushes that seemed a little too symmetrically placed.  Especially, though, I kept seeing dozens of fountains and small statues.  I know next to nothing about that sort of thing, so all I can tell you is that they looked marble to me, not concrete, and most of them were devoted to the cavorting of strange looking little people, like dwarves and fairies and elves, along with plump, mostly undressed young women, all of them having a great time, eating and drinking, playing harps and lutes, and making eyes at one another.

By the time I came within sight of the house, I was expecting to find an old and dilapidated Victorian mansion, and maybe even a hunchbacked gardener and an old lady in the attic, but it turned out that both the house and the area immediately around it stood in sharp contrast to the neglected atmosphere of the woods and its abandoned garden.  The asphalt drive, shaded by tall pecan trees, widened into a parking area in front of the house and looked new and spotlessly clean, and the house itself, a white stucco with a red tile roof, might even have been freshly painted.  All of the windows, and there were a lot of them, had shutters to match the roof and flower boxes full of small, delicate looking red and white flowers.  As I peered out cautiously from the brush, I thought it looked like a cozy little inn hidden away in a remote part of a large forest.

The ladder was just where the note said it would be, on its side between the air conditioning unit and the side of the house.  The Chevy wasn’t there, but I saw the white Triumph that the note said belonged to Mrs. Burke.  I sat down in the shade, not that it helped much, and leaned back against the trunk of a pecan tree to wait.  I waited for half an hour, most of it with my eyes closed, snoozing a little maybe but not really sleeping.  There were too many bugs and it was too hot, which I guess was a blessing in disguise, because if the weather had been mild, I might have conked out until dark.  I could have, I know, started having more second thoughts about what I was doing.  I could have come to my senses, in other words, but I didn’t.  Maybe, as I’ve said, I was too hungover, or maybe I was already enjoying it too much, the exhilaration, despite the hangover, or maybe I didn’t want to give up the money.  Whatever it was, I just let the heat lull me into an almost pleasant coma, until I saw the Chevy come up the drive.

The driver parked in front of a walkway that went around the side of the house and up to a patio in the back.  He was a big, bony guy with very white skin and lots of curly black hair, both on his head and on his arms, and he walked to the back of the house with the long confident strides of someone who lived there.  He even went in through the patio doors, which were unlocked, without knocking.

I gave him time to get upstairs, then hurried across a short open space of lawn to get the ladder.  Getting on the balcony was easy.  The hard part, as usual, even when I was taking pictures from the relative safety of my car, was not being seen, although I think in this case it was more a matter of not caring about it, since it was broad daylight and on a balcony with no cover.  What I did was make sure I was ready to take pictures the second I was exposed, so that even if I got busted right away, I might have something, assuming I could get away with the film, that I could use.

According to the diagram, the head of the bed was just to the right of the double, glass-paned doors, so the only way I was going to even see it, unless I stood right in front of the doors, was to crouch down in a foot of space between them and the balcony wall.  That’s where I put the ladder, as near there as possible, and when I stuck my head up over the wall, I saw immediately that it would probably work, even though the angle was severe.  Light, at least, didn’t look like it would be a problem, since I could see into the room even from the ladder, and although there was a little glare, the whole balcony was in shade, and it was almost as bright in the room as where I was standing.

Even from the ladder, I could see most of the bed and someone sitting or lying on it,  knees up, under a sheet.  I waited, though, before going any further, hoping I could see  that the other person was in the room before I climbed over the ledge.  But nothing happened for several minutes, and I spent most of that time looking down over my shoulder, to make sure nobody was sneaking up on me, and some of it watching a big, scruffy yellow cat that was perched on the wall at the far end of the balcony.

Finally, I saw the guy standing up on the far side of the bed, undressed, and from the ladder, I snapped that, both his face and the full frontal nudity part, and soon after, the sheet came off the legs, and they unquestionably belonged to a woman.  Short but nicely formed, and I snapped that.  Then, trying not to think of consequences, I got up enough on the ladder so that I could sort of roll over the wall, and when I sat up, I duck-walked back a couple of steps into the foot of space.  I still couldn’t see her face or anything at the head of the bed, and the first shot I got from there was of his hairy back next to her legs while he was sitting up, his hand on her knee.  Then he almost disappeared on the other side of her except for his butt, and I snapped that and her legs.  Then his hand came down between her legs, and I snapped that.  Then he crawled on top of her, and I snapped that, and then I got very lucky.  They rolled over, as one, and she was sitting on top of him.  I snapped her face and breasts, his side and legs, his hands on her breasts, her with her head back, first to the left, then to the right.  She kept doing that for a while, and I kept snapping until I finished the roll, just before she leaned forward, exhausted, over him.

I reached back to pull myself up with the help of the wall and grabbed a handful of fur.  I must have jumped a foot off the ground.  I heard the cat spit, and when I turned around, it had backed up a little, and it stood there crouched as if about to pounce on me.  For a minute or more,  I stood crouched, half up and half down, waiting to see what the cat would do, and my legs must have started aching but the only thing I felt was my heart beating.  Luckily, the cat didn’t have to back up any more for me to get on the ladder, and I finally decided it would be content to just hold its ground.  And even if I was wrong, what choice did I have?  I stood up very slowly, expecting to hear at any moment the door open behind me, but when I got back on the ladder and turned around, Mrs. Burke was just where she had been, and only the cat was watching me.

(Wednesday morning)

The next morning, with no alcohol in my bloodstream, ten hours of sleep (I fell asleep watching TV), and a hundred dollars on the way, I was feeling pretty good as I sat in Leo’s office and watched General Burke look at the prints of his wife and the reporter.  As it turned out, the general aroused in me more curiosity than sympathy.  Dressed in khakis, leaning forward over his skinny, crossed legs, his cigarette so mangled that it almost looked hand rolled, he studied the prints slowly, allowing time for each one to make an impression before placing it behind the others, almost as if he were deciding which ones to keep. 

As a rule, even though they were rarely if ever as graphic as those, clients looked at my photographs as if they were identifying a dead body.  Many got so agitated at the sight of their spouses kissing or holding hands with someone else that I was sometimes afraid they’d take it out on me.  I’d seen grown men cry, and I’d seen both men and women lapse into icy, unnatural silences, but I’d never seen anyone take the time to look at all 24 prints or have the presence of mind to put them back in the manila envelope and close the clasp.  And they never said, “Well done.”

But he was right about that, if I do say so myself.  Considering the conditions and the fact that I’m not really much of a photographer, they came out extremely well.  As soon as I got home, I developed the negatives in my bathroom, but then I ran out of steam and spent the rest of the day sleeping, eating, and watching TV.  I put off making the prints until first thing that morning.  It’s true that there was a little glare and the frame of one of the glass panes in the door got in the way in a few shots, but on the whole, what was happening and who was doing it was perfectly clear.  I’d gotten the reporter’s face in the first shot, so there was no question about his identity, and I’d gotten Mrs. Burke’s face many times. 

Which says nothing about my reaction.  I don’t know what I expected.  I guess I didn’t think about it.  While I was on the balcony, I was too nervous and preoccupied to think anything, and once I got home, I was too relieved and tired.  But the next morning, as I stood in my bathroom looking at the contact sheet through a magnifying glass, it was as if I were looking at something I’d never seen before, as if someone else had taken the pictures.  “Fetching,” as Leo had described Mrs. Burke, was an understatement.  He might have added blond and buxom, but that wouldn’t have covered it either.

What I saw in Mrs. Burke’s face, even before I blew up the prints, was unique.  For one thing, I don’t think she’d have seen me if I’d walked in and leaned over in front of her and said, “Boo.”  She was in another world, absolutely without self-consciousness, or even any consciousness at all, and it wasn’t so much that condition as what it did to her face that caught my interest.  It gave her a look I’d never seen before.  She was pretty, no doubt about that, but that doesn’t cover it a whole lot better than “blond and buxom.”  Or “fetching.”  There was more, and like the general, though not, I assumed, for the same reason, I spent a very long time looking at the photographs.

After putting them back in the envelope, he leaned forward to put his cigarette out in the ash tray on Leo’s desk.  He was little, both short and slight, but he had a square jaw and a gray crewcut that made him look rugged, and a deep booming voice, full of authority.  “Well done,” he’d said, and who could doubt it, who would dare, since with a little more volume he might have rattled the windows. 

As soon as he spoke, Pensinger, his assistant, who’d been standing at his shoulder all this time, stepped forward and put a hundred dollar bill on Leo’s desk.  He looked like a lady’s man.  His dark, wavy hair, graying a little at the temples, his blue blazer and yellow silk shirt, open at the collar, and his gold jewelry, more than I was used to seeing on a man, made me think of a European film star, not any particular one, but definitely a womanizer, a man everyone should hate but in fact can’t resist.  “Poor man,” women might say, “he just can’t help himself, and he’s always got that cute twinkle in his eyes.”

On their way out, the general nodded to me curtly, my tip, I guess, and when I heard the door click behind them, I said, “That was weird.”  Leo didn’t say anything.  He took out his pipe and started doing his ritual with it, tamping and lighting, and we just sat there for a while, the blinds making their pattern on the ceiling and the air conditioner still chugging away.  I’d spent a lot of time in Leo’s office.  I was comfortable there, and I don’t know how many times we’d sat together like that after a client had left, but something was different this time.  Normally, we would trade observations and anecdotes about the client.  Leo might tell me about a previous encounter with him, and I might tell him about something that happened during my investigation.  But Leo didn’t seem very sociable that particular morning.  In fact, he’d been uncharacteristically reserved the whole time the general had been in the office, and I remembered the doubt I’d seen on his face the day before.     

“I’ve never seen anyone that composed about it,” I said, trying to ignore the fact that I sensed a problem.  “He was all business,” I added. 

“And it’s none of ours,” said Leo. 

“No,” I said, “I guess not.  Watching him was pretty interesting, though.” 

I told him my impression of  Pensinger, hoping he’d find it amusing, but he turned his chair around to face me and gave me a long, not very amiable look. 

“There’s not one fucking interesting thing about either of them,” he said, in a tone that confirmed my worst suspicions about his mood.  “Pensinger could kill you, Johnny, faster and in more ways than a cat can lick its ass.” 

“What do you mean?” I asked. 

It was not a very relevant question, I know, but it was the best I could do.  Leo had always been easy to get a long with, and I felt a little like I’d had the wind knocked out of me, but when he didn’t answer me, I began to recover and get a little pissed. 

“Any particular reason you don’t like him?” I asked, “besides his politics?” 

He’d turned back sideways to his desk, to assume his favorite position, staring at the ceiling while he bit down on his pipe.  I hadn’t planned on bringing that up.  In fact, though, it was something else that had been bothering me, or at least had thought of as strange, that I’d studiously ignored. 

He didn’t say anything right away, but finally, after I’d just about given up on getting an answer, he said, “I’ll tell you about it sometime,” and I knew the conversation was over.

I wanted to ask him more than ever why he’d taken the job in the first place, especially since it was clear now that he found it so distasteful, but it wasn’t the time to ask him anything.  I was even tempted to go further and tell him I’d actually enjoyed it.  But I knew better. That wouldn’t have been smart even if he’d been in a good mood.  Leo didn’t mind doing whatever it took to get the job done, even in divorce cases, and he wasn’t above joking about some of the things that happened, but saying he enjoyed the dirty work was going too far.  And in his current mood, it would guarantee disaster.  I kept my mouth shut.  “I’ve got something else for you,” he said, after a minute.

         TWO

(Wednesday morning and afternoon)

 I started working on the new job as soon as I got home, but keeping my mind on what I was doing wasn’t easy.  The more I thought about Leo’s bad mood, the more it pissed me off and got me to thinking about what had always annoyed me about him.

Leo was thoroughly conventional.   He’d come up through the ranks and made the most of it, accumulating contacts and cronies every step of the way:  in law school, in his tenure in the DA’s office, in his active involvement in politics, and in all the predictable social activities—church and clubs and charities.  And even though I admired his success, I was also suspicious and disdainful of it.  I was pretty young then, remember, and I found it very easy to see and very hard to forgive what I considered dull,  narrow-minded, and hypocritical in other people’s lives.

I spent the rest of the morning on the phone, drinking too much coffee and smoking too many cigarettes, and spending too much time fretting about Leo.  I also caught myself   daydreaming about Mrs. Burke, or I should say, about my photographs of Mrs. Burke’s face, as I watched my landlady, Mrs. Hendrix, work in her garden.  It was a way of wasting time, watching Mrs. Hendrix putter around, that I usually enjoyed.  In her bonnet and long dress, to protect her from the sun, she was always doing something out there, rain or shine. Weeding or pruning, fertilizing or planting.  Most of the time, I have to admit, I couldn’t tell what she was up to, and even though I never understood it, I respected her dedication, and I admired the garden’s colors and order.  I even liked, and still get a kick out of remembering, all the junk she loaded it up with:  the concrete bird baths, all sorts of feeders hanging from every tree, the plastic deer family, and especially the two foot high ceramic bullfrog.  In his top hat and tails, the bullfrog leaned on his cane in the middle of the pansies, or whatever they were, that grew around one of the pecan trees.  I think they were pansies.  I never could keep the names of the flowers straight. 

The new job involved a man named Rich, a shoe salesman, and coincidentally, like the Burke job, it had no direct connection to Leo’s law practice.  Mr. Rich’s father-in-law was a long time client of Leo’s, a small businessman of some kind, sheet metal maybe, but the job was to find Mr. Rich, who hadn’t been seen for a couple of days and whose wife was about to have their first kid.  When I found him, I was supposed to call the father-in-law and tell him where he was. The wife, who I called first, said she thought he had a girl friend, but she also said that all he’d ever been interested in before was her and shoes, which made me wonder if her father wasn’t the one who thought he had a girl friend.  Then I talked to his mother and his aunt, and neither were much help, except by way of elimination.  So I started calling motels, which I knew might also be a waste of time, but I couldn’t think of anything better to do. 

By noon I was pretty tired of that, and besides, I had a date at one, so I decided to quit for a while.  I wrapped a piece of bread around two slices of bologna, poured myself a glass of milk, and ate standing at the kitchen counter while I thought some more about why Leo had been such a prick.  He hadn’t looked at the pictures, of course, and even if he had, he wouldn’t have appreciated the way Mrs. Burke looked.  Nor had he noticed, I felt sure, the way the general mangled his cigarette, or the way Pensinger peeled a hundred dollar bill off a roll of bills thick enough to choke a horse.  All of that was insignificant to him, the great moderate, compared to their politics.  There was nothing interesting about them, he’d said, coming down on “interesting” as if it were a four letter word. 

Obviously, then, there was something very wrong about Leo taking a job he would normally avoid like the plague, from people he despised, and for no money.  But right then I couldn’t be bothered with that part of the problem.  I was too preoccupied with my irritation at what I could only interpret as Leo’s moral queasiness.  Nothing interesting about them, he’d said.  And too, Mrs. Burke’s face, or the look it had, was never out of my thoughts for long.

My date at one, a standing date every Wednesday, was with a married woman who’d hired me to check up on her husband, a twist Leo would have appreciated as long as it involved someone else, but which, since it involved me, I hadn’t mentioned to him.  She had talked to me for about two minutes at a party and then called me the next day to say she thought her husband, a music professor, was having an affair with a graduate student.    I think, though, that she’d have been very surprised if I’d confirmed her suspicions.  The real reason she called me, which was clear during our first interview but not confirmed until the second, was to find a lover for herself.

So every Wednesday afternoon at one o’clock, while her husband taught some sort of graduate course, advanced flute theory or something, I spent an extremely stylized and impersonal hour with Mrs. Conrad, whose other main activities, as far as I could tell, included drinking about a gallon of white wine a day and smoking three or four packs of unfiltered Old Golds.  I can’t call her an enthusiastic lover, or any kind of lover at all.  In fact, she was so passive, so cold, really, her mind somewhere else, staring at the wall, a blank expression on her face no matter what I did, that I sometimes felt like I was raping her, or at least indulging in some sort of necrophilia fantasy.

At first I wondered if she thought that sooner or later I’d get mad and do something that would shock her out of her passivity, but rather than get frustrated, I actually began to enjoy it.  Her coldness seduced me even as it kept me at bay.  There was something arousing about the distance between us.  What was she thinking as she stared at the wall?  I didn’t know, since she rarely said a word to me, even as I had coffee and she drank her wine and smoked her Old Golds at her kitchen table, which constituted our foreplay.   

Later that afternoon, before I returned to the drudgery of my phone calls, I visited with Mrs. Hendrix for a while, as I often did, at her breakfast table, and drank iced tea and ate cookies with her while we looked out on her garden and watched the squirrels chase each other around the trees.  She filled me in on those occasions on what she’d done lately to make this or that bloom better, or on how she’d adjusted her watering or planted more what-nots in the shade, and so on, all of which went in one ear and out the other, but she also talked about her son and her relatives in East Texas and her duties and friends at church.   

Even though I paid little attention to the details, I listened closely enough to what she said about the garden to know that while she had a farm girl’s no-nonsense attitude towards the things she grew, she tempered it with a maternal tolerance for their failures and limitations.  Even their eccentricities.  And what is more, she applied that same attitude to the people she talked about.  Not that she ever said anything directly or explicitly that couldn’t be categorized as the most innocent small talk, but despite that, I began feel like I knew the people she talked about, so much so that each story she told began to seem like a confirmation of what I already knew, and I was often tempted to say, even though I’d never met the person, “Oh, that sounds just like him.”

(Wednesday night)

At around ten that night, I was put through to a Mr. Rich in a motel out on the Fort Worth highway, but I hung up before he answered and drove out there to check it out, thinking I might catch him indulging his interest in shoes with a pair of spiked heels, but when he answered the door in his jockey shorts, he had a carton of milk in his hand and the TV tuned to a Charlie Chan movie, and rather than look at me shamefaced or with anger, he hardly looked at me at all, but simply turned around and walked back towards the bed, looking so pale and little that if it hadn’t been for a few dark hairs on his legs, he could have passed for a ten year old kid.

He got back in bed to watch TV again as if I weren’t there, and started eating little pecan pies, the kind that come on tinfoil plates wrapped in cellophane.  He had a whole bag of them and had apparently been munching on them for a quite a while, judging from how many wrappers and empty plates littered the bed and even the floor.  I sat down in a chair by the door, but I wasn’t sure he knew I was there, and the longer he ignored me, as I tried to talk him into letting me take him home, the more worried I got that the next time he reached in his bag for a pecan pie, he’d pull out a gun instead and blow his brains out.  Or mine.

Not more than half an hour after I called his wife, his father-in-law showed up, a big guy, brawny, with a red face and not much to say.  He stood in front of the TV, deliberately, I thought, to block Mr. Rich’s view, and he didn’t seem to hear me when I pointed out all the wrappers and plates and milk cartons, or when I told him I’d seen no sign of a woman, or when I added, against my better judgment, but sometimes I can’t keep my mouth shut, that I was worried about Mr. Rich.  That almost got a reaction, I could tell, one I wouldn’t have liked, I’m sure, but he restrained himself and just stared at me, not trying to hide his impatience as he waited for me to leave, his face getting redder by the second.

In those days, I still knew some people I’d grown up with who lived in and hung around one of those then new apartment houses near downtown.  The ones that still have names like the Bora Bora or the Shangri-La or the Mar or Del something or other, and are all built around swimming pools and have game rooms and saunas.  These days, those places are slums, and it’s hard to drive down that street without seeing an ambulance and a patrol car.  It wasn’t like that then.  The people I knew were all single, about my age, and tended to work odd hours, mostly at places that made computer chips, and I could count on there being something happening there about any time I got in the mood for it, which wasn’t often. 

Normally, I found the Camaro, Budweiser, Marlboro singles crowd about as depressing as fried bologna or naked overhead light bulbs, but after Mr. Rich and his father-in-law, I was in the mood to get drunk.  So I stopped by and wound up spending the whole night in a chaise longue by the pool, alternating for a while between sips of the beer I’d brought and shots of tequila somebody else had, watching the lights under the water and listening to Jimmy Reed on the radio as a friend named Jesse told me all about every “cherry” car he’d ever owned and every, as he put it, “piece of ass” he’d ever had.  And I think I also spent some time talking to a girl named Linda Kay, telling her no doubt about how I was saving my money so I could go to San Francisco and drink espresso with Lawrence Ferlinghetti at the City Lights bookstore and drink wine in the alley behind Third Street and Howard with Jack Kerouac.  Which didn’t lead anywhere, of course, except to bore her to death, since she’d just barely heard of San Francisco—what state is that in?—never mind Ferlinghetti and Kerouac.  I thought I was slumming in those days and just killing time, like watching nothing on television, and I was sure life promised better things, but lately I’ve caught myself getting sentimental about “Bright Lights, Big City,” and thinking fondly of the Bora Bora.

        THREE

        (Thursday night)

“The d’Artagnan of the AEF,” said Leo, pouring himself another martini and spreading a handful of cocktail peanuts, which he ate one at a time, in front of him on his desk.  “That’s what they called MacArthur in those days.  That’s American Expeditionary Force, in case you slept through World War I in high school, Johnny.  He went out on night raids sporting a muffler his mother had given him, a turtle-neck sweater, cavalry boots, and a riding crop.  ‘It’s the orders you disobey that make you famous,’ he was supposed to have said.” 

It was the evening after my Bora Bora binge.  I’d slept through most of the day, and a little hair of the dog was feeling pretty good right about then, especially since Leo, who never drank anything but martinis, had managed to find some bourbon in one of his file cabinets, which he said he’d always kept on hand for one of his clients who was now deceased, so we might as well get some good out of it. 

He sent RC, the old black man who hung around the office building waiting for somebody to ask him to do something, to go get me a bag of ice, which embarrassed me, RC’s existence, I mean, but the one time I brought it up to Leo he asked me what I wanted him to do about it.  “Tell him to go find a real job?  Tell him to stand up straight, not drag his feet when he walks, and stop calling me Mr. Leo?   Martin Luther King is all fine and good,  Johnny, but he’s too late for the RC’s of the world,” said Leo, as if he were reading off of stone tablets, and after thinking about it for a moment, and sucking on his pipe, he added, “And if he were forty years younger, I still wouldn’t be able to tell him anything.  He wouldn’t listen.”  He was right, of course.  It would be impossible to change RC, and probably even cruel to try, but I still couldn’t help being embarrassed, and also a little put off by Leo’s apparently painless acceptance of the situation.  There were times when it seemed to me that Leo liked to pick and choose what would stir his moral outrage.

What we were talking about that evening, though, was not RC, and not even MacArthur, but General Burke.  We were worried that something had happened to the reporter.  It was too early to be sure, just over 48 hours since I’d seen him in the general’s bed, but late in the afternoon Leo had received a phone call from a guy named Harry Prince who called himself a freelance photographer and who was always trying to get Leo to give him work.  He was the kind of guy who was usually in trouble for something, little things mostly, like unpaid traffic tickets or passing bad checks, and he seemed to know every disreputable character in town.  I didn’t know him well, but he was enough of a hustler to make a big deal out of it every time we ran into each other, which was usually by accident, at places like the drug store or a coffee shop.  I was never particularly friendly to him, mostly because, I have to admit, of how he looked.  He was always greasy, and he liked to wear flowered Hawaiian style shirts and Bermuda shorts, as if he were deliberately trying to parody a tourist, but with his oily hair swept back in duck tails, and long sideburns, and a big tattoo of his name on his forearm, he was never going to look like he belonged on the beach with a camera around his neck.  Probably the most annoying thing about him, though, was that even though he always acted like running into me made his day, once we actually started talking, he seemed preoccupied unless he was the one talking, and he always tried to say something that would impress me, which for Harry meant that he’d brushed elbows with somebody rich or famous, however briefly or impersonally.

Harry knew that the general and Leo had done some business recently, and that it involved Peter Norris.  He called, he said, because he thought Leo would want to know that Norris hadn’t shown up for work Wednesday or Thursday, and to offer information that would help find him.  For a price, of course.  Leo put him off and then called the paper to confirm the story.  “He didn’t show up for an interview he had this morning,” said Leo, “and he hasn’t called in sick.  No one down there has seen him since Tuesday morning.  I got his home number but no one is answering.”  “Want me to go over there?” I asked.  “Do it in the morning,” said Leo.  “You’ve earned your money today.”

I hadn’t done anything that day, but that was a technicality.  What he meant was that I’d made short work of two cases, and also, he may have been feeling guilty about his mood of the day before.  He wanted to make it up to me, even though he could hardly be feeling better about General Burke.  Maybe, I thought at the time, he’s just good at putting off admitting that anything is wrong.  He was in denial, as we’d put it these days, but even though that might have been a factor, as might have the number of martini’s he’d consumed,  I think now that what had happened to Peter Norris was less important to him than his decision, in the first place, to become involved.  And although that was undoubtedly still bothering him, he’d had a day and a half to find a way to deal with it that didn’t make everybody else’s life miserable, which I think was what the lecture on Burke was about.  It was a way of circling around what was bothering him, and he started as far away as he could, with talk about the general’s mentor.

MacArthur’s “defining moment,” according to Leo, was his raid on the veterans that had camped out in Washington during the Depression, demanding benefits.  “There are many reasons for hating MacArthur,” he said, “But pride, Johnny, was his main fault.  The man would do anything, including firing on the very men who followed and adored him during the first war, to satisfy that itch, and then to justify it afterwards.  Anything.  He would have sold his soul to the devil, did sell it, in a manner of speaking, at the drop of a hat.” 

I could tell that Leo was lost in whatever he was saying when he forgot to re-light his pipe and just sat there sucking on it as he stared at the ceiling.

“How did he justify it?” I asked.  “It seems like a pretty strange thing for him to do.  You’d think he’d be on their side.” 

“Ambition made that impossible,” he said, “They were all communist agitators, of course.  The same way our friend Burke justifies every shitty thing he does.  But—and I’m stealing this from Voltaire, Johnny, in case you played hooky that day—if there’d never been such a thing as communism, men like MacArthur and Burke would’ve had to invent it.  In fact, I’m not sure that they didn’t.” 

I reached for the bourbon, having decided I needed a little more hair.  If one drink made me feel good, I reasoned, two should make me feel twice as good. 

“How much of a menace communism is, you mean?” I asked. 

He nodded thoughtfully and pulled some matches out of his front pocket.  “And what scares the pants off of me, Johnny,” he said, pausing to light the pipe, “is not so much that Burke goes around the country telling people we ought to drop the bomb on Red China, but that if given the chance, the crazy old fart would do it.” 

“I’m surprised,” I said, seeing an opening and unable to resist, “that he’d come to you for anything, since knowing you, I’m sure you’ve made it clear to him how you feel.”  But he didn’t bite. 

“People like that,” he said, “can make themselves believe anything, depending upon what’s expedient at the moment.  A prime example in Burke’s case, besides what you just mentioned, is that I’m sure he believes it himself when he tells people he quit the Army on principle when MacArthur was fired.  The key words here are ‘on principle.’  He quit because MacArthur was fired, that much I believe, but the ‘on principle’ part is pure horseshit.  The truth is, he knew that without MacArthur around to protect him, the powers that be would send him so far out to pasture he’d never find his way back to the barn again.  Not in a coon’s age.  He’d never see anything like Korea again, and of course it didn’t hurt that he had enough money to quit anytime he felt like it.” 

I knew Leo hadn’t really answered the question, but I didn’t push it.  I didn’t want to risk spoiling his mood, and I didn’t have much faith in persistence working anyway.  If Leo didn’t want to tell you something, he had more ways of not telling you than you could shake a stick at.

“Is he rich?” I asked, and Leo shook his head at me wearily. 

“You’re going to have to start using that muscle up here,” he said, tapping the side of his head with his finger, “as much as you do this one down here.  Read his book.  I’ve got it here somewhere.  In fact, I’ll give it to you.  Not that it’s worth reading, except as an excellent example of prime horse shit, but I guess, come to think of it, that could be called character insight.” 

He got up and walked across the room to the book shelves, which were as overflowing with papers as his furniture.  Leaning forward, he squinted at the titles in the dim light even though he had his glasses on.  “Rosen Jewelers,” he said, still bent over the book case, “They used to be all over the place.  Ever heard of them?” 

I shook my head. 

“They were bought out a few years ago, you don’t see them anymore, but Abe Rosen made a shitload of money.  He built that house you went to, as a matter of fact, and he had one kid, a daughter who was the apple of his eye.” 

He pulled a slim blue book off the shelf and tossed it to me.  As he walked back to his desk, he said, “Marilyn was a beautiful woman.  Rich and beautiful.” 

“Yeah,” I said, “but what about her personality?” 

He took a sip of his drink and said, without so much as a smile, “All kidding aside, she had a good one.  I was in the DA’s office back then, before the war, and now and then we’d get to hobnob with the social elite, and Marilyn was one of those who acted like she really gave a shit about what you’d been up to lately, which, even when its phony—and I don’t think it was in her case—you grow to appreciate if you’re thrown with that crowd often enough.  And she did some good things.  She was a genuine philanthropist, especially when it came to kids, maybe because she didn’t have any herself.  And I guess you can’t really blame her for marrying him, he was a good catch, but on the whole I think she’d have been better off if she’d become an old maid, and it’s a cinch all that money would have been put to better use.  Died in the late forties.  Cancer.” 

“She didn’t have to leave all her money to him, did she?” 

“Community property,” said Leo.  “They’d still be fighting over which was hers and which was theirs if she’d given him reason to contest it.  Not that I know that’s why she didn’t.” 

He stared at the wall behind me for a minute, a sure sign that he was about to get sentimental about something, which meant it was time to eat.  It was getting close to seven.  I shifted in my chair and said, “I’ll go by Norris’ place first thing in the morning and snoop around.” 

“That’s fine,” he said, still looking like he was thinking about something else. 

“Leo,” I said. 

“What?” 

“Norris probably just got a wild hair up his ass and went somewhere and forgot to tell anybody.” 

He looked at me like he didn’t quite understand what I was talking about, and about that time his wife, Maxine, walked in the door.

“Started without me, I see,” she said, giving me a wink.  I stood up and kissed her on the cheek.  “You look nice,” she added, pulling back to get a good look at me. “I keep telling Leo to invite handsome young men to dinner, but he’s so jealous.” 

“At least we got him out of those jeans and that damn T-shirt,” said Leo. 

“Leave him alone,” she said, as she poured herself a martini.  “If he wants to look like James Dean, that’s fine with me.” 

Even though Maxine had recently celebrated her sixtieth birthday, I sort of had a crush on her.  In fact, if she’d been 30 years younger and not married to Leo, I might have gone nuts over her.  She wasn’t bad looking, a fact she seemed not to be aware of or care about, but what I liked about her was that she struck me as the kind of woman who’d always been most comfortable in the company of men, and she spoke her mind whenever she felt like it, in a throaty voice that I suspected had become even throatier over the years, given the number of cigarettes and martinis she’d consumed.

She downed two before we left, and told us she’d spent the day trying to keep one of Leo’s clients out of jail for tax evasion, by sweet talking an IRS agent.  She’d always been Leo’s real legal secretary, while receptionists like Pam came and went, and she also kept books and did taxes for many of his clients.  I was glad to get away from the subject of General Burke, and although nothing more was said about him, and as far as I could tell, Leo was back to his usual self, I got the feeling that Maxine knew that something was bothering him.  She flirted with me, but she kept a close eye on him.

I didn’t have to ask where we were going.  Several nights a week and always on special occasions, they drove their Buick across the street to their country club, where they usually had prime rib, along with more martinis, while they listened to a guitarist who Leo said had played with some famous big bands.  It was the kind of evening I wasn’t always in the mood for in those days, but every now and then it was fun, especially since I really liked Maxine.

  

FOUR

(Friday morning)

Peter Norris lived like a poor college student in the attic of an old house that was not too far from the Bora Bora.  Unlike most of the other old houses in the neighborhood, those that hadn’t been torn down, it hadn’t been cut up into apartments, but it was occupied, from what I could tell, by several people who were more or less roommates. The exact number at any given time, I suspected, was anybody’s guess. 

The living room was still a living room, but it was dusty and what little furniture there was looked like it came from Goodwill.  The first person I came across was sitting on the couch, which I think he’d slept on.  Pale and consumptive looking, he was younger than me, I think, and wearing boxer shorts and playing a recorder.  When I asked for Norris, he simply pointed up and said, “Attic,” and when I got to the second floor, I found a ladder in the hall that lead up through an opening in the ceiling.

It was a poor student’s room:  a mattress on the floor with sheets on it that didn’t look too clean, a card table for a desk, an old typewriter, a flexible metal desk lamp, paperbacks and record albums scattered all over the place, and a pile of dirty clothes.  In a cardboard box under the card table, I found a package of Oreos, a jar of peanut butter, and a bottle of very cheap vodka.  There were several ash trays, all overflowing, and a stash of dope, rolling papers, and a pipe in a metal cash box on the card table.  For romance, I guess, a couple of wine bottles with candles in them sat on the floor next to the mattress, and for music, there was a green plastic radio and a portable record player.  Looking through the books, most of which were lined up along one wall, I didn’t see much fiction, the exceptions being a couple of John Barth novels and Catch-22.  The majority were political science and sociology, and bought, I suspected, for college courses. A few philosophers, though:  Rousseau’s Confessions, The Republic.  On the wall was a black and white photograph, cut out of a magazine, of Lyndon Johnson holding up his beagle by the ears.  It was held up with a dart through Johnson’s heart.  Among the records were Dylan, Joan Baez, Buffy Saint-Marie, and Woody Guthrie.  But no writing, not even a diary, and I looked everywhere.

After nearly running into a naked fat girl who’d just taken a shower, and who didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with me seeing her naked, I found the owner of the house in the backyard.  Wearing faded jeans and loafers, no shirt, he was standing in the middle of a pile of scrap metal, cutting up a bed frame with an acetylene torch.  Lined up along one side of the garage were what I assumed to be several examples of his sculpture, all of it of horses, some of it traditionally western and some very abstract.    “Haven’t seen him for a few days,” he said, holding the torch to the side, a full minute after I asked him about Norris.  He wiped the sweat off his face with his free hand, and looked right at me with extremely watery and bloodshot eyes.  My guess is he was in his middle or late thirties. 

“Does he have any friends living here?” I asked. 

He had to think about everything for a while. 

“Friends?  Well, I knew him before he came here.  We worked together on the paper in Beaumont.  In fact, I told him about the attic when he said he was coming to town.  But I don’t see him much.  He doesn’t spend much time up there.”

“You’re not worried about him dropping out of sight for a few days?” 

He turned off the torch and pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes out of his hip pocket. 

“Have you tried him at work?” he asked. 

I said, “They haven’t seen him since Tuesday morning.” 

He struck a match and cupped his hands to light his cigarette. 

“I don’t know what to tell you, then,” he said.  “What do you want to see him for?”

He wasn’t suspicious.  He was just taking a break and making conversation.  But instead of an answer, I gave him my business card. 

“Would you ask him to call me if he shows up?”  

He nodded, and then after reading the card, asked, “Is this your real name?” 

“Yeah.” 

“Tell me something.” 

“What?” I asked, bracing myself for the inevitable.

“ ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’” he said, and then stared at me totally deadpan.  I simply raised my eyebrows and tried not to blush.  “Is that all you really need to know?” he asked, finally. 

“I doubt it,” I said, and he grinned. 

“Well, I don’t,” he said, after a minute of red eyed concentration on my answer, “but it sounds easier than it is.  See my horses over there?” 

I nodded. 

“If just one of them, just one, Mr. John Keats, and I swear this on a stack of Bibles, had an ounce of truth in it, I’d die happy right this minute.” 

Then he laughed, and I looked at the horses and wanted to say something supportive, but the truth is they didn’t do much for me.  So I didn’t say anything.

To break the silence, though, which began to be a little awkward, at least for me, I said, “Has anyone else come around asking about Norris?  A middle-aged guy, maybe, who dresses like he wants to be an Italian movie star?” 

“Marcello Mastroianni?” 

“Something like that.” 

He shook his head but said “Marcello Mastroianni” again just for the fun of it. 

“I was up in the attic a minute ago,” I said, “and I thought it was kind of strange that there was no writing up there.” 

“Why?  Norris was a reporter, not a writer.” 

“What’s the difference?” 

“Buy me a beer sometime,” he said, “and I’ll tell you.” 

We just stood there for another minute.  I was thinking about leaving, but then he said, “I hadn’t thought much of it, to tell you truth, but if I had, I guess I’d assume he’s shacked up somewhere.” 

“Does he have a girl friend?” 

“Plural.  Girl friends.  But never one that lasts for more than a couple of days.  Him not showing up for work, though, shacked up or not, is pretty strange.”  

He took a long drag on his cigarette and stared off into space for a while again.  Then he said, “His family lives in East Texas.  St. Augustine.  Maybe they’d know something.  Know where that is?  Deep, dark piney woods.  His father’s a logger, I think.” 

“He ever say anything to you about work?” 

“No, we just sort of grunt at each other when we find ourselves in the same room together.  Norris has his own ways.” 

“You don’t get along?” 

“Let’s say he doesn’t exactly understand the concept of private property.” 

“He steals things?” 

“Not exactly.  He just doesn’t seem to recognize the difference between what’s his and what’s somebody else’s.  He’ll go in there in the kitchen and help himself to whatever the fuck he’s in the mood for, doesn’t matter if somebody else bought it.  Why should he give a shit?  And he took one of my sculptures once, without saying a word to me about it.  Burned my ass.  Gave it to a girl, he said, just like I wouldn’t care.  And I might even have given it to him, if he’d asked.”

He dropped his cigarette on the ground, squashed it with the heel of his loafer, and re-lit the torch.  “I’ll call you if I see him,” he said.  I stepped back when the sparks started to fly. 

I’d gotten an early start, so when I got back to my place it was barely ten.  By ten-thirty I had his mother on the phone, and like the sculptor, she wasn’t all that worried  when I told her he hadn’t showed up for work for a couple of days. 

“Pete has his own mind,” she said, “Always has.”  She told me he usually called on holidays but didn’t come home much.  “Don’t see him hardly at all anymore.” 

“It wouldn’t hurt to call the police,” I said, “if he doesn’t show up pretty soon.” 

“No, maybe not,” she said vaguely. “ I’ll see what his daddy wants to do when he gets home.  You don’t think he’s in any trouble do you?  Why is it, now, you want to see him?” 

“He’s working on a story I’m investigating.” 

“Doesn’t have nothing to do with dope, does it?  That always scared me about what he did.  Writing about dope dealers and criminals.” 

“No, ma’am.” 

“Maybe he found hisself a new job.  I wouldn’t put it past him to just start a new one and not tell nobody.”

“That’s possible.” 

“His uncle got him that job, you know.” 

“No, I didn’t.” 

“But I don’t think he ever appreciated it.  Said they wouldn’t give him the right things to write about.  That boy was never satisfied, the whole time he was growing up.” 

“You could call the paper,” I suggested.  “Maybe they’d know better who to talk to at the police.” 

“I’ll talk to his daddy when he gets home tonight.” 

I  stared at the phone for a while, knowing what I ought to do next—try to see Mrs. Burke—but wondering if I really wanted to do it. 

About all I’d established so far was that Norris was definitely missing and that he was probably a prick.  Neither the sculptor nor his mother seemed overly concerned about him, nor did they seem to think he would care much if people were worried.  So why should I?  Or more to the point, why should Leo?  I was doing this, wasn’t I, because Leo wanted me to?  But the more I thought about it, the less inclined I was to think that Leo really felt any responsibility for Norris.  After all, Norris was an adult and nobody forced him to screw the general’s wife, nor did Leo force the general to seek retribution, assuming he had.

And besides, unforeseen and unpleasant consequences came with the territory.  Leo gets a man off accused of rape, and he rapes again two days later.  So what?  He files for a divorce for a woman whose husband, as soon as he finds out, beats her to death.  Is that Leo’s fault?  I’d never known him to think so before, and it wasn’t just divorce and criminal cases that might give him second thoughts. Even the estates and business deals Leo handled every day weren’t exactly ivory tower stuff.  In nearly every situation, some people came out on top and some got the shaft, or thought they did.  After all, Leo was an advocate.  He wasn’t a priest or a judge, a detached interpreter of the law, and he was well aware of that.  He had to fight for the interests of his clients, to know how, as he put it, to “put the big britches on people.” Somebody always got burned, and it was always possible to give Leo the blame or the credit, depending upon which side you were on.  Leo helps a man set up his estate so that his family and not his creditors get most of his money.  The family thinks he’s a saint, the creditors hope he burns in hell. 

But in this case, Leo wasn’t even an advocate.  He’d simply passed the work on to me.  It couldn’t, then, as far as I could see, possibly be his conscience that was bothering him, which probably meant that he was worried about his reputation.  At least that was what next came to mind, as something Leo held dear, and now that I was no longer smarting from his bad mood, and not as distracted by the memory of Mrs. Burke’s look in the photographs, that possibility piqued my interest.  Obviously, he detested the general, and he wasn’t too thrilled about the nature of the job.  Did he take it, then, to protect himself?              

FIVE

(Friday morning)

From the angle of the driveway, and in the comfort of my air conditioned car, the general’s house looked even more like a secluded country inn than it had before, a remodeled old villa in Italy, perhaps, the grounds around it mysteriously neglected.  What could be the explanation?  Who had put the garden in?  According to Leo, the general’s father-in-law had built the place.  Had he put the statues in too, or were they a contribution of the first Mrs. Burke?  And in any case, why would the general not keep the place up?  According to Leo, he wasn’t hurting for money.  Sentimental reasons?  Something to do with his dead wife?

As soon as I got out of the car, of course, and into a dose of August reality, I knew I wasn’t in Italy.  I’d never been there, but somehow I doubted that they had summers in which the hot air clung to your skin like damp plastic wrap, and the screams of the locusts  were only slightly more pleasant than fingernails on a blackboard.  Each one seemed to be screeching its own tune and their discarded shells littered the driveway and crunched under my feet.  This wasn’t Italy.  It was more like the Congo or the Amazon.  Heat waves rose off the tile roof, and the paper thin little red and white flowers under the windows looked tired.

The white Triumph was there, just where it had been during my first visit, and one other car, an ordinary American sedan of some kind.  There was no bell or knocker on the door, so I banged on it with the side of my fist, but got no response.  When I peeked through the window panes in the top half of the door, I discovered that I could see all the way through the house to the patio.  The front room was a kitchen and breakfast area, all stainless steel, copper,  and Mexican tile, behind which was a big, sunken living area with a beamed ceiling, a glossy hardwood floor, and a rock fireplace.  It was the sort of place where I’d expect to see people in tweeds and riding clothes gathered for tea before a fox hunt.  At first, though, I didn’t see anyone, and then I noticed Pensinger on the patio side of the French doors, holding a watering can.

I took the route Norris had taken around the house.  Pensinger was holding the can  over one of the big concrete urns that flanked the gate to the patio.  He was more casually dressed than he’d been at Leo’s office, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t put some thought into it, nor did it mean that he hadn’t maintained a Continental look.  He still had on his gold, along with thick soled leather sandals, which was enough right there to make him look different, but he also wore baggy, white cotton pants that looked like pajama bottoms and a loose fitting V-necked purple jersey with the collar up in the back. 

“I’m John Keats,” I said, as I walked up to him, hand out to shake.  “I saw you in Leo’s office the other day, and I’d like to see Mrs. Burke.” 

He shifted the can to his left hand, shook hands with me, and grinned. 

“‘O! For a life of sensation!’” he said suddenly, in a mock dramatic tone as he looked at the sky, “‘rather than thoughts.’” 

Lucky me, I thought, twice in one day.  Sometimes I go for months without even so much as a double-take, but I guess when it rains it pours.  One time, a guy I knew I would hate recited every line of “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” but I’d never had anyone quote that line before, and I have to admit, I didn’t know where it was from. 

“I’m afraid,” I said, noticing the gleam in his eye that I’d first seen in Leo’s office, that “cute twinkle,” as the women might say, “I don’t know that one.” 

“It’s not a poem,” he said.  “It’s the beginning of a speech to the Royal Academy of Science in London.” 

And then he gave the date, which I forget, and I thought about asking him what Keats was wearing that day and what the weather was like.  Instead, I just nodded and said, “So, is Mrs. Burke home?” 

He leaned towards me and squinted, and I realized I wasn’t quite sure how to take the twinkle in his eyes.  On the one hand, it suggested that he thought a lot of himself, it was blatantly cocky, but on the other hand, there was something good-natured about it too, a touch of self-mockery that was hard to dislike. 

Finally, in a friendly, just curious tone, not at all as if he were guardian of the gate, he asked, “What did you want to see her about?” 

I still sensed, though, that if he had anything to say about it, there was no way in hell I was going to see her. 

“I guess you know Peter Norris is missing,” I said, figuring I might as well see how he’d react.  “It’s been nearly four days since anyone has seen him.”

He frowned, which was when I first realized that the twinkle was a permanent fixture, no matter what. 

“No,” he said, “I didn’t.” 

I waited for more, but all I got was more of the squint.

“Kind of a coincidence, isn’t it?” 

He moved the can back to his right hand and started watering again. 

“Why is that?” he asked. 

“Leo and I would hate to think,” I said, “that anything bad happened to him as a result of our investigation.” 

He put the watering can down on the ground. 

“Mrs. Burke is not available,” he said, flatly, his tone suddenly cold, which made for an interesting contrast with his eyes. If anything, they twinkled with more intensity than ever.  “And I don’t think she’d want to see you in any case,” he added. 

About that time, either I happened to look up or something caught my eye in a window above us, I’m not sure which, but when I glanced up, I saw a curtain move, and then I saw her standing in the window, looking down at us, wearing nothing, as far as I could tell, but a baggy orange T-shirt.  I was too far away to see her face distinctly, but the legs were definitely the same well formed ones I’d seen on the bed.  I might have waved, and I know I’d have stared for a while, but the moment  I looked up, Pensinger took my arm and held it just tightly enough to convince me that he meant business.  He didn’t say anything as he began to lead me back around to the front of the house.

“Do you like jokes, Mr. Keats?” he asked, keeping his eyes on the ground and his hand around my arm as if we might be a father and son out for a stroll, having a heart to heart conversation, perhaps, about how I was doing in school, or my plans for the future.  He didn’t give me time to answer.  “Stop me if you’ve heard this one,” he said, “It’s about a young rooster who had a habit of pecking at the gravel around railroad tracks.” 

He glanced up at me, but I didn’t say anything, and we kept walking, his grip still firm. 

“One day he pecked a little too close to the tracks and a freight train came along and took off his tail.”  About that time we reached my car and he released my arm.  “And when he turned around,” Pensinger continued, still looking at the ground, “to see what had happened, another train came by and took off his head.” 

He looked up and squinted at me.  “Do you know the moral of that story, Mr. Keats?” 

The expression on his face was completely good-natured.  “No,” I said, glancing over his shoulder at the house.  We were both in the shade and both sweating.  He had to raise his voice a little to be heard over the locusts. 

“The moral of the story,” he said, “is that you shouldn’t lose your head over a piece of tail.” 

Aside from the natural humor in his eyes, the ubiquitous twinkle, he gave no indication that he’d just told a joke.  He simply stared at me for about half a second, and then, without waiting for a response, he walked away.

I decided Leo was probably right.  Pensinger probably could kill you in more ways than a cat can lick its ass, while he recited Keats, took care of his flowers, told jokes, and who knows what else. A regular Renaissance man, no doubt, and he’d evidently decided, on very little evidence, that I was interested in Mrs. Burke.  Maybe he just assumed that everybody was, or at least everybody who’d seen her in bed.  But did he seriously think I was using the fact that Norris was missing merely as a pretext for seeing her? 

It was entirely possible, of course, that he’d just wanted to make an impression, whether it made sense or not.  The gleam in his eyes suggested an ego big enough for that.  As I drove away, though, I began to think seriously about how I did feel towards Mrs. Burke.  The photographs had certainly made an impression, one I couldn’t reconcile with my idea of a general’s wife, even a young and pretty one.  In a sense, I’d never really seen her in real life.  Through the camera lens in those circumstances and the brief glimpse of her on the balcony hardly seemed to count, but since I knew I could assume that she was an attractive young woman married to an older, very rich, ultra-conservative, retired Army general, why would I have to actually see her?  What would there be that wasn’t in that description?  And that was the problem.  I’d expected a face I’d seen a thousand times on the covers of magazines, a face capable, at most, of a sweet smile and a provocative pout.  And that would be it.  It would be a face that might inspire an obscene remark from my buddy Jesse at the Bora Bora and arouse the interest and envy of old men, but I could take it or leave it.

Did Pensinger know that the look in the photographs had intrigued me?  Was he clairvoyant on top of everything else?  Or had he seen it too? 

I parked in the same spot I’d used on my first visit, figuring she might decide to go out sometime soon, and entertained myself while I waited by inventing a conversation with Pensinger.  Let go of my arm, I said, and we can settle this.  Being an older man, though, and a world traveler, no doubt, you should probably be the one who does the talking.  Tell me what it means, Mr. Pensinger, when a woman looks like that.  It means that she’s in love, doesn’t it?  That’s easy.  When she’s in love, the mask comes off and reveals a face that is so natural it takes your breath away.  That makes sense, except for one thing.  It was a face in a photograph, and she was making love to someone else, someone I don’t even know, and if I did, someone I wouldn’t think she could possibly love.  What?  Bourgeois morality?  That’s an odd comment coming from you, or are you and the general aristocrats?  In any case, what should I do?  What are you recommending?  That I swear off of my attachment to the notion of private property?  That I put the photograph, suitably framed, on my wall, for all of my friends to admire?  

The Triumph came out of the woods after about an hour, and I followed it downtown.  When she got out of the car, it was the first time I’d seen her in street clothes, and  I can’t honestly say that there was anything about her appearance that would have turned my head more than once.  Like nearly everyone when they went downtown in those days, she was dressed up, in something summery that showed off the fact that she had a good body and a healthy tan, and she was pretty, as I’ve said already more than once, definitely blond and buxom and fetching, but there was nothing really special about her, which was both a disappointment and a relief.  As I watched her cross the street, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t lose my head.

Old department stores, even fancy ones in the city like the one I followed Mrs. Burke into, always reminded me of the old Penney’s in my hometown.  On the first floor, at least, there were the same wood floors, cramped aisles, and old women selling cosmetics, but if you looked closer, I have to admit, in the fancy stores, the old women weren’t really the same.  For one thing,  they all looked like they couldn’t possibly exist anywhere else.  They’d probably spent their whole lives behind those counters, had always been in their sixties, and had always worn black, a lot of lipstick, and had been born with hard, exotic looks and foreign accents.   And almost without exception, they were either too friendly or too rude.

And upstairs, completely unlike Penney’s, there was a spacious boutique, not a shoe department, which was actually a novelty for any store in those days.  Customers sat on couches and the women who waited on you looked like young heiresses.  That’s where I approached Mrs. Burke.  She was trying on shoes as she sat on a couch that was probably worth more than I paid for rent in a year.  I simply walked up and sat down next to her and introduced myself, and her response was not at all what I expected.  I’d hoped to catch her off guard.  I thought she’d be nervous and scared.  Instead, she gave me a big smile and even shook my hand.  We were instant friends, it seemed, even after I told her I wanted to ask her a few questions about Peter Norris.

 I opened with more or less the same thing I’d said to Pensinger.  I was determined not to let her intimidate me with friendliness. 

“You know he’s missing, don’t you?” 

Continuing to smile, she did something with her eyes that made her look puzzled.

“No,” she said, slowly, as if trying to figure something out, “No, and I’m not sure that’s true.” 

“I’m worried about him,” I said, “And I’d think you would be too.  No one has seen him since Monday night.  No one knows where he is.  I’ve talked to his mother, the people he works with, and the people that live with him.  I thought you might know something.” 

She looked surprised. 

“Me?” she asked, as if flattered.  “You think I might know something?” 

“Did he say anything to you about going somewhere? Out of town?” 

Before she could answer, the saleswoman came out with several boxes of shoes and knelt down in front of her. 

“I’d think you’d be worried about him,” I repeated. 

She put a pair of the shoes on, stood up, and walked a few feet away. 

“Are they comfortable?” asked the saleswoman. 

“I think so,” she said, looking down at them.  “What do you think?” she asked, looking at me. 

“They look great,” I said, even though I had no opinion at all.  They looked like shoes. 

She walked over to a mirror and modeled them for herself, turning her feet this way and that.  Did she have a sensual twin, I wondered?  The woman modeling shoes looked wholesome enough to be a PTA president, a Sunday school teacher.  I could see her counseling teenage girls on the risks of petting in cars.  Reputation is the most important thing a girl can have, she might say as a finalist in a beauty pageant, after playing her semi-classical piece on the piano. 

She came back and sat down to try on another pair. 

“What I really need, though,” she said, to no one in particular, “is something white.” 

She bit her lower lip as the saleswoman held up a white pair.  This was serious business, but not so all consuming that she couldn’t turn on the smile whenever she glanced in my direction. 

“Did he say anything to you about leaving town?” I asked again.     

She touched my arm, smiled at me, and then looked seriously at the saleswoman. 

“Did you bring out the other white ones?” she asked. 

While the saleswoman looked through the boxes, Mrs. Burke said to me, “The person you should be talking to is my husband’s assistant.  He’s a very nice man, and I’m sure he’ll answer all of your questions.”  She started looking in her purse.  “Do you have a pen?” she asked, after a minute.  “I’ll give you his number.  Tell him you talked to me.” 

“I’ve already talked to Pensinger,” I said.  “He might be dead, you know.” 

“Dead?  Who?” 

She smiled reassuringly at the saleswoman, who looked alarmed at the word “dead.” 

“I’m going to have to think about this some more,” she said to her, slipping her own shoes back on.  “I want to look at dresses.”  She stood up, took my arm, and said, “I’ll walk with you to the elevator.”

“You should be more careful what you say in front of people,” she said when we were alone.  She looked at me as if I were a naughty boy.  “And I’m very, very sorry, but there’s absolutely nothing I can tell you, except, of course, that he’s not dead.  Were you serious?” 

“Yes.” 

I tried to get her to look at me, but she wouldn’t.  Nor would she admit that she believed I was serious.  I thought I saw, though, a flicker of concern in her eyes when she asked if I were serious, even though her intent was to convince me how absurd I was being.  The elevator bell rang and the door opened.  She practically pushed me into it.   

“I’ve just got to look at dresses,” she said, “I’m sorry.  Really, though, talk to Mr. Pensinger again if you have more questions.  Nice to meet you.” 

And she took off to look at dresses as the elevator doors closed in front of me.   

When I got home, I found some meat loaf that Mrs. Hendrix had donated and made myself a sandwich and a glass of tea and sat under the air conditioner and thought rather darkly about the fact that I had no place to go from there.  That’s what my activities of the morning had accomplished.  A dead end.  I thought I had a pretty good idea of who Norris was, what kind of prick he was, I should say, and it seemed pretty obvious that Pensinger and Mrs. Burke had something to hide, but how was I going to get past that?

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I wasn’t even sure I wanted to get past it.  It was dangerous.  Pensinger’s arm hold had driven that point home, not to mention the possibility, which was beginning to sink in, that he or the general had murdered Norris.  And Mrs. Burke?  A cover girl.  A beauty queen.  A cheerleader.  Nothing more and nothing less.  Just the thought of her smile embarrassed me.  I must have hallucinated the look in the photograph.  A steady diet of Mrs. Conrad had probably left me starved for something that didn’t even exist.  I wished I’d made extra prints.  I’d thought about it.  I’d been very tempted, and if I had, I could’ve proven to myself that I was inventing the whole thing.

But even if I hadn’t, what relevance did it have?  Did I want to become Mrs. Burke’s lover?  Take Norris’ place? 

Mrs. Hendrix was mowing her yard, what little space she’d saved for grass, with her old push mower.  She made good meat loaf.  Lots of onions.  Her husband, Earl, had been a barber.  He died of a heart attack on a Saturday night after closing his shop.  They’d always had steaks on Saturday night, she told me, and French fries, and she’d bought watermelon that day, the first of the season.  She knew something had happened at five minutes after seven, because he was never late.  That was ten years ago, but she talked about it like it was yesterday, and in the same tone she used for all of her small talk about her relatives.  It was as if she were talking about somebody else. 

So tell me, Mrs. Hendrix, what would you do?  You’d ask Leo, wouldn’t you?  Ask him why he took the job, and why it’s important to find out about Norris.  I know how young people are, Johnny, she would say, but forget the woman.  Earl and I were married for forty years, and  I know you haven’t known Leo that long, you haven’t been alive that long, but forget the woman.  Leo is solid and respectable.  You can trust Leo.  Just ask him.         

SIX

(Friday afternoon)

I still have the 1953 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia that I had as a kid, but I no longer use it the way I did in the mid-sixties, to help me sleep after lunch.  It’s still fun, though, from time to time, to choose a volume at random and turn the pages until I find something that holds my attention, something, for example, about beavers, or the fact that California was the leading barley producing state in the country, or about weaving baskets, or that Robert Blake was an English admiral in the 17th century who defeated Holland, which was then, as a result, “no longer mistress of the seas.”  I can’t remember what volume I browsed that afternoon—it could have been B—but I know that it worked the way it was supposed to, which was to make me sleepy enough after ten or fifteen minutes to push it aside, lay my head on the pillow, and doze off with the thoughts of whatever I’d just read blending with the sounds of the afternoon, which in the summer was always just one thing, the air conditioner, the window unit, the hum becoming a kind of chant or lullaby, almost like music as I drifted off.

On many days, this one included, I never completely went to sleep, or thought I didn’t, never being quite sure, really, whether I was awake or asleep, whether I was consciously constructing a fantasy or dreaming, whether I was in control of what I was thinking or not.  Instead, as happens to everyone, I’m sure, the rational layer of my thoughts fell away and something less sensible emerged and took hold, and as a consequence, I can’t say how I got from barley, or whatever it was that day, to thinking, if that’s the word, that in a perfect world I would be both a genius and courageous, and she would be whatever I wanted her to be.   And what I wanted, if she was to be truly worthy of me, of my superior intellect and my heroism, if she was to appeal to me, she would also have to be purely feminine, the meaning of which, as I dreamed, I thought I understood completely, and it was not in her walk from the car to the department store, not in what she wore, not in how she handled herself when I spoke to her, all of that was predictable, but in a certain type of intelligence.  When I thought of the photographs, it seemed that the outer layer, the friendly smiles, the prettiness and the self-consciousness, had been peeled away, and what remained—I was totally convinced of this in the dream—was something she knew and had temporarily become. 

In my half dream, by the light of a full moon, she climbed down from the balcony and ran naked through the woods, among the little statues of dwarfs and fairies, not from or to anything, not in fear, but just from the joy of being alive, just for the thrill of running naked, as a child runs around the house after a bath, her top heavy figure, the large breasts and small hips and short legs, youthful and strong and tender all at once.  She inspired the statues in the woods to come alive, to celebrate nothing more than a warm night full of stars and a bright full moon, nothing more than the act of breathing itself, than moving itself, and the dwarfs and fairies loved and accepted her, trusted her, trusted her as one of their own, adopted her, and it seemed for awhile as if the night might last forever, but after a while she forgot herself so much, played with such abandon, that before morning she became tired and fell asleep, and at first it was the best sleep of her life, in the cool night air, among the little fairies she loved and trusted, but in the middle of that deep sleep, just when she was most profoundly drugged by it, by the seductive vapors of the night air, she felt something strange inside of her, which at first was pleasant, seemed right, as if it were meant to be, what should happen in the depths of such a beautiful sleep on such a night, to make it complete, but as she regained consciousness, or at some point in the slow progress towards it, it struck her suddenly that the thing inside her was alien—strange, sticky, and bony—and not at all friendly or gentle, but mean and invasive, and what she was feeling was not pleasure but pain, not in the sense that one turned into the other, but as if she suddenly realized the true nature of the feeling, not completion but repulsion, and her mind and body, as one, revolted, and she opened her eyes to find over her one of those little fairies, crouched over her like a tiny jockey, grinning at her cruelly and mischievously, whipping her flanks with a joy and abandon that was at once familiar and distant, his pleasure her pain, his frenzy her horror, and when she tried with all of her strength to rid herself of him, to rise, to close her legs and lift her knees to throw him off, the pain shot through her whole body, a sharp crushing ache that made her want to scream, but she could no more make a sound than she could move, the cruel little fairy being, it seemed, of a superhuman weight, as if a huge rock had dropped on her from the skies.

But where, then, was the genius and the hero?  Watching?  I ask that now, of course, thirty years later, not then, as I was dreaming, nor even after I woke up.  But when I became more or less conscious, yet still half asleep, eyes still closed but aware, or so I thought, of where I was, I was scared because in my mind’s eye, my room no longer seemed the same.  It was furnished the same.  The round table was still there in the center, with mail and newspapers and dirty dishes on it, the bookshelves still needed dusting, and the books on them were still crammed this way and that, too many for the space, and the old record player I’d had since high school was still on the cheap little painted table, but the light was strange, the room dark and shadowy but suffused with some sort of orange glow, reminiscent of sunrises or sunsets, yet not a natural light, and I knew that I’d woken up in order to save her, in order to jump up and run to her rescue, and in the illogic of the dream, she was no longer in her own garden.  She was just outside, in Mrs. Hendrix’s garden, the rape taking place as I lay there, under the gaze of the squirrels and the plastic deer family, as well as the rest of the dwarfs and fairies, who seemed to be cheering the rapist on, jumping up and down with horrible grins on their faces.  But I also knew that something sat in the corner, staring at me, waiting for me to open my eyes, and I knew that the moment I did that, in fact, the moment it saw any sign from me that I was awake, it would pounce.  At first I thought it would be the cat, but then in my mind’s eye, I could see or sense that it was the bullfrog, holding his top hat and cane between his back legs, waiting calmly, without emotion, without impatience, just waiting, and I knew too that in an instant his manner would change, that he would be on top of me before I could get up, and eat me alive.

That, of course, was a problem worthy of a genius and a hero, and the fact is, I actually began to act very commendably, doing exactly what I should have done, which was relax, control the fear, and try calmly and rationally to think of a way to defeat the bullfrog and save the girl from the fairies.  Should I roll this way or that?  Or at all?  Wouldn’t it be better to look him in the eye and try to throw him off stride with my lack of fear?  I went through those and dozens of other scenarios, imagining each one in detail, from start to finish, and in fact, I became so involved in inventing acts of brilliance and courage that I almost forgot about the presence of the bullfrog, not to mention the suffering of the heroine, and only when I heard a tapping noise, unsure of what it was, did I return to a full recognition of the scene, and keeping my real eyes closed, of course, but glancing over cautiously with my mind’s eye, I saw that the bullfrog was tapping his cane, but looking no less detached and impassive than before, and I tried very hard to figure out the significance of the taps, and I felt as if I just about had it, as if the meaning of the taps was within my grasp, and it would somehow enable me to defeat the frog and save the girl, when they suddenly became louder and stripped away the knowledge before I knew what was happening, and I opened my eyes and realized that someone was knocking at the door.

It was Maxine.  She looked strange on the landing outside my door, a cigarette dangling from her mouth, hands on her hips, staring with frank curiosity at Mrs. Hendrix’s backyard.  She looked strange because I’d never seen her anywhere without Leo, and because she’d never been to my apartment before.  In fact, for a moment, I wondered if I were still dreaming.  Why would Maxine come to see me?  But as I should have known, with her customary directness, the moment she walked in the door, she began to answer that question.

“There are things you don’t know about Leo and the general,” she said, as I held the door open for her, “and since he’s not going to tell you, I am.”  And then, as she looked around the apartment with the same frank curiosity she’d given the backyard, she asked, “Wouldn’t have anything to drink, would you?”

I headed for the kitchen and my bottle of bourbon.

“Two fingers and one ice cube,” she said, as she studied my bookcase while I made both of us drinks.  “For someone who never reads, you sure have a lot of books.” 

“I gave it up,” I told her, and she gave me a skeptical look as I came back with the drinks. 

“Gave what up?” 

“Reading.  You know,” I said, “Like some people give up smoking.  I decided it was bad for me.” 

“Why?” 

Instead of playing along, which I’d expected her to do, she looked at me seriously, as if she really wanted to know.   

“Fogs up the brain,” I said, lamely. 

She shook her head. 

“No,” she said, “You’ve already told me why.  The professors picked on you in school.” 

“Yeah, I couldn’t take it.  Want to sit down?”

I cleared the dirty dishes off the table and straightened up the mail and sat down across from her.  Maxine and Leo thought I was saving my money to go to law school.  Leo was the first lawyer to hire me, on the recommendation of the father of a school friend, and my story, which I actually halfway believed at the time, was that I was taking a year off in order to build up my bank account and my incentive to study, but the year had turned into three years, and I no longer had any intention of going back, a now obvious fact that neither Leo nor Maxine wanted to accept.  It wasn’t their style to lecture me, though, so Leo contented himself with barbed references to my ignorance while Maxine tried to finagle me into intellectual discussions.  It was flattering, of course, that they even cared, but I was beginning to wish they’d forget it.

“What I’m about to tell you,” said Maxine, dispensing with any more small talk, “happened after Joe McCarthy’s time, but as you may or may not know, we’re not out of the woods yet with all that.  We still have loyalty oaths, blacklists, and so on, so just think what it must have been like ten years ago.  And there was no question, of course, of running for public office around here, including for district attorney, if there was anything even remotely pink about your background.  You could be called a communist sympathizer in this town for supporting public transportation, and I’m not kidding.” 

Maxine sipped her drink like it was ice water, which wasn’t unusual.  I was surprised, though, by the lack of humor in her face.  As a rule, she looked pleased with herself and amused when she said something caustic.

“Leo wanted to be district attorney?” I asked.  

“No, but he wanted to run for it.  He knew he didn’t have a chance against that J. Edgar Hoover twin we’ve had now since the beginning of time, but he thought he could do some good as the loyal opposition.  He’d worked in the DA’s office for five years, knew the abuses, especially when it came to colored people, and knew that nothing would be done about it unless somebody raised a stink.” 

“Would anybody around here care, though,” I wondered out loud, “even then?” 

“Probably not, but there was some indication in the fifties that the courts and the President were willing to exert some pressure in regard to racial issues, segregation for example, and Leo thought somebody had to start somewhere.  You didn’t know Leo back then.  He wanted to change things.” 

I didn’t look at her skeptically, but I was tempted.  Leo, the quintessential moderate and realist, was an activist and idealist during the McCarthy era?  Could she be exaggerating?  Or remembering it the way she wanted to?   Or the way it would most impress me?  And was she disappointed or relieved that he’d changed? 

Maxine chain smoked, and she was already ready for another drink.  As I poured her another one, and freshened mine up, I watched her from the kitchen and wondered about this new mood of hers I was seeing.  Evidently, it hadn’t just been the subject that made her not play along with my remarks about reading.  She was worried, and once I thought about it, I realized that just her showing up in the first place should have been enough to tell me that something special was going on.  Something bad, no doubt, and probably something about Leo that I didn’t want to hear.  

Despite my differences with Leo, I  guess I had a stake in thinking of him, and of them as a couple, in a certain way, and talking to her alone made me nervous.  I counted on him being in control, and together they’d always seemed to me indomitable.  A solid front, like one person, their world not perfect, of course, but figured out.  His wife showing up to confide in me, then, was a bad sign, and for that moment at least I didn’t care that she might be about to tell me why Leo agreed to get me to take the photographs of the general’s wife. 

As I walked back from the kitchen, I said, “Listen, Maxine, I guess you know that I’ve been looking for that reporter, Peter Norris, and why, but I’ve just about decided to drop it.  Whatever happened to him is nobody’s fault and probably none of our business.”

She took the drink without looking at me. 

“Most people were laying low, like B’r Rabbit,” she continued, just as if I hadn’t said anything, “And they counseled Leo to do the same.  The insidious thing about red baiting is that it puts a damper on any criticism of anything.  You have to be extra careful of everything you say, for fear that some bastard will smear you with it.  That’s politics, of course, it’s always been that way to some extent, but not like it was then.” 

She held her cigarette like a man, between her first two fingers, not like a pencil, as most women did back then, and she even used her thumb to flick off ashes, instead of daintily tapping it over the ash tray.  She was tough, I thought with envy, and I even thought about how it would be nice, when I got old, to have somebody so loyal at my side. 

“Did you hear me?” I asked.  “What I said about Peter Norris?” 

“But Leo thought he had a duty to rattle the cage a little,” she said, completely ignoring me.  “And he had some support from a couple of people with means.  Like him, they thought a little accountability was in order.  And Leo, of course, had done his homework.  He knew of at least half a dozen solid cases in which colored men were in prison for crimes they probably didn’t commit.  There were many more than that, of course, but half a dozen for sure that would pass muster, that would’ve embarrassed the DA.  The problem, of course, and he knew this all along, was that people associated ‘nigger lover’ with communist, and if you weren’t careful, you could get yourself tarred and feathered right quick for being on that side of the fence.”

I knew by then where she was going, and I really knew I didn’t want to hear it.  I knew that Leo had never run for DA, and what I didn’t want to hear was why, since I didn’t know how it could be a reason I’d like. 

“You don’t have to tell me this,” I said, “Because the Burke case is closed.  What’s done is done.  We’re going to let sleeping dogs lie.” 

She looked up quickly, stared at me until I looked away, and then said, “Johnny.” 

“What?” 

“Shut up and let me finish.” 

“Yes, ma’am.” 

“Soon after Leo’s intention to run became well known, but before he officially announced, General Burke came to see him.  He just showed up at the office one day, bullied his way in unannounced, he and that dandy he takes with him wherever he goes, and proved himself a complete horse’s ass.  He just told Leo flat out that if he ran, by the time the campaign was over, everyone in this part of the state would be convinced that he was a card carrying communist who took his orders directly from Khruschev.  Leo pulled out the next day.” 

“Did the general have any proof?” 

“Don’t be silly.  The general wouldn’t know proof, in any decent sense, if it came up and bit him on the ass.”

I looked out the window.  Long shadows had fallen over the perfect order of the backyard, muting its colors, and Mrs. Hendrix was kneeling over some small purple flowers with a trowel.  I couldn’t imagine what she was doing, though, since there was, of course, no sign of a weed anywhere.  I wanted to ask Maxine why Leo would give in to the general so easily, but something about her tone warned me against it.  It had seemed to suggest that any sensible, decent man would have done the same.  I didn’t agree. 

I moved on, then, and asked, “Why, then, would Leo agree to do a job for him?  It couldn’t be the communist thing anymore, could it?  And for the matter, why would the general ask?” 

“I don’t know.” 

I looked at her and realized that was why she’d come.  She hadn’t come to answer those questions but to ask me to help her find the answers. 

“Let me tell you something, Johnny,” she said, “Leo likes you.  You’ve been good for him.  You listen to the stories everyone has heard a hundred times, and you look up to him, and he knows it.  And he’s counting on you.” 

“To find out what happened to Norris, you mean?” 

“Yes.  It’s very important to him.” 

She hadn’t come right out and said it, but it sounded to me like she thought his conscience was bothering him.  Like I had, she assumed that Leo had taken the job under pressure and now regretted it, or at least dreaded the consequences, but that’s where we parted company.  I couldn’t, though, tell his wife that I thought the threat to his reputation was more important to him than Norris’ welfare.  And did it matter?  The issue of the moment was whether I should continue to help.

“What has Leo told you about what I did?” I asked.

“As little as possible,” she said.  “I found out from Pam that the general had been at the office, and when I asked Leo what he’d wanted, he said you’d helped prove that the general’s wife was cheating on him.  He didn’t give me the details, by the way, and I don’t want to know them.  All he said was that you’d proven it, and he told me the lover was missing.  I didn’t even know who he was until you said that about Peter Norris.”

“I assume you asked Leo why he took the job.”

“He said he knew you needed the money and that it wasn’t political, so why not.”

“But you don’t believe him.”

“Leo and I don’t lie to each other.  But we don’t always tell the whole truth either.  There’s something else.” 

“I’m not sure I understand,” I said.  “Do you want me to find Norris or find out why Leo took the job?”

What I was thinking, of course, was that if he wouldn’t tell Maxine, he sure as hell wasn’t going to tell me.  They’d been married forever.  They were together every day of their lives.  I was a minor character in their lives.

“Find Norris,” she said.  “The uncertainty is bothering him.  I can tell.  Whatever his reason for taking the job, it can’t be dealt with until we find out what happened to him.” 

I poured us a third drink and thought about telling her what I’d been doing all day, and that there was little more I could do.  But now that she’d made her case, she didn’t look so tough anymore.  I could tell that she wasn’t sure she’d like all the answers, but it was something she thought she had to know.  I agreed.  I thought she should know too.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said.  We lifted our glasses and drank to it.

SEVEN

(Friday night)

Maxine left after she finished her drink, and I went fishing, which is what I usually did on Friday nights.  Mrs. Hendrix let me use a cane pole and some red and white plastic corks and hooks that had belonged to her late husband, and I always bought stink bait from a little grocery store across the street from the lake, which was within walking distance of the house.   From the short wooden pier, I could see the tinfoil skyscraper over the treetops, and behind me I could hear the traffic of a busy four lane thoroughfare.

I didn’t go fishing every Friday night, just when the weather was good and I had nothing better to do, which was pretty often.  Staying home and doing nothing was out of the question.  I was too young for that, and besides, I had a pretty good time, in spite of the mosquitoes and the traffic, watching the sun go down, the stars and the lightning bugs come out, and the usually still water and the trees on the far shore slowly turn black.  I enjoyed listening to the crickets and the splash and plop of the fish, turtles, and snakes.  When you’re sitting on the end of a pier, idly watching the cork, it’s relatively easy to not think about things you don’t want to think about. You’re waiting but you’re not really caring whether you catch anything.  The cork floats gently, the sun sinks slowly behind the trees,  and it doesn’t hurt the mood if you’ve got a cup of ice with you and a bottle of bourbon, or as Leo called it, “a beaker of the warm South.”

It’s true that if the goal was to forget about everything for a while, the fishing and the bourbon didn’t work that night, but that was probably never the goal that particular Friday night.  It was more like I was talking myself into something, or even better, it was letting what I really wanted to do come to the surface and present itself as something that, if not sensible, was what I ought to do and could do.  I already had a reasonable plan.  The next morning I would go see Harry.  I doubted whether he really knew anything, and doubted even more that Leo would agree to pay him, and I knew for sure I couldn’t appeal to the goodness of his heart, but I thought it was worth a try.  Harry’s weakness was that he liked to play the big man, and he liked to think that he knew everything, so there was a chance that I could flatter him into at least telling me how he knew that the general had hired Leo to spy on Mrs. Burke.

But like I said, I wasn’t thinking about that as I sat on the pier.  That was already decided, and I’d figure out my strategy in more detail on my way to Harry’s.  What was on my mind was what I really wanted to do right then, that night, which was see Mrs. Burke again.  In regard to finding Norris, it made sense.  Of all the people involved, aside from the most likely culprits, Pensinger and the general, she was the most likely to know what had really happened to him.  Or at the very least, she would know something that would help me figure it out, and the more I sat there, the more I sipped on the cup full of whiskey, the less crazy it seemed. 

As a rule, I would sit there until I got hungry or got a bite, and if I landed a catfish, I’d go home, slap some cornmeal on it, start a pan of French fries, and open up a can of pork and beans, and have a feast while I watched television.  And then I’d doze off until the test pattern or the Star Spangled Banner woke me up.  If I didn’t catch anything, I’d usually buy something at the barbecue joint near the spillway and take it home, but that night neither of those possibilities appealed to me.  I wanted to see Mrs. Burke.

As I drove over there, I was beyond thinking, planning, reasoning, caution, etc.  I was beyond questioning my own motives.  Was seeing her more important to me than helping Maxine?  Looking back, I still can’t answer that question.  Sober and with thirty years between me and the deed, I’m still not sure.  I guess it was a little of both. I wouldn’t have gone without the excuse of helping Maxine, but that probably wouldn’t have been enough by itself to have made me do something so crazy.  What happened was that the drunker I got, the more I began to think about the photographs, and slowly but surely, in spite of the letdown of that afternoon, in spite of her insipid smile and prettiness, I felt compelled to see her.

It’s all well and good , sober and thirty years later, to realize how insane it was, to think of several excellent reasons for not becoming obsessed.  But at the same time, I still have a lot of sympathy for that drunken frame of mind, for that condition in which everything seems both possible and desirable, and when everything and nothing matters, when risk is the greatest virtue.

I’m usually luckiest when I’m drunk, and that night was no exception.  The only car in the driveway was the Triumph.  A light was on in the bedroom, and the back patio door was unlocked.  But the luckiest thing of all was that Mrs. Burke didn’t shoot me, scream, run away, or call the police when I showed up at her bedroom door.  She was in bed, propped up against a pile of pillows, wearing the orange T-shirt I’d seen her in that morning, which had TEXAS written across the front of it in white letters, and reading a very thick paperback novel with a flashy looking cover. 

She’d heard me come in.  I’d made no attempt to hide my presence, and when I appeared in the doorway, she’d lowered her book but still held it open.  The doors to the patio were on the far side of the bed, and I couldn’t help but stare for a moment at the space where I’d squatted with the camera.  Would I be able to see someone in the dark corner?  I wasn’t sure.

Mrs. Burke didn’t seem to notice where I was looking.  She was pouting, not at me but at whoever she’d been expecting, and when she saw it was me, her look quickly changed to one of surprise.  Not fear.  Not irritation.  Not even disappointment.  She simply cocked her head to one side and said, “Oh.  Hi!”  And then she gave me that maddening smile, as if it were the most normal thing in the world for me to show up late at night in her bedroom.

 If I’d been sober, despite my experience with her in the department store, her reaction might have surprised me, but being drunk, I knew what to expect.  It came as naturally to her as breathing, and she would probably have reacted the same way if King Kong or Count Dracula had walked into her bedroom.  Being friendly was her religion;  therefore, what the other person had in mind didn’t matter, since there was nothing a big smile couldn’t resolve.  You want to maul me?  Suck my blood?  No, the smile said, I don’t think so.  It’s just that no one has ever really been nice to you.  And once you experience that, once the smile really gets hold of you, you’ll realize how silly you’re being.

But she was even more than friendly.  She realized I was drunk, which didn’t take a genius to figure out, by the way, since I was using up a lot energy trying not to weave, even though I was standing still, and she decided to be sweet, not just friendly.  She looked at me as if I were a resident of a nursing home or an orphanage.  She knew how to act when she encountered someone less fortunate than herself.  Her job was to humor me, help me get home safely.  She took pity on me.  The smile was just as big and bright as ever, but her eyes were moist with concern.

Keeping her head tilted as if she were talking to a child, she asked me all sorts of stupid questions, like where I was from originally, how long I’d lived here, where I lived exactly, did I like it, and to my great surprise, not only did I answer her, I enjoyed it, and even took it as a challenge to answer without slurring my words.  That was the hard part. 

“It’s so different here,” she said, after telling me she was from a small town too.  “There’s so much to do.” 

If I’d been less drunk, I think I would have been infuriated, but controlling my reaction turned out to be easy.  I was so drunk it was easy to be detached, above it all.  Let her wind down on her own, I thought, or at least until I get tired of it.  Meanwhile, just enjoy the performance.

Without makeup she looked different, but it was only a change in costume.  She was so young and so naturally pretty that, at least in the indirect light from the lamp by her bed, she looked just as fresh and perky as she had that afternoon.  Less formal, though, and younger.  In fact, she could easily have passed for a sorority girl in bed studying for an exam or sitting up to gossip with a roommate, her bare legs crossed in front of her, careless about how the T-shirt covered her, the yellow hair not perfectly combed. 

“Where I come from,” she said, “Believe me.  There’s nothing to do.”  

She went on and on about that, or something, having run out of questions, I guess.  I didn’t listen.  I was fascinated by her, I admit, by how pretty she was, but I knew she wasn’t really talking about anything.  Whatever popped into her head, the more innocuous the better. 

“May I sit down?” I asked, deliberately interrupting her in mid-sentence. 

“Oh!” she said, and for the first time she looked a little unsure of herself, which  surprised me.  I’d half expected her to keep on talking as if I hadn’t said anything.  She must have known that I wasn’t just going to stand there and listen to her rattle on for the rest of the night.  I waited for her to say something else, but instead, she just repeated herself.  “Oh!” And sat there wide eyed with her mouth open. 

Without permission, I sat down in an arm chair that had a full length view of the balcony doors and was across the room from her.  A safe non-threatening distance, I thought, but I doubt if she’d have blinked even if I’d sat on the edge of the bed.  Instead of protesting, she recovered quickly.  She immediately began smiling again, but she didn’t say anything, and at the time, throwing her off balance again seemed like a good idea. 

“Tell me,” I said, after I’d made myself comfortable, “why such a beautiful young woman like you is married to an old man.  Money?”

I expected, at the very least, a standard pout, which I assumed was the other side of the standard smile, but evidently, she couldn’t be insulted.  She wasn’t capable of believing that anyone could be so deliberately mean.  I had simply proven that I was drunk enough to be careless about her feelings.  I was going to be honest and direct to a fault, even impolite, and not at all nice, but it wasn’t my fault.  I’d had too much to drink.  The alcohol was making me do it. 

“Please,” she said, lowering her voice to show me how sincere and concerned she was.  “You seem very nice.  I can tell that you’re really a very sincere, very nice person.  If you’ll go now, I promise to meet you in the morning.” 

Even though she kept smiling, she managed to make it sound like she was worried about me.  I was the one in danger, because I was drunk, not her.  But at least the smile was no longer quite as bright.

I said, “I don’t understand how money could be so important.  Isn’t it kind of like sleeping with your grandfather?” 

For the first time, she frowned, a variation no doubt on the pout.  I was in worse shape than she’d thought, but she wasn’t going to say anything.  The frown was all I was going to get, as if she expected it to shame me into being nice. 

“Let me tell you why I’m here,” I said, fully intending to tell her the truth, to confess, to confront her with the knowledge that I’d seen another side of her.  Surely, I thought, that will bring her around, maybe even piss her off, but at the last minute, I changed my mind.  Did I want to go that far?  Did I want her never to look at or think about me without thinking of that, of me spying on her?   

“A friend of Norris’ asked me to investigate,” I said, hoping I was far enough away and the light was dim enough to hide the color that rose to my face.  “The friend and his mother are worried about him, and, as I told you this afternoon, I was hoping you could help.  That you might know something.”  Therefore, I thought, my face getting redder, like the true professional I am, I got drunk and wandered into your bedroom in the middle of the night.

But she didn’t notice because she was no longer looking at me.  About halfway through my explanation, she looked away as if to think about it.  The concern about me had vanished, probably because I was more coherent than she expected me to be 

“He’s okay,” she said after a moment, tilting her head and putting the smile back on.  She looked at me as if that was all she needed to say, and I knew then that it was Norris she’d been waiting for.  When she heard me coming up the stairs, she thought it was him. 

“May I ask how you know?” I asked.  

“My husband told me.  He gave him money to get him started, and found him a new job in another place.” 

She beamed at me.  The enthusiasm in her voice was beginning to get on my nerves. 

“So,” she added, “You can tell his mother that he’s okay.” 

She moved her head back and forth, kind of like Howdy Doody, and widened her eyes as if to say that settled the matter and now I could go. 

“But that doesn’t explain why no one’s heard from him,” I said. 

For a moment, she looked like she was thinking, but she didn’t let go of the smile or the enthusiasm. 

“Yes, it does,” she said, “because my husband doesn’t want anyone to know where he is.” 

“Is he afraid you’ll run away?  Go to him?” 

She shook her head. 

“It’s not like that,” she said, still smiling.

Sitting down had reminded me that I had a flask in my hip pocket.  I took it out, offered it to her, and when she refused by pulling her head back and frowning for just a split second, long enough to let me know she didn’t approve, I took a good healthy swig.  The sympathetic moisture returned to her eyes, and she looked at me as if she were looking at a poor bum draining a bottle of cheap wine.  I knew that she was about to tell me again that I ought to leave, for my own good.  She was incorrigible.  But she seemed to hesitate, and despite the bright glow of the infuriating smile, I thought, as I had that afternoon in front of the elevator, that I saw something that resembled real concern behind it.  As far as I knew, she had no one to talk to, no allies, and no friends.  And she must have felt especially alone with Norris gone.  

“What is it like?” I asked. 

Her eyes slid away from me, and to my surprise she lapsed into a thoughtful stare.  What was “thoughtful,” I wondered?  Another variation on the pout? 

“You must have loved him,” I added. 

It wasn’t a wild guess.  I was thinking of the evidence of the photographs.  I knew she loved him.  That was the only explanation. 

“No,” she said, “I don’t love him.  I love my husband.” 

That was when I realized that somewhere along the way she’d become less pretty.  The perfect face and the friendliness had disappeared as one.  She was no longer the cover girl.  Did that mean that this new thoughtfulness wasn’t just another variation?  I looked at her cautiously.  Did she have red blotches in the wrong places on her face?  Was her nose a little too big?  Maybe the eyes didn’t quite line up.  I continued to stare at her, looking for what had made her pretty, and catching glimpses of it now and then.  But it came and went.

“I never loved him,” she said, very deliberately, with none of her former enthusiasm.  Finally, she was dead serious.  “I had a big crush on him at first.  That’s true.  But I never loved him, and I told my husband that, and he said that was worse.” 

She glanced at me. 

“You’re a man,” she said, “Do you understand that?” 

“Maybe he’s thinking,” I said, “that if it’s not love, it’s lust, and it’s worse for you to be a slut than in love.” 

“But I had a crush on him.  That’s not just lust.  Is it?” 

I shrugged. 

“Maybe he doesn’t realize how bad he’d feel if you said you loved Norris.” 

“I don’t know why he can’t forgive me,” she said, “I’m willing to forgive him.” 

I sat up straight.

“For what?” I asked.  “Forgive him for what?”  

She put one hand over her eyes and started shaking her head, this time not at all like Howdy Doody.  Then she sniffled and reached for a Kleenex on the bedside table.  Her eyes were red and puffy. 

I almost laughed.  I’d achieved the opposite of my goal.  I’d broken through the friendliness barrier, maybe, and wound up with someone who was getting less attractive by the minute.  I made myself sit up even straighter, tried to rub the drunkenness from my eyes, and reminded myself that even though I hadn’t really had a practical motive for wanting to see her, trying to get through to her could be a means for finding out for Maxine what happened to Norris.  

“Let me get this straight,” I said.  “You have something to forgive him for, something you won’t tell me, and the general won’t forgive you for Norris.  Is that right?” 

She nodded her head and blew her nose. 

“The thing he has to do for me,” she said, “is why we separated.  So when Norris came along, I was both mad at the general, very mad, and lonely.  Why can’t he understand that?” 

“Why did you separate?” 

“I don’t know how I could be so stupid.”  

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and then she blew her nose again. 

“It’s like he’s never done anything stupid.  He’s so perfect.” 

She wiped her eyes with a finger.

Evidently, she wasn’t going to tell me why they separated.  I decided to try a more indirect approach. 

“Tell me about Norris,” I said.  “How did you meet him?” 

She shook her head as if she didn’t want to talk about that either, but then said, “He called one day and said he was doing a story on different things that people put in their yards, and he wanted to look at ours.  My husband’s first wife collected little statues and they’re still out there.  But that was just to get to know me.  What he really wanted was some dirt on the general.  I see that now.  I see now that he never cared about me.  He was using me to find out things about my husband.” 

“What sort of things?” 

I couldn’t tell whether she heard me.   

“I was hurt,” she said, as if I hadn’t asked her a question, “And I’d been alone for six months, and Norris was so different from the general.” 

“Not so perfect?” 

“He didn’t care about anything.  He’d pull his car right up to the front of the house like he owned the place.”  She held a Kleenex in one hand and gestured with the other.  “It’s true that you can set your watch by the general’s schedule, he and Penny are here every morning from seven until noon sharp, and that’s it, but still.  It took a lot of nerve to just take that for granted.”

She looked up and tried to smile.  She couldn’t quite manage it, though, so she lowered her eyes again and went back to looking thoughtful. 

“And he was just different in a lot of ways.  He didn’t care.  Just little things.  Sometimes he’d show up needing a shave, and he was terrible about getting haircuts.  He said he hated to do those things.  They weren’t important.” 

Her eyes had  become brighter as she talked about Norris, but I wasn’t sure whether it was with pleasure or pain.  Nor was it possible to tell if she was recalling the details about him with approval.  I’m not sure she knew herself. 

“What was important?” I asked. 

She had a ready answer. 

“What’s important to all men?” she asked.  “Stupid politics, that’s what.” 

She came down hard on the word stupid and twisted her face until it was almost ugly. 

“When did you find out he was just using you?”

It couldn’t possibly have been before I took the photographs, I thought.  Wouldn’t she have to trust him to make love like that?  Or did that matter? 

“I knew it all along,” she said, as if it were a given. 

She was a fool, she was telling me, and she didn’t mind admitting it.  She might not understand all the idiotic rules men had about women, but she could tell what a man was thinking, what he wanted from her, whether he really cared for her. 

“And I didn’t care,” she added, “It was like being a dope fiend.  I hated it, but I couldn’t give it up.”

I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes.  She loved him.  It didn’t matter what she called it, or what she compared it to, and it struck me as odd that in the act of love she was perfectly beautiful, whereas in confessing her love, she became plain.  What did that mean?  That like everyone else I was attracted to strength and repelled by weakness?  But what had the general seen each of those times, I wondered?  The same?  How could that be?  It seemed just as likely, given his stake in her, that he’d seen the opposite.  Maybe she looked ugly to him when she was strong and happy, as she sat on her lover, and beautiful in her vulnerability when she confessed.

“The first time he mentioned my father,” I heard her say, “I knew it was politics, even though he pretended to be just making conversation.” 

“Your father?” I asked, opening my eyes. 

“No one casually mentions him to me for no reason,” she said, “because if they know what happened, they’re afraid of hurting my feelings.  Of course, you could say that Norris is a person who wouldn’t care about feelings, which is true, but I didn’t know him well enough to know that then.  So I suspected right away that it wasn’t the little statues he wanted to talk about, but my father.  Do you know who he was?” 

I shook my head. 

“Have you ever heard of Sam Barnes?” 

I shook my head again, and was sorry that Leo wasn’t around to comment on my ignorance. 

“Okay,” she said, straightening herself up on the bed as if she were about to recite a poem.  “Well, he committed suicide when I was thirteen, all because of this Negro man who found ten thousand dollars at the city dump.” 

She was all concentration.  She pulled the T-shirt down further over her legs, not from modesty, but as if she were getting comfortable, and I began to realize that my status had changed.  She’d forgotten that I was drunk.  She didn’t care that I was almost a stranger.  In fact, my being a stranger may have made it easier for her to talk.  She was settling in. 

“The dump in the little town I come from, near Tyler,” she explained.  “I don’t mean the Negro man made him commit suicide, exactly, it wasn’t really his fault, he just found the money, but see, the problem was they wanted to take it away from him.  The sheriff and police chief and all those people.  But Daddy thought he ought to be able to keep it, so he tried to help him, but then they arrested him, the Negro man, I mean, I forget what for, but it was just an excuse so they wouldn’t have to let him keep the money, and then all the colored people got up in arms and came marching over from their side of town to the jail house, and all hell broke loose.  A lot of people got hurt, and before it was over, a colored man got lynched.  Nobody ever knew about that.  The lynching part.  I mean it wasn’t in the papers or anything, but everybody knew about it.  It was terrible, and everybody blamed Daddy for it, even some of the colored people that had been friends of his, and he never got over it.  A few months later he went out to the garage and shot himself.” 

She stopped long enough to take a deep breath and then added, “At least that’s all of the story I knew until Norris told me the rest of it.” 

As she’d told the story, she’d changed again.  Of all things, she started to look cute.  The baby sitter telling me a bedtime story. 

“Norris told me,” she said, continuing to tug on the T-shirt and then running her hand over it as if to straighten it out, “that the general spread the rumor around town that Daddy was a communist, and that’s why he got all the colored people stirred up.  And they were going to arrest Daddy, and that’s why he killed himself.” 

“Arrest him for what?” I asked.  “You can’t arrest someone just for being a communist.” 

“Well, I don’t know about that, but that’s what Norris said, and they can do pretty much whatever they want to over there.  I know that.  The people who run the town.” 

“It wasn’t the lynching that made him do it?”

“Well, that’s what everybody thought it was, but not according to Norris.  Or it wasn’t the only thing.” 

“Is that what you were mad at the general about?” 

She looked up, as if surprised at the suggestion. 

“No,” she said, “Of course not. I was mad at him about what happened before.  I mean I found out about it, why I’m mad at him, before I found out about him and Daddy.” 

“Norris’ story just made it worse?  Or what?” 

“No, it didn’t make it anything.  It’s just politics.” 

She continued to play with the end of her shirt.  She didn’t need the Kleenex anymore, and her eyes were getting back to normal.  When she saw the look on my face, she folded her arms and pouted.  She was definitely incorrigible.  Would holding her be the same way?  If you made love to her, who or what would you be having sex with?  How often would she change in the course of that?  

“What?” she asked, finally. 

So the whole baby sitter routine was just a variation on the pout, and I can’t say, in all honesty, that it didn’t work.  When a woman pouts, aren’t you supposed to want to take her in your arms and make her feel better?  Aren’t you supposed to want to reassure her?  Tell her everything is okay?  Aren’t you supposed to feel strong and in control?  And isn’t the pout itself proof of your strength? 

“I was just telling you how I knew what Norris really wanted,” she said.  “What’s wrong?” 

“If Norris is right,” I said, “the general might just as well have murdered your father.” 

She shook her head. 

“You don’t understand.” 

“And if I were real cynical,” I said, “I just might get the impression that the general married you in order to humiliate your father even after he was dead.” 

She looked puzzled.  She didn’t get it.  Or if she did, she wasn’t going to admit it.

“Well, you’d be wrong,” she said, patiently.  “He explained everything to me, just the other night.  He married me because he fell in love with me.  And he made it a point to meet me because, even though what happened to my father wasn’t his fault, he felt bad for my mother and me, being so poor.  He paid off our mortgage and put me through college, without us even knowing who it was that did it, and after I graduated, he just wanted to meet me.” 

And get his reward, I thought, but I knew she wouldn’t get that either.  She couldn’t be insulted, much less persuaded.  It wasn’t open to discussion.  She had it all figured out.  The general loved her for herself alone, and Norris had simply used her for “politics,” and rather than beat my head against the wall, I decided to try to get more details about those “politics”  Norris was so interested in.  Wasn’t that closer to why I was there in the first place?

Whether the general had paid Norris off, which I doubted, or had murdered him, which seemed more likely, politics rather than jealousy might have been the real motive.  The general might consider Mrs. Burke valuable, but I doubted that he loved her, just as I doubted that he simply bought off Norris.  There was that image of him in Leo’s office, looking carefully at each print.  That could mean a lot of things, but not love.   

But in regard to politics, despite Norris’s interest in and knowledge of Mrs. Burke’s father, it couldn’t be that, or just that, even if the general’s role in the affair wasn’t public knowledge.  The fact that General Burke had tried to smear people he considered communists wasn’t a secret.  It was something he still defended.  Something he was proud of.  Had Norris just used the story to get her on his side?  Had he invented it?  As it turned out, he didn’t need it.  How had he reacted when he realized she didn’t care?  Surely, he’d have been even more surprised by her indifference than I was. 

She held the pout, staring at me as if she’d start crying again if I didn’t agree with her.  The job now was to protect herself  from my opinions, and she knew instinctively that the pout was the way to go.  The smile was the generous side of her.  She gave it to me when I needed help, but now the tables were turned.  She needed something from me.  My approval.  She lifted her chin a little higher and gazed at a point just a little over my head,  and she looked ridiculous and vulnerable, which in some peoples’ minds might add up to cute.  I guess I was supposed to admire her pride.  A cute pride.  A spirited specimen of womanhood.  I’m not immune to that.  I wasn’t completely immune to it that night, but it wasn’t what I’d seen in the photographs.  It wasn’t what I’d expected.

 “In case you’re interested,” she said, “I’m leaving him.  I’m moving in with my mother, back home.  If he wants me, he knows what he needs to do.  Period.” 

Firm and cute, I thought.  And more than a little stupid?  Or was she just trying to delude herself?  I took another hit off the flask, another swig of the warm South, and tried to regroup. 

“That’s good,” I said, not trying to hide the fact that I was skeptical.  “But we kind of got off the subject, didn’t we?  I suspect that Norris’ mother, and the police, when they get involved, will want some proof that he’s alive and well.  Given the circumstances, when everything comes out, the general might even be a suspect.” 

I didn’t know if that were true.  I just hoped it scared her. 

“What was Norris using you for?” I asked. 

“I don’t know anything about that,” she said, “Really, I’ve told you everything I know, and I’m sure if it comes to that, if the police get involved, Penny will know how to handle it.” 

“Penny?” 

“Mr. Pensinger.  My husband’s assistant.  And don’t worry, I’m not going to tell him about your visit.  And I didn’t tell him about today.  You’re nice, like I said, not like that creepy little man at the grocery store yesterday.”

“What creepy little man?” 

She waved the question away, as if it weren’t important, but she answered it. 

“He was a detective, too, or so he said, but he wasn’t at all like you.  In fact, he upset me so much I told Penny about it.” 

“What did he want?” 

“Money.  He just came right up to me out of the blue while I was shopping, like you did, but at the grocery store, and he acted like he knew me, like we were old friends.  I tried to be nice, but everything he said seemed to mean something dirty.” 

“What did he know that he wanted money for?” 

“I think he’s the one that spied on Norris and me, which makes my flesh crawl.  He was disgusting.  To think of him watching us.  Ugh.” 

She hugged herself, and involuntarily, I glanced at the patio doors.

“Was that it?  He just knew about you and Norris?” 

“No, no.  He knew that the general already knew about that, which is why I think he’s the one.  He said he’d tell what Norris knew if I didn’t give him a thousand dollars.”

 “What did Norris know?” 

“I told you already that I don’t know.  I even asked him.  I thought maybe it was about Daddy, but when I asked him that, he just winked at me, like he was sure I knew and was just playing games with him.  Anyway, he wrote his phone number down on a sheet of paper and left it in my cart, and I immediately told Penny.  He gave me the creeps.”

I took another swig of whiskey.  I was going see Harry first thing in the morning.  In fact, I wondered if I shouldn’t go see him immediately, but the drinking was starting to catch up with me.  Lying down for a while sounded okay. 

Meanwhile, Mrs. Burke’s hurt pride subsided and she replaced it with the old smile. 

“I’m afraid you’ll fall asleep,” she said, “and I won’t be able to get you up before seven.  You look awfully tired, and you don’t want Penny to catch you here, do you?” 

I pushed myself up out of the chair. 

“When are you leaving?” I asked. 

“Leaving?  Oh, you mean leaving the general.  I don’t know.  I just decided today.  I don’t know.” 

The smile was like a bright light in my eyes when I was trying to sleep. 

“If you need anything,” I said, “Let me know.  And thanks for talking to me.” 

“Oh, well, I guess I needed to get some things off of my chest.”  She cocked her head to one side.  “You’re such a good listener,” she added, her enthusiastic sincerity making me wince, “And I promise to think about what you said.  I know how strange some of it sounds.”

 

On the way home, I wondered how much of her the general could take. His reason for wanting her was no mystery.  She conformed perfectly to the familiar, reassuring notion of what young women ought to be, naughty and nice diversions, something to get men’s minds, temporarily, off of the real work of the world, which made her the perfect prize for the general.  What greater spoils, at least symbolically, could there be than an enemy’s daughter?  And the more the daughter conformed to the ideal, the greater her value.  As such, she was living proof that General Burke was a better man than Sam Barnes, which made me wonder if he’d let her leave.  Like a rare jewel, she might not be something he’d want to wear every day, but that wouldn’t stop him from thinking that he couldn’t live without her.

As I pulled up to the apartment,  I thought again of him sitting there at Leo’s desk carefully studying each print as impassively as if he were picking out wedding photos.  What did that mean?  Had he seen what I’d seen in her face?  Was he capable of seeing it?  Could he or anyone be capable of both seeing it and thinking of her as a jewel?  As spoils?  I found that almost inconceivable.  The look I’d seen defied stereotypes, or so I’d thought.  It had made her human.
 

EIGHT

(Saturday morning)   

The effect of alcohol on the brain never ceases to amaze me.  As I plied myself with coffee and sweet rolls from the 7-11, I thought seriously about banging my head against the wall to punish myself for being fool enough to just saunter in like that to Mrs. Burke’s bedroom.  The fact that it had worked, or at least hadn’t been a disaster, didn’t help.  I could have gotten myself killed, and the way I was feeling right then, it would have served me right.  Thinking of myself driving up there and walking into the house like I owned the place gave me goose bumps.  How could it possibly have seemed so right?

As soon as I felt halfway decent, I called Leo’s office to get Harry’s address.  I didn’t want to talk to Leo yet, but Pam insisted on putting me through, and I give him a very abbreviated version of what I’d come up with, leaving out the late night visit with Mrs. Burke.  I told him, though, that she thought the general had simply booted Norris out of town and that Harry approached her in the grocery store. 

“Okay,” he said, “I think you’re right.  It sounds like Harry knows whatever it was Norris thought he had on the general.  See what you can get for free from him, and then we’ll take it from there.” 

“Do you think they could’ve been in on something together?” I asked, “and that’s why Harry knows something?” 

“If so, Norris is an idiot.  Harry could fuck up a wet dream.  Go talk to him.”

Harry lived across the river in an old but respectable neighborhood of pre-war, white frame houses with beveled siding and big front porches.  The signs of its age simply made the neighborhood look more comfortable. Tracks still ran down the middle of the street even though there hadn’t been street cars in town for at least a couple of years, and on a nearby side street, a cleaners and a little grocery store still hung on in an otherwise vacant string of store fronts.  The yards were kept up, of course, the grass watered and mowed and edged, and the flower beds weeded, and no cars, junked or otherwise, were parked in the front yards.  In fact, many of the houses had been customized over the years.  There were fences around some front yards, vines growing over them, and houses nearly hidden by magnolia trees, some painted gray instead of white, with bright colored shutters or awnings.  If it had been earlier in the day, I’m sure I’d have seen newspapers and milk bottles on all the front porches, and I might even have been tempted to roll down my window and smell the honeysuckle.     

      At first I thought the address Leo had given me was a vacant lot.  All I saw was a big cedar tree about halfway back and a gravel driveway.  I went ahead and parked, though, on the street, and finally saw the house as I walked up the drive.  It was a tiny place, much smaller than the other houses on the block, and built right on the alley. 

      Parked right in front of the door was a beat up old Rambler with the back window out, a bumper sticker that said “Passing Side, Suicide,” with arrows pointing in the appropriate directions, and an old cocker spaniel asleep in the space between where the window was supposed to be and the back seat.  The dog was snoring pretty loudly, and even though I made no attempt to be quiet, he never moved a muscle.  I thought maybe the swamp cooler in a nearby front window masked the noise I made, but even when I knocked on the screen door, the dog didn’t stir.

I tried to peek through the screen, which was pushed out on the bottom, but it was too dark inside to make out much.  I could hear the TV and I could smell beans cooking.  After knocking a second time, I pulled on the screen and found out it wasn’t latched.  “Anybody home?” I asked, stepping inside.  The TV was in a corner to the left of the door, and when my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw an old man asleep on a couch.  Against one wall was a radio console, on top of which was a pair of bronzed baby shoes, a black and white photo of a bride and groom, and a framed picture of Jesus.  On a coffee table in front of the couch was a Bible.  The old man was very skinny, and he slept with his arms folded over his chest and his mouth open, his feet, in brown dress socks, propped up on one arm of the couch.

The front room went all the way across the front of the house, the area to the right of the door taken up by a big, heavy looking mahogany dining table that probably hadn’t been used for eating in years, the space under it and along the walls packed with small appliances.  There were enough toasters, coffee pots, irons, mixers, electric ovens, waffle irons, hot plates, and who knows what else to start a small business.  The kitchen, where the beans were simmering in a big pot, was directly behind that part of the front room, and its faded linoleum floor, even though it looked clean, felt gritty, and the flooring beneath it groaned and squeaked with every step I took.  The beans still had plenty of water, and the stove top was clean.  Big aluminum salt and pepper shakers, a matching grease pot, a plastic timer, and a box of kitchen matches sat on the back of it in an orderly row.  The kitchen table was wiped clean and had nothing on it, and the sink was empty, a dishrag hanging over the faucet and several jelly glasses drying next to it on the rack.

Behind the kitchen, a short hall with doors on either side led to the back door, and the door on the left opened onto a room not much larger than a walk in closet.  There was hardly enough space in it to turn around, even though it was furnished with only a small dresser and a single bed.  Harry lay on the bed on his back, arms folded over his chest, more or less in the same position as the old man in the front room, but he was staring at the ceiling.  He still had his shoes on, brown penny loafers, but all he had on besides that was an old fashioned undershirt, the kind Clark Gable didn’t wear, and a pair of boxer shorts decorated with big red ants on a white background.  The spot of blood in the middle of his forehead was about the size of a quarter, but the blood from the back of his head had run down the pillow to form a large pool on the sheet under his neck.  I wanted to close his eyes for him, but I didn’t have the nerve.

Nothing happened.  The police didn’t barge in and arrest me for murder.  No one hit me over the head or shot me in the back or held me at gun point.  I could faintly hear the TV and the swamp cooler as I stood there glued to the spot for an insanely long time,  staring alternately at Harry, and then through the open window on the alley side of the room at the paint chips and dead flies in the window sill and the weeds in the alley.  The room had a musty smell, probably from the gravel in the alley, and the floor seemed to slope towards the back of the house.  Harry looked surprised.  Shocked even, just as I was, by his condition.

It took me a while to turn my attention to the matted photographs, most of them nine by twelve or larger, that covered nearly every inch of wall space over his bed.  Except for the expression on his face, Harry could have been laid out in a casket, ready for his funeral, and if there’d been flowers, the twenty or so black and white photos of people having sex that hung above him on the wall might have been part of a tribute at his wake.  This was Harry, friends, a man with an uncanny ability to spy on and secretly photograph people in the act.  Notice the completely natural attitudes of the persons photographed, and the extraordinary amount of detail, despite the obvious challenge, in nearly every print, of the lighting conditions.  Harry was a skilled photographer and voyeur.  No doubt about that.

There was nothing classy about the photographs, though.  They weren’t the sort of pictures you see in art galleries that make thighs and breasts look like sand dunes, but they weren’t what you’d see in adult magazines either, even the slickest and most graphic, since there was a complete lack of self-consciousness on the part of both the photographer and his subjects.  No attempt at artifice; no sensual posing.  The photographer was interested in no more than getting the clearest, most unambiguous representation possible of the act, and the subjects were without a doubt unaware of his presence.

My feet were still planted where they’d been when I first saw him, and I was not inclined to move them, knowing that even the lightest step would make the floorboards creak, thus proving to myself that I was there, but I finally forced myself to turn around and walk away as quickly and quietly as possible.  I got as far as the back screen door, knowing that all I had to do was step outside and walk around the house, back down the gravel driveway to my car. That would solve the problem, the immediate one anyway, but I still saw the photographs on the wall, even though what I was really looking at was two beat up metal trash cans on a wooden stand, under which weeds grew, among some spilled trash, a can or two of peas or corn, a raisin box, coffee grounds, and some pieces of wax paper.  I still saw the photographs, even as I smelled the beans and heard the TV and the fan.  They bothered me, I think, more than the body.   

Except for the blank stare and the hole in his head, Harry looked normal enough.  He still had his greasy hair and his tattoo, and it was hard to believe he wasn’t really there anymore.  That’s not what was bothering me.  It was the nakedness in his pictures that was getting to me.  It made me think of the army, of prisons, and even concentration camps, places where the point was to rub it in that you were scum, beneath contempt, defeated, and no doubt soon to disappear off the face of the earth.  And the eyes that looked through the lens at the couples in those pictures on the wall, the same eyes that now stared vacantly at the ceiling, were cold.  Colder than I’d thought, given my tender years, possible.  And the couples, even though they knew nothing of what was happening and were in no physical danger, looked exposed.  They might or might not have been in the heat of passion, but in the pictures they looked huddled together for warmth, not passionate in the unconscious warmth of each other, but agonized by isolation from the rest of the world.

I thought about the Cadillac lady who looked like Dorothy Lamour.  She’d had that forties, long legged and long dark hair swept back in a bun look, and her husband, or so he said, “would know her ass anywhere.”  She liked to entertain the college football players who worked for her husband in the summer.  She liked to give them a perk at the lake, the same one where I fished, bending forward over the trunk of her Cadillac and taking them, in broad daylight, between the tailfins.  Leo had nothing to do with it.  It was a referral from another attorney.  “I think my wife is cheating on me,” the husband told me, giving me a wink that at first puzzled me, and then he asked me to go back a second time, and then a third time, because, or so he said,  I’d never quite managed to get her face.  And when I finally caught on, it scared me so much, mainly because it was so far beyond my understanding, I told him I couldn’t, and he slapped me on the back and said, with a  philosophical tone, “That’s okay, boy, it doesn’t matter.  I’d know that ass anywhere.”

It wasn’t the same, of course.  The Cadillac lady, I presume, knew she was being photographed.  It was a game.  But I’d taken the job, hadn’t I?  That was the point.  At first I didn’t know that she knew, and I knew all along that Mrs. Burke hadn’t known.  Had it just been for the money or not?   

Standing there at the back screen door, I took a long look at myself.  I liked my afternoon naps, my gossip with Mrs. Hendrix, my Wednesday afternoons with Mrs. Conrad, my talks with Leo and Maxine, my fishing on Friday nights, and just enough work to keep me busy and a roof over my head.  And oh yeah, I was going to San Francisco to become a beatnik when I saved up enough money. And what then?  Somehow I’d gotten the idea that you could hear Charlie Parker when you walked through the fog near Golden Gate Bridge, that all the women in North Beach were Edna St. Vincent Millay, and that Zen was the city religion.  It was a city, I imagined, with no Baptist preachers, no high school football, and no Cadillacs.  A working definition of nirvana.  But what was I going to do there?  Listen to jazz?  Pick up women?  Stare at my big toe?  At that moment, I was staring at an empty can of black eyed peas, and not more than ten feet away, Harry stared at the ceiling, and nothing I could think of to do seemed like it could ever amount to anything worthwhile.  Worth the trouble.  The locusts hadn’t noticed anything strange, though.  They went on as before, like high pitched violins warming up, each player in his own world.   

 I heard something behind me and nearly jumped out of my skin.  I should have known what it was—just the pitter-patter of little feet—and shouldn’t have been so scared, and so relieved when I turned and looked down into the expectant eyes of the cocker spaniel, his long tongue hanging out and what little he had for a tail wagging so hard it nearly took his back legs off the ground.  We looked at each other for a minute, and it didn’t take me long to figure out what he wanted.  I walked back into the kitchen, the pitter-patter following me closely, and sure enough, his water bowl next to the refrigerator was empty.  I filled it up, and for no good reason, stood there and watched him drink, very noisily, for what seemed like forever.  Finally, when he’d had enough, I followed him back through the front room and watched him scramble through the hole in the screen, which he could barely squeeze through, and then leap through the open back window of the Rambler and up to his perch.  The old man on the couch hadn’t moved a muscle, and the dog was already asleep, and snoring, before I even got to the driveway.    

NINE

(Sunday morning)

It’s possible, I suppose, that after living through more than two decades of sunlight, pastels, and ferns, I would now find Leo’s old office, if it were somehow possible for me to see it again, oppressive.  I might feel trapped by the cloud of sweet smelling pipe smoke that constantly hovered around the drawn blinds and over the heavy, dark furniture, by the stacks of journals and papers on every chair and table, and by the book shelves bursting at the seams.  At the time, though, those things contributed to the feeling I had that Leo and the office, just as they were, had always been there and always would be.  Nothing ever changed in the office.  Leo had always been behind his desk, a little pudgy and a little bald, in his white shirt and bow tie, puffing on his pipe, leaning back in his chair, and staring at the ceiling, as had all the familiar things around him, right down to the old globe in the corner with its bright colors coded to identify European colonies, and nearby, on the floor, the dictaphone machine with half an inch of dust on it.

And what is more, the office was proof that Leo had always known important things and the right people.  More than half of the books in the room weren’t law books.  Leo’s reading covered a broad range.  Looking over his collection was almost like browsing through a good used bookstore.  And nearly every inch of wall space not covered with books was devoted to photographs, many of them dating from before the war, of Leo with Democratic presidents and vice-presidents, and Texas governors and senators.  And alongside the photographs were framed certificates of honors and awards, including one that named him an Admiral in the Texas Navy.

Leo was solid.  He was respectable.  And he was smart.  I’d thought he could be relied upon, even when it irritated me, to be a moral compass.  When I went to his office, I expected to hear what was right.  Depending upon my mood, his smug certainty might make me impatient or it might reassure me, but I never doubted that he knew what was right.  Not until, that is, Maxine told me how he’d reacted when his ass was on the line.  She thought he had no choice, of course.  She considered him a victim.  My inclination, though, was to think of him as a coward.

Since no one close to me was directly affected by the McCarthy era, and I was just barely a teenager at the time, I was only vaguely aware of what was happening, and I took it for granted that the communists were the bad guys and the grown-ups knew what they were doing.  No hint of dissent reached my ears until I was out of high school, at which time I promptly changed direction and adopted the position that anyone who had named names or had in any way cooperated with McCarthy was beneath contempt. 

Leo would have been proud.  I hadn’t slept through that.  I knew the issues and had an opinion, and although Leo’s crime, buckling under pressure to not run for public office, didn’t directly ruin the lives of  people, I didn’t see how it was essentially any different.  It was still a matter of abandoning principle to save his own skin.  Is that how Leo became solid and respectable?  If so, I wanted nothing to do with it, and as we sat in his office waiting for Detective Smith to arrive, I had difficulty looking at him.  I was angry and upset because I knew that both he and his office had changed for me.  It would never be quite the same.

Never mind that Leo was the only reason I was sitting in his office, instead of in jail or in an interrogation room.  He’d called Detective Smith, his contact in the police department, Saturday morning, immediately after I told him about finding Harry, and even though it turned out that a neighbor had seen me drive up to the house, Smith fixed it, for Leo’s sake, so that I didn’t have to be questioned by the detectives who were assigned to the case.  He was, however, going to drop by the office to take an unofficial statement from me, just to see, he said, if I knew anything that might help. 

What Smith meant by “help,” of course, was physical evidence, not our theories.  In order to get me off the hook, Leo had to tell him why I was there in the first place, which lead to why we thought that General Burke might be involved, but Smith made it clear that without something very substantial, hard evidence, in other words, he wasn’t going to suggest that theory to anyone.  Leo, of course, knew that’s what he’d say, but he wanted me to meet him an hour before Smith’s appointment, he said, to discuss what details we should tell him.  But that was just an excuse.  We never really got to that.  I think Leo wanted to talk to me in order to help himself decide whether he wanted to let me continue to find out what had happened to Norris, or forget the whole thing. 

The way he went about it was to tell me more of what he knew about the general, which was fine with me since it was much easier to just listen, given my frame of mind, than to try to talk.  I hadn’t realized, to tell you the truth, how I felt, how disillusioned I’d become, until I got there.  Until then, I hadn’t even had to try very hard to push it to the back of my mind.  I wanted to help Maxine.  I wanted to see Mrs. Burke.  I was preoccupied, to put it mildly, with discovering Harry’s body.  But when I pulled into the empty parking lot that Sunday morning and saw Leo’s blue Buick, the only other car in the vicinity, and then walked up the stairs by the closed dentist’s office and into the empty reception room, Pam’s typewriter covered and her desk neat and cleared, and no sign of RC, I knew things were different, and the prospect of spending an hour alone with Leo was less appealing than eating worms.

But if he noticed anything wrong, he didn’t show it.  He never really looked at me. 

“Did you read the book I gave you?” he asked, as soon as I sat down. 

“No.” 

He was already sitting sideways at the desk.  For a minute, he didn’t say anything.  He just bit down on his pipe and stared at the ceiling for a while.  The old sage collecting his thoughts, I was supposed to think, which made me squirm a little.  Was listening really going to be better than talking?  Could I force myself to show the usual respect?   

Finally, he said, “You would know, if you’d read it, that the general had a pretty rough childhood.  His father disappeared and his mother farmed him out, sold him, is what it amounted to, to a Swede family in Minnesota, who, or so he says, made him sleep in the barn, even in the dead of winter.” 

He patted his shirt looking for matches. 

“But I’m not sure I believe that,” he said, “the part about the barn, I mean.” 

“You want to use my lighter?” I asked. 

He opened his top drawer, felt around in it for a minute, and came up with a book of matches. 

“But true or not,” he went on, as he lit the pipe, “it shows you how much he hated them, which probably helped make him such a jackass.  Some people, and Burke’s one them, Johnny, take my word for it, aren’t capable of putting themselves in someone else’s place.  He’s like the boy who can pull the wings off a fly and then set it down on a table and get pleasure from watching it suffer.  He sees nothing in the fly that resembles himself.   No connection.”

He paused for minute and puffed vigorously on his pipe to keep it going.  He was talking to me like he would to a jury.  Taking his time, making it a narrative that anyone could follow, and hiding his opinions in common sense metaphors that no reasonable person could question.  As a rule, I enjoyed his performances.

 “And a boy that’s made to sleep in a barn,” he continued, when he had his pipe going the way he wanted it, “or even imagines that he was, while the rest of the family is safe and snug in their beds, just might, out of self defense, decide that there’s no difference, as far as he’s concerned, between the Swedish family and the fly.  They don’t give a shit about him, obviously, so why should he care about them?  And then, when somebody does come along who’s nice to him, instead of reacting like you might think he would, with gratitude, it’s too late.  The boy’s already decided that nothing and nobody resembles himself.  He’s alone, that’s the way it is, and people who are nice to him are no more than opportunities for him to be the Swede family, the tormentor, for a change.”

He rested his head on the back of his chair and half closed his eyes.  Sometimes he got so much pleasure from his pipe that I wondered if he wasn’t smoking opium. 

“When the general was about twelve, Johnny, a woman came along, a spinster school teacher, a rich one, lucky for him, and of course he claimed he loved her like a mother, but I don’t believe it.  She saw the potential in him, though, and was eventually responsible for getting him into West Point, and unless you read the book, you can’t appreciate how coldly he speaks of her.  He says what he needs to say, how she instilled in him all the Christian virtues of self-reliance and hard work and the value of an education and so forth, but his main point about her, his summation, is not about anything personal, not about her personality or her virtues, but that she was living proof of the supreme goodness of capitalism, because it enabled a woman of keen insight to become the benefactor of a worthy boy like himself.” 

He paused then for a long time, abruptly, and if I hadn’t known better, I might have thought he’d fallen asleep.  In the silence, the air conditioner seemed to get louder, and it occurred to me that from the inside the office was no different on Sunday than from any other day of the week.  With the blinds pulled and the door closed, the parking lot could be full, the florist shop could be full of customers, the dentist’s drill could be whirring away, Pam could be at her desk, and RC could be lounging around the front door.  Everything could be the same, except for how I saw Leo.

“It doesn’t occur to him,” he said, leaning his pipe against the side of his ash tray and sitting up to arch his back, “that morons and criminals have money.  It’s as if Voltaire never existed, Johnny.  The rich get richer and more powerful because they deserve it.   Why else would God have allowed them to become rich in the first place?  Occasionally the rich get poor, of course, but for the same reason, because God allows it.  Therefore, whatever happens is right and good, and it’s wrong for us to meddle in such things, to try to thwart God’s will, which of course would be a vain effort anyway, if the general is right, but he doesn’t think of that.  He’s too busy justifying himself to worry about being logical.  Whatever happens is right and good, which is easy to say, of course, when you start life as an indentured farm hand and wind up a West Point graduate, and then a general, and on top of that marry into a fortune.”

He picked up his pipe again and settled back in his chair.  I looked at the  photographs as he spoke.  It had been a while since I’d made a conscious effort to see them.  Leo with Roosevelt.  With Truman.  With John Nance Garner.  With Kennedy.  With Johnson.  All more or less the same:  shaking hands as they look at the camera, both men smiling stiffly.  What the pictures meant, of course, was not that Leo really knew any Presidents.  They meant he’d helped get them elected.  And to his clients, they suggested that he had some clout.  That he could get things done.  That he was a man of some distinction.  Even more than solid and respectable.

 “My point, though, is not the general’s intellectual shortcomings, but that he’s a man without feelings, without compassion, which made West Point the perfect choice.  A military man can’t afford to think about the feelings of the fly, can he?  I was too young for the first war, Johnny, and too old for the second, but I got a taste of the service during the second in an intelligence outfit that they invented for old guys with law degrees who felt guilty about not being in uniform.  We never did anything but study Russian and learn Morse code, but it got me close enough to the military to form an opinion of how they think, and it fits perfectly with having no remorse for the fly or the Swedes or anybody else.  It’s an order, son, nothing personal.  Just do it.  Dig a latrine, do twenty pushups, kill somebody.  It’s all the same.  And that’s our general, Johnny.  That’s him.” 

He sat up in his chair, turned to face me, and rested his arms on his desk.  I looked at the gallery of governors.  Pappy Lee O’Daniel, Allen Shivers, Price Daniel. 

“Of course, most men,” he said, “even when they follow orders, and even when, I would go so far as to say, they give them, do have some feelings about it, some regrets, even if they think what they did was right.  But not the general.  Everything he ever did was right, totally, just because it happened, which leaves open the question, of course, of what he thinks when he fails.  And there was a lot of that at the beginning of the war.  The ride on MacArthur’s coattails wasn’t always smooth, even before that.  Dugout Doug was always an outsider when it came to the rest of the Army brass.”

I could feel him staring at me, and I kept my eyes on Ralph Yarborough. 

“Burke made a good flunky for MacArthur,” he said, “He was more ideological and less flamboyant.  He could explain politics to him and deal with people who thought MacArthur was just plain weird.  Which he was at times.” 

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him light up the pipe again.  I focused my attention on a wooden tennis racket that for several months had been propped up against the wall under the photographs.  One of the strings was busted.  “How do you think he rationalized failure?” I heard him ask.

Without looking at him, I said, “I don’t know.  Builds character?” 

I couldn’t keep the flippancy out of my voice, and even out of the corner of my eye, I could tell from the expression on his face that he knew something was wrong.   

“Think about it,” he said, “he’s cold, without feelings, and everything that happens is fate.  God’s will.  What happens, then, if God decides to rip your guts out?  Who’s responsible?” 

I shook my head.  “I don’t know.” 

I expected something sarcastic about my knowledge of the world, but he just stared at me.  Finally, when he realized that I wasn’t going to say anything or take my eyes off the tennis racket, he said, “The devil.  You didn’t fuck up.  You’re not wrong.  The devil did it.  God doesn’t rip your guts out.  Satan does it when God’s not looking.”

I looked at my watch.  Smith wasn’t due for another fifteen minutes. 

“What are we going to tell Smith?” I asked. 

I was being rude, very uncharacteristically, and we both knew it, but Leo chose not to notice.  He’d successfully hidden the surprise and concern that I’d seen briefly when I’d answered his first question.  I knew he hadn’t forgotten it, though. 

“I’ll take care of it,” he said, which was fine with me.  I didn’t care much for Smith.  But why, then, had I come early? 

“Are you going to want me to pursue this?” I asked.  I tried to make my voice sound normal but it wasn’t working. 

“Let me finish,” he said, “Bring you up to date on Burke.  Then we can decide together.” 

I nodded.

“Remember I told you I liked Marilyn?  The general’s first wife?” 

“You said she wasn’t a snob.” 

“Well, there was more to it than that.  I knew her better than that because she came to me not long after the war and said she wanted a divorce.  I’m not sure why she chose me, but she did, just called me up one day out of the blue and came by and told me everything.  And I mean everything, although really it boiled down to just two.  Two main problems they were having.” 

“Did the general know she came to you?” I asked. 

“I’m not sure.  Why?” 

If he thought I had some hidden motive for asking the question, he didn’t show it.

“Nothing,” I said.

“One problem involved the general’s fidelity and the other was about his politics.  I think she could have put up with an affair, even a long term and serious one, since I think she knew from the start that he married her for her money.  Marilyn had a good head on her shoulders, and I always thought that she knew that he’d cheat on her eventually, but she hadn’t counted on the way he did it.  It seems that he has a fondness for whores.  In fact, you might call it an insatiable appetite, an addiction almost, because he has to have one every day.  Every single day, mind you, and I guess Pensinger’s as much of a pimp as he is anything else.  He rounds them up.  Serves them up each and every morning for his boss, like pancakes.” 

I straightened up in my chair and forgot about the tennis racket.  That had to be why he no longer lived at the house.  It had to be what Mrs. Burke didn’t want to tell me.  Was it that embarrassing to her?

“Does this still go on?” I asked. 

“As far as I know, yes.  When Marilyn found out about it, she said it made her sick to her stomach.  Getting carried away by passion, getting tired of your wife, was one thing, but having a fetish like that was something else.  She thought it confirmed what she’d long suspected, which was just what I’ve been saying, that the general didn’t have any passion, never mind love, for anybody or anything.” 

“And the other thing?” 

“He’d become more extreme in his anti-communism than she’d bargained for, and it was creating problems because she was thinking about becoming involved in the civil rights movement.  He wanted to retire and run for office, and he couldn’t do it if she insisted on doing something as radical as that.” 

“Sounds like he’s pretty passionate about  communism,” I said. 

Leo thought about that for a second. 

“Maybe,” he said, “but it’s an idea, not a person.  And I’m not sure you could call it passion.  Anyway, Marilyn knew he was going to try to stop her from doing any civil rights work, had already threatened her, in fact, so she wanted a divorce.  I actually got started on it, but then she all of a sudden, it seemed to happen overnight, she was diagnosed with cancer.  We put it off, and six months later she was dead.”

He crossed his arms, which meant he was through. 

“I’ve been wondering,” I said, “why the general came to you in the first place.  Besides nearly representing his first wife in a divorce, how do you even know him?  He’s got at least two reasons to avoid you, doesn’t he?” 

“Two?” 

“The divorce and your politics.” 

If Leo heard any hostility in my voice, he still didn’t show it. 

“It’s a long story,” he said, “and Smith will be here any minute.” 

“I think it’s something I need to know,” I said, which got a reaction.  His face got red, and I think he was both annoyed and embarrassed.  He knew I was right.

He said, “Do you think if there was anything I knew that might be dangerous to you I wouldn’t tell you?” 

I said, “I hope not.”

“And besides,” he added, “unless Smith has some very good news, I think we’ll just drop the whole thing.” 

Had that decision come from his monologue or my attitude?  I often wonder now what he could have been thinking at that moment.  Why had I become so difficult all of a sudden?    

“Did you think this might be your chance to get even with the general for something?” I asked, “Is that why you took the job?” 

He frowned, then chose the diplomatic answer. 

“It’s not a matter of getting even,” he said, “I just think he’s dangerous.  I’ve always thought his ideas were dangerous, but now it may be worse than that.”

He turned back sideways in his chair and closed his eyes.  I knew he wouldn’t tell me, no matter how hard I pushed.  We waited for Smith in silence.

After Smith arrived it was at least ten minutes before we got down to business, since Leo had to tell him all about his daughter, who’d married a psychiatrist and lived now in California, and his son, who was a geologist working for an oil company in Saudi Arabia.  He showed Smith a post card and some sort of  Arab costume that his son had sent back, and pointed to the picture of his two grandchildren behind his desk.  And then Smith had to catch Leo up on his kids.  Three girls, their ages ranging from six to fifteen, which gave us a glimpse of what life was like in the Smith family.  The youngest could say the alphabet backwards and knew how to spell words her parents had never heard before; the middle one, thirteen, couldn’t stay off the phone, and the oldest had started to “car date,” a source of so much concern to Smith that he insisted that the boys come in and talk to him before he’d let her leave, which his daughter hated, of course, but the boys seemed not to mind it so much.  “Once they figure out I’m not going to bite,” he said.

I wasn’t so sure about that.  If I’d been a teenage boy, I think Smith would have had me shaking in my boots.  In the first place, he seemed big.  He wasn’t extraordinarily tall, a little over six feet, but he had big arms and shoulders and a thick neck that made the starched collar of his white shirt look a couple of sizes too small and his tie look like it was choking him.  He had come in carrying his hat and sport coat, and the back of his shirt was soaked with sweat, and the thick hair on his forearms was bleached white from the sun.  He made me think of a football coach, a man who took pride in punishing himself physically and who judged other men by that measure, by how much they could take, since how much punishment they could dish out was the easy part, and nothing easy was ever worth as much as what was hard. 

And I suspected that the teenage boys who sat in his living room receiving the third degree instinctively knew that, and knew too that he assumed that the males of the species who subscribed to that ethic were also the most likely to adhere to what was upper most in his mind, the rules about women, which centered around the word ‘respect.’  If you knew what it meant, it was the first and last rule about women, and those teenage boys no doubt not only knew all of that, but realized that they were going to be judged quickly and decisively, and that if they were found wanting, there’d be no appeal.

After telling us he had less than hour because he taught a Sunday School class, Smith took a small spiral notepad, a number two pencil, and a cigarette out of his shirt pocket.  He licked the pencil, stuck the cigarette in his mouth, and opened the pad.  “Now,” he said, as he lit his cigarette with a Zippo, “with your permission, Leo, I’d like to ask Mr. Keats a few questions.” 

I told my story in less than ten minutes, but he must have interrupted me a dozen times.  It was like something from Dragnet.  He wanted just the facts.  All I had to do was hint that I might stray into a comment about why I did something or what I was thinking and he would say, “I don’t need that.”  He wrote the whole time I talked, never looking up, and when I finished, he flipped the pad shut, stuck it back in his pocket, and turned to Leo.  He didn’t like me any more than I liked him.

“Fill me in some more about what you said on the phone,” said Smith.

When Leo talked, no matter what he said, Smith didn’t interrupt, and he knew when to nod and when to frown.  Leo, for his part, was much more candid with him than I expected.  His tone might have been mildly condescending, but that was nothing new and they both seemed comfortable with it.  I’d expected Leo to explains things with much broader strokes, to tell it simply as a story of a jealous husband, and to stick mostly to the facts—my taking the pictures, the general seeing them, Norris’s subsequent disappearance—but he went much further.  He said he thought the general was obsessive and fanatical, that Pensinger was capable of anything, and that Norris was evidently a fool who hadn’t realized the danger he was in.  And he speculated about Harry’s involvement. 

“Either Norris and he knew each other,” he said, “and Norris told him more than he should have, or Pensinger approached Harry first about taking the pictures and for some reason the deal fell through.” 

“Maybe both,” I suggested, but if either of them heard me, they didn’t show it.  I got the hint, and for a while I kept my mouth shut.

I had the feeling that Smith doubted nothing Leo told him and understood all of it.  Everyone in the room, then, agreed that the general was probably responsible for two murders, but at that point, that wasn’t the issue. 

“There’s nothing at Harry’s place,” said Smith. “The killer just came in, shot him, and left.  It’s clean as a whistle.  No prints, no weapon, no eyewitnesses, unless you count the neighbor who saw Mr. Keats.  Lucky for him, though,” he added, as if I were no longer in the room, “the murder took place long before dawn.  Sometime between eleven at night and three in the morning, best we can tell.  The old man, Harry’s father, didn’t hear a thing.  He got up just before Mr. Keats came and put on some beans and went back to sleep, not knowing his son was dead in the back room.” 

“No sign of Norris?” asked Leo. 

Smith shook his head. 

“He’s officially missing now, but we don’t know anything.  My advice, Leo, is to forget it.  I don’t like it any more than you do, but without evidence, we can’t do anything.  You know how it is.  If it’s not a sure thing, they think, it’s best to just leave it alone, and we can’t even question someone like the general without a good reason.”

Leo stared at the ceiling and puffed on his pipe.  I knew that he knew that Smith was right.  We’d both known it before he showed up, and if I wanted to be perfectly honest with myself, I had more than one good reason to hope that Leo wanted to forget it.  As I’ve said, my enthusiasm for working with Leo was gone.  That’s one thing, and for another, I wanted to think as little about Harry as possible.  What I said next, then, made no sense, but I couldn’t stop myself.  

“What kind of evidence would you need?” I asked, “Before you could question the general.” 

Smith looked at Leo, and Leo looked at me.  If he’d asked me point blank why I’d asked the question, I couldn’t have given him a straight answer even if I’d wanted to.   

“We don’t want amateurs involved in this,” said Smith, making a point of not looking at me, “and another body.” 

“What if I could get the photos of Norris and Mrs. Burke?” 

“Wouldn’t mean a thing,” said Smith, “unless you found Norris’ body and fingerprints at the scene or a weapon we could link to the general.” 

Leo said, “Don’t worry.  We won’t do anything foolish.” 

Smith looked at his watch and started to get up, at which point Leo surprised me.   

“Just out of curiosity,” he said, “What if you did turn up some hard evidence?  I mean, what if the department did?” 

Smith settled back down in his chair with a sigh. 

“You know I’ll do whatever I can for you Leo, but…” 

Leo lifted his hand and shook his head. 

“I’m just wondering what things are like down there now,” he said. 

Smith looked at him skeptically. 

“You probably know more about that than I do, or as much.” 

Leo nodded. 

“I just want to get your opinion,” he said. 

“They don’t like him.  You know that.  Ever since Kennedy, they don’t like extremists.  At the same time, though, I doubt if they’re eager to have any more publicity.  I know they’re not.  So I’d say they’d have to be cornered into it.” 

“They’d have to be damned more, in other words, if they didn’t do something?” 

Smith nodded. 

“We’d need lots of evidence and lots of publicity,” he said. 

“Thanks, Smitty.” 

When Smith was gone, neither of us said anything for a long time.  I leaned back in my chair and stared at the old dictaphone machine.  Leo went back to contemplating the ceiling through a cloud of smoke.  I knew he’d made up his mind, despite his last few questions to Smith.  He was going to do the sensible thing, as always, the solid and respectable thing, and quit.  The questions didn’t mean anything.  He was simply trying to help me save face a little with Smith.  Throw me a bone and maybe my attitude would improve. 

But I wanted some answers.  It was a matter of pride.  It was personal.  I’d been through a lot, worked hard, got results, and the two men who were supposed to be on my side had folded up the tent and were treating me like a kid.  Smith just wanted me to go away and Leo was humoring me.  Did they really think that I hadn’t noticed that they were completely ignoring the question of why Leo cared?  Not once did Smith ask Leo why he got involved in the first place or why he had me pursue the matter.  Not in front of me at any rate. 

I wasn’t sure yet what I wanted to do, but I was absolutely sure that Leo owed me an explanation.  Helping Maxine was no longer the main incentive.  At least not at that moment.  I looked at the world globe.  I looked at the gallery of photographs and the framed certificates of honors and awards from the ABA, the TBA, the NTBA, and so forth.  I’d stuck my neck out.  Never mind climbing up on the balcony.  What about Pensinger’s grip on my arm?  What about the late night foray onto the general’s estate, into his wife’s bedroom?  What about finding Harry with a bullet in his head?  I wanted Leo to level with me, but most of all, I wanted him to tell me why I shouldn’t think he’d always play it safe.

“How did you get so chummy with Smith?” I asked.

I wasn’t stalling, I told myself.  I was breaking the ice. 

“He decided he liked me,” he said, “as much as he could like any defense attorney, at least, when I defended his good for nothing brother-in-law.  I refused to let him pay me when it became clear that the brother-in-law would never fork over a dime.  It’s not that he likes him, he can’t stand him, but he protects him for his wife’s sake.” 

“What had he done?” 

“He ran over a queer on a bicycle,” he said, pausing to let that sink in.  “And that’s how I got him off.  When I found out who the victim was, or what he was, the DA lost interest in the case, even though the brother- in-law was drunk as a skunk when it happened.” 

“Did the guy die?  That got run over?” 

“Dead at the scene.  The DA figured most juries would think my client did them a favor, so they dropped the case down to a DWI, which didn’t hurt us because my client had had his drivers license suspended years ago.” 

“You got a lifetime of favors for that?” 

Leo shrugged. 

“If Smith decides he likes you, he can’t do enough for you.” 

“He doesn’t like me.  That’s for sure.” 

He shrugged again and didn’t say anything. 

“I think I should talk to Mrs. Burke again,” I said. 

“Why?” 

Leo turned his head in my direction and frowned.  It was as if that was the stupidest thing I’d ever said. 

“Her father.” 

“Who?”

“You don’t know who her father was?”

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. 

“I know.  What about him?” 

“What exactly do you know about him?” I asked. 

At first, I wasn’t sure he was going to answer me, but finally he grudgingly replied. 

“It made the paper here,” he said, “ but I didn’t know him.  I wasn’t surprised, though.” 

“What do you mean?” 

“I knew who he was.  He’d made a reputation for himself  as a troublemaker.  A reformer and a liberal, and if he’d toned it down a little and not got mad and quit when people over there didn’t immediately see the error of their ways, he probably could have ridden Yarborough’s coattails into Washington.  But since he was so much smarter than everybody else and knew everything, he wound up dropping out of sight until that case came along.”

“Maybe his conscience wouldn’t let him play the game,” I suggested.  “Judging from what Mrs. Burke told me about it, he had balls.”

“Yeah.  Just enough to kill himself.” 

“You don’t blame the general?” 

If he was surprised by how informed I was, he didn’t show it. 

“There was mention in the papers of the rumors about him being a communist,” he said, “but it didn’t say, of course, where they came from, and I never heard anything about it.  I wouldn’t be surprised, though, to hear it came from the general.” 

I looked at him closely.  As far as I knew, Leo didn’t play poker, but he’d have been good at it.  There was no indication in either his voice or his face that the topic of conversation was hitting close to home.

“Do you think the general gave him an ultimatum before he started the rumors?” I asked,  “To drop the case?” 

He didn’t blink. 

He said, “I have no idea.”

There was a finality about his tone.  It was a subject he wasn’t interested in discussing, and only then did I realize how determined he was to not tell me anything.  It was a private matter.  None of my business. I also realized that the last thing I wanted was for him to know that Maxine had told me about his first encounter with the general, but that was probably the only way I’d pry anything out of him.  Was it, then, even worth asking him directly?  All he had to do was refuse to say anything, and I had no leverage that I was willing to use for convincing him otherwise. 

Which didn’t mean I couldn’t be an asshole.  Let Leo and Smith close ranks on me, I thought.  Screw them. 

“I’m going to talk to Mrs. Burke again,” I said, “To see if I can make her feel guilty about her father.” 

Leo shook his head. 

“No,” he said, “I’d like to get that bastard, but I don’t want you taking any more risks.  Understand?  It’s not worth it.” 

“Maybe I want to stick my neck out,” I said, “and besides, why would you care either way?” 

He turned his head again and stared at me for a long time.  Surely, I thought, he’s wondering why I’m being so difficult, and if he doesn’t ask, it’s because he’s afraid he knows. 

“If I hear of you doing anything,” he said, finally, “I’ll never hire you again.  And I’ll call every lawyer in town and tell them not to.  Is that clear?” 

I hadn’t expected that, and my first reaction was to blush and wonder if after all I wasn’t just a kid.  Had I been playing games with something I didn’t understand?  Had I underestimated its importance?  I stared at the wall for a minute or so, at the gallery of photographs, and felt him staring at me.  I thought about apologizing, but couldn’t quite bring myself to do it, and then, as if out of nowhere, a wave of anger came over me.

“Are you afraid of losing your contact at the police department?” I asked.

Leo sat up in the chair, picked his keys up off the desk, and stood up.  Without so much as a glance at me, he walked over to the door of his office and held it open. 

“You coming?” he asked. 

I followed him through the outer office.  He locked the front door and then the door to the outside.  He walked over to his car, and for a moment I thought he was simply going to get in and drive away.  But after he unlocked it and pulled on the door handle, he just stood there.  I hung out nearby, waiting for him to say something.

Finally, he said, “I meant what I said, Johnny.  If you get into trouble, you’re on your own.” 

We looked at each other briefly, and then he went on. 

“But I wasn’t born old, you know.  I was as hard headed as they come when I was your age.  And lucky.  I just hope you are too, but sometimes things don’t turn out the way you expect.  Sometimes you don’t know as much as you think you do, and sometimes you aren’t lucky.  Keep that in mind.”   

TEN

(Sunday afternoon and night)

When I got home, I spent the rest of the morning cleaning the place, doing things I usually put off, like mopping the kitchen floor, dusting all the furniture, and drying and putting up the dishes.  And then, after taking a long, hot shower, I went to the store and bought the fixings for a deluxe tuna salad, including walnuts, apples, sweet pickles and onions.  I even put sliced tomato on the sandwich and made a fresh pitcher of  tea.

None of which really worked.  I might have been virtuous and clean, but I couldn’t enjoy my sandwich.  Nor could I make up my mind about what exactly was bothering me.  One moment, I was wondering if I’d really hurt Leo, and the next, I was disgusted with him for being such a wimp.  At times, I was tempted to call him and apologize for the  remark about losing his contact with the police and tell him he was right.  I’d forget the whole thing.  And, the truth is, I was no longer sure I didn’t actually think he was right.  If I did anything that had a chance of getting results, it would be both dangerous and unlikely to succeed.  Foolhardy.  At times it didn’t seem like too much of an exaggeration to say that the situation demanded no less than what might amount to a suicide mission, and from the comfort of my breakfast table, as I made myself a second sandwich, I wavered in how I felt about that.  First, I was nervous about it, but then I got excited.  And then I went back to feeling guilty again.

Why I was even considering pursuing the matter was not easy to figure out.  Most of the time,  I was sure that it had little to do with wanting justice for the victims.  It was hard to muster up any sympathy for either Norris or Harry, and as for Mrs. Burke, I’d decided again that what had attracted me to her was an illusion.  I must have had some sort of hallucination.  What I probably needed was a real girl friend.  

I ate a second sandwich and made some more tea.  Mrs. Hendrix was not in her garden.  Nearly every Sunday after church, she served pot roast to her son and his family.  She and her daughter-in-law were probably doing the dishes.  Her son was probably asleep in an arm chair, and her grandkids were probably bored to death and lobbying their parents to go home so that they could play with their friends.  And what about Mrs. Conrad?  I didn’t know, but since her husband was a music teacher, they probably went to some huge middle-of-the road church with a big choir.  It was hard, though, to picture her anywhere without her Old Golds and white wine, and impossible to think of her making him Sunday dinner.  Maybe he went to church by himself and fixed himself something when he got home.  Or maybe they ate out.  That conjured up a grim picture, the ascetic music teacher and the pasty alcoholic eating together.  Smith’s wife probably fixed Sunday dinner.  Did his brother-in-law eat with them?  The three girls still in their Sunday dresses, and the brother-in-law who’d just gotten out of bed?  Would Smith make him comb his hair?  Put on a shirt?  Leo and Maxine went to some huge Methodist church, with other solid and respectable citizens, and then ate lunch at a cafeteria, next best to home cooked.  Maxine said once that Leo had tried to teach her how to cook but after she both burned and cut herself in less than ten minutes, he decided he liked to eat out after all.

I took my plate back to the kitchen, put it in the sink, and stood by the phone.  While standing at Harry’s back door, staring at that can of black eyed peas, I’d felt like nothing mattered.  A reasonable reaction to finding a body, I supposed.  That’s what death will do to you.  We’re all going to die anyway, so who cares?  But that didn’t last long, did it?  I hadn’t exactly been detached in Leo’s office.  Saturday had been like having a hangover, I guess, and by Sunday I cared again, and caring was a pain in the ass, and to make it worse, I didn’t know why I cared.  That was as elusive as the tapping of the bullfrog’s cane had been in my dream.  And perhaps as much of an illusion.  What can tapping mean in real life?  Even if I remembered, it would no doubt seem absurd.  At Harry’s back door, though, I’d been wide awake, and I was certain that there was no way out.  I couldn’t have moved.  I couldn’t make myself open the screen and get the hell out of there.  If the dog hadn’t come along, I might have stood there until the old man in the front room woke up.  But were Leo’s sensible life and Harry’s cold detachment the only alternatives to doing nothing?  That had been the issue, and despite my despair, I knew there was something else.  I knew it, but I hadn’t been able to quite put my finger on what it was as I stood there at the back door, before the patter of little paws on the linoleum interrupted me, much as Maxine’s knocking had.   

I picked up the phone.  It was after twelve, so the coast would be clear.  Sure enough, she answered. 

“Read the paper this morning?” 

“No.” 

“Harry got murdered.” 

“Who?” 

“The creepy little guy you met at the grocery store.” 

“Oh.” 

There was a long silence.  Was it sinking in? 

“Are you there?” 

“Yes.” 

She didn’t sound too happy. 

“I think your friend Pensinger did it.  Maybe because Harry knew what happened to Norris.  Or at least something about it.” 

“Don’t say that.  Do the police think that?” 

“They don’t think anything,” I said, “And they have no facts.  Anyway, doesn’t it make you worry a little about Norris?” 

“No.” 

But she’d hesitated.  I could tell she wasn’t sure. 

“I want to talk to you,” I said. “In person.” 

“What about?” 

I didn’t say anything.  The truth is, I wasn’t sure.  She saved me, though, from having to make up something.  After a minute of silence, she said, “Actually, I was thinking about calling you.  I know the general didn’t hurt Norris, but it would still make me feel better to know where he is.  Do you think you could help me?” 

“If you’ll meet me somewhere.” 

“Okay.”   

 The car was an oven.  I was soaked with sweat before it cooled off.  No one who didn’t have to be was on the street, of course, and since everything was closed back then on Sunday, there was very little traffic on the streets.  All good citizens were taking naps under their air conditioners after their pot roasts.  Even the dogs and cats and squirrels were laying low.  Only the locusts were thriving on the heat, their rising and falling screeches the one thing the sun hadn’t put to sleep or chased inside.

 I’d asked Mrs. Burke to meet me in a little beer joint that was five minutes from my house, a hole in the wall that was sandwiched between a fire station and a dry cleaners.  The layout and decor was predictable:  it was dark, long, and narrow, a bar on one side and a row of booths on the other, a pool table and a juke box in the back that you had to pass on the way to the rest rooms, and neon beer signs all over the walls.  It was the sort of place where you knew the beer would be ice cold and the juke box mostly country.  It was unique, though, in one way.  Its busiest time of day was in the morning, when the firemen’s shifts changed, and I knew that in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, it would be pretty quiet. 

As it turned out, it was very quiet.  A couple of young guys in T-shirts and jeans were shooting pool, and a middle-aged man who kept checking his pocket watch was sitting at the end of the bar nearest the door.  He was sort of talking to Tiger, the woman who ran the place.  I say “sort of” because mostly they just seemed to stare past each other.  I guess they’d run out of things to say.  Both of them nodded to me when I walked in, as if they thought they knew me but weren’t sure, but when I got my beer and took a seat in a booth, they went back to staring past each other.  For my part, I stared at the front door, waiting for Mrs. Burke.  No music was playing, so I could hear the click of the balls from the pool table and every once in a while, one of the players would say “Shit” or “Bitchin.” 

When Mrs. Burke came in, Tiger looked at her like she’d just come from the moon.  I hadn’t thought about her looking out of place, but I could tell from the expression on Tiger’s face that in her opinion, Mrs. Burke had no business being there.  I doubt if there was any one thing that she focused on.  In matters of style, or class, it’s everything, and I’m sure that’s what made Tiger hate her the minute she set eyes on her.  Tiger was outclassed and she knew it.  There was nothing hard about Mrs. Burke, nothing showy.  She was completely clean cut.  A lady, the man with the pocket watch might have said.  Or a high-falutin’ bitch, as Tiger might have put it. 

My back was to the pool players, but I’m sure they watched her all the way to my booth, and the man at the bar figured out that she was with me just in time to stop himself from leering.  He looked down at his beer a little too quickly when I caught his eye and started scratching the label as if he were trying to rub out a spot.  Tiger, though, wasn’t fazed.  She continued to stare even after Mrs. Burke sat down, and even stared at her over my shoulder when I got up to get her a beer.

 I hadn’t anticipated the reception, but I wasn’t concerned about it.  It even crossed my mind that it might be helpful if she was uncomfortable.  But she wasn’t.  On the contrary, she smiled at me without a trace of doubt in her eyes and leaned forward and lowered her voice almost to a whisper. 

“I always wondered what this place was like,” she said, “I pass it all the time.” 

“It’s just your typical beer joint,” I said. 

She looked around as if the beer signs had been put up to be admired as art. 

“But it reminds me of places I used to go in college.  Would you mind if I smoked one of your cigarettes?” 

I gave her one and lit it for her. 

“The general doesn’t like it,” she said, allowing herself to pout for a moment, “when women smoke.” 

She was like a teenager who’d sneaked out of the house.  She puffed seriously on the cigarette and continued to look around, a kid in a candy store.

“I appreciate your being concerned about me,” she said. 

“Well,” I replied, “I appreciate you not throwing me out of your house the other night.” 

Her smile broadened.

“Oh, I knew you’d just been drinking.  And I was impressed by how serious you were.  I think you’re an honest person.  I think I can trust you.” 

“Thank you.” 

“But I haven’t changed my mind,” she added quickly, “I mean, like I said on the phone, I’m sure that what I told you the other night is true, about Norris.  I know the general and Penny wouldn’t hurt him.  They wouldn’t hurt anybody.  But I’ve been thinking about what happened to that man.” 

I nodded.  The smile, meanwhile, had evolved into a look of concern.

“Well,” she said, as if she’d said nothing about it on the phone, “even though I know they wouldn’t do anything like that, I just decided that I’d feel better if I knew for sure that Norris was all right.  I mean I know he is.  But I mean for sure.” 

“I need to ask you some questions first.” 

“Okay, and I’ll pay you for your time, of course.” 

She was beaming again.  Her enthusiasm was disconcerting.  It made it hard for me to take anything seriously.  I felt a little like the boy next door, scheming with her against imaginary bad guys. 

“We can talk about that later,” I said.  “Are you sure you’re not carrying a torch for Norris?” 

She didn’t have to think about it. 

“Yes.  I just want very much for things to be like they were.  With the general.  I want him to come live at home, and I want to start going on trips with him again.  Norris was a terrible mistake.  But I just have to know for sure that he’s okay.” 

All of a sudden, she looked like she might be thinking about crying.  I was having a hard time keeping up with her change of moods.  I glanced over at Tiger.  She was keeping an eye on us. 

“Okay,” I said, “but first, I need to ask you a little more about that night.  When the general walked in on you.  Okay?” 

She nodded and took a sip of her beer. 

“Was Pensinger with the general?” 

“No.” 

“Could he have been in the house?” 

“He could have been.  I don’t know.  Why?” 

“Did the general have a gun?” 

“Yes, but. . .” 

“Tell me exactly what happened.” 

“Do I have to?” 

“Yes, if you want me to help you.” 

She put her cigarette out, barely half smoked, and started to pout. 

“It was very embarrassing.  Norris and I were in bed and we were, well, you know, we were in the middle of it, sort of.  It never even occurred to me that he’d ever show up like that.  He keeps to a very strict schedule.  I told you that, didn’t I?  Everything has to be done at a certain time every day.” 

And then she started telling me the general’s schedule, in detail.  It seemed worth knowing, so I let her, but when she started to digress even more, I interrupted her. 

“Just tell me what happened,” I said, “After that.  That night.” 

“Okay.  I’m sorry,” she said.  “I just looked up and there he was, the general.  He was just standing there in the middle of the room, watching.  I don’t know how long he’d been there, and I just about died.  I started to shrink away from Norris.  I pushed him away, and when Norris saw him, he turned white as a sheet.  The general had the gun and some photographs in his hand.  He wasn’t pointing the gun.  Just holding it.  And when Norris finally noticed him, he tossed the pictures at us and made us look at them.  There were a bunch of them, and he made us look at every single one, and then he told Norris to get dressed and he took him out of the room.  I heard the patio door close and that was it.” 

“Did you get out of bed to try to see what was going on?” 

“No.” 

“Did you hear a car start?” 

“No, but I wouldn’t have.  The air conditioning.” 

“And no gun shot?” 

“No!  Of course not.  I just lay in bed for a long time, in shock, I guess, and maybe half an hour later or longer, probably longer, because it was starting to get dark, the general came back, by himself, and told me that he’d sent Norris away.  And that’s it.”

“Did he still have the gun?” 

“I don’t think so.  I didn’t see it.”

And you were relieved, I thought, studying her face closely.  Relieved that the general had rescued you from the brink.  From your addiction, as you’d put it.  Now you can be a good girl, or could be, if the general would only cooperate.  But was she cunning enough to want me to find something that would force him to cooperate?  It was hard to think of her as cunning, but wasn’t that implicit in my neat little theory about her smile and her pout?  That every emotion, every facial expression, every thought was merely a variation on one of them?  To get her what she wanted?

No.  Not if cunning included cold blooded deliberation.  If Mrs. Burke was anything, she was spontaneous.  If she wanted to help me feel better, as she had wanted to Friday night, the smile came naturally.  If she wanted the general to cooperate, the pout came naturally.   

I said, “Maybe if I knew more about what Norris wanted, it would give me a lead.” 

“How would that help?” 

The pout intensified.  She didn’t want to think about Norris’ deception. 

“I don’t know,” I said, “I can’t know until you tell me.” 

“And I can’t tell you what I don’t know.  He’s somewhere,” she said, “And he’s probably contacted somebody.  His mother.  A friend.  All you need to do is talk to them.” 

I let it go.  If she knew what Norris was plotting against the general, and I wasn’t sure of that, she wasn’t going to tell just anybody.  She was going to be fiercely loyal to the general. 

I thought about telling her I knew about the whores, that I knew what she wanted the general to give up and apologize for, and that I knew he’d never do it.  The price she had to pay for the security she wanted from him, in my opinion, was to give in, admit that she was little more than property, and do whatever he wanted.  But I was afraid that if I told her that she might just get up and walk out.  She wanted to hear that even less than she wanted to talk about how Norris had used her.

 “Have you ever seen Pensinger with a gun?” I asked. 

She stared at me for a minute like she couldn’t believe the question.  A variation on the pout. 

“No,” she said, finally, “Of course not.  I know he’s my husband’s body guard, along with everything else, but he wouldn’t shoot anybody.  Don’t be silly.  And besides, he doesn’t need a gun.” 

“What does that mean?” 

“Well, I have seen him in action.  I saw him break a boy’s arm once.  It was at a college, and the boy came right up and called my husband a Nazi, and Penny just stepped up and gave one little twist and tossed the guy aside like it was nothing.  But he didn’t mean to break it.  He felt real bad about it, and we paid the hospital expenses and everything.”

I didn’t say anything. 

“Are you going to help me?” she asked. 

How could anyone refuse someone so cute and helpless?  I nodded.  She took out her check book.  I raised my hand to object. 

“Let’s see if I get results first,” I said. 

“But I have to pay you for your time in any case,” she said. 

“Later.” 

Reluctantly, she put the check book back.  She finished her beer. 

“Are you staying?” she asked. 

I nodded. 

“I think I’ll just have one more.” 

“Thank you so much for helping me.  You don’t know what it will mean if I can be sure about Norris.” 

“Are you still going to leave the general?” 

She frowned. 

“Yes,” she said, “Of course.  I can’t stay under the circumstances.  I’d like to tell you what they are, what I need for him to do, but it’s private.  You understand, don’t you?” 

“Sure.” 

I understood everything.  I was a nice, sweet guy she could count on. 

“I know it’s the thing to do,” she said, “Leave him, I mean, but it still scares me.  What if he just forgets about me?  But he wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble about Norris if he didn’t really love me.  Would he?”

The question took me completely by surprise.  It was encouraging that she admitted having some doubt, and flattering that she asked me my opinion, even though I knew it wasn’t a real question.  She didn’t really want my opinion.  She wanted me to confirm what she wanted to believe, and I almost did it, but then I caught myself.  It was time to stop fooling around.  I’d gotten some facts out of her, about the night Norris disappeared, but that wasn’t all I wanted. 

“Did your father love you?” I asked. 

“I don’t want to talk about that.” 

“Why?  Does the general suffer by comparison with your father?” 

“I told you how I felt the other night.” 

She looked at the wall. 

“Your father sounds like a good and a very brave man to me.  He sticks his neck out for a ‘nigger’ in East Texas.  It’s hard to think of anything that would take more guts than that.” 

“I told you, it was politics.  And what does this have to do with Norris?” 

I looked at her profile.  Normal Rockwell could have painted her.  She was just a little girl who didn’t deserve to be picked on.  I shouldn’t bully her. 

“A good and brave man that the general, your husband, fucked royally.” I added.

She looked around as if someone might object to my language.  No one did.  Tiger was still staring at us but couldn’t hear our conversation.  The man at the bar was still staring at nothing in particular.  The pool players had forgotten about us. 

“Did you have some reason for hating your father?  Is that why you’re betraying him?” 

That did it.  She started to cry. 

“I’m not doing that.  Betraying him.  How I feel about the general has nothing to do with my father.” 

“But look at it from the general’s point of view.  Your father was his enemy.  He stood for everything the general hated.  It was war.  Everything for the general is war.  Or the spoils of it.  So just like in the old days, the general defeats the enemy and carries off the prize.  Rape and pillage.  That’s why men become soldiers.  In this case, the enemy’s beautiful young daughter.” 

“You’re sick,” she said, tears rolling down her cheeks. 

She looked scared.  Was this expression different?  Had I really broken through, finally?  I knew Norman Rockwell wouldn’t like it. 

“Why are you doing this?” she asked, looking around desperately, as if someone in the bar might help. 

“I want you to know how I feel.” 

“Well,” she said, “I think I get the message.” 

Or was this another illusion, I wondered?  Would it become clear in a moment, as it had in her bedroom, that this was yet another variation on the pout?  Or had I gotten somewhere? 

“He was just never there,” she said. 

“Who?” 

“My father.  I mean, he was there, but he wasn’t.  He was depressed, I think.  I mean, even before what happened.  I don’t know why, but I know he never paid much attention to me.  And then he killed himself.  Why do I have to love him?” 

It was a good question.  Better than I’d expected.  She bit down on her lower lip and stared at the wall.  She looked terrible, miserable, and not the least bit pretty anymore.  I wanted to tell her I’d seen the look on her face when Norris was making love to her, or she was making love to him, it didn’t matter, the look was the important thing, the abandon, the perfect bliss, totally unselfconscious, totally natural, the opposite of her usual perky self.  Give in to it, I wanted to tell her.  Why not live your life for it?  That’s what you were born for, not to be a cover girl.  But I knew it wouldn’t do any good.  It would just drive her away.  Permanently.

I knew this was the time to push it, though, regardless of the consequences, and I knew it would make her look exactly the way I wanted her to.  It wouldn’t be the way Norris had made her look.  She didn’t have a crush on me.  She wasn’t addicted to what I was doing to her.  But it would wipe that smile and pout off her face for good.  It didn’t matter whether the crying, the way she was looking at that moment, was still a variation of the pout or a real step towards the look I wanted.  The important thing was that she was ready to go further, genuinely vulnerable, I could feel it, and all I had to do was tell her I’d taken the pictures.  She wouldn’t be able to fake her response to that.  She’d know I knew her.  But what then?  I was wishing I was drunk. 

“You’re right,” I said, “I’m sorry I brought it up.”  

Most of the time I’m glad I decided to back off, but right then I was hoping she’d ask me why I brought it up.  That would tell me that she wanted me to pursue it, even though it was very painful to her.  But she didn’t say anything.  She used my handkerchief to wipe her face.  She blew her nose.  She sniffled.  And then her face brightened up, she smiled, and when she handed the handkerchief back, she said, “I got it all dirty.  I’m sorry.” 

“I’ll call you tomorrow or the next day and let you know if I’ve made any progress.” 

“Okay.” 

She bounced as she slid out of the booth. 

“Don’t get drunk now,” she said, shaking her finger at me and smiling.  Tiger watched her until she was out the door.

 I got up to get another beer.  Without looking at me, Tiger took my two empties, dropped them with a clatter under the bar, and got me another one.  She was a middle-aged woman, not bad looking, and she wore a lot of everything, including enough of whatever she used to smell good to make my nose itch.  She took my money and turned around to the register, which sat in a recess behind the bar and in front of a mirror that was cluttered with all the required and usual signs.  No firearms allowed.  No one under twenty-one could be sold alcoholic beverages.  A list of distributor’s phone numbers, and a few business cards. 

“Want to play the jukebox?” she asked, picking up a quarter from the change she’d put on the bar.  She looked at me as if to say I could drop dead either way.  I said, “Sure,” and she walked off with my quarter towards the juke box. 

I picked up the beer and the man at the bar, after checking his watch, said, “You like fried chicken?” 

“Sure.” 

“Then how do you make it?” 

“Make it?” 

“Yeah, what do you put in it?” 

From behind me, I heard Tiger say, “He don’t cook, Wade.” 

“I know my landlady’s recipe,” I said. 

A Jim Reeves song started. 

“She put garlic in it?” asked Wade. 

“Garlic?  No, I don’t think so.  Just a little pepper and paprika, I think.” 

“See?” said Wade, to Tiger, “She don’t use garlic neither.  Nobody does but you.” 

Tiger walked back up the length of the bar as I sat down. 

“He don’t care how we make fried chicken, Wade,” she said. 

“Garlic sounds okay,” I said, and Tiger shrugged.

              

“So what’s the difference,” I asked the sculptor, “between a writer and a reporter?” 

“You said you were buying?” he asked. 

We were sitting at the bar.  He grinned at me with very bloodshot eyes.  Already, he’d made a trip to the bath room and had come back a little more red-eyed and at peace with the world than before.  I signaled to Tiger to bring us two more.  Soon after Mrs. Burke left, I’d called him and asked him to meet me at the bar, telling him I was buying as an incentive to come, and that I thought I knew what had happened to Norris.  

Wade, who it turned out was retired from the railroad, had been asleep, his head on the bar, for about an hour.  The pool players were still hard at it, though, and Jim Reeves was still on the juke box, which was about to drive me nuts.  It was the only thing Tiger would play.  Many people had come and gone, including a fat cop who’d downed two glasses of draft beer in about five minutes, the radio of his patrol car audible from inside the bar; a black man who Tiger served at the back door and knew by name; and a rangy, goofy looking guy in a dirty torn T-shirt, who, in a thick Midwestern accent told us how he’d trained his parrot to say “fuck you” in four languages.  When the man said it in English the third time, Tiger told him to shut up, and he did.

“Sounds like an aggie joke,” said the sculptor.  “What’s the difference?” 

“I told you this morning that there was no writing in Norris’ room.” 

“Oh, yeah.  The difference between them.  Okay.  Take my horses, for example.  Norris calls them my hobby, and he can’t figure out why that pisses me off.  Do you know why it pisses me off?” 

The sculptor looked perfectly at home on the bar stool.  He could have just come in from a hard day pounding nails or driving a fork lift. 

“It’s what is most important to you?” I guessed. 

“That’s right.  But Norris can’t see that.  A horse is a horse for Norris.  Something you ride or bet on when you’ve got nothing better to do.  Not much different from a woman, in his opinion.” 

“Recreation,” I suggested. 

He nodded. 

“So what writing he does is work,” I said, “And at work.” 

“That’s my guess.  So what happened to him?  Did he get caught with his pants down by a jealous husband?  Nothing in skirts was safe around Norris.”

“He made a habit of going out with married women?”  

“Like I told you this morning.  He didn’t seem to understand the concept of property, not that I’m a fucking capitalist, but it’s a question of manners.  But there was something else.  He thought he knew it all and loved proving it to you.  That got him into trouble, too, but he never learned.  I think the paper was going to fire him.  They’d been trying to wean him off those dopey features for a while, get him on the local beat, but he’d either not show up or he’d write a fucking editorial about a house fire.” 

“You seem to know a lot about it,” I said. 

“That’s how we met.  I was a sportswriter, believe it or not, in Beaumont, which was the first place he worked, on account of who his uncle is.  That’s why he wasn’t already fired.  Connections.  But they were going to do it.  They just kept putting it off, giving him more chances.”

“If somebody bought him off,” I said, “Ran him out of town.  Where would he go?” 

“That I don’t know.  He applied for a job to every major newspaper in the country, but nobody wanted him.” 

“Did he ever talk to you about General Burke?” 

“Yeah.  And all the rest of the fascist pigs in town, as he called them.  I could care less about those assholes, as long as they leave me alone.” 

He sipped his beer. 

“He talked about Burke mostly in connection with Kennedy.  He used to say that Dallas killed Kennedy, which kind of pissed me off.  Not that I really give a shit, but how can a whole city kill somebody?” 

“Did you ask him that?” 

“Yeah.  It was atmosphere, he said.  An atmosphere of violence.  I said bullshit.  You wouldn’t know an atmosphere of violence if you tripped over it.  Try a roughneck bar in Beaumont if that’s what you want.  You say you’re buying?”

When Tiger brought us two fresh ones, she leaned forward with her elbows on the bar and gave me the same drop dead look as before. 

“You don’t plan on driving home, do you?” she asked. 

“Sure,” I said, “Why not?” 

She just shook her head and walked off.  The sculptor winked at me. 

I said, “She’s interested in my safety.” 

He just nodded. 

“When he talked about the general,” I asked, “Did he say anything besides about Kennedy?” 

“Are you saying the general is somehow involved?  What’d Norris do?  Screw his wife?” 

When he saw my face, his jaw dropped. 

“That dumb mother fucker.” 

“Well?” 

“Well shit, why would there have to be something more than that?” 

“Maybe there wouldn’t.  I’m just checking.” 

“Do you know this for a fact?” 

“Yep.” 

“How?” 

“Can’t tell you.” 

“He screwed the general’s wife?” 

I nodded.  It took him a while to recover from that.  He just sat there shaking his head for a long time.  After a while, he said, “You know, he hated everybody in town with any power, but he did have a special thing for the general.  I think he really thought he had something to do with Kennedy.” 

“Like what?” 

“You asked me a minute ago where he’d go.  He might try Cuba.” 

“Are you serious?” 

“When he was loaded, he talked about it as if he were serious.  Helping with the sugar harvest.  That sort of shit.  But I think it was all whiskey talk.” 

“What made you think of that?” 

“I don’t know.  I didn’t understand half of what he said.  He didn’t say jack shit when he was sober, and when he got drunk, he didn’t always make a lot of sense.  But I got the idea that he associated the assassination with Cuba.  I think he thought that’s what it was all about.” 

“So the general killed Kennedy to free Cuba?” 

“I guess.”

I don’t know what time the sculptor left, or how many beers I bought him.  Long before he was gone I stopped counting or even paying attention to what money Tiger took off the bar and what she brought back.  My memory of the last part of our talk and what happened after that survives only as snatches of this and that—the two girls who joined the pool players, both wearing tight pants and looking very, very young,  the railroad man not being there all of a sudden, the goofy guy with the parrot trying to make out with an old woman with a gold front tooth and an orange beehive hairdo who got lipstick all over the tips of her cigarettes.  I think she kept talking about Galveston.  And Hank Williams finally replaced Jim Reeves on the juke box, which made me feel better.  A blond guy wearing a fringe jacket complained about the beer being flat until Tiger threw him out, and all of it, before it was over, spinning around me, as the sculptor and I talked about his horses and Beaumont and sports writing and San Francisco and photography and Bolivian peasants and who knows what else, none of it good or bad, all of it okay, needing no explanation, my only goal being to not fall off my stool.

I don’t know when I started talking to Tiger, and of course I can’t remember everything, or even most of what I said to her, but I know what it was about.  Jim Reeves, and how much I hated him and why, in excruciating detail, from the mellowness of his voice to the strings that accompanied it.  I told her, in effect, that it made everything good in the world disappear and made me feel like a shoe salesman.  I told her that it made me afraid I’d wake up one morning and find myself in a den with knotty pine paneling and Olan Mills color photographs on top of the TV, next to the rabbit ears, the house on a street with no sidewalks and that was all curves, and every garage on the block, including mine, turned into a den and across the street from a grade school.

But did I tell her that, or is that where she took me?  Why she didn’t just toss me out, I don’t know.  She never changed the drop dead look, and finally I was riding in a car with the window down, needing the warm humid breeze in my face to stay awake, lights whipping by, and then I thought I was sneezing but it turned out later I threw up in bed, in Tiger’s bed, and at some point I remember opening my eyes and looking into her eyes and telling her I wanted to hear “Four Walls,” and she said, “Honey, if you’re not careful, you’re going to piss me off in a minute.”

ELEVEN

(Monday Morning)

Nobody’s perfect.  Of course, I never said I’d go on the wagon, but wasting time with a hangover was not part of the plan either.  I’ve heard that twenty four hours is the only real cure for a hangover, no matter what your age, I presume, but I think the booze used to hit me with a smaller hammer, so that usually, unless my memory is playing tricks on me, which is entirely possible, once I got rid of the headache, I felt okay.  That day, however, was an exception.  I’d really overdone it.  I took the cure:  the aspirin, the long hot shower, the carbohydrates, but by noon, even with the headache gone, I felt only halfway human and considered taking the pledge:  I swear to God I’ll never drink again.  Leo was right.  How could something I liked so much could treat me so bad?

That morning, after taking the cure but before the headache went away completely, I assumed the position in bed, neck stretched and butt in the air, and tried, unsuccessfully, not to think about things.  For example, that what the sculptor had told me made it even more imperative that I go back to Harry’s.  If Norris thought the general had something to do with Kennedy, and had made some sort of Cuban connection, then Harry might have known about it.  Was that what he wanted to sell to Leo?  And to Mrs. Burke? 

 As I drove back over the viaduct, across the all but dry river bottom far below, heat rising off the pavement the whole way, all I could think about was what a great day it would be for doing nothing.  Camp under the air conditioner, find some golf or baseball on TV, and let my eyelids close whenever they damn well felt like it.  That was the ticket, not some fishing expedition in Oak Cliff that seemed, for at least a couple of reasons, very unlikely to yield results.  In the first place, I had no specific idea about what I was looking for, and in the second, I wasn’t at all sure that I’d even be able to get in the house.  Maybe the police had it sealed off, or maybe Harry’s father would be there and tell me to get lost.  In any case, I’d probably wind up just driving there and back, which made a lot of sense. The fact that Leo had told me not to pursue it, had in effect given me an ultimatum, never entered my mind.  That seemed like ancient history.  Whether I was still mad at him or should apologize didn’t seem relevant anymore.  Getting drunk, I guess, had flushed it out of my system.  And on top of that, I was still hungover.  So why didn’t I just turn around and go home?  For one thing, I’d made a commitment to Mrs. Burke.  For another, the sculptor had aroused my curiosity.  But that doesn’t really explain it, does it?  The real question was why I’d made the commitment to Mrs. Burke.  Why I’d called her in the first place.  Why I’d thought the day before that I really cared. 

 The dog was still asleep, but the old man wasn’t.  He was eating his beans, along with a slice of bread and butter and a jelly glass of iced tea, at the kitchen table.  A family Bible with a bright purple cloth bookmark lay in front of him, and he was running his fingers down one of the pages and chewing his food with the slow, exaggerated  deliberation of a man with false teeth.  He’d simply yelled “Come in,” from the table when I knocked, and when I walked into the kitchen, he didn’t look up from his reading until I cleared my throat. 

Glancing at me over his glasses, he repeated, “Come in, come in,” and then added, “Have a seat.  Help yourself to some beans if you want’em.  I can’t eat’em all.  There’s bowls up there in the cupboard behind you and spoons right there on the counter.” 

Instead of sitting down, though, I stepped back and leaned against the counter. He had his son’s scrawny physique, and he was still wearing brown socks. 

I said, “Thanks, but I’ll take a rain check on the beans.” 

“Suit yourself,” he said, and then looked back down at the Bible.

“I’m sorry about Harry,” I said. 

“You a friend of his?” he asked, “Or here on business?” 

“I knew him,” I said, “but it’s business.” 

“Didn’t lend him money, did you?” 

“No, sir.” 

“That’s good.  I don’t reckon anybody in his right mind would lend Harry any money.” 

He sopped the last bit of bean juice out of his bowl, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and moved his tongue around in his mouth as if adjusting his teeth.  He looked at me closely, waiting good-naturedly for an explanation. 

“The man I work for,” I said, “is helping the police try to figure out who murdered your son.  I’d like to take a look at his room, if it’s okay with you.” 

“The police know you’re helping them?” 

“Not exactly.” 

He continued looking at me for a minute. 

“So what are you?” he asked, finally, “A detective of some kind?” 

I handed him a card, and while he studied it, I said, “Did Harry ever say anything to you about a reporter named Peter Norris?” 

His eyes still on the card, he said, “Harry never said nothing to me period, except go to hell and leave me alone.  Why?  You think that fella done it?” 

“No.  But Norris has been missing for a few days.” 

He reached out to hand me the card back, but I told him to keep it, and then I waited with my arms folded while he moved it around on the table as if he were thinking about something.  Finally, without looking up, he said, “You know where his room is?”  But then he pushed his chair back and said, “Here, I’ll show you.”

He lead the way down the hall and into Harry’s room and turned on the revolving fan in the window. 

“He kept saying he needed an air conditioner,” he said, “and I told him ‘fine with me, as long as you’re paying the light bill.’” 

Everything looked exactly the same, except that Harry’s body wasn’t there.  I glanced at the pictures on the wall, but with Harry’s father there, they seemed to have lost their punch.  They were simply embarrassing.

“Police went over it with a fine tooth comb,” he said, “but you’re welcome to look some more.  Just ignore them pictures on the wall, if you can.  I ain’t got around to taking them down yet.” 

I walked over to the dresser. 

“What is it you want to find?  Maybe I can help, but I doubt it.  Nothing got him hotter under the collar than somebody going in his room, so I stayed plumb away from it.” 

“Maybe I could look through the dresser drawers,” I said. 

“Help yourself.” 

The top of the dresser was just like I remembered it, everything arranged obsessively, stacked carefully or in a line or squared with the edges of the dresser. 

“Was Harry ever in the service?” I asked.  

“Navy.  Four years.  That’s where he learned how to take pictures.  I thought he’d come back and open up a studio.  Go to weddings, take baby pictures.” 

The top two drawers were full of clothes, all folded immaculately.  In one of the bottom two was a large collection of pornography, and in the other one, an even larger collection of baseball cards.  Both drawers were organized into categories, the former according to the type of act, the latter by year and manufacturer.  The pornography was not just hard core but kinky, and a quick study of the baseball cards made me think that Harry probably had every card made after World War II.

As I looked through the drawers, the old man leaned against the door sill and moved his tongue around in his mouth. 

“Since he was a growed man, there wasn’t nothing I could do about them pictures.  I about had a stroke when he put them there on the wall.  ‘Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ,’ I told him the Bible said, ‘and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lust thereof.’  But he never paid no attention to me.  Now I reckon the flesh done got him killed.” 

I turned around and noticed a wardrobe I hadn’t seen before, behind the door.  It looked like it had been a packing case originally, and there wasn’t much in it.  A pair of brown slacks, a plaid sport coat, a white shirt, a couple of ties, and a couple of jackets, one with a school letter on it. 

“Why do you say that, Mr. Prince?” I asked, checking the pockets of everything. 

“Bound to a been,” he said, “You can’t go sneaking around like he done and not expect it to catch up with you sooner or later.” 

“Sneaking around?” 

“You know, with that camera of his.  Snooping on people.” 

“He still do that?” 

I knew, of course, that Harry still made his living that way, but Mr. Prince seemed to be suggesting that he also did it for fun. 

“All the time.  Done it since he was a kid.  He’d sneak out this back door here when he was nine years old and walk up and down the alley at night, looking through people’s windows.  Nothing I could do about it, though.  Whenever he got caught, I’d beat the tar out of him, but the first chance he got, he’d be at it again.  Stubborn as a mule, just like his mother, God rest her soul.” 

“But that’s how he made his living,” I said. 

“You didn’t have to pay Harry to do that.  He done it on his own.  It was like me and liquor used to be.  The devil had a hold on him, and he didn’t even want to shake it off.”  He shook his head, moved his tongue around, and then asked, “How’d you know him?” 

“Oh, we’d just run into each other now and then.” 

He nodded, as if giving that some thought, and then said, “I told him I’d set him up in damaged freight if that’s what he wanted.  That’s what I do.  I have a little store up there on Jefferson, next to the picture show.  Not in the market for a toaster are you?” 

“No, sir.” 

“And then I preach, too, whenever somebody’ll let me.” 

I nodded, and waited, sensing that he wanted to say more. 

“You never know when He’s going to take you, do you?” 

“No, sir.” 

“And that’s why it don’t pay not to be prepared.  His mother used to say, ‘What if Jesus comes this Sunday and finds you in the picture show?  Aren’t you going to be sorry?’  She didn’t hold with going to the show on Sundays, which was before I accepted Jesus as my own personal savior.  I’d sneak him some money and tell him to go on, behind her back.  I didn’t see no harm in it, but it was wrong, to go behind his mother’s back like that, and I wonder sometimes if it was that or maybe them shows he saw that turned him wrong.  That’s what I was doing when you come in.  Asking the Lord if it was something I did or didn’t do that turned him bad, cause there’s not a doubt in my mind that he’s burning in hell right this minute.”

If Mr. Prince hadn’t been standing between me and the door, I’d have probably started trying to get outside right about then.  His voice had started to tremble a little, and I was afraid he was going to crack up on me, but he was still leaning against the door sill, still moving his tongue around, and not acting like he was in any hurry to have me leave. 

I said, “I’m sure Harry had his good points.  He was always real friendly whenever I’d see him.” 

“Don’t matter,” he said, “cause he never was baptized.  His mother made him go to church until he was about ten, but never could make him walk down the aisle.  She beat the tar out of him more than once over it, but he never gave in.  And finally, when he started throwing fits about going to church at all, I told her to leave him alone.  And then by the time I quit the liquor and accepted Jesus as my personal savior, he was too old to make him do anything.  Couldn’t have made him do it if I’d put a gun to his head.” 

Mr. Prince didn’t seem to notice any irony in what he’d just said, and although I’m sure I must have at least raised my eyebrows, he didn’t notice that either.  He was too absorbed in making his point and trying to figure things out.

“I guess everybody has to choose,” I said. 

“That’s right.  They do.  And that’s what I keep telling myself.  Even if I did do wrong, that don’t mean it’s my fault that he didn’t get saved.  He had all them years to make up his own mind.  That’s right, ain’t it?” 

“That’s right.” 

“You want to see his other file?” he asked, pushing himself off the door frame. 

“Other file?” 

“I didn’t tell the police about it.  They didn’t ask, and I didn’t see why I should volunteer to give them more proof than they already had that my son was a pervert.  They seen them pictures, but not them other ones.”

Mr. Prince lead me back through the house, out the screen door, and up to the old Rambler with the back window out. 

“This here’s Queenie,” he said, pointing to the dog with his car keys.  At the sound of his voice, Queenie half opened her eyes to look at us but didn’t lift her head.  Mr. Prince opened up the trunk, then stepped back and motioned towards a cardboard file drawer. 

“Them dirty pictures in his drawer is what he bought, but them on the wall and these here are what he took hisself. And all his notes is in there, too.  On what he done and when.” 

Mr. Prince seemed to know a lot about what was in the files, but I didn’t say anything.

“Mind if I take a look?” 

“Take it.  The whole kit and caboodle.  You can take them others, too.  Especially them on the wall.” 

“This is all I’m really interested in,” I said, reaching in and pulling out the drawer. 

He closed the trunk and I rested my load on the rear bumper. 

“I appreciate it,” I said.

“Maybe it’ll tell you who done it.  And if it does, I’d like to know.” 

“Sure.” 

“I don’t put no trust in the police.  Once they figured out I didn’t do it, they didn’t seem to care anymore.  I told that to one of the deacons down at the church and he said it was on account of the niggers.” 

“Oh, really?  How’s that?’ 

“How they’re always killing each other, but I don’t know what that has to do with it.  My son wasn’t no nigger.” 

“No, sir.” 

“Don’t know what he meant by it.” 

“Maybe he meant they were real busy, saw a lot of murders.” 

He moved his tongue around in his mouth for a minute and looked over my shoulder as he thought about that. 

“Don’t know why niggers killing theirselves would keep the police busy.  That’s their own business over there, ain’t it?  Anyway, they didn’t even look in the car.  One of them got as far as the screen there and asked me if the dog bit.  Hell, I told him, that dog ain’t been wide awake for five years, what do you think?  I try not to curse, but he just rubbed me the wrong way.” 

I picked up the drawer.  “I guess I’d better be going,” I said.  “Thanks again, Mr. Prince.”                

When I got home, I hauled the file box up the stairs and dropped it on the table.  Then I made some coffee and immediately started looking through the files.  I saw no reason to be in a hurry, and a nap would have suited me fine, but I had a hunch that an important part of why Harry was dead and Norris had disappeared was in the box.  A box that Harry’s murderer apparently hadn’t known about.  It was certain that both Harry and Norris had been snooping around in the general’s life with the idea of finding something that would hurt him.  As a team, maybe, but for different motives.  Harry for the money, and Norris because he hated right wing extremists and wanted to be famous.  Actually, I wasn’t sure the two could be separated in someone like Norris, and come to think of it, Harry’s motives were probably complicated as well.  Obviously, in addition to always being on the make for a dollar, he just liked to spy on people, and I didn’t have to dig very deep in the box to find out that he often did it for free.

The files, the green folders hanging from metal holders, were alphabetical by last names, and out of curiosity I decided to pull one at random before I looked at the one that said Burke.  The name was Prewitt.  In one manila folder labeled “notes” was a sheet of yellow legal paper with dated entries.  “1/25/65.  The Mrs. leaves house at ten am.  Goes on errands:  post office, bank, drug store, grocery store and home.  Stays home rest of day.  Comes out on porch once to check mail.  Mr. gets home at six.  TV on downstairs until ten.  Can see her in kitchen a few times, can’t see what doing.  Light upstairs on until eleven.”  There were entries like that for a whole week, and then a week of following the Mr., which was even less exciting because he never even left the office for lunch.  Had Harry watched those people for two weeks for the fun of it?  A second manila folder was labeled “pictures.”  They were of the Mrs. doing the errands, walking out to her car, in her kitchen.  And of the Mr. doing more or less the same. 

Struck by the apparent lack of significance of anything in the file, I pulled another one at random.  It was virtually the same, except that the name was Nichols and there were pictures of the Mr. eating in a restaurant with a nice looking younger woman.  From the notes, it was clear that Harry thought he was on to something at that point, but nothing in them suggested that anything ever came of it, and after two weeks, he went on to something else.  It had probably been secretary’s week.

Did Harry just pick people at random and follow them around and take their pictures and make notes about what he could observe about their lives, hoping to find something he could turn into a profit?  Spying on spec, I guess you could call it.  I pulled the Burke file.  In the “notes” folder, Harry’s chronicle of Mrs. Burke’s week is very eventful, and judging from the way he refers to Peter Norris, he seems to know immediately, if not already, who he is.  The note for the third day said:  “took pictures from balcony. Cunt got into it.”  After uttering a few curse words, I immediately opened the “pictures” folder. 

Harry was a better photographer than me, which wasn’t saying much, necessarily, but in my opinion, he was very good.  The prints were better defined.  In fact, if they hadn’t been taken from the exact same position I used, and if in a couple of them I hadn’t seen the frame of one of the glass panes, I might have suspected that Norris and Mrs. Burke knew they were being photographed.

The positions that day had been different, but Harry still managed to get Mrs. Burke’s face at the critical moment, and although she was on her knees and elbows, not sitting, the expression on her face was the same.  How she didn’t see him, I don’t know.  They were crossways on the bed, parallel to and facing the balcony doors.  The main difference between Harry’s pictures and mine, aside from the obvious one of position, and the one of quality, was that he also got Norris’ face during the critical moment.  And the most significant thing about that was that he was looking directly into the camera.

I looked back at the notes.  “Took pictures from balcony.  Cunt got into it.”  “Stupid prick” was what I thought, but after a moment of reflection, I realized that I ought to have regarded the comment with a certain amount of envy.  If that had been my reaction, I’d have been wondering what to do with what was left of the hundred dollars I’d made after paying the rent, not staring again at Mrs. Burke’s face.  “Cunt got into it.”  Was that the level of response, the degree of sensitivity, that Harry brought to all his work?  Had that been what he looked for when he patrolled his neighborhood’s alleys as a kid?  When he followed strangers through their daily routines?  When he took those photos I’d seen on the wall?  Cunts getting into it? 

I was the sucker.  I was the old fashioned fool who, like Smith, got pissed when men didn’t respect women, but it didn’t even have to be my daughter they were calling a cunt, or my sister, or my wife.  Why should I give a shit what Harry called Mrs. Burke?  But I began to realize, after thinking about it for a while, that my reaction had very little to do with Mrs. Burke.  Personally.  It wasn’t her I wanted, or even respected.  It was something she knew, something that Norris, like Harry, evidently had no interest in.  The bastard had no more appreciation for what was happening than Harry.  He was looking directly at the camera, mugging for it like a kid on an amusement park ride, and the grin on his face looked nasty and stupid to me.  The mischievous look in his dark, deep set eyes was infuriating.              

Could the general have kept his composure, as he had in Leo’s office, if he’d seen Harry’s version?  Given the chance, I might have been capable of killing Norris myself at that moment.  But the general hadn’t seen Norris while in the act.  What had he seen?  Granted, I’d never met him, but I couldn’t imagine him thinking of his wife as a cunt.  Or any woman, for that matter.  From what Leo had told me and from his public image, I couldn’t imagine him being that crude.  Wouldn’t we at least share the old fashioned notion of respect?  And this was his wife.  His wife, though, in the middle of doing what if anything would strip away that respect.  But he hadn’t said anything.  He’d studied each photograph with enough care to memorize the details, as if like me he’d been fascinated by them.  Had he seen what I had in her face?  Had he seen it before?

By the time I reached the last one, I was so absorbed in wondering whether the general appreciated the look on his wife’s face that it took me a minute to realize, when I got to the last picture, that I was no longer looking at Norris and Mrs. Burke.  The last photograph was of the general and Pensinger and a man I’d never seen before.  They were standing outside a restaurant, and the general and the man were shaking hands and smiling at each other.  The man was unmistakably Hispanic.  I went back to the “notes.”  There was no mention of it. 

I decided to lie down for a while.  I didn’t try to go to sleep.  I just got comfortable, which meant stripping down to a T-shirt, lying down on the unmade bed, and pulling the sheet up to my neck and staring at the ceiling.  It was the middle of the afternoon, but my bones and muscles ached.  Having a hangover was like having the flu, but in place of a fever there was just a pleasant malaise.  Pleasant, at least, when you could just lie down and ride it out.  Alcohol was like medicine.  Too little and it didn’t do anything.  Too much and it killed you.  Just enough and it temporarily drove out all problems and doubts, all the clutter, leaving you weak but clean.  And after twenty four hours of recovery, you were ready to start over, ready to start accumulating all the crap again.

 But that afternoon I was in the middle of the twenty four hours of recovery, and as I lay there, insulated from the noise and activity of a hot summer day by the sound of the air conditioner and the drawn shades, I didn’t even try to control my thoughts.  Whatever came to mind, came to mind.  I didn’t know what I was going to do, or wanted to do, or should do.  If anything.  I just let whatever happened recently come and go as it pleased, along with anything else that wanted my attention.

The cool sheets felt good, but I wasn’t the least bit sleepy, and my eyes were wide open.  Maybe Smith was right about me.  My only ambition in life was to lie there feeling content.  I had no aggression, no anger.  I had nothing to prove.  It was even okay that a woman wasn’t beside me, even though hangovers and women often go well together.  I became so relaxed, though, and so void of ambition, that just thinking about women was okay.  Maybe even better, since I could move without explanation from one to the next.  Had Tiger and I done anything?  Sneezing, puking, and ejaculating were all mixed up in my memory of the evening.  And then I wanted to hear “Four Walls.”  I was in the car, her car, my head out the window, singing or yelling something.  Hank Williams?  “Long Gone, Lonesome Blues”?  Singing to street lights as we passed them.  A street light near her driveway as we necked in the front seat. 

Formidable Tiger.  Stripes in her hair?  Streaks?  I was pathetically drunk, and she was just putting up with me.  Waiting me out.  Not participating, which had pissed me off.  Why am I here if you’re not horny?  Patient Tiger.  All of a sudden we’re in the house and I’m lying on the bathroom floor and can’t get up.  Did she help me to the bed?  Did I repay her by throwing up on it?  The next morning:  a grin on her face all the way through breakfast.  She fixed me eggs.  She grinned as she drove me back to my car.  She had to start work, open the bar.  No hint of the night before, except the grin.  What did it mean?  I said more than once, half apologetically, “I guess I was pretty drunk.”  She just kept grinning.  She answered me, but so vaguely that I understood nothing.  Had I been insulting?  Violent?  Inept?  “I hope I didn’t say anything too stupid,” I told her, and she just kept on grinning.

Why was it so hard to figure out what women were thinking?  How would Tiger respond to me now, both sober and horny?  Would it matter if I was sober?  Sober and still wanted her?  Maybe not.  Maybe what she really wanted, all she wanted, was to peel me off the bathroom floor, clean up after me, and make me breakfast.  And prevent me from killing myself driving.  And protect me, perhaps, from Mrs. Burke, the high-falutin’ bitch.  She liked me.  The drop dead look all afternoon and the grin the next morning.  That meant something.  The two went together somehow. 

What had Norris been waiting for?  He had a picture of the general with an Hispanic man, maybe a Cuban, if what the sculpture had said was true, and he’d hinted to the sculptor that he knew what the general was up to.  Why wait?  He needed more than the photograph?  The identity of the Hispanic?  Is that what he needed?  Or more than that?  Or did he even have the picture?  Just because Harry had it in his files didn’t mean that Norris had access to it.  Was Harry trying to get money from Norris before he’d let him have it?    Whatever the reason, the ultimate goal was almost certainly some sort of article about it.  One that somebody with clout, if not the local papers, would print.  One that would make Norris a real reporter and enable him to forget about raccoons in chimneys forever.

Mrs. Conrad would never agree to straddle me.  In that position, she’d have to move.  Participate.  Reveal what she was feeling.  On top, she’d be unable to enjoy her misery.  She couldn’t watch herself as she acted out the role of an indifferent masochist, punishing herself for not feeling.  But why wasn’t she tired of it by now?  I knew it wasn’t me.  What we did had very little to do with me.  She didn’t like me or dislike me.  All she cared about was cheating on her husband.  That’s what she liked.  But why hadn’t that got old by now?  Had she chosen me because I was the opposite of her ascetic husband?  The hairy ape.  Don’t say anything.  Just grunt.  Grunt over the virgin sacrifice, or some such thing, lying there like a corpse. 

Mrs. Conrad:  married to a music professor.  An anemic, cold blooded, nice guy, ascetic, cerebral.  A mathematician.  All abstraction.  What attracted him to her in the first place?  Who knows?  Who knows what Mrs. Conrad was like when she was young?   Maybe all she was and wanted then was abstraction.  Purity.  Or maybe she was a slut and thought  purity would save her, but as the years passed, her desire for flesh never let up, got worse, made her hate herself more, until she gave in.  But since we never talked, I never really knew.  What would she say if I asked her?  What would she look like on top?  What changes would her face undergo if she really started to feel something?  Did all women know what Mrs. Burke knew?

Of course, it was also possible that Norris was reluctant to stop screwing Mrs. Burke, but I doubted that after seeing Harry’s pictures.  According to her, all he was interested in was using her for “politics,” and now I knew she was right.  But why get Harry to take the pictures?  Did he have some plan to humiliate the general with them?  Surely, he wasn’t crazy enough to do it just for the fun of it, no matter how much he hated the general.  Or how much of a prick he was.  The prick gets the girl.  It’s true that I was young then, but old enough to know how that worked.  Norris’ success with women wasn’t in spite of but because of the way he was.  Both men and women were attracted to what was bad and bad for them.  Attracted and then repelled.  And attracted again.  I swear to God I’ll never get drunk again.  But of course, unlike bad people, booze waited for you no matter what.  It was always there and always in the mood.  It was never that uncomplicated when you were trying to swear off a bad person.  

And to complicate things further, she hadn’t gone looking for what Norris gave her.  Mostly, she wanted the protection of a richer and older man.  She wanted security, in a big time way.  She wanted to be the cover girl.  Take care of me and I’ll be sweet and pretty.  In that sense, the face in the photographs was an aberration, something that had no doubt surprised her, or maybe she wasn’t even aware of it.  Maybe it was something you never remembered.  A kind of knowledge you could only know about when it was happening, and it took someone like Norris, who came along with same element of chance as lightning or an earthquake, someone who was the opposite of the general, or so she thought, to bring it out. 

A depressing idea.  Even more depressing than what she didn’t yet realize, or want to admit, which was the price she’d have to pay for her lapse.  To get back the security she really wanted.  Even though the general had made it clear to her by not budging on the whores, and by making Norris disappear, she refused to believe it.  And she actually believed that leaving him, assuming he’d even let her, would make him come around.  She didn’t see how impossible that was.  That to do so would make her not what the general wanted. 

What he wanted, I was convinced, was all wrapped up in how he got her in the first place.  She wanted to believe that he wanted to soothe his conscience, even though he wasn’t responsible, which made no sense, of course, and the truth, as I saw it, was that he wanted to rub it in, make the victory complete, not just defeat but humiliate the enemy.  What fun was war if you couldn’t humiliate?  But as far as she was concerned, the only thing separating them was mutual forgiveness.  And she was ready to ask for it.  She was truly sorry for the lapse, the aberration, and what she didn’t get was that for the general, the whores were not a lapse, not an aberration.  They were just a normal, even essential, part of his life.  He could no more give them up than breathing.

Did I enjoy Mrs. Conrad’s misery?  It’s certainly true that her indifference aroused me, and when we had sex, I was not so much trying to give her pleasure as I was enjoying her passivity.  But was it that she felt nothing or that she was hurting that gave me pleasure?  Either way, she lay there all but dead, and it was the only time I felt comfortable with her.  I thought about the ritual:  the bored look she greeted me with at the door, the lazy walk to the breakfast table, the looking past each other as we drank our coffee in silence, and then following her to the couch to help her pull out the bed, turning my back until she was undressed, turning around to see her lying there, stiff as a board, looking the other way. 

Wham bam thank you ma’am is what she seemed to want, and there were times, not when I was horny, but when I was lonely, that I was tempted to push it.  Make her kiss me.  Tie her down?  Make her let me touch her?  Show her what she’s missing, or, if I was real lucky, what she secretly wanted.  What she knew about but had never experienced?  Or what she’d experience and had forgotten?  Or should I just do it harder?  Maybe that would be a safe, simple way to see if she was wanting me to hurt her.  Try to hurt her, but as if I’d gotten carried away. 

And what if it was what she wanted?  What if she said, “Hurt me.”  And actually yielded for a change.  What would that prove?  Where would that get us?  It’d probably scare the shit out of me.  I’d probably get up and run.  Sorry, ma’am, I didn’t really mean to move you in a serious way.  I swear to God I’ll never do it again.  Or maybe I’d laugh and find myself thinking, “the cunt’s really getting into it.”

Why did I care?  Why did I have to think of every woman as someone to save?  Who needed saving?  I tried to think of Mrs. Burke on top of me, with the look, but I couldn’t.  The whole idea was too embarrassing.  It was his look, Norris’, even though he didn’t appreciate it.  It belonged to him, not me, because he’d made it happen. 

I remembered the face in the bar:  desperate when I brought up her father.  Not because she was doubting how she felt, but because she couldn’t believe that I, the nice guy, was attacking her.  Mutual forgiveness.  That’s what she wanted, and it was a pipe dream.  Easier said than done.  Like Leo had said, the general would never admit to having done anything wrong.  And I knew he wouldn’t give up anything for a woman.  It would defeat the point of having the woman.  She would no longer be spoils.  Would it be possible to convince her that she couldn’t have the general on those terms?  And did that mean leaving him, and meaning it, not just as a ploy, or did it mean accepting the relationship on his terms?  

My eyelids started to close.  Did I like her?  Did I respect her?  Because of a look, a look that in a way, at least for me, existed only in a photograph, and that stood for something I didn’t understand, and that I had never experienced?  I didn’t know, but when I wondered why I cared she came to mind before Leo or any of the general’s other victims.  She was right.  All of that was just politics.  The general was probably responsible for two murders and ruining two people’s lives, but those were abstractions  compared to Mrs. Burke and what she knew. 

TWELVE

(Monday night)

When I was a kid, due to a misunderstanding of some sort with my parents about when they should pick me up, I had to sit through Walt Disney’s Pinocchio a second time, although it seems now like I saw it even more than twice.  Maybe I’d already seen it when I went that time, which wouldn’t have been unusual.  In any case, I remember thinking I’d never get away from it, that somehow my life had turned into a continuous showing of Pinocchio.  Every scene became painful to watch, and in particular I remember the jeering, ugly faces of the bad boys, with their freckled noses and cheeks and big front teeth.  Of all the scenes in the movie, that one more than any other brings back how I felt, as if I were trapped in something that was both distasteful and obsessive, like endless counting or making things come out even, or the repetition of a tune I’d learned to hate but can’t get out of my head.  For years I couldn’t think of Pinocchio without having that feeling of pointless and helpless waiting in which you are always impatient, always hoping that the next thing that happens will break you out of the loop, and always trying not to care, to get your mind off of it.  Sooner or later, though, it gets the best of you, and you become upset in a way that is very much like panic.

That’s the worst kind of waiting.  The best kind, of course, is when you’re waiting for something good to happen, and you’re confident, you know, that it will happen.  It’s just a matter of time.  The waiting itself is a pleasure, perhaps even more so than whatever you’re waiting for, because those moments are charged with purpose, they lead up to something that you know is meaningful and worthwhile, like Christmas for kids, a dance or a concert for a teenager, or a vacation, a new house, a job, or a car for the rest of us.  In those cases, waiting heads in a straight line towards something, or seems to, since to receive the full pleasure from it, we convince ourselves that Christmas, the concert, and the vacation are permanent goals, will last forever, and that the house or the job or the car will always be fresh and exciting.

Waiting was a big part of my job, and most of the time it was pleasurable, although the barrier between anticipation and anxiety can be treacherous, perhaps because no waiting is really linear.  We can mark off the days from left to right on the calendar, but when we pull back, we see the endless succession of Christmases and concerts and vacations and new houses, and we know how we feel immediately after, when we’re tired, and gorged with pleasure, and prone to wonder what all the fuss was about.  When just the thought of opening another present or hearing another note or making any sort of change makes us wish for boredom and the routine of every day life.  At those times, we see anticipation for what it really is, a stage in an endless process, a part of the loop.

But then, of course, after a while of routine or a lot of sleep, the spirit rekindles itself.  When I stared at that message on the tile in my shower, I swear to God I’ll never get drunk again, I profoundly took the oath, knew in my heart that I’d never even be tempted to take another drop, that life would be so sweet without hangovers and getting drunk was overrated anyway, and that feeling, that commitment, as I’ve said, generally lasted until after lunch, when I started feeling good again, when I got my energy back, and along with it my appetite for having a good time, for listening to some music, for talking to people, for making love.

I can’t wait, children say about Christmas and hundreds of other things.  The anticipation is too much for them.  They can’t control it, but as we get older, we not only learn to control it, but if we’re smart, we learn to enjoy it, savor it, and even anticipate the anticipation.  We become connoisseurs of anticipation, and of waiting in general.  We learn how to be content, even happy, during each moment of it, instead of wishing it away.  Don’t wish your life away, mothers say the world over.   

Watching a particular place, whether it be a house or a café or a motel, for hours on end, waiting for something to happen, could of course be as tedious as Pinocchio was for me when I was a kid.  When will my parents show up?  Or will they ever?  Will what I’m waiting for happen or will all this waiting be for nothing?  But I learned not to look at it that way.  Something was always happening, just as, for example, something is always happening for a fisherman before a strike or an outfielder before a pitch.  The wind picks up and dies down, the sun or moon change positions in the sky, clouds drift by, grass grows, a light comes on or goes off, the tires of a car squeal, leaves rustle mysteriously, your heart pounds, a door opens or closes, a voice is carried on the wind, and so on.  And even in what doesn’t move, in its immobility in relation to what does, something happens.  You are waiting, but you are also watching and listening and smelling and feeling, from a ringside seat, the sometimes steady, sometimes erratic, movement of something happening.

I waited in my car in the general’s driveway for the light to go out, and then I waited another half hour, and on such occasions, when you have a firm grip on waiting, when you’re totally confident that the waiting is for a good purpose and your mind is clear, the most overwhelming impression is how indifferent everything else is to your presence.  The house just sits there in the moonlight, red tiles gleaming, the same as it would if you weren’t there, as do the red and white flowers in the boxes, and the asphalt drive, and all the trees, and even the little sculpture, which in fact had sat there neglected for twenty years, six hundred hot August nights, or more, and not one piece had cared or moved beyond the slow, inevitable settling into the ground.  Which was nothing, of course, compared to ancient sculpture, which, when you looked at things from that perspective, did move, collapsed, or decayed, arms and hands falling off, disturbed by man or nature, which got me to thinking about the house, and how if I sat there long enough, sooner or later a tile would come tumbling down off the roof, or a shutter would come loose, a crack appear in the wall, and then it would become still again, but like everything else, the house would eventually decay, is decaying, and bury itself.        

According to what Mrs. Burke had told me in the beer joint, when the general wasn’t traveling, he kept a tight schedule, as you might expect of a military man who was also a semi-retired gentleman, and who enjoyed a more or less equal measure of work and play.  He rose every morning at five sharp, and after his shower and a shave, Pensinger served him a breakfast consisting of half a grapefruit, a slice of raisin toast, and coffee, which he ate when he lived at home in his office as he looked through the morning paper and discussed his schedule for the coming day with Pensinger.  By seven, or half past at the latest, he was ready to attend to business, which meant discussing offers to speak or write articles, revising speeches, writing letters to supporters and politicians, and working on another book. 

Until their separation, the general and Mrs. Burke had lunch together at home, prepared by Pensinger, after which he took a nap, played golf at his country club, had two gin and tonics, and then met his wife for dinner at the town’s oldest French restaurant, a dark, intimate little place where the maitre’d spoke with a thick eastern European accent and a woman who might have been in her nineties played sentimental songs on the piano.

After their separation, the schedule changed only in that he had to eat lunch and dinner alone, and then return to his high rise at night.  He and Pensinger arrived at the house promptly at seven every morning and left at noon, and according to Mrs. Burke, they were never there otherwise.  Once the light went off in her room, then, and I’d given her enough time to fall asleep, I felt pretty confident about searching the place, as long as I was reasonably quiet.  And as I’d hoped, the back door wasn’t locked.

I went straight to the office.  Its centerpiece was a glass topped, dark mahogany desk that looked as big as a queen size bed and was flanked by a couple of small palm trees in copper pots.  There was not much on the desk.  A gold plated, engraved pen and pencil set from a chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom, a glass encased clock, also a gift from some patriotic group, and an onyx ash tray the size of a medium pizza pan.  That was it.  No papers.  Not even a calendar.  Behind the desk, white drapes were drawn over a picture window that in the day would have afforded a nice view of a lawn that sloped down to bamboo reeds and tall grass that grew around a creek bed.  The view from the general’s chair was of floor to ceiling book cases on either side of the door, and on the parquet floor were a couple of rugs that looked Oriental and expensive.  On the left wall were pictures of the general with important people, at the center of which was a black and white blowup of the famous photograph of MacArthur returning to the Philippines, wading in the surf in his khakis and sunglasses.  It was autographed.  The right wall was a collection of the heads of big game animals and hunting rifles in a glass case, and   underneath all of that was a big leather couch, on which I suppose he had entertained his prostitutes.

      From the comfort of the general’s chair behind his desk, I looked around and tried to imagine what he might think when he sat there in the morning.  There wasn’t really much about it that was unique.  No strange collections, unless you counted the big game heads.  It could have been designed by an interior decorator.  Pensinger?   Could I add that to his list of talents?  The truth is, I was a little disappointed.  It was very impersonal, which made me wonder if in that way it reflected the man.  I thought of the little man in Leo’s office, clutching the mangled cigarette, the hard face and steel gray crew cut, the legs crossed like sticks, and the deep, confident boom of his voice.  A no nonsense, plain American exterior if there ever was one, with no nonsense, plain American views.  A whore a day on that couch?  How plain American was that?  A whore a day for twenty years.  A lot of whores.   

The middle drawer of the desk was locked, so I used the letter opener to pry it open.  Pulling it out unlocked the other drawers as well, and as with the decor of the room, what I didn’t find is what surprised me.  There was the usual stationery type things in the middle drawer, note pads, a ruler, several pencils and ball point pens, scotch tape, and so on.  And in the top drawer were stationery and envelopes.  But the rest were empty.  Empty green file holders hung on racks in the bottom drawers.  Did that mean that the general had moved everything to his apartment?  Did that explain the impersonal feel of the office?  Or did he have anything?  Did Pensinger, perhaps, take care of all the details of his life?  That would make Pensinger a very busy man.  A man who needed an office and would have a lot of papers, which were probably now in the high rise.  Evidently, that was where I really needed to be searching.

I got up and walked over to the book cases.  They weren’t exactly “books by the yard,” but something told me that most of them hadn’t been read.  All were in perfect order, arranged by subject and author, and even lined up evenly from the edge of the shelf.  No books or magazines or papers or ashtrays lying on top of or in front of the books.  On one side of the door, all were military in one way or another.  History and strategy and tactics.  On the other side were reference books, an encyclopedia Brittanica,  a big dictionary, and a couple of shelves devoted to great books, arranged chronologically, starting with Homer and ending at about the turn of the century.  Henry James was the most recent.  I picked one up, an elaborately bound volume of Shakespeare, and found that the pages hadn’t been cut.

“Do you like Shakespeare, Mr. Keats?” 

I looked up and saw Pensinger standing by the door. 

                    

I put the book back carefully, making sure I got it in the right place, and then walked towards him with my hand out and a smile on my face, as if he’d been expecting to find me there.  I didn’t really think it would work, but I thought it was worth a try.  Now, though, I’m more of the opinion that I should have kept my distance, since as soon as I got within range, hand still out, still smiling, he put the side of his hand against my larynx with such force that it knocked me to my knees, and I stayed there, kneeling, holding my throat with one hand and holding myself up with the other, palm on the floor, gagging and coughing my guts out for what seemed like forever.

And then, just when I was beginning to think I might live, and might even be able to talk again someday, if I was lucky, he walked around to my side and kicked me in the ribs, lifting me, or so it seemed at the time, off the floor.  I rolled away, curled up in a ball with my back to him, still coughing, ribs aching.  I focused on the design of one of the expensive looking rugs to the exclusion of everything else while I coughed and ached and waited for whatever was coming next.  It seemed to help.  I had no thoughts worth the name and probably didn’t want to have any.  I wanted to be left alone. 

After a while,  I heard Pensinger clear his throat and looked up to see him standing there with a glass of water in his hand.  I sat up and took it.  It hurt to swallow but it was obviously the best thing to do.  I drained the glass and handed it back to him, still sitting on the floor.  He walked over to the couch and sat down.  Next to him was General Burke.  I started to get up but Pensinger raised his hand, which clearly meant “stay put.”  I obeyed, and it became clear that the general, when he got around to it, would speak.  

He wore the same outfit as he had in Leo’s office, khaki pants and shirt, and he crossed his legs and held his mangled cigarette the same.  He was not looking at me.  He rested his elbow on his knee, the cigarette pointing upwards, and stared at a spot behind me and just over my shoulder, his eyes wide as if he were distracted, and at that moment, it would have been easy to believe that the chiseled face and hard little body were merely remnants of a former toughness, and that sitting before me was a kindly, mellowed old man lost in thoughts of the past, subdued by the patient melancholy that often comes with old age.  At the same time, however, I had as evidence to the contrary, the pain in my throat and ribs.

Pensinger was still wearing his blue blazer, but this time he wore a pink shirt with it, and he too looked benign, not at all like he’d nearly choked me to death and bruised a few of my ribs.  Unlikely as it seems, I wasn’t scared.  I guess I was in shock, but also, both men looked so normal, as if we were simply having a business meeting or a friendly conversation.  The whole scene was normal, except for me sitting on the floor, and it even occurred to me that maybe my memory was playing tricks on me.  Maybe I’d passed out,  tripped on something, or dreamed the whole thing.

Without so much as a glance in Pensinger’s direction, or at me, the general said, “Get us some brandy, Penny.”  He kept his eyes focused over my shoulder while  Pensinger walked over to a cabinet on the far side of the room, under all the pictures, and took out some brandy glasses and a bottle.  Until he’d filled our glasses and resumed his seat, the general didn’t acknowledge my presence.   

“Health,” he said, lifting his glass, but still not looking at me. 

The sting of the brandy felt good, like medicine, in my throat. 

“Tell me something,” he said, quietly, the deep voice having a soothing quality like that of a radio announcer.  “Have you been screwing my wife?” 

It was a good thing I’d already swallowed the brandy or I might have choked on it. 

“No, sir,” I said, very relieved that I was able to say anything, although I did sound a little hoarse. 

He looked at me briefly, as if there might be a possibility that at some point in our conversation I might hold some interest for him, although he doubted it, and then looked away again. 

“Would you like to?” he asked, almost as if he were extending an invitation.   I glanced at Pensinger.  He was concentrating on sniffing his brandy. 

“She’s very attractive,” I said. 

“That’s not what I asked you.” 

He kept his eyes on the wall, and the deep voice held an edge I hadn’t heard before. 

“If she wasn’t married,” I said, “and the situation was right.” 

“And what do you think a man should do who catches his wife with another man?” 

“I don’t know,” I said, “I’d have to be in that situation to know.” 

He looked at me again, still doubtful that I was worth the trouble. 

“Let me make it easy for you,” he said.  “Let’s say you walk in on them with a gun in your hand.  They’re in bed and you’re standing there holding the gun.  Which one would you shoot?” 

He closed his eyes while he waited for my answer. 

“Neither,” I said. 

He shook his head. 

“You have to choose.” 

“Okay.  Her.” 

“Why?” 

He opened his eyes, and I looked down at my empty brandy snifter. 

“Because,” I said, after a moment, “she’s the one who’s betraying me.  She made the vow.” 

I looked up in time to see him close his eyes again, nod his head slightly, and allow himself what might have been a grin.  After that, we sat there in silence for a while.  He kept his eyes closed and nodded as if he might fall asleep. 

 “What were you looking for, Mr. Keats?” 

It was Pensinger.  Painful though it was, I cleared my throat.  Maybe the brandy had given me courage.  Or maybe getting beat up had given me an adrenaline rush.  In any case, I said, “I’d rather not say.” 

“My next move, Mr. Keats, is to squeeze your balls.  And I mean that literally, so maybe you’d like to reconsider your answer.” 

I took his advice.  I considered my options, which didn’t take long, and was just on the verge of blurting out the truth when I had a brilliant idea.  I had a hunch that if I mentioned Cuba, I might join Norris, wherever he was.  The only good option, then, seemed to be to lie. 

“My negatives,” I said, “I was looking for my negatives.”  

“Why?” 

“Money.” 

“Who offered you money?” 

As always, Pensinger seemed to be enjoying himself.  He focused the gleam in his eyes on his brandy glass. 

“No one,” I said, a little surprised at the swiftness of my reply and the credible ring in my voice.  “It’s speculation,” I added.  “I thought they might be worth something.” 

Pensinger swirled his brandy.  The general stared so intently over my shoulder that I couldn’t be sure he was even listening. 

“Leo’s not behind this?” Pensinger asked.

“No.” 

It was clear to me that Pensinger had no trouble believing I was after the negatives, but he doubted that I was acting independently. 

He said, “One more chance, Mr. Keats.  Who put you up to this?”

I took a deep breath and tried to look like I was debating how brave I wanted to be.  In reality, I was trying to figure out the implications of several possible lies, and I was about to “confess” that Leo wanted the negatives, since they already thought that anyway, when the general put his hand on Pensinger’s leg and said, “Tell me your opinion of Leo, Mr. Keats.”  And to my surprise, when I didn’t answer immediately, he went on talking.  “Like me,” he said, “Leo has high principles and strong convictions.  Don’t you agree?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“But there’s an important difference, young man.  He’s willing to compromise those convictions and principles for the benefit of his friends and family.  That’s his weakness.” 

He paused, as if to let that sink in for a minute. 

“‘Make sure you’re right, and then go ahead.’  Do you know who said that?” 

“Teddy Roosevelt?” 

Despite Leo’s opinion, I’d been awake in a few classes in school.

“Everything else is bull shit, Mr. Keats.  If we’d listened more to Teddy Roosevelt in this century, and hung the other Roosevelt for treason, we wouldn’t be in the fix we’re in.  Isn’t that right, Penny?” 

“Yes sir,” said Pensinger, keeping his eyes fixed on his brandy glass.  They still held that cocky, confident gleam, but I thought I detected a little discomfort.  Did he not want the general to give a speech?  Was he afraid he might say something he shouldn’t? 

“Leo’s problem, young man, is that he’s a democrat, small d, which means that he spends most of his time feeling sorry for the masses, and on top of that, he thinks he’s Socrates, that it’s his duty to always be buzzing around and annoying people.  What Leo won’t accept is that this a republic, not a democracy.  That’s what the founding fathers intended.  ‘And to the republic for which it stands.’  Do you know what that means?  It means a few good men rule.  A few.  The best and the brightest.  And yes, the richest, too, since they’ve proven their mettle.  Cream rises to the top, and when you stir it up what you have is democracy, and when you remove the cream, you’ve got communism.  The tyranny of the majority, the rabble who care for nothing but filling their bellies with rice and beans.” 

When the general paused to catch his breath, Pensinger cleared his throat and said, “I think you were about to tell us, Mr. Keats, who told you to break in here and what they wanted.” 

“So, young man,” said the general, as if Pensinger hadn’t said anything, “I sense that you’re in the other camp.  That you’ve been brainwashed by Leo to love and obey Marx and the Jewish bankers.  Are you a democrat, with a small d?” 

“I’m afraid so,” I said, and I was about to add that I didn’t think that meant I had to love and obey Marx and Jewish bankers, but he cut me off. 

“There are times,” he said, “when I agree with you about which one to shoot, and I can’t deny that it would have given me great pleasure.” 

What that had to do with Marx and Jewish bankers, I wasn’t sure, but it sounded for a minute like it might be the general who was going to confess, which wasn’t lost on Pensinger. 

“General,” he said, “with your permission, I’d like to ask Mr. Keats a few more questions.” 

But the general paid him no attention. 

“Sometimes I think I should have put the gun to her forehead just to see the expression on her face before I pulled the trigger.  She deserved it.” 

He paused for a moment and sighed, as if something had saddened him. 

“We need to question, Mr. Keats,” said Pensinger, without conviction. 

“The truth is,” said the general, “they’re both lucky I didn’t cut their guts out with my pocket knife.” 

“Why didn’t you kill them?” I asked. 

Pensinger gave me a nasty look.  The general took a deep breath.

“Leo thinks I killed that reporter, doesn’t he?  And he wants to use those negatives to prove it.  Am I right?  You don’t have to answer, young man.  Relax, Penny.  Why bother with questioning him?”

He stared at the wall over my shoulder and swirled his brandy, oblivious to Pensinger’s concern. 

“Do you know why I’m so sure?” he asked, looking at me for the first time.  “Because you’re his little robot.  I can see his handiwork all over you.  The same soft, bleeding heart, democratic sentimentality.  He wants to get even, doesn’t he?  And the icing on the cake is that if he gets rid of me, he helps make the world safe for democracy, with a little d.  You don’t have to answer.  I can see the truth on your face.  You agree with Leo and the reporter.  Do you know what he had the nerve to tell me?  The reporter?” 

I looked at Pensinger.  He was staring at the general, obviously trying to figure out how to shut him up.  It gave me a great deal of pleasure to see Pensinger uneasy. 

“I’m a menace to society, I’m the snake in the garden, Caesar and Napoleon all wrapped into one.  He’d create his utopia by killing all the generals, starting with me, I suppose, so that everybody could turn into lotus-eaters and walk around naked with big stupid grins on their faces.  That’s his ideal society, and meanwhile he fucks my wife.  He tells me that after I catch him fucking my wife.  So who’s the snake, Mr. Keats?  I ask you that.”

The general returned to looking over my shoulder, at the wall behind me, as if I were a member of a crowd, and it was his method when he spoke to look just over the heads of his audience.  Or was he looking at MacArthur, returning to the Philippines? 

As he spoke, I’d  begun to realize that making an impression on him of some kind was not the way to save myself, assuming that my life was in the balance.  And I thought it wise to assume that it was.  At first, when he gave me the choice of who to shoot, I assumed he was trying to figure me out, but now I realized that he was simply making a point.  If we had any relationship at all, if there was any contact between us, it was that of teacher and student, and the general’s method, of course, was not Socratic.  He was lecturing, and I could have been anybody.  Who I was didn’t matter to him.  His message was everything.  How, then, if it was impossible to make contact with him, could I convince him not to murder me? 

When it was clear that he was through with his speech, Pensinger spoke up. 

“What did Leo plan to do with the negatives?” he asked. 

But the general said, “Penny, get us some more brandy.” 

As Pensinger performed his chore, the general began to recite from Keats:  “ ‘That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,/And with thee fade away into the forest dim:/Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget/What thou among the leaves hast never known.’  What’s he talking about there, young man?  You know the poem, don’t you?” 

“Death,” I said. 

That got his attention, but still, anyone might have spoken.  He blinked a couple of times and frowned for a second.  Then he shook his head. 

“The bird’s immortal,” he said, “How do you explain that?” 

He didn’t give me a chance to answer. 

“For a short time before Pearl Harbor, young man, I was in London, and I recited that whole poem, I knew it by heart, to a Welsh prostitute.  During the blackout, you see, the whores would walk around with little pen lights, and when you approached them, they’d shine them on your shoulders to see your rank.  ‘Nothing less than a captain,’ that one told me.” 

He paused long enough to take the brandy from Pensinger. 

“I told her to undress and then shined her light on her while I recited Keats.  She was exquisite.  She was very pale and pleasantly plump, as I recall, and had jet black hair that I made her take down, so that it fell over her shoulders.” 

Pensinger handed me my second brandy without looking at me and resumed his seat. 

“No,” said the general, “I think it’s about Mr. Norris’ utopia.  Lotus-eaters.  That’s the forest dim.  Not death.” 

Judging from the way he’d gone back to studying his brandy, Pensinger seemed resigned, at least for a while, to letting the general talk. 

“Do you know the difference between the reporter and Leo, young man?” 

“No, sir.” 

“The reporter believed in good and evil, like me.  Leo, on the other hand, is a rational man.  The way Leo looks at things, I’m sick.  Disturbed.” 

He paused for effect and moved his tongue over his teeth, reminding me of Harry’s father.  Then with all the contempt he could summon, he said, “Disturbed.”  But he still didn’t look at me.  He was looking at MacArthur, I assumed.

By that time, I’d relaxed.  I’m sure the brandy had something to do with it, but for the most part, I knew by then that I was helpless.  The general didn’t care what I said.  It was like being on a ride of the general’s design, and he was either going to let me off when he stopped or throw me out at some fatal height or curve.  And there was nothing I could do but hold on and hope for the best.  And hope he hadn’t noticed that I’d noticed that he’d referred to Norris in the past tense, or that he didn’t care. 

Pensinger, evidently, felt the same way.  He no longer looked like he was even tempted to say anything.  The general was in charge, and the only thing to do was wait it out and hope for the best.

The general took another deep breath and quickly regained his composure.

“At least the reporter thought I was evil,” he said, “I’ll give him that.  He was a worthy adversary in that regard.  He had respect for his enemy.  Remember that.  You’re young, and who knows, if you get away from Leo, maybe you’ll even learn to see things our way.  You’re still just a kid.” 

The reference to my future gave me hope.  I was very happy to hear that he thought I had one, and I suspected that the conversation was nearly over.  We’d come full circle.  The general had all but told me that if he had to choose, standing there in the bedroom with the gun in his hand, he’d have killed the man.  The man was the enemy, and the enemy was evil.  To kill the woman would be like punishing the jewels instead of the thief. 

“If I catch you here again,” I heard him saying, “or near my wife, or sticking your nose in my business in any way, I’ll tell Penny here to make sure you regret it.  Or I’ll do it myself, and don’t think I couldn’t.  Or wouldn’t.  I don’t make idle threats.  Do you understand?”   

“Yes, sir.”

At a signal from the general,  Pensinger took my arm and lead me outside. The hot, humid air never felt so good.  When we got to my car, he let go of my arm. 

“Tell Leo,” he said, “that he’d better put you on a shorter leash.  The general meant what he said.  Next time you might not come back.” 

I reached for the door handle.

“Wait,” he said. “The general was speaking metaphorically when he talked about shooting people.  You understand that, don’t you?” 

“Sure.” 

“What did you and Mrs. Burke talk about in the bar?” he asked.

I froze.  It had never occurred to me that Pensinger might follow me.  Had he even watched me watch the general’s house?

“You’ve been following me all day?” I finally managed to ask.

“Just about.  Don’t take too much time answering,” he said. . 

“She was upset about things, that’s all.  She wants to get back together with the general.” 

“On what conditions?” 

“He has to give up the whores to prove his love.” 

“That’s not even worth mentioning to him.  Why would she come to you about that?” 

“I talked to her before.  When you weren’t looking.” 

“What about?” 

“She convinced me that Norris is okay.  That the general simply encouraged him to leave town.” 

He thought about that for a minute.  I crossed my fingers. 

“Now tell me,” he said, after a minute, “why you want the negatives.” 

“Leo wanted them.  I don’t know why.” 

He didn’t say anything. 

“By the way,” I said, as I pulled the car door open, “What does the general have on him?” 

I might as well not have asked the question.  I’m sure Pensinger heard it, but he was thinking about something else.

“When can you talk to her again?” he asked.

“Mrs. Burke?  You want me to talk to her?” 

“He wants to move back in.  She must trust you.” 

“But he just told me not to go near her.” 

“I’ll take care of that.  Trust me. It would mean a lot to him.  And to me.”

We were standing in the shadows of the trees.  The moon was still up but I couldn’t see his face too well.  I couldn’t see the gleam in his eyes, but I assumed it was there.  We were both sweating, though.  I could see that.  He’d adopted such a reasonable tone that I seriously considered telling him what I really thought.  It was none of my business, for one thing.  It was doomed to failure, for another.  I even thought about laughing.  Was he trying to tell me that the general had a broken heart? 

Instead, I said, “I’ll give her a call tomorrow.” 

He didn’t stop me when I pulled open the door.

What was done was done.  No use crying over spilt milk.  Harry Prince and Peter Norris, two people that only a mother could love, were dead.  A creep and a prick.  It could even be argued that the general had done the world a favor.  And hadn’t they asked for it?  Both of them had a serious case of stupid.  A fatal case.  And even if I didn’t buy any of that, even if I was pig-headed enough to think that murder was murder and something ought to be done about it, why was it any of my business?  All I did was take pictures of something the general already knew about.  Maybe, just maybe, the pictures were the last straw, but so what?  Not my finest moment, perhaps, but it didn’t saddle me with the responsibility of bringing a murderer to justice. 

Obviously, even as I walked down the sidewalk with my flashlight in front of the brick homes, I was still trying to think of some rational reason for going home.  I was almost talking out loud, my lips moving rapidly with the above arguments.  All to no avail.  I kept walking, and the houses were all dark and as quiet as tombs, the warm, damp air clinging to my face, the hum of air conditioners blending with the sounds of locusts.  I knew I’d never regret taking the pictures.  I’d never in my life regretted knowing anything, and this was no exception, even though I still wasn’t sure what it was I’d learned.  All I had was an expression on a face, a look, and a certain feeling whenever I thought of it.   

But could that explain what I was doing?  To the adult question, all I had was the child’s answer.  Didn’t you know it would be dangerous?  I didn’t think about it.  Or, when pressed, perhaps more truthfully: Yes, of course I knew it would be dangerous, and that’s why.  Like I said, when all is said and done, I really haven’t changed much.  Wasn’t this, in a way, like having a good time?  A mind altering substance?  I don’t look back, though, and consider myself a fool.  Far from it.  That love of recklessness we associate with youth but which, of course, is by no means confined to it, but to which after a certain age we attach the epithet of fool, is still with me, and I’m sure that I’d still feel today as I did then, as I left the relative security of the red brick houses and stepped into the woods.  I’ve never regretted knowing anything. 

In the moonlight, the road looked like a bar of silver, and the trees looked like they’d been cut out of black construction paper.  It was very still.  A hot, muggy night in Texas.  The source, no doubt, of the phrase prickly heat.  My face and back were soaked with sweat.  The mosquitoes were terrible.  I slapped at them at first, but finally gave up, and made myself concentrate on making my way as quietly as possible through the vines and bushes and over the thick carpet of dead leaves and fallen branches. Very little moonlight filtered through the trees, and even after my eyes adjusted to the dark, I had to feel my way along.

It didn’t take long to find the pecan tree I’d sat under that first afternoon.  I sat in the same spot and waited for her light to go out.  Why was she still up?  Had the general talked to her before he and Pensinger left?  Had he told her I’d been there?  Had she told him that I was looking for Norris for her?  Had Pensinger told him that I’d met her at the bar?  Maybe that explained the general’s first question.  Maybe I should have told him she wasn’t my type, that I had no interest in screwing her, which he wouldn’t have believed.  In fact, I’d have sounded like a weasel and he’d have taken it as an insult.  Who could believe that such a pretty and perky young woman could not be anyone’s type?  It had been better to tell him what he expected to hear, regardless of how true it was.  And maybe it was true.

As I watched the light, I had plenty of time to think about that and anything else that popped into my head.  Even though it was only a few acres, the woods felt like real woods, so naturally I thought about chiggers and spiders and worms and water moccasins and rattlesnakes and poison oak and poison ivy and rats.  Not exactly a place for a lotus-eating utopia.  More like a circle of hell.  I took a swig of whiskey and also thought about nightingales.  Did Texas have nightingales?  I didn’t think so.  I wouldn’t know one if I saw it.  Night birds.  I’d know an owl.  Someone told me once that Mexicans think owls are ghosts.  Or was it witches?  Anyway, they do look like they’re really looking at you.  Wise ghosts.  Wise witches.  Watching and waiting.  Hunters.   

If I’d been her lover, or wanted to be her lover, if she had really been my type, I could have walked up under the balcony and thrown pebbles at the window.  Would she have come out in her orange T-shirt?  What would I have said?  Something corny, I’m sure:  “With all my heart and soul, my dear, I know that beneath that thin cover girl veneer, a true heart beats, and I’ve come to set it free.  Come down from the balcony.  We’ll cavort in the woods until dawn.  I’ll come for you every night.  Our secret.  A second life, in the moonlight.”  Or maybe we could just fade far away.  Into the forest dim.  That, of course, was the real test.  A real commitment, as we say today, now that such a thing is no longer taken for granted.  Which made whether it was death or a lotus eating utopia irrelevant.  No coming and going.  No blissful moments of unconsciousness to remember in old age.  No old age.  That was the point.  The frightening, seductive eternity of immortality.  An eternity of blissful unconsciousness.  Was that what I saw?  A glimpse of that in her face?     

For a long time, I sat and stared at nothing in particular, legs crossed in front of me, a cigarette in one hand and the flask in the other, as if I hadn’t a care in the world.  I must be a fool of fools, I thought, a candidate for the fool’s hall of fame, the king of fools.  But I hadn’t come for love, I told myself.  I hadn’t come to throw pebbles at windows and pursue some idiotic, romantic notion about a look on a woman’s face.  I’d come to prove something.  Not to the general.  Or to Pensinger.  It was to Leo.  As I sat under that tree, I could feel his complacent superiority.  I could see him smugly smoking his pipe, as foolishly certain about what he believed in as Norris or the general.  The general had been generous to him:  Leo put family and friends above principle.  The way I looked at it, Leo put his reputation before principle.  His success.  It was merely an accident that family and friends were a part of that.  But he had a secret.  A skeleton in the closet, and the general knew it.  Something that would wipe that smug look off his face.

       At least the general was straightforward.  Honest and uncompromising.  He didn’t care, or maybe didn’t even know, about Norris’s real reason for screwing his wife.  It didn’t matter to him.  What mattered was getting even for the insult.  He marched the culprit outside, just far enough into the woods so that they couldn’t be seen.  He had no trouble shooting him.  For a capital offense like adultery, it’s automatic.  Maybe the condemned man was allowed a few last words, and surprisingly, maybe because he was foolish enough to think it was a joke, or at most a bluff, he told the general that he was evil, a menace to society, which made pulling the trigger not just easy but a genuine pleasure. 

Afterwards, Pensinger would take care of the body.  God knows where the body was.  It probably wasn’t even a body anymore.  Norris disappears into thin air.  And then it hit me, and I knew for sure that I wasn’t just sitting there in the woods for nothing.  I probably jumped, just as if someone had snuck up behind me and said, “Boo!”  Pensinger didn’t know there was a body.  He’d meant it, believed it himself, when he said the general was speaking metaphorically.  That’s why I wasn’t dead.  And on top of that, he honestly believed that the only thing keeping the general and Mrs. Burke apart was her silly, feminine insistence that he give up his distasteful obsession for whores.  The story could, from his point of view, still have a happy ending.  And maybe he was right.  More right than he knew.  How would she react if she knew that the general had murdered Norris?  Would it matter any more than his role in the death of her father?  Probably not.  She’d find some way to explain it.

I don’t know how long I sat there, sipping whiskey and smoking cigarettes and staring at one of the little statues.  It took me a while to realize, though, that I was looking at Cupid, a pudgy little thing, belly bulging over a cute little wee wee, round cheeks and a mouth that somehow managed to be mischievous and innocent at the same time.  Bird shit all over his curly locks, and weeds hiding the pedestal.  The arrow aimed down the center of what might have once been a parallel row of hedges, now just a bunch of bushes with weeds between them, and here and there a few young trees.

With some effort, groaning, I got up, put my flask away, and turned on the flashlight.  I walked between the bushes, in the direction the arrow would travel if Cupid had ever gotten around to shooting it.  I walked carefully, but it sounded to me like I stepped on every dry twig and leaf in my path.  It sounded like I was crashing through the woods.  Surely, she could hear me, even with the balcony doors closed.

Where would Cupid’s arrow land?  After walking about fifty feet, the flashlight picked up a dry pool made of Mexican tile.  It was hard to tell much about the pool with just the flashlight.  It was round, about four feet in diameter, and it was full of dirt and dry leaves and Norris’ body.  I’ll spare you the details.  Let’s just say I had no doubt that he’d been there nearly a week.  The back of his head had a bullet hole in it, and the body was curled up on its side in a fetal position, as if he’d been killed while kneeling and then toppled over.  I was surprised the general hadn’t blindfolded him.  Had he offered him a last cigarette?  An execution between gentlemen.

I shined the light all around him, into every part of the pool.  Then I walked around it, looking for, but not really expecting to find, the gun.  I even shined the light into some of the bushes nearby.  Maybe the general just threw it away.  No luck.  At least not until I started back.  About twenty feet back, I still had the flashlight on the ground, not really hoping to see anything, but there it was.  I could have stepped on it when I was going in the other direction.  I knelt down.  It was a Colt 45.  Army issue.  I straightened up and let the light stray back towards the Cupid.  It picked up a pair of eyes, looking in my direction.  At first I thought it was an owl, but it turned out to be the scruffy yellow cat.  It was just sitting there, next to the statue, its tail wrapped around its body, watching me curiously. 

  

THIRTEEN

(Tuesday afternoon)

“I thought I told you to leave it alone,” said Leo.  He was in his usual place behind his desk, leaning back in his chair, eyes on the ceiling, pipe sticking out of the corner of his mouth.  Smith sat next to me.  He had his hands on his knees and his eyes fixed straight ahead on nothing in particular.  He had his coat off, and he was armed.  I always thought a shoulder holster looked like some sort of back brace.  It was the only thing different about him from the last time we’d met in Leo’s office.  Evidently, he looked the same whether he was teaching a Sunday school class or being a cop, except that he didn’t wear his gun to Sunday school.

When Pam called to say that Leo wanted me to meet him and Smith in the office that morning, I’d assumed that the purpose was for Smith to fill us in on the details of the investigation and on the DA’s plans for prosecuting the general.  I’d delivered.  I’d dropped the body and the weapon in their laps.  A body and a weapon that were found in an extremely incriminating location.  It should, I thought, be an open and shut case.

I suspected, though, even before I sat down that something was wrong.  Both of them looked very unhappy.  What could have happened?  Something about the gun?  Did it not belong to the general?  Did it have someone else’s fingerprints on it?  Or was the problem with the body?  Had I been mistaken?  Was it not Norris?  Not a body at all?  Could I have been hallucinating?  Maybe it was just a pile of brush.

I didn’t say anything, though.  I simply sat up a little straighter in my chair and tried to prepare myself for whatever was coming.  Maybe they were irritated at my success.  They’d wanted to give it up.  I’d disobeyed orders.  It was only natural that they wouldn’t like being proved wrong.  Especially Smith, who probably explained it to himself as pure luck, since I think he was of the opinion that I had difficulty getting the right shoe on the right foot in the morning.  And too, I’d created a lot of work for him.  The general would be hard to prosecute, regardless of the evidence against him.  He was rich.  He was famous.  The DA and the police would have their work cut out for them.

Leo’s attitude, though, was harder to understand.  Maxine had dismissed the idea that the general had any evidence that Leo was or had been a communist, but I couldn’t think of any other reason for Leo’s disapproval, now that there was no longer any risk of failure.  The general was on the hook, hardly in a position to damage Leo’s reputation.  Leo was as solid and respectable as they come, the general was a murder suspect, and although red baiting hadn’t completely gone away, it wasn’t the mid-fifties any longer.  What was the big deal?

Of course, I had thought about just walking away.  When I got back to Cupid, I hesitated for a long time.  Do I turn right and go to my car and forget I ever saw anything?  Let sleeping dogs lie, one of Leo’s favorite expressions.  Or do I turn left and use the general’s phone to call the police?  In the end, what prevailed seemed to have nothing to do with all the reasons I’d been giving myself, at various times, for not forgetting about it.  Standing there, I didn’t think about either Leo or Mrs. Burke.  I didn’t want to prove anything or even learn anything.  I guess you could say that I’d already proven what I needed to and learned all there was to learn.  So, in the end, I simply decided I couldn’t live with it.  My conscience made the decision for me.

When it became obvious that I wasn’t going to say anything, Smith cleared his throat.  I felt a speech coming on.  His eyes still fixed straight ahead, and his face redder than usual, he said, “If it weren’t for Leo, you’d be in jail right now for the murders of Peter Norris and Harry Prince.  It took me a very long time to convince the DA’s office not to have you arrested.  They’d still like to do it.  Finding two murder victims in less than a week seems like a strange coincidence to them.  And it wouldn’t make me lose any sleep if they did arrest you.” 

He lit a cigarette in an obvious effort to calm himself down.  His dislike for me had developed into something closer to hatred. 

“I thought for a while that I was going to have to round up some poor old nigger to get you off the hook,” he continued, “but then Leo suggested I try the drug story, and it worked.  Poor Mr. Norris, it seems, was working on a story about drug dealers.  He must have done something stupid, like say he was going to put their names in the paper, so they took him out in the woods and shot him.  The DA likes it when drug dealers are suspects because it gives him a chance to make a speech about how tough we have to be to keep the city from becoming like all those corrupt shit holes back east.  But that’s not what really cinched it.  What he really liked about the idea is that if you were the suspect, we might have to involve the general, but there is no way to connect drug dealers to the general.  It was just coincidence that they killed Norris less than a hundred feet from General Burke’s house.  He had nothing to do with it.  That’s the important part.  He had nothing to do with it.  Can you remember that?” 

  I said, “I guess if he walked into city hall and shot the mayor while reporters were filming it, he still wouldn’t have anything to do with it.  Right?” 

Smith’s face got redder than ever, but he didn’t say anything.  Leo hadn’t taken his eyes off the ceiling. 

“Why?” I asked.  “Just tell me why they’re too chicken shit to go after him.  Does he really have that much pull?” 

“That’s the least of your worries,” said Smith. 

“What does that mean?” I asked. 

Leo sat up in his chair and turned to face us.  He looked terrible.  He always looked a little rumpled.  I was used to seeing his bow tie a little askew, his hair messed up from his habit of running his hand over it all day, and almost always, spilled pipe tobacco down the front of his shirt.  But I’d never thought of him before as looking pasty, and I’d never seen his eyes, which avoided me, look in pain.  It wasn’t like before.  He wasn’t just worried about what might happen.  It was almost as if overnight he’d developed some terminal illness.  

“He’s got no pull,” he said.  He sounded tired.  He wasn’t talking to a jury.  He was explaining something very elementary to a slow learner.  “Everybody just wants him to go away.  He feeds the hate image of the city, Johnny, that we’re fighting right now.  I’m sure some people think it would be good to come down hard on him, to prove we don’t like extremists around here, but the majority opinion, which the DA evidently shares, is that he should be ignored.  The last thing they want is for him to be at the center of a murder trial.  The people in this town might even rally around him, and that would be a real nightmare.” 

“So he gets away with murder,” I said, feeling like the slow, stubborn member of the class.  He didn’t answer me.  After an uncomfortable silence, I asked, “What did Smith mean about the least of my worries?” 

Smith was still red in the face.  I was every boy he didn’t want his daughters to date.  I was soft, lazy, and disrespectful.  I’d never amount to anything.  He could tell just by the way I looked.  I didn’t sit up straight.  I didn’t look him in the eye.  I was too quiet, which meant I must be hiding something.  He would like to have arrested me just for being alive.  I could see in his eyes that whenever he thought of me, which he tried not to, he wanted to throw me against the wall, break my nose and maybe a few ribs, book me, and toss me in the can along with the rest of the riffraff. 

“We think it would be safer for you,” said Leo, “if you left town.” 

“Leave town?  Is this a joke?  You’re kicking me out of town?” 

“Just take the advice,” said Smith. 

“Are you afraid I’ll try to raise a stink about this?” 

Nobody answered me.  The two men sat on opposite sides of the desk and stared past each other, like a couple of book ends.  I looked around as I tried to figure it out.  The globe of the world.  The dictaphone machine.  The tennis racket.  The color photographs.  The air conditioner.  The pattern of the blinds on the ceiling.  And in plain view on Leo’s desk,  the picture of the Hispanic looking man with Pensinger and the general.  I’d given it to Smith.  As soon as he got to the scene, he pulled me aside and questioned me, and I told him about finding the photograph.  I foolishly believed that he’d want to know everything and get it all wrapped up into one tidy bundle.  The only thing I left out was any mention of Harry’s photos of Norris and Mrs. Burke, and luckily, I’d put them in a separate place.  But Smith had everything else.  He left my apartment early Tuesday morning, before daylight, with the box I’d taken from Harry’s Rambler.

“What about that?” I asked, pointing to the photograph. 

“It doesn’t concern you,” said Smith. 

Leo glanced at Smith. 

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.  “In fact, the more we tell him, Smitty, the less likely he is to get himself into more trouble.” 

Smith shrugged. 

“Smitty talked to him this morning, Johnny,” Leo said, “He’s a Mexican, a wetback.  Back home, he was an actor, a singing cowboy.  Is that right?” 

Smith nodded.  

“I guess,” Leo continued, “he was out of work, came to the States, and was living with some relatives in Little Mexico.  He said he started out in the kitchen at his brother-in-law’s restaurant, and he’s now, or was, before they picked him up to send him back home, working as a waiter.  And on weekends he was playing the guitar and singing.” 

“Did he admit to knowing the general and Pensinger?” I asked. 

“Be hard to deny it,” Smith growled. 

“After Smitty showed him the picture,” Leo said,  “he said Pensinger had lunch at the restaurant all the time.  Pensinger knows Spanish.  He also knows how to play guitar.” 

“Figures,” I said.  He probably knew a dozen languages and played at least that many instruments. 

“Pensinger didn’t tell the wetback much about why he wanted his help,” Leo went on, “He didn’t have to because the general can’t speak Spanish.  When they met, Diaz and Pensinger would talk about whatever they wanted to.  Diaz said mostly it was about bullfights.” 

“Another sideline of Pensinger’s, I’m sure,” I said.  “He was probably a matador for a while.” 

“And Pensinger would say something entirely different in English.” 

“Diaz knows English?” 

“A little.  Enough to know that Pensinger and the general talked about Cuba.  About the general giving some money to Cubans.” 

“Cuban refugees,” I said.  “Shit.  The general thought the Mexican was a Cuban refugee?” 

Out of habit, I expected Leo to compliment me, sarcastically, on my knowledge of Cuba, but he said nothing about it.  He did, though, lapse into his addressing the jury mode. 

“Since the Kennedy assassination,” he said, “Cuba has been a dead issue.  Money from the government to refugees has dried up, and it’s even been hard to get donations from people who regularly give to the causes that the general supports.  So he decided to donate his own money.” 

“His wife’s money?” I asked. 

Leo nodded. 

“The Mexican wasn’t sure what the plan was.  About Cuba is all he knew.  My guess would be an assassination attempt on Castro.”  

“Pensinger must have been protecting the general,” I said  “His money and his reputation.” 

“Why couldn’t he just have figured the money would look better in his own pockets than in the Cubans?” asked Smith, in a tone that suggested that I’d just fallen off the turnip wagon. 

Leo said, “It doesn’t matter why he did it.  What probably happened was that Norris hired Harry to follow the general around, and Harry came up with this picture.  Whether Norris knew the Mexican was a fake or not, we’ll probably never know, but that doesn’t matter either.  Either way, he could embarrass the general.  Ironically, though, that wasn’t what got him killed.  Your photographs did that, Johnny, and then, once Harry figured out he was missing, he started to try to cash in on what he knew.” 

“And instead,” I said, “Pensinger murdered him.”

No one said anything.  They weren’t particularly proud of or happy about letting the general and Pensinger get away with murder.  I’ll give them that.  Is that why they wanted me to leave town?  To get whatever reminded them of it out of their sight?  Surely, they didn’t think I could attract any attention with the truth.  Or maybe it was orders from the DA.  Maybe there was a rule that if you find two bodies, you have to leave town.  No, I decided, I was right the first time, except that it was mostly Leo who wanted me out of his sight. 

“What’s he got on you?” I asked Leo. 

I never knew what hit me.  The next thing I knew I was on the floor with the chair on top of me.  I got up very slowly.  The left side of my face felt like I’d been hit with a crowbar.  Smith was standing over me, flexing his left hand.  Leo was staring at the ceiling.

I never stood up completely.  In high school, I’d been a pretty good guard.  My specialty had been pulling.  I was quick and could accelerate fast and get down the line with a full head of steam before I crashed into the defensive tackle.  I took one look at Smith’s exposed mid-section, kept my head up, lowered my shoulder, and charged.  There were no consequences.  Before and after didn’t exist.  I just wanted to hit him as hard as I possibly could.  I wanted to feel his body give in.

It was like hitting a brick wall.  I bounced off him like a hammer against a thick sheet of metal, and the next thing I remember, I was sitting on my butt in the parking lot.  Smith must have put me there, but he was nowhere in sight.  When I finally stood up, though, I saw RC sitting on his haunches next to the building entrance.  He’d always bowed and scraped every time I’d come within fifty feet of the place, calling me Mr. Johnny, opening the door for me, telling me it sure was hot.  Now he looked right through me.  I wasn’t there anymore.   

FOURTEEN

(Tuesday night)

In those days, if you wanted to drink something other than beer in a club, you brought your own in a brown paper bag.  Pensinger had brought a bottle of  Johnny Walker black, which along with a bucket of ice sat on the bar between us.  He smoked some sort of little cigar that was not much larger than a cigarette and came in a tin with Arabic writing on it.  The bar was a long one, thirty feet or more as I recall, and ran along the street side of the building.  That night no one else sat there.  It was the middle of the week, and the rest of the small crowd of out of town businessmen, along with a few wives or girl friends, was clustered around the stage.

When The Corral was dead, it was like a huge, empty barn.  I don’t remember ever seeing the ceiling, and there must have been dozens of tables, almost all of them empty, between where Pensinger and I sat and the stage.  We had a good view, though, if not a close one.  There was no runway, but the stage curved out from each wing to form a semi-circle.  Tucked back on one side were three musicians in tuxedos, all of them trying to look bored and doing a pretty good job of it,  and on the other side was a microphone for the emcee.

Much of the music, because of the size of the place, was swallowed up before it got to us.  We didn’t even have to raise our voices.  We sat sideways on our stools, glancing now and then at the strippers, but we’d come there to talk.  And to drink, although I was trying to stay relatively sober, partly because I knew I had to think about moving the next day, but mostly because I had no idea what Pensinger had in mind.  He drank like a fish, but at first it didn’t seem to have much effect on him.  He looked just as fresh and spiffy as he had earlier in the day, when he’d shown up late that afternoon, unannounced, at my door.

Even though it didn’t make any sense, my gut reaction was to assume that he’d come there to murder me.  After all, he probably knew that I was the one who’d found the body.  And he was probably wondering, and worried about, what else I knew.  It came as quite a surprise, then, when he suggested that we eat some Mexican food and then go to a strip joint.  And help ourselves to the Johnny Walker all along the way.  I was still suspicious, of course.  Maybe even more than ever.  Was this like the last meal of the condemned man?  Nevertheless, I went along with it, since I figured I didn’t have a choice.  Who was I going to call?  Leo?  The police?  And my throat was still a little sore from the last time we’d had a drink together. 

We ate in the place the singing cowboy had worked.  Everyone knew him there by name.  He ordered his “usual,” which turned out to be nothing more than a regular tex-mex combination plate, and in those days, if you got a dinner, it included three or four courses.  I ordered the same, and we filled up on quesadillas, tacos, enchiladas, a tamale, beans, rice, and even a cup of sherbet.  We talked about the food, the Mexican beer he ordered, the little cigars he smoked, and that lead to talk about his travels in South America and the Near East.  He’d been everywhere, of course.  He had conversations in Spanish with the waiters, and after we ate, the owner invited us back to the kitchen, where he gave us each a little bourbon in a water glass, out of a half gallon bottle mounted on a stand.  He was a little guy with a mustache and shiny black hair that he combed straight back over a bald spot on top.  And he kept putting his arm around Pensinger and telling me what a good “hombre” he was.

At The Corral, everyone knew him by name also, even the bored musicians, and all of them had to come over to say hello, so it was over half an hour before there was a break in all that, at which point he re-filled both our glasses with ice and scotch and proposed a toast.  I lifted my glass.  “To the general’s wife,” he said, and we touched glasses.  We drank to that, and he said, “I love happy endings.” 

Even in the dim light at the bar, his eyes were extraordinarily bright.  And observant.  I was certain that he saw the surprise on my face, even though I tried to hide it. 

“She went back with him?” I asked.

He looked at his gold watch. 

“They’re probably in bed together as we speak,” he said.  And will live happily ever after, I thought.

I glanced at the stage.  The current dancer was a tall redhead.  She was squirming  around on a tiger skin rug, or what at a distance passed for one, and the drummer had put on a rubber black face mask, half minstrel show and half African, and switched to bongos.   Behind the redhead were two cardboard or plywood palm trees that were flanking crossed spears with feathers on them. 

“She’s visited the general more than once,” said Pensinger, nodding towards the stage.  I nodded, but couldn’t quite bring myself to say anything.

“It’s no longer really about sex,” he said, as I watched the redhead, who was still on her back on the rug, lift herself up on her hands and feet and bump a few times, the drummer hitting the bass as well as the bongos.  “Half the time now he doesn’t even touch them.  It’s more like a private performance.” 

The tempo of the bongos increased dramatically and the redhead, stripped to her pasties, did something that resembled a series of cartwheels. 

“He writes each one a sonnet.  That’s what he does all morning.  He sits at his desk with a legal pad and writes a sonnet.  He doesn’t read anymore.  He doesn’t work on his speeches.  I handle all of his correspondence and all of his business affairs.” 

When he picked up his glass, I noticed that his fingernails looked manicured.  Did he get that rosy glow on his cheeks from some special sort of soap?  How did he keep every hair on his head in place?  He was the cleanest, most well groomed man I’d ever known.  How did he have time to do all that and take care of the general’s business?  And get away with murder, I might have added. 

“I’m trying to talk him out of the few speaking engagements he still has.  He’s been giving essentially the same speech for ten years, revising it to make the examples current, but sometimes he comes out with a reference we haven’t used in years.  The last time he spoke, he referred to Kennedy as if he were still alive.”

I began to realize that the Scotch was, in fact, having an effect on him, and although I’d had my share, his sudden candor was beginning to make me nervous.  Had I been right in the first place?  Was he going to treat me to a good time, get everything off his chest, and then put a bullet through my head?  I feebly tried to change the subject. 

“How often do you come here?” I asked. 

The spotlight that had been on the redhead, when she finished her act on her knees, back arched, arms thrown out and her head back, went out for a minute and then came back on the emcee.       

Pensinger ignored my question. 

“I didn’t like her at first,” he said, “Did she tell you that?” 

“No.” 

“She knew it, though.  I thought it would be a disaster.  And it was.  Most of the support we get is from older women who find the general attractive.  Showing up with a young thing like her was not smart, to put it mildly.  I wanted to get rid of her, but then a couple of things changed my mind.  In the first place, he was really silly about her.  It was important to him.  And in the second place, he should retire.”

The emcee alternated between sex and race jokes.  A sprinkling of knowing guffaws came from the occupied tables in response to a long story about two black men who didn’t  understand the physics of water skiing.  The emcee followed that with a quick farmer’s daughter variation, which elicited groans as he introduced the next stripper.

 “It will be a great relief if I can convince him to retire,” said Pensinger, “and with her back, I think I can.  Still, taking care of him won’t be much easier, and that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” 

The trio started playing a tune that was a Broadway version of hillbilly music.  Something from Oklahoma, maybe. 

“I could use someone to keep an eye on her.” 

It took a moment for it to sink in. 

“You’re offering me a job?  That’s funny.  I thought you were going to kill me.” 

Pensinger was very good at ignoring what he didn’t want to hear.  He looked in the direction of the stage, but it was obvious that he wasn’t interested in what was going on there.

“She likes you,” he said, “She listens to what you say, obviously.  I really didn’t have much hope that you could talk her into coming back.  But you did, which suggest to me that you can keep her out of trouble for me.  So, you’ve performed two excellent services for the general.  One was inadvertent, of course, but so what?” 

Finding the body had been a service?  All I could figure was that Pensinger had been as concerned as everyone else about what had happened to Norris, and now, thanks to me, the general was in the clear.  

“Thanks,” I said, “but I’m going to California.” 

He picked up a napkin and took an extremely expensive looking ball point pen out of his shirt pocket.  On the napkin he wrote a figure that represented more than I’d made in the three years combined since I’d dropped out of school.  “Plus,” he said, with a sweep of the hand and a nod towards the stage, “There are fringe benefits.”  A woman who looked like Daisy Mae was brandishing a pitchfork on stage.

Pensinger leaned closer as I stared at the napkin.  He was closing a sale.  The look on his face said I’d be a moron to turn him down.  This was a sweet deal between two people who understood each other.  Was this a payoff?  Pensinger’s equivalent of kicking me out of town?  Why didn’t he just put a bullet through my head?

Daisy Mae straddled the pitchfork like a broomstick.  Even from the distance of the bar, I could see that her eyes were too dark and cynical to be Daisy Mae.  A wolf in sheep’s clothing. 

I said, “Tell me something.  What did the general have on Leo?” 

Pensinger straightened up and freshened our drinks.

“He let you down, didn’t he?” 

“What do you mean?” 

Of course he knew that I didn’t find Norris in order to clear the general, and I must have looked worried because the grin on his face got wider.  But then he shook his head, as if it didn’t matter, and said, “Now you know why the general hates people like Leo.  They’re chicken shits.  They claim to stand for moderation.  Tolerance.  Compromise.  The American way.  But you know what compromise means to people like Leo?  It’s not the art of the possible, my friend, it’s the art of survival.” 

He took a sip of his drink. 

“But you want to know why the general hates Leo in particular, don’t you?” 

“Yes.” 

“What did he tell you?” 

“He didn’t tell me anything.  Maxine said that ten years ago he wanted to run for DA and the general threatened to smear him as a communist.” 

“Is that what he told her?  He is a communist, you know.” 

“Leo’s not a communist,” I said. 

“Sure he is.  All chicken shits are communists.  What you do, Johnny, is find a word for chicken shits that works.  See what I mean?” 

“I get it,” I said, “Are you going to tell me what it was?  Or do you know?” 

“I know.  He screwed Marilyn.  The general’s first wife.”

Daisy Mae had abandoned her pitch fork and most of her clothes.  She was sitting on a three legged stool, facing the front of the stage, her legs spread as wide as they could possibly go, pantomiming the milking of a cow. 

“Does Maxine know?” I asked, “Did you tell her?”

“The general thinks she does,” he replied.  “He told me to tell her today.  As soon as he knew it was you who found the body.  He never bluffs.”

“So why haven’t you told her?”

He shrugged. 

“What’s the point?  As long as I don’t tell her, we can still hold it over him.  There’s nothing to be gained in doing it now.  Unlike the general, I don’t believe in revenge.  All it gets you is in trouble.”

I wondered if he thought that would persuade me to work for him.  He killed Harry in cold blood.  Nothing personal.  As long as I didn’t get in the way of business, then, I had nothing to worry about.

I said, “Thanks for the offer, but I think I’ll pass.  I’ve been counting on seeing San Francisco.” 

He knew I meant it.  I started to slide off my stool, but his hand shot out and grabbed my crotch.  It hurt, and I knew it would hurt even worse if I moved.  I was trapped halfway on and halfway off the stool.  One foot was just barely touching the floor. 

“I wouldn’t mind killing you,” he said.  “The truth is, you’ve caused me a lot of trouble.  But I’ll tell you what.  Since you’re leaving town anyway, just answer one question and we’ll call it even.” 

“Okay.” 

“What did you say to her?” 

I hadn’t seen her or talked to her. 

“I’d like to take all the credit,” I said, trying to sound unconcerned, even though my eyes were watering.  “But I think she just needed a little push.” 

Pensinger puffed on his little cigar and looked as if he were debating whether or not to say something else.  He didn’t loosen his grip.  He was waiting for more.

I said, “I told her the general loved her.” 

His first reaction was to frown, as if he didn’t quite understand.  But then he started to grin and the twinkle in his eyes got so intense that I could barely see them.  He let go, then reached in his pants pocket and pulled out his wad of bills.  He peeled off a twenty and stuck it in my shirt pocket. 

“Take a cab home on the general,” he said.

FIFTEEN

(A week later)

Mrs. Hendrix always used elegantly slender iced tea glasses with little roses frosted onto the sides, real silverware and cloth napkins, and spotless white bowls with thin blue stripes around the rims for sugar, lemon wedges, and fresh mint from her garden.  In the center of the table, there was always a tray of little shortbread cookies, usually with pecans in them, store bought she confessed, lowering her voice as if afraid of scandalizing the neighbors.  “Now, Johnny,” she said, nearly every time I sat down with her, “I can start making you sugar cookies, it’ll be no trouble at all, if you think you’d like them better, but these were Earl’s favorites.”  Then she’d laugh and say, “I guess I’m getting sentimental in my old age.”

She poured the tea away from the table, from a pitcher she kept in the refrigerator, and used tongs to remove the ice cubes from a bowl she emptied the tray into.  I always offered to help, and she always refused.  Once at Mrs. Hendrix’s table, there was no getting up for anything.  “Men just get in the way,” she said often.  “I wouldn’t even let Earl, Jr. in here when he was growing up, except to take out the trash.  I have my own way of doing things, and my mother was the same way.  Even about us girls.  I had to beg her to teach me how to cook.”

I always felt very comfortable with Mrs. Hendrix.  On the first day I ever had tea with her, one of the first things she said was, “Now, Johnny, feel free to smoke.  Earl smoked a cigar in the house, so I think I can put up with cigarettes.”  And then she told me all the smoking stories she knew, one of them about her brother, Aub, who was whipped with a razor strop for chewing tobacco when he was eighteen.  “He was almost a grown man,” she said, “a foot taller than Papa and engaged to get married.  But Papa was strict about that.”

On the afternoon of my last day in town, Mrs. Hendrix had many things on her mind.  Her sister-in-law, Grace, had an operation and was doing fine, her brother was thinking about not raising chickens again because the company that supplied the chickens was raising the price of feed, and when she talked to the people at the cemetery about the pond near Earl’s grave, which was full of green slime, they acted like they couldn’t do anything about it.  “I almost wish we’d buried him in the church cemetery back home,” she said, “At least then I could take care of him myself.”

She helped herself to one of her store bought cookies, which she chewed slowly, and I could see her telling Earl, Jr. to do the same and keep his mouth closed.  Nearly a week had passed since I’d found Norris’ body, and I’d made all the arrangements I needed to make to move and had a ticket for an evening bus to San Francisco.  I was beginning to feel a little foolish about leaving.  Every day, it seemed more certain to me that Leo and Smith had just been trying to scare me into inaction.  I don’t think I could really have hurt them, but if I’d been stubborn, I might have created some embarrassing moments.  It occurred to me that if I just laid low, like B’r Rabbit, as Maxine had said, it would all blow over.  But what would I do in the meantime?  It seemed very likely to me that Leo had in fact blackballed me with the other attorneys in town.  And I would be a little nervous wherever I went, since I figured a traffic ticket might get me life in prison if Smith had anything to do with it.  In other words, I knew when I wasn’t welcome. 

I sold my car to my friend the medical student.  I could use the money, and besides, I wanted to walk around San Francisco so I could hear Charlie Parker in the fog.  My friend and I celebrated our transaction and my departure the night before with the last of his Scotch.  He talked again about Bolivia.  I talked about beatniks.  I didn’t tell him why I’d decided to leave all of a sudden.  He probably wouldn’t have believed it anyway.  Since I’d been talking about the wonders of California ever since we met, he just assumed I’d decided it was time.

I hadn’t said anything about the Burkes to anyone.  “San Francisco,” said Jesse, when I stopped by to see him at the Bora Bora.  “Ain’t that where they got all the queers?”  Linda Kay, he told me, had gotten married to some guy who worked at the General Motors plant.  And he was thinking about customizing his Camaro in a way that I only partly understood. 

I thought about calling Maxine.  In fact, I felt bad about not calling her.  I hadn’t seen her or talked to her since she’d come by to ask me for help.  I had no idea, then, despite what Pensinger had told me, what she knew about what had happened or what she thought about it.  Things had happened so fast, I hadn’t even given her a thought.  She had to know, though, that I’d found the bodies, and if she hadn’t already, eventually she’d wonder what had happened to me.  Why didn’t she call me?  I’d done what she’d asked.  I knew why Leo had taken the job, and she knew that Leo was hiding something.  Had she simply asked him?

In fact, before I left, I started hoping it wasn’t her every time the phone rang, since I knew I’d have to lie to her.  And I was terrible at that.  She’d know I was lying, and she’d know then that it was something that would hurt her.  Why didn’t she call?  Maybe she knew all along that it was something she didn’t really want to know.  Or had Leo told her?  Maybe he figured it was certain that Pensinger would tell her, and it would be better if she heard it from him.  Or had Leo made up something that she believed?  Or wanted to believe?  I doubted that.  I could see her at their table at the country club, sipping on her martini as she listened to Leo’s lies, and I couldn’t imagine her being the least bit gullible.  The first story had been plausible.  It had been the McCarthy era.  The new story, I thought, would have to be true.   

But I have to admit that I had difficulty understanding the whole situation.  They’d been happily married for forty years.  The affair had been over for fifteen years and the woman was dead.  How much of a crisis could that create?  Wouldn’t it soon be forgotten?  Why hadn’t Leo just confessed and put an end to it?  I tried to predict Maxine’s reaction.  I’d always thought of her as tough, but could it be concern for her that stopped Leo from telling her?  He told me that my photos got Norris killed.  During my last week, that remark came back to me more than any other part of our conversation.  Was he trying to extricate himself from any responsibility?  My photos?  What the hell did that mean?  What about his fear of telling his wife the truth?  But was that the right question?  What about his concern for his wife?

There were times when far from dreading a call from Maxine, I was tempted to pick up the phone and tell her myself.  Maybe that’s what Leo needed, a big dent in his respectability.  Why did he think his marriage was any different from that of the General and the current Mrs. Burke, or from Mrs. Conrad’s or even the Cadillac lady’s, for that matter?  Maybe that’s why he wanted me to leave town.  Maybe he knew I’d be tempted to tell her, or that she’d eventually get the truth out of me.  I’m very glad now, of course, that that never happened.  I like to think that Maxine never called because she realized that coming to see me in the first place had been a mistake, not because she didn’t want to know, but because it was none of my business.

The day I told Mrs. Conrad I was leaving town, she had opened the door as always and turned to walk back to the table without looking at me.  And as always, she was wearing a man’s bathrobe, loosely wrapped around her so that her body was hardly visible at all.  Any visual stimulation I might want at that moment had to come from the back of her head or her feet, and there was nothing particularly special about either feature.  She wore her hair short and bushy, with thick black curls.  Thinking of Mr. Rich, I looked at her feet that day.  They were pale like the rest of her, and also like the rest of her, neither particularly long or short, narrow or wide.  Her toes might have curled a little more than what might be considered normal.  That’s all I can think of.

She poured me a cup of coffee as always and put it down on the table like she was a waitress with more important tables to worry about.  She sipped her wine and looked out the window, at the magnolia tree that hid the whole backyard, its curled, brown leaves littering the ground around it.  Many of the waxy, green leaves pressed against the window.  Her eyes were bloodshot, and she had crow’s feet around them and wrinkles on her neck.  “What are you thinking about?” I asked.  That was new.  We never talked.

Moving only her eyes, she looked at me.  It was not a friendly look.  “I’m leaving town,” I said.  “I won’t be able to come see you again.”  She didn’t reply.  It was as if I hadn’t said anything.  She stood up and walked over to the couch.  “Did you hear me?” I asked.  I helped her take the cushions off the couch and fold out the bed.  She waited for me to turn my head before she took off her clothes.  When I looked, she was in her place, face to the wall, and stiff as a board.  “Maybe we could try something different today,” I suggested.  Keeping her eyes on the wall, she asked,  “Why?”  I sat down on the edge of the bed.  I hadn’t taken off any clothes yet.  “Do you know why I come here every Wednesday?”  “Because you’re horny?”  “Because I’ve started to like how unresponsive you are.”  She lifted her hand.  “Don’t spoil it, then” she said.

After a minute, I said, “I’m sorry.  I guess I’m not horny today.”  She turned her head and looked at me.  I don’t know if she wanted to say something, or if she was just curious.  In any case, after a while she turned her face back to the wall, and soon after, I got up and left.   

As soon as I got home, I tore up Harry’s photographs into small pieces and flushed them down the toilet.  I was tempted to take one last look.  Would she still look oblivious?  Blissful?  Would I still think that she knew something I didn’t?  Or would I become Harry?  “Cunt’s getting into it.”  Or the general, in which case I might decide that she looked “exquisite.”  Maybe it was age, I thought.  Maybe becoming Harry or the general—what was the difference?--was inevitable.  But it was just a thought.  I didn’t really buy that, even then.  And now I know it’s not true.  She did know something, at least at that moment, and whether it lasted, whether it was even consciously remembered, was beside the point.  As had been my attempt to help.          

When it was time for me to go, Mrs. Hendrix put her hand on my arm.  It was the first time she’d ever touched me.  “My friend at church,” she said, “her son-in-law works in a place out there where they make airplanes.  She said it was near San Francisco, and she goes out there nearly every year to see her daughter.  She says it’s real nice.  Real pretty, but it gets cold even in the summer.  So you make sure you have a jacket with you.”  “Yes, ma’am.”  “And here.”  She got up and went to the refrigerator and pulled out a grocery sack that looked about half full.  “I made you some sandwiches and put in some other things I know you like.  To eat on the bus.”  I took the sack. 

“Mrs. Hendrix,” I said, “if you had died first, do you think Earl would have kept up your garden?”  She was following me to the door, so I couldn’t see from her face how she reacted.  But it took her a long time to answer.  It was totally unlike anything we’d ever talked about. 

From inside, from Mrs. Hendrix’s kitchen window, it didn’t look all that hot outside, but as soon as I opened the back door, the heat rushed in at us, along with the screeching of the locusts.  We stood there together, looking out on her garden.  Finally, she answered me.  “I wouldn’t have expected him to,” she said.  “Men aren’t good at those things.  And besides, he’d know I’d be looking down on him and criticizing everything he did.  It would have drove him crazy.”  She laughed, a little nervously I thought.  I guess she was afraid I’d want to know more, and I suppose she thought Earl was watching her as well. 

All the colors of the rainbow seemed to be represented in her flowers.  The borders of the flower beds were diagonally placed red bricks, clean and damp now from the noon watering.  The small patches of grass looked like the greens of a golf course.  The deer family, curled up together on one of the patches, looked very content, and the bull frog under the pecan tree seemed to be looking at me, but it didn’t bother me because there was no one to save.  No one for the time being anyway.