A World the Color of Salt (21 page)

At the front driveway to the Fairdale Apartments, a freestanding directory holding the names of the residents was enclosed in a wood-framed glass box. I looked through the strips of blue-and-black labeling tape for “Dugdale.” Found it. Whoever punched the label hit the ampersand instead of the pound sign: &210. The manager's was #100.

Driving through passageways narrow as alleys, I intended to spot number 210 first, lock its location in my mind, and come back to it later, after handing over seven hundred of my hard-earned dollars.

The apartments were grouped in circular segments and painted deep gray with white trim. Clouds of lavender impatiens and pink vinca poofed out along patches of too-green lawn by each apartment, the sod newly installed in visible blocks. Palms, their fronds still tied up at the top to prevent transplant shock, lined the roadways. Rustlers can get five thousand dollars for the tall ones, complete with nesting rats, but these palms were only about ten feet high and probably worth no more than five hundred, so they just might survive awhile. Nailed high into the stucco of some of the end apartments was an occasional brass unit letter out of sequence. This is a test: You can't live here unless you can figure out the system.

Halfway down one of the asphalt passageways I saw a Bronco parked under an open carport with maybe thirty empty spaces around it; black, looking like one of our police
vehicles without the six-pointed star on the side. Ours are full of wooden drawers holding flares, lanterns, first-aid stuff, yellow tarps. But this one, if it was a Dugdale's, full of what? Diving gear? B-and-E goodies? I stopped behind it. The license plate bore an unremarkable seven-character tag, but it was the plate frame that interested me, and I memorized the license plate anyway: two-Mike-Hotel-Xray-six-fourteen. The frame was from a dealership in Victorville, a high-desert town a solid hour and a half northeast of Los Angeles, full of coarse sand, strong wind, and spiky Joshua trees. The city used to be little more than a highway gas stop; a drunken man could walk home hoisting his brown sack in happiness and baying at the moon until about ten years ago. Nearby, Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, and their stuffed horse, Trigger, could listen to the wind whooing out over the far hills that cradle dude ranches and spas deep in their shadows. Now there were Kmarts and apartment houses within rock-throwing distance of the freeway. But restaurants still served country breakfasts with white gravy, and women with rolls of flesh around their middles laughed hard, talked with cigarettes in their mouths, and didn't give a damn. The thing was, it was still a desert town, with a desert mentality, and somebody like Roland Dugdale would be from Victorville—or Texas or Oklahoma—the point being, someplace with large landscapes just a little left-side of the law. I almost pulled into the spot next to the Bronco. But I went on. Find the lady. Pay the lady. Come back. Go knock on Roland's door and ask what the fuck he thought he was doing.

I found her, I paid her. She gave me a receipt I was prepared to ask for, then said, “I guess you know if she doesn't show up, I'm entitled to store her stuff and let the apartment out to somebody else.” She was wearing an all-over bright-pink polyester pant outfit, and her hair was orange and thin on top so you could see the very pale scalp. She said this to her desk while she was putting away my cash, and when I didn't respond, she looked up at me.

Fastening the latch on my purse, I said, “No, I didn't know that.” I smiled and said, “But I'll sure look up the code,” and left out the screen door.

I must have driven at least twice past the spot where I
thought the Bronco was because of the damned layout—and because I couldn't believe it was gone. Not that soon. But it was.

I wheeled into a slot and got out, seeking number 210. When I found it, my heart was beating hard enough for me to hear it in my ears. I took a breath and knocked. Waited. Saw a bell nearly obscured by bushes, and rang.

No answer. As I started off to walk the opposite direction around the hexagonal path, I slowed and looked in a window of apartment 210. A red sweater was draped across the back of a couch near the window. On the floor at the other end was a mound of clothes near an empty laundry basket, and across from the couch a guitar case leaned upright on a cantaloupe-colored loveseat. The furniture was whitewashed pine and the colors were fashionably soft—so far, not a place, it seemed, that a country boy or a deep-sea diver would rent. Doubt swept over me. Did I even have the apartment number right from the registry? I was confused and felt foolish lingering at someone's picture window like a snoop. I stepped away but glanced back and could see the corner of the dining-room table. Outlined there were two wine bottles and several beer cans. Now, if I could just see a diver's suit, a helmet with brails. How about a gun, a pistol, say, with big focking rounds lined up ready to be loaded. How about something
concrete
, I told myself. And walked away, disappointed, disgruntled, and disgusted.

All week it wore on me, where Patricia could be, and how this thing happened with Dugdale. Saturday I worked, and Sunday I did the usual maintenance stuff: grocery-getting, laundry, gasoline. Then, back from my last foray out, my key still in the front door and the door open a crack, I heard a familiar engine, and looked down. From the second-story walkway that leads to my unit, I saw Patricia's Peugeot pulling around the circular red-brick courtyard, seeking one of the few parking places available to visitors. There's a stone fountain in the center of the courtyard, with small yellow and blue flowers popcorning around it, and the sun turned the cascading water into a cellophane umbrella.

Both front doors opened. As Patricia folded out of her side, Roland Dugdale ducked out of his, wearing a lime-green shirt, an open brown leather jacket over that, sand-colored shorts, and beach thongs. Then the rear door opened, and the top of someone's head, a woman's, emerged, the hair shiny and dark, chin-length. Patricia said something to the woman, and then they were all of them coming toward the stairs below where I stood on the balcony, Patricia looking up, spotting me. She called out, “Smokey, here! We've come to say hello.”

I just stared and let them come up, pulling my door shut, and moved to the top of the stairs—Roland Dugdale wasn't coming into my apartment.

A long box of sun lit up the pebble-surfaced stairway and fired Patricia's hair as she ascended.

Roland looked up once, his green eyes splintering into mine. Between Patricia and Roland, the other one, the girl,
about my height but more delicate, and pale. As she squinted into the glare of sun, I saw that she was young, younger than Patricia and I.

“Smokey . . . what's the matter?” Patricia said, coming toward me. “Listen, you shouldn't have. You didn't need to do that. I mean, thank you and all, but really, you didn't need to pay my
rent
.” She laughed her nervous laugh, with only one of the two dimples forming. “I brought money to pay you back.” She began ferreting in the black patterned purse that hung from her shoulder and across the Australian outfit I knew she got from Olivia Newton-John's billabong shop or whatever she calls it, at Mainplace. “Here, meet my friend,” she said, extracting a wad of bills from her purse and waving it toward the pale girl. I saw the perennial sweetness of Patricia's face, and in her eyes the readiness to accept all things, and thought for a moment, She's better than I, kinder, more tolerant, open. Innocent; and that man too, and this new girl, this Southern California Saks Fifth Avenue–decorated girl standing behind Roland; in this country,
innocent
until
established
guilty by means I was privileged to have at my disposal, not by bias, not by reaction, not by emotion. Innocent. Look Roland in the face and acknowledge innocence. Look.

“This is Annabel Diehl, she works with me, and, of course, you know—”

I didn't even look at Annabel. My attention was focused on Patricia, the way she looked at Roland then as if he were a football star, only with a dash of reserve, maybe fear, as if at any moment, at the wrong word, he'd turn on his heels and leave three women standing there alone.

“I think we better talk.”

Roland opened his jacket and pulled from it three stems of blue lantana he must have grabbed by the fountain. “A pretty gal like you should get flowers every night.” He thrust them forward at me, and I looked at Patricia.

“Roland!” Patricia said. “Where's mine?” When she saw I wasn't taking them, she did. And then Roland turned, taking Annabel with him, to lean over the balcony and watch, I guess, the fountain. The son of a bitch. It had to be him, with the paper and the lemonade berry.

“What is going on here, Patricia?”

Roland and Annabel stayed put, Roland cocking an arm out to rest on the balcony railing, but definitely around Annabel. As I would peer out around Patricia in the next few minutes, I'd see Annabel's face turned up to him, smiling, and then it would reflect uncertainty and in another instant reverse itself to become self-conscious, aloof, a photographer's model trying to look alone and worldly as she stood on a balcony with wind blowing her hair and skirt, hands jammed tight in the pockets. She wore a doe-skin jacket, cream-colored skirt, cream stockings with little knobs all over them like I never had the nerve to wear, cream high heels.

I took Patricia by an elbow and pulled her even farther away from the two. I laid into her, asking what the
hell
did she think she was doing, where the
hell
had she been, and what
frigging
idea had planted itself in her brain that she thought she could come breezing in here, my place, with a man suspected of murder.

She said, “God, what happened to you? You met him. He's fine, just fine.”

And when I held my rigid glare too long, she turned around to Roland and her friend and said, “I think we made a mistake.”

Roland shrugged. “You got it. Guess we better be movin' along,” but he didn't look like he wanted to be movin' along.

A sharp breeze cut in through the balcony and under my unzipped jacket, and I could smell the gasoline still on my hands from the last errand. At our head level just outside the walkway a white gull flew by.

Patricia had her hand all this time in the yaw of her purse. She'd put the wad of money back in, and now she pulled it out again. “You shouldn't worry about me,” she said as she handed it to me. “I'm twenty-nine years old. I can take care of myself.”

“It looks like it. What's with Miss Nordstrom over there? She taking care of herself too? I don't appreciate it you go away and nobody knows where you are. I'm sure your boss doesn't appreciate it either. You're hanging out with a criminal. You think of that? Are you in love or just shootin' in both arms?” I stepped out so I could see Roland, what he was doing, and to break the moment. He caught my eye and moved
toward Annabel and put his hand on her upper arm, said something to her. I couldn't hear him, but I knew whatever he was saying to her was for my benefit, for me to watch and wonder about.

“You don't know it all,” Patricia said, low, dark. “You're smarter than me, I know that. But you don't know it all. I'm just sorry. I thought we were friends.”

I never knew she thought I was smarter than she was. I said, maybe softer now, “We are
friends
, Patricia. What friends do is look after one another. Confide in one another. You didn't confide in me. You didn't tell me you were going to take up with him until after you already had. Because you
knew
what I'd have to say. And you lacked the courage and the respect to tell me. You're not dumber. You're just not honest.” That sounded so cruel, and I could see the hurt in her eyes. “Where were you all this time? Did you give one thought to me, or your parents, or your job, for Christ sakes, even one thought?”

“Nobody can talk to you.” Her mouth drooped, and then the lips parted, as if she wanted to say something else but didn't know what.

Whispering, I said, “You knew what I felt about that murder in Dwyer's. You knew police suspected Roland and his brother—God, you were there with me in the observation room. And still, you took up with him anyway.”

“If you were so against him, why'd you come to the pier?”

I heard an apartment door close, and felt the floor of the walkway begin to shake with someone's steps. The clip of high heels pocked behind me, and Patricia and I stood looking at each other as the woman approached and headed for the stairs.

“You think I'm a hard-ass, but I know these kind of people better than you do. What about all the talking we've done? What about all the stuff I've told you I've seen? Your brains are between your legs, Patricia.”

And that was all she wrote.

She started away, turned back to say, “You're hopeless.”

Roland then was moving toward us, Annabel thrust ahead like a figure on a ship's prow, his hand on her elbow. “You girls ready? We goin' to roast wienies on the beach or what?”
He rubbed his palms together like making fire the Indian way, then settled on his feet and hooked both thumbs in his pockets, smiling his lady-killer smile first at Patricia and then at me. His eyes searched mine, and the white teeth showed themselves, See, I'm harmless. And for just one half of one second I forgot who he was, saw the intimacy between him and Patricia, and felt left out.

I looked at Annabel and said, “Hi.”

“Hi. I'm supposed to be at work. I'm supposed to work overtime,” she said, and laughed faintly.

“I know how that is.” I was trying to figure out what it was about her that was off.

“We're playing hooky,” she said.

I saw it then, behind her dark eyelashes. “You're higher than helium,” I said.

One side of her mouth crept upward. She leaned back against the railing, raised her head as if to catch the sun, but there was no sun there, we were all in shadow.