Fugitive Nights (20 page)

One woman was working at a desk and another was answering a telephone by a filing cabinet. There was a half-door with the top open leading into a small warehouse where he could hear people talking.

“Can I help you, sir?” the woman asked.

She was about his wife's age, but blonde and fair, not half as pretty as his wife, and she wore makeup like the Mexicali whores who'd kept propositioning him when he was trying to secure the forged documents.

“I would like to see about a gravestone, please,” he said, in his slightly accented, singsong cadence.

“Would you like something in imperial black?” She opened some brochures stacked on the desk. “You can have a plaque sixteen by twenty-eight for a little over four hundred dollars. I think you'll find our prices competitive. But if you'd like the best, I'd suggest blue pearl granite. It's from Norway, and it's about one thousand dollars. Two hundred more for a custom job.”

He leafed through a few pages and said, “You see, I was talking to a man who buried his mother in the Palm Springs area last year in September. He described her monument to me. It was so very lovely, he said. The monument may have been made here. I must have one just like it.”

“We don't make our plaques here. We order them. What was the name of the client?”

“That is the problem. I do not know.”

“What was the name of the deceased?”

“I am afraid I do not know that either.”

“How can I tell you then?” She was one of those American women who had chewing gum in her mouth when she talked. She didn't chew it, but it was there, and she had to move it from side to side in order to speak. He had never found women in the U.S. to be particularly attractive.

“I know the exact date when he called to arrange for the monument,” he said. “It was on day thirteen of September.”

“Was the deceased buried at the memorial park in Cathedral City?”

“I do not know. I am sorry. I know very little, except that he ordered a tombstone for an old woman on that date. With orchids carved on it.”

“Orchids? It was a custom job then.”

“Yes, I believe that is so.”

“We can do an orchid or any other flower for you. We can order red stone, or green. Green can be quite lovely.”

“No, no, please,” he said. “I need a monument precisely the same as the one that was arranged on day thirteen of September of last year.”

“Just a minute,” she said, and picked up the telephone.

It frightened him, the sudden move to a telephone, but this time he didn't panic. He said to himself: What could she be doing? Only calling her boss, nothing more.

“Sam, come in here a minute, will ya?” she said into the telephone.

He pretended to be perusing the brochures until a man in coveralls entered through the Dutch door and said, “Yeah?”

He was a hard-working man. The fugitive had already learned that it was more comfortable to be around working people here than the other kind. This man had hands like those boys he'd met in the stand of tamarisk trees, those boys who had disobeyed him when he told them not to drive the stolen car. He'd read in the newspaper what had happened to them, but it was not his fault, they should have obeyed him. This man had hands like those hardworking boys.

“Sam,” the young woman said, “did you deliver a custom order last September for a …” She turned to the fugitive and said, “Was it imperial black or what?”

“I am sorry,” he said, with an apologetic shrug.

“Okay, coulda been marble, granite, bronze. Did you take any sort of custom job where the client wanted orchids on the plaque?”

“For an old woman,” the fugitive said.

“Lots of roses,” the man said.

“Orchids,” the fugitive said. “For an old woman.”

“What was her name?”

“We already been through that,” the young woman sighed. “He doesn't know.”

“Orchids? No, we didn't deliver no orchids.” Then he said, “A daisy. We delivered a daisy plaque for a little girl's funeral.”

The mansion was an elephantine dead-white stack of rectangles—a Frank Lloyd Wright ripoff that didn't work—but it was a short walk to downtown so the location was okay.

“You don't look so good,” Nelson said, when he arrived and Lynn answered the door in pajamas.

“I was gonna go home early but I ran into a manicurist I met once before in Breda's office. This time she didn't look at me like I was something that'd go tits-up if you found it in your underwear and covered it with blue ointment.”

“Did you do her?” Nelson asked, and the leer looked particularly silly on him.

“I hope not,” Lynn said. “Cause anyone that'd ball me'd ball
anybody
, and that's scary. But I'm prob'ly safe. In Zimbabwe when a chameleon crosses your path you become impotent. I think it's also true of Palm Springs lizards.”

“Come on, Lynn, take a cold shower and let's jam,” Nelson said. “I got some new ideas.”

When Lynn lurched past a huge gold-leafed mirror in the foyer of the massive house, he looked at his reflection and said, “I'm puffing up like a pigeon. I got MFB.”

“What's that?” Nelson asked.

“Massive fluid buildup. I'm horny enough to do the tailpipe of a Studebaker, but it's no use. My sex life's history!”

When they were out on the road in Nelson's Wrangler, with the desert wind in their faces and Lynn nursing a sick head, Nelson put in a tape. “I know you don't like country, but wait'll you hear
this
guy. It's Clint Black. Listen for the cryin harmonica.”

Lynn groaned and said, “Got any Furnace Room music? You know, Snookie Lanson's greatest hits?”

“That house you're livin in is the most fantastic place I ever seen,” Nelson said as he downshifted, causing Lynn to lurch forward painfully.

“Yeah, it's cozy, like the Kremlin, except the owner has the taste of a Manila pimp. I gotta line up another house-sitting job real soon or I'll be begging a bed from a rich Indian I did a favor for one time. He might take me in. He lets his horse sleep on the patio. I could maybe do his gardening, trade in my gun for a weed-eater. Except his goats do it better. They live on his tennis court.”

“How do ya get house-sittin jobs, anyways?”

“Used to be, it was easy. There was always some millionaire looking for a Palm Springs cop to sit his house for a few weeks or a few months. We provided very cheap security for rich guys. But like always, some cop screwed up the deal. One a the house-sitting gigs turned into Animal House Revisited—a party for about twenty cops and two thousand and twelve beauticians, cocktail waitresses and masseuses. The rich guy's dune buggy ended up in the swimming pool. When he got back from Aspen he had to be real careful with his swan dives and back flips. The word got out that cops're unreliable house-sitters.”

“You're right,” Nelson said with disgust, “there's always a cop that'll screw up the good things for all the others. Some stupid selfish
moron.
”

“That's what everybody called me all right,” Lynn said. “For the longest time.”

Breda opened her office very early and used the quiet time to write checks, both personal and business. She looked through the local paper to see if there was any appropriate office space for rent that she hadn't already called. There wasn't. She started to make coffee but decided she'd had her morning limit. The fact was, it was too damn early to be in the lonely office. Early birds and worms had nothing to do with her business. She was wondering if there were enough clients in Palm Springs for the number of P.I.'s.

Breda looked at her watch. Most physicians opened up at 9:00
A.M.
In that Clive Devon's urologist was either stonewalling or knew nothing, she decided to take a shot at his G.P.

The medical building wasn't far from Desert Hospital. In the days of Gable, Tracy, the Marx brothers, Garbo—in Palm Springs' golden age—the hospital had been the city's finest resort hotel, El Mirador.

The receptionist in the G.P.'s office wore a nameplate with only a first name, much like those worn by cocktail waitresses. And indeed she looked like a drink-wrangler. The nameplate read “Candy.”

“Good morning.” Breda was pleased that there was only one patient in the waiting area, an elderly man who had more than urinary problems; his face was alive with skin cancer.

“Yes?”

“I'd like to talk to Doctor Gladden. It's about my husband.”

“He's not with you?”

“No, he's not willing to come in yet,” Breda said quietly, glancing at the old man, who was busy reading
Palm Springs Life.

“Do you wanna make an appointment for him?”

“No … yes. I mean, I'd like to talk to the doctor. You see, I'd like him to take a semen sample.”

“A fertility check?”

“We're pretty sure he's okay in that regard,” Breda said. “Actually, we're considering in vitro fertilization with a surrogate. For now, we'd like to have my husband's sperm stored at whatever sperm bank you use.”

“Doctor Gladden's seventy-three years old,” Candy said. “He's semiretired and almost never takes a new patient. He's never done anything involving sperm banks in the two years that I been here.”

“Really? We have a friend, Clive Devon, who's a patient of Doctor Gladden. I thought he had it done here, the taking of the sample, the storage, all of it.”

“We haven't seen Mister Devon in over a year,” Candy said. “Doctor has very few patients these days. If Mister Devon's done something like that it musta been with another physician.” Then the young woman said doubtfully, “Are we talking about the same Mister Devon? He's getting on in years, the one we know. A sperm bank?”

The Range Rover cruised south on Palm Canyon Drive and just kept going, to the Indian canyons. Clive Devon was going into the reservation, he and the young woman's big brown dog.

Jack Graves wondered what he was doing with the woman's animal. She'd have to come back to get it, or maybe Clive Devon and she were going to meet up for a desert picnic like the one Lynn had described. Jack Graves hoped there'd be other cars by the Indians' toll booth, but there was only one vehicle on that narrow road. He decided to hang back and allow the Pace Arrow RV to pass, separating him from the black Range Rover. He paid $3.25 admission fee to a huge Indian woman sitting inside a wooden shack.

When the Range Rover got to the fork and turned right into Murray Canyon, Jack Graves stopped his Mazda and waited, letting a station wagon pass him. Then he too made the turn, staying behind the wagon. There were mostly four-wheel drives and station wagons in Murray Canyon that day, and Jack Graves counted at least fifteen hikers already up on the rocks and trails, so he felt safe when he pulled into the unpaved parking area with the other cars.

Jack Graves was wearing his hiking boots and a floppy hat. He'd brought a small canteen and a day-pack. He was ready to cover some ground but he didn't believe that Clive Devon would attempt a strenuous hike. Certainly not to Upper Palm Canyon Falls.

Jack hadn't seen those falls in several years, not since the drought. White water used to drop straight down in a serpentine, between gashes in the granite, and when the light hit the falls just right, the chunky rock glinted like quartz. Cactus and wildflowers shot out wherever the gashes were wide enough to trap sand and seed. Clumps of leaning yucca lined the granite rock face, lending the oasis effect that made it one of the most photographed sites in the valley. But that was before the five-year drought.

Upper Palm Canyon Falls had always been Jack Graves' favorite spot in all the world. He could stay forever, there by the falls, if such a thing were possible. That's what he'd always thought.

As soon as Clive Devon and the dog began walking, the animal started to bark and romped into a tiny patch of desert sunflowers, Indian yellow, interspersed with the violet-rose of the verbeña. Jack Graves watched through binoculars as Clive Devon whistled for the dog, obviously not wanting him to paw the ground like a young bull and destroy the lovely wildflowers. The flowers were very early, believing spring had arrived.

As soon as he'd offered the minor correction, Clive Devon knelt and roughed up the dog's ears and hugged him. Then they were off again, the man hiking briskly, the brown dog frolicking like a pup, bounding into the cold water of Andreas Creek, which meandered down from the mountains and passed through the palm-shrouded canyon oasis where the rocky cliffs jutted out at 45-degree angles. In past years, Jack Graves had spent hours picking out the profiles of people or the heads of animals in them, nature-carved.

He hiked into Andreas Canyon alongside a group of a dozen riders on horseback, men and women in western garb, two of them on the most beautiful Appaloosas he'd ever seen. There were many places of concealment within the tunnels of palm and rock that sheltered those canyons.

In the afternoon Clive Devon removed his day-pack and shared a picnic lunch with the dog. Using the pack as a pillow, the man reclined on the hillside with the dog's head on his chest and fed the dog tidbits from his hand. Jack Graves watched from the crest of a terra cotta hill of rock and sand, a hundred yards above them.

Then Jack Graves dug out a nest for himself behind a shelf of rock the color of iron ore, near some Neowashingtonia Filifera palms, seventy feet in height and up to two centuries old. The fan palms were native to the valley, and their presence assured that there was sufficient water either on the ground or close underneath.

He smelled sage, and saw bluebirds overhead, and several wax-wings carrying palm fruit. As he watched, a falcon hovered high, then dropped like a rock, swooping up just before crashing into the face of the cliff, snatching something from the crevices that no man could see.