Hugger Mugger (17 page)

A
T SEVEN
-
FIFTEEN THE
next morning, we walked down Powell Street in the glow of the early light off the Bay, to meet Sherry Lark for breakfast in a restaurant that called itself Sears Fine Foods, a little up from Union Square. I loved Sears Fine Foods. Their name overrated their cuisine a little, but every time I was in San Francisco I tried to eat there because, in tone and food, it transported me to my childhood. I thought that all good restaurants were like Sears until I began eating out with Susan Silverman. By seven-thirty we were in a booth, with coffee, waiting for Sherry.

Susan put her sunglasses up on her head when we sat down. She had on a black short-sleeved blouse and white pants, and a little black choker necklace. Her throat was strong. Her arms were slim and strong. I knew her thighs to be firm. She sat beside me, leaving the opposite side for Sherry.

Hippies are not slaves to the clock. Sherry arrived at
eight-fifteen. We had already drunk two cups of coffee, and the waitress had begun to hover around us with the menus. Sherry's gray-blond hair was twisted into a single braid that hung to her waist. She wore a folded red bandana as a headband, and what looked like an ankle-length, tie-dyed T-shirt. It was unfortunately apparent that she was braless. I stood up as she approached the booth.

“Sherry Lark,” I said. “Susan Silverman.”

They said hello and Sherry slid into the booth across from us. I sat down.

“Thank you for coming,” I said.

“If it's about my girls, I'm always there,” Sherry said.

The waitress pounced on us with the menus. We were quiet while we looked. I ordered scrambled eggs with onions. Susan ordered a bagel, no butter, no cream cheese. Sherry ordered waffles. Susan was watching her with a pleasant expression, but I knew her well. The pleasant expression meant she was registering that Sherry had no makeup, no bra, no socks, remarking that Sherry was wearing a long T-shirt and sandals. Susan was already sensing how seriously Sherry took herself, and smiling inwardly. The waitress brought Sherry herbal tea, and freshened up Susan's coffee and mine.

I said to Sherry, “Odd things are going on in Lamarr.”

“Lamarr is odd,” she said. “Stifling to the spirit.”

“How so?” I said.

“All that rampant machismo, all that rancorous capitalism.”

“Of course,” I said.

“You know that the two are really mirror images of each other,” Sherry said.

“Machismo and capitalism,” I said.

“Absolutely. You're a man, you probably don't understand it.”

She turned to Susan. “But you do.”

“Yes,” Susan said. “Naturally. Money is power, and power is all men ever care about.”

Sherry nodded, approving of Susan's intelligence. She put a hand out and patted Susan's forearm.

“And they don't even know it.”

Susan looked at me and I could see something glinting in her eyes.

“Duh!” she said.

“Lucky I have you,” I said.

“It certainly is,” Susan said.

“When's the last time you talked to one of your daughters?” I said to Sherry.

“Well, of course I talked with all of them at the funeral,” she said. “And I talked with Penny about two weeks afterwards.”

“About what?” I said.

“We . . .”

The food came and we were silent while the waitress distributed it. Sherry got right to her waffles. When she stopped to breathe, I said, “We . . . ?”

“Excuse me?”

“You started to say what you and Penny spoke of two weeks after the funeral.”

“Oh, yes. Well, can you believe it? Walter left me without a dime.”

“No,” I said.

Susan still had the glint in her eye as she broke off a small piece of bagel and popped it into her mouth.

“I told Penny that I thought that wasn't right. I made him a home, and gave him three lovely daughters. I felt I deserved better.”

“And Penny?”

Sherry chomped some more of her waffles. I wondered if she'd had a good meal lately.

“Penny has always been cold,” Sherry said.

“Really,” I said.

“Like her father,” Sherry said. “I'm the imaginative one. The artistic one. I'm the one whose soul has wings. Penny is very . . . earthbound. Since she was a small child. She has always known what she wanted and has always done what was necessary to get what she wanted.”

“She's practical,” Susan said.

“Oh, hideously,” Sherry said. “So practical. So material. So . . . masculine.”

Susan nodded thoughtfully. I knew Sherry was annoying Susan. But I was the only one who knew her well enough to tell.

“You get along with Penny?” I said.

“Of course—she's my daughter.”

Susan blinked once. I knew this meant more than it seemed to.

“But she's not sympathetic to your needs in this case,” I said.

“Oh God no,” Sherry said. “Penny is not the sympathetic sort.”

“How about the other girls?”

“Stonie and SueSue are much more like their mother.”

“Sensitive, artistic, free-spirited?” I said.

“Exactly.”

“Did you know that they have separated from their husbands?”

“Both of them?”

“Yes.”

Sherry chewed her last bite of waffle for a time, and swallowed, and turned her attention to the herbal tea.

“Well,” she said finally, “they weren't much as husbands go, either one of them.”

“All three of your daughters seem to have withdrawn,” I said. “They don't go out, and people are prevented from visiting.”

“Solitude can be very healing,” she said.

“You think it's grief?”

“Their father provided for them very well.”

“Do you have any theories why both Stonie and SueSue separated from their husbands at this time?”

“As I said, they weren't first-rate husbands.”

“They never were,” I said. “Why now?”

“Perhaps Walter's death.”

“How so?”

“Well, now that Walter's gone, Penny is in charge.”

“And?”

“And she's always been a puritan.”

“You think she forced the separation?”

“Even as a little girl she was full of disapproval.”

I nodded.

“I was supposed to clean and cook and sew dresses,” Sherry said. “As if I could reshape my soul to her childish materialism.”

“You think she could have forced her sisters to give up their husbands?”

“I don't think her sisters would have fought very hard,” Sherry said.

She signaled the waitress, and ordered two Danish pastries.

“They didn't love their husbands?”

“They married to please their father,” she said, and took a large bite from one of her Danish. “They married men their father approved of, men he could control.”

“How come Penny hasn't married?”

“She's young. And frankly, I think she frightens men. Men like pliant women. I find men are often frightened of me.”

“You're not pliant,” I said.

“No. I am fiercely committed to beauty, to poetry, to painting, to a kind of spiritual commingling that often threatens men.”

“If Susan weren't here, I'd be a little edgy,” I said.

Sherry smiled at me.

“Irony is so masculine,” she said. “Isn't it, Susan?”

“So,” Susan said.

She still had half a bagel to go. Sherry polished off the rest of her second Danish.

“Is it possible that Dolly Hartman had an affair with your husband twenty-something years ago?”

“The whore? Certainly she's capable of it, but twenty years ago? No, Walter and I were very close at that
time. The girls were small, Walter was not yet the big success he became. No, we were a happy little family then.”

“Dolly claims that she did.”

“Well, she didn't.”

I saw nowhere to go with that.

“What do you know about Jon Delroy?” I said.

“Very little. Jon was on the business side of things. I never paid any attention to the business side of things.”

“Do you know how long he worked for Three Fillies?”

“Oh, I don't know. He was there before I left.”

“How long have you been gone?”

“Nine years.”

“And what was his job?”

“God, I don't know,” Sherry said. “He was always around with his storm troopers. So tight. So shiny. So controlled. So anal-retentive. So full of violence.”

I looked at Susan. She was studying the row of people sitting at the counter across the room. “Are you still with the guitar player?” I said.

“I'm not with anyone,” she said. “Freedom is best pursued alone.”

The waitress came by and put the bill down on the table.

“Whenever you're ready,” she said.

I had been ready since Sherry Lark sat down, but I'd come all the way to San Francisco to talk with her. I made a final stab.

“Do you have any thoughts on who might have killed Walter?”

“I don't think of death. It's very negative energy. I'm sorry, but I prefer to give my full energies to life.”

I nodded. Susan was still studying the counter, though I thought I could see the corner of her mouth twitch. I picked up the bill and looked at it.

“Would it be rancorous capitalism if I paid this?” I said.

“We both know if you didn't you'd feel threatened,” Sherry said.

I paid. We left.

“Y
OUR INSECURITY WAS
pathetically obvious,” Susan said when we were alone walking up Powell Street. “The way you grabbed that check.”

“I feared emasculation,” I said.

“And had you waited for her to pick it up,” Susan said, “we'd have grown old together sitting there in the booth.”

“You have any thoughts?” I said.

“Based on an hour of observation?”

“This isn't a clinical situation,” I said. “We have to make do.”

“I have no thoughts,” Susan said, “but I can give you some guesses.”

“Guesses are good.”

“Well, she's not as stupid as she seems. Brief hints of intelligence slip through the hippie mumbo jumbo.”

“Not many,” I said.

“No. I didn't say she was brilliant. And mostly she
recycles things she's heard. But it is not uncommon, for instance, for fathers to encourage their daughters to marry men against whom the fathers can compete successfully. She may have simply heard it said, but she understood it enough to apply it to her husband.”

“If it's true,” I said.

“I told you these are guesses.”

“What else?” I said.

I was trying to breathe normally, as if the climb up Powell Street were easy. And I checked Susan closely. Her breathing seemed perfectly easy. Of course, I was carrying eighty or ninety pounds more than she was. And I'd been shot several times in my life. That takes its toll.

“She's full of anger.”

“At?”

“At her husband, at men, at Penny, at a world where she is marginalized, and probably at the guitar player who dumped her.”

“Can I believe what she says about Penny?”

“No way to know,” Susan said. “Her anger may be accurate, and well founded, or it may be a feeling she needs to have for other reasons.”

“Do you think she loves poetry and beauty and peace and flower power?”

“I think she hates being ordinary,” Susan said.

“You think she loves her daughters?”

“She left them when the youngest was, how old?”

“Fifteen.”

“And she moved to the other side of the continent and she sees them rarely.”

“So if she does love them, it's not a compelling emotion.”

“No.”

“And the money she didn't inherit?”

“It would have helped her to be not ordinary.”

“It will support her daughters,” I said.

“One thing you can count on,” Susan said, “and this is an observation, not a guess: Whatever it is, it's about Sherry.”

“All of it,” I said.

“Every last bit.”

“I'm more confused than before I talked with her,” I said.

“And you came all the way out here to do it.”

“Well, you came out too.”

“Every dark cloud,” Susan said.

We reached California Street. Susan paused for a moment.

“I'm willing to give in first,” she said.

“You need to rest a little?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Thank God,” I said.

We stood on the corner watching people get on and off the cable cars. We were in the heart of Nob Hill hotel chic. The Stanford Court was behind us, the Fairmont across the street. Up a little past the Stanford Court was the Mark Hopkins, where one could still get a drink at the Top of the Mark. In the distance, the Bay was everywhere, creating the ambient luminescence of an impressionist painting. It imparted a nearly romantic glow to litter in the streets and the frequent shabbiness
of the buildings. Behind us, below Union Square and along Market Street, there were so many street people, and they were so intrusive, that I didn't want Susan to walk around alone. . . . Being Susan, of course, she walked around alone anyway, in the great light.

“What's confusing you most?” Susan said.

“There's so much conflicting testimony from so many unreliable witnesses.”

To the right, down California Street a little ways, was Chinatown, with its pagoda'd entrance, everything a Chinatown should be. And way down, on the flat, was downtown, which was everything a downtown should be. Even when no cable cars were in sight, the hum of the cable in the street was a kind of white noise as we talked.

“And yet there are some things which seem clear when I listen to you talk about it.”

“Like it's clear that I don't know what I'm doing?”

“Like everything changed after the father's death.”

“Maybe it was naturally, so to speak, the way it is now, and he prevented it.”

“Or maybe someone else has stepped into his place and reshaped it,” Susan said. “Either way, he was the power and now he isn't. So who is?”

“A number of different people say Penny, and they say so in pretty much the same terms.”

“As Sherry,” Susan said.

“Yes.”

“As an outside observer, let me suggest that there is one thing which hasn't changed.”

“Suggest away,” I said.

“The security company.”

“Security South,” I said. “Jon Delroy. You like him for it, don't you?”

“He was there when the father was alive. He is there now,” Susan said.

“Pud suggested that Delroy and Penny were involved sexually.”

“What do you think?”

“At the time I thought it was preposterous. She's adorable. I was kind of offended.”

“And now?”

“Now . . . well, we only know what we know. Delroy's still there, and several people say that Penny has the power.”

“Life is full of heartbreak,” Susan said.

“Luckily I have a fallback position,” I said.

“You certainly know how to turn a girl's head with your slick talk,” Susan said.

“The truth of the matter is,” I said, “you are my position. Everything else in life is fallback.”

Susan smiled and bumped her head once against my shoulder.

“You okay to walk down to the hotel now, old fella?” she said.

“Wait a minute, you were the one wanted to tarry awhile.”

“Pity,” Susan said. “I took pity on you.”

We began to walk downhill on California Street, toward Stockton.

“We don't have to leave until tomorrow. What would you like to do the rest of the day?”

“I don't know, what would you like to do?”

I smiled.

“Oh,” Susan said. “That.”

I smiled some more.

“Afterwards can we shop?”

“Sure,” I said. “If you're not too tired.”

“I'm never too tired to exercise my rancorous capitalism.”

“Nor I to display my rampant machismo,” I said.

“A match made in heaven,” Susan said.

We turned right on Stockton Street and went into the hotel.

S
USAN AND
I had hugged for an extended period at San Francisco Airport, before she got on a plane to Boston and I flew off to Georgia. Now, looking for my car in the Atlanta airport, I imagined that I could still smell her perfume and maybe taste her lipstick. Missing her was a tangible experience. I was already homesick for her, and by the time I retrieved my car and drove down to Lamarr I was quite sad, for a man of my native ebullience. I sang a little to cheer myself up, but “I'll hurry home to you, Lamarr, Georgia” didn't have quite the right ring.

It was hot even at night, and by the time I walked from my car to the hotel, my shirt was soaked with sweat. I made a drink in my room, and sat on the bed and sipped it, and thought about Susan. I had another drink, and when it was done, I rinsed out the glass, put away the bottle, took a shower and went to bed, and lay
awake for a long time. In the morning, after breakfast, I got a call from Martin Quirk.

“Jon Delroy,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“FBI has no record of him ever working for them.”

“Ah hah,” I said.

“Ah hah?”

“It's a detective expression,” I said.

“Oh, no wonder I was confused,” Quirk said. “Then I ran him past the Marine Corps. They have a Jonathan Delroy killed on Guadalcanal. They have Jon Delroy, a lance corporal, currently on active duty. They have a Jon Michael Delroy, discharged 1958.”

“My guy's around forty,” I said.

“That's all the Delroys they got,” Quirk said.

“Ah hah, ah hah,” I said.

“That's what I thought,” Quirk said.

I hung up from Quirk and called Dr. Klein. The woman who answered said he would call me back. I said no, that doctors did not have a good track record on calling back promptly and I would prefer to stop by. She asked if it was an emergency. I said yes, but not a medical emergency. That confused her so deeply that I was transferred to the doctor's nurse. After a lot more give-and-go with the nurse, I got an agreement that he would see me after hospital rounds and before his first patient. But only for a moment. The doctor was very busy. She recommended I get there by ten.

I did. At eleven-fifteen Klein came out of his office and grinned at me, and jerked his thumb to come in.

“So, you got by the guardians,” he said.

“Barely.”

“They're very zealous.”

“Me too,” I said.

“What can I do for you?”

“Tell me when the results of Walter Clive's DNA tests came back,” I said.

“That's all you want?”

“Yep.”

“I could have told you that on the phone.”

“And when would you have called me?”

“Certainly before the end of the month,” Klein said.

He pushed a button on his phone.

“Margie? Bring me Walter Clive's file, please,” Klein said into the speakerphone. Then he looked at me and said, “I've been keeping it handy until I figured out how to resolve the questions about his DNA results.”

“I'm going to help you with that,” I said.

Margie came in with the folder. She looked at me with the same deep confusion she'd displayed on the phone and then went back to her post. Klein thumbed through the folder and stopped and looked at one of the papers in it.

“I got the test results on May twentieth,” he said.

“How soon did you notify Clive?”

“Same day.”

“Are you sure you're a real doctor?” I said.

“I called him at once,” Klein said. “I remember it because it was so unusual.”

“So he knew the results on the twentieth.”

“Yes.”

“He's the only one you told?”

“Yes.”

“Could anyone else have known?”

“He could have told someone.”

“But nobody at the lab or in your office?”

“No. He used a pseudonym. I've told you all this before.”

“If the pseudonymous report was in his file, how hard would it be to figure out whose it was?”

“It wasn't in his file,” Klein said. “I kept it, along with Dolly's results and Jason's, in a sealed envelope in my locked desk until long after he was dead.”

“Do you remember when he died?”

“Couple months ago.”

“He was killed on May twenty-second,” I said.

Klein sat back in his chair. On the wall behind him was a framed color photo of three small boys grouped around a pretty woman in a big hat. Next to it was his medical degree.

“Jesus Christ!” Klein said.

W
HEN
I
PULLED
back into the parking lot behind my motel, a smallish black man in a baseball cap got out of a smallish Toyota pickup truck and walked toward me.

“Mr. Spenser,” he said. “Billy Rice, Hugger Mugger's groom.”

“I remember,” I said. “How is the old Hug?”

“Doing good,” Billy said. He looked a little covert. “Can we talk in your room?”

“Sure,” I said.

We went up the stairs and along the balcony to my room. Billy stayed inside me near the wall. The room was made up. The air-conditioning was on high, and it was cool. Billy looked somewhat less unhappy when we had the door closed behind us.

“You mind locking it?” he said.