Hush Money (12 page)

Like a bomb, I said. Yes, but the slow-ticking kind, the kind that never goes off but throbs dully in your brain and leaves that cold sickish tightness in your guts. I sat there holding it on the white couch, leafing back and forth through the pages, trying to put two and two together and coming up with two hundred. I could see why no father would want a last testament like that circulating—it certainly wouldn't do much for his public image—but was it enough to send people chasing after each other for? Some of them with guns and at least one dead because of it? Maybe so, I never having been a father, that I know of, but the brand of sensitivity Twink Beydon had shown me was strictly of the Arrid Extra Dry variety. As far as the Diehls went, assuming they'd had a falling out with Twink, what use could they have made of it? Whereas rather than trying to hit them up, any corner-drugstore shakedown artist with a little intelligence would have peddled it to the nearest newspaper or magazine.

This last idea crossed my mind more than once, and it wasn't respect for the dead which sent it out the other end, but something more valuable.

Like twelve handwritten pages. Twelve, not two hundred. Twelve sheets that could have been torn from the notebooks. A Karen Beydon sampler? Some pages had been torn out, you could tell it from the paper shreds still stuck inside the spirals, and except for an account of the Winnemucca adventure, her grand tour in the drugstore-on-wheels was missing entirely.

Could have been.

Or was it the other way around? Were the two hundred pages a sampler for the twelve, did the twelve tell why Karen Beydon died, and was I being set up as the agent for the purchaser? Because who besides George S. Curie III and his client would have known that I'd been “relieved of my duties”?

The phone rang.

My stomach jumped like a frog. Normally, once it's rung three times the biddy at the answering service takes over, and normally I let her. But this time I had one of those weird gut intuitions that the next person I talked to was going to be the one.

It was Freddy Schwartz.

“I've been trying to get you all morning,” he grumbled at me. “Since when do you work Sundays?”

I didn't answer.

“Whatsamatter Cage, where's the repartee? Cat got your tongue? Hello? Are you there, Cage?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I'm here.”

He had some news for me all right, but he wouldn't let me have it till he'd worked me over a little. He must've been sober because when he's not, which is mostly, he takes what comes his way, no complaints so long as it's wet. But finally he got to the point. As far as his information went, the Diehl brothers were financially solvent and then some, but the Diehl Corporation was percolating again. Word was they were fishing for capital, only it wasn't the brothers who were making the waves. It was Twink Beydon, none other. He'd been to the banks already that week, and then just the day before one of the paper's stringers had picked up his trail out in Palm Springs. He was closeted with oil and they were still closeted, Twink Beydon and some half dozen of the biggest goo-peddlers this side of the Sheik of Araby. And the reason, though it was more speculation than fact, wasn't that the Diehl Corporation was bobsledding toward bankruptcy but that the timetable for Diehl City was going to be accelerated.

“Why?” I asked Freddy Schwartz.

“I thought you were going to tell me,” he said. “You seem to have a different angle.”

“I've got no angle,” I said.

He started to whine then, like the jew he was. He said there was supposed to be a quid pro quo between us, but so far it had been all quo. He said he wasn't used to working one-way streets, he was a trader. He said so far all he'd gotten out of me were a lot of promises, and it was time I cashed some of them in. Etcetera. Etcetera.

Maybe I figured I was going to need every friend I had, even Freddy Schwartz. At any rate, he was the first investment I made for Cage & Cage out of the capital accumulated that last week, and not the worst either. It would be enough to keep him in booze till Yom Kippur, if he lasted that long, and with what was left over he could plant some trees in Israel.

He had nothing for me on the other questions I'd put to him. I told him to keep listening. I asked him if he'd heard anything about an aztec who'd been gunned down under peculiar circumstances a few nights before, and he said he hadn't, that it didn't sound like much of a story. I guess it wasn't, because I never found an obit for Garcia in the
Times
, not even back in the squash section.

No sooner did I hang up than the phone rang again. It was the biddy from the answering service. While I was on, another call had come through.

“It was another one of your lady friends,” she said. She had a way of saying “lady friends” that made it sound as though I was running a hundred-dollar-a-shot call girl racket.

“Her name wasn't Karen by any chance, was it?”

“Who? Oh that one! No, she hasn't called in three, four days. This was another one. She didn't leave her name. She sounded funny, I don't know …”

“What d'you mean, funny?”

“Funny? I don't know.
Funny
, y'know what I mean? She said it was terribly important she talk to you. She said it was about something she'd sent you, she wouldn't say what. She said she'd call back sometime. But if it was that important, why didn't she leave her name and number? And when I asked her, do you know what she did? She burst out laughing! Now what was so funny about that, I ask you?”

I told the biddy to keep listening too. If it wasn't Karen calling from the grave, suddenly I had a pretty good idea who it had been, and I figured I'd better wait it out in case she really did call back.

So I sat there. I read Karen, and I read the
Times
. I thought, and I caught a few minutes of the Dodgers on TV. Sutton was pitching. I never could see Sutton. Then I read some more of Karen, and to settle my stomach I grilled myself a steak, with some scrambled eggs and hashed browns on the side and a pint of Bass Ale to wash it down.

The way I had it pegged turned out to be part right and part wrong, but I got to see another Santa Monica sunset before the phone rang again.

11

For a bad minute I was reminded of the one time in my life I'd talked across the Pacific. You could hear the waves in her voice like it was going up and down with the sea, and I kept waiting for the operator to say, “Deposit ten million yen for the next three minutes please.” Finally I figured out that she was the one who was making the waves, not the connection. In fact the connection was good, good enough to make out music in the background, and if I hadn't recognized her I'd have thought I'd freaked out altogether. Because it was a hymn of some kind, a hymn, and voices were singing it, and behind the voices was something that sounded like an organ.

But Sister Robin Fletcher was the one who was freaked out. Whatever she was on, it sent her up and down like a yo-yo. One minute she was flying and the next crying, then laughing her head off, then cooing at me in some weird imitation of a Marilyn Monroe, then climbing up one side of me and down the other because, she said, I was no better than the rest, then telling me I'd better come get her because she couldn't stand it any more. In between she had some coherent moments, but then the train slipped off the tracks again and went careening across the alfalfa.

“Hey sweet baby,” she said for openers, “is that you, darlin' Cage? You get the package?”

“Yeah, I got it. Did you deliver it?”

“Friend of mine,” she said. “Hey what'd you think of the poems?

“Twink twike tweek twuck,” she said, “huis throughout. And now you want the rest of it, honh? You'd like the letter too, wouldn't you, you greedy little baby. Greedy little monster. You gre-heedy littu monster …”

“Well let me tell you something, Buster,” she said, and her voice jumped about an octave, “what makes you think you're the only one? D'you think you're the only one?”

“No,” I said, “I don't think so.”

“He doesn't think so,” she said. “He doesn't think so. Well let me tell you something baby, there's a line around the block about a mile long waitin' to get it, did you know that? An' y'know what they're waitin' for? They're waitin' for Mommy, that's who.

“It's a long mother,” she said, singsonging it. “Oh it's lo-o-ong, like it's real lo-o-o-o-ong …”

“So how'm I supposed to get you up close to the titties? They're only two, Brother, two poor littu boobies, poor Mommy Robin's babies, hey did I ever tell you what their names were? Tell you what I'll do honey, jus' for you,” and her voice went real low, “I'll give you a little suckie right now, right now.

“Here,” she said. “Have a little. Here's Karen.”

And she started to giggle.

I could hear the hymn behind her.

I tried to play it straight.

“Listen Robin,” I said. “I don't know what the hell you're talking about, but I've got it and I've read it. So what's missing? A letter?”

“A letter? Hey listen to him now! A
letter
?”

The giggle went wild like a crow baying at the moon, and she started cussing me for being so dumb they ought to make me a guard at Disneyland, or such a smartass like I hadn't read it right there, something about a letter, Nancy's letter, it rang a bell but I couldn't think what, she had it all right, at least she used to, she said, and then her voice got caught in a trough between the waves and I tried to ask her who had it, did Ford have it? But that set her off again, tripping about poor baby Andy Ford, poor baby Andy Ford this and poor baby Andy Ford that, poor baby Andy Ford had gone running off with the goodies and nobody would catch him, not even Robin, but poor baby Andy Ford didn't have the biggest goodie of all did he?, so why didn't he come back, Andy Ford, she'd make it nice for him again, it'd be grand, he ought to know. And before I realized it, it wasn't me she was talking to any more, it was him head-on, the blond young stud on the surfboard, the traveling pharmacist, and she was laying it all out for him, Robin Fletcher on a platter, wailing for him, aching for him, like a torch song nobody was meant to hear, not even him, and even if the record was cracked, her voice too, it almost made me blush to listen in.

Then I could hear the hymn again.

“Cage? Are you still there Cage?”

I said I was.

“You gotta get me out of here,” she said. Now her voice was flat, low. Robin's voice. “You gotta spring me, sweet baby. Come and get me Jesus, I can't stand it any more. There's some kind of terrible shit coming down on me. Whatever you want, but you better come fast. Like I'm stoned, Brother, I'm zonked, can you tell?” A little giggle, then: “Jesus God, oh I'm so stoned on Jesus God. I'm gonna crash, Cage, I can tell. It's a trap, honey, it's a big bear honey trap, it's like four walls and a roof, it's like …”

“Hey Cage,” she said, like she was waking up, “you ever been locked up in stir when they won't let you out?”

It sounded real enough, and then she started to sob and that sounded real too. I said I'd come get her. I said I'd come as fast as I could drive but she had to tell me where she was. I told her to try to get a hold of herself long enough to tell me where she was.

It was the wrong thing to say.

“Try to get a hold of myself!” she started in. “Oh and wouldn't you like to know, my darlin' man? Wouldn't you like to know? You and how many others?
Everybody
wants what Sister Robin's got, didn't I tell you? Like Brother Pablo wanted it so I gave him some of it, but then I took it back, and Brother Andy wanted it so I gave him some of it, but then I took it back, and Brother Tito …”

I could hear her suck air, hesitate, then let it out again.

“… but he couldn't have it, could he? And you want it too, sweet baby, and I'd give it all to you, honest to Jesus I would, only you'd give it away, wouldn't you? So how could I take it back? 'Cause Brother Pablo wants it again, and now Brother Fitz wants it, Brother Phil, Brother Pete wants it,” and she started laughing and rattling the names off so fast like the disc jockey back home who used to end up his request list saying, “and-for-all-the - gang-down-at-Eddie's - All-Night-Esso Station.” Then she started to croon about somebody called Brother Pablo, it was a torch song like the first only cornier, it took me back too, years back, when I used to overhear my sister talking on the phone to some other number, comparing the swordsmen in their class at school, those endless conversations that went nowhere, and I tried to get across to her that I wasn't working for Twink Beydon any more, that I wasn't working for anybody, but by then she'd started yelling into the phone that nobody was going to get it, nobody except her Sweet Lord Jesus, she was saving it for Him, and I was thinking doubletime that the equation had changed, that all my equations had changed in a hurry, and trying so hard to break the parentheses out of the parentheses that I all but missed what came next.

She was yelling. She was yelling at
me
all right, yelling her crazy fool head off.

“I saw it, Cage!” she shouted. “Like I was there! Sweet Jesus God, I was
there
! I watched her go! Nobody pushed her! She went out on her own, an' I was too zonked to stop her!”

There was more of it, more before and more after till the cackle took over again, that godawful sound that started out a giggle and ended up like all the old crones of the world listening to Flip Wilson, with the crows and the geese and the banshees joining in. But maybe there's something like a telephone high, else I was listening too hard, because my brains started spilling over in every direction.

Like:

Nobody had seen her fall, and it might have taken a couple of minutes for them to find her, and at that the law would have taken at least five to get there, more like fifteen—plenty of time anyway for somebody to ride the elevator down and walk out, somebody so familiar that nobody would have noticed, somebody so zonked that all she knew to do was run. But the law had her alibi, didn't they? Wasn't it established that she'd been nowhere around? And they'd checked it out, hadn't they, down to the last comma, with a bunch of depositions behind it thick enough to send Sister Robin all the way to the finals of Miss Clean America? Well, but the law's been known to fuck up before, and to cover up where they've fucked up. Suppose Robin Fletcher had baked a cake for the law and suppose the law had swallowed it whole? Because the law had been all over 708, hadn't they, and come up with nothing more interesting than a drawerful of pantyhose to add to their collection? Nothing, say, like the two spiral university notebooks which happened to be staring back at me right then from my coffee table? Nothing like whatever it was Sister Robin had been lending out and taking back?