The Orange Curtain (18 page)

The old man shuffled very slowly, leading him out onto the airy screen porch where they settled side by side in decaying stuffed chairs. They looked out through the gnarled branches of a huge live oak at the opposite wall of the canyon 50 yards away, sumac and sagebrush and dry yellow grass. Shadows were scudding across the hillside to dot-dash the vegetation with light.

“I don’t get it,” Jack Liffey said.

The old man nodded. “Ray and me had a deal. I’d tell him about my cases and he’d write ’em up, but he got most of it pretty far wrong. I don’t mind too much, though. I know he had to fix things up to make up good stories.”

“So there really was a General Sternwood, say?”

He scowled. “The name was really Doheny, I got the job through a friend of Ray’s who knew the oil Dohenys. The name Sternwood is a little too literary for a rich old fart, don’t you think?”

“That’s one of my favorite books. What do you think of Bogart’s portrayal?”

He shrugged. “It’s all romanticized, of course. Who wouldn’t be flattered to have Bogart play him? But what burns my ass is Ray making me say things that are anti-colored and anti-Semite in the books. I was never those things. I
like
Jews. That was something that little British pansy picked up in his rotten private school in Dulwich.” He waved the unlighted cigarette around and pronounced it Dull-witch, maybe on purpose.

“Chandler wasn’t gay, and it’s DULL-ich.”

“You look close at the books.
His
Marlowe doesn’t like women a lot and he gushes way too much at a bare he-man chest or some such.”

“I never noticed.”

“
I
did. I kept complaining to that little fop, but he wouldn’t stop it. He had these big horn-rims, Ray, and always wore white gloves and a bow tie and carried a silver-top cane. Jesus. Always drunk as a skunk by noon, too. Reminds me, it’s early but can I get you a drink?”

“I’m not in a drinking period of my life.”

“Interesting. What do you do?”

Rain was finally beginning to come down outside, spatting on the screen and adding a twist of sage scent to the air.

“I find missing children.”

“Shit. You mean, you’re a
detective
.”

“Only in the loosest sense of the word. I don’t think I’m tough enough to bring off the real thing.”

Philip Marlowe laughed scornfully, and Jack Liffey noticed he was regularly checking his wristwatch.

“Are you expecting someone?”

“Aw, the hell with it.” He grabbed up a cheap butane lighter and lit his cigarette. He settled back and luxuriated in the first deep puff. “I get one every two hours. Doctor says they’ll kill me, but at 93, I say, let ’em try. There aren’t many other pleasures left to me. I’m like old Doheny sitting out in his greenhouse with his orchids.”

“Worrying about his wicked daughters.”

He grinned and closed his eyes. “Oh, they
were
wicked all right. I fucked both of them.”

Jack Liffey was shocked, despite himself. “And after the war, did you marry and move out to Palm Springs like that last thing Chandler was working on,
Poodle Springs
?”

“It didn’t take. She was rich and I always hated the rich like poison. Ray got that right.”

The rain roared for a moment, startling them both. Drops were actually leaping up off the broad sill of the screen windows and the noise on the thin roof was deafening. He smoked his cigarette about as far down as you could and seemed genuinely bereft when it finally ran out.

“I always loved the rain. It’s so powerful and important in Southern California when we finally do get it, like snow at Christmas. And it isn’t that pissant mist that barely gets you wet, like up north. Luckily I’m high above the creek.”

“How do you get up and down those steps?” Jack Liffey asked him.

“The lady who does my kitchen brings the groceries twice a week. I haven’t been out in 18 months, not even to the doctor.”

The second guy he’d met in Orange County who never left his house. He wondered if it was something in the air. “So you’re just retired here.”

“Yup. My ex let me have this house in her will when she died, and Social Security does the rest.”

“It must be a bore after your life.”

“Most of my life was a bore.”

“You didn’t like being a detective?”

He shrugged. “What did I know different? Like saying I wish I had different parents. I only know my whole life was a fight against dying of yawning. The Big Yawn, there’s a title for Ray.” He cranked his torso around to look at Jack Liffey, as if acknowledging his presence for the first time. “You get cold sweats about dying, don’t you?”

Jack Liffey nodded. “You, too?”

“Nope, but I can spot one a mile away. And don’t you go getting smug about lack of imagination neither. In my experience there’s two completely different types of guys. There’s the anxious types, like you, and long about age 50, if they aren’t stupid, they start breaking into a sweat when the thought of going
pffft
one day comes into their head. Right?”

Far away there was a grumble of thunder, like one of the gods horning in on the discussion.

“That about sums it up. And the other type?”

“We’re the depressives. Man, some days any life at all looks way too long. I’m 93 and I can’t wait for the Big Sleep. The Dirt Nap. The Underground Vacation.”

“You said two types of guys. Does it hold for women, too?”

“I never understood women. Ray was pretty true about that. Liked ’em, but never understood ’em.”

“I’ve gotta get back on the job. Any advice you can give me from your experience as a detective?”

He yawned. “I’d tell you where to get a good single-malt cheap, but you’re not a drinking man.”

“Nope.”

“Then I’ll tell you what I miss from the fifties. It’s not practical advice, like how to find a skip-trace or keeping a gun on your ankle, but it’s what I’ve been thinking about recently, with all this sense of
economy
and husbanding and prudence we got up to our ears today. I miss the sense of waste we were so full of back then.”

“Waste?”

“Tail fins and ten miles per gallon and throwing stuff away and endless possibilities and no need to worry about spoiling something because there’s more of it right around the corner. You can’t have a feeling of real abundance in your life without a glory of waste. I think what did me in was getting used to that feeling and getting to need it.”

For two hours he’d sat there on the chenille bedspread that he’d thrown over the soiled sofa, completely oblivious to the thundering downpour that came and went like a series of long freight trains past the house. His mind was churning out an elaborate and foolproof way to rearrange the furniture, move the old Chinese screen in from the corner, plus subtly adjusting the curtains so he could creep his way around the house without being seen from any of the unfortunate curtain openings that had been left all over the place. It was a comfort getting deep into all the things you could control to make a secure world around you, like the way he had built a fort out of sofa cushions when he was little, over and over to perfect it. He knew he couldn’t change the curtains much without revealing he was inside, and then, all of a sudden, he realized he couldn’t move the furniture much either. It was all wasted scheming. He’d missed a crucial point by rushing immediately into The Plan, as he did so often. The man had almost certainly peered in the front window and presumably knew the lay of the room.

And once Billy Gudger realized that, he knew he couldn’t risk leaving all the frozen foods on the floor of the service porch, either, right across from the big white freezer chest. The man hadn’t looked in the back window, but he might next time and the stacks of thawing peas and rump roasts and TV dinners just didn’t belong on the floor. Billy Gudger had yanked them all out of the chest late at night to make room for it. Now he went and stuffed the sodden cartons and cello packets into two big kitchen trash bags, and dragged them into the shower stall in the bathroom and shut them in.

Getting
it
into the chest had been a major job. Using all his strength, he had just been able to drag it into the service porch on a throw rug, but then the problems had begun. Half way up, the great weight had defeated him, and he’d had to hurry outside, the chilly drizzle surprising him, to get the jack out of his VW and work out a complex apparatus of ropes and leverage to lift it over the lip of the freezer into the cavity that was sending out waves of cool mist. So there he’d been, for a good half hour, with the thing stranded in space half way into the chest, trussed up by ropes and half its weight propped on a chair, in plain sight for anyone who came to the back door and peered in the gauze curtain. The potential for disaster had grown so great he could hardly bear it, and he had no idea why but he had developed a throbbing erection that only went away after the lid of the freezer was safely slammed down.

His planning wasn’t a complete waste. He saw that there was one safe and commanding place he could wait, out of sight of all the windows and curtain peepers, right next to the six-foot long stub wall between the kitchen and dining room. He brought a kitchen chair to the spot, and then a comfortable pillow and a glass of water. He made two sandwiches and set them on a carton that he took from under the sink and nudged right against the wall. Then he put his pistol on the box and an extra clip of the brass-nosed cartridges, the top one winking seductively at him where it protruded from the clip. Finally he had a brainstorm and went into the chest in the palmreading room and dug out the old plastic periscope.

She had kept a lot of toys in there to entertain the children of clients, a firetruck, Parcheesi game, wooden building blocks, a ratty teddy bear with one button eye missing, even an old deck of Tarot cards secured by a fat rubber band. He looked around the palmreading room with the periscope, sighing because this room would have been the perfect hideaway, cut off from the house by the hanging tapestry with sun, moon and stars on it, if only she hadn’t left the window curtain wide open to the outside world. He came back to his sanctum and set the periscope on the floor beside the stub wall so the top part just peeked toward the back door. He could lie on his stomach, right against the wall, and see anyone at the back without being seen.

By my Bufonites or Toad-stone I intend not that shining polish’d stone, but a certain reddish liver colour’d real stone.

—Robert Plot,
The Natural History of Oxfordshire
(1677)

He settled in to wait, munching on one of the Velveeta sandwiches. One finger idly tapped the nose of the brass 9mm cartridge. He knew the man would come back.

The old wipers shrieked a bit at each slow push but they did manage to squeegee the drizzle aside. He thought about Philip Marlowe’s cranky musings about waste and abundance as he drove down out of Silverado Canyon. He doubted that much of the profligacy had gone out of the culture since the ’50s, maybe just all that naive glorying in it. The waste had become embedded in so much that was even worse, the narcissism of 5,000-square-foot houses for childless couples and the swagger of big top-heavy four-wheel-drive assault vehicles that never left city streets. Of course, he thought, it was easy to resent big expensive vehicles when all you could afford was a beat-up old AMC Concord.

He emerged from the canyon into a suburban tract, then a business street of fast food, real estate offices, and nail salons with cute names that might have been in any urban outskirts in America. No one walked by on his hands, and no one waved a plastic sword at the traffic. He found he missed the casual insanity of L.A., the chance that at any moment you might see two men in a zebra-suit clip-clopping along for no apparent reason. At one point in his life all that phantasmagoria had unnerved him a little, but now, it was as if his psyche had nothing much left to lose.

When he got back to the big neon palm sign, the bungalow behind it looked unchanged, and the black VW still waited at the curb, its cloth top glistening with wet. The rain was no more than a sprinkle now, just keeping things damp and leaving the streets hissy. He looked toward the front door as he walked up the driveway. There was still the little wrinkle he’d kicked up in the thin welcome mat. It was a trick he used to use at his condo during a particularly paranoid time to see if anyone had dropped by to jimmy the door while he was away. Nobody had come in or out the front door of the bungalow.

He tried the little cottage out back again, but there was no answer, and then he clomped up the four steps to the wooden stoop at the back door. White paint peeled away from the door in little tongues and eyebrows. He knocked, waited, knocked again and then shielded his eyes and peered into a gloomy utility porch with a freezer chest on one side and a vintage washer and drier on the other, separated by what looked like worn green linoleum that mimicked terrazzo. There was a small kitchen just beyond, even deeper in the murk. He thought he heard something, but then he had an inspiration.

“Billy, it’s Jack Liffey. If you’re in, I’d love to have a talk with you.”

He let his voice die away and listened. There were those who said you could sense a presence in a house if you listened hard enough, but that was just the sort of hogwash the palm reader in there would have peddled. He felt the boy was inside, hiding out, but it was just an intuition, not a real sensation of any kind.

“I was fascinated by what you said about the toadstone. Could we talk about it? Let’s be friends.”

His voice sounded thin and ineffectual, bounding back from the window. Listening hard for a response, he found there were plenty of noises issuing, and they had a strange presence, the way they do in crisp wet air, and there was a sensation of impending event, too, as if something startling was about to happen. A cricket chirruped in the yard. Somewhere not far away a dog was barking, single yelps over and over like a finger pressing on a bruise, and, farther away, traffic grumbled. At the back of the lot, just beyond a grapestake fence, a stand of tall bamboo creaked in the breeze.