Winter Tides (34 page)

“So what are you telling me?”

“There’s better product, you know what I mean?”

“Okay.”

“For another five hundred we can find cards with a longer life span.”

“How long?”

“Two or three weeks.”

“What’s the deal with that? What’s the difference?”

“The good cards come from old folks, say in a convalescent hospital. Or dead people. Whatever kind of people aren’t paying attention very hard. Nobody figures it out till the bill comes at the end of the month.”

“These come with some kind of guarantee, then? If they kill the card number in four days, I get some money back?”

“No guarantees, my friend. They’ll be good, though.”

“How much do you want? You know damned well that you’re nickel-and-diming me here. Why don’t you give me a total—one price for the whole package?”

“Twenty-eight hundred.”

“Fine. Twenty-eight hundred.”

“I need some details. What was the name of the hotel. The one you told me yesterday?”

“Huntington Towers. It’s on the Coast Highway south of Beach Boulevard. Six stories high, pink and green—you can’t miss it.”

“Listen, then. Here’s the drill, my friend. You put the cash in an envelope along with a passport photo and leave it for a Mr. Johnson. You got that?”

“Mr. Johnson.”

“Do it right away. Within the hour. Tomorrow morning you pick up the documents the same way.”

“What name do I use when I pick them up? I don’t want to use my own name at all, not around town here.”

“Call in the morning and we’ll tell you.” The phone was hung up then, and for a moment Edmund thought they’d been cut off. Then he realized that the conversation was simply over.

“Asshole,” Edmund said into the dead receiver. He hung up the phone.

Edmund looked at his watch. Anne still hadn’t come out of her apartment, although she was only a couple of minutes behind the schedule she’d kept for the last couple of days. Edmund was wearing his jogging togs, and he set out north now, jogging toward Olive Street, where he headed east for half a block before ducking into an alley and starting back down toward Walnut again. As he rounded the corner onto Main, he saw that Anne was crossing the street toward Starbucks. He spotted a break in traffic and jogged across, waving happily at her, as if he were surprised to see her. She smiled back at him, and waited while he caught up to her.

“Out jogging?” she said.

“Four miles every morning before work. Can I join you?”

She looked at him blankly for a moment before saying, “Yeah, sure. I’m just chasing a cup of coffee.”

“I need something cold. You want to grab a table? What do you want? A cappuccino? It’s on me.”

“Really, you don’t have to,” she said.

“It’s my pleasure, Anne.”

“Then just a simple coffee. Whatever they’ve got today.”

He went inside and ordered, watching her through the window. He had strong feelings about her this morning. She was clearly impressed with his physical fitness, with the jogging. Women were attracted to a package, to the whole picture, and anybody who said they weren’t was crazy. There wasn’t much room for improvement in his package, if he did say so himself: money, looks, health—he had all that wired. As for his artistic talent and his intellect, she’d know all about that if only she’d give him a chance here—which she would.

Her attraction to Dave had come very near to spoiling everything. He was so obviously beneath her. A woman worthy of Edmund Dalton wouldn’t descend to that level unless she had been fooled. And if she had been fooled, then he had to be fair. He had to give her a chance. He understood the Night Girl well enough, since he was largely responsible for her—for her shape, her passions, her being. He knew absolutely that he was the literally creative link between the Day Girl and the Night Girl. Without him, the Night Girl would not have come into existence at all, and Anne would have forever denied half of her being. But Anne herself, the Day Girl, was largely a mystery to him. She was a little bit like a sprightly, forward child, and it was only fair that he had to lead her a little bit—show her the way. Their drinks were up, and he brought Anne’s coffee and his own more healthful fruit drink outside and sat down.

“So how do you like work so far?” Edmund asked. “Everything satisfactory? Nobody bothering you?”

“I’m fine,” Anne said.

“Good. That’s good.” He sipped his drink and smiled at her. It occurred to him that her manner was a little brisk—which was rude, considering that he was her superior and that he’d just bought her a cup of coffee. He had gotten this same treatment at the gallery the other night. It didn’t become her. “I’ve got a little proposition for you,” he said, getting right down to the point.

She nodded at him, still not smiling quite enough to suit him.

“You remember when we talked about you and I going down to Mexico together? To Club Mex, near San Felipe?”

“
Together
?” she asked.

“Well, I think I mentioned it to you, yes. In the parking garage, in Laguna the other night.”

“You mentioned you were going to Mexico, I think, but I don’t remember that you asked me to go along.”

He smiled winningly at her. “Then I guess I’m asking you now.”

She started to say something, but he waved her quiet. “Wait,” he said. “Look at this.” He opened his belt pack and took out a pair of plane tickets and the Club Mex resort brochure. “I took a chance on you,” he said, pointing to her name on one of the tickets. “One thing that you don’t know about me is that I love the way fate works. Sometimes you just have to trust it.”

“You were carrying these around with you while you were jogging?”

Her tone sounded snide to him, but he didn’t let it get to him. “The travel agent’s down on Acacia Street,” he said. “I stopped by just now, then I headed back downtown on the off chance I’d see you. What do you say? Wait. Don’t say anything until you know what I’m talking about. Take a look at this.”

He opened the brochure onto the tabletop and gestured at the photos. Club Mex was a first-rate vacation spot—water sports, tennis, a four-star restaurant; the place had it all. “I’ve booked separate rooms, of course. I’m not suggesting anything out of line here.”

“I think it’s a little bit out of line to show me any of this,” she said.

He was baffled at first. “I’m not sure I understand,” he said.

“We hardly know each other, Edmund. You honestly don’t think I’d run off to Mexico with a man I don’t know?”

“Oh, I think we know each other better than you’re willing to admit.”

“I don’t follow you. We’ve talked with each other a total of about four times. I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but I guess I’m not that easy.”

“Well, let’s just say that I know something about you,
then, about … the darker side of your work. You won’t deny that there is one?”

“Deny it? What are you talking about? Why would I want to deny anything to you? You’ve made some kind of mistake, Edmund. I don’t know why you bought so many of my paintings, and I don’t know why you bought these plane tickets, but it’s all part of the same mistake. And it’s really got to stop right now.”

“I’m asking you to think about it, Anne. How is that a mistake? Listen to what I’m saying. I’m
very
much attracted to you, on an intellectual and artistic level.” He gestured at the brochure. “And I can certainly vouch for the quality of the resort.” He broadened his smile, although he wasn’t smiling at all inside. She was acting like he was asking her for some kind of favor. Here she was locked up in her goddamn Mary Poppins world of pretty pictures, obstinately letting the fire in her soul burn out. All he wanted to do was fan it back into flame. He knew the way to that fire, but she wouldn’t let him take her there. What the hell did she want from him? “Listen to me,” he said, lowering his voice and leaning forward. It was time to level with her. “What do you know about the astral plane?”

“Is that what you’re taking to Mexico?”

He stared at her, not quite comprehending … Then he knew that she was joking. He picked up the Club Mex brochure and held it out. He would give it one more try. “I’m talking about all expenses
paid
,” he said.

There was a long moment of silence. “Do I look like a prostitute to you, Edmund?” she asked finally.

“Whoa!” He held out his hands. “I didn’t say
that.”

“Of course you did. Really, this irritates the hell out of me. You have no right to make any assumptions about me at all. You wasted your money, Edmund, and you’re wasting your time. If I’m fired, tell me right now. I suppose that’s next.”

“Why should it be? Anne …” He shook his head helplessly. “On the surface we see this whole thing from such
different
points of view.”

“I guess we do.”

“But it’s
under
the surface that we’re so much alike.” He sat back and winked at her.

“Thanks for the coffee.” She stood up, turned around, and walked away up the street toward the Earl’s.

He watched her go. No way in hell was he going to chase her. He really wasn’t very surprised. She hadn’t rejected him—he knew that. She hadn’t understood him well enough to reject him. She was like a child rejecting some healthful food out of ignorance. She didn’t know anything about nutritional value. What surprised him about it was not that
she
didn’t measure up, because in his experience, people
never
really measured up. What surprised him was that he himself hadn’t read her better. He had overestimated her, and that was a bad mistake.

Still, what had he offered her? A resort vacation in the sun. Maybe
that
was his mistake. He had wanted to appeal to something deep within her, and instead he had tried to entice her with something superficial. He had attempted to play the game by her rules, by navigating in her world, instead of inviting her into his own….

He tore her plane ticket in two and dropped it into the trash. He had an intuitive suspicion that he might soon make good use of his own ticket, although he would have to save Club Mex for the fall. He wasn’t going there after all. Not now.

R
AY
M
IFFLIN PULLED INTO THE PARKING LOT AFTER A
three-hour lunch. He bought a newspaper off the stack in the liquor store, then walked down to Right Now Notary and let himself in. He flipped the clock sign around and stood for a moment looking out at the parking lot. All day
long cars pulled in and cars pulled out. Either they stopped for five minutes at the liquor store or for an hour at the Laundromat. Now and then a Mexican alien came into his office in order to wire money home. This time of year, that was about it. Today no one at all had come into the office. He might as well have stayed home. And now that he had the deal going with Dalton, working was turning into a farce, which made him nervous. Easy money always made him nervous, and it turned out that
really
easy money made him really nervous.

The day’s mail lay in a pile under the slot, and he bent over to pick it up. Beneath the mail, strangely, lay his driver’s license, face up. And a couple of feet away, as if it had bounced, lay his Mastercard.

Puzzled, he took his wallet out of his back pocket. Despite what he saw on the floor, he was vaguely surprised to find that they were missing from where he kept them in the wallet, slipped in with his Visa card in a leather slot. Had they slid out of the slot somehow? He couldn’t recall whether he’d had his wallet out of his pocket earlier in the day—perhaps when he was going out the door to lunch…. He was pretty sure he hadn’t. It was more likely that he had left them somewhere, and that some good Samaritan had run his address down, shoving the cards through the slot while he was gone to lunch. He tried to remember the last time he’d used them both, but he couldn’t. They might have been missing for a week, two weeks.

He was too tired today for mysteries. The good news was that he had gotten them back. Apparently there were still honest people in the world.

He opened the newspaper, leaned back in the swivel chair, and worked through the sports before he got onto the local news, where he found a quarter-column article about a murder—only the second murder in Laguna Beach this year. He read the article through without really paying much attention to it: a man’s body found on the bluffs north of Laguna Beach by two women on horseback. The victim had been decapitated after he had been shot. The police weren’t making it clear how. The corpse’s finger pointed toward an open Gideon’s Bible with an underlined passage.
There was a reference in the newspaper article to a satanic cult murder a decade past, but the police insisted that there was no real reason to believe this was any such thing.

Mifflin nearly stopped reading in disgust. He had no kind of fascination with cult murders, if that was what this was. They were evidence that the world was full of the worst kind of idiots, and that was about all. He read the last paragraph, though: the night, according to the police, had been densely foggy, and there were no reports of gunfire or suspicious activity. The victim hadn’t been identified, but given the condition of his clothes he was quite possibly a homeless man. There was a brief description of his faded yellow coat, a worn brown leisure suit….

His hands shaking now, Mifflin set the paper down on his desk and took out another cigarette. He picked up the paper and read the entire column again. The dead man was old Mayhew. It had to be. Mifflin slowly felt a general relief, which he was only momentarily ashamed of. If he were a good citizen, he would call the Laguna Beach police and identify the body, at least anonymously. But he wasn’t a good citizen—not any longer. He was up to his neck in fraud, and he was dangerously closely connected to the victim. It was a tough way for old Mayhew to check out, but all that aside, at least the man was no longer a threat.

Had
Dalton
killed him? The idea paralyzed him. Of course not. It was impossible. Mayhew was a pain in the neck, but he was cheap. You didn’t kill a man if you could buy him for a carton of cigarettes and a pint of Jack Daniels. And although Dalton was squirrelly as a hollow tree, he couldn’t be as stupid as
that
. Not with a million easy dollars in the picture. Not even if Mayhew had threatened him with real trouble. It just wasn’t worth it. And mutilating the body …