Dark Blonde (4 page)

“Decorating for their new vacation home up north on Lake Michigan. Listen
 
—
 
there are things I don’t feel like disclosing, private family things. Please stick to finding Gail.”

“I’ll try. If my nose gets too long just slap it for me. I only appear heartless. I ask a lot of questions to a lot of people not knowing how any of the answers might link up. Think of it as the curse of a private eye. You’re hiring an eye. Eyes look, they poke around, turn over rocks to look, ask too many personal questions and have a morbid fascination for dirt, some of which, strangely enough, can clean things up. Believe me, it’s not as glamorous as you see on television. Tedious, low pay and an occasional knot on the head. Every now and then someone like Miss Mathews brightens up my day. Even better, every now and then a nice leggy brunette turns out to be a blonde. Sometimes they don’t even ask about this scar.”

She began a weak smile but it was only a beginning smile with no place to go. It slipped off her face and a smirk dropped by. “I don’t mind the scar. Anything else?”

“Did she seem worried lately? Moody, different in any way?”

Her eyes darted over my shoulder while I talked, like her thoughts raced ahead again, or maybe she wanted another drink. “No, things were fine. We were going to work on Henry’s campaign this week, designing the set for the television debate. She was very excited to be involved. She didn’t like my having veto over her ideas, but that’s nothing new.”

“All right. I’ll take your case and see what I can do. That is, if you’ll have another Murphy’s with me.”

She nodded and I flagged little Ponytail who scooted over like a twenty-dollar tip waited with an ice cream sundae and free tickets to
American Bandstand
. She scooted off again and we sat exchanging smoldering looks until the drinks came. Julia teased her Murphy’s down with ginger ale. I downed mine in one motion. Something like admiration passed through her eyes and left them sadder and empty again, fixed upon her glass. Her magnet eyes did most of the work for her face. They were easy to stare at and easy to compliment. So I did.

“You have interesting eyes, Mrs. Gateswood, it should be illegal to have eyes that large, even though it makes them easier to read. I can see why you won Miss Midwest. Maybe those gold flecks dancing around in slate-blue pools said the right things to the judges. Why do I get the idea you’re not leveling with me, leaving things out?”

Julia kept sipping and peering at me over her glass. Her smirk stiffened. “As you say, it’s the way a private investigator often feels. But let’s skip that, also as you say. You don’t need to cozy up to me. I’m having a drink and hiring you, this isn’t a date. I’m a married woman. I’ve given you the basic information you need to get started. If you need more please call me at my private number. If you get a lead on Gail, call me at any hour. Any hour.”

“You left out the ‘happily’ that women usually include when they tell a man they’re married. Of course it can be pro forma whether happy or not, but it’s telling when left out.”

She glared at me then relaxed back against the cushions, threw the rest of her shot between those full red lips, gave out a little chirp of a laugh and said evenly, again in that breathless way, “We each got what we wanted. I’m not complaining.” There was more forming in that head of hers and I waited for it but it didn’t come. I had a feeling under the right circumstances it would. I had another feeling that I’d like it when it did.

“I’d like to get a key to Gail’s place and look around if you don’t mind. The five hundred will cover things for ten days. If I locate your sister before then, I’ll expect the balance as a bonus. If she shows on her own I’ll deduct fifty per day. Expenses extra. You’ll get an itemized list of those. Usually, this is where I qualify a client to see how they expect to pay, see if they can pay, not everyone can. I guess we can skip that part. A private investigator hollering for payment right before an election isn’t the sort of press I’d guess you’d want. I already know enough about your family to fill a few pages in the National Enquirer.”

“There’s no need to insult me Mister Angel, or to threaten me. What’s more, I don’t appreciate your tone. This is strictly business.” She dug in her handbag, pulled out a key ring, snapped off one key and handed it to me, all the while boring in with narrowed eyes.

“Forgive me mother for I have sinned. My tone often grates on people. It’s something I’m working on, humming scales in long cold showers. It’s my ambition to someday have perfect pitch, the right tone for rich, demanding, drop-dead-gorgeous customers like yourself. The right tone can’t be wasted on just anyone. Now, if you’d rather hire another investigator, one with a nice tone, perhaps I can recommend a few. There’s a pastor I know with a great calming manner who occasionally does missing persons.”

The wall around Julia Gateswood was hard, high and cold, even though it sometimes rolled down suddenly and unexpectedly. I was betting even she didn’t know when that might happen. I’d pushed her; her eyes said she didn’t resent it as much as she acted so. Politics is a dirty hard business; she was up to her neck in it, and it wouldn’t take more than a few years to cement the wall in place. Strange, but she didn’t strike me as one of the new Peace Corps types, all wide-eyed idealistic about the power of government to fix man’s basic nature, which was the sort of bosh Henry Gateswood was trying to sell to the masses. Government
was
man’s basic nature, the whole slimy sewer of it.

Not all fashion has to do with tail fins or hemlines; the fashionable JFK bandwagon, with its talk about bearing any burden and paying any price was merely a lead-in to dishing out the same old graft to rob from the rich and give to the down-and-out, including those who choose to be down-and-out. Of course, I could be wrong, but the current noisy political hoopla sweeping the country almost made a guy miss those sleepy I-Like-Ike years.

If anything, Julia played the cold-driven realist of the old order, someone who’d put on any disguise to reach her ends, or her husband’s. Was she the avaricious, power-hungry queen who would walk over any corpse to get what she wanted, or a manipulated Nebraska beauty, over her head with powerful people and sending me secret signals for help? To discern which would require a different sort of investigation than she’d hired me for. Either way there was fire between us, the kind of fire that meant I had to go slow. Given gasoline and sparks one didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to see what was coming. Maybe I wasn’t smart enough to say no, though I should have after that first meeting.

“You’d never make it in politics,” she said, gathering her things together.

“A blessing for me.”

She stood and looked down at the key in my hand and said: “I went to Gail’s last night to see if she’d been there. Nothing was out of place. Her bed hadn’t been slept in. I feel something’s terribly wrong. Please let me know if you find out anything.”

She turned. I watched her hips beat music across the floor to the ladies’ room and did the easy mental work of undressing her again. I put my coat on and stopped at the front entrance. Julia’d walked off like she was finished with me, but it was dark now and raining so I felt I should walk her to her car. I also wanted to take one more look at her; call her Julia instead of Mrs. Gateswood, discover how blonde locks might reflect in those eyes.

In a few minutes she came out, still wearing the wig. When she saw me both eyebrows went up, and stayed up when I held the door open for her.

“Is there anything else you need?” she asked like she was excusing her butler.

“A few, but I’ll save them for next time. I’ll walk you to your car.”

She’d parked across the road in the parking lot of a closed nursery. Powder blue Mercedes 300 SL, one of those fancy jobs with doors that flip up like a sardine can. She got in and didn’t seem to mind that her skirt hiked up revealing plenty of white thigh. She made no move to hike it back down.

I hung through the open door and fed my eyes. She liked carnal looks and kept her thighs open. The wig peeled off. As a blonde she would turn all the male heads in a crowd, big heads and little heads alike. There were at least ten shades of honey and ash and even a few platinum streaks that blended like a Tchaikovski concerto. I enjoyed the tune.

My head buzzed. Maybe it was the accumulated Murphy’s. I tried not to drool, but a little editor with a hard on scurried about in my brain searching for the right words to cap the evening, or maybe extend it. He finally collapsed with the weight of sophomoric phrases, all having to do with undressing her and the fun we might have later. Where was suave when I needed it?

“You mind if I stop by your office for that Vegas info tomorrow, Julia? I’d rather not put Miss Mathews through another osculation lesson. She might accuse me of rape the next time she decides to taste me.”

“Call me.”

Julia started the engine and reached to my hand in the open window. She wasn’t in a hurry to remove it. She lolled her head back against the seat rest, her face a delicious dusky glow, her blonde hair framing it too fully and invitingly, so that her face looked smaller than it should have. Her lips parted and she smiled at a nice angle. This smile was straight from Nebraska and finished all the way, her front teeth dim little angels in the dark. The engine purred politely, waiting as we held the moment, a moment that seemed to whisper clichés about destiny, the sort that makes me put down a sappy novel.

Her eyes gleamed dark hazel now, reflecting gold from the car’s dash. If I’d ever known what to say to a goddess, I’d forgotten. She said it for me:

“If I hadn’t just hired you…”

The window slid up, easing my hand out. She didn’t look back as the car drifted out into the street, the glowing tail lights sinking into the night, leaving me to wonder just what, just exactly what would be if she hadn’t just hired me, and knowing that the most meaningful thing to say to a goddess would always begin with “if.”

The next afternoon I drove to Gail Gorovoy’s bungalow, a squat stucco house at the end of a long walkway, tucked between two courtyard apartments on Englewood at Ashland Avenue. The apartments were shabby but the house looked well maintained except for overgrown junipers that hid the Spanish charm. If the address hadn’t been on a lamppost near the walk’s entrance, I might still be looking.

A bright blue tricycle was overturned in the middle of the yard with some toy dishes arranged for a tea party next to it. Julia hadn’t said anything about kids. Maybe they were from the courtyard apartments next door, or maybe Gail was into babysitting.

Dead plants in massive glazed pots stood sentry at the door. Cigarette butts stuck out of the dirt in them, a few with faded traces of lipstick. The curtained door was one of those all glass panel jobs that sat well into a curved frame. When I stuck the key in the lock and turned the doorknob, also glass, the sheers inside fluttered a bulge through the window panel next to my hand. The glass had been broken out and the door was unlocked. I checked behind me and walked to each end of the sheltered porch.

My scar was a searing flame with needles in it. I stopped and backed away, looking around the perimeter of the place. The side yards were empty. I stopped and listened. Nothing. I felt like asking Dad if this was a false alarm, because my scar sometimes acted up without his warning. I whispered his name, asking if the place was empty. Nothing.

Then I stepped inside the house and met a stale trace of marijuana mixed with cheap perfume. The air hung dead like the house had been shut up for a year. Two lonely coat hangers and some dust bunnies inside the entryway cloak closet. Fingers of light through the front door fell across objects littering the floor.

I groped to the right where the light switch should be and flipped two switches. Lights went on in the dining room to the right. Furniture had been upturned, drawers sat emptied in piles in the living room floor, books scattered to the walls. The place had been ransacked. In the bedrooms the mattress had been turned off the bed and torn lengthwise. Bureau drawers were heaped on the box springs. Except for a few pairs of shoes, some white cotton socks and a black garter belt, no clothes. The Goddess’s sister had taken enough clothes for a trip to Europe. The bathroom scene was similar: medicine cabinet door open, sink full of bottles with their caps off and contents dumped. The kitchen was a similar candidate for “before pictures” to Good Housekeeping.

Be extremely careful. Pull your weapon and go slow!

Dad’s warning. Someone must be in the house.

I moved through the kitchen to a door that looked like it led out to the back yard. I say looked like because when I reached for the knob a movement came from my left just behind the refrigerator. Dimly at the edge of my vision I saw a blurred arm connected to a fist and whatever was at the end of that fist kicked me full on the back of my brain, just as I heard Dad say
Watch out!
Too late, Pop. I sailed through a pitch-black tunnel with a fiery frame that exploded into nothingness.

Shrill hollers of a child came from somewhere beyond the darkness, somewhere behind me in the blinding light, somewhere behind the room that was too small for my head. The wailing became persistent. Traffic sounds drifted around the voice and the drone of an airplane that sounded like it would land on the roof seemed to come from a football field from the back of my skull. A foot kicked the bottom of my shoe, kept kicking, not hard but sending jolts up my body to both ends of my brain. Parents don’t teach kids how to behave nowadays. This one never learned not to kick a man when he’s down.

I wobbled to my knees and tried to see my feet. Spots jumped before my eyes on a murky field of purple and red. I blinked twice and saw the silhouette of a three-foot person with a big head blocking the light from the dining room. The back of my skull trapped a gorilla inside banging to get out. At least the wailing had stopped, but now it said “mister, mister” about a hundred times and all I could do was grunt.

The footsteps ran away out the front and the silhouette was gone and so was the voice. I flopped to a sitting position against the refrigerator where someone had hidden between the back door frame. I sat there shuffling and rearranging the past twenty-four hours until all the pieces fit. Mostly. Inside my jacket I felt the reassuring cold grip of my Browning-Colt .45 automatic. My wallet was intact and didn’t look like it had been rifled. Whoever slugged me had been in a rush to get away, and didn’t care who I was or if I carried a piece or a wad of cash.

I crawled to the sink, pulled myself up on wobbly legs. Blood raced from my eyes to other more important places, trying to satisfy every limb that screamed deficit. I gripped the counter and turned on the faucet, hanging my head under the stream. I had a lump the size of Texas behind my left ear, a swollen mound that pulsed electricity up and down my spine like a neurotic flamenco dancer on speed. The water ran cold and colder.

After awhile the little feet returned with a pair of big feet, the boy’s mother, a neighbor from the courtyard apartments who was nice enough to make me an ice bag and show me where the end of my head was. She hadn’t seen or heard anything and knew Gail only enough to say hello and goodbye. Gail often let her boy play in the yard, the only lawn on the street. I thanked the kind neighbor but felt like smacking the kid, who was at that age that wants to know why to every answered question.

The telephone was working so I dialed Julia’s number.

“Someone’s visited your sister’s place since you were here, and left a little mess. Can you get here right away?”

“If it’s more information you need, I have what you asked for. Could Miss Mathews deliver it?” The thought of Miss Efficiency made my head pound harder. I winced, trying to put together just the right swear words. Before I could insist that she come, she said: “And what do you mean a little mess?”

“They’ve torn the place apart. Be here in fifteen minutes and don’t send Bird Legs if you want to keep me on the case.”

I hung up.