Death Claims (6 page)

"Well, don't cook," Dave said. "I'm seventy-five miles away and I've still got a man to see here. Will you drive up? El Molino. There must be a good restaurant. I'll phone Madge. She'll know." 

"Ask her to join you," Doug said. "She's closer. It's a hell of a drive from here, Dave, and it's the worst time of day for traffic." He didn't mind traffic.' He lived to drive that red Ferrari of his and he drove it the way Szeryng played the violin. "And I'm tired, and my hand hurts." 

"I'm sorry," Dave said. "Did you see a doctor?" 

"Yes. It's elegantly stitched. It still hurts. I'll see you when you get here. All right?" 

"Tomorrow," Dave said. "I'll phone you in the morning." He hung up. He hadn't known he was going to say that. Or had he? He felt hollow. Since last November, when they'd met at the sudden end of a policy-holder's heartbeats in a sand-flea beachtown roominghouse, they hadn't slept apart. This would be the first night. Did he feel bad about that? If so, why? He waited a few seconds for an answer. It didn't come. But the hollowness didn't go. It began to hurt. 

He fed the phone a dime and dialed Madge. 

The place was called The Hound and Hawk. Thatch roof, white plaster, half-timbering outside, fumed-oak rafters and paneling inside. Leaded windows. Flamelight from logs in a huge fireplace glinted on the silver, crystal, white linen of stillvacant tables, and reflected ruddy in the polished broad-board floor he crossed to a short set of warped oak steps that climbed to a door marked TAPROOM. Torchlight, hanging rows of pewter mugs, taps bunged into oaken cask ends, a barmaid out of Holbein, frill-capped, buxom, rosy-cheeked. From somewhere a trickle of Morris Dance music, lute, hautboy, tabor. He hoped Madge would hurry. He had a low tolerance for sham. 

He ordered Glenlivet with water on the side and put it away fast, dodging thoughts of Doug. And a second. And was working on a third when she stood beside him, tugging off driving gloves, unpegging her duffel coat, shaking back her wind-blown hair, boy-cropped, gray. He caught the tang of sea air when she hiked her long, fine bones onto the stool next to his. She gave him her good smile. It had been good for him for twenty-odd years. Dependable, real. He wished it was all he needed. He gave the smile back bleakly. 

She pushed the gloves into a pocket, told the girl, "Margarita, thanks," and laid a lean, freckled hand on Dave's. "You look tired." 

"Repeated encounters with nice, normal, everyday people who kill each other for money," he said, "can wear a man down after a couple of decades." 

She winced for him. "Again? Who, this time?" 

"A loving son, a not-so-loving wife, a pretty young mistress, a business partnern
—
he dug out cigarettes, lit one for her, one for himself
—
"or none of the above." His fingers turned the stubby glass in its circle of wet on the bar top. Blinking through smoke, he watched them. "If I knew, I'd leave word with the management here that they've got the wrong Elizabeth and go home." 

"Home?" She cocked an eyebrow. "I thought you asked on the phone to stay over with me. You'd driven all over Southern California today and you were whipped." 

The ashtray was thick pewter stamped with a coat of arms. Hound and hooded hawk. He tapped his cigarette on it. 

She said, "I suppose you're aware that's never happened before." 

He shrugged. "I'm not as young as I once was." 

"It's not that. You'd have driven from Tierra del Fuego to get back to Rod at night. And it's not your work you're tired of, either. If you'll permit me an educated guess, it's Doug. Am I wrong?" 

He drank and gave the flame-shadowed room a long, skeptical look. "I know you've never led me astray, but can the food here really be eaten?" 

"Trust me." Her drink came, creamy, the rim of the stem glass frosty with salt. She tasted it, nodded approval, set it down with a delicate click and touched his hand again. "Talk about it, Davey." 

He glanced at her and away. "
You
talk about it." 

"Ah? Ready for an opinion now, are we?" 

His laugh was short and wry. "You've had one prepared for some time." 

"From the minute I met him. I thought I'd been masterfully deceptive about it. You knew?" 

"That day at the raceway. The two of you with your heads together. The Ferrari owner, the Porsche owner. All that chat about Formula A versus Formula One, three litres versus five litres, V-eights versus flat twelves . . ." 

New Year's it had been. Hard blue sky. Two-mile stretch of clean white grandstand. Flat black drag strip. Cars like toy-shop sharks, hammerheads. Crawling on squat tires. Then rawthroated engine roar. Track a jagged slash through new green landscaping. Along it McLarens, Lolas, BRMs screaming, snarling, skidding. For the inside, the front, the money. Average speed maybe ninety. Top speed maybe twice ninety. And off to the north, indifferent-brown mountains. Afterward, Doug, eyes shining, down in the clean concrete pit where the French team drank and laughed. Madge with him, very gay. Dave outside, above, hands jammed into car-coat pockets, shoulders hunched against wind that wrapped torn programs around his legs
—
watching, thoughtful. 

"It was a little too real. Sure, you enjoyed it. But not that much. And not that way. You don't enjoy things that way. Doug didn't know, but I knew." 

"Mmm." She had a mouthful of tequila, lemon, salt. She shook her head, swallowed. "No, no. You mustn't think I don't like him. I do. That makes it sadder." 

"Than what?" 

A hand touched his shoulder. He turned. A silver-haired man smiled deferentially. He wore a robe of brown velvet, ankle length, open down the front, gold-edged, with hanging sleeves.
Am an attendant lord
, Dave thought,
one that will do to swell a progress
. . . . 

"The dining room is beginning to fill, sir. May I reserve a table for you and the lady?" 

"Thank you." Dave slid a bill from his wallet and folded it in the man's hand. "Not too near the fire, please. And can you leave us a menu?" 

He did. It was folio size, the parchment cover stamped with the shield, the hound, the hawk, in crusty gilt. He dug out his reading glasses, let the bows fall open, slipped them on, opened the menu and turned it so the torchlight flickered on the lists. Crude blackletter type. Quaint spelling. 

"No four-and-twenty blackbirds?" he wondered. 

"Steak-and-kidney pie." Madge pointed it out.
Steke & Kydney Pye
was how the hired scholar had rendered it. "It's beyond belief." 

"Like the rest of the place." Dave dropped the menu, clicked the glasses shut, pushed them away. "Hungry?" And when she nodded, he stubbed out his cigarette, laid bills on the bar, got down from his stool and handed Madge off hers. "Send another margarita to our table, please." 

"Another Glenlivet for you, sir?" The barmaid's accent was Hollywood Cockney. 

"Thanks." He nodded and moved with Madge to the crooked steps again and down to where the firelight now had human faces to ruddy. The waiters were playing-card characters from
Alice in Wonderland
. Belted, open-sided tunics, green velvet, hound and hawk stitched in gold on the back. Yellow tights, a riband at the knee. Loose shirts with puffed white sleeves. They looked embarrassed. Dave wondered if their wives laughed at them. Their kids wouldn't
—
not kids these days. The problem would be to keep the kids from expropriating. Especially the slouchy yellow velveteen caps. Their waiter was missing his. Dave bet it was at a drive-in movie right now, a basketball game, a taco stand. After their drinks had arrived and he'd ordered and spoken to the cellarer
—
in a robe like the host's, only wine red, of course
—
he lit cigarettes for himself and Madge and asked her: 

"Why did you wait till now?" 

"Because you're the giver of wise counsel. Remember me? Twenty wrong choices in as many years. I never had anything but questions. You had answers." 

"I've run out. I'm ready for yours." 

"He looks like Rod. That was all there was to it. I was shocked you'd be so simple." 

"He's a good human being. He's a grownup." 

"That was always your formula for me." Her smile, her headshake were rueful. "I never followed it." 

"Until Sylvia." Miss Levy was plain and thirty-five, a college librarian, nothing like the handsome, coltish boy-girls Madge
—
a clever and successful designer, not of her life, but of textiles and wall-coverings
—
had pursued from one calamity to the next through a wreckage of years. None of them had been worth her time, certainly not her grief. Most had simply used her. It had pained Dave to witness. "How is Sylvia?" 

"Wonderful." Madge glowed. "It was good advice, Davey, even if it did take two decades of disaster to make me accept it. I'm grateful." 

He shrugged. "Other people's problems are easy." 

"All right. Let me try at yours." She tasted the margarita, set it down, looked grave. "Yes, he's a good human being. Yes, he's a grownup. As are you. But when you found each other, you were both in deep trouble. Not used to loneliness. Not able to cope. You'd had Rod. All your adult life. He'd had Jean-Paul. He's shown me photographs of Jean-Paul.'' In magazines, newspapers, souvenir programs, French, English, Italian, yellowing at the edges. Dave knew them. In a cardboard carton in a closet. More than once he'd started to throw them out. Madge said, "He was underweight, with beautiful square shoulders. Like you." She reached across to brush the fall of straight hair off his forehead. He liked her touch, cool, dry. "Blond like you, blue-eyed." She took the hand back and her smile regretted. "It couldn't have been a sadder coincidence." 

"People have to look like somebody," he said. 

She frowned, picked up her glass, studied him across its circle of salt. "Why don't you want to go home and sleep with him tonight?" 

"For the same reason he didn't want to come up here and have dinner with me.'' 

She nodded, tasted the drink, set it down. "Because he can't be Rod. Because you can't be Jean-Paul." 

"I guess we both figured it out about the same time." With a finger he turned the little block of ice in his glass and watched the straw-yellow whiskey curl around it. "Not very quick. Not very bright." 

"You could try loving each other. Under your real identities. You're both worth loving." 

"You've told me. Who's going to tell him?" 

"You are. Tonight. When you get home." 

"Home?" he said. "Where's that?"

A
VERY SMALL
girl opened the door. It was a heavy door and it took her backward with it a few steps before she remembered to let the knob go. Her yellow flannel sleepers were printed with drawings of the comic-strip dog Snoopy. A rubber band tugged her taffy hair into a topknot, but some strands had got away and were damp. She was rosy from scrubbing. She clutched a plastic duck. 

"I had my bath," she said. "Now Daddy's going to read to me about snakes." 

"That sounds like fun," Dave said. 

Back of her, in a long sunken living room where gentle lamplight glowed on glossy new Mediterranean furniture, a pair of older children, six, eight, sat on deep gold wall-to-wall carpet and watched television. Winchesters crackled. Orange Indians tumbled from purple horses. A young woman came between him and the action. She wore splashed denims, but starchy white was what she was used to. She moved like a nurse. She was blonde as the child, her eyes were Delft blue like the child's
—
but not childish. Armed. 

"Dr. De Kalb," Dave said. 

"He doesn't see patients at home." One hand eased the child backward, the other began to close the door. "If you'll call the office tomorrow morning and make an appointment
—
" 

"I'm not a patient. I'm from Medallion Life." 

"Thank you." Her smile flicked on and flicked off. "We have all the insurance we need." 

"The death-claims division," Dave said. "It's about a former patient of his. A man who drowned." 

"Oh?" She frowned, but she stopped moving the door. She turned and spoke into the room. "Phil?" 

The chair De Kalb unfolded from faced the television set, but he hadn't been watching. He'd been reading. The book was in his hand. Gray and heavy. A medical text. He kept a finger in it as he came to the door. He looked young, but he walked old, a stoop to his shoulders. He was tall and lanky, a towhead like his wife and kids. His eyes were Delft too but hidden under a bony thrust of brow. His ears stuck out. They didn't look adaptable to a stethoscope. 

"Thanks," he told his wife, and she gave him a smile that was brief but real and led the little girl away, and he asked Dave, "What's the problem?" 

Dave gave him a card. "It's about John Oats." 

"Ah." De Kalb winced and shook his head. "That was tragic, damn it." He stepped back. "Come in." 

The room he led Dave to was down steps and out of range of the television gunshots. Desk and coffee table were deal. Easy chair and couch were tawny corduroy. The walls were knotty pine and crowded with glittering sports trophies on wooden brackets, sports photographs in frames. A few were team pictures
—
baseball, basketball. But most were of De Kalb solo. Younger but unmistakable. Head thrown back, muscles strained like wires, face twisted in agony, chest snapping a track-meet tape. Leaping straight as an exclamation point to slam back a high drive on a tennis court, packed bleachers in the background. Jackknifed in mid-air over a tourney swimming pool. No wonder he walked old. He laid the book on the desk, dropped into the easy chair, nodded at the couch. 

"I don't understand it," he said. "John was doing just fine. Considering the extent and severity of his burns, he'd come back very well. No sign of liver dysfunction, which is what you really fear in these cases. He was a happy man the last time I saw him. Why would he kill himself?" 

"Did he?" Dave sat and lit a cigarette. "The coroner's jury called it accident." 

"Hah. They never swam with him." De Kalb stretched a long arm, rattled open a drawer of the desk, brought out an ashtray. "Scars and all, he could outlast me."