People Like Us (55 page)

“Well, good-bye,” she said, rising at the end of the visit.

“We’re allowed to kiss,” said Elias.

“Oh, yes, of course.” She smiled. As he leaned toward her, she averted her face a fraction of an inch so that his kiss landed on the side of her mouth rather than full on her lips, like a son at boarding school saying good-bye to a departing mother. Elias understood. Each avoided the other’s eye. For a few moments they simply stood there.

“I read in Dolly’s column that Loelia married Mickie,” said Elias, wanting to forestall her departure.

Ruby nodded. “I read that,” she answered.

“What do they call her now, Loelia Minardos?”

“Apparently.”

“Don’t sound so snappy as Loelia Manchester.”

“I suppose not.”

“You don’t see Loelia?”

“No.”

Elias nodded. “I wonder if she paid Ned all that money he was asking.”

“No,” said Ruby.

“How come?”

“Ned would never have taken money from Loelia. It was just to keep her from marrying Mickie that he asked for all that money. Now he doesn’t care.”

“How do you know?”

“That’s what I heard.”

Lord Biedermeier visited Elias in prison and reported at a dinner party later that same evening, at Maisie Verdurin’s house, that Elias had wept when he talked
about the divorce. Feelings against Elias still ran high, and the consensus was that Ruby Renthal had done the correct thing.

“Ruby just dropped out of sight,” said Maude Hoare. “I don’t know a soul who sees her.”

“Poor Ruby,” said Aline Royceton.

“But why in the world did you go to visit Elias?” asked Maisie.

“Oh, I was always fond of Elias,” replied Lord Biedermeier.

Lord Biedermeier did not say to the group at his table that he was hopeful of securing a second book from Elias, on the prison life of a billionaire, even promising him someone willing to make weekly visits to Allenwood to ghost-write it for him.

“A sort of
De Profundis
,” Lord Biedermeier had said to Elias in the visitors’ room, shifting his position to see him better through the mesh screening that separated them.

“A sort of what?” asked Elias.

“
De Profundis. De Profundis
,” Lord Biedermeier said, clapping his hands in mock exasperation, as if everyone in prison would know about Oscar Wilde’s final prose written during his incarceration. “Listen to this, Elias,” he said, quoting, loosely, from Wilde’s letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, that Lord Biedermeier had jotted down on the back of an envelope in the limousine on his way to the prison in Pennsylvania. “ ‘I have disgraced my name eternally.’ ” Lord Biedermeier gestured toward Elias to show that he, too, had disgraced his name eternally. “ ‘I have made it a low byword among low people. I have dragged it through the very mire, and turned it into a synonym for folly.’ You see Elias, you could change folly to greed.”

But Elias Renthal, whose name had indeed become a synonym for greed, could not think of
De Profundis
that day. Elias Renthal could only think that he had lost Ruby Renthal forever. He could only look blankly at Lord Biedermeier.

“Keep a journal, Elias. Write everything down, the day-to-day of what happens here. Get to know the most serious offenders. What a book it will make!” He clapped his hands, and his pince-nez fell off. “Start reading the Bible every day. You know the sort of thing, I-found-God-in-Allenwood. The public will eat it up, and everyone will be on your side by the time you get out. There’s a whole great big life waiting for you out there. Oh, perhaps not with the Van Degans and that set, but there’s other fish to fry in life than Laurance Van Degan who, by the way, in case you hadn’t heard, had to resign as president of the Butterfield.”

Elias looked up. “Because of me?” he asked.

“Apparently,” replied Lord Biedermeier.

“Holy shit.”

48

Gus moved into a hotel in Hollywood. He read books he had always meant to read. He watched videos of films he had wanted to see, but missed. He called none of his friends from the years he had lived in Hollywood, when he worked in films, and he did not frequent any of the restaurants where he was likely to run into people he knew. Several times a day he drove by the apartment complex in West Hollywood that blocked 1342¼ South Reeves from view from the street, but he never got out of his car. Every day he stopped in to see Peach, usually late in the afternoon. Every few days he went to the cemetery where Becky was buried and lay a rose from Peach’s garden on her grave. Peach watched her former husband and worried that he might be having a nervous breakdown.

“He’s out,” Gus said one day, when they were
staring at one of the afternoon soap operas that Peach always watched. He had come into her room and sat on the edge of the bed for twenty minutes before he said a word.

Peach didn’t say, “Who’s out?” even though they had not mentioned Lefty Flint’s name since Gus returned to California.

“How do you know?” she asked instead.

“I just know.”

“Did your private detective tell you?”

“He wasn’t a private detective.”

“I know he wasn’t a private detective.”

“I fired him.”

“Then how do you know? Vacaville doesn’t send out announcements.”

“I saw him.”

“You saw Lefty?” she asked. Peach looked at the back of his head. She picked up the tuner and turned off the television set.

“Where?”

“Carrying groceries out of Stop and Shop.”

“Did he see you?”

“No.”

“Was he alone?”

“No. Marguerite what’s-her-name was with him. The bartender.”

“Don’t make me pull it out of you line by line, Gus. Tell me everything.”

“They were laughing. They were enjoying themselves. I can’t stand it that he should be happy, after what he did.”

“Where did they go?”

“He has an apartment at 1342¼ South Reeves in West Hollywood. They went there.”

Peach picked up a magazine from the bed. “Of all the cities in this country, why did he have to come back here where it happened?”

“Sometimes I wonder why we were never searched
all through the trial when we went into the courtroom,” said Gus. “It would have been so easy.”

“What would have been so easy?” asked Peach.

With his forefinger and thumb, he imagined his Luger in his hand. He pulled his trigger finger and fired, making a
pow
sound with his lips at the same time. In his mind, his bullet hit its target.

Peach stared at him. Then she leaned over and picked up the telephone. “I’m going to call Detective Johnston,” she said.

“Why?”

“I know that son of a bitch is going to come here. I know it. I’ve known it ever since he wrote me that letter from prison. I want them to put a guard on my house.”

“He won’t come here, Peach. I guarantee you that.”

By the end of the first week, Gus had gotten the movements of Lefty Flint down. He knew the time of day Lefty Flint rose. He knew the diner where he had breakfast. He knew the laundromat where he took his washing. He knew he marketed at the Stop and Shop for only one day’s provisions at a time, as if he were a temporary visitor. After lunch he drove Marguerite to her bar in Studio City and left her there. Sometimes in the afternoon he went to a film. He stayed by himself most of the time. At seven he went to the bar again and took Marguerite out to an early dinner at a restaurant near the bar. After dinner, he went to work as night bartender and stayed on duty until closing time. Marguerite often left between ten and eleven, either taking a cab home or getting a lift from someone she knew, but it was usually about two, after the glasses were washed and the tables stacked and the trash put out and the waiters paid, before Lefty Flint locked up and left the bar by the back entrance. There was a space by the trash cans where he parked Marguerite’s Nile-green Toyota. Gus had twice tried the doors of the car, but they were locked. He had tried hiding himself behind
the trash cans, but once he accidentally knocked one over. Afraid that the sound would attract attention, he had retreated to the street and walked away as fast as he could.

On an early morning, before anyone in the area of bars and restaurants was around to open the businesses, he made an inspection of the alley behind the bar. He found a place to stand on the far side of the alley wall, where, at night, he could not be seen but where he could see perfectly the back door of the bar, the trash-can area, and the place where Flint parked Marguerite’s Toyota. He held up his hand, as if he were holding up the German Luger, and imagined pulling the trigger. The gesture and the
pow
sound he made had become a habit.

On the morning of the day that Gus planned to kill Lefty Flint, he went to Mass at a church he had never been to before. He sat in a back pew throughout the service without participating in it, like a street person seeking temporary shelter, neither reciting the prayers nor taking communion.

“What the hell are you doing here, Gus?” asked a voice from behind him as he was leaving the church.

Gus, surprised, turned. It was Faye Converse.

“What the hell are
you
doing here?” he replied.

“They’ve got a hospice here for some of my people,” said Faye. “I come to visit from time to time. Brucie is here. Remember Brucie? My secretary. You met her on the plane.”

“Sure I remember Brucie. How is she?”

Faye shrugged the shrug that said not good, or good under the circumstances.

“Give her my love.”

“You look strange, Gus.”

“How strange?”

“Not yourself. Haunted, sort of.”

“How’s this?” he asked, assuming a happy stance.

“Better. Better. I read your piece on Elias Renthal in prison. The son of a bitch.”

“Why son of a bitch?”

“Did you know he stopped payment on the two-million-dollar check he gave me at the ball?”

“I don’t believe it!” replied Gus, amazed, although he did believe it. It was the first time in weeks he had been interested in anything but Lefty Flint.

“Ruby made the check good, though,” said Faye. “I liked Ruby. Terrible position she’s in now.”

“She’s a class act, Ruby,” said Gus.

“You never let me know when you’re out here. How long are you staying?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I’m having a party tonight. Come.”

“Can’t tonight.”

“Yes, you can. What are you doing that’s more important than a movie-star party at Faye Converse’s?”

“I’m going to kill a guy.”

“Well, come after you kill the guy,” she said.

They both laughed.

Later, on the evening of that day, Gus went to see Peach. He stood in the doorway of her bedroom most of the time, rather than sitting on the end of her bed, as he usually did.

“Did I ever tell you about this woman I know in New York called Ruby Renthal?” asked Gus.

“Whose husband is in prison for insider trading, that one?”

“That one.”

“I don’t know if you did or not. She gives parties and lives in that vast apartment. I’ve read all that.”

“Her name used to be Ruby Nolte. She used to be an airline stewardess.”

“Is there a punch to all this?”

“There is. About seven years ago, when she was still a stewardess, she got beaten up here in Los Angeles, by a man she was involved with at the time. The guy really bashed her face in.”

Peach, interested now, looked at Gus.

“She was in the hospital for ten days. She wanted to press charges, but the guy warned her not to, and the guy had some tough friends, and so she didn’t press charges.”

“Yes?”

“The guy was Lefty Flint.”

“Why did I know that was what you were going to say?”

“He’s going to do it again. You know that, don’t you?”

“Then call the police, Gus.”

“The police can’t do anything until after the damage is done.”

They remained in silence for a few moments.

“I have to go,” said Gus, finally, looking at his watch, as if he were on a schedule. He walked toward her bed. As usual, she was barricaded in it by her wheelchair and the long table covered with books and magazines. He undid the brake of her wheelchair and backed it out of his way, pushed the table to the side, and walked up to her. When he was by her side, he bent down and kissed her. In his gesture, she read farewell.

“S’long,” he said.

“You sound like you’re going on a trip,” she replied.

“No.”

“Are you all right, Gus?”

“Sure.”

“You sound odd.”

He looked at the woman he had been married to for so many years, and divorced from for so many years. Nearly bedridden, she had become accustomed to staring at a television set with picture but no sound when she did not wish to deal with the moment at hand in her life, but this time she returned her former husband’s look. He felt a tremendous affection for her.

He turned and replaced the wheelchair in its correct position, braked it, put her table back in place, and
walked out of her room, down her hallway to the front door. There, on a table, in a chipped porcelain bowl, was a bouquet of roses from Peach’s garden, jammed together, in an arrangement that Lorenza, in the unlikely event she ever saw it, would disapprove of. Gus reached in and pulled out a yellow rose, open to almost full flower, and took it with him as he opened the front door and walked to his rented car parked in the driveway.