Smoked Out (Digger) (10 page)

She liked soft rye bread, which Digger told her was a contradiction in terms. At the nearby restaurant, she ordered and drank a red-wine spritzer. Fortunately, she had a weak bladder and had to visit the ladies’ room.

"Somehow I don’t think Matilda and I are going to make it," Digger told Alyne.

"Poor Rico. Doomed to a life of emptiness and unfulfillment."

"You know," Digger said, "I’ve been wondering where I’ve seen you before. And now I remember. At the funeral for Jessalyn Welles. That was you, wasn’t it?"

"Yes. What were you doing…you were passing around that sympathy card."

"That’s right. I knew Jessalyn back in Connecticut. A friend of the family. I was getting that card for her mother. Did you know her well?"

"Jessalyn’s mother?"

"No, Jessalyn."

"We weren’t really close."

"I only met her husband once," Digger said. "Seems like a nice man."

"He is. A fine man," she said.

"Tough on him, losing his wife so tragically," he said.

"Yes, it was tragic."

"Her mother was really upset by it all. She even…" Digger stopped for a moment. "It’s too silly even to say."

"Say what?" Alyne asked.

"Well, Mrs. Welles thought Jess might have…you know, taken her own life. We called her Jess."

Alyne looked at him coldly. "Why would she do that? She had a wonderful husband. She had everything to live for."

"Well, being sick and all. Sometimes—"

"I didn’t know she was sick. What was wrong with her?"

"I don’t know. I had just heard that," Digger said.

Alyne shook her head. "You can forget that," she said. She was very firm about it. "It was just a tragic accident. Poor Gideon."

Matilda, with a timing that would have been the envy of her charm, picked then to come back.

"The restroom is dirty," she said. "What kind of place is this?"

Digger tossed her his napkin. "Go clean it," he said.

"Very funny," she said as she maneuvered herself back into her chair.

"Eat your sponge sandwich," he said. "Where were we?"

"Being grim," Alyne said. "Grim’s no good for lunch. Let’s talk about your career."

"First you destroy it, now you want to analyze it? You’re heartless."

"But not bladderless. Where is that dirty bathroom?"

"Back of the stairs, first door on the left," Matilda said.

"Follow the hoofprints," Digger said.

Alyne excused herself. She took change off the table and Digger watched her walk away.

"Beautiful woman," he said.

Matilda, all full mouth and chewing, shrugged.

"We were talking about poor Dr. Welles."

She swallowed a lump as big as a baseball. "Why poor?" she said.

"Losing his wife."

"Yeah. Maybe," Matilda said. She chomped again and swallowed. If she ever got food stuck in her throat, Digger thought, it would take a jackhammer team working over her back to loosen it. Carrying out the Heimleich maneuver would take seven generations of the Heimleich family.

"I thought everybody liked Mrs. Welles," Digger said.

"I guess so."

Digger was silent. He moved the salt and pepper shakers back neatly into the center of the table. He looked into Matilda’s eyes and waited, staring.

"I don’t think they were so happy," Matilda said.

"I can understand Alyne being in love with him," Digger said.

Matilda nodded and engulfed her sandwich.

"You’ve got to wonder, though, if Welles isn’t just after Alyne’s money," Digger said.

"That’s a joke."

"Why?"

"She doesn’t have any," Matilda said.

Digger thought of Alyne taking change off the table. She wasn’t that poor.

"Are there pay booths in that bathroom?" he asked.

"No. Why? They shoulda paid me for using it."

Digger left the table and walked toward the bathrooms. Looking down the narrow corridor, he saw Alyne Gurney’s back. She was standing at the telephone, her hand close to the mouthpiece, talking to someone.

Digger went back to the table.

"Tell Alyne I had to go. I’ll take care of the check."

He paid the waiter on the way out, walked the two blocks back to the theater and got his car. He drove back to the restaurant and parked in a corner of the lot behind a large black Cadillac, his car out of sight of the front of the restaurant.

Ten minutes later, a Mercedes convertible pulled into the lot and parked in front of the main entrance. Dr. Gideon Welles got out and walked into the building.

Only a few minutes passed before he and Alyne Gurney left the building. They drove off in the Mercedes. Digger followed them at a cautious distance, watching them pull into the driveway of a small house on Lomitas Avenue. Alyne Gurney’s address. Dr. Gideon Welles’s little love nest?

When he drove away, Digger thought of poor Matilda. He hoped she had enough money to call a truck to take her back to the theater.

So Dr. Welles and Alyne Gurney were an item. Wasn’t that nice? A classic little triangle with Jessalyn Welles as the third corner, all by herself. If Jessalyn Welles had not died accidentally, was the triangle the reason? Could Welles have got rid of her to make way for Alyne Gurney? Or could Alyne have done it to open her path to Gideon Welles?

He shook his head while he was driving. Why was he pressing so hard on this murder bullshit when there wasn’t even a hint of it? Was it just stubbornness? Or was he, maybe, just as crazy as Koko thought he was?

And his classic triangle didn’t hold up at all, because already it had four points. Ted Dole. Jessalyn’s sometime boy-lover. You can’t squeeze four corners into a triangle, he told himself.

He was dreaming.

He glanced into his mirror. A yellow sedan was following him. It had been following him earlier when he went to the playhouse in the hills. Digger pulled off to the curb to wait. The yellow car turned off the road and vanished up a side street.

Okay. Maybe he was dreaming. But if he was dreaming, why was somebody following him?

Chapter Twelve

The story on her death had said that Mrs. Welles was a member of the Sorrow Cove Yacht Club. Unless she were the rare woman that liked to sail, that meant her husband kept a boat there and she was never in the place. Digger decided to check anyway. He was right. The bartender at the yacht club had never seen Mrs. Welles, but Doc Welles had been a regular until maybe six months ago. Doc Welles was, the bartender confided, an all-right guy. He argued with the bartender about the best football bets of the week. He liked the horses and he liked women. Oh, did he like women. Gideon Welles would screw anything that didn’t screw him first.

A blonde girl, in her moderate twenties, came into the almost-empty lounge. She was wearing jeans and a red-and-white-striped boating top.

The bartender, his confidences oiled by a judicious application of twenty dollars, leaned over to Digger. "That’s one of the doc’s chicks now."

"Don’t say anything," Digger said.

The girl sat two stools away from Digger, looking out at the long finger-piers that jutted out into the little bay, whose narrow mouth emptied into the Pacific. She had fine flaxen hair. Her eyes were big and blue and vaguely sad. The body was slim, long-legged and tiny-waisted.

"Hi. Will you have a drink with me?"

She looked at him carefully before replying, then nodded.

"Nice club."

"Yes."

"You have a boat here?" he asked.

"Do you?"

Her voice still had the singsong ups and downs of Scandinavia in it. The o’s were burped from deep in her throat past goldfish-pursed lips that Digger decided were sexy.

"I will soon," he said. "You come here often?"

"Sometimes," she said.

"My name is Tom. Tom Lipton. I’m in love with you. I’ve always been in love with you. I’m joining this club just to be near you. I’m hoping you’ll forsake all others and give yourself to me. And now if that doesn’t get more than two words out of you, I quit."

The blonde laughed. "I’m Sonje Bjorklund. I come here a lot. I like boats. I can’t give myself totally to you because I’m going to the dentist tomorrow and my mouth belongs to him. Try me after that."

"Fair enough. What do you drink?"

She nodded to the bartender. He knew what she drank. He poured aquavit into a rocks glass and refilled Digger’s vodka. Digger winked and pushed a ten-dollar tip across the bar to him. Sonje watched him do it.

"Are you a new member here?" she asked.

"Just looking around. I’m moving out to the West and I’m bringing my boat. I wanted to check this club out. It was recommended to me."

"What kind of boat do you have?"

"Eighty-six-foot oceangoing Brackler. Twin Stevens diesels. Tamiko auxiliaries." He looked down at his vodka so she wouldn’t see the lies in his eyes.

"I’m not familiar with that craft," she said.

"All custom. Made in Argentina," Digger said.

"You live on it?"

"Yes."

"What do you do? Tom?"

"Tom. Tom Lipton. I’m retired now."

"You’re young to retire. What did you do before you retired?"

"I owned a pretty big slice of an oil company. I sold it out and decided that was enough work. I’m going to play for the rest of my life."

"Good for you. Me, too." He loved to hear her say "too." It came out like "ta-yoooooo."

"You’re young to retire, too," he said.

"All things are possible with a little help from one’s friends."

She had turned on the bar stool so that she faced Digger, who had pushed back the stool that separated them. Their knees flirted with touching. They touched. Neither recoiled. Digger knew his P & L had passed inspection. If she thought
those
lies were good, wait until he really got going.

"Where are you staying?" she asked.

"The Sportsland Lodge," Digger said.

"Not the Bonaventure?"

"I think outdoor elevators are tacky. The last time I stayed there, I was in the elevator and passed a room on the fourteenth floor where a couple was on the bed making love."

"Were they any good?"

"I’ve seen better," Digger said.

"I don’t like to
watch
," she said.

"Anyway, I may buy the Sportsland, so I wanted to look at it without anybody knowing what I was doing. I was just in town for a funeral. I’ll be getting an apartment next week until my boat arrives. Are you getting hungry?"

"I’m always hungry," she said.

"Good. Here’s what we’re going to do."

"Decisive men are always sexy."

"We’re going to get along fine. We’re going to leave this place and we’re going to have a roadie."

"Roadie?"

"One for the road. You pick the place. Someplace where real people hang out. I want to see what kind of places you like. Then we’re going to dinner. You pick the place as long as it isn’t French. I hate the French."

"What happens after that?"

"We’ll think of something."

The bar she took him to was a dark, overly air-conditioned motel cocktail-lounge on Ocean Avenue in Venice City. The only other people in the bar were the bartender and a man who sat at the far corner of the long, copper-topped bar answering the telephone, indulging in brief, whispered conversations and making notes on a pad of paper in front of him. The man was a lump of hard-looking flesh hunched over the bar, looking, from Digger’s vantage point, like a side of beef with a mouth. If people one day evolved into fire hydrants, Digger decided he had found the father of us all.

The bartender knew Sonje. He asked Digger what he was drinking and, because they didn’t have Finlandia vodka, he drank Absolut. Sonje got her aquavit without asking.

When he finished serving the drinks, the bartender went to the end of the bar and whispered something to the man near the telephone. Digger saw the man crane his vestigial neck, looking at him and the blonde girl.

"Bottoms up," Digger said.

"Skoal."

The man at the end still stared at them. Digger got up to buy a pack of cigarettes from the nearby machine. The man got up from the bar and walked toward Sonje. Digger waited until the man was past him before pulling out the machine’s lever and picking up the pack. He walked back to his seat slowly. He heard the man talking.

"Long time no see."

"I haven’t been around."

"Neither has your friend. You see him lately?"

"Not in months. He’s not around any more."

Sonje looked up as Digger returned.

"Marty, this is my friend Tom."

Marty looked at Digger and grunted. "See you later," he told Sonje.

"He didn’t seem happy to see me," Digger said as he eased himself back onto the bar stool. He opened the pack of Salems even though he knew he would have morning cough tomorrow. Why didn’t saloons stock their machines with mild cigarettes?

"He’s never happy. Let’s finish our drink and go eat. I’m hungry."

"What’s his name?" Digger said as he lit a cigarette.

"Marty."

"Marty what?"

"Bumpus or something."

When they left, Marty was on the telephone again. As Digger went out the door, he saw the burly man hang up the receiver. As he and Sonje drove out of the parking lot, Marty was standing in the doorway of the cocktail lounge watching them.

The restaurant was a steak house on Sunset Strip, decorated in instant old-English with plastic-paneled Tiffany lamps.
The New York Times
would never have stood for that or the prices or the chewy steak.

Sonje didn’t seem to mind. She ate as if finishing first would win her a trip for two to Acapulco.

"You said you were here for a funeral? Who died?"

"Friend of the family. You wouldn’t know her, I guess. Jessalyn Lindsley. We grew up together in Connecticut."

"No, I didn’t know her."

"She was married to a doctor. What was his name again? Welles. That’s it. Welles."

"Gideon Welles?"

"That’s right."

"I know Gid."

"You do?"

"Sure. He used to keep his boat down at the club."

"I’ll be damned. It really is a small world. I never really met him. I just saw him at the funeral, just that one time. Seems like a nice man."