The Poet (46 page)

I was out of cigarettes. I stepped back into the lobby to ask the night man where I could get a pack. He told me to go back to the Cat & Fiddle. I saw he had an open pack of Camels on the counter next to his stack of tabloids but he didn’t offer me any and I didn’t ask for one.

As I walked Sunset alone I thought about Rachel again and became preoccupied with something I had noticed during our lovemaking. Each of the three times we had been together in bed she had been fully giving of herself, yet I would say she was decidedly passive. She deferred control to me. I waited for the small nuances of change on the second and third times we made love, even hesitating in my own movements and choices in order to allow her to take the lead, but she never did. Even at the sacred moment when I entered her, it was my hand fumbling at the door. Three times. No woman that I had been with before on that number of occasions had done the same.

There was nothing wrong with this and it did not bother me in the least, but still I found it to be a curiosity. For her passivity in these horizontal moments was diametrically opposed to her demeanor in our vertical moments. When we were away from the bed she certainly exercised or sought to exercise her control. It was the sort of subtle contradiction that I believed made her so enthralling to me.

As I stopped to cross Sunset to the bar, my peripheral vision picked up movement to the far left as I glanced back to check traffic. My eyes followed the movement and I saw the form of a person ducking back into the shadowed doorway of a closed shop. A chill raced through me but I didn’t move. I watched the spot where I had seen the movement for several seconds. The doorway was maybe twenty yards from me. I felt sure it had been a man and he was probably still there, possibly watching me from the darkness while I watched for him.

I took four quick, determined steps toward the doorway but then stopped dead. It had been a bluff but when no one ran from the doorway, I had only bluffed myself. I felt my heartbeat rising. I knew it might only be a homeless man looking for a spot to sleep. I knew there might be a hundred explanations. But just the same I was scared. Maybe it was a transient. Maybe it was the Poet. In a split second a myriad of possibilities took over my mind. I was on TV. The Poet saw TV. The Poet had made his choice. The dark doorway was on the path between me and the Wilcox Hotel. I could not go back. I quickly turned and stepped into the street to cross to the bar.

The blast of a car horn greeted me and I jumped back. I had not been in any danger. The car that sped past trailing the laughter of teenagers was two lanes away but maybe they had seen my face, seen the look, and known I was easy prey for a scare.

I ordered another black and tan at the bar along with a basket of chicken wings, and got directions to the cigarette machine. I noticed the unsteadiness of my hands as I lit the match after finally getting a cigarette into my mouth. Now what, I thought as I exhaled the stream of blue smoke toward my reflection in the mirror behind the bar.

I stayed until last call at two and then left the Cat & Fiddle with the exodus of die-hards. There was safety in numbers, I had decided. By loitering behind the crowd, I was able to identify a group of three drunks walking east toward Wilcox and fell in a few yards behind them. We passed the doorway in question from the other side of Sunset and as I looked across the four lanes I could not tell if the darkened alcove was empty. But I didn’t linger. At Wilcox I broke away from my escort and trotted across Sunset and up to the hotel. I didn’t breathe normally until I entered the lobby and saw the familiar, safe face of the night man.

Despite the lateness of the hour and the heavy beer I had filled myself with, the scare I had submitted myself to robbed me of any fatigue. I could not sleep. In my room I undressed, got into bed and turned off the light but I knew as I was doing it that it was fruitless. After ten minutes I faced the facts of my situation and turned on the light.

I needed a distraction. A trick that would allow my mind to rest easily and for me to sleep. I did what I had done on countless prior occasions of similar necessity. I pulled my computer up onto the bed. I booted it, plugged the room’s phone line into the modem outlet and dialed long distance into the Rocky’s net. I had no messages and wasn’t really expecting any but the motions of doing it began to calm me. I scrolled the wires a little bit and came across my own story, in abbreviated form, on the AP national wire. It would hit the ground tomorrow and burst like a shell. Editors from New York to here in L.A. would know my byline. I hoped.

After signing off and shutting down the connection, I played a few hands of computer solitaire but became bored with losing. Looking for something else to distract me, I reached into the computer bag for the hotel receipts from Phoenix but couldn’t find them. I checked every pocket of the bag but the folded sheaf of papers wasn’t there. I quickly grabbed the pillowcase and frisked it like a suspect but there were only clothes.

“Shit,” I said out loud.

I closed my eyes and tried to envision what I had done with the pages on the plane. A sense of dread came over me as I remembered at one point stuffing them into the seat pocket. But then I recalled that, after talking to Warren, I had retrieved them to make the other calls. I conjured a vision of putting the pages back into the computer bag as the plane was on final approach. I was sure I had not left them on the plane.

The alternative to this, I knew, was that someone had been in my room and taken them. I paced around a little bit, not sure what I could do. I had had what could be construed as stolen property stolen from me. Who could I complain to?

Angrily, I opened the door and walked down the hallway to the front desk. The night man was looking at a magazine called High Society which had a cover photo of a nude woman skillfully using her arms and hands to strategically cover enough of her body to allow the magazine to be sold on the newsstand.

“Hey, did you see anybody go down to my room?”

He hiked his shoulders and shook his head.

“Nobody?”

“Only ones I seen around was that lady that was with you, and you. That’s it.”

I looked at him for a moment, waiting for more, but he had said his piece.

“Okay.”

I went back to my room, studying the keyhole for signs of a pick before going inside. I couldn’t tell. The keyhole was worn and scratched but it could have been that way for years. I wouldn’t know how to identify a picked lock if my life depended on it but I looked anyway. I was mad.

I was tempted to call Rachel and tell her about the burglary of my room but my dilemma was that I couldn’t tell her about what had been taken in the burglary. I didn’t want her to know what I had done. The memory of that day on the bleachers and other lessons learned since went through my mind. I got undressed and got back into bed.

Sleep eventually came but not before I had visions of Thorson in my room going through my things. When it finally came, the anger had not left me.

37

I was awakened by a sharp banging on my door. I opened my eyes and saw light bleeding brightly around the curtains. The sun was already well up and I realized I should have been also. I pulled on my pants and was still buttoning a shirt as I opened the door without looking through the peephole. It wasn’t Rachel.

” ‘Morning, sport. Rise and shine. You’re with me today and we’ve got to get going.”

I stared blankly at him. Thorson reached over and knocked on the open door.

“Hello? Anyone home?”

“What do you mean I’m with you?”

“Just like it sounds. Your girlfriend has some things she has to do alone. Agent Backus has assigned you to be with me today.”

My face must have shown my thoughts on the prospect of spending the day with Thorson.

“I’m not exactly thrilled to pieces myself,” he said to me. “But I do what I’m told. Now, if you just want to stay in bed all day, that’d be no skin off my back. I’d just tell-“

“I’m getting dressed. Give me a few minutes.”

“You’ve got five minutes. I’ll meet you in the alley at the car. If you’re not there you’re on your own.”

After he was gone I looked at my watch on the bed table. It was eight-thirty, not as late as I had thought. I took ten minutes instead of five. I held my head under the shower and thought about being with Thorson for the day, dreading every moment of it. But most of all I thought about Rachel and wondered what assignment Backus had given her and why it didn’t include me.

After leaving my room I went up to her door and knocked but got no answer. I listened at the door for a few moments and heard nothing. She was gone.

Thorson was leaning on the trunk of one of the cars when I got out to the alley.

“You’re late.”

“Yeah. Sorry. Where’s Rachel?”

“Sorry, sport, talk to Backus. He seems to be your bureau rabbi.”

“Look, Thorson, my name isn’t sport, okay? If you don’t want to call me by my name, just don’t call me anything. I’m late because I had to call my editor and tell him there was no story coming. He wasn’t happy.”

I went to the passenger door and he went around to the driver’s side. I had to wait for him to unlock it and it seemed like he took forever to notice I was waiting.

“I don’t really give a shit how your editor was this morning,” he said over the car before sliding in.

Inside the car, I saw two containers of coffee sitting on the dashboard, steam from them fogging the windshield. I looked at them the way a junkie looks at the spoon held to the candle but didn’t say anything. I assumed they were part of some game Thorson was going to try to play.

“One of those is yours, sp-uh, Jack. You want cream or sugar, check the glove box.”

He started the car. I looked at him and then back at the coffee. Thorson reached over and took one of the containers and opened it. He took a small sip, like a swimmer dipping a toe into the water to test the temperature.

“Ahh,” he said. “I take mine hot and black. Just like my women.”

He looked over and winked in a man-to-man gesture.

“Go ahead, Jack, take the coffee. I don’t want it to spill when I move the car.”

I took the container and opened it. Thorson started driving. I took a small sip, but I did it more like the Czar’s official food taster. It was good and the caffeine hit came quickly.

“Thanks,” I said.

“No problem. Can’t get started without the stuff myself. So what happened, bad night?”

“You could say that.”

“Not me. I can sleep anywhere, even a dump like that. I slept fine.”

“Didn’t do any sleepwalking, did you?”

“Sleepwalking? What do you mean?”

“Look, Thorson, thanks for the coffee and all but I know it was you who called Warren and I know it was you who was in my room last night.”

Thorson pulled to a stop at a curb marked for deliveries only. He threw the car into park and looked at me.

“What did you say? What’re you saying?”

“You heard what I said. You were in there. I might not have the proof now but if Warren comes up with anything ahead of me, I’ll go to Backus anyway and tell him what I saw.”

“Listen, sport, see that coffee? That was my peace offering. If you want to throw it in my face, fine. But I don’t know what the fuck you are talking about and for the last time, I don’t talk to reporters. Period. I’m only talking to you now because you have special dispensation. That’s it.”

He jammed the car into drive and lurched out into traffic, prompting an angry rebuke from the horn of another driver. Hot coffee slopped onto my hand but I kept silent about it. We drove in silence for several minutes, entering a canyon of concrete and glass and steel. Wilshire Boulevard. We were heading toward the towers of downtown. The coffee no longer tasted good to me and I put the cap back on it.

“Where are we going?” I finally asked.

“To see Gladden’s lawyer. After that we’re going out to Santa Monica, talk to the dynamic duo that had this dirtbag in their hands and let him go.”

“I read the Times story. They didn’t know who they had. You can’t really blame them.”

“Yeah, that’s right, nobody’s ever to blame.”

I had completely succeeded in taking Thorson’s offering of goodwill and flushing it down the toilet. He had turned sullen and bitter. His usual self as far as I could tell, yet it was still my fault.

“Look,” I said, putting my coffee on the floor and holding my hands in an I-give-up gesture, “I’m sorry, okay? If I’m wrong about you and Warren and everything else, I’m sorry. I was just looking at things the way they seem to me. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong.”

He said nothing and the silence became oppressive. I felt like the ball was still in my court, that there was more I needed to say.

“I’ll drop it, okay?” I lied. “And I’m sorry about … if you’re upset about me and Rachel. Things just happened.”

“Tell you what, Jack, you can keep your apology. I don’t care about you and I don’t care about Rachel. She thinks I do and I’m sure she’s told you that. But she’s wrong. And if I were you, I’d watch my ass with her. There’s always something else going on with her. Remember I told you that.”

“Sure.”

But I drop-kicked that stuff as soon as he said it. I wasn’t going to let his bitterness infect my thoughts about Rachel.