Lila made no further protest when he took the car. He drove to the IHOP, listening to the all-news station on the radio, and heard about the “pointless killing.”
Before entering the restaurant, he bought a newspaper from the machine out front. But it was too early for the story to have made print.
He ate hugely—a large order of pancakes, two eggs over easy, a ham steak, home fries, double order of toast, and coffee.
The aging orange-haired waitress asked if he wanted anything else; pencil poised to total his check, she let her eyes flicker to the front where people were waiting for tables. But he said, “Yes, a piece of cherry pie, please,” and poured himself a third cup of coffee from the thermos pitcher and lit a cigarette. The smoke felt wonderful, even though he was down to six or seven a day and planning to quit within the month. He ate his pie slowly and had another, leisurely cigarette. Lila could wait for her car and the waitress for her empty table and the cheap Sunset Boulevard crowd for their lunches.
When he did leave, he drove to Fairfax Avenue and a great delicatessen, to make certain that his dinner wouldn’t be one of Lila’s diet plates that did neither of them any good since they both cheated. And Mom loved that thin-sliced roast beef . . .
Later, at home, watching the news on TV with Lila as his mother napped. he learned that the cab driver had been identified as Arnold Latrile, once a blackiack dealer in a Las Vegas casino. Latrile had been sought by Nevada authorities for questioning in a robbery of that same casino . . . but his employers apparently had found him first.
He chuckled a little. Lila glanced at him and began to speak. He tried to hear what the announcer was saying about Carla Woodruff, but Lila was going on about his mother again. And he was getting a headache again.
Lila had to stop when his mother came in for dinner. But sitting at the table with both of them ruined the joy of deli cuts, pickles, and potato salad.
He left them still eating, saying he was going for a walk.
Outside, he turned away from the street, going up the driveway and around to the back yard and the bushes near the master bedroom windows. He dropped to his knees and felt beneath the bushes and found the gun in its plastic bag.
Still kneeling, he removed the bag and held the long automatic in both hands. He stayed that way for quite awhile.
Then he went for his walk.
FOUR: Sunday, July 30, a.m.
Arthur called Diana at one-thirty. She wasn’t overly fond of the Grecian Massage’s owner-manager because of his AC/DC action and his numerous attempts to drag her into it. But yesterday had been the worst day of her life, and now she was into the black morning hours, and there was no one to turn to. Certainly not Mom and Pop.
Arthur said, “I’ve been in La Jolla since Friday afternoon, y’know?”
“I know.”
“I just got back about an hour ago and Lori’s filling your shift and she tells me what happened and I can’t believe it, right?”
“Right,” she whispered.
“You need anything?”
“I can’t sleep.”
“Quaalude’ll relax you. I’ll bring a few. And a friend so we can talk.”
“No friend, Art.”
“A lady, hon. A doll.”
“Please. I’m a sick girl tonight.”
He was silent. She knew she’d spoiled his plan to dope her and comfort her with hetero and lesbian sex. To Arthur Dumont, sex was the answer to all pain, all loss and anguish, his main, perhaps his only reason for living. And he wasn’t alone. The Strip was loaded with what street people called “come freaks.”
When he still said nothing, she said, “I’d be glad to pick up the pills at your place if you don’t want to bother coming here. I really need something to knock out the thinking mechanism, the memory banks.”
“What about your books?” he mocked, having resented her withdrawal into reading as so many of the parlor people did.
She answered straight. “Can’t read, Art. Can’t concentrate. Can’t do anything but remember.” Which disarmed him.
“Yeah, well, a tragedy like that—” He sighed. “You don’t know how to live, Diana. I’ll bring ’em over.” He hung up.
It would be at least half an hour, probably longer. Arthur was in Hollywood; Diana lived in a condominium in upper Malibu, inland side of the Pacific Coast Highway but with a good view of the ocean. One of a row of attached two-level apartments called town-houses in L.A.—two bedrooms and bath upstairs; living room, kitchen, dining area, and shower-bath downstairs—it had cost more than she’d felt she should spend. But she’d needed a place away from the action, a place with some sense of the natural world, with the peace that the ocean provided, and she’d sunk just about every dime into buying and furnishing it. That was three years ago, and the townhouse had turned out to be the best investment she could have made, more than doubling in value. A neighbor had recently sold a similar apartment for two hundred thousand.
Another reason she’d bought the townhouse was so that her beach-loving sister would spend weekends with her. Her friend. Her lifelong playmate . . .
She was crying again, and there was no sense in that. Better Arthur’s way, with drugs and repeated orgasms. Better any way than to remember Carla, remember childhood.
St. Louis. Mom and Pop and Carla and Diana. And, for fifteen years, their brother, youngest of the brood, Jackie. Like Carla, doomed. Like Carla, struck down by violence. But unlike Carla, it was violence of his own making. He’d wanted a car. He’d stolen two before taking the Corvette from the dealer’s lot, and being chased, and dumping the car, and running.
And being shot when he ignored the officer’s repeated commands to stop.
“I swear I thought I would hit him in the legs,” the officer had said at the inquest, looking at her parents. “But he tripped . . .”
So he’d been struck in the back, the bullet passing through his heart. So he’d been buried near Grandma’s, in St. Anne’s township, where he’d been happiest.
Not that they hadn’t been happy enough as kids. Poor, yes, but no one mistreated them too badly. An occasional slap in the face from Pop, who saved his real anger for Mom. Her he beat up. And that, along with Jackie’s death, had sent Diana out of the house, out of her sophomore year at Washington University and plans to teach English, to Los Angeles and a brief attempt to break into the movies.
Being pretty, being involved in amateur theatrics, had led to a good deal of attention from men in St. Louis, and to a certain amount of sexual experience. Which increased during her year of acting classes and auditions in Hollywood. Also, her own appetites had been strong and steady.
Still were, though her cynicism had matured and altered the way she looked at men. A stiff penis was one thing; it could be enjoyed on the very simplest of terms without involving your mind, your future, your freedom. Love, long-term affairs, and marriage were other things entirely, being weighted, it seemed to her, so heavily in the male’s favor that fewer and fewer intelligent women were willing to involve themselves. Careers were the answer for these women. And Diana felt her career was to earn as much money as quickly as possible with as little involvement as possible.
Which the massage parlors had offered, with the big plus of satisfying her sexual appetites. She got ten percent of the money Arthur received from her basic twenty-dollar fees, plus everything else she could make. Other parlors had paid less, but she hadn’t stayed long where she wasn’t getting her just share. Now she was content.
Or had been.
She’d had her condominium and her reading and an occasional play or movie.