Hush Money (19 page)

He was an ineffectual old geezer, closer to seventy than anything else. If he'd believed me over the phone, he sure didn't in broad daylight, on his front porch, though I suppose it didn't help that my face looked like the last barber who'd worked on it had had St. Vitus' Dance.

“Can't you people leave her alone?” he said in a whine. “You're the one who said he was a doctor, aren't you? I could tell. Hasn't she been through enough already this …”

But then a voice I recognized broke in behind him:

“It's O.K., Daddy. I know who it is.”

She looked old. She was wearing one of those shapeless gingham housedresses and you couldn't see the little-girl-in-the-sandbox no matter how you tried. Come to think of it, I guess we all looked pretty old, standing there. Arthur Fletcher looked old enough to be her grandfather, which he probably was in years. Robin looked old enough to be his daughter, which she was. And me? Well, I could've been the guy who'd brought her kicking and screaming into the world, which I wasn't.

She sent her old man back to his whittling and took me into what passed for the living room. Maybe she was embarrassed about it, but she needn't have been. Like I'd been there before myself: the upholstered wicker furniture, the curtains that couldn't take another washing, the footstool with its guts hanging out the bottom. All that was missing were the
Reader's Digests
and the
Geographics
. Maybe in Tulare County they kept them up in the attic.

“You can't go home again,” I said, “is that it, Robin?”

She grinned at me halfway and sat down. I did too, feeling all of a sudden not only old but tired, used, and not so bad about it either because for the first time in longer than I could remember there was no rush, no hurry. The last little ball had slid into the hole.

Sure it had.

She said she felt the same way as me, wasted, she said. She said she'd give me what I wanted, she was tired of running, she couldn't make it any more. But first she wanted to talk a little. She said she felt like talking if I didn't mind listening. Would I mind listening a little while, she asked me?

I guess I was feeling pretty big-hearted. I mean, everybody's supposed to get his last wish, etc.

I told her I wouldn't mind listening.

She started in about Karen's mother. She was a cold frigid bitch, she said, I'd understand once I'd read the letter. Not that you could blame her, given what she was married to. It was awful, she said, the way people screwed themselves up getting married. She didn't think she ever would. She didn't think she'd ever get married, she meant. Look at her own parents, she said. I'd seen her father, what was left of him. What was left of her mother was in a sort of half rest home, half asylum, up on the other side of Fresno. She told me all about her mother and father. Sometimes, she said, she wondered how much of her mother she'd inherited, but when that got to her too much, all she had to do was take a look at the rest of the people running around on the loose. She guessed there wasn't a funny farm built that was big enough to hold them all. Sometimes she thought that was all the world was: a great big funny farm.

I gave her an I for Insight. Then, to bring her back to a topic of greater mutual interest, I asked her what was in Bryce Diehl's will.

She told me, mostly. When she was done, I couldn't keep a soft whistle from coming out. It wasn't just the money then, it was the power that went with it. And all of it Karen's.

Maybe Grandpa Diehl had outgrabbed them all at that.

“How'd you find out about it?” I asked her.

“Karie told me.”

“After George Curie told her?”

“That's right.”

I began to see why Twink Beydon had gotten so exercised. Only what had taken him so long? “I haven't seen as much of her as I should have,” he'd said once, where if I'd been in his shoes I'd've been down on my knees in front of her washing the linoleum before she took a step.

“And then Karie died,” I said.

“Yeah. Poor Karie.”

“Which changed all the equations around. Did you push her, Robin?”

It seemed like I'd asked that question a thousand times before, but I got the same answer.

“No, like I said. She was busting out. I really think that's what she was doing: busting out. I guess I could've stopped her, but …”

She bit at a knuckle to show she was feeling bad.

“Poor Karie,” she said.

“And then you took off with the family jewels.”

“That's right.”

“And they were off and running at Santa Anita.”

She giggled a little.

“Tell me something,” I said. “Why'd you send me the journal? Was it just so I could read her poems? And why'd you call me up?”

“I liked you, Cage. I needed you, I really did.”

“Yeah, and you also thought I was still working for him, didn't you? That maybe I could be your way in? And what about when I showed up the other night, is that still what you had in mind?”

“Like I say,” she answered, “I liked you.”

She smiled at me, a sideways smile. So help me, she even ran her fingers down the hair alongside her cheek.

“Sure you liked me. Like your brothers liked me. Everybody likes me.”

“They had me set up,” she said. “Both of us. Pablo knew all about you. They kept me zonked the whole week in case you showed up. They thought I'd tell you where it was.”

“And you knew that's what they hoped you'd do, didn't you?”

“Well …”

“And you figured out a pretty good way to get rid of most of the competition, honh, all in one little lie? With a phone call to the law to put the frosting on the cake?”

Just then while I was talking I may have had a little flicker inside, no more.

“Tell me something, Robin, were you really stoned?”

“Like there's no way of faking that, man, is there?” she said. “No way.”

Amazing. And to think of me, while she was setting us all up, down and under in the drycleaner's clothes bin. A question of experience, I guess.

“It's too bad,” I said magnanimously. “If you hadn't diddled me around so much, maybe I could have figured out a way to cut you in.”

“You didn't seem the type, Cage.”

“The type?”

“To cut people in on anything.”

“I'm not,” I said, “any more than you're the type who writes poetry.”

That seemed to piss her off. Of all things. Her face went tight, and without any warning she started hollering at me:

“What makes you think
you're
such a hot shit? Look at you! You've got it all wired, haven't you? Right! That's how you get your rocks off, honh? Oh you've got it wired all right, sure you have! You're real clever, and you've outthought everybody, Mr. Bigshot Cage! There's not a man in the world you can't outthink, is there? Or a woman who's not gonna cream her jeans just at the sight of you? Oh right, right! Oh right …”

The flicker again, stronger. I'd been nice enough long enough.

I stood up.

“O.K. Robin, you've said your piece. Now let's have Nancy's letter.”

She didn't budge. Instead she began to laugh, that cackle sound that curled my ears. The flicker became a twitch and all of a sudden all of the little balls shook loose in the glass puzzle and started to roll around again.

“
Let's have Nancy's letter! Let's have Nancy's letter!
Listen to him now, Mr. Bigshot Cage! What makes you think I'd give it to you if I had it? You'd have to cut my heart out first, you bastard! You're late,
Mr
. Cage! You're too
late!
And all while we've been sitting here shootin' the breeze! You've fucked up, Mr. Smartass Cage, and now I don't think you're ever gonna get it!”

Her cackle went up one wall, across the ceiling, and down the other. Then her knee came up, ready, and it stopped me cold.

I reached for my musket.

The laughter died down. In its place came tears, and I guess they were real enough though with Robin Fletcher I wouldn't take bets. They ran down her cheeks and wetted up her hair like hay left out in the rain.

“Go ahead, Cage!” she shouted. “Do you think I give a damn? He's gone now, long gone, and I'll never catch him, and neither will
you!

“
Sure
I gave it to him!” she howled, seeing the look on my face. “After you called what did you think I was gonna do? Sit here and
wait
for you? He's ten feet taller'n you, Cage! Than you'll ever be!
Sure
I called him! He drove all night, which is more than you ever did! And he
beat
you, Cage!
We
beat you, me 'n' Andy! We beat you by an hour and now it's more, every second. So what you gonna do, Cage,
shoot
me? Sure, go ahead Cage, shoot me!”

“You dumb cunt!” I shouted back at her. “D'you think you'll ever see him again now? D'you think he's coming back for
you
?”

She didn't have to answer. She just peered out at me with that cockeyed lop-ended teary grin on her face.

“So long, sweet baby,” she said hoarsely. “Have a nice day.”

She was asking for it so, was that the only reason I didn't give it to her? I glanced down at the musket. It looked absurd, stuck there in my hand. I put it away.

Then I lit out, leaving her singing the last chorus of the Andy Ford blues. I punched the Mustang into action and turned her loose. By the time we hit the freeway she was wide open, and any cop that wanted to stop us would have had to call the Air National Guard for help. It was then or bust, and if I was going to end up with spaghetti for dinner, I'd just as leave have eaten it in hell as Santa Monica.

At that I'd hate to have had to bet on my chances. He could have gone south or north. Heads you win, tails I lose.

I picked south.

She'd said he had an hour or more head start, and that made it tough odds even for Breedlove.

But it must have been less. Either that or he'd stopped for coffee, or to count his money before he had it.

I guess we're all entitled to one mistake.

I caught him even before he'd made the top of the pass. The cream-colored van all right, black curtains and all. And out in the fourth lane doing like eighty uphill, which is about twice what any van is entitled to do, it says in
Road & Track
. But no match in any case for the Mustang on a dry strip.

He saw me.

He started to zig and zag from lane to lane like he expected me to try and pass him, over in the third and back into the fourth, back into the third and over in the second, all the way into the first and back out again. He was good at it too.

I sat on his tail and admired his style.

Hell, what was I supposed to do on four lanes of freeway, pass him? And then what? Try to run him off into the island or the shoulder, take your choice? After all, it'd only have been paying him back for what he'd done to me once.

But no sir. That wasn't
my
style. I wanted what he had, not him, and I wanted it in one piece, clean and legible, with no charring around the edges. So I sat on his ass, right up close to give him something to think about, and we went over the pass that way, zigging and zagging and braking and accelerating—Oh he was a cute one, he was—and started down the other side, the L.A. side, past the lodges and the motels they've got up there, and then I guess he started thinking overtime. Or stopped altogether.

In other words he made a second mistake, just like I had and just as dumb, and you'd have to say it was his last one too.

19

Some years back on that particular road, they had quite a headache with trucks running out of brake on the grades and causing general havoc among the downhill populace, not to say themselves. I mean, you figure that sea level is some four to five thousand feet down from the top of the pass, and you put Joe Truck on the downgrade loaded up to the earlobes with lettuce and take his brakes away, and it doesn't even take high school physics to imagine the salad he's going to make by the time he comes to a dead halt. It used to be great reading at breakfast along with the comics.

Finally the highway engineers went back to the drawing board, and they came up with a series of emergency runoffs spaced out all the way down. Escape hatches, you could say, or a kind of highway ejection seat. So nowadays when you get that uneasy weightless feeling where there's nothing under the brake pedal but floor and the gear shift comes loose in your hand and the little voice starts shouting, “Bombardier to Pilot, Bombardier to Pilot, we've been hit, sir, is it O.K. to bail out?” You're supposed to answer, “Leave everything to me, boys, hang on to yer cocks” and make for the nearest runoff, and if you kill yourself that way, well, at least it spares a lot of civilians.

Like I say, Andy Ford made a mistake. Meaning that he tried to pull a Cage, and not a bad idea at that, except that it had occurred to me too.

A few miles down from the crest he zagged over into the second lane, and he stayed there. I zagged over behind him, and when he didn't zig back for the next half-mile, his mind was all spread out before me in big boldface type with plenty of white space between the thoughts.

He waited till the last second to try it. Then he blew across the truck lane doing eighty and he hit the runoff square on the money.

I went right behind him. I won't say it didn't give me a turn. The Mustang fought it. She sucked in her sides and wallowed and screeched her ass end and generally fried rubber all over Interstate 5. But when I opened my eyes again, all I saw was California mountain vista and ZNV 218 square in the middle of the picture.

It must have panicked him. I mean, by that time I was supposed to be halfway down and no place to turn around till I got to Hollywood and Vine. It had thrown me too when the Firebird showed up in my rearview that night on the Diehl Ranch. But then I'd had my unknown friend at 22 Acacia Drive, whereas the only friend Andy Ford had left in the world was me.