Dead Lines

Joseph cracked a dry smile. ‘Was he your water bearer?’

‘He saved my life when I was at the end of my tether. And he braved many an insult for a chance to peer at the ladies.’

‘Sounds like he had at least one good friend,’ Joseph said, softening. Right before his eyes, Peter thought, the sun was melting this chilly man with the grey face. The sun and the thought of a wake.

‘You’d love what I saw last night,’ Joseph said, apropos of nothing. He stared at the horizon, the hazy blue sea beyond the grass and hills. ‘Do you believe in spooks, Peter?’

‘You know I don’t.’

‘I hope I never see them again.’

Peter shivered involuntarily. He did not like this.

Another silence.

Joseph grimaced as if experiencing a stomach pain and waved his hand. ‘I’ll tell Michelle to give you a five-hundred-dollar bonus. Come say howdy when you’re back.’

Peter prepared to leave. Joseph spoke out from across the pool. ‘Michelle tells me those damn plastic thingies actually work. She’s passing them around to her friends. Maybe I booted that whelp son of a bitch too early.’

Joseph waved his hand again. All was square.

Michelle was unusually quiet as she handed Peter five hundred dollars in cash in the foyer. It was eleven o’clock. The whole damned house felt sad, Peter thought.

‘When are you going to use a checking account?’ she bugged him, a favorite topic. Peter had cut up all his credit cards and never carried a checkbook. He had a small savings account and that was it. He was now strictly cash-and-carry, paying his bills in person when he could, and having Helen write his tax and other checks when he visited to make child-care payments.

‘When I deserve to be a yuppie again,’ he answered.

‘You can be such a pill,’ Michelle said.

As he left, she gave him a quick peck on the cheek and a friendly pat on the buns and wished him a good trip to Marin. ‘Don’t let it get you down,’ she warned.

Peter had already put his bags in the Porsche. He descended the winding road to Pacific Coast Highway and turned left into light traffic. He had had his share and more of grief, of unbearable loss and hopeful speculation. After his lowest moment, when manic anguish and drink had almost killed him, he had come down firmly on the side of tee totaling skepticism. Put on armor, wrapped himself in blankets.

Now, for reasons he could not fathom, people were trying to poke him through the blankets. First Sandaji, and now Joseph.

‘Blow it off,’ he suggested. Then he glanced in the rearview mirror, looking into eyes made cynical by the rush of warm air. He puffed his upper lip into a feline pout and said ‘Spooks’ several times, mimicking Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion in the forest of Oz.

Fifty miles north of the Grapevine, driving north on 5, lulled by the road, he felt an oddly comforting, bluntly selective silence fill the Porsche. He could still hear the slipstream, the whine of the engine, the rumble of tires on the grooved freeway. Still, the silence was there. Sometimes that happened. He would be in a quiet room and the ambient noise would flicker, replaced by a distant, high-pitched hum that faded slowly into a new silence. He remembered listening to the whine of the air as a boy, back when his ears had been far more sensitive.

He instinctively patted his pocket and felt the green Trans.

His thoughts wandered as the traffic grew sparse and the freeway straight and monotonous. Someday, he mused, before all passion was spent, in this world of high-tech communications, his own final true love would call him and her voice would rise above the ambient noise of all the other women. That was Peter’s one supernatural quest now: the perfect woman, a beauty who watched him with cool amusement from behind his thoughts and memories, elusive and brazenly sexy.

Peter had met only one woman that came close to that impossible ideal, a model and sometime actress named Sascha Lauten. Buxom, smart, cheerfully supportive, Sascha had been sufficiently vulnerable and sad about her life to make his heart puddle. Phil had warned him about Sascha. ‘She sees right through you,’ he had said. ‘Your charms do not soothe her magnificent breasts.’ Sascha had ultimately turned down his proposal and married a skinny-assed salesman with bad skin. They now lived quietly in Compton.

He stuck his hand through the half-open window to feel the speed. Over the wind he sang, ‘I hate this crap, burn up the road, I hate this shit, burn up the ROAD.’

CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_8a4d58cb-8477-558d-82e6-5470d50474d2)

Peter crossed the Golden Gate Bridge at midnight and climbed the long hill into Marin before turning inland. Somehow, he missed a turn. Sitting at a gas station, he used the Trans to call Lydia. When she answered, her voice was like a little girl’s. She gave Peter the final directions to Phil’s house in Tiburon. ‘The place is filled with boxes,’ Lydia said. ‘God, was he a pack rat.’

Peter was tired. He thanked Lydia and closed the Trans. He had long wondered where Phil had stuck all the books and old magazines and movies that he had bought over the decades. Apparently, for some years Phil had been hauling his worldly goods north in the Grand Taiga, following through on a long-planned final escape from Los Angeles. And he had not told Peter about any of it.

The last few miles he followed a winding, dark road beneath a black sky dusted with ten thousand diamonds. Shadowy grassland and expensive houses flanked the road. Beyond lay more hunched hills. When he found the last turn, onto a culde-sac called Hidden Dreams Drive, he looked south and saw San Francisco lit up like a happy carnival on the far shore of the Bay.

The house cut three long, inky rectangles out of the starry sky between silhouettes of knobby, pruned-back trees. Peter drove up beside a new-style VW Beetle. As he set the parking brake, he saw Lydia sitting on a front porch swing, short, bobbed hair like a dark comma over her pale face. The orange bead of a cigarette dangled from her hand. She did not wave.

Jesus, Peter thought. The lot alone must be worth a million dollars. He stood on the gravel at the bottom of two wooden steps. ‘Nice night,’ he said.

‘I’m not staying,’ Lydia announced. She got up from the porch swing and stubbed the cigarette into a tuna can. Then she tossed the butt into the darkness. Peter jerked, thinking she might start a fire or something. But that was Lydia.

‘Should I go in?’ Peter said.

‘Up to you. He’d probably want you to,’ Lydia said dryly, ‘just to sort through his stuff. Last hands pawing what he wanted most on this Earth. He sure didn’t love his ladies worth a damn.’

Peter did not rise to the bait. Lydia stretched. At forty-eight, she still had a pruny grace. Low body-fat since youth – and wrinkles from smoking – had diminished her other native charms, but the grace remained.

Peter hauled his one suitcase onto the porch. She handed over three keys on a piece of dirty twine. The twine was tied to a small piece of finger-oiled driftwood. The driftwood dangled below his hand, swinging one way, then another.

‘The medical examiner found my address in Phil’s little black book,’ Lydia said. ‘Some cops came to visit me. They said he had been dead for a couple of days.’ She opened the screen door for him. ‘Did you know he had this place?’

Peter shook his head and entered the dark hallway. He set down his suitcase.

‘He sure as hell didn’t tell me,’ Lydia went on. ‘It didn’t turn up on the divorce settlement. What do you think it’s worth?’

‘I have no idea,’ Peter said.

‘Ancient history,’ Lydia said. ‘Anyway, I got him into a crematorium in Oakland. I think maybe the mailman found him. He had been dead for a few days.’

‘You said that,’ Peter said, grimacing.

‘The mortuary will bring him back tomorrow. Hand delivery. We’ll hold the wake in the back yard. I’ve invited some folks who knew Phil. And some of my friends. For backup.’

‘When did you get up here?’ Peter asked.

‘This morning. I left everything the way I found it. Peter, I hope you understood him. I hope somebody understood Phil. I sure didn’t.’

Peter did not know what to say to that.

‘You know, despite everything, he was the sweetest guy I ever met,’ Lydia said. She poked Peter in the chest. ‘And that includes you. See you tomorrow around one. If they deliver Phil early, just put him on the mantel over the fireplace. And, oh …’ She held out her hand. ‘I have no idea where he kept his money. I paid for everything. Donations cheerfully accepted.’

Peter removed his wallet. He pulled out the five hundred dollars Michelle had given him in Malibu. He was about to peel off several of the bills when Lydia dipped her hand with serpentine grace and snatched the whole wad.

She counted it quickly. ‘That doesn’t cover even half the cost,’ she said. She patted his bearded cheek. ‘But thanks.’ She walked across the gravel to the VW, her bony, denimed hips cycling a sideways figure 8.

The car vanished into the dark beneath the stars.

That left Peter with ten dollars, not enough to pay for the gas to get home.