Golden Orange Page 8

  She sat catlike, exposing that muscular thigh. Those goddamn white stockings! Winnie was a sucker for willowy babes in white stockings. Made them all look like lascivious nurses in blue movies, the kind his team used to see at a movie house in Santa Ana when he was a high school kid playing football.

  “Why’re you afraid of me?” Tess asked abruptly.

  “Shows, huh? Well, maybe after this Russian potata juice ferments I’ll relax more.” He took a big hit on the vodka.

  “Why do you drink so much, Win?”

  “Oh, I don’t usually drink so much. Not like this. Not like tonight.”

  “No? Why tonight then?”

  “You’re buying.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I guess so. I’m jist nervous.”

  “So why’re you afraid of me?”

  “Well, let’s see …” His speech was getting slurred and he knew it. So he took another drink. Too late now!

  “Lie down,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Here. On the sofa. Lie back and put your feet up.”

  Tess dropped to her knees on the white carpet, lifted Winnie’s legs onto the sofa and slipped off his cheap penny loafers. She plumped the sofa pillows behind his head, got up and swayed toward the fireplace. She lit a small gas fire for effect. The logs were fake. Then she came back and knelt beside him.

  Winnie watched her take her jacket off and toss it carelessly onto the matching silk sofa on the other side of the glass table. She picked up his drink and held it to his lips, showing him an unreadable smile. She was acting just like a goddamn nurse! Was this one of those blue movies, or what?

  “Comfy?” she asked.

  “You kidding?”

  He thought she was going to lean over and kiss him, but she didn’t. She giggled softly. Wind chimes again.

  “Still scared?”

  “Sure.”

  This time she chuckled out loud. “Win Farlowe, you’re perfect!”

  “I know. You said. A straight-ahead guy. Can I ask you something?”

  “Okay,” Tess said. “Anything.” She crept a little closer, resting her arm on the cushion beside his. He could feel the soft down on her forearm. In the firelight it was the color of polished brass.

  “I mean, I wasn’t conceived in a Cal Tech sperm bank. But I’m not stupid.”

  “Of course not,” she said.

  “I mean, I don’t like poems that don’t rhyme, but I’m no dummy.”

  “You are definitely no dummy,” she agreed.

  “So why me?”

  “Why you, what?”

  “Someone like you. Looks. Brains. Money. A real babe! I don’t get it.”

  “You’re the world’s only ex-cop who ever broke up a parade all by himself. You’re different.”

  “I’m different. Slumming, is that it?”

  “You’re going to force me to get specific? Okay, starting with your looks, well, you look like … like daybreak at Catalina. When I was a girl and my dad took me over to the island for weekends, we’d sit out there on the water at dawn, fishing. Or rather, he was fishing and I was watching the sunrise. I thought, if there’s one thing you can depend on it’s that beautiful sunrise over the island. All this, after my mother and father had been screaming at each other all night and my fingers were bleeding from chewing my nails to the quick. Unlike you, I’ve always thought of the sun in masculine terms. Old mister sun rising up out of the sea at dawn. Anyway, I look at you and I think of that. That’s how you strike me, old son. There’s something certain and reassuring about you.”

  “That’s why you call me old son? You mean like in the big sun up there?” Winnie pointed toward the twenty-foot ceiling.

  “Could be a subconscious choice of words,” she said. “I don’t pretend to understand myself any more than I’ve understood the men in my life: my father, my husbands, all three of them. But I think I understand a few things about you. You’re a straight-ahead guy.”

  “Got any kids?”

  “No,” she said. “Guess I couldn’t bring myself to inflict the men I married on some helpless child. How about you?”

  “My ex talked me into adopting her brats, I guess, so she could get a little more when her lawyer opened my veins. Never had any a my own. Sometimes I wish I had a son. Me, I had a great old man.” Thinking of his father, he sighed, then said, “So, how about all the guys around here? All the guys at your club? You don’t like em?”

  “They bore me or threaten me or repel me. Maybe they seem as ruthless as my father, I don’t know. But you, you’re different.”

  “I don’t scare you, huh? That figures. I don’t scare anybody.”

  “But I scare you?”

  “I’m starting to get used to it,” Winnie said, and his hand inched toward her bare shoulder. His little finger lightly touched the flesh. She felt cool even with the fireplace heating up the room. “It still don’t exactly add up.”

  “Stop acting like a cop,” Tess said, moving her shoulder so that three of his fingers were touching her. “If you must have a motive, try this one: From the first moment I saw your photo in the newspaper, I was intrigued. You appear so vulnerable and yet look what you’ve done. I wanted to find out more.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. A time of life. Divorced for the third time. Facing middle age. Almost broke. Yeah, don’t let this house fool you, it’s mortgaged to the hilt. All alone, with my father dead less than a year. A father who left his property to someone else. Well, I saw your photo, when you were walking out of jail with your lawyer, and I thought: That man, I’ve got to meet him.”

  “What? Pity?”

  “Self-pity, maybe. You’d acted! You did something, though I’m sure you regret it now. Still, through frustration or rage or whatever, you did something and it made people notice you. Me, I’m afraid to do anything to change my life. With you I somehow feel that anything’s possible. There, is that enough of a motive for you, Officer? And please don’t say I’m trying to make a father figure out of an ex-cop. Believe me, old son, you are nothing whatsoever like my father, Conrad P. Binder.”

  “How come you use your maiden name?”

  “My last husband took everything else so I thought he should get back his name. Never liked it anyway. Anything else you’d like to know? About motives or clues or evidence or whatever else a cop looks for every time he meets a woman who likes him?”

  She was smiling when she said it, but she turned away and dabbed at one eye and removed her glasses.

  “Hey!” Winnie said, propping himself up on one elbow. “Hey.”

  She turned back to him, and once again her eyes were opaque and unfathomable and absolutely dry. “Hey, what?” she said.

  “Hey, lady,” Winnie said softly. “Hey, lady, I didn’t mean to make you sad.”

  She leaned over and kissed him. Then she took his hand and held it to her face. Then she turned and kissed the palm of that hand, and then every fingertip. “You wouldn’t mind walking me upstairs, would you?” she whispered.

  “I’m as helpless as a kitten up a tree,” Winnie Farlowe said.

  He followed Tess Binder through the living room to that sweeping staircase. She led him by the hand, but stopped for a second when he had to grab the rosewood banister.

  “I’m okay,” he lied.

  Tess led him through a set of double doors and switched on a lamp. The master bedroom was the biggest Winnie had ever seen outside a movie. It was done pretty much like the living room with statuary and paintings in gilt frames. The carpet was white but seemed heavier and whiter than the one downstairs. Tess pulled back the ivory silk bedspread. He’d never slept on peach-colored sheets. He’d never seen peach-colored sheets.

  Tess said, “Hop in there and warm the linen. I’ll be right back.”

  She was gone for nearly five minutes. Winnie got undressed, wondering if it was okay to leave his clothes on the black leather chaise, a high-tech job that looked like a stealt
h bomber in flight. It was the only object in the entire house that Tess had picked out herself, and it clashed outrageously with the costly kitsch her husband had collected.

  Winnie decided what the hell, stripped, tossing his things onto the black leather chaise, and jumped into bed. He was glad she hadn’t seen his ragged boxer shorts.

  He was under the covers when she reentered the room, wearing a primrose peignoir. Tess switched off the light, but instead of coming to bed, she walked to the window and threw open the drapes. Winnie could see the headlights behind her from Pacific Coast Highway, and heard voices from the restaurant parking lot across the narrow, yacht-choked channel. Tess stood with her back to the room for a full minute. He wished she’d hurry; the booze was hitting him hard and his eyes were getting heavy.

  When she finally turned toward him, she stood motionless in the moonlight, next to a marble sculpture that Ralph had loved but left. The nymph extended a hand toward Winnie Farlowe. He found himself growing more alert. Agitated. Something! What was it? He couldn’t guess what the nymph might be offering with her open-handed gesture. The hand was empty. Déjà vu?

  We looked at each other in the same way then

  But I don’t remember where or when.

  Tess Binder opened the tie on the peignoir and let it fall to her hips. Then she tugged again and let it fall to the floor. Winnie could see that she was small-breasted like the nymph, but a tad more voluptuous in the hips. The nymph was a size four.

  He looked from Tess to the nymph and back again. They were the loveliest things he’d ever seen in his life: the nymph and Tess Binder. Both of them so cool and still and bewildering in the moonlight. He was sober enough to hope he’d remember it all in the morning. He forgot about the song, and that glimpse of something half remembered.

  “Well, old son,” Tess said finally.

  But it sounded like the voice came from the cold marble nymph.

  8

  Straight-ahead Guy

  When Winnie’s eyes popped open he fully expected to find the twin buzzards perched on his bed, maws gaping and bloody. Instead, he found peach-colored sheets and a faint smell of jasmine and for a moment he couldn’t remember where the hell he was.

  Then he saw Tess sitting on that black futuristic chaise, staring through the open French doors, a cigarette glow reflecting off her glasses. She was wearing only the peignoir even though the offshore wind was cool and damp. Seeing her cleared his mind and he wanted to make love to her all over again. And he did remember most of that. He plumped his pillow and she turned toward him.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hello, lady.”

  “It’s three o’clock, go back to sleep.”

  “I know it’s three o’clock,” he said. “I always wake up at three o’clock.”

  “Why?”

  “The blood sugar,” Winnie said. “The booze makes it do a swan dive. Then you wake up and meet your hobgoblins. Mine’re a couple of real characters. They stay with me about two-three hours on average. You got any?”

  “Men,” she said. “Cruel heartless men I’ve known.”

  “Lemme visit the head and then you can tell me about ’em if you want,” Winnie said.

  He got out of bed. Suddenly self-conscious of his nakedness, he sucked in his gut and hurried into the bathroom. He wasn’t sure, but she might’ve chuckled.

  When he returned and jumped into bed, he said, “Gold faucets in the sinks and tub! They real gold?”

  “They’re as real as the Gold Coast itself,” she said. “They complement the stained-glass window, don’t you think? My husband could’ve designed it, it’s so like him. This statue was one of his investments in art.”

  Tess always figured that Ralph was the only man in the entire history of The Golden Orange to have a life-sized marble nymph in his bedroom. Completely left to his own devices he’d probably have painted in the nipples and pubic hair like a Saudi sheik on Sunset Boulevard.

  The ice in her voice made him pause, but he said, “Yeah, well, I like the window. All those sailboats and dolphins.”

  “Newport Beach belle époque,” she said. “Nineteen seventy-nine. That’s when my husband’s company built this one. He could’ve afforded any house he wanted on this island, but he had that arriviste’s insecurity. Wanted to be able to liquidate and run if the market failed, but it’s hard to run with a house. On the other hand, some of the people around here are fearlessly nouveau. One conspicuous consumer completely remodeled his house five times in a four-year period. One of our Y.P.O.’s.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Young Presidents’ Organization. Have to do twenty million a year and have at least fifty employees, or something like that. They kick you out when you turn fifty. He’s nouveau Jewish, that one. When I was growing up there wasn’t a Jew at any of my father’s clubs, which’re probably still restricted—de facto if not de jure. Even my club was probably only fifteen percent Jewish until about ten years ago.”

  “You got a problem with Jews?”

  She shot a look at him and said, “Of course not.” Then she turned back toward the darkness.

  “Me, I only got a problem with money,” Winnie said. “Problem is I got none, and no prospects for any. But I like talking about it. Unless it bothers you.”

  “Not at all.”

  “What’s it cost to join your local golf club?”

  “The initiation fee’s about a hundred and thirty thousand. Waiting list of a year, at least.”

  “I used to play a little,” Winnie said. “Read where it costs over a million to join in Tokyo and you gotta wait years. Guess the rich and shameless don’t have it so bad around these parts. Not compared to Tokyo.”

  “I never needed to be rich, Win,” she said. “Comfortable, yes. I’m used to certain comforts, I don’t deny that.”

  “Wanna come to bed?”

  “In a minute. After I finish this cigarette.”

  “I saw this guy in your club tonight,” he said. “Real wrinkled old guy. The kind where you wanna swag his neck? Wearing either a solid gold Rolex or the hubcap off his wife’s Mercedes. And I thought, this is the guy I handled a burglary for one time. Residential job out on the peninsula. They stole his wife’s full-length lynx which cost a hundred grand. And they also got his gold-plated license-plate holder. That cost twenty grand, with its own burglar alarm on it. I had to make a supplemental report for them after he got through thinking it all over. About the insurance and all? So I went to your club, this was, oh, seven, eight years ago. I took the report on his yacht. One a those eighty-footers where you could fill the slips below the waterline with concrete and he’d never notice ’cause it never goes out. And I thought, there’s something very very wrong with my life.”

  He paused to clear the vodka mucus from his throat, and she said, “What was wrong?”

  “I got a conscience,” he said. “I got this baggage he didn’t have. I mean, I knew the report was bullshit so he could rape the insurance company and IRS. And his wife was there and had to excuse herself to go pick up the poodle at the doggie day-care center. I bet there’s lots like her making annual visits to a plastic surgeon where the croaker’s floor is slushy with sucked-out pheasant and fried squid in pumpkin sauce, and the goddamn sludge from kiwi and angel-hair pasta can wear out a dozen Roto Rooters. And I thought, Where’s the justice here? Me? I had a few chances at bad bucks during the years I policed this town, but there I was, bankrupt as Eastern Airlines.”

  “Are you saying your conscience held you back, is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Any regrets that you have this policeman’s overdeveloped superego?”

  “Sometimes. Know some a the things I hate about cop shows on TV? They always say, ‘Put out an APB.’ Me, I never put out an APB in my life which is just this thing when nobody can find the suspect and already gave up. Another thing that gets me on the cop shows is when they go, ‘Use extreme caution.’ Like, after a guy shoots a bu
nch a people with an AK-forty-seven. If they gotta tell you to use caution you gotta be brain-dead, right? But more than all that, I really hate where they say, ‘The defendant was sentenced to life three times and he showed no emotion.’ They even say that in the newspapers all the time.”

  “Why do you hate it?”

  “’Cause he can’t show any emotion. He’s a sociopath, most likely. His feelings are deader than ten-cent phone calls. All this brings me back to the guy on his yacht, phoneying up that supplemental burglary report. And me, I’m sitting there helping him screw the insurance man and the taxpayers. And I know it and he knows it, but he don’t give a shit if I know it. He’s a sociopath, no doubt. And he’s glad of it.”

  “Ever get tempted to do something illegal for money? When you were a cop?”

  Tess Binder snuffed out the cigarette and got up from the chaise, but didn’t come to bed. She walked toward the window, toward the cold marble nymph. She stood by the wall and Winnie could feel those smoke-gray eyes watching him from dark shadows.

  “Once, maybe,” he said. “There was this doctor. He had this rich wife, even richer than he was.”

  It was a case he’d worked on just before his injury. He was teamed with Buster Wiles at that time, before Buster became the cynical burnout Winnie had introduced to Tess at Spoon’s Landing. It began as a simple follow-up to an anonymous phone call.

  “I’ve got to meet a homicide detective,” the anonymous caller had said. “There’s going to be a contract murder. Meet me at two o’clock. End of Balboa Pier. I’ll be wearing a black T-shirt.”

  Winnie and Buster had absolutely nothing going that day, having finished their routine paper work. It was a bright summer day, and they could always get a hamburger at the faux-forties diner out on the end of the pier. So even if the anonymous tipster turned out to be just a nut case, they decided to make an appearance. They found him standing by six fishermen, who were doing okay from the looks of the battered buckets full of dead fish.

  Buster approached the guy and said, “You the one that called?”

  He was as tall as Buster, but lean and stringy. Ruddy and fair, he was one of those beach lovers who were candidates for skin cancer but refused to wear hats. His lips were raw, and he had a couple of precancerous flakes on his nose and cheeks and old dermatology burns along his forehead and eyebrows. Winnie had gotten sick of warning guys about Haole-rot, back in his lifeguard days.