Weiss was driving north out of the city. Passing the Sausalito bluffs just then. Watching the lowering sky, catching glimpses of the water.
It was late afternoon. The clouds were gathering dark and burly on the tops of the headlands. The bay was choppy with whitecapped waves, and its depths looked thick as blood.
Weiss followed the curl of the highway west toward the edge of the open ocean. He knew what he was looking for now. He also knew that he would probably never find it. But what else could he do? He had nothing else—nothing but a feeling, his instinctive sense of other people’s lives. That wasn’t enough for him; he didn’t trust it. Down-to-earth cop type that he was, he wanted more logic, more proof. Whatever there was to see, he wanted to see it for himself.
It’s not just what one person’s making up in his head, after all. It’s what the other person’s making up, too. It’s what that makes up when you put the two things together.
Those were the words that had brought him here in the first place: the words of wisdom I’d delivered in my conversation with him the night before. They had started him thinking. Thinking about Brinks and Arnold Freyberg and how they’d imagined each other. Thinking about himself and how he’d imagined Julie Wyant and the whores he hired to act his imagination out. And thinking about Bishop—mostly he started thinking about Bishop. Because it was then he finally saw what was bothering him, worrying him, nagging him with so much urgency.
Bishop had fallen for Honey Graham—and no one knew what it was that she imagined. No one knew what she dreamed or what she wanted. No one, when you came right down to it, knew who she was at all. Her father had spent his money to find her. Weiss had turned a blind eye to keep Bishop on her trail. And Bishop—Weiss could see how he wanted her, how she’d reached him. But who was she? How did she really feel about him? What was she after? No one had even bothered to ask.
Weiss knew her history. He had Bishop’s report. He’d heard how the rich girl had crawled naked through mud to collect a drug dealer’s hundred-dollar bills. Then she’d ridden backseat to a killer—and then she’d switched to Bishop when the law closed in. There was a logic to it, Weiss could feel that, but he couldn’t quite put it together. He couldn’t quite figure her out.
And then he could.
Or he thought he could. He thought maybe he was beginning to get a sense of the pattern of her actions. But it was just another of his inspirations. He couldn’t be sure of it. So here he was, driving off the highway now, headed up a rising road, stopping at a rustic pinewood toll booth.
There was a ranger in the booth, a short, big-breasted young lady with a homely face as round as a pie plate. Weiss reached out his car window to show her his photographs.
“You seen either of these two?” he asked.
The ranger studied them, first the newspaper photo of Beverly Graham, then Mrs. Cobham’s snapshot of Harold Spatz. She shook her head, handed them back. It was what Weiss expected. If they’d been here, it would’ve been more than a month ago now.
He waved in thanks. Drove on.
He chugged up the side of the mountain. The big trees closed over him. The big clouds tumbled low. He parked near the gift shop and visitor’s center, a slanting rhombus of pine and glass. There was another ranger there, inside—a strapping man. And there was an older woman with frosted hair working the cash register. Weiss showed them the pictures, too. They shook their heads, too, just like the ranger in the toll booth. Then he showed them a page of Harold Spatz’s sketchbook. “The Beach from Lost Trail.” The ranger pointed to the spot on a big green map taped to the wall.
“You might want to be careful going up there now,” he said. “Weather looks like it’s deteriorating pretty fast.”
Weiss returned to his Taurus. Drove on.
He maneuvered as close to the peak as he could, but the paved roads only reached so far. In the end, he found himself trudging up the mountain on foot. Under redwoods that skyrocketed to the very belly of the gathering storm.
It was hard climbing. The ground was spongy and damp. The ascent was steady, sometimes steep. Weiss’s wind was good and his legs were strong from walking the hills of San Francisco, but he was way out of his element here. He followed the trail, head down, breath heavy. It was a big chore for him. A big, probably useless chore.
But he couldn’t help it. He had to keep going. He had to see whatever there was to see.
After a while, he lifted his eyes to gauge the distance left. And even he—days later, in his office, in his chair, with his feet up—had to admit the sight was magnificent. The rough-jacketed trees rose up so straight and swiftly into heaven they were like so many prayers, so many prayers solidified into spires, spires that broke startling out of the mossy tangle of branches in the underbrush as if they were the remnants of a lost city, a lost city of the spirit and its prayers. And the clouds above them. The black, black clouds. Churning and muttering at the tower tops. They were so low it seemed he might walk right into them. It seemed he might discover giant gears in there, and pulleys and presses, and sweat-streaked musclemen in their midst: a whole great skyborne factory of making and destruction—
“Uy,” Weiss muttered. Well, he was no outdoorsman. And he still had a ways to go.
He toiled on. He met no one going up or coming down. Not in this weather. Even the birds had stopped singing. Even the insects made no sound. The air itself had grown weirdly silent, weirdly green. A faint irritation of electricity was everywhere.
Finally he saw it. A break in the tree line ahead and above. An opening vista of dark sky. The top board of a railing visible. And a descending side trail off to the right that the ranger had told him about.
He followed that smaller path. It corkscrewed down steeply. For a moment, the forest grew clammy and shadowy and close. And still, unnervingly silent.
Then, very suddenly, the land ended. One more step and he was on a promontory of earth and stone. It jutted out, dizzying, into the wind over the Pacific.
Below, far below, there were rocks rising out of the water. One enormous formation, cleft in two jagged halves, seemed to reach up nearly to his shoe soles. Others had lower peaks and looked like distant mountains. Some just barely showed their domes above the whitecaps. The waves smacked against them all, hurling spray, then retrieving the falling mist as they snaked back foaming through the crevices and sank again into the body of the sea.
Weiss fought off vertigo. He felt as if he were standing on the farthest effort of the continent. With his feet planted wide and his arms lifted slightly from his thighs for balance, with his tie and jacket whipping and fluttering in the strong air, he had to force himself to look down.
He did look down. He saw the living image of Harold Spatz’s sketches. He recognized the curl of the cliffs around him, the reach of branches into his eyeshot, the rocks—more than anything, the shape of the rocks below. They were all in the pictures.
He stood there a long time. A long time, in spite of the first rumble of thunder. After coming all this way, he didn’t even turn to search the surrounding ground. What was he going to find there? A pair of moss-covered tickets to Reno? A cheap engagement ring discarded in the dirt? An uncorked bottle of sparkling wine?
All right, he’d look—eventually. Before he left, he’d take a good long look around. He had to do that, too. But right now, just standing there, just squinting through the wind, he thought he saw enough. He thought he saw everything.
He saw Harold Spatz. He pictured the pimply-faced boy as he’d barely dared to sketch himself, walking in his special place with the special woman who had unaccountably come into his life. Standing with her out here at the edge of everything. And she coming toward him, her face uplifted to his, her hands pressing lightly against his chest.
The whole scene was clear in Weiss’s imagination. The girl with her fingers on the boy’s shirtfront, the boy working up the courage to propose. He saw the swift and unexpected motion of her slender arms. He saw Spatz stumbling backward. Poor, spotty Harold Spatz, with the taste of the best kiss he’d ever had still on his mouth—hardly able to relinquish his hopes so he could understand that he was falling—hardly willing to reshape his lips so he could scream before he hit the rocks and died.