THE FACTS DID SHOW otherwise a few days later. Three days to be exact.
I spent those days taking Lamps advice. The tapes and transcripts arrived from New York, the IBM Selectric from a rental outfit down on Sepulveda. I set myself up in Sonny’s study at his massive desk, his pictures and awards looking down at me. I was up to Knight and Day’s postwar glory days now, and finding the going rough.
Sonny wasn’t around anymore to look over my shoulder and growl, “Yeah, that’s just how I felt, pally,” or “No, that ain’t me.” I had a pile of tapes, some notes, some impressions, and the power to create a man out of it. I was on my own.
It felt a lot more like a novel now.
I was also having trouble concentrating. Every time I started to look through the transcripts for a specific anecdote or phrase, I instead found myself searching in vain for that something Sonny had said, that thing that kept nibbling away at me. I couldn’t shake that. Nor the awareness of where the book was headed now, and the conversation I’d have to have with Connie about it.
I spent a lot of the time staring out the study window at the eucalyptus tree. And swimming laps. And ’pooning.
And with Wanda. I was in her movie a lot now. Background music was playing. The setting was lavishly appointed. A lot of action. Very little dialogue. No questions. No past. No other present. Just now.
Only once was there so much as a flicker of reality to us. She came into the study one morning, sat down on my lap, and ran her fingers under the shirt she’d given me.
“What will happen when you finish? Will you go back to New York and leave me?”
I pulled the snaps of her denim shirt open. “I can’t even imagine leaving this room.”
And we didn’t. Like I said, it was only a flicker.
Occasionally, we chatted idly about going down to Spago or to a movie, but we never left the estate. There were two more cases of Dom Perignon in the cellar, and when we got hungry for food, Maria was there to cook us something. It did occur to me that this was the best life I’d led in a long time.
The only trouble was that Sonny had paid for my rebirth with his life.
I was out on the lawn ’pooning and trying to hear his voice when Lamp called. I was hitting the towel nine times out of ten again. The old eye was coming back. The voice wasn’t.
Maria took the call. I picked up in the study.
“Start speculating again,” Lamp announced without even a hello.
“What happened to your facts?”
“Know where Vic Early is? Know where he’s been for the past four days? The Veterans Administration hospital on Sawtelle. He went straight there after he escaped. Checked himself in. They logged the time. He was there on the night of your bonfire. He’s been there all along. Just took us awhile to catch up with him.”
“What’s he doing there?”
“That’s the strange part. Maybe not so strange. He said he felt he was going to have to end up there, that there wasn’t going to be much choice, and that he wanted that choice to be his own. He escaped because he wanted to walk in there on his own two feet. He’s a proud guy. I kind of like him, to tell you the truth.”
“So do I.”
“Guess you’re feeling pretty smart about this.”
“Not really.”
“I’m not going to say you were right and I was wrong. The facts looked a certain way, so I went with them. Now they look different. Early’s not eliminated. He still could have pulled the trigger. But I have to look elsewhere.”
“Back to your theory?”
“And to speculating.”
“About anything in particular?”
“Yes. About who might have gotten mad at Sonny Day for telling secrets. Real mad.”