In December she had leased an empty shop downtown – a small, modern, brick-and-glass oblong on Hope Street. Almost overnight it became a bookstore, The Librairie.
Just across the street was a hotel, the Del Rio. The Eye moved into an upstairs front room, keeping his place at the La Cienega rooming house as well.
During the shop’s renovation, she would arrive in the morning and stay there all day, supervising painters and carpenters and electricians. At one o’clock the Bentley would drive up, and she and Ralph would have lunch together. They’d come back at two and the work would continue, Ralph seated in a corner, trying to keep out of everybody’s way. The chauffeur, Jake, would remove his tunic and spend the afternoon sawing boards and hammering nails. The only problem they had was with the gangs of bikers roaring up and down the street, terrorizing pedestrians and occasionally throwing something through a window.
The Eye sat in his room, watching all this through binoculars.
On opening day, all the Forbeses were there, popping champagne corks and distributing trays of sandwiches. Charlotte and Joan placed portraits of Proust and Hemmingway, Conan Doyle and Joyce in the display windows. Basil sat on a stool, playing folk songs on a zither. Ted stood outside, inviting passersby to come in for a drink. A best-selling author, a friend of Ralph’s, breezed in and autographed copies of his latest novel. A crowd gathered on the sidewalk. Two movie stars showed up and had their pictures taken.
By noon over a thousand customers had bought books, emptying half the shelves.
It was Christmas Eve, Joanna Eris’s birthday.
That night the Eye moved through the blackness of the yard to the living room window. Forbes was on the settee, drinking a cognac, smoking his pipe.
Joanna walked past him. She was holding his cane, twirling it.
‘I wanted to be a majorette,’ she said. ‘But we couldn’t afford it. The uniform cost fifty dollars. That was way beyond our means.’ She tossed the cane into the air, caught it. ‘I used to practice for hours. With a stick. Daddy kept promising me that just as soon as we had some money in the bank everything would be all right. But we never had any money in the bank and nothing was ever all right.’
Ralph said something.
‘He was everything,’ she continued. ‘A plumber, a truck driver, a paper hanger. Name it. Bartender, TV repairman, gardener, garbage man, bricklayer. Everything and nothing. One summer –’ her voice broke; she coughed. ‘One summer he sold encyclopedias from door to door. Or tried to. Never sold any.’ She whirled the cane, dropped it. ‘The worst job he ever had – oh, that was really awful! He was the chief usher at the Mayfair. God!’ She picked up the cane, set it on a chair. ‘The Mayfair was a movie theater on Broad Street. He wore a red uniform with big buttons and epaulets and a cloak – a mauve cloak – and a little round hat …’
She walked to the window. The Eye dropped to his knees. ‘He took tickets in the lobby, and looked absolutely ridiculous! Like a – a – I don’t know what.’ She went over to the Dual, turned it on.
She took a record from the rack, ‘It was bad enough when he was a plumber and used to come home smelling like shit. But that uniform! All my girlfriends at school saw him, my teachers, the neighbors.’
The record was playing. ‘But then, thank God, he was fired … as usual. That was the fall my mother died, in September. And there we were, just the two of us. He didn’t work at all then. We were totally broke. September. October. November.’
She wandered across the room, rubbing her hands, pinching her bent finger. ‘December. We were going to be evicted. One afternoon a man came and turned off our gas and electricity. It was my birthday. The twenty-fourth of December. I was eleven years old. Daddy bought a tree somehow, and we decorated it with strips of paper. An old woman who lived down the block – Mrs. Keegan – gave me some pears. That was our supper. Then we went out for a walk. We just roamed the streets like a couple of derelicts, looking at the lights. It was snowing, and people were still shopping. There were guys in Santa Claus outfits standing on the corners, ringing bells. I was frozen. We went into a department store to get warm.’
She walked to the Dual and replayed the record. ‘This was playing on the loudspeaker. “La Paloma.”’ She stared at the turning record. ‘It was so incredibly lovely! The most beautiful song I ever heard. It made me cry. He thought I was crying because he … because he … I was standing there sobbing, you see, and he thought it was because he couldn’t give me a present. So he said, “Wait a minute, I’ll get you something.” The poor man! He tried to steal a sweater and they caught him. I ran out of the store. I went home and waited for him. I waited all night. The next morning two detectives came and told me he was dead.’
She walked past the window. ‘He was dead. He had a heart attack at the police station. He just … he …’ Her mouth opened. She bit her finger. A rasp of deep sorrow down in her throat shook her body. She dropped to the floor and sat on the rug, wild-eyed, streaming with tears. Ralph got to his feet and came forward, groping for her. He collided with a chair, knocked it over.
‘Charlotte!’
His searching hands found her, seized her. He sank beside her, took her in his arms.
She leaned against him, wailing softly.
‘I can’t wait until judgement day,’ she moaned, ‘when I can stand before God and tell Him how much I loathe Him!’
The Eye walked off to the street.
He spent the rest of Christmas Eve in a bar on La Cienega, drinking beer and doing a crossword puzzle. At two in the morning he drove around LA, watching the merrymakers. He parked his car on Fifth Street and sat on the front steps of the library for an hour. A hooker, then a fag, then another hooker tried to pick him up. He walked past The Librairie on Hope Street and looked at the books and portraits in the window. He had a cup of coffee in an all-night place on Grand Avenue. There were Christmas cards on display at the cashier’s desk. He bought one of them. It was Norwegian. VELKOMMEN DEILIGE JULEFEST! He took his pen and wrote on the inner flap:
Long time no see. What are
you up to? I miss you terribly.
I hope you’re happy. Please
don’t forget me. I want so much
to see you, but I know I never will.
Merry Christmas.
Daddy
He addressed the envelope to Maggie, c/o American Express, Ulan Bator, Mongolia, and dropped it in a mailbox on Pershing Square.
The next day he flew to New Jersey.
The Mercer County Home for Girls was pure Charles Dickens. Grimy walls, a soot-smirched courtyard, dirty windows, dungeon archways. It looked like a Victorian flashback.
Joanna Eris.
A column of little girls in gray smocks marched out of a shed, all carrying buckets. Several others were sweeping a hallway. Two more were changing the tire of a truck jacked up in the yard.
A thin, bald, erased-looking fellow wearing what looked like a streetcar conductor’s uniform led the Eye through a passageway. He knocked respectfully on a door, ushered him into the lair of an old woman named Mrs. Hutch.
She was in her seventies, walrus-necked, puffy, mean, carnivorous.
‘Joanna Eris? I remember her, yes.’ She didn’t invite him to sit down. ‘What about her?’
‘My company is trying to trace her. A deceased uncle in West Virginia left her some insurance money.’
He gave her one of his bogus cards. She didn’t bother to take it.
‘She’s probably in Sing Sing.’
‘Is that where your alumnae usually end up, Mrs. Hutch?’
‘In the last five years, Mr. Wiseacre’ – she picked up a ruler, moved it from the left to the right side of her desk – ‘fifteen hundred and thirty-six young ladies were discharged from this institution, and they are all now gainfully employed, every one of them.’
‘That’s remarkable.’
‘I think so, too. We’re very proud of our record. One of our alumnae, as you call them, is now in the State House, the private secretary of the governor of New Jersey. Another is a Bell Telephone supervisor, in charge of one hundred switchboards.’
‘And Joanna Eris?’
‘Joanna Eris’ – she picked up a pencil, moved it – ‘was one of our rare dropouts. She left here when she was eighteen. And good riddance!’
‘You didn’t like her, Mrs. Hutch?’
‘She was a troublemaker and a sneak. Insubordinate, vicious. A foul-mouthed, cat-eyed little misfit.’
‘Where did she go when she left?’
‘To Trenton. She worked for two months with General Motors. Then she was fired. The personnel manager called me up one day and said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Hutch, I just cannot keep her on.” And he asked me if she was retarded.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘I told him the matter was no concern of mine.’ She moved the ruler back from the right to the left side of her desk. ‘Then she went to New York and was arrested for theft.’ Her counterfeit grandmother’s head sank deeper into her blubbery neck, and she looked at him with hooded eyes. ‘Is this really about insurance?’ she asked.
He was completely taken aback. ‘I don’t understand, Mrs. Hutch …’
‘You wouldn’t be’ – she smiled bleakly – ‘fishing by any chance, would you?’
‘Fishing?’
‘Going to try to bring a lawsuit against the home after all these years?’ He laughed flatly. ‘She told me she’d sue me one day. Wouldn’t put it past her. Brazen little minx.’ He had no idea what she was talking about. He waited.
‘It was her own fault. Just like that business with the electricity. Almost got herself electrocuted playing with the fuses. Blew the lights out all over Mercerville. Or when she was working in the kitchen. She left the gas turned on all night once. Could’ve killed us all.’
She moved a paperweight on the desk. ‘She was always demolishing things. She was clumsy, inept, incapable of touching anything without smashing it. She ruined three sewing machines. Had to replace them. Put her elbow through the window of the greenhouse, had to have five stitches. If I were to send her a bill for all the damage she caused, it would cost her a fortune. She had nobody but herself to blame for her hand.’
‘Her hand? Do you mean her finger?’
‘Just carelessness.’
‘How did it happen?’
‘You see? You’re fishing.’
‘No I’m not.’
‘If you are, say so’ – she pointed to the telephone – ‘and I’ll call our attorney.’
‘I’m not fishing, Mrs. Hutch. How did it happen?’
‘A sickle.’
‘A sickle?’
‘Cutting grass.’
He looked past her. Hanging on the wall behind the desk was a dusty oil portrait of a pretty woman with a shy, frightened face. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked.
She turned, looking up. ‘Me.’ Her mouth twisted. ‘One of our girls painted it. In 1929. The year of the Crash. Herbert Hoover. Everybody was on relief, but my girls ate three square meals a day. They had coal in the winter and a week in Atlantic City every summer. Nobody remembers the Depression now. It didn’t last long, thank the Lord. Everything passes.’ She moved a pair of scissors across the desk. ‘Time passes. I wonder what Joanna looks like today. The little bitch.’
She broke wind gently, filling the room with the rank odor of locomotive smoke.
The Eye went back to Trenton.
He walked down Tyler Street.
Number 127 was a small, square, livid wooden house next door to a grocery store. The railing of the front porch was broken. The windows were open, a TV voice was laughing and chattering in the living room.
A young black came out the door. ‘Can I help you, stuff?’
The Eye hesitated. What was the name Joanna had mentioned? ‘I’m looking for –’ What the hell was it? The old woman who gave her the pears. ‘Mrs. Higgins.’
‘Don’t know her.’
‘No – hold it. Mrs. Keegan.’
‘Oh, her. Lived up the block. Dead and gone long ago. Passed off when I was just a pygmy.’
‘How long have you been here?’
‘What’s it to you, man?’
‘Nothing. Just curious.’ More blacks were standing around now, watching him blankly. Four … five … eight… ten of them. On the sidewalk, in the street, on nearby porches. ‘I used to know the family who lived in one twenty-seven. Mr. Eris and his daughter. Did you know them?’
‘When was that?’
‘The fifties and early sixties.’
‘No way at all!’ he giggled. ‘This was honk territory then. The Zulus have taken over since, as you can see.’
A huge man in a turtleneck sweater rolled up to the Eye, playing to the crowd. ‘You want something, you?’
‘No, I don’t want anything.’
‘Then why don’t ya just keep walkin’?’
He caught the noon train to New York. He drove to White Plains, first to the courthouse, where he read a transcript of her trial, then to a service station on Hudson Avenue, where he talked to a hunchbacked mechanic standing in a grease pit. His name was Zalesney.
‘Yeah, Joey. Sure,’ he said wistfully. ‘Real good-looking chick. Wearin’ them white overalls, the guys really honked their horns. She didn’t last very long. Couple of months. She worked in the office, with Mr. Wozniak. And at the pumps when we was rushed. One day she climbed into a brand new Lancia Scorpion and just took off. The state cops busted her away up around Albany somewhere. The guy who owned the heap was tear-assed. He made the DA ram it to her, the prick. I don’t know why they had to make such a big deal about it. She was just takin’ a spin. She’d of probably brung it back. They gave her thirteen months.’
The Eye drove to Norwich and had a look at the Women’s Detention Farm. It was a village of immaculate white buildings in a hundred acres of woods and pastures. Girls in olive drab suits were driving tractors and marching around carrying shovels on their shoulders. From a distance they looked like soldiers.
A guard at the gate phoned the administration building and a few minutes later a warder in a Jeep drove out to talk to the Eye. His name was Giulianello.
‘Time magazine.’ The Eye gave him one of his fake cards. ‘I’d like to interview your shrink.’
‘Shrink?’ Giulianello blinked at him.
‘You have one, don’t you?’
‘Yes, sir. Dr. Brockhurst.’
‘We’re going to do a story on prison psychology. I’m handling the girls’ detention angle in New York State.’
‘We couldn’t let you in without authorization from Albany, sir. Besides, Dr. Brockhurst isn’t here. He’s lecturing at Yale this month.’
‘Well, I’ll get in touch with him later then. And I’ll check with Albany first.’
‘That would be best, sir. I have a three-year subscription to Time.’
‘Good for you. How long has Brockhurst been with you?’
‘Since seventy-three.’
‘Who was it before that? Maybe I could talk to his predecessor, I could miss all the red tape bit.’
‘That would be Dr. Darras,’ Giulianello said. ‘Martine Darras. She’s in private practice now. In Boston.’
The Eye spent the night in New York and took a morning shuttle flight to Boston. He found Dr. Martine Darras’s St. James Avenue address in the phone book.
Her office was a tenth-floor suite with inch-thick tempered-glass walls facing the John Hancock Tower. The waiting room was bare and blue, with one long low couch against the window and a zodiacal chart on the wall.
A young woman in a faultless garnet-coloured Chanel tailleur came out of the inner office. She was about thirty-two, dark, exquisite, mirror-eyed. Hanging around her neck on a thin chain was a silver disc engraved with a Virgo symbol. She was holding a pack of Gitanes.
‘We’re closed,’ she said pleasantly. ‘It’s Saturday.’
‘Dr. Darras?’
‘Yes.’
‘You were the prison psychologist at the Norwich Detention Farm a few years ago.’
‘Yes, I was.’
He decided not to lie to her. He gave her one of his Watchmen, Inc. cards. ‘I’m investigating one of the former inmates. Could you give me just a few minutes?’
‘Who are you investigating?’
‘Joanna Eris.’
‘Come in,’ she said.