Do you ever drive around to think things through? There’s something about motion that inspires concentration, even if it doesn’t exactly make you into a wonderful driver.
God knew I had enough to think about. In my cop days I used to make a simple list of all the people involved in a homicide investigation. That was on the right margin. On the left I made another list, their possible reasons for wanting the victim dead. I could see it was time that I do that.
On top of Stephen Elliot’s murder—and now the deaths of the motel clerk and the prostitute, which had been disguised by somebody very clever as the murder-suicide the press was reporting—there was my growing confusion about Donna Harris. Last night had been a downer of sorts and I wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t just because I’d dropped in unannounced and she’d been sleepy. I felt a sense of her holding back. Maybe it was simply because I was rushing things out of my own needs. Or maybe there was something going on….
When I got back to my apartment, the hour-long drive having made me think through things to the point of quiet madness, I found a message from Donna with my answering service.
“She left an address,” the operator said. “Would you like it?”
I wrote it down, a terrible feeling starting to form like a weight in my stomach. Maybe Donna was taking this detective thing seriously. Maybe she’d started to investigate on her own and gotten into some trouble.
“No phone number?” I asked.
“No, just the address.”
“Thanks.”
Fifteen minutes later, having violated more than a few traffic laws, I wheeled into the parking lot of 2605 Kelvin Avenue.
The large brick complex had originally been designed for swank office space. But the city built an expressway and bypassed the place, and now the offices were anything but swank. The owner spent minimal dollars on upkeep, and the space that had been designed for suites now housed a myriad of tiny, struggling businesses. Half the insurance agents in the state seemed to be here, along with a number of firms with totally baffling names such as “Omega Corp.” Maybe the obscurity was intended.
I took an elevator to Room 402, as Donna’s message had instructed, to find myself in a hallway with carpeting that was shaggy from wear, not by design. Everything looked chipped and scratched and dented. It was unlikely the Getty family would consider leasing space.
There was a hand-stenciled sign on 402 that said AD WORLD. WALK IN.
Which was what I made the mistake of doing.
The first thing I noticed was the couple holding hands. Right then I didn’t know who the guy was, only that he had Donna’s hand cupped in his and was staring fondly into her eyes. He was a tribute to razor-cut hair and camel’s-hair topcoats and the kind of bearing meant to intimidate. His Gregory Peck head turned slowly and irritably to take note of me.
Donna flushed, pulling her hand from his more quickly than he probably liked.
“Gee, Dwyer, hi.”
She was redefining the word strained for our generation.
“Gee. Hi.” I wasn’t doing much better.
“This,” she said, “is Chad.”
Then she nervously jumped to her feet and came around the desk and sort of clapped me on the shoulder. “Chad. The former Mr. Harris.”
By now he had walked around the desk too. Unlike Donna and me, he seemed to be feeding off this moment of general embarrassment.
He put out a hard, dry hand politician-style and I shook it.
“So you’re Dwyer.” He shook his head. “Donna’s told me all about you. You sound like quite a character. Part-time actor, part-time private eye. Quite a character.”
Why did I feel that I was standing for inspection before Donna’s father instead of her ex-husband?
And he was making it clear that I had failed inspection. Quite a character is one of those phrases that could fit anybody from Howard Cosell to Jack the Ripper. He looked around the tiny office as if he were a land baron inspecting his domain. Everything seemed slightly humorous to him. Not because it was funny, but because it failed his standards in some way. His dark eyes danced with smugness.
“It’s nice you’re going to help her with her little magazine project,” Chad Harris went on. Little magazine project irritated me. I could see that he was good in court. The best lawyers have that ability to undercut and deflate with subtle language. The good ones rarely go for bombast. Chad here could castrate you with adjectives. Before I could respond, he tucked his thumbs in his vest and strolled around the room as if he were a tour guide in a museum. “She’s done a wonderful job, don’t you think?”
And she had.
She’d covered the walls of the one-room office with framed copies of her best ads. They lent color and style to the place. The inexpensive filing cabinets were new enough to shine and the round coffee table around which she’d placed three straight-backed chairs gave the room a sense of proportion. Only the glum wintry sky filling the cracked window spoiled her work.
“Great job,” I said. But I still hadn’t found my voice. All I could think of was them holding hands. Who had a better right than formerly married people? But that didn’t help, of course. My mind had outstripped the reality of Donna and me. There was nothing between us, certain sappy thoughts of mine to the contrary.
“This should generate a nice little income for her,” Chad was saying.
“Chad was nice enough to lease this office for me for six months,” Donna said.
“Boy, that’s wonderful,” I said. “Just fantastic.”
Maybe I should have tried “absolutely and totally fabulous” or something while I was at it.
Chad glanced at his watch like a surgeon inspecting a liver. “Damn. Late for court.”
His hand struck out again.
We shook.
He shrugged into his camel’s-hair coat and surveyed the office again, and then did what I’d hoped he wouldn’t. Leaned into Donna and put a possessive arm around her waist and a more than perfunctory kiss on her cheek.
“Don’t forget about dinner,” he said. “That’s a for-sure, toots.”
Then he beamed at me magnanimously and I sensed, as I always sense around men like him, all the ways I have failed not only my gender but the fucking human race, and then he did me the inestimable favor of opening the door and leaving.
We stood in the kind of silence that only lovers can share. Part suppressed anger. Part hurt. Part confusion.
“Gosh,” she said.
“Gee,” I said. And pointed out all the things that had just been pointed out by the one and only Chad. “This looks great, fantastic.” There I went again—fabulously wonderful, et cetera.
“So,” she said.
“So.”
“You got my call.”
“Got your call. Yes indeed.”
“Were you surprised?”
“To put it mildly.”
I knew she was talking about Ad World’s office space so once again I waved my arm in the direction of the ads hanging on the wall. “Fabulous,” I said.
Then she decided to give us both a break. “It was kind of uncomfortable, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t expect him to show up. He just kind of popped in and—”
“Hey, you don’t owe me an explanation.”
“Well, I do sort of, Dwyer. I mean, we’re in a weird situation here, wouldn’t you say? I mean, we’re not really lovers or anything, and neither of us really owes the other anything, but there is something going on between us, don’t you think?”
“Something. Yeah.”
“So here I am holding hands with my ex-husband when you walk in.”
“Yeah. I noticed that.”
“Your eyes kind of bugged out. Sort of like a cartoon character.”
“God, was I that obvious?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Shit.”
“It’s all right, Dwyer. I don’t handle things like that very well myself.”
I sat down and lit up a cigarette, confused and miserable. “Maybe it’s better if we don’t talk about it.”
She lit up too. “Yeah.”
“So this is really a great office.”
“The last time you said it was fantastic. In fact, you’ve alternated between fantastic and fabulous. Great is sort of a step down.”
“Oh. Okay. This is a fantastic office.”
“Yeah. I really like it.”
“And it was damn nice of him to lease it for you.” I wanted to cut out Chad’s heart, of course, but there didn’t seem to be any graceful way of working that into the conversation just now.
“Fabulous of him, actually,” she said. Then she said, “And it was a complete surprise. He calls one week to see how I’m doing—I mean, we’re really good friends these days—and tells me to meet him at this address in half an hour—and voila, Ad World has its first office.”
“He really seems like a fantastic guy.”
“You didn’t like him, did you?”
“I thought he was a jerk.”
“That’s what I thought you thought.”
“I mean, if we’re being honest.”
“I understand.”
“He kind of sneers.”
“I know.”
“And he puts people down.”
“I kinda figured you didn’t like being called ‘quite a character.’”
“Also I didn’t like him calling this your ‘little project.’”
“That’s how he was all the time we were married.”
I was a fucking lapdog, but I couldn’t help myself. I just wanted her to say something reassuring about us.
“I can see why you broke up.”
“He’s dumping the court stenographer.”
“Oh.”
“He says he thinks he’s in love with me. He says he thinks he never really fell out of love with me. That the thing with the stenographer was just a middle-age itch.”
“Well,” I said.
“I thought I’d better tell you that.”
“I appreciate it,” I said.
“You don’t look like you appreciate it.”
“Well, I can appreciate it without being absolutely fucking thrilled about it, can’t I?” The anger was starting to surface.
“I really like you a lot.”
Man, I could hear it coming. I wanted to beat her words to the door.
“Right now I’m just confused,” she said.
“Right.”
“I still want to work with you and – and maybe even see you, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“But right now …” She paused.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Shit,” she said.
“That seems to be as good a word as any,” I said.
I left.