Bernhardt's Edge, page 16
part #1 of Alan Bernhardt Series
For as long as she could remember, she’d seen herself in a picture like this. She’d known it would happen; she’d never lost faith. Because all the promises had been made: the TV sitcom, the movies, the glossy four-color ads, all of them had promised her happiness: a sanitized, deodorized, homogenized future, she and her husband and their sanitized, deodorized children.
It had been in high school that the dream had begun to lose definition, like an old photograph, fading in the sun. It had happened quite suddenly, it seemed—on a Friday in April, perhaps, when there’d been a party, and no one had invited her. Until then, she’d always thought she was pretty, always thought that, when the time came, she’d find the right man, the one who fitted into the Norman Rockwell painting.
But something had happened to her on that Friday in April. Perhaps it had happened in her subconscious, between the time she’d gone to sleep and the next morning. Because it seemed that until one day, one specific, fateful day, she’d always thought of herself as pretty—just the one simple word, “pretty.”
But then, the next day, she no longer thought of herself as pretty. She didn’t think she was ugly. She’d never thought that. It was just that, from that particular day until this particular day, she’d never thought she was pretty.
And prettiness, she knew, was a state of mind. Prettiness, and everything else, everything that mattered, it was all a state of mind. Pretty was a code word—for a teenager, for a woman, any woman, pretty was the ultimate code word. In high school, “pretty” meant that the boys liked you, wanted to take you out—wanted to feel you up in the backseats of their fathers’ cars. Later, after everyone had lost their virginity, “pretty” meant, simply, that you were a woman that men wanted to lay. The prettier you were, the more men wanted to lay you. And the more men wanted to lay you, the prettier you felt, therefore the more self-confident you felt of your sexuality. Meaning that you could pick and choose. Making you more inaccessible. Making you, therefore, more desirable. It was a simple supply-and-demand equation, really—elementary stuff, for first-year business school majors.
She shifted her gaze to the only other poolside person: the tall, lean, fortyish man with the dark, quick eyes. The man moved easily, smoothly, like an athlete. And he smiled like a shy schoolboy. She’d seen him yesterday, when he’d registered. Ever since, she’d been aware of him watching her, appraising her.
Yesterday, on her second evening in town, she’d driven out to The Crosswinds restaurant, located a few miles east of town, at the airport. Just as she was ordering, he’d arrived. He’d taken a nearby table, and nodded to her, and smiled. She’d returned the nod, but not the smile. She’d wondered whether he’d followed her from the motel to the airport with sex on his mind. It wouldn’t’ve been difficult to follow her. In the desert, day or night, cars were visible for miles. But he hadn’t followed up on the smile, and she’d left while he was still eating his entree. After dinner, in the twilight, she’d decided to drive east for a few miles, away from town, out into the desert. When she’d turned back toward town, she’d seen his car still parked at the restaurant.
Last night, late, after the TV movie, she’d unlocked her door and walked past the swimming pool and out through the motel’s broad driveway to the county road and the phone booth that stood close beside the road, beneath the motel’s blue neon sign. Without realizing it, she’d intended to call her mother, perhaps to reassure her mother that, yes, she was feeling better—or, at least, wasn’t feeling worse. Yet she also realized that she was reluctant to make the call. While she was debating, standing a few feet from the sign, facing the phone booth, she was aware of a sound from behind her: a soft, furtive scuffling. Quickly, she’d turned—in time to see a shadow of someone standing beside a huge ocotillo bush that grew beside the driveway. Suddenly terrified, she’d darted to her left, putting the phone booth between herself and the bush. As she stood there, two cars had materialized out of the night, one pair of headlights coming from the north, from town, the other pair blazing out of the desert. Instinctively, she’d raised her hands, to signal. But something had prevented her, some irrational reluctance to make a scene, cause a fuss.
The cars had crisscrossed almost directly before the motel entrance, leaving her suddenly alone, in darkness again. And then, when she’d looked at the ocotillo, there was no figure, nothing. Watchfully aware that the man, whoever he was, must have come from the motel, she’d returned to her cabin, double locked the door, turned up the TV.
Could a killer have a shy smile and a pleasant, open face, and a manner reminiscent of an assistant professor of the classics?
He was just a few feet from her now, sitting shaded from the sun beneath a redwood lanai that ran the full width of the pool. He was sitting at a table. There was a briefcase on the table, and a clipboard. Frowning thoughtfully, eyes far away, he was sucking at a ballpoint pen. He’d been sitting like that, writing, for most of the afternoon, long before she’d come out to the pool with her copy of Time and Again.
She looked at her watch, lying beside the book on the beach towel. Three o’clock. She was more than halfway through the day; in eight more hours, with luck, she could sleep. It was the sixth consecutive day she’d gotten through alone, without Nick. So the hours had indeed turned into days. And tomorrow, the days would have turned into a week, one whole week, alone. And weeks would become months, and eventually the months would become years—until, finally, she would die, too. With or without another man, she would die, too.
It was natural, probably, that she should think of her own death, natural that she should even welcome the thought—accounting, perhaps, for the phone call she’d made, to Daniel DuBois.
But was it natural that, so soon, she should wonder whether she could find another man?
Was it natural that—yes—she’d begun to wonder how she would respond, if the man across the pool, the lean, intriguing-looking stranger, should make a move on her? Was it natural that, so soon, she was wondering what it would be like with a quiet, sensitive-looking man, after more than a year with Nick?
They’d come here once for a week in February, she and Nick. He’d never been to the desert, despite having lived for years in Los Angeles. And, sure enough, he hadn’t liked the desert—didn’t see the point of going to the desert when they could’ve gone to Hawaii, or Puerto Vallarta. She’d been wise enough not to try and make him see what she saw: the subtlety of the desert vegetation, the sense of timelessness, the feeling that life was reduced to its essentials, much of it scaled down to less than human size. Even the trees were hardly higher than a man’s head, and cacti a hundred years old were only a few feet high, a world in miniature. In her imagination she could sometimes see a small arroyo transformed into a canyon where fist-size rocks were boulders, and thumb-size cactus husks were as large as fallen trees. At will, she could change the scale of the universe, with herself looking down, the creator.
Yet, when the setting sun turned the nearby mountains purple, a separate shade of purple for each range, and the desert sky turned yellow, and orange, and finally black, and the stars came out, and the desert vegetation disappeared in the night, she was transformed again, this time into something smaller than the smallest desert animal, awed by the vastness of the night sky, the eternal mystery of infinity.
At first, she’d tried to share it all with Nick, tried to show him what she saw, make him feel what she felt. But she knew he’d never really listened, never really looked.
But then Nick had discovered that he could rent a dirt bike and ride out into the badlands, so-called, east of town, where there were miles of off-road tracks, set aside for dirt bikers. So, the last two days they were here, Nick had ridden the badland trails while she read, or swam, or walked through the desert. She had a snapshot of him on his dirt bike, squinting into the sun, his nose wrinkled, smiling for the camera.
What would have happened to them, if he hadn’t died? Would they have stayed together, she with her degree in fine arts, he with his stock-car racing trophies, and his scars to prove it?
She’d never known, really, how it had happened that she and Nick had gotten together. She knew the details, of course. He’d been visiting friends, a couple who lived in her apartment building, staying with them for the weekend. There was a small patio between the two halves of the building, with an even smaller pool. Wearing their bathing suits, Nick and his friends, the Kramers, had been sitting around the pool on a sunny Saturday afternoon, drinking beer. Nick had arrived in Los Angeles two days before, she’d discovered later, on a selling trip. Like Larry Kramer, the host, Nick sold performance auto parts. Both men had taken their lumps on the racing circuit, and they shared a rough and ready camaraderie that she’d found appealing for its bluff exterior that was obviously meant to conceal a genuine warmth.
She’d been wearing a bathing suit when they’d met, one that she knew was flattering—just as, now, she was wearing the same kind of suit, a black one-piece suit cut high on the sides. She’d been reading—just as she’d been reading now. And, yes, she’d been aware of the good-looking stranger. Just as, now, she was aware of this new stranger, still sitting hunched over his clipboard, brow furrowed, apparently deep in thought—the same man who, incongruously, last night, she’d suspected of wanting to kill her, for money.
But here, in the bright sunlight, the suspicion seemed preposterous, and as she watched him she wondered what he was so industriously writing, seemingly so oblivious to everything else. Could he be a writer? A fortyish student, working on his thesis? Or, probably more like it, he could be nothing more glamorous than the manager of a small branch bank, who happened to look a little like a poet as he puzzled over a contribution to next month’s issue of The Rotarian.
Thinking about it, still speculating, she rose to her feet, stretched, and walked to the edge of the pool, at the deep end. With her back to him, she stood motionless for a moment, concentrating. Then she moved forward on the parapet until her toes could curl over, gripping the edge. She gathered herself, crouched, flexed, drew a deep breath, held it—and committed herself to the dive.
4
“HOW LONG’LL YOU BE with us, Mr. Fisher?”
“Why don’t we say two days?” He slid the VISA card across the counter and smiled. “I’ve got to see about this heat.”
The clerk was a small, middle-aged woman, skinny and dried out, with leathery skin, uneven teeth, and clear blue eyes. She didn’t return the smile, but instead frowned as she examined the registration card he’d filled out. Now she looked up at him sharply, as if she were comparing his face with a passport photo. Finally, plainly reluctant, she put his VISA card in the impression machine. As she jerked the lever roughly back and forth, the muscles of her forearm flexed. He signed the VISA chit, put both the card and the receipt in his wallet, took the key to his room, and walked out into the afternoon glare of the desert heat. He would unpack, take a quick shower, change shirts. Then he would drive around town, get the feel of the place, check out the restaurants and the stores—and the local law enforcement. He’d find people who liked to talk—and he’d let them talk.
And then, when he’d gotten the feel of the place, gotten the roads in and out clear in his mind, he’d check out the Ram’s Head Motel, a mile out of town to the south.
The entrance to the Ram’s Head Motel was a wide, graveled driveway that narrowed as it curved in among the dozen-odd cabins that were visible from the road. The cabins had been built at random, in no particular pattern, mingled with wild-growing desert vegetation and trees, some of them low, feathery trees, some tall palms. Cacti grew between the trees, some small, some head high. A tall, white-flowered hedge screened the motel grounds from the road, but the driveway was wide enough to reveal a large oval swimming pool. The motel office was built across the driveway from the pool, closest to the road. Among the trees, Dodge could count three cars parked beside the three separate cabins. A waist-high split rail fence bordered the motel property on two sides, joining the flowering hedge at the road. The cabins were plain stucco, simply built. According to one guidebook, rentals began at forty dollars a day. And the guidebook mentioned twenty-one units, so the property must go back farther than he could see through the cacti and the trees. Beneath the small blue neon Ram’s Head Motel sign, “Vacancy” was spelled out in red neon. Just to the left of the sign, maybe ten feet away, there was a telephone booth—an old-fashioned roadside telephone booth, with folding doors.
To himself he nodded, put the Camaro in gear, began driving slowly south, toward the open desert.
If he’d planned it, he couldn’t have worked out a better layout. Never.
Some layouts were easy, some were hard. Some seemed impossible. Once, in Chicago, he’d spent a whole week working out a plan. He’d even made notes on when the mark came and went, when the patrol cars passed, when the mailman came, and the delivery boys, and the children coming home from school. And there’d been neighbors, too, neighbors all around, living in split-level houses. It had been very complicated, that Chicago situation.
But this situation was simple—deadly simple. There was a woman in a cabin at the Ram’s Head Motel. He’d seen her earlier, a lucky chance, when he’d driven past, still getting the feel of the town. He’d seen her walking from the pool to the motel office. She’d been wearing a black bathing suit, and she’d had a better body than he’d have thought. So she was there, in her cabin, one cabin among twenty-one, built so they looked like they were all natural, all part of the desert, with only a split rail fence that separated the fake Ram’s Head desert from the real desert: no-man’s-land, with only a few scattered houses nearby. Big, low, rambling houses, that had been built to look like they were part of the desert, too.
But all of them were faking it, pretending to be part of a desert they could never live in, not for a minute, not without their swimming pools, and bars, and air-conditioning. Because the desert was nothing but sand and rock and cactus and heat like an oven.
And anything that moved in the desert was noticeable. An animal, a car, a man—anything that moved would be seen—and remembered. And the town was no different: two thousand people, baking in the sun, marking time until the tourists began arriving to open their winter homes, start spending their money. Any new face, even a white face, would be remembered. Already, he knew, people were watching him—and wondering. The people he’d talked to—the woman at the motel, the man at the gas station, the man at the hardware store where he’d bought a few things, just for the conversation—they’d remember him. And they’d talk to each other, too. In small towns, they all talked to each other.
So the longer he stayed, the bigger the risk. Knowing what he knew now, it would have been better if he’d driven into town, found the Ram’s Head, spotted her, knocked on her door, did the job in broad daylight, using the silencer, or else the ice pick, taking a chance. He could’ve been out of town in minutes—out in the desert. Or, better, he could’ve gone back the way he’d come, over the close-by mountains west to Los Angeles, or southwest, to San Diego. Even if he was seen doing the job, it would take the local sheriff a half hour to get organized, get together with the highway patrol, get it on the radio. And a half hour was all he’d need, even in daylight.
But already it was too late for that kind of a plan. Already he was known: a well-dressed black man driving a black Camaro—a real estate man, he’d told them, successful, just passing through, on his way to Mexico. So if anything went wrong, he could be identified. And in daylight, things went wrong. Unless everything was planned, carefully planned, things went wrong.
So he must wait until dark—four more hours, until it was dark. He’d wait, and he’d watch. Whatever it took, he’d do the job tonight.
5
AS DUBOIS TOUCHED ONE green button on the arm, the wheelchair’s motor whirred, the right wheel turned and the chair pivoted to the left, bringing him directly in front of the Utrillo. The painting was titled “The Marketplace,” and represented the best of Utrillo’s middle period. This was the time when Utrillo had been experimenting with the middle of his palette. Never had he been more successful with his close values and subtle textures, even though, in this period, it was possible to discern the beginning of the broader, bolder brush strokes that characterized his most productive, most evocative period, the period that continued until his death.
With the first two fingers of his right hand, he simultaneously pushed the two green buttons, lightly. The motor whirred again; the chair inched forward, letting him move close enough for his quadra-focals to bring the details of the painting into sharper focus.
Specially designed wheelchairs, specially ground lenses—special bed, special food, a special communications network mated to a mainframe computer, they were the miracles of science that circumscribed his life.
Yet, half a glass full, they expanded his life, these mechanical and electronic miracles. Without the self-propelled wheelchair he would be immobilized, dependent on a servant to wheel him wherever he went: to bed, to the bathroom—and here, to his paintings, these masterworks, these magnificent painted fragments of men’s lives, literally their souls expressed on canvas stretched over wooden frames. Without his gadgets, he would be denied this pleasure, this ultimate experience of his life.
Without the gadgets…
Without Betty.
If electrical gadgets circumscribed his life, then so did platitudes. She’s like a daughter to me was one of the paler platitudes. The child I never had was another.
