5••••

SINCE IT WAS GETTING ON INTO SATURDAY AFTERNOON, and since I didn’t feel like Christian charity on the hoof, I hoped Albert Griffith wouldn’t answer his telephone. No such luck. After I explained what I wanted, he agreed to meet me in his office at five. He even sounded anxious to talk to me. I drove to Petaluma and found an anonymous motel bar and dirge of a Giants game on the television with which to slay foul time until five.

After a couple of deadly dull innings and slow, carefully paced beers, the bartender drifted by and I asked him for a drink.

“Stay me with CC ditches, my friend, for I am bored shitless by all this.”

“Hey, fella, take it easy, huh,” he said, then walked away.

“That’s Canadian Club and water, you turd,” I shouted at his back. “But I’ll have it someplace else.”

“That’s fine with me, buddy,” he said.

For a tip, I left him the remains of a stale beer. When even the bartenders lose their romantic notions, it’s time for a better world. Or at least a different bar. I found the local newspaper and the nearest bar.

Albert Griffith, though, had enough romantic notions to gag Doris Day. He kept an office in a restored Victorian house on a quiet side street just outside the downtown area, sharing the house with another lawyer and two shrinks. And he had dressed for the occasion. A dark-blue, expensively tailored, vested, pinstriped suit and a silk tie. As he ushered me into his office, he offered me a wing-backed gold brocade chair and a taste of unblended Scotch. I accepted them both. In my business, you have to buy everybody’s act. For a few minutes. Usually lawyers are too devious to suit me. They seem to have the idea that justice is an elaborate game, that courtrooms are tiny stages, and clients simply an excuse for the legal act. They also have a disturbing habit of getting elected to political offices, or appointed to government commissions, then writing laws you have to hire a lawyer to understand. But Albert Griffith acted as if he were my best friend. For a moment.

As soon as I was settled, he leaned against the front of his massive desk, his arms crossed as he’ towered over me, smiling in a friendly way beneath sardonic eyes. After I had a taste of his great Scotch, he leaped into his act.

“All right, Mr. Sughrue,” he said, “let’s get something straight from the very beginning. I don’t know how you persuaded Mrs. Flowers to hire you for this wild goose chase, and I don’t know how much money you have managed to weasel out of that poor woman, but she’s a personal friend of my mother’s, and I intend to put an end to this nasty little gambit of yours.”

“You want me to cut you in, huh?” I said. “Okay. There’s enough for everybody.”

“What?”

While he worked on his confusion, I stood up and walked around behind his desk, took a cigar out of a burled walnut box, lit it, sat down in his leather swivel chair, and propped my boots on his desk.

“What the hell are you doing?” he asked.

“Making myself comfortable, partner,” I said, then blew smoke in his face.

“Get up from there,” he sputtered. He couldn’t have been any angrier if I had sat down on his wife’s face.

“Listen, Buster Brown,” I said, taking a fistful of his cigars for my pocket, “you’ve got a fancy setting here, but you’re just another second-class creep. Your daddy, when he can stand up, holds a sign for the highway department, and your momma put you through law school with a beauty operator’s tips. Your daddy-in-law is springing for this antique whorehouse decor, this whole lawyer scam, and you, Mr. Griffith, aren’t only a failure, you’re a courthouse joke, so get out of my face with this big-shot attorney crap.”

“If you don’t get out of my office this instant, I’m calling the police,” he said in a voice on the verge of sobs.

“After you apologize,” I said, “maybe we can start this whole thing over again.”

At the moment, though, he didn’t have anything to say. I watched his face change hues about four times and examined the shoddy dental work on his back lower molars. At the newspaper bar, I had found an AP stringer who, for the price of a 7&7, had given me Albert Griffith’s life history.

“If it will improve your attitude,” I said, “give Rosie a call. She’s got eighty-seven bucks, two beers, and a smile into this, and I might take another beer or two, and I might only lose a hundred bucks on this, but -she’s paid all she’s going to pay. So call her while I have another taste of this overpriced whiskey.”

While I stiffened mydrink, he called Rosie and spoke softly to her for a minute. Then he hung up, loosened his tie, and made himself a really stiff drink. I didn’t have much of a picture of Betty Sue Flowers yet, but just the mention of her name seemed to drive grown men to drink.

“Let’s sit on the couch,” Albert said, and we sat at opposite ends of a long leather expanse. “Please accept my apology,” he said. “I’m sure you’ve been in the business long enough to understand that most independent operatives are scumbags. Even the corporate security people are frighteningly ugly beneath that slick exterior they maintain.”

“Thanks.” “For what?”

“For not thinking I have a slick exterior.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, glancing at my faded Levis and worn work-shirt and laughing. A bit too long to suit me. “Rosie explained everything, Mr. Sughrue, and I am sorry for acting so hastily.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m used to it.”

“Well, I am sorry,” he repeated. I wished he would stop. “Rosie even said that you told her it was probably a waste of time and money,” he said, then smiled sadly. “Let me tell you that it is definitely a lost cause.”

“Why’s that?”

“I was a student at Berkeley when Betty Sue ran away,” he said, “and I spent all my spare time for two years searching for her in the city. Let me tell you, my transcript showed it too. I nearly didn’t get into law school,” he said dramatically. I wasn’t impressed yet. “I never turned up a single lead.’ Not one. It was as if she walked away from my car that afternoon and off the edge of the world, off the face of the earth. I even had a friend from law school—he’s in Washington—check her Social Security payment records, and there hasn’t been a payment since she worked a part-time job the summer before she disappeared.” He sucked on his whiskey glass, his hand trembling so badly that the lip of the glass rattled against his teeth. “I can only assume that either she doesn’t want to be found or that’s she’s dead. Though if she is, she didn’t die in San Francisco or any place in the Bay Area. At least not in the first five years after she ran away.” “How do you know that?”

“I checked Jane Does in county morgues for that long,” he said softly, as if the memory made him very tired.

“You went to a lot of trouble.”

“I was very much in love with her,” he said, “and Betty Sue was a very special lady.”

“So I’ve heard,” I said, then regretted it.

“From whom?” he asked in a voice that tried to be casual.

“Everybody.”

“Which everybody, specifically?”

“Her drama teacher, for one,” I said.

“Gleeson,” he snorted. “That faggot son of a bitch. He didn’t know anything about Betty Sue, didn’t care anything about her. He encouraged her acting so she would think he was a big man, that’s all. She was good at it but she didn’t even like it. She used to tell me, ‘They just look at me, Albert, they don’t see me.’”

“I thought Marilyn Monroe said that.”

“Huh? Oh, perhaps she did,” he said. “I’m sure it’s a common psychological profile among actresses. Betty Sue was very sensitive about her looks. Sometimes when we would be having a … spat, she would cry and tell me, ‘If I were ugly or crippled, you wouldn’t love me.’ “

“Was she right?” I asked without meaning to.

“Damn it, man,” he answered sharply, “I haven’t seen her in ten years and I’m … I’m still half in love with her.”

“How does your wife feel about that?”

“We don’t talk about it,” he said with a sigh.

“Could Betty Sue have been serious enough about the acting to have run off to Hollywood or New York, something like that?”

“Do girls still do that?” he asked, glancing up at me.

“People still do everything they used to do,” I said. “What about her?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” he said, then asked if he could freshen my drink. When I shook my head, he got up and made himself a new one. “I don’t think so at all,” he said from the bar. “She enjoyed the work— rehearsals and all that—but for her, the play wasn’t the thing.” He sat back down. “She suffered from passing enthusiasms, you know,” he said, as if it were a disease from which he had been spared. “One month it would be the theatre, the acting just a preparation for writing and directing, and the next month she would be planning to go to medical school and become a missionary doctor. Then she would want to be a painter or some sort of artist. And the worst part of it was that she could do damn near anything she set her mind to. For instance, I wasn’t a great tennis player—though I nearly made the team at Cal—and when I could get her on the courts, she gave me a hell of a time, let me tell you.” He paused to look at his drink, then decided to drink about half of it in a gulp. “And, you know, in spite of all the things she could do, she was the loneliest person I ever knew. That was the heartbreaking part of it, that loneliness. I couldn’t help her at all. Sometimes it seemed my attempts just made it worse. I couldn’t stop her from being lonely at all.”

“Not even in bed?”

“You’re a nosy bastard, aren’t you?” he said quietly. “Professional habit.”

“Well, the truth is that I never laid a hand on her,” he said with proper sadness. “Maybe if I had, I wouldn’t still be carrying her around on my back.”

“Did anybody else lay a hand on her?”

“I always suspected that she wasn’t a virgin,” he said with a slight smile. “But she wouldn’t talk about it.”

“Did you two fight about it?”

“I fought, but she wouldn’t fight back,” he said. “She’d just sit there, drawn into some sort of shell, and weep. Or else she’d make me take her home.”

“Did you have a fight the day she walked away?”

“No,” he murmured, shaking his head. “It was just a normal day. We drove over to San Francisco for dinner and a movie, and on the way she decided that she wanted to drive through the Haight to see the hippies. We got stuck in a line of traffic, and she just opened the car door, stepped out, and walked away. Without looking back. Without saying a word,” he said slowly, as if he had repeated the lines to himself too many times.

“You didn’t chase her?”

“How could I?” he cried. “I didn’t know she was running away, and I couldn’t just leave my car sitting in the street, man.”

“I thought you had tickets for a play,” I said.

“Hell, I don’t know,” he said. “It was ten years ago, ten goddamned years ago.”

“Right.”

“Need another drink,” he either said or asked. When he stood up, I handed him my glass, but he paced around the office with it in his hand.

“Can you tell me anything else about her?” I asked.

He stopped and stared at me as if I were mad, then started pacing again, taking the controlled steps of a drunk man. But his hands and mouth moved with a will of their own; he waved his arms and nearly shouted, “Tell you about her? My god, man, I could tell you about her all day and you still wouldn’t see her. Tell you what? That I had loved her since she was a child, that I couldn’t just stop because she ran away? I tried to stop, believe me I tried to stop loving her.” Then he paused. “It all sounds so silly now, doesn’t it?” “What?”

“That the disappearance of a damned high school chick that I’d never touched was the most traumatic experience of my life,” he said. “And let me tell you, I know something about trauma, growing up with a drunken father. What do you want to know anyway?”

“Everything. Anything.”

“That I married a safely dull woman and fathered two safely dull children that I can’t bear to face and can’t bear to leave and can’t bear to love because they might all run away too,” he said.

“Hey, man,” I said, “take that crap upstairs to the shrinks. Don’t tell me about it. I asked about her, not you.” He stopped to stare at his feet. “You’ve already been upstairs, right?”

“I’ve been going for two years now,” he said with that mixture of pride and shame people in analysis so often have. “And, in spite of the jokes, it’s working. I meant to go to medical school, you know, but all those visits to the morgue, all those anonymous faces beneath the rubber sheets, were too much for me.” He went to the bar to splash whiskey aimlessly into our glasses, then kept mine in his hand. “As you so aptly said, as a lawyer I’m not even a good joke. But I’m enrolled in next fall’s medical school class out at Davis. Thanks to Betty Sue, it’s taken me ten extra years to get started, but now I’m finally going to make it.”

“Good luck,” I said.

“Thank you,” he muttered, not noticing my irony.

“Anything else?”

“One more question,” I said, “which I hate to ask, but I really would appreciate an answer.”

“What’s that?” he asked, then saw the two glasses in his hands. He still didn’t give me mine. “And why do you hate to ask it?”

“I heard a rumor that Betty Sue had made some fuck films in San Francisco.”

“That’s so absurd I won’t even bother to answer,” he said, and finally gave me my drink.

“You don’t know anything about that, huh?” I asked as I stood up and put some ice in the warm whiskey.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, facing me across an expanse of Persian carpet.

“Okay,” I said. “Do you remember a girl named

Peggy Bain?”

“Of course. She was Betty Sue’s best friend. Only friend, I guess.”

“You wouldn’t know where she’s living?”

“Actually, I might,” he said. “I handled a divorce for her some years ago, and she sends me a Christmas card once in a while.” He stepped over to the desk and thumbed through his Rolodex, then wrote an address and telephone number on a card with his little gold pen. The simple chore had restored some of his facade, but his knuckles were white around his glass when he picked it up. “Two years ago she was living at this address in Palo Alto. If you see her, please give her my regards.”

“Thanks,” I said, “I will.”

“Say,” he said too loudly, “let’s sit down and have a drink. Pleasure instead of business.”

“No thanks,” I said, setting my unfinished Scotch on the coffee table. “I’ve got a date.”

“Me too,” he said sourly as he checked his watch. “With my wife.” We shook hands as he led me toward the door, then he held my hand and asked, “Would you do me a favor?”

“What’s that?”

“If you should, through some insane circumstance, find Betty Sue, would you let me know?”

“Not for love or money,” I said, and took back my fingers.

“Why’s that?” he asked, confused and nearly crying.

“Let me tell you a story,” I said, which didn’t help his confusion. “When I was twelve, my daddy was working on a ranch down in Wyoming, west of a hole in the road called Chugwater, and I spent the summer up there with him—my momma and daddy didn’t live together, you see—and my daddy was crazy, had this notion, which he made up out of whole cloth, that he was part Indian. Hell, he took to wearing braids and living in a teepee and claiming he was a Kwahadi Comanche, and since I was his only son, I was too. And that summer I was twelve, he sent me on a vision quest. Three days and nights sitting under the empty sky, not moving, not eating or sleeping. And you know something? It worked.”

“I’m not sure I understand what you’re telling me,” he said seriously.

“Well, it’s like this,” I said. “I had a vision. And I’ve been having them ever since.”

“So?”

“You know, when you were telling me about those Jane Does and those rubber sheets, I had another one,” I said.

“Of what?”

“I saw your face all scrunched up in disappointment every time you didn’t find her under that rubber sheet,” I said, and he understood immediately. After two years on the couch, he had begun to have visions of his own. “I know you’re a nice person and all that and that you didn’t mean to feel that way, but you did, and if I find her,-you’ll never hear about it from me.”

“Why are you doing this to me?” he screamed, but I shut the door in his face. I didn’t have a vision for that yet.

As I opened the outside door, I held it for a thin, 66

lovely woman with fragile features and a brittle smile. She thanked me with a voice so near to hysteria that I nearly ran to my El Camino. No visions, no poetry for her. Just a road beer for me. I sat for a bit, holding the beer from the small cooler sitting in the passenger seat like an alien pet, thinking about my mad daddy and those days and nights sitting cross-legged on a chalk bluff above Sybille Creek, sitting still like some dumb beast or a rock cairn marking a nameless grave. Of course I had visions. At first they were of starving to death, or being so bored I died for the simple variety of the act, then it was maybe freezing to death under the stars or finding myself permanently crippled, locked into my cross-legged stance like a freak on a creeper. Later, though, the visions came: a stone that flew, a star that spoke like an Oxford don, Virginia Mayo at my feet. I guess I wasn’t a very good Comanche; I had seen too many movies, and besides, my crazy daddy had made the whole thing up. But, by god, I had visions. And none of the drugs, or combinations thereof, I had ingested as an adult had ever matched those first ones. But I had never gone back up Sybille Creek to that chalk bluff either. And never would.