4••••

AT THE SUPERMARKET, I ASKED THE CHECK–OUT LADY FOR a receipt for the fifteen pounds of magazines and paperbacks, then flashed a deputy sheriff’s badge— obtained under extremely suspicious circumstances— from Boulder County, Colorado. I told her I was investigating the material for hidden pornographic meanings. She didn’t turn a single artfully tousled hair. Which was one of the things I had always liked about California: Everybody’s so crazy, you have to be really weird to get anybody’s attention.

When I delivered my load to Traheame’s room, he was sleeping like a grizzly gone under for the winter, curled on his unwounded hip, spitting out snores that seemed to curse his sleep, great phlegm-strangled, whiskey-soaked, cigar-smoked, window-rattling roars. I wondered how he slept in all that racket, how his wives, past and present, ever got any sleep. I hid his afternoon ration of vodka between something called The Towers of Gallisfried and a thin Western, Stalkahole, then tiptoed out quietly, trying not to awaken the monster.

At the nearest pay telephone, I found the high school drama teacher’s number listed. When I called Mr. Gleeson and told him why I wanted to talk to him, he sounded vaguely amused rather than surprised. He didn’t have to thumb through his memory to recognize the name, though, which was a good sign. He agreed to talk to me as soon as I could drive out to his house, but only for a short time, since he had a student appointment later that afternoon. Then he proceeded to give me a set of directions so confusing that it took me thirty minutes to drive the ten miles out to his house at the base of the Oakville Grade. By the time I found it, I had stopped myself twice from driving on over the Grade into the Napa Valley and a wine tour.

Charles Gleeson lived in a cottage in a live oak glade, a small place that looked as if it had been a summer retreat once, with a shake roof and unpainted walls that had tastefully weathered to a silver gray. Some sort of massive vine screened his front porch and clambered like crazy over the roof, as if it feared it might drown among the large flowering shrubs that cluttered the yard. He came to the screen door before I could knock, a small man with a painfully erect posture, a huge head, and a voice so theatrically deep and resonant that he sounded like a bad imitation of Richard Burton on a drunken Shakespearean lark. Unfortunately, his noble head was as bald as a baby’s butt, except for a stylishly long fringe of fine, graying hair that cuffed the back of his head from ear to ear. He must have splashed a buck’s worth of aftershave lotion across his face, and he was wearing white ducks, a knit polo shirt, and about five pounds of silver and turquoise.

“You must be the gentleman who telephoned about Betty Sue Flowers,” he emoted as he opened the door. A cruising fly, hovering like a tiny hawk, banked in front of me and sped for the kitchen. Gleeson swatted at it with a pale, ineffectual hand and muttered a mild curse.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” I said.

“The directions, right? I must apologize, but my conception of spatial relationships is severely limited.

Except on stage, of course. My god, I can block out a monster like Morning Becomes Electra in my head but I can’t seem to tell anyone how to find my little cottage in the woods,” he prattled as he twisted the heavy bracelet on his wrist. Then we shook hands, and he patted my forearm affectionately and drew me into his Danish Modern, Neo-Navajo living room. “It’s lovely out,” he suggested, touching the squash-blossom necklace, “so why don’t we sit on the sun deck? I fear the house is a disaster area—I’m a bachelor, you see, and housekeeping seems to elude me.” He waved his hand aimlessly at some invisible mess. We could have lunched off the waxed oak floorboards or performed an appendectomy on the driftwood coffee table. I didn’t mind going outside though. His sort of house always made me check my boots for cowshit. Unfortunately, this time they were innocently clean.

The sun deck, built out of the same silvered planks as the house and threatened by the same heavy vine, was done in wrought iron and gay orange canvas. At least it was outside. With a deep, throbbing sigh, Gleeson collapsed into a director’s chair and genteelly offered me the one facing him.

“It’s a bit early for me, but would you care for a cerveza?” he said, idly swirling the ice cubes in the blown Mexican glass he had picked up from the neat little table that matched his little chair. “A beer?” he added, just in case I hadn’t understood.

“Right,” I growled, “it’s never too early for me.” Then I chuckled like Aldo Ray. If I had to endure his l’homme du monde act, he had to suffer my jaded, alcoholic private eye.

“Of course,” he murmured, then reached into a small refrigerator on the other side of his chair and came out with a can of Tecate, a perfect pinch of rock salt, and a wedge of lime already gracing the top of the can. He had prepared, the devil. “Do you like Mexican beer?”

“I like beer,” I said, “just like Tom T. Hall.”

“I see,” he said, trying to hide a superior smile with a supercilious eyebrow. “Mexican beer is quite superb. Perhaps the best in the world. I’m quite fond of it myself. I summer in Mexico, you see, San Miguel de Allende, every year. Takes me away from the mundane world of high school,” he said as he handed me the beer.

“Must be fun,” I said, guessing that he spent his summers wearing a three-hundred-dollar toupee which looked like a dead possum and boring hell out of everybody for forty miles in every direction.

“A lovely country,” he sighed, meaning to sound wistful and longingly resigned to a life unworthy of his talents. Then he glanced up and said, “A touch of salt on the tongue, then sip the beer, and bite the lime.”

“Right,” I said, then gobbled the salt, chug-a-lugged the whole beer, ate the lime wedge, rind and all, and tossed the empty can onto the lawn. Gleeson looked ready to weep, and when I belched, he flinched. “Got ‘nother wunna them Mexican beers?” I said cheerfully. “That weren’t half bad.”

“Of course,” he said, the perfect host, then doled me another can as if it were rationed. Before I had to destroy that one too, I was saved by the bell. Or the chirp. His telephone chirped like a baby bird. “Oh damn,” he said. “Please excuse me.”

After he went back inside, I stood up to let the heavy beer lie down. Out of an old nosy habit, I checked Gleeson’s glass. Cranberry juice and a ton of vodka. He was either a secret tippler, a pathological liar, or more nervous about my visit than he cared for me to know. I sidled up to the kitchen window but I couldn’t hear anything except the distant throb of his voice and

the insane buzz of a frustrated fly. I opened the back door to let the poor starving devil out, then sat down to watch a hummingbird suck sugar water from Gleeson’s feeder. I couldn’t believe the little bastard had come all the way from South America for that. Or that I had come all this way to talk about a girl who had run away ten years before.

Gleeson came back muttering gracefully about the foibles of his simply, simply lovely students. “Now,” he said as he leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands around his knee with a soft clink of silver rings. “What can I do for you?”

“Betty Sue Flowers.”

“Quite.” A brief frown wrinkled his forehead up toward the fragrant, glistening expanse of his scalp. “Betty Sue Flowers,” he sighed, then shook his head and smiled ruefully. “I haven’t thought about her in years.”

“What comes to mind?”

“Such a gauche name for such a lovely, talented child,” he said. “When it became apparent that she was more than just a good amateur actress, I advised her to change her name immediately, discard it like so much childhood rubbish.”

“I sort of like the name,” I said. I didn’t like women who changed their names. Or men who wore jewelry before sundown.

“Quite,” he said. “What exactly was it you wanted to know? I haven’t seen or heard of her since the Friday before she ran away. What was that? Six, seven years

ago?” “Ten.”

“How time does fly,” he whispered with a dreamy lilt, mouthing the cliche like a man who knew what it meant.

“Quite,” I said.

He glanced up, narrowed his eyes as if he was seeing 47

me for the first time. “It isn’t polite to mock me,” he suggested politely. He sounded half pleased, though, that I had taken the trouble.

“Sorry,” I said. “A bad habit I have. What did she talk about that day?”

“I’m afraid I don’t have the slightest notion,” he said, then held up a finger. “Wait, I seem to remember that she stopped by my office to tell me that she had tickets at the ACT for the next night.” He started to explain the initials, then stopped. “I’m afraid I don’t remember what they were doing. It has been quite some time, you understand.”

“Too long,” I admitted for the tenth time.

“Do you mind if I inquire into your motives in this matter?”

“Her mother asked me to look for her,” I said. “Do you do this for a living? Or are you a member of the family?”

“Both,” I said. “I’m a cousin on her mother’s side and a licensed private investigator.”

“Would you be insulted ifI asked for some identification?”

“Nope,” I said, and took out my photostat.

“I would have thought, from your accent,” he said as he handed it back, “that you were from the Texas or Oklahoma branch of the family.”

“Texas,” I said. “But they let us live just about anywhere we want to nowadays.”

“I see,” he said. “Has there been some new information about Betty Sue that prompted her mother to hire

you?”

“Nope,” I said. “I was just handy. Down here on another case. And both Mrs. Flowers’ sons are dead now, and she just thought she’d like to see her baby girl again.”

“I don’t imagine she’s a baby anymore,” he said, smiling at his own joke. “But if I were you I would get in touch with her father. For reasons I don’t quite understand—perhaps because he withheld his affection from her—Betty Sue had an unhealthy fixation on him. I would think she would have been in touch with him. Yes, I would look for the father,” he said, then leaned back in his chair, sipped his drink, and sighed heavily, like a detective who had just broken a big, sadly corrupt case in an existential movie.

My temper and my mouth had always gotten me in trouble. And occasionally prevented me from picking up the information I needed. I wanted to tell Gleeson to stuff his stupid advice. I also wanted to tell him to stuff his Time magazine analysis, and to explain what fixation meant, but instead of carping, I kept my mouth shut, my temper in hand.

“I never had a chance to meet Betty Sue when she was growing up,” I said, changing directions. “What sort of girl was she?”

“One in a million,” he answered, quickly but softly, then paused abruptly as if he had confessed to something. I knew I had him now.

“Why?”

“Why?” he whispered. “When I first saw her, she was playing in a grade school production of Cinderella, which I had to attend for reasons I don’t even want to think about now. A simply dreadful production, even for grade school, and Betty Sue had been wasted in the fairy godmother role, but let me tell you, my friend, when that little girl, that mere child, was onstage, all the other children seemed like creatures of a lesser race. She had the best natural stage presence I had ever seen. Offstage, she wasn’t anything special, a pleasant-looking child, no more, but onstage she was in charge. Such presence. Such a natural sense of character, too.” He paused to chuckle. “Her fairy godmother was a queen, her gifts bestowed grandly on her inferiors. And even then, she had a frighteningly sexual presence. You could almost hear the middle-aged libidos in the audience whimpering to be unleashed.

“After the production, I went backstage to talk to her,” he continued, “and found her staring with such awful longing eyes at the little girl who had played Cinderella that I gave her a lecture then and there about how good she had been. I’m afraid I quite lost control for a bit. When I finished, she looked up at me and said, ‘It’s just a prettier dress than mine, that’s all. I wouldn’t be Cinderella, anyway. I wouldn’t stand for it.’ She was nine, my friend, nine years old.