Belinda (14 page)

I mean, not a clue to who she was. And for some reason this made me feel all the more guilty for what I was doing.

Had she deliberately obliterated her past? Or had she bolted on the spur of the moment?

I went over the clothes in the closet-the old things she brought with her.

Except for the school uniforms, of which there were three, it was class in every case, as I had figured. Tweeds were Harris or Donegal. Skirts and blazers were Brooks Brothers, Burberry, Cable Car. Nothing frivolous as we'd bought yesterday on our little downtown spin. Even the shoes were respectable.

But all of it was used, definitely, some of it probably made before she was born. Not likely any of it had been hers before she had hit the streets. This was too puzzling.

In the pockets I found New York theater ticket stubs, something from a recent concert in San Francisco. Matchbooks from the big hotels. The Fairmont, the Stanford Court, the Hyatt Regency.

It troubled me, this. I didn't want to think about what she'd been doing in all those hotels. But maybe she was simply roaming the lobbies, homing to places like those in which she'd once lived. Looking for some way back into the adult world.

But her recent past wasn't the point. We were going to destroy all that together. It was the real past that mattered. And there was nothing here to tell me the slightest thing about her. It was downright scary. Even the tapes had only those commercial labels. The best clue so far was Susan Jeremiah.

I got out the magazines, sat down on the side of the brass bed, and read through them.

Well, this was an interesting woman all right. Born on a Texas ranch, went to school in Dallas, later in LA. Was making movies with a home camera when she was ten. Worked in her teens for a Dallas TV station. Final Score, which had won accolades at Cannes, was described as atmospheric, fast-paced, philosophical. Done on location in the Greek islands, it concerned a gang of nihilistic young Texan dope smugglers. Film buff talk about handheld cameras, artistic debts to Orson Welles, the Nouvelle Vague, philosophical approach, that sort of thing. All too short. On to another woman director, New Yorker, featured in the same article.

The Newsweek piece wasn't much better. Focus on the April television film Bitter Chase, praised for a "a high quotient of visual beauty, something often altogether absent from films made for television." Jeremiah would make two more for United Theatricals, but didn't want to be stigmatized as a television director. Heavy praise for the star of the film, Dallas girl Sandy Miller, who had also starred in Jeremiah's "arty and often self-indulgent erotic film," Final Score, never released in this country. But oddly enough, the only picture in the magazine was of Jeremiah. I think that Texas getup and that lean frontier face really got them. Too bad for Sandy Miller.

I sat there more confused than ever and feeling pretty damned guilty. I wanted to take those videotapes down, run them through the machine in my office. Or better yet, the machine in the den. The den door had a lock on it. And that way if she came in—

Oh, but how would she ever forgive me if she found out what I was doing? And what if I just brought up the tapes in conversation? She might explain everything. No need to betray her at all this way, because maybe this stuff had nothing to do with who she was.

It was ten forty-five. I had to get going.

DAN didn't show until noon. I apologized for keeping him from lunch. "Look," I said. "This is client-lawyer privilege."

"What's that supposed to mean? You kill somebody?" He sat down opposite me behind the desk. "You want some lunch? I'm sending out for a sandwich."

"No. I'll make this as quick as I can. I want you to do some detective work."

"You're kidding."

"You have to do it yourself. You can't hire anybody from an agency. You have to do what you can by phone, and then if you have to travel, I'll pay for it."

"Do you know what that will cost you?"

"Doesn't matter. You have to find out something for me."

"Which is what?"

"The identity of this girl," I said. I handed him my photos of her. He studied them for a moment.

"This is absolutely confidential," I said. "You cannot let anyone know who wants to know all this."

"Come on," he said impatiently, shaking his head. "Fill me in. What am I looking for?"

"She's sixteen," I said.

"Uh huh." He was studying the picture.

"Till two days ago she was on the street. She says her name's Belinda. That may or may not be true. She's been all over Europe, grew up in Madrid, she said, spent time in Rome, Paris. She was in New York this winter, I'm pretty certain of that. I don't know when she got here." I described the theater programs, the top-price tickets.

"She's maybe five foot four. No taller than that. One hundred pounds, maybe a little more. Hair, face, you can see. Her body is very grownup. Full breasts. Her voice is grownup, too, very grownup, but no accent except for a touch of something I can't place. I don't know if that would help anyway."

"What's your connection with her?"

"I'm living with her."

"You're what!"

"I don't want to hear about it. I want to know who she is, where she came from-"

"-You don't want to hear about it! She's sixteen? And you don't want to hear about it!"

"-But I want to know more than that. I want to know why she ran away, what happened. I'm pretty sure there's money mixed up in it. She's too well educated, her taste is too good. There has to be a family somewhere with money. Yet it doesn't add up. It's strange. I want to know everything you can possibly-"

"Jeremy, this is crazy."

"Don't talk, Dan. I'm not finished."

"Do you know what this could mean if you're caught with this kid?"

"I want to know how she got to be where she is. Who she's hiding from? I'll tell you the strangest thing. I went through her belongings and there's not a single clue to her real identity."

"You crazy son of a bitch. Do you realize what this could do to you?

Jeremy, do you remember what happened to Roman Polanski?"

"I remember."

And what was all that rot I had told Alex Clementine about scandal not hurting anyone anymore? And he had said the right dirt in the right measure. Well, I knew in my case this was the wrong dirt, never mind the measure.

"Polanski got nailed for one lousy afternoon with a minor. You're telling me you're living with this one?"

I told him quietly and calmly about the Page Street address, the police, them writing down my address and the fake name Linda Merit in their notebooks.

"I wish the cop hadn't recognized me."

"Put her on a plane for Katmandu. Immediately! Get her out of your house, you idiot."

"Dan, find out who she is. I don't care what it costs. There must be people you can ask, on the qt, without revealing anything, maybe some way to ask around at the street down there. I am almost one hundred percent sure someone is looking for her."

"So am I. Europe, money, education-" He picked up the picture. "Christ!" he muttered.

"But remember, I have to know everything, who are her parents, what did they do, why did she take off?."

"Suppose they didn't do anything and she's a rich bitch who decided she wanted some excitement."

"Out of the question. You wouldn't say that if you talked to her. In fact, the funny thing is, she's too poised to be rich, yet she's gotta be." 'q don't get it."

"Rich kids are sheltered. They're soft. There's always a little naiveté shining through, no matter how precocious they are. The girl's poise is deep and almost hard. She makes me think of the poor girls I knew when I was a kid, I mean, the ones who had big diamond engagement rings on their fingers by sixteen and two kids by a piano mover husband by the time they were twenty. You know the kind of girl. She can hardly read or write, but she can run the cash register in the all-night drugstore for five hours without ever breaking one of her long manicured fingernails. Well, there is something sad and tough about this little girl which is like that, something old. But she's too educated, too refined for the rest of the image."

He was giving me angry glances in between studying the picture. "I've seen this girl somewhere," he said.

"At Andy's exhibit the other day," I said. "She was with me."

"No, I didn't even know you were there. Missed you completely-"

"But she was wandering around, in a pair of pink sunglasses-"

"No, no, I mean I know this girl, I know this face, I know her from somewhere."

"Well, then, get on it, Dan. Because I have to know who she is and what happened to her."

"And she won't tell you."

"Nothing, not a word, made me promise never to ask or she'd walk out. I know it's something terrible."

"You mean, you hope it's something terrible to get you off the hook with your conscience!"

"Maybe. Maybe so."

"You think it will get you off the hook with anyone else, you're crazy."

"Dan, I just want to know-"

"Look, I'll get on it. But in exchange you listen. This could demolish your career. Demolish, as in obliterate, annihilate, disintegrate, do you understand me? You're not a European film director. You're a children's book author."

"Don't remind me."

"You are putting it on the line, every nickel of it, if this gets to the press. And if her parents are rich, it could be kidnapping on top of everything. There could be charges I haven't even thought of. I gotta look this up. I gotta-"

You should see the paintings, I thought. But I said:

"Dan, that can wait. Find out all about her."

Yes, definitely the wrong dirt in the wrong measure.

So why did I feel this exhilaration, this warmth all over, this sense of being alive suddenly? It was like that day when I walked onto that jet plane at the New Orleans airport and knew I was headed for California.

"Look at me, Jer! You'll get the Lewis Carroll Kinky Old Man Award of the Year, you hip to that? They'll pull your books off the library shelves and burn them. The bookstores in the South and Midwest won't even stock them. And any Disney movie deals you can kiss goodbye forever. You're not listening to me. You're not listening!"

"Dan, I have an imagination. Imagining things is what I get paid for. I love this little girl. And I have to know if somebody is out there looking for her, I have to know what they did to her."

"This is not the sixties, Jeremy. The flower children are gone. The feminists and the Moral Majority are joining ranks these days to get the child molesters and the pornographers. This is no time for-"I had to laugh. It was Alex Clementine all over again.

"Dan, we are not in court. I am impressed. My rights have been read to me. Call me when you have something-anything?'

I locked the briefcase and started towards the door. "They'll cancel the Saturday morning show!"

"Lawyer-client privilege, Dan."

"Disney is bidding right now against Rainbow for the rights to Angelica?'

"Oh, you reminded me. Belinda's interested in movies, very interested. Cahiers du Cinema, magazines like that. Film buff stuff."

"She's sixteen, she wants to be a star, so did Lolita. Get rid of her, the little bitch."

"Come on, Dan. Don't talk like that about her. I mean, she reads serious film things. And she has a special interest in a woman director, someone named Susan Jeremiah."

"Never heard of her."

"Up-and-coming Texas woman. Did a TV film in April for United Theatricals. There just might be a connection."

"I'11 get on this all right, you better believe I'll get on this, just to show you how dangerous this is!"

"Be careful, whatever you do, when you call me. She's there all the time."

"No shit."

"If you leave a message on the machine, make it sound like book business."

I STOPPED in the lobby long enough to take a deep breath. I felt like an absolute traitor. Please, let it be something rotten. Let them be corrupt. Let her belong to me.

I WENT to a phone booth on Market Street and looked up the address of a riding apparel shop. It was on Divisadero.

I knew her sizes from the day before, and the woman assured me I could bring back anything she didn't like. So I bought her everything. A red wool hacking coat, and a black hunting jacket, and two beautiful black velvet hard hats with chin straps. Breeches, gloves, a couple of quirts. Some very pretty little shirts and things. I knew it was the sort of thing people didn't use everyday for riding. It was for shows. But I wanted to see her in it, and I hoped she would like it.

Then I went home, put all of this out on the bed, and went upstairs. The palette was still loaded with wet paint from last night, and the brushes were still wet, too, so I went right to work instantly. Last bit of gold on the lettering of the last picture: the punk-waif picture.

I scarcely looked at the work I'd done. I got paint all over my wool pants, but it didn't matter.

Only when I looked at the shadowy little V between her legs did I have to stop, have to detach. She was too alive for me. I stood back, and when I saw the amount that was done-the size of the three canvases, the detail all finished-I was a little overawed. Even for me this pace was wondrous.

ABOUT four I went out for some beer, milk, the dumb little things I needed from the corner market. I got her five different brands of foreign cigarettes. Jasmine, Dunhill, Rothmans, anything unusual that she might like. I also got plenty of apples, oranges, pears, good things she might eat on the run instead of garbage. I mean, here I was buying a kid cigarettes. I doubled up on the milk, grabbed a few boxes of dry cereal. The car was in the drive when I came back.

When I shut the front door, I saw her standing at the top of the staircase.

There was only a weak light from the stained-glass window there, and my eyes had to get used to the shadows before I could really see her.

She had on the black velvet riding hat and the high leather boots. And she was posed like an old-fashioned portrait, with one hand on her hip and the other holding the black leather riding quirt. She was otherwise naked. She smacked the side of the boot with the quirt.