Burning Time (22 page)

“What, just like that?”

His thin face was very red.

“Not so just like that. It’s been coming on for a long
time. You don’t love me, Jimmy, and I don’t love you. I guess that about covers it.”

“How do you know I don’t love you?” he said very quietly, with daggers coming out of his eyes.

She wanted to get away from those angry eyes before he found a way to curse her for all time.

“Because of the way you act,” she replied.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. We’ve been together almost three years.”

“And that’s about long enough.” Too long.

“Look, I said I was sorry about the lunch.” He was very angry now. His voice was tight. His eyes had all but disappeared into their Mongolian folds.

She looked around for someone she knew. “Give me the keys, Jimmy. I have to go now.”

He saw her nod at a uniform, a big guy, probably Irish. He handed her the keys.

She got in the car and closed the door very gently. “Have a good life,” she said, careful not to curse him.

It was more than he would do for her. He sloped off toward the subway without a word.

Troland knelt on the floor and lifted the blind just a few inches, so he could peer out sideways at Mrs. Bartello’s living room window. He did this every few minutes. She never seemed to be in there. That was good. Sometimes he thought she was dead. There was no sign of life in her house.

When she came to the door the first time, the old lady was wearing a stiff black dress and said, “What do you want? I’m in mourning.”

That was good. He switched his attention to the front window. Out on the street the traffic was backed up. A jet thundered in over the roof, heading for LaGuardia.

“I want to rent the place,” he said. He pointed to the hand-lettered sign in the window,
GARAGE APARTMENT FOR RENT
.

He had seen the sign as he wandered around looking for the way into Manhattan the first time, and knew it was there for him. He exited to the service road and parked in front, just like he had lived in the neighborhood all his life. It didn’t feel good, though. He breathed in the air and
felt dangerous particles entering his body. It was gray and damp. He didn’t think much of New York.

“You can call me Mrs. Bartello.” She was a small, thin woman. She looked him and his rented Ford Tempo over. “I guess you’ll want the garage, too.”

“I have to have the garage,” he said.

She shrugged. He had to have it. It was the only way into the apartment.

“You don’t have wild parties with loud music, do you?” she asked, looking him over again. He was blond and not too big. He had blue eyes, was wearing a leather jacket, black jeans, and boots.

“I don’t like music,” he said.

“What about drugs?”

He shook his head.

“Okay.” She took the two hundred in cash he gave her, counted the bills with surprising speed, and shut the door.

He liked that about her. She wasn’t interested. She let him look at the place alone because she didn’t like going there. Reminded her of her dead husband, she said. For days after he took it, he kept looking for a flaw. He couldn’t find one. It was a perfect setup.

He could drive into the garage and go upstairs without being seen from the outside. He had two rooms, one with a sofa, table and chairs, a little kitchen, and a telephone; the other, a tiny bedroom with a single bed and a skylight. He didn’t like the skylight. He saw faces looking in from above. Airplanes and faces.

There were windows on three sides. Troland checked the back and the side. When he got restless he took the rental car into Manhattan. The first few times he did it he had a map with him. He experimented crossing different bridges and working his way across town to the West Side. Then he tried taking the subway. The subway was faster,
but an old crazy lady pulled up the two skirts she was wearing and urinated in front of him, squatting between two cars, as the train sped along. Crazy people made him upset.

He got there early in the morning and sat in the car down the block, looking up at the window and waiting for her to come out. Sometimes he parked the car far away and walked around the neighborhood, getting the feel of it. He hung around the next block over, trying to figure out the buildings.

Half of the block, from west to east, was built around a sort of garden that was part of a larger building on the other side. Sometimes the iron gate to the garden was open. She lived on the fifth floor.

He’d seen her about six times now. The first time it was like being hit by a blast of cold air. Like when he rode the scooter at seventy-five on the freeway with no helmet. Cold, exhilarating beyond anything, and almost out of control. It was a shock. The bitch he’d taken all the trouble for didn’t look like her. She looked like somebody he wouldn’t even look at. It almost took his breath away. Sixteen years and she was someone else.

She was wearing a tan skirt and loose tweed jacket with a kind of purple blouse under it that didn’t show her figure at all. Her hair was not as blond as it used to be, was hardly blond at all now. Not blond by California standards. Even from a distance he could see she was quite thin, and her face was—different. She was not like the girl in the movie. This one was not the kind of woman he would talk to. He didn’t like her. That upset him. Then he told himself, so what? He wasn’t supposed to like her.

He saw her stop at the wrought-iron doors and talk briefly to the doorman, a guy so small he couldn’t stop a child from getting in. Then a tall man came out with a
dog. The dog jumped up on her like it knew her, and she leaned over to pat it. A small hairy thing. She smiled. Yeah, it was her. The smile made him mad.

The second blow came when he delivered a pizza and found out she was living with a man. A doctor.

“Chapman, or Dr. Frank?” the doorman asked.

“It says Chapman here.” Troland showed him the receipt where he had written Emma’s name and address. He saw the doorman ring up 5C.

“There must be a mistake. She’s out.”

Course she was out. He saw her go out. Shit, he hadn’t considered a man. What kind of man would let her do that?

“Look, I can’t help you,” the little doorman said. “I’m not supposed to ring the Doc under any circumstances, okay? You’ll have to take it back.”

“Nah, you keep it.” Troland handed the pizza over and walked away.

What kind of doctor wouldn’t let the doorman ring up under any circumstances? He wanted to get a look at the doctor. He wanted to get inside and look around where she lived. But it didn’t take a genius to see the inside was a problem. It was a really old building. He didn’t like the see-through elevator, or the center staircase. Anybody coming in or out could look up the middle of the building and see all the front doors. It didn’t take a genius to see it was a problem.

The man came out of the building early, as Troland was walking by in a windbreaker and baseball cap, with a newspaper under his arm.

“Morning, Dr. Frank,” he heard the night doorman say. The night doorman went off at eight.

“Morning, Pete.”

The doctor didn’t look like a doctor. He was at least
an inch taller than Troland and probably a few pounds heavier. He was wearing white shorts and a plain gray sweatshirt, had muscular legs. No gray in his hair. Not a bad-looking guy. He felt himself getting upset.

Troland slowed down and passed him when he stopped to stretch.

“Nice day,” the doctor said to the doorman who stood outside with him, looking.

“Perfect day.”

The doctor took off at a brisk jog and passed Troland, heading for the path along the river. At a slower pace Troland followed him. Much later in the day, he couldn’t believe his luck when he saw him come out of her building with a suitcase and get into a taxi.

After breakfast, Jason drove around until he found North High School, which turned out to be south of both South High and Central High. It was a three-story brick building that looked only a few years younger than the municipal buildings nearby. It had a lot of steps going up to the entrance, green stuff that wasn’t ivy growing on the walls, a huge parking lot in front, and playing fields in the back. It was a real old-style American high school, the kind that’s always in the movies.

As he pulled into the parking lot, he tried to picture Emma as a lonely senior in this tight community, where the rest of her class had been together for years. What he saw instead was himself and Emma, talking so many times in a coffee shop, a half hour stolen here and there, between his patients and her jobs. He had interviewed her for a paper he was writing on adults who had been constantly uprooted as children. And they kept meeting.

He remembered the way she sat leaning slightly forward, with her hands relaxed in her lap as she told him how the Navy liked to move people as far away from
where they had been as possible, preferring to move them laterally around the world, rather than up and down a coast. She had spent second and third grades in Jacksonville, fourth and fifth grades in Seattle. Sixth and seventh in Norfolk, Virginia. Eighth and ninth in Hawaii. Tenth and eleventh in Kodiak, Alaska. San Diego was her father’s last post.

The parking lot was nearly full at ten, on another in an endless succession of golden mornings in southern California. The cars parked here showed no sign of a recession in the country’s economy. This was clearly not a deprived area. Corvettes, Mercedeses, Miatas, a few Hondas and Toyotas were tightly parked side by side, all polished and shiny. It made Jason think again of maybe getting a car.

He parked in the area reserved for visitors and started toward the building. Earlier he had debated what to wear, and finally decided to stick with what he had come in. Khaki pants and a sports jacket in the kind of muddy colors women don’t usually like, but men find unchallenging and comfortable. He noted some temporary classrooms on what had been another parking area.

It didn’t take long to find Guidance, which was in the same office as College and Career Counseling. There was a list of names on the wall outside. He studied them for a second before going in.

“Can I help you?”

A plump woman with heavily rouged cheeks, red lips colored outside the lines, fluffy orange hair, and a purple blouse looked up from her computer screen.

Jason almost said “Wow.”

“Ah, yeah,” he replied diffidently. “I’d like to see Dr. Londry. Would that be possible?”

“Anything is possible.” She smiled, showing off a set of whiter-than-white teeth to prove it. “Especially now with
all the students in the middle of third period,” she added. “He’s right in there.”

She pointed at a closed door behind her with frosted glass in the top half so nothing could be seen through it.

Jason tapped on it softly and obeyed the equally soft reply, “Yes, come in.”

He found Dr. Londry sitting at his desk with his feet up, reading a newspaper that he put down as soon as he saw his visitor wasn’t a student. Londry had long lifeless hair that grew unashamedly around a large circular bald spot on the top of his head. Rimless glasses magnified the lines around his pale eyes. His short-sleeved plaid shirt was open at the neck, and he promptly took his suede shoes off the desk.

“Hi.” Jason held out his hand. “I’m Frank Miln. I’m out here doing an article for
New York Magazine
on rising stars from California who make it in film in New York. It’s kind of a reverse coast thing.”

“Good lord,” Londry said, blinking. “Yes, I heard something about that. You want to come in?”

“Yes, thank you,” Jason said.

“Big film industry in New York, right? I’ve heard of people going down to Florida, too. What brings you here?”

“Well, Emma Chapman is going to be in the article, and she was at school here. She graduated thirteen years ago. Were you here then?”

“Oh, yes, somebody told me something about that just a few days ago.” He narrowed his eyes at Jason. “I was here, but I couldn’t tell you anything about her even if I had a file on her, which I don’t.”

Jason laughed comfortably. “Oh, I wouldn’t want to see what’s in the file. That would be—” he hesitated, “unethical, of course.”

“Well, they do,” Londry said disapprovingly, pulling his lips into a thin line. “Reporters ask for anything they can get. Sometimes it makes good reading.” Londry swiveled back and forth in his chair. “But I don’t have a file on her. I’d remember if I did.”

“Well, I wasn’t looking for a file. I just stopped by to see if you knew where I might find some of her friends. She’s lost touch with them.”

Londry sneaked a look at his bookcase. Jason followed his gaze.

“I talked with her, and her parents, of course. She said she didn’t mind who I talked to,” Jason said. “But she couldn’t remember the names of the people she knew then. You probably don’t either. I guess a lot of kids pass through.”

“I remember them when I see their faces.” He got up and crossed to the shelves of yearbooks. “Seventy-eight, you said?”

“Seventy-nine. She mentioned one person in particular. A guy, of course. Had a Harley-Davidson.”

Londry took down a book and opened it, searching for a face to attach to Emma Chapman. “Ah, yes, the actress. Yes, I remember. There was something.”

“What?” Jason asked too quickly.

“Oh, nothing. She was in a play. Noel Coward.” He turned pages. “I don’t know,” he murmured, shaking his head. “There are always a few kids in every year with motorcycles.”

“This guy might have gone into the military, or the defense industry.”

“Okay, then you must mean him.” Londry pointed at a small square picture that was slightly out of focus. “Great guy. You’d think he was running for president. Yeah, talk to him. He knew everybody.”

“Do you know where I might find him?” Jason asked, making a note of the name.

“Sure I do. He’s at General Defense.”

“Where’s that?”

“Lindbergh Field.”

“Of course.” Jason put out his hand with a broad grateful smile. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.”