Ellipsis (20 page)

Chapter 20

Lucy Bardwell's reclusive quest for literary achievement weighed heavily on me as I drove toward downtown. I didn't know anything about her talent, but in her lonely devotion to art and in the sacrifices she had made to pursue it, she was more of a writer than most, at least in my judgment. Unfortunately for Lucy, my judgment didn't count. Unfortunately for me, I didn't seem to have the will or the passion to make such an effort myself, on behalf of anything. Except maybe Jill Coppelia.

I was on my way to the offices of Thurston Buckley, the real estate tycoon who had been smitten with Chandelier Wells and whom Chandelier had allegedly dumped, but by accident I found myself driving down Folsom Street past the offices of the
San Francisco Riff
. In light of the paper's flagrant enmity toward Ms. Wells, I decided to make a detour.

The
Riff
was a self-styled alternative newspaper, the latest in a long string of such publications that sprouted with regularity in the Bay Area and whose lineage went back to the
Berkeley Barb
. The
Riff
was more prosperous than most of its ilk, and since it was given away free at what seemed like ten thousand locations in the city, it had a wide circulation and, on occasion, a surprising degree of clout, especially with regard to social and multicultural issues. Although not nearly as much as its arrogant editorials implied.

I read the
Riff
myself from time to time, mostly for the weirdly inventive cartoons and the masochistic and irreverent sex column, but I skimmed the book, movie, and restaurant reviews as well, since they catered to inclinations and budgets more like my own than those the
Chronicle
's pompous experts addressed. Their in-house book critic was Allen Goodhew, who advertised himself as a former publishing executive, which might mean he had been a senior editor at Knopf or that he had a Xerox machine in his basement or Pagemaker on his computer.

I parked in the small gravel lot next door and entered the similarly modest brick building, a two-story former warehouse with the faded remains of a Burke's Cartage and Storage sign still clinging to the side, a thriving coffee roaster on the ground floor, and the offices of the
Riff
on level two. The office was sparse and cluttered, with rock posters on the walls, computers on the desks, rows of reference materials on the bookshelves, and coffee cups on every available surface, no doubt in tribute to the addictive powers of the aromas rising up from the roaster below. I got my daily dose of caffeine merely by inhaling.

When I finally found someone who would talk to me, it was in the person of a young woman named Wendy Lowenstein. She was dressed in a black floor-length skirt, a purple skintight leotard, and an oval band of pink lipstick that was double the width of her lips. Around her hips was a braided sash, apparently fashioned out of someone's neckties.

When I asked if Allen Goodhew was around, she wrinkled her nose and shook her head. “I doubt it. He usually makes it a point not to be.”

“Do you know where I can find him?”

“We're not supposed to say. Especially about our precious Allen.”

“Why not?”

She adjusted one of the many silver rings that wrapped her fingers like hose clamps. “Allen makes people mad. Especially writers. Or victims, as he calls them. A fantasy guy broke his nose one time after Allen called him a Terry Brooks without balls.” She pointed left and shuddered. “The bloodstain is still in the carpet. Allen is very …”

“Acerbic.”

“Yes.”

“Callous.”

“Yes.”

“Vituperative.”

She frowned. “What are you, some kind of wordsmith yourself? I suppose you want a piece of him, too.”

I shook my head. “I'm what you might call a source. Goodhew called me a couple of days ago and left a message on my machine. I used to work for Chandelier Wells. Apparently I have some information he's interested in.”

“Derogatory, I'll bet.”

I smiled. “Massively.”

“Allen hates her, for some reason.”

“So I hear. Why do you think that is?”

“Knowing Allen, she probably split an infinitive.”

“Surely it's more than that. In his last review, he called her a syntactical slut.”

“He's called her worse than that, believe me, though not in print, fortunately for our libel insurer. But with Allen, all it takes is bad writing. Really. The guy's a fanatic about prose. He lit into my piece on genital accessories so rabidly I thought he was going to wring my neck.”

“He's going to wring
my
neck if I don't get this information to him.”

“Well, the only thing I can tell you is that he hangs out in the bar down the street.”

“There are lots of bars down this street.”

“McGuinn's.”

I nodded. “Thanks.” I turned to go, then looked back. “What does he look like?”

“Short. Skinny. Pizza face. Ponytail.” She smiled at a private thought. “He doesn't bathe all that often, so if you don't see him right away, you can probably smell him.”

“You sound like you know Mr. Goodhew pretty well.”

She wrinkled her nose and nodded. “Yeah. Typical, I guess.”

“Typical how?”

“I knew him lots better than he knew me.”

I set off down the street in search of a bar that trafficked in literary criticism. In the fifties, that would have included half the gin joints in town. Now, McGuinn's might be it.

It was a typical south-of-Market Irish pub. The decor was obsolete and untended, the customers insular and aloof, the bartender huge and intimidating and in this case scarred above both brows from the bare-knuckle brawls of his youth. I started to ask about Allen Goodhew, then realized I didn't have to.

He was sitting in a booth in the back, wearing a wrinkled tuxedo jacket over a faded gray sweatshirt and hunched over a notebook in which he was scribbling as fast as he could with a black enamel fountain pen. Although it wasn't much after noon, he was nursing a pint of dark beer. He looked more like a punk rocker than a scribe, and he was twenty years younger than anyone else in the place.

Without being asked, I slid onto the bench across from him. “Let's talk about Chandelier Wells,” I said when he didn't bother to look up, firing my best shot first.

The pen he was using looked sleek and expensive. The journal he wrote in was the size of a menu and bound in black leather. The ink he applied to its milky white page stopped flowing in midsentence.

The eyes that peered up at me were bleary and bloodshot and vague. “Who the hell are you?”

“A fan.”

“I don't have any fans. Thank God.”

“Not you. Chandelier Wells.”

He snapped the cap on his pen and leaned back. His smile was lazy and pejorative and exposed a row of teeth that were stained the color of weak tea. “You don't
look
like a moron.”

“Looks can be deceiving. For example, you don't look capable of murder. Or even planning it. But that doesn't mean you aren't.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Who am I supposed to have murdered?”

“Not murdered. Only attempted.”

He shrugged with elaborate unconcern. “Who's the lucky survivor?”

“Chandelier Wells.”

His smile recombined to become a gloat. “Let me guess. The weapons were my trenchant textual analysis, my scathingly scrupulous aesthetics, and my crushingly apposite wit.”

“The first time, yes. The last time, you used more potent ammunition.”

“Like what?”

“A car bomb.”

He shook his head with disgust, as if I had suggested we dance to the monotonous jig being piped through the loudspeakers. “What are you, friend, some pathetic pop novelist trying out a puerile plot device to see if I bite? Or are you merely a minion of the local gendarmerie?”

As if he was used to bringing the world to a halt with his quips, he uncapped his pen and began to write in the journal again. Without a word of warning, I shoved his hand away from the page and closed his journal. “Chandelier Wells was badly injured over in Berkeley yesterday. As I'm sure you know.”

He replaced the cap on his pen with the precision of Eastern ritual. “How would I possibly know that?”

“The papers. The nightly news.”

“I don't read papers and I don't own a TV.”

“How noble of you. How do you fill your spare time?”

“I read decent prose when I find it, which is so seldom as to be terrifying, and I record my observations of the passing scene over my morning stout.”

“A postmodern Samuel Pepys.”

Goodhew bowed with false modesty. “That remains to be seen.” He reopened his journal and sipped at his beer, rereading his prose and pondering his place in the pantheon.

“You're notorious for your enmity toward Ms. Wells,” I went on. “Have you ever met her?”

He shook his head. “I've read her pallid prose. Believe me, it's as close as I want to come. Admittedly, that's close enough to render anyone of taste and discernment homicidal.”

“You take her seriously enough to be a suspected assailant.”

“Suspected by whom?”

“Me.”

“And you are?”

“A private detective.”

“Another Chandler wanna-be.” Goodhew rolled his eyes toward the roof. “Spare me, O Lord.”

“Maybe I'll spare us both. Prove to me you didn't do it. Then I can get out of here.”

His thick brows lifted and his pink eyes bulged. “A car bomb? Please. I'm not a Neanderthal. I possess far more effective means to accomplish my goals.”

“Your reviews?”

He nodded.

“I hate to break your bubble, but Chandelier's crying all the way to the bank.”

He seemed genuinely indifferent to the implication of impotence. “For now, perhaps. But reason and refinement will prevail. They must, or the world is no longer fit to occupy.”

I smiled. “When you find evidence to support your faith in reason and refinement, let me know.”

He shrugged and grinned and adjusted the clamp on his ponytail, suddenly a bashful boy. “Why do you think I don't watch TV?”

I gave him time to finish his beer. “I still don't get why you're so hostile toward Ms. Wells,” I said as he wiped his lips on his sleeve. “She's hardly the only popular novelist who isn't William Faulkner.”

“The Chandelier, as I call her, embodies all that's wrong with the modern woman. She's arrogant, assertive, humorless, graceless, and oblivious to her artistic irrelevance. The worst of it is, Chandelier Wells actually believes she can write.”

“So do a couple of million readers, apparently.”

His sneer was world-class. “Idiots also, of course. We have bred a generation of subliterate dunces. In their day, Shakespeare and Mozart were popular artists. In the aesthetic of the baby boomers, the successors are Chandelier Wells and Yanni.”

“You're a bitter man, Mr. Goodhew.”

“There's so much to be bitter about,” he exulted pleasantly, then looked at his watch. “You should hear me when I've had a couple more pints and have a subject more worthy of my energies than the Chandelier.”

“Where were you yesterday at three?”

“How should I know?”

“Were you drunk?”

“Probably.”

“Here?”

“Of course not. I have more appropriate places to spend my afternoons than toilets like this.”

“Who were you with?”

“Only my muse.”

“Girlfriend? Boyfriend?”

“Both on occasion. Neither at the moment. Which is more of my life story than you're entitled to.” He put his pen in his pocket. “One of us needs to move on.”

Since I'd had more than enough, I stood up. “The bomb thing looked pretty professional, Mr. Goodhew. But if it wasn't, if it was some childish stab at fomenting cultural revolution, you'll take a fall. You're not nearly as smart as you think you are.”

“Which still makes me the smartest man in the room.”

“Only after I leave,” I said, and left him to war with the world with his pen.

Chapter 21

Thurston Buckley ran his extensive real estate empire out of the top floor of his own building on the corner of First and Market, one of several titanic structures he had developed and leased to a variety of well-heeled tenants. Like most San Francisco architecture, the Buckley buildings were lackluster in design and unimaginative in execution, but exceedingly productive of profit—Buckley always made the list of the city's wealthiest residents, as did his second ex-wife, who had made off with enough of Thurston's money in their bitter divorce to become a player in the social whirl herself. As was her new husband, the lawyer who had represented her in divorce court.

I'd never met Thurston Buckley, but what I'd heard of him I didn't like—he was typical of much of the new class of wealth in the state, wholly lacking in subtlety and restraint, wholly convinced of his own acumen whatever the subject at hand, wholly oblivious to his lack of any significant attributes other than arrogance and assets. I wasn't looking forward to meeting him, let alone probing his love life.

The odds of getting in to see Buckley seemed slim, even though I'd called for an appointment. When a secretary as smoothly solicitous as a tour guide ushered me into the boss's office first thing, I figured she thought I was a cop. When I looked into the massive room, what I saw was Thurston Buckley perched like a bull rider on a high-backed leather throne behind a rough-hewn wooden desk that was as large as a garage door, as thick as a railroad tie, and raised a foot off the floor by a brushed-chrome base that passed for solid silver.

When he saw me admiring the desk, Buckley beamed with pride. “Single slab of cedar. Over a thousand years old, from up near Sierra City. Drives the tree huggers crazy when they come around to hit me up for donations.” He stood up and extended a hand. “Thurston Buckley.”