The Door into Summer

CHAPTER 7

I made a date with her.

My first impulse had been to tell her to go to hell and switch off. I had long since realized that revenge was childish; revenge would not bring Pete back and fitting revenge would simply land me in jail. I had hardly thought about Belle and Miles since I had quit looking for them.

But Belle almost certainly knew where Ricky was. So I made a date.

She wanted me to take her to dinner, but I would not do that I'm not fussy about fine points of etiquette. But eating is something you do only with friends; I would see her but I had no intention of eating or drinking with her. I got her address and told her I would be there that evening at eight.

It was a cheap rental, a walk-up fiat in a part of town (lower La Brea) not yet converted to New Plan. Before I buzzed her door I knew that she had not hung onto what she had bilked me out of, or she would not have been living there.

And when I saw her I realized that revenge was much too late; she and the years had managed it for me.

Belle was not less than fifty-three by the age she had claimed, and probably closer to sixty in fact. Between geriatrics and endocrinology a woman who cared to take the trouble could stay looking thirty for at least thirty extra years, and lots of them did. There were grabbie stars who boasted of being grandmothers while still playing ingenue leads.

Belle had not taken the trouble.

She was fat and shrill and kittenish. It was evident that she still considered her body her principal asset, for she was dressed in a Sticktite negligee which, while showing much too much of her, also showed that she was female, mammalian, overfed, and under exercised.

She was not aware of it. That once-keen brain was fuzzy; all that was left was her conceit and her overpowering confidence in herself. She threw herself on me with squeals of joy and came close to kissing me before I could unwind her.

I pushed her wrists back. "Take it easy, Belle."

"But, darling! I'm so happy-so excited-and so thrilled to see you!"

"I'll bet." I had gone there resolved to keep my temper just find out what I wanted to know and get out. But I was finding it difficult. "Remember how you saw me last? Drugged to my eyebrows so that you could stuff me into cold sleep."

She looked puzzled and hurt. "But, sweetheart, we only did it for your own good! You were so ill."

I think she believed it. "Okay, okay. Where's Miles? You're Mrs. Schultz now?"

Her eyes grew wide. "Didn't you know?"

"Know what?"

"Poor Miles... poor, dear Miles. He lived less than two years, Danny boy, after you left us." Her expression changed suddenly. "The frallup cheated me!"

"That's too bad." I wondered how he had died. Did he fall or was he pushed? Arsenic soup? I decided to stick to the main issue before she jumped the track completely. "What became of Ricky?'

"Ricky'?"

"Miles's little girl. Frederica."

"Oh, that horrible little brat! How should I know? She went to live with her grandmother."

"Where? And what was her grandmother's name?"

"Where? Tucson-or Yuma-or some place dull like that. It might have been lndio. Darling, I don't want to talk about that impossible child-I want to talk about us."

"In a moment. What was her grandmother's name?"

"Danny boy, you're being very tiresome. Why in the world should I remember something like that?"

"What was it'?"

"Oh, Hanolon ... or Haney... Heinz. Or it might have been Hinckley. Don't be dull, dear. Let's have a drink. Let's drink a toast to our happy reunion."

I shook my head. "I don't use the stuff." This was almost true. Having discovered that it was an unreliable friend in a crisis, I usually limited myself to a beer with Chuck Freudenberg.

"How very dull, dearest. You won't mind if I have one." She was already pouring it-straight gin, the lonely girl's friend. But before she downed it she picked up a plastic pill bottle and rolled two capsules into her palm. "Have one?"

I recognized the striped casing-euphorion. It was supposed to be non-toxic and non-habit-forming, but opinions differed. There was agitation to class it with morphine and the barbiturates.

"Thanks. I'm happy now."

"How nice." She took both of them, chased them with gin. I decided if I was to learn anything at all I had better talk fast; soon she would be nothing but giggles.

I took her arm and sat her down on her couch, then sat down across from her. "Belle, tell me about yourself. Bring me up to date. How did you and Miles make out with the Mannix people?"

"Uh? But we didn't." She suddenly flared up. "That was your fault!"

"Huh? My fault? I wasn't even there."

"Of course it was your fault. That monstrous thing you built out of an old wheel chair... that was what they wanted. And then it was gone."

"Gone? Where was it?"

She peered at me with piggy, suspicious eyes. "You ought to know. You took it."

"Me? Belle, are you crazy? I couldn't take anything. I was frozen stiff, in cold sleep. Where was it? And when did it disappear?" It fitted in with my own notions that somebody must have swiped Flexible Frank, if Belle and Miles had not made use of him. But out of all the billions on the globe, I was the one who certainly had not. I had not seen Frank since that disastrous night when they had outvoted me. "Tell me about it, Belle. Where was it? And what made you think I took it?"

"It bad to be you. Nobody else knew it was important. That pile of junk! I told Miles not to put it in the garage."

"But it somebody did swipe it, I doubt if they could make it work. You still had all the notes and instructions and drawings."

"No, we didn't either. Miles, the fool, had stuffed them all inside it the night we had to move it to protect it."

I did not fuss about the word "protect." Instead I was about to say that he couldn't possibly have stuffed several pounds of paper into Flexible Frank, he was already stuffed like a goose when I remembered that I had built a temporary shelf across the bottom of his wheel-chair base to hold tools while I worked on him. A man in a hurry might very well have emptied my working files into that space.

No matter. The crime, or crimes, had been committed thirty years ago. I wanted to find out how Hired Girl, Inc., had slipped away from them. "After the Mannix deal fell through what did you do with the company?"

"We ran it, of course. Then when Jake quit us Miles said we had to shut down. Miles was a weakling... and I never liked that Jake Schmidt. Sneaky. Always asking why you had quit. as if we could have stopped you! I wanted us to hire a good foreman and keep going. The company would have been worth more. But Miles insisted."

"What happened then?"

"Why, then we licensed to Geary Manufaturing, of course. You know that; you're working there now."

I did know that; the full corporate name of Hired Girl was now "Hired Girl Appliances and Geary Manufacturing, Inc." although the signs read simply "Hired Girl." I seemed to have found out all I needed to know that this flabby old wreck could tell me.

But I was curious on another point. "You two sold your stock after you licensed to Geary?"

"Huh? Whatever put that silly notion in your head?" Her expression broke and she began to blubber, pawing feebly fox a handkerchief, then giving up and letting the tears go. "He cheated me! He cheated me! The dirty shiker cheated me...he kinked me out of it." She snuffled and added meditatively, "You all cheated me... and you were the worst of the lot, Danny boy. After I had been so good to you." She started to bawl again.

I decided that euphorion wasn't worth whatever it cost-or maybe she enjoyed crying. "How did he cheat you, Belle?"

"What? Why, you know. He left it all to that dirty brat of his after all that he had promised me... after I nursed him when he hurt so. And she wasn't even his own daughter. That proves it."

It was the first good news I had had all evening. Apparently Ricky had received one good break, even if they had grabbed my stock away from her earlier. So I got back to the main point "Belle, what `was Ricky's grandmother's name? And where did they live?"

"Where did who live?"

"Rickey's grandmother."

"Who's Ricky?"

"Miles's daughter. Try to think, Belle. It's important."

That set her off. She pointed a finger at me and shrilled, "I know you. You were in love with her, that's what. That dirty little sneak... her and that horrible cat."

I felt a burst of anger at the mention of Pete. But I tried to suppress it. I simply grabbed her shoulders and shook her a little. "Brace up, Belle. I want to know just one thing. Where did they live? How did Miles address letters when lie wrote to them?"

She kicked at me, "I won't even talk to you! You've been perfectly stinking ever since you got here." Then she appeared to sober almost instantly and said quietly, "I don't know. The grandmother's name was Haneker, or something like that. I only saw her once, in court, when they came to see about the will."

"When was that?"

"Right after Miles died, of course."

"When did Miles die, Belle?"

She switched again. "You want to know too much. You're as bad as the sheriffs... questions, questions, questions!" Then she looked up and said pleadingly, "Let's forget everything and just be ourselves. There's just you and me now, dear... and we still have our lives ahead of us. A woman isn't old at thirty-nine: Schultzie said I was the youngest thing he ever saw-and that old goat had seen plenty, let me tell you! We could be so happy, dear. We--"

I had had all I could stand, even to play detective. "I've got to go, Belle."

"What, dear? Why, it's early... and we've got all night ahead of us. I thought-"

"I don't care what you thought. I've got to leave fight now."

"Oh dear! Such a pity. When will I see you again? Tomorrow? I'm terribly busy but I'll break my engagements and-"

"I won't be seeing you again, Belle." I left.

I never did see her again.

As soon as I was home I took a hot bath, scrubbing hard. Then I sat down and tried to add up what I had found out, if anything. Belle seemed to think that Ricky's grandmother's name began with an "H"-if Belle's maunderings meant anything at all, a matter highly doubtful-and that they had lived in one of the desert towns in Arizona, or possibly California. Well, perhaps professional skip-tracers could make something of that.

Or maybe not. In any case it would be tedious and expensive; I'd have to wait until I could afford it.

Did I know anything else that signified?

Miles had died (so Belle said) around 1972. If he had died in this county I ought to be able to find the date in a couple of hours of searching, and after that I ought to be able to track down the hearing on his will... if there had been one, as Belle had implied. Through that I might be able to find out where Ricky had lived then. If courts kept such records. (I didn't know.) If I had gained anything by cutting the lapse down to twenty-eight years and locating the town she had lived in that long ago.

If there was any point in looking for a woman now forty-one and almost certainly married and with a family. The jumbled ruin that had once been Belle Darkin had shaken me; I was beginning to realize what thirty years could mean. Not that I feared that Ricky grown up would be anything but gracious and good

but would the even remember me? Oh, I did not think she would have forgotten me entirely, but wasn't it likely that I would be just a faceless person, the man she had sometimes called "Uncle Danny" and who had that nice cat?

Wasn't I, in my own way, living in a fantasy of the past quite as much as Belle was?

Oh well, it couldn't hurt to try again to find her. At the least, we could exchange Christmas cards each year. Her husband could not very well object to that.