A Is for Alibi

  I turned out the remaining lights and slipped to the back door, opening it a crack. I could hear voices remarkably close. A garbage can lid clattered near the apartment to my right.

  “You better tell the manager her light’s burned out,” a woman commented. She sounded as if she was standing right next to me.

  “Why don’t you tell her?” came the slightly annoyed reply.

  “I don’t think she’s home. Her lights are off.”

  “Yes she is. I just saw the lights on a minute ago.”

  “Sherman, they’re off. The whole place is dark. She must have gone out the front,” the woman said. The wailing siren was very loud, its tone winding down like a phonograph.

  My heart was pounding so hard it was making my chest burn. I eased out onto the darkened patio, pausing to tuck the keys back into the little crevice behind the plastic watering can. I hoped like hell it wasn’t my car keys I was hiding there. I slipped out of the patio, turning left, moving toward the street again. I had to force myself to walk casually past the patrol car that was now parked out front. I unlocked my car and got in, pushing the lock down hastily as though someone were in pursuit. I stripped off the rubber gloves. My head was aching fiercely and I felt a flash of clammy sweat, bile rising up in my throat. I had to get out of there. I swallowed convulsively. The nausea welled up and I fought an almost irresistible urge to heave. My hands were shaking so badly I could hardly get my car started but I managed, finally, and pulled away from the curb with care.

  As I drove past the entranceway, I could see a uniformed patrolman move around to the back of Sharon’s apartment, hand on the gun at his hip. It seemed somewhat theatrical for a simple domestic complaint and I wondered, with a chill, if someone else had placed a call with a message more explicit than mine. Half a minute more and I’d have been trapped in that apartment with a lot of explaining to do. I didn’t like that idea at all.

  I went back to the Bagdad and packed, cleaning the place of fingerprints. I felt as if I were running a low-grade fever. All I really wanted to do was roll up in a blanket and go back to sleep. Head throbbing, I went into the office. The manager’s wife was there this time, looking like a Turkish harem girl—if the word “girl” applied. She was probably sixty-five, with a finely wrinkled face, like something that had been left in the dryer too long. She wore a pale satin pillbox perched on her gray hair, veils draped provocatively over her ears.

  “I’ll be on the road at five in the morning and I thought I’d get my bill squared away tonight,” I said.

  I gave her my room number and she sorted through the upright file, coming up with my ledger card. I was feeling restless, anxious, and sick, and I wanted to be out on the road. Instead, I had to force myself, brightly, casually, to deal with this woman who moved in slow motion.

  “Where you headed?” she asked idly, toting up the charges on the adding machine. She made a mistake and had to do it all over again.

  “Reno,” I said, lying automatically.

  “Any luck?”

  “What?”

  “You win much?”

  “Oh yeah, I’m doing pretty good,” I said. “I really surprised myself.”

  “Better than most folk,” she remarked. “You won’t be making any long-distance calls before you leave?” She gave me a sharp look.

  I shook my head. “I’m going to hit the sack.”

  “You look like you could use some sleep,” she said. She filled out the credit-card charge slip, which I signed, taking my copy.

  “I didn’t use the fifty dollars’ worth of coupons,” I said. “You might as well have those back.”

  She put the unused coupons in the drawer without a word.

  Within minutes, miraculously, I was out on Highway 93, heading southeast toward Boulder City, where I took 95 south. I got as far as Needles and then I had to have relief. I found a cheap motel and checked in, crawled under the covers again, and slept for ten hours straight. Even that far down in oblivion, I felt an awesome dread of what had been set in motion and a pointless, aching sense of apology to Sharon Napier for whatever part I’d played in her death.

  14

  In the morning, I felt whole again. I ate a big breakfast in a little diner across the road from the motel, washing down bacon, scrambled eggs, and rye toast with fresh orange juice and three cups of coffee. I had the car filled up with gas, the oil checked, and then hit the road again. After Las Vegas, the desert drive was a pleasure. The land was spare, the colors subdued: a mild very pale lavender overlaid with fine dust. The sky was a stark, cloudless blue, the mountain ridges like crushed velvet, wrinkled dark gray along the face. There was something appealing about all that country unconquered yet, miles and miles of terrain without neon signs. The population was reduced to races of kangaroo rat and ground squirrel, the rocky canyons inhabited by kit fox and desert lynx. At fifty-five miles an hour, no wildlife was visible but I had heard the cries of tree frogs even in my sleep and I pictured now, from my speeding car, the clay and gravel washes filled with buff-colored lizards and millipedes, creatures whose adaption to their environment include the husbanding of moisture and an aversion to hot sun. There are parasol ants in the desert that cut off leaves and carry them as sunshades over their backs, storing them later like beach umbrellas in the subterranean chambers where they live. The idea made me smile, and I kept my mind resolutely from the recollection of Sharon Napier’s death.

  I found Greg Fife in a little gray humpbacked camper outside Durmid on the eastern shore of the Salton Sea. It had taken me a while to track him down. Gwen had said that he lived on his boat but the boat had been pulled out of the water for paint and repair and Greg was temporarily lodged in an aluminum trailer that looked like a roly-poly bug. The interior was compact with a folding table hooked flat against the wall, a padded bench that became a single bed, a canvas chair that completely blocked passage to the sink, a chemical toilet, and a hot plate. He opened two bottles of beer, which he’d taken from a refrigerator the size of a cardboard box, located under the sink.

  He offered me the padded bench, unfolding the small table between us. A single leg flopped down to give it support. I was effectively hemmed in and could only get comfortable by turning sideways. Greg took the canvas chair, tilting back so he could study me while I studied him. He looked a lot like Laurence Fife—lank dark-brown hair, a square-cut smooth face that was clean-shaven, dark eyes, bold dark brows, square chin. He looked younger than twenty-five but his smile had the same touch of arrogance that I remembered from his father. He was darkly tanned, cheekbones tinted with sunburn. His shoulders were wide, his body lean, his feet bare. He wore a red cotton turtleneck and cutoffs that were ragged at the bottom, nearly ruffled with bleached threads. He took a sip of beer.

  “You think I look like him?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Does that suit you?”

  Greg shrugged. “Doesn’t matter much at this point,” he said. “We weren’t anything alike.”

  “How so?”

  “God,” he said facetiously, “let’s just skip over the preliminaries and get right down to the personal stuff, why don’t we.”

  I smiled. “I’m not very polite.”

  “Neither am I,” he said.

  “So what do you want to talk about first? The weather?”

  “Skip it,” he said. “I know what you’re here for so get to the point.”

  “You remember much about that time in your life?”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  “Except for shrinks,” I suggested.

  “I did that to please my mom,” he said and then smiled briefly as though he recognized the fact that the phrase “my mom” sounded too boyish for him at his age.

  “I worked for your father a couple of times,” I said.

  He began to peel a strip of label with his thumbnail, feigning disinterest. I wondered what he’d heard about his father and I decided, on impulse, not to give Laurence Fife any posthumous pats lest I sound cond
escending or insincere.

  I said, “I’ve heard he was a real bastard.”

  “No shit,” Greg said.

  I shrugged. “I didn’t think he was that bad myself. He was straight with me. I suspect he was a complicated man and I don’t think many people got close to him.”

  “Did you?”

  “No,” I said. I shifted slightly in my seat. “How’d you feel about Nikki?”

  “Not that good.”

  I smiled. “Try to keep your answers short so I can get ’em on one line,” I said. He didn’t bite. I drank beer for a while, then rested my chin on my fist. Sometimes I just really do get sick of trying to coax information out of people who aren’t in the mood. “Why don’t you fold up the table and we’ll go outside,” I said.

  “What for?”

  “So I can get some fresh air, fucker, what do you think?”

  He chuckled suddenly and moved his long legs out of my way as I slid out of the seat.

  I’d surprised myself, getting snappish with him, but I get tired of people being cute or sullen or cautious or tight-lipped. I wanted straight answers and a lot of them too. And I wanted a relationship based, just once, on some sort of mutual exchange instead of me always having to connive and manipulate. I walked aimlessly, Greg at my heels, trying to cool myself down. It wasn’t his fault, I knew, and I’m suspicious of myself anyway when I’m feeling righteous and misunderstood.

  “Sorry I snapped at you,” I said.

  The trailer was about two hundred yards from the water’s edge. There were several larger trailers nearby, all facing the sea, like a queer band of animals that had crept down to the water to drink. I pulled off my tennis shoes and tied the laces together, hanging them around my neck. The Salton Sea has a mild to nonexistent surf, like an ocean that has been totally tamed. There is no vegetation visible in the water and few if any fish. It gives the shore a curious air, as though the tides had been brought to heel, becalmed, the life forms leeched away. What remains is familiar but subtly changed, like a glimpse into the future where certain laws of nature have been altered by the passage of time. I placed a drop of water on my tongue. The taste of salt was fierce. “Is this ocean water?”

  Greg smiled, apparently unperturbed by my former outburst. In fact he seemed friendlier. “You want a lesson in geology,” he said, “I’ll give you one.” It was the first time his voice had contained any sign of enthusiasm.

  “Sure, why not?”

  He picked up a rock, using it like a piece of chalk as he drew a crude map in the wet sand. “This is the California coastline and this is Baja. Over here is Mexico. Right at the tip of the Gulf of California is Yuma— southeast of here, more or less. This is us here,” he said, pointing. “The Colorado River curves right up through here and then up past Las Vegas. That’s Hoover Dam. Then it goes up here and over into Utah and then to Colorado, but we can skip that part. Now,” he said, tossing the rock aside. He began to draw with his fingertip, glancing up at me to see if I was listening. “This area in here is called the Salton Sink. Two hundred and seventy-three feet below sea level—something like that. If it weren’t for the Colorado River forming a kind of natural dam right here, all this water from the Gulf of California would have spilled into the Salton Sink years ago—all the way up to Indio. God, that gives me the willies when I think of it. Anyway, the Salton Sea came from the Colorado River itself, so it was originally fresh water. Overflowed in 1905—the river did, billions of gallons of water pouring in over a two-year period. It was finally controlled with rock and brush dams. The salt, which has been gradually saturating the water, was probably from prehistoric times when all of this area was submerged.” He stood up, brushing wet sand off his hands, apparently satisfied with his summary.

  We began to walk—he on the beach side, me scuffling my bare feet through the shallows. He tucked his hands in his back pockets. “Sorry if I was a pissant before,” he said lightly, “I’ve been in a bad mood with my boat out of the water. I was never meant to be on land.”

  “You sure snapped out of it quick enough,” I remarked.

  “Because you said ‘fuck.’ I always get tickled when women say that. Especially you. It was the last thing I expected to come out of your mouth.”

  “What do you do down here?” I asked. “Fish?”

  “Some. Mostly sail. Read. Drink beer. Hang out.”

  “I’d go nuts.”

  Greg shrugged. “I started out nuts so I’m getting sane.”

  “Not really ‘nuts,’ ” I said.

  “Not certifiable, no.”

  “What kind then?”

  “Don’t make me tell all that stuff,” he said mildly. “I get bored with myself. Ask me something else. Three questions. Like magic wishes.”

  “If I have to limit myself to three questions, I might as well go home,” I said, but basically I was willing to play the game. I looked over at him. He was looking less like his father and more like himself. “What do you remember from the period just before he died?”

  “You asked me that before.”

  “Yeah, and that’s just about the time you turned all surly on me. I’ll tell you why I’m asking. Maybe that will help. I’d like to reconstruct the events just before his death. Maybe as far back as the last six months before he was killed. I mean, maybe he was involved in some kind of legal hassle—a personal feud. Maybe he fought with a neighbor over a property line. Somebody did it, and there had to be a sequence of events.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that stuff,” he said. “I can tell you just family events, but the other I wouldn’t know.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “We came down here that fall. That’s one of the reasons I came back.”

  I wanted to prompt him with another question but I was afraid he’d count it as one of my three so I kept my mouth shut. He went on.

  “I was seventeen. God, I was such a jerk and I thought my father was so impossibly perfect. I didn’t know what he expected of me but I figured I’d never measure up, so I was a pissant. He was supercritical and he hurt my feelings a lot, but I’d just stonewall him. Half the time I hung on his every word and the rest of the time I hated his guts. So when he died, I lost the chance to square myself with him. I mean, for all time, you know? That’s it. I’ve got no way to take care of any old business with him, so I’m stuck. I figured if I was stuck in time, I might as well be stuck in place, too, so that’s why I came here. We were out on the beach once—and he had to go back to the car for something and I remember watching him walk. Just looking at him. He had his head bent and he was probably thinking about anything but me. I felt like I should call him back, really tell him how much I loved him, but of course I didn’t. So that’s the way I remember him. That whole business really screwed me up.”

  “It was just the two of you?”

  “What? No, the whole family. Except Diane. She got sick and stayed with Mom. It was Labor Day weekend. We drove to Palm Springs, first, just for the day, and then came on down here.”

  “How’d you feel about Colin?”

  “Okay I guess, but I didn’t see why the whole family had to revolve around him. The kid had a handicap and I felt bad about that, but I didn’t want my life to focus on his infirmity, you know? I mean, Jesus, I would have had to develop a terminal disease to compete with him. This is me at seventeen, you understand. Now I’m a little more compassionate, but back then, I couldn’t cope with that stuff. I didn’t see why I should. Dad and I were never bosom buddies, but I needed time with him too. I used to have these fantasies of what it would be like. I’d really tell him something important and he’d really listen to me. Instead, all we talked about was bullshit—just bullshit. So six weeks later he’s dead.”

  He glanced at me and then shook his head, smiling sheepishly.

  “Shakespeare should have done a play about this stuff,” he said. “I could have done the monologue.”

  “So he never talked to you about his personal life?”
/>
  “That’s number three, you know,” he remarked. “You sneaked in that little question about whether it was just Dad and me down here. But the answer is no. He never talked to me about anything. I told you I couldn’t be much help. Let’s knock it off for a while, okay?”

  I smiled and tossed my shoes up on the beach, starting to jog.

  “Do you jog?” I called back over my shoulder.

  “Yeah, some,” he said, catching up. He began to trot at my side.

  “What happens if I work up a sweat?” I asked. “Can we get cleaned up?”

  “The neighbors let me use their shower.”

  “Great,” I said and picked up the pace.

  ________

  We ran, not exchanging a word, just taking in sun and sand and dry heat. The whole time, the same question came up over and over again. How could Sharon Napier fit into this scheme? What could she possibly have known that she didn’t live long enough to tell? So far, none of it made sense. Not Fife’s death, not Libby’s, not Sharon’s death eight years later. Unless she was blackmailing someone. I glanced back at the little trailer, still visible, looking remarkably close in the odd perspective of the flat desert landscape. There was no one else around. No sign of vehicles, no boogeymen on foot. I smiled at Greg. He wasn’t even panting yet.

  “You’re in good shape,” I said.

  “So are you. How long do we keep this up?”

  “Thirty minutes. Forty-five.”

  We chunked along for a while, the sand causing mild pains in my calves.