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.She took his hand.She looked up the beach in one direction.Someone with a dog was coming, too far away to even tell if it was a man or woman, throwing something to send the dog out ahead.“Are you afraid of him?” Jimmy said.He meant her husband, Hesse.She didn’t have a quick answer.Or a defiant one, which surprised him.She pulled him to her.“I’m glad you’re here,” she said.Was that the answer?“What did he say? When you were arguing?”“This isn’t about him,” she said.“In the end.”“Of all the city parks in all the towns in the world, I walk onto yours,” Jimmy said, holding her.She wasn’t going to let him throw movie lines at her.“L.A.is only a few hundred miles away,” she said.“We would have run into each other again eventually.”“You knew where I was; I didn’t know where you were.”“You’re the one who used to talk about Fate all the time,” she said.They still held each other.It didn’t sound as harsh coming out of her mouth as the words would look on a page.Or would seem, remembered.“You were the one who always said that we were meant to be together.”“We were young.”“What are we now?” she said.“Together,” Jimmy said.He wanted to say one more line.He wanted to ask her why she went into the arms of a Sailor, why she married a Sailor.Was it possible she didn’t know about Hesse? Even he didn’t believe in a Fate that blind.Or blinding.She seemed to sense how close he was to asking the real question about her husband.“Come on,” she said.“There’s a motel up the way.I called ahead.”The man with the dog had reached them.Mary didn’t look his way, but Jimmy did.The man didn’t want their eyes to meet, put all his attention on the dog.“Rex!” the man yelled and threw the stick again.Mary was looking up at the sun.Or maybe she was gauging the time left by the position of the faint curl of daylight moon.They made it back before dark, time to spare.In time.In time for Jimmy to be waiting at dusk for Hesse to exit the medical center.To tail him.Maybe in time for Mary to pick up the kid and make it home and shower and change into evening clothes for a reconciliatory dinner with her husband someplace nice in the City, because Hesse never went home.He drove from the UCSF med center to the Sequoia Club to get cleaned up, emerged a half hour later in a slick suit for a dinner date.Only the doctor met someone else for dinner.A woman not his wife is the phrase.Great gears turn.And not-so-great ones, too.Jimmy had seen all the detective movies, so he knew, Jake Gittes and Chinatown aside, no self-respecting investigator did divorce work.The money wasn’t any good, the hours blew, and the customers were never satisfied at the end of the thing, were more likely to hate you more for telling the truth than the guilty party for living the lie.When he started “looking into things” for people, formally and informally, for money or, more often, for his own private reasons, he knew what he wasn’t going to do.He wasn’t going to follow husbands to dinner dates.But here he was.Why was it always husbands? Because husbands tried to pull it off in town.Women at least had the sense to go out of town.Out to some sleepy little beach town for instance.On a Thursday afternoon.Jimmy didn’t have any reason to think Hesse had identifie d the Porsche, so he’d only stayed two car lengths behind the corpuscular red Mercedes as it left the Sequoia Club.He had the top up, but that was because it felt like rain, the air thickening, clouds descending onto the hills of San Francisco like a stage curtain dropping.He was working.He had half a pack of the American Spirits left.Angel’s pint of Courvoisier was in the glove box if he needed it.There was good music on the radio.He’d made love hours ago in a motel at the beach with the only woman he cared about, still had her scent on him.Life was confusing, but it was good.A wave bigger than Mavericks might be building a thousand miles offshore, but it wasn’t here yet.Hesse and the woman met at the restaurant.Separate cars, meet out front.They’d picked a restaurant on top of a high-rise with glass elevators on the outside of the building, right downtown.Maybe they thought it would look like some kind of business meeting, on the up-and-up.Sophisticates in a sophisticated city.The woman wore a stylish hat, a two-hundred-dollar version of a skateboarder’s sock hat.Nothing sexier than that [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]