“If I want to be yelled at, I’d go back to Graus,” she said, softly. “Oh, wait a minute …” Then her bottom lip began to tremble.
Beaten by her childlike quality, I sat down beside her. “Look, Katie. I can’t guarantee your safety here. The cops could show up, any minute. We’ve got to figure out what to …”
Katie was nuzzling at me now. In another second she was kissing me, gently, all over my neck. Another man could have resisted this obvious attempt at diversion. But another man might have had more women in his apartment recently. Besides, as I mentioned, I liked Katie.
“Mute it again,” I whispered.
—
When we woke up, Royal Wedding had ended, and the station was showing an old short from the thirties where dogs played all the parts. A bulldog judge was sentencing a poodle prisoner to death. Silly as it was, it gave me a chill.
“It’s nicer with you than with Johnny,” Katie was murmuring. “He was never really there, you know.”
I took the compliment, but a police siren cut short my pleasure. Only when it faded did I relax back into the pillow.
Katie kept complaining about Johnny, and I looked as much as listened. Left with only her T-shirt, she leaned languidly against the pillow. She looked like Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind after Clark Gable carried her up the stairs. Only, you know, without pants.
Suddenly, my mind raced, as if toward an answer. George Cukor was replaced by Victor Fleming as director of Gone With the Wind … Fleming directed The Wizard of Oz, in which Jack Haley replaced Buddy Ebsen …
“And Johnny always did things for the worst reasons. You’ve at least got a real passion, Roy.…”
Dudley Moore replaced John Malkovich in Crazy People … George Segal was replaced by Moore in 10… and twenty years later, Segal replaced Moore in The Mirror Has Two Faces.…
“Johnny just talked about how much money he could make off trivial stuff …” She started teasing my foot with her own, ready to go again.
Barbra Streisand replaced Lisa Eichhorn in All Night Long … Eichhorn starred in Yanks with Richard Gere, who replaced John Travolta in American Gigolo.… Recently, Travolta was starring in a film co-starring Isabelle Adjani and directed by Roman Polanski, which was scuttled over “creative differences,” even as Steve Martin prepared to take over the lead. It was to be an adaptation of Dostoyevky’s The Double.
“… and Johnny had a nose job, did you know that? I mean, what’s with that? He wasn’t an actor, he was a director …”
Someone who was Gone With the Wind … who had Two Faces or was a Double … and had something to do with a 10 …
I quickly sat up, yanked my pants from the floor, where I’d flung them. I scrambled in the pockets, for the last vestiges of Johnny’s cash, which had paid for Katie’s breakfast.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
Dollar bills flew out and were thrown aside. It was the change I was after. A quarter and a nickel rolled onto my rug. Then, at long last, so did another one of Johnny’s coins.
A fake dime.
JOHNNY COOPER WAS STANLEY LAGER.
Suddenly it made sense—his changing identities, his violence, his immoral motives. Whether it was Quelman or Clown, who else would stalk someone so greedily over trivial things? How he’d trailed me, I didn’t know. But if there were patches left in the picture, it was more complete than it had ever been.
Now all I had to do was find him. Then I could see the film and clear Katie. Was that the order of importance? I couldn’t say.
“Where are you going?” Katie asked.
“I can’t explain now. Please just do what I ask you.…”
I warned Katie again about going out. I told her not to answer the door, not even for the cops. I told her where the spaghetti was. I said I’d be back as soon as possible. Then I took money from her for transportation. We kissed, sloppily, before I could pull away.
I didn’t say I was going a hundred miles from there, to the privileged upstate enclave where Stanley Lager hid. Jeff Losson had told me in his comic book store—could it only have been weeks ago?
Then, before I left, I removed the gun from my underwear drawer.
—
Three hours later, I was in Millwood, New York, standing on line at a bakery. There was a middle-aged man ahead of me, endlessly grilling the teenage clerk about the filling of croissants.
“Is there cherry? No cherry? That’s too bad, I really like cherry. What else do I like …? How about almond? No almond?”
Tension was causing a tremor in my eyelid. I tried to be inconspicuous among the well-heeled Dutchess County clientele, shopping for weekend brunch. But I could sense their uneasy glances at the grungy interloper in their midst. Who else had come to town by bus?
I was in Nature’s Meal, the flagship store of the boutique bakery that had brought its goods to the Farmer’s Market in Manhattan. It was the only place I knew in the community, where the answers to so many questions now might lie.
My turn finally came. Though the challah looked good, I was about to walk away.
“You need another job?”
It could have been no one else. I turned and, big, blond, sunburned, and contemptuous, there was the person I was seeking: Annabelle the farmer.
“No,” I said. “I need something else.”
—
We sat at a table in the back of the crowded store. Annabelle had agreed to “two seconds” of conversation, since she was “actually working here.”
I didn’t know where to begin. So much had changed since I held my balloon in Union Square. Yet to her I seemed the same rootless loser, not a determined detective on the brink of a breakthrough.
