Stuart Kaminsky: Now You See It

“Listen,” I said.

Jeremy and Alice were near the door talking to Gunther. Shelly and Pancho were a few feet in front of me, talking to Blackstone and his brother.

“When you smile,” said Shelly, pointing at Blackstone’s mouth. “I can see a little turn, a twist in your upper right … that one there.”

“I’ve never noticed it,” said Blackstone.

“Trust me,” said Shelly. “Come and see me tomorrow. I’ll take care of it. No charge. I’ll throw in a cleaning and exam. All I ask is that if I do a good job you let me do an ad with your picture. And, right under your picture, it’ll say, ‘Sheldon Minck Will Do Magic With Your Teeth.’”

“Listen,” I repeated loudly.

Everyone stopped talking and looked at me.

“We just got some information that gives us pretty good reason for thinking that Jimmy Clark knows something about what’s been happening.”

“What?” shouted Alice.

“Phil’s on his way to your apartment to try to find him,” I said.

“Try to …,” Alice said. “He’s there with Natasha.”

I shook my head and started to explain, but Jeremy and Alice were out the door and gone before I got two words out.

“Jimmy Clark?” said Pete Bouton. “I can’t believe it.”

Everyone began talking, and I raised my voice. “Hold it! Hold it!”

Nobody listened. Blackstone moved to my side and said quietly, “Listen.”

They all stopped talking. Blackstone turned to me, indicating the floor was mine.

“I’ll call the police,” I said. “Gunther, go to the hotel where people in the show are staying. Shelly, you and Pancho get back to the Farraday and wait by your phone.”

I looked at Blackstone and his brother and said, “Does Clark know anyone in Los Angeles?”

“No relatives, no friends,” said Pete. “Just the people in the show. So far as I know.”

“We’ll get back to the theater,” Blackstone said. “We’ll check with everyone in the show about where Jimmy might be. You say he has a child with him?”

“Looks that way,” I said.

Blackstone grabbed the satchel and hurried across the room and out the door with his brother.

“Let’s move,” I said.

I called the Wilshire Station from the Roosevelt lobby and was unlucky enough to find that Cawelti was still there. When he came on the line, he said, “Make it fast, Peters. I don’t want to talk to you.”

I explained what had happened. He was quiet. When I finished, a Cawelti voice I had never heard before said, “Spell the kid’s name.”

I did.

“You say he’s from Decatur, Illinois?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Tell me everything you know about him,” said Cawelti.

I told him. It wasn’t much.

“Let me know if Blackstone has his photograph,” he said when I finished. “I know what he looks like so I’ll put out a description.”

“Don’t forget the limp,” I said.

“I won’t. Photograph of the girl?”

“I’ve got one,” I said.

“I’ll send someone to the Butler’s apartment to pick it up. How old is she?”

“Two,” I said.

Cawelti was silent.

“Two,” he repeated softly. “Where can I reach you?”

“Shelly’s in his office. I’ll check in with him.”

“Tell Butler …,” he began. “No, I’ll go over to the Farraday and talk to him and his wife. It goes APB as soon as I hang up the phone.”

He hung up the phone.

I probably could have gotten to the Farraday faster by running, but I might need the car later. It was parked half a block down in front of the Roosevelt.

When I got to the Farraday and through the front door, I could hear voices echoing from above. Voices at night in the cavern of a lobby were always indistinct and a little ghostly. The elevator was up on another level. I didn’t want it, anyway. I went up the stairs as fast as I could and tried not to pant when I went through the door of the Butler apartment.

Juanita was the only one sitting.

“He called,” Phil said. “Jeremy talked to him.”

“What’d he say?”

“Natasha is alright,” said Jeremy, his arm around his wife’s ample shoulder. “He hasn’t hurt her, will not hurt her. He saw you talking to Wilde before he left to come here. He knew by Wilde’s face that he’d recognized him.”

“He was right,” I said.

“What does he want?”

“Time,” said Phil.

“Time,” said Jeremy. “Which is what we all want. He said he needs time to decide. I don’t think he’ll hurt her.”

“I agree,” I said, not mentioning that the freckled young fellow with the big grin and touching limp may well have murdered three men in the last three days.

Alice turned away to face the window and then turned back. “If he touches her or even frightens her, if he … I’ll.…”

No one in the room, including her husband, doubted that she would make Jimmy Clark a very sorry young man if she ever got within reach of his neck.

“And you,” she said, pointing at me. “I’ve warned you. Jeremy got involved with all this because of you. He met Jimmy Clark because of you.”

I doubted if the combined efforts of Jeremy and my brother could have stopped her from getting to me if she had decided to tear off any part of my anatomy. She took one step toward me and stopped. Juanita had said something.

“High,” Juanita said.

She was sitting in a straight-back wooden chair.

“High,” she repeated. “He’s some place high, looking up at the stars, crying. Natasha is sleeping in his arms.”

There was nothing eerie, distant, or ghostly in Juanita’s words. She had her head turned a little to the right, and she held up a single finger of her right hand. She was trying to see something. She gently bit her lower lip.

“You’ll run and run and look,” she said. “In darkness and light, searching for a secret where there isn’t a secret. It’s all simple.”

“What’s simple?” I asked.

“Huh?” asked Juanita.

“What’s simple?” I repeated.

“Whatever you’re all making complicated,” she said, waving her bangle-covered left arm.

“We’ll find her,” came a voice from the open door behind me.

I turned. It was Cawelti. He looked at Phil. Neither man spoke, but something passed between them-a truce.

“He needs a photograph of Natasha,” I said. “I’ve got one downstairs.”

“Wait,” said Jeremy.

He moved to the door to the bedroom on his right. The rest of us stood: Alice looking at me, me looking at Juanita, Juanita looking at her hand, pursing her lips and then getting up.

Juanita moved to Alice and touched her shoulder gently.

“Tea, I could use some tea. You got some?”

Alice didn’t want to stop looking at me.

“Tea?” Juanita repeated. “I’ll make it myself if you tell me where it is.”

Alice turned toward the smaller woman and said, “It’s in the cupboard over the sink. I’ll get it.”

As Alice moved toward the kitchen, Juanita stage-whispered to me, “I hate tea. My husband, Sol, loved the stuff. Never has any taste as far as I’m concerned.”

Jeremy came out of the bedroom with a photograph in his hand about the size of a book. He handed it to Cawelti who repeated, “We’ll find her.”

“It’s odd,” Jeremy said. “The only poetry that comes to mind is that of Poe, and it gives me no solace. There are times when even poetry will not suffice or comfort.”

After a last glance at Phil, Cawelti was out the door and gone.

I started to look at the watch on my wrist, my father’s watch, the watch that never had the right time, that lived in a time world of its own. I’ve heard people say that even a stopped watch was right twice a day. But my father’s watch just kept on ticking as long as it was kept wound and it kept on turning at its own pace.