Brian Garfield: Necessity

“Thank you.”

“Take this form over to that line and make an appointment for your road test.”

She manages to take the road test the same afternoon: it takes pleading (“I can’t afford to keep taking taxis all the way out here”) and some batting of eyelashes. Nothing, she thinks, is beneath me.

They give her a temporary license and she telephones for a cab; she has it drop her a few blocks from her motel at the supermarket, where she buys provisions for the evening and several newspapers. When she lets herself back into the motel room she opens the papers to the classified pages and spends the evening making phone calls.

Next day she looks at four cars and buys a three-year-old air-conditioned Japanese station wagon from a woman in Reseda whose husband is hospitalized with emphysema. “We won’t be needing two cars for a spell,” the sad woman says, and agrees to take $3,750 cash for the car.

By then it is time to drive to Van Nuys airport for her lesson.

She’s going to want two apartments: one that can be used as a vested lawful address; the other to live in.

For her legal residence she picks out a furnished room off Lankershim Boulevard. She chooses it mainly because it’s cheap and because the mailbox, to which she is given a key, is in an oleander-screened passage around the side of the building. She can drive in by way of the alley and no one watching the apartment or the main doors will be able to see her when she checks the mailbox.

The rental agency is a busy office a mile away and that’s helpful because she doubts very much that they’ll remember what she looked like when she signed up. They won’t see her again; she only needs to remember to send in the rent check once a month.

Hurrying through cheap department stores and thrift shops she buys a wardrobe of new and used clothing. The three pairs of shoes are two sizes too large for her and the underwear and clothes are chosen to fit a woman approximately three inches shorter and ten pounds heavier than she.

In Duttons’ bookshop she picks up a carton of second-hand paperbacks, most of them Regency romances. She buys an old black and white TV set for forty dollars and a couple of timers that will turn the lamps on and off automatically; an assortment of inexpensive toiletries and cosmetics, none of them her own brands; two bottles of very cheap wine, a few frozen foods and juices, several cans of soup and a few boxes of crackers-a variety of nonperishable foods with which to stock the dummy apartment so that it will look lived in.

She makes the bed and squirms in it and then climbs out, leaving the top sheet and blanket turned back and the pillow dented and a romance novel open face down on the bedside table. It occurs to her to leave two windows narrowly ajar to permit air circulation so that the place won’t feel stuffy and uninhabited. Then she hangs a set of towels on the racks, unwraps a bar of soap and a toothbrush, uses them and leaves them in the bathroom.

A couple of tissues crumpled in the wastebasket; a folded paper towel beside the sink with an upended coffee cup on it; let’s see-what else?

It seems enough. Not much by way of evidence about the woman who lives here-but such as it is, it doesn’t point to the real tenant.

The next thing to do is leave a forwarding address at the motel where she’s been staying. From now on, this is the legal and mailing address of Jennifer Corfu Hartman.

And now for her actual residence she investigates seven or eight advertisements and chooses a one-bedroom apartment at the back of a court.

The furniture is nondescript; you could find better in a second-class hotel. The place is dark because its windows are small and set high, insulation and privacy and security being more important than light or a better view of the swimming pool in the unshaded yard below.

Under the afternoon sun it is far from cool in mid-July even though the through-the-wall air-conditioning units are running at capacity.

It has no grace, no flavor-nothing left of the transients who must have occupied it momentarily on their way up or on their way down or simply on their way through.

She takes it because it is clean and it is furnished and the price is reasonable and it is available month to month for cash without a lease.

She doesn’t expect to entertain here; with luck nobody will know she lives here; she doesn’t intend to stay any longer than it will take to get her bearings and decide on a structure for her new life and find a residence suitable to it: one into which she may blend so precisely that she’ll never arouse anyone’s curiosity.

It all needs to take place quickly. Because of Ellen it is a matter of acute urgency: she has six weeks, no longer. But she can’t execute the crucial part of the plan until the license with her photograph on it arrives in the mail from Sacramento.

That will take a fortnight or more. Time enough to set Jennifer Corfu Hartman up in business.

She finds the shop easily enough from the instructions on the phone. It’s set back in a little Burbank shopping mall, hardly much bigger than a motel-she counts eleven stores in the U-shaped court.

When she emerges from the car it is like opening the door of an oven that someone neglected to turn off two days ago: the heat has accumulated in pavement and walls and cars from which it radiates in lancing slivers of reflected sunlight, as painful against the eyes as steel darts.

Everything is too bright, too raw. She scrutinizes the place with unease and a growing skepticism.

It shows painful evidence of a promoter-builder’s efforts to be quaint. The shops have high wooden false fronts and the walkway is shaded by a veranda roof supported on posts and wooden arches-an imitation wild west movie set. The parking lot is decorated with wagon wheels.

There are a western wear shop, an ice cream bar, the Native American Crafts Shop, a one-hour photo store, a harness and tack outfit that features silver-tooled saddles; she makes a face at the hitching rail in front of that one. Next door a display window holds agate and turquoise jewelry under a wooden sign that hangs on chains and carries the legend The Desert Rockhound. On the corner by the curb is a restaurant where you may eat al fresco at rustic tables under big umbrellas, the dining area surrounded by a split-rail corral fence. Behind it the small windows are filled with colored neon signs advertising several brands of beer. That is-inevitably? — Buffalo Bill’s Saloon.

It looks like bloody Disneyland, she thinks, and makes her dubious way toward the half-hidden corner shop that announces itself with a meekly faded sign as Books of the West.

Inside she finds the soothing relief of air conditioning and another kind of relief that the shop hasn’t been decorated with cheap gimcracks: no framed plastic replicas of old guns.

The bookcases along both walls are filled with volumes most of which don’t seem to be new-many are without dust jackets-and the bins and tables that crowd the center of the room are stacked high with oversized picture books and paperbacks and bargain selections: All Books On This Table $1.59.

The cash register near the front door is a genuine antique-brass keys and pop-up numbers behind glass. But she sees a computer screen on the shelf behind.

There is no one at the counter. Two men are deep in conversation near the back: the older one glances her way and speaks up: “Be right with you, ma’am.”

“Take your time,” she says. “No hurry.” She smiles at his “ma’am.”

He is white-haired: tall with a flowing white gunfighter’s mustache, a bit stooped, dressed in jeans and an outdoorsy red plaid shirt. The customer with him is younger-thirties or early forties, brown mustache, khaki poplin business suit.