True-Life Adventure

I’d have liked to go on forgetting, but with six angry eyes upon me there wasn’t much choice. I got back there and cleaned.
    And while I cleaned, I listened.
    “While they’re putting his head back together, maybe they’ll make him a new nose,” Lufburrow said.
    I heard laughter, but apparently not everyone joined in. “I don’t get it,” someone said.
    “He’s got no nostrils left. Well-known fact.” The speaker was a crusty old dude who worked for the Examiner .
    “If he ran for mayor, I’d think twice before I contributed to the campaign,” said Lufburrow. “He’d probably snort up all the contributions.”
    Everybody laughed again.
    So Brissette was a cocaine freak. Who’d have thought it? It didn’t fit with his Mr. Moderate image.
    I finished up and came out in the pressroom again. “How’s Brissette?” I said again.
    Lufburrow shrugged. “Who knows? It’ll be a while— always is.”
    “You didn’t happen to see what happened to my jacket, did you? I put it under his head.”
    “Oh, yeah. Janet said it was yours. I brought it up.” He gestured towards his cubbyhole-office, and I went in and plucked my coat from the rack. A bit wrinkled, but good enough for a scientist.
    I told the boys good-bye and hit the road.
    On the way to Koehler’s I couldn’t help thinking about Brissette, despite my best efforts at repression. I was wondering if he’d been hit and if it was my fault. Maybe if I hadn’t played that little game with Blick, he’d have gotten to him earlier and Brissette would have unloaded what he knew and Blick would have had enough sense to figure out what it meant and the murderer would have been safely under arrest and Brissette wouldn’t have got hit. It was a sobering thought. I hated it. I can’t tell you how much I hated it. Because if there was the dimmest possibility in the world that it was true, I was going to have to do some serious thinking of the type I hated worst in the world. I was going to have to root around in corners of my mind with Do Not Disturb signs on them— musty alcoves I hadn’t visited for twenty, maybe thirty years, and never wanted to see again.
    Something like that, in abbreviated version, went through my head when I felt that soft spot on Brissette’s. That was why I puked.
    The Watergate was much like a condo complex I knew in San Francisco, which was very similar to another I’d been to in San Mateo. I think the same guy designed them all, and maybe lots of others as well. He didn’t seem to go in much for modifications.
    Marilyn Markham let me in. She was short and dark. A bit overweight perhaps, but sensuous, with large breasts under a blue sweater. Her features were heavy and her hair was the hair of a woman who couldn’t be bothered getting it cut right. Or I suspect that’s how she looked at it, but it was my experience that women who didn’t bother with their appearance were afraid to. I don’t know if they were afraid they still wouldn’t look good or if they were afraid they would.
    Marilyn wasn’t the beauty Lindsay was, but she was a lot of woman. I could feel it, just standing in the doorway. She was someone to be reckoned with, someone to push against— a strong-willed, determined someone who was probably squishy like a rubber duckie when it came to little Terry. All that and a first-rate scientific mind. Good catch, Jacob.
    “Come in, Mr. Mcdonald,” she said. “We’re a bit upset at the moment.”
    I came in. Jacob was sitting on a couch, looking as forlorn as it’s possible to look when you’re about six feet three, with the kind of shoulders you get from swimming every day.
    He stood up to shake hands, and I got to see the whole length of him. He was wearing tan corduroy trousers and a light blue sweatshirt. He had a slender, powerful body topped by those massive shoulders and a fine, craggy-featured head with slate-blue eyes in it. On the head was a curly mop of gorgeous gray hair. It was a joke, he was so handsome.
    As a pair, he and Lindsay must have drawn crowds. He motioned me to sit down and sat himself. “I felt this interview was absolutely necessary,” he said at last. “Desperately urgent.”
    I caught a motion of some kind out of the corner of my eye and, turning, saw that Marilyn had either signaled him or given an involuntary jerk of some sort. She seemed very upset.
    “But now,” said Koehler, “I don’t know. Marilyn— I mean, we’ve had some rather upsetting