CHAPTER 9

I ONLY SET MY ALARM WHEN I'M ON A CASE. THAT MORNing I'd been dreaming a pleasant dream of normal, genitally reoriented sex with an idealized composite blonde—no resemblance to Celeste Stanhunt—when the alarm went off and it projected the wake-up dream into my head instead. The image this morning was of a series of cartoon sheep jumping over a cartoon wooden fence against a background of ambient white. The last sheep caught its back legs against the top of the fence and came tumbling down in a clatter of splintered wood and bleating. Then a giant hand reached out of the clouds and picked up the sheep, dusted it off, and patted it on the rump to send it scurrying along after the rest of the flock. The hand turned to reveal a watch face on its wrist, and the watch face grew closer and closer and the ticking grew louder and louder until I finally woke up.

I sat with a pad and pencil over coffee and tried to piece together my next move, but the coffee stung the fresh cuts in my gums and I ended up having to concentrate instead on drinking through only one side of my mouth. After wrestling down a second cup, I went back to the pad and wrote the name Danny Phoneblum just to have a look at it. Underneath it I wrote Pansy Greenleaf, then Grover Testafer and Celeste Stanhunt. I drew a few circles and triangles on the pad, then tore the sheet off and threw it into the wastebasket.

After breakfast I made a call and requested an address and phone number for Testafer, which I got, and the phone number for the house on Cranberry Street, which wasn't available, even after I offered up my privilege access code. Either my code had been suspended or Celeste Stanhunt's privacy rated higher than my privilege.

Either way, the result was the same: I'd have to drop in on the house if I wanted a word with Celeste, or with Pansy Greenleaf. And I did want a word—hell, maybe even a whole bunch of them strung together. But the day was young, for once. I had plenty of time. First I'd take a drive up into the El Cerrito hills and have a look at Dr. Testafer's fancy address. I was in the mood for scenery.

The doctor's house was on Daymont Court, which was a public road but just barely. It terminated in a pair of drive-. ways, each barred with a gate to stop traffic. The mailbox on the left said TESTAFER. I parked to one side of the clearing and set out on foot past the barrier, walking with loud crunching steps in the gravel so I wouldn't be mistaken for surreptitious.

The house was a botched American replica of a French country cottage, marred by aluminum storm windows and a satellite dish mounted on the shingles of the low roof. There wasn't any car in front of the house, but I went up to the front door and pushed the buzzer anyway.

A meekly feminine voice emanated from an unseen intercom: "Dr. Testafer isn't here right now."

"My name is Conrad Metcalf," I said, not knowing if there was a microphone to pick it up. "I'm a private inquisitor. I was hoping to have a word with you." Whoever you are, I didn't add.

There was an interval of silence. I examined the doorway and failed to find the intercom.

"I—I'll be right there," said the voice.

I waited on the doorstep, but the sound, when it came, was on my right, and I turned to see a smaller door opening in the lower wing of the house. The voice turned out to belong to a black-eared ewe wearing a housecoat and slippers. She stood in the doorway with one hand on the sash of her robe, blinking her big watery eyes in the sunlight.

I went over to her little door. "I'm Conrad Metcalf," I said again. The ewe came up to about the middle of my chest, and I took a step back again so I wouldn't seem to tower over hen.

"My name is Dulcie." The margin between her lip and her black nose trembled as she spoke. "Please—come inside."

I nodded.

"It's a little low," she said. "I don't have the keys to the main house." She turned and tiptoed inside, leaving the door open. I stooped to enter.

The apartment was as wide and deep as it should have been, but about half as tall. I stood just inside the doorway, bent over uncomfortably, until my eyes adjusted to the dimness; then I made my way to the couch by the farthest wall of the room and sat down. I could almost have reached up and touched the ceiling from a sitting position. Testafer had had the entire wing remodeled to fit the ewe or someone else her size. The colors in the apartment were all childish pinks and blues, and pretty much everything short of the doorknobs and faucets was carpeted. The curtains were drawn against the morning sun; the room was lit instead by a pair of big floor lamps which had to crook their necks to fit. I felt a kinship with them, real-life visitors in the dollhouse.

The ewe performed a nervous little dance before choosing the easy chair across from me and sitting down. I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees and said: "Has Dr. Testafer told you what happened to Dr. Stanhunt?"

"Well, yes," said the sheep. "He was very upset."

"We all are," I said. "Especially my client. He's about to take a trip to the freezer, and I personally don't think he killed the doctor. Did you know Stanhunt very well?"

The ewe flinched, but it could have meant anything: I was no Doolittle. "I met him once," she said.

"He came up here?"

"Yes."

"Do you ever come down off the hill, Dulcie?"

She wrenched up her mouth. "Not very often."

"Must be kind of lonely," I suggested.

"I'm not going to say anything against Grover, if that's what you have in mind. I'm quite happy here, and if I wasn't I'd leave."

"Yes, I'm sure you would. Does the name Danny Phoneblum mean anything to you? Dr. Testafer seemed uncomfortable talking about the subject, and I thought you might cleat it up for me."

"I'm afraid not."

"That's funny," I said. "That's exactly what Dr. Testafer said. I mention Phoneblum, and everyone is afraid not. What are you afraid of, Dulcie?"

Her eyes widened and a funny sound emerged from her throat, a sort of strangled bleat. "I—I shouldn't be talking to you. Grover will be angry with me."

"You ever meet a strong-arm kangaroo named Joey Castle? He works for Phoneblum, or at least he did last night."

"No." She said it firmly. She seemed relieved to be able to deliver an answer.

"All right. Let's try another tack. Testafer was worried about some papers that had gotten lost, something from the office files. What can you tell me about that?"

"Nothing." She kicked the slipper off her right hoof and scratched at her left flank in an unnaturally repetitive way, as if she were being bitten by a flea under her wool.

"Okay," I said. "You're afraid of somebody and you don't want to talk. That's fine. I'm a patient guy, believe it or not. This carpet's big, but it's not all tacked down as neatly as you and Testafer. We'll find out what's been swept underneath." I congratulated myself on the metaphor and started to think about where to go next. I wasn't as confident as I sounded, and I'm not really patient—not even a little.

"Grover is under a lot of pressure," said the ewe suddenly, surprising me. "You've got to understand. It's not his fault. Danny Phoneblum is—"

"That's enough," came a voice from the doorway. It was Grover Testafer, and he had a gun pointed in my direction. It was an electronic dart gun, and he held it like he might know how to use it.

"Hello, Doctor," I said. The sheep just trembled in her chair.

Testafer stepped inside and shut the door behind him without looking away from me for a second. He'd learned the trick of bending at the knees to fit in the apartment, and he duckwalked over to a position beside one of the stoop-shouldered floor lamps. His florid face was lit up from underneath like a demonic mask. "Get up," he said.

"Right," I replied wearily.

"Outside."

I gave Dulcie a smile and then I walked hunchbacked to the door.

"Go." He turned to the sheep. "You stay here." His voice was brittle.

I put my hand on the knob. "Here's a tip, Grover; You're supposed to go first—"

"Shut up."

Well, I'd tried to warn him. I opened the door and stepped to the left and pressed myself flat against the shingles. Testafer said "Shit," and I didn't say anything back. He nearly had to bend double to get through the little door, and when his gun hand appeared, I kicked it as hard as I could, which was hard. Then I reared back and hit him with a solid right from the waist, and almost broke my hand on his jaw. His fat body sagged in the doorway, but I grabbed him by the collar before he fell back inside. I pushed him up against the side of the house and reached down for the gun, but my right hand wouldn't close enough to pick it up. So I kicked it a few feet away, and it vanished in the unmowed grass.

Testafer was pressed up against the house as if I were still holding him there, his face crumbling to reveal fifty-odd years of terror and insecurity. Drool leaked from the side of his mouth where my fist had landed. I felt real sorry for him.

"Let's go inside and talk," I said, except it came out a pant. He nodded silently and walked shakily to the big front door. Dulcie was following instructions, I guess; there wasn't a peep from the little house.

Testafer's quarters were a little more tasteful, and a lot more spacious. The living room was light and airy, at least by comparison. One wall was entirely taken up with shelves displaying old magazines in glossy plastic covers. I could see through to a kitchen tiled in white and blue and, beyond that, a covered porch on the back of the house. Testafer walked straight through and rinsed his mouth in the sink, swirling a mouthful of water like fancy wine before spitting it out. I didn't see blood, but my hand hurt and I didn't see blood on that either.

When he was done, he came back into the room and stood in front of me. He'd put his composure together again somewhere in the interval. "Have a seat," he said, and I did.

The table between us was a big cross-section slice of a tree trunk polished to a mirrored sheen. It was empty except for a little silver box at one corner, and I wasn't too surprised when Testafer opened the box and spilled some make onto the table. "You're very persistent, Mr. Metcalf," he said, and as the words came out, I could hear him working his jaw to find out what hurt and what didn't.

I decided to get right to business. I was tired of feeling people out and getting nowhere. "I need to talk to Phoneblum," I said, and tried to sound like I knew what it meant to be saying it.

"I guess I could help you with that," he said carefully. "You do things differently than the Office."

"I try to, yes."

"I should warn you that you're out of your jurisdiction on this."

"One of the pleasures of my job is deciding for myself where my jurisdiction lies," I said. "Who is Phoneblum that he commands such respect?"

Testafer leaned forward and began chopping at the make with a little ivory-handled blade from the box. He looked up at me from under his eyebrows and then down again at the make on the shiny surface. The sun threw a beam into the room that crossed the table, and as Testafer chopped, I could see little motes floating away in the light.

"I spent most of my adult life working to achieve this," he said, gesturing with his hand. "I'm not comfortable in the city. I don't like people. I like cooking, and music." He put the knife back into the box. "We all make our compromises. In an ideal world there wouldn't be a Danny Phoneblum."

I nodded to keep him going.

"I met him through Maynard, and I tolerated him only to the extent that I understood their relationship to be necessary to Maynard, though I never knew why. He's a dirty gangster, you understand. But he owned a piece of Maynard, and I found that out too late."

"Does he own a piece of you?"

"No—no." Testafer worked his jaw again. "Phoneblum has ways of manipulating events and karma to suit his needs—he could make my life uncomfortable, and he hasn't. But he doesn't own me. Not a bit." He took a straw out of the box and leaned over the table.

"You call him a gangster—what's his racket?"

Testafer stopped snorting, but he stayed bent over with his face in the make. "I wouldn't know."

"Who would?"

Testafer sat back up and neatened his shirt at the sleeves and waist with careful, pinching fingers. His face was still red but it looked more composed now. "Phoneblum, I guess."

"I don't know—my impression was your sheep would have told me in another minute. Since you don't know, why don't we go and ask her?"

He didn't want to talk about the ewe. His fingers whitened on his knee, the way they had back in his office downtown the first time we tangled. "Dulcie doesn't talk to strangers often," he said with effort. "She's very...impressionable." He looked closely at my face and then stood up abruptly, as if someone were jerking his strings.

"You're a young man," he said.

"I'm older than I look." The line was stolen, but I'd said it often enough to make it my own.

"You don't remember before the Inquisition."

"No," I admitted.

He stepped over to the shelves and pulled down one of the old magazines. "These are television guides," he said. "There used to be such a variety of programming that you needed a guide to decide what to watch."

"It's probably illegal to own those," I said.

"I don't care. I collect them. It's one of my hobbies. Here, look" He handed me the magazine. It was wrapped in transparent plastic. The cover featured an ensemble of performers—maybe jugglers or magicians, I couldn't tell—and the name of their show.

"Abstract television isn't an improvement," he said. "There's something missing that used to be commonplace. An art form that's completely vanished."

I wasn't impressed. "You're only remembering, through those magazines, what a lot of people know, even though they aren't supposed to. It has nothing to do with television. What's missing that used to be commonplace is a sense of connectedness in people's lives. In my line of work that's old news. The shows you're talking about were only a reflection of that."

"You don't understand. What I'm talking about is a lost art form—"

"I've never seen old television," I said. "But I'm sure television was the same then as it is now. Art mirrors the culture. The abstract stuff they have now just shows how bad it's gotten. You think you're pining for some old program, but what you're really missing is a kind of human contact, a kind that's not possible anymore." I was making it up off the top of my head.

He took the magazine away from me. "You'd feel differently if you could remember."

"That's possible. Listen, Doctor—not that I don't find this stuff interesting, but I came here to talk about Phoneblum. I need to see him."

He put the magazine carefully into its place on the shelf and then turned back to me. His smile was enigmatic. "I've no doubt that you'll eventually accomplish that," he said. "Though I can't recommend it as an experience. But I'm powerless to put you in touch with him. Phoneblum comes and goes according to his own schedule."

"You know so much more than you're telling that it's leaking out of the sides of your eyes, Doctor. What's got you scared?"

His smile evaporated, "You really don't understand. If you could see yourself the way I see you—as far as I'm concerned, you and Danny Phoneblum are like two peas in a pod. Remember that when you meet him. You're both dangerous, temperamental men who like to barge in and demand things from people who'd rather not have anything to do with you. You impose your violent paradigms on others. The only difference is that Danny is more assured in his evil—he doesn't cloak it in self-righteousness, as you do—and therefore he's more dangerous than you. I'll place my bets on his side of the table, thank you."

"Yeah, sure." I got up to leave. "You're headed for higher ground. It's obviously a habit with you. Only this time maybe you should build an ark. It's going to be raining awhile."

"An interesting concept."

"Yeah, interesting."

I went to the door. He just stood there. It occurred to me that I ought to make some kind of crack about him and the ewe, but I couldn't think of anything. I opened the door and looked out into the sunny garden. It was noon.

I turned and looked back into the house. "See you later, Grover."

"As you wish."

I closed the door on his idiot smile. Before I walked down the driveway to my car, I went over and found Testafer's little electric gun in the grass. I clipped the safety and put it in my inside jacket pocket.

Dulcie's Utile door was closed, but I could see light shining through from underneath. Once he heard my engine start, Testafer would probably go in and see her, and I wondered what they would say to each other. Would they make love? Would he hit her? Did he hit her a lot?

Sometimes it's better not to think in questions, but I can't seem to get out of the habit.