“Who cares about old guys?” one of the boys asked. “We were looking for women.”
“You’d have noticed this old character if you’d seen him. He’d most likely have been wearing swim trunks.”
“Tonight?” Tommy said. “It’s almost December, man. You feel that wind?”
“Maybe he was wearing something else.”
“Didn’t see him,” Tommy said. “No old guy with white hair. Any you guys see him?”
The other three said they had not seen any old fart fitting the description they had been given, and then they were allowed to drive on, north from the public beach, into a residential area of seaside homes and private beaches.
When they had rounded a low hill and were out of sight of the man who had stopped them, they pulled the blanket off Garrison, and he sat up with considerable relief.
Tommy dropped the other three boys off at their houses and took Garrison home with him because his parents were out for the evening. He lived in a house that looked like a ship with multiple decks, slung over a bluff, all glass and angles.
Following Tommy into the foyer, Garrison caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror. He looked nothing like the dignified silver-haired barrister known by everyone in the city’s courts. His hair was wet, dirty, and matted. His face Was smeared with dirt. Sand, bits of grass, and threads of seaweed were stuck to his bare skin and tangled in his gray chest hair. He grinned happily at himself.
“There’s a phone in here,” Tommy said from the den.
After preparing dinner, eating, cleaning up, and then worrying about Einstein’s loss of appetite, Nora and Travis had forgotten about calling Garrison Dilworth and thanking him for the care with which he had packaged and shipped her paintings. They were sitting in front of the fireplace when she remembered.
In the past, when they had called Garrison, they had done so from public phones in Carmel. That had proved to be an unnecessary precaution. And now, tonight, neither of them was in the mood to get in the car and drive into town.
“We could wait and call him from Carmel tomorrow,” Travis said.
“It’ll be safe to phone from here,” she said. “If they’d made a link between you and Garrison, he’d have called and warned us off.”
“He might not know they’ve made a link,” Travis said. “He might not know they’re watching him.”
“Garrison would know,” she said firmly.
Travis nodded. “Yeah, I’m sure he would.”
“So it’s safe to call him.”
She was halfway to the phone when it rang.
The operator said, “I have a collect call for anyone from a Mr. Garrison Dilworth in Santa Barbara. Will you accept the charges?”
A few minutes before ten o’clock, after conducting a thorough but fruitless search of the park and beach, Lem reluctantly admitted that Garrison Dilworth had somehow gotten past him. He sent his men back to the courthouse and harbor.
He and Cliff also drove back to the harbor to the sport yacht from which they had based their surveillance of Dilworth. When they put in a call to the Coast Guard cutter pursuing the Amazing Grace, they learned that the attorney's lady had turned around well short of Ventura and was heading north along the coast, back to Santa Barbara.
She entered the harbor at ten thirty-six.
At the empty slip belonging to Garrison, Lem and Cliff huddled in the crisp wind, watching her bring the Hinckley smoothly and gently into its mooring. It was a beautiful boat, beautifully handled.
She had the gall to shout at them, “Don’t just stand there! Grab the lines and help tie her up!”
They obliged primarily because they were anxious to speak with her and could not do so until the Amazing Grace was secured.
Once their assistance had been rendered, they stepped through the railing gate. Cliff was wearing Top-Siders as part of his boater’s disguise, but Lem was in street shoes and not at all sure-footed on the wet deck, especially as the boat was rocking slightly.
Before they could say a word to the woman, a voice behind them said, “Excuse me, gentlemen-”
Lem turned and saw Garrison Dilworth in the glow of a dock lamp, just boarding the boat behind them. He was wearing someone else’s clothes. His pants were much too big in the waist, cinched in with a belt. They were too short in the legs, so his bare ankles were revealed. He wore a voluminous shirt.
“-please excuse me, but I’ve got to get into some warm clothes of my own and have a pot of coffee-”
Lem said, “God damn it.”
“-to thaw out these old bones.”
After a gasp of astonishment, Cliff Soames let out a hard bark of laughter, then glanced at Lem and said, “Sorry.”
Lem’s stomach cramped and burned with an incipient ulcer. He did not wince with pain, did not double over, did not even put a hand on his gut, gave no indication of discomfort because any such sign from him might increase Dilworth’s satisfaction. Lem just glared at the attorney, at the woman, then left without saying a word.
“That damn dog,” Cliff said as he fell into step at Lem’s side on the dock, “sure inspires one hell of a lot of loyalty.”
Later, bedding down in a motel because he was too tired to close the temporary field office tonight and go home to Orange County, Lem Johnson thought about what Cliff had said. Loyalty. One hell of a lot of loyalty.
Lem wondered if he had ever felt such a strong bond of loyalty to anyone as the Cornells and Garrison Dilworth apparently felt toward the retriever. He tossed and turned, unable to sleep, and he finally realized there was no use trying to switch off his inner lights until he satisfied himself that he was capable of the degree of loyalty and commitment that he had seen in the Cornells and their attorney.
He sat up in the darkness, leaning against the headboard.
Well, sure, he was damn loyal to his country, which he loved and honored.
And he was loyal to the Agency. But to another person? All right, Karen.
His wife. He was loyal to Karen in every way-in his heart, mind, and gonads.
He loved Karen. He had loved her deeply for almost twenty years.
“Yeah,” he said aloud in the empty motel room at two o’clock in the morning, “yeah, if you’re so loyal to Karen, why aren’t you with her now?”
But he wasn’t being fair to himself. After all, he had a job to do, an important job.
“That’s the trouble,” he muttered, “you’ve always-always-got a job to do.”
He slept away from home more than a hundred nights a year, one in three. And when he was home, he was distracted half the time, his mind on the latest case. Karen had once wanted children, but Lem had delayed the start of a family, claiming that he could not handle the responsibility of children until he was sure his career was secure.
“Secure?” he said. “Man, you inherited your daddy’s money. You started out with more of a cushion than most people.”
If he was as loyal to Karen as those people were to that mutt, then his commitment to her should mean that her desires ought to come before all others. If Karen wanted a family, then family should take precedence over career. Right? At least he should have compromised and started a family when they were in their early thirties. His twenties could have gone to the career, his thirties to child-rearing. Now he was forty-five, almost forty-six, and Karen was forty-three, and the time for starting a family had passed.
Lem was overcome with a great loneliness.
He got out of bed, went into the bathroom in his shorts, switched on the light, and stared hard at himself in the mirror. His eyes were bloodshot and sunken. He had lost so much weight on this case that his face was beginning to look downright skeletal.
Stomach cramps seized him, and he bent over, holding onto the sides of the sink, his face in the basin. He’d been afflicted only for the past month or so, but his condition seemed to be worsening with startling speed. The pain took a long time to pass.