Six

John Pembroke lay on his back, stark naked, debating whether to answer the door. The knocking had woken him up. It was noon-he’d checked his Timex-and he’d been sound asleep. No one ever visited him.

There was another knock.

A reporter? He hoped not, but it was Friday. Tonight was the annual Chandler lawn party and the twenty-fifth anniversary of Lilli’s disappearance. John wished he could sleep the whole damn day.

His two window air conditioners-one in his small bedroom, one in his all-purpose room-rattled and groaned trying to keep up with the blistering Tucson summer heat. He’d heard the temperature was supposed to climb to a hundred-fifteen today. Might as well be living in hell.

He rubbed one hand across the grizzled gray hairs of his chest, trying to wake up. He’d been dreaming about swimming in the ice-cold stream out behind his nutty mother’s gingerbread cottage, as he had summers as a boy. But he’d never go back, hadn’t since Lilli disappeared. Saratoga was nothing but memories for him. Even Lilli had become just another memory. You couldn’t touch a memory, he’d discovered. You couldn’t live one.

Except once in a while.

Like just now, when he’d opened his eyes, thinking he was in the maple bed in his and Lilli’s old room at the Chandler cottage on North Broadway. He’d heard her breathing beside him. He’d rolled over, knowing she was there. So certain. He’d wanted to hold her, to make love to her.

There was yet another knock.

“I’m coming!”

He heaved himself out of bed and pulled on a pair of wrinkled elastic-waist shorts. He’d developed the habit of working late, often past dawn, and sleeping well into the afternoon. In summer he missed the worst of the blazing heat. And the desert night sky, he’d discovered, was incomparable. He’d head up into the mountains and stare at the sparkling stars and endless dark and imagine Lilli’s spirit in union once more with him, imagine what their life together might have become.

Hell of a romantic he was.

He’d tell her, as he hadn’t often enough in their too-short time together, how much he loved her.

Rubbing his face with his palms, he could feel the rough stubble of a couple of days’ growth of beard. He seldom shaved every day. His neighbors initially had thought he was a do-gooder or gentrifier come to restore one of the street’s old adobe houses and sell it at a profit. Now they pretty much figured he was just an old reprobate. He’d once asked the family next door, eight people crowded into an apartment not much bigger than his place, their advice on identifying and killing-unless there was a damn good reason why he shouldn’t-a giant spider that had taken over his bathroom. Turned out it was just an ordinary desert spider. Nothing to worry about. They’d thought his naïveté and terror great fun and gave him a beer and had Carlos, the baby of the family, go back with him to liberate his bathroom. Meanwhile, of course, the spider had vanished. Now John never took a leak without wondering where the damn thing had gone.

He went through his all-purpose room to the front door. When he’d fallen into bed early that morning, he’d left out the books, photographs, articles and two hundred pages of the manuscript for the biography he was writing of his notorious great-grandfather, Ulysses Pembroke. Dani had commissioned him. John had no idea what she planned to do with it. He hadn’t asked. He knew damn well she hadn’t given him the job out of a sense of charity. He’d used up his daughter’s goodwill a long, long time ago.

He pulled open the door, the dry heat hitting him as if he’d pulled open a furnace running full blast against a subzero chill. “Yeah, what’s up?”

A kid, no more than eighteen, in shorts, T-shirt and sandals, stood red-faced on the landing. He looked parched. John felt a wave of guilt at having kept the poor bastard waiting in the scorching heat. It was hot, even for Tucson in August.

“Mr. Pembroke?” the kid asked tentatively.

John stiffened, immediately thinking of Dani. Something had happened to her. Then he thought of Nick: his father was dead. Ninety years old and finally gone to the great beyond. Or Mattie. But he wasn’t ready to say goodbye to his mother yet. He tried to will away the habit of thinking the worst, but couldn’t. The worst had happened often enough.

“Yes,” he said sharply, trying to control his fear.

The kid took a step back, no doubt wondering if he’d come to the wrong place. John supposed he looked like hell. Although still lean and rawboned, his black eyes as alert as ever, he’d lost weight, both fat and muscle, and his skin had begun to sag on his neck and elbows. He was fast becoming an old man with flabby knees. Lately his grooming amounted to daily teeth cleaning and a weekly shower. Part of his routine came from conviction: the desert wasn’t a place to be profligate with water. Part came from not giving a damn. Twenty-five years ago he’d never have answered the door unshaven, gray hair sticking out, in nothing but a pair of wrinkled turquoise shorts.

“I’m from Tucker’s Office Supply,” the kid said. “A fax came for you.”

John had never received a fax here. He didn’t own a telephone or a computer. He’d given up on as much technology as he could since Eugene Chandler had given him the boot.

“Delivery was included,” the kid said.

“So I don’t owe you anything?”

He shook his head. The air was so hot and dry his sweat evaporated instantly. Or maybe John had left him out there so long he’d stopped sweating. Dehydration and hyperthermia were constant threats in summertime Arizona.

John took the offered envelope. “Wait a second.”

He went back into the cooler gloom of his adobe, walking right over the scattered books and papers in his bare feet, and dug in his small refrigerator for a bottle of Pembroke Springs Natural Orange Soda. Dani had sent him a case-and the bill. His daughter was a barracuda. He handed the soda to the kid, who looked relieved. John heard the fizz of the bottle opening as he shut his door. His good deed for the day. Didn’t want the kid croaking on his drive back to the two-bit office-supply store where he worked.

The fax had been sent from Beverly Hills:

Dear John, What kind of damn fool would live in the desert with no phone? Dani’s been robbed. She’s okay, but I’m not. Call me: I have a phone. Nick

Not, John observed dispassionately, “Love, Dad,” or even the conventional “Your father.” Just Nick. Like they were old pals, which they weren’t. Of course, they weren’t much as father and son, either.

John laid the slippery fax on the counter and got out a Dos Equis, then heated up a leftover quesadilla and lit a cigarette. He’d learned to smoke the night he’d lost his first thousand in a poker game. He hadn’t had a thousand to lose, and gambling had seemed a hell of a way to get rid of his money. Smoking hadn’t helped. He’d known it wouldn’t, but he’d needed something to try to assuage his guilt and self-hate, although why he’d thought a cigarette would do the trick he still couldn’t figure out. Now he smoked whenever he felt particularly guilty or rotten. Usually all someone had to do was mention his daughter.

He sat on the tattered couch he’d picked up from the Salvation Army fifteen years ago. He’d always thought he’d have it recovered but never had. He reread his father’s fax. A fax machine wouldn’t intimidate that old geezer. Nicholas Pembroke was the most selfish and egotistical and totally unreliable man John had ever known, but endearingly honest about his failings, and direct, and unafraid-to a fault-of taking risks. John, on the other hand, seldom told anyone what was on his mind and had learned to avoid risk. To him his gambling wasn’t taking risks. It was avoiding them. Popular media opinion declared that his Pembroke genes-a penchant for gambling and adventure and self-destruction-had led to his downfall. He disagreed. He’d been all over the world, gambling, writing the odd travel article, doing as he damn well pleased. But it was a life he’d chosen not for its risk but for its safety. Staying on at Chandler Hotels and being the only parent to his only child would have required greater courage. Staring in the mirror every morning and wondering if he’d driven Lilli off all those years ago. Wondering if he’d helped make her feel trapped and unhappy. If he’d pushed her into making her deal with his father to act in Casino on the sly.