“A couple of days.”
“Why didn’t you report it?”
“I thought no good would come out of it.”
“No, you thought you’d write your own rules. You put your friendship with Clete ahead of the job. I’m pulling your ticket, Pops. I’m not going to take this shit.”
“I’m on the desk?”
“You’re on leave without pay. I’m referring this to Internal Affairs.”
“What about Clete?”
“He’d better get his fat ass back to New Orleans and stay there for a long time.”
“I made a mistake. So did Clete. We didn’t know about the biker murder.”
“You made your bed,” she said. “Dave, you use a nail gun on the people who love you most. You don’t know how much you hurt me.”
• • •
AT MIDDAY, ALAFAIR was still at the set. I ate lunch by myself and then lay down in my room and fell asleep. An hour later, I woke from a disturbing dream about a mountainous desert that was not a testimony to the curative beauty of the natural world but instead a crumbling artifice inhabited only by the wind. I sat on the side of the bed, gripping my knees, my head filled with a warm fuzziness that felt like the beginning of malarial delusions, a condition I’ve dealt with since childhood.
Perhaps I fell asleep again. I can’t remember. Then I went downstairs and sat for a long time by the entrance to the lounge and took a table in the dining room by the big window that gave onto the swimming pool and a vista like the long trail disappearing into the buttes in the final scene of My Darling Clementine. The waitress asked if I would like anything from the bar.
“A glass of iced tea,” I said.
She was pretty and young and had thick soft brown hair and an innocent pixie face. “Sure thing.”
She walked away, yawning slightly, looking through the window at the swimmers in the pool. I wondered if she dreamed about being among them. Many of them were celebrities, or the children or the lovers of celebrities, and those who were not celebrities were obviously well-to-do and carefree and, like the celebrities, enjoying the coolness and turquoise brilliance of the water and the heat of the sun on their bodies, as though all of it had been invented for them, as though the wind-carved shapes to the north had no connection to their lives.
The waitress put the tea and a coaster by my hand. “Are you with the film crew?”
“Afraid not. I’m just a tourist,” I said.
“Must be nice, huh?”
“What must be nice?”
“To live like that. To make movies and not have to worry about anything.”
“Could be,” I said.
“Let me know if you want anything.”
I watched her walk away and tried not to look below the level of her waist, then put the charge on my room and left a five-dollar bill under my glass, even though that was more than my personal budget allowed. I used the stairs rather than the elevator to reach my floor and spent the rest of the afternoon in my room. A faucet was ticking in the bathroom as loudly as a mechanical clock, with the same sense of urgency and waste. I tried to tighten the faucet but to no avail. I lay down and put a pillow over my head, the afternoon sun as red as fire behind my eyelids.
• • •
ALAFAIR WAS LATE getting back from the set. I had dinner with Clete in a Mexican restaurant and told him about my phone call to Helen and the information I had given her about Clete’s decision to let Hugo Tillinger go. I also told him about the penalty she had imposed on me, as well as her feelings about Clete’s cutting Tillinger slack a second time.
“A fed says he tore up somebody in the AB with a mattock?” Clete said.
“Which means maybe he put the baton down Axel Devereaux’s throat.”
“Why didn’t the fed do something about it?” Clete said. “Why’s he dropping this on us?”
“Nobody is dropping anything on us. You made a choice, and so did I. It was the wrong choice.”