The Sweetman Curve Read online

  Today, though, he was out earning money. It was ten bucks an hour for walking pedigrees, seven-fifty for mutts. It was ten bucks for a custom wax job. He walked into the kitchen to collect his rags and polish.

  The kitchen was a cathedral, all blue-and-white Italian tiles. John had privately dubbed it the Chocka-Fulla-Nutsa. In the sunlight that fell through the tall leaded windows, the black maid Yolande, in her white cap and white apron, was wiping up the butcher block centre island and singing, ‘The Woman Behind Every Man.’

  ‘How are the kids?’ asked John, opening the cleaning cupboard and taking down the Turtle Wax.

  ‘Oh, they’re fine,’ said Yolande. ‘They’re black and they’re proud.’

  ‘Still into racial politics?’

  She looked up at him. ‘Aren’t we all, Mr Cullen? That’s what politics is about – race.’

  He shook up the car-wax bottle and loosened the cap. ‘Race is only a part of it. Race is only a fraction of it. If the blacks were a little more laid-back about race, we might all get our stuff together a damned sight sooner.’ Yolande shrugged. ‘You’re white, Mr Cullen. When you’re white, you can afford to be laid-back.’

  He leaned on the kitchen counter. ‘You can call me John if you like.’

  ‘Mr Cullen will do.’ She paused, then, ‘You taking that powder-puff out for a walk?’ she asked.

  He shook his head. ‘Mrs Benduzzi is scared of the Strangler. She reckons he might attempt dogicide, just to keep his hand in.’

  ‘You talk like murder amuses you.’

  He opened the back door. ‘It’s funnier than taking dogs for a walk.’

  She smiled. She was irresistibly pretty when she smiled. ‘You just get along there and lay a shine on Mrs Benduzzi’s bumpers,’ she chided him.

  ‘How about a date?’ he responded. ‘Or just a quick rape?’

  She laughed. ‘If I didn’t know you were living with someone, I’d still say no, honkie.’

  ‘Please yourself. You'll regret it when you’re old and grey.’

  He closed the kitchen door and walked across the covered way to the garage. It was unseasonably hot for November, way up in the mid nineties, and he took his sunglasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on. The tall yuccas in Mrs Benduzzi’s scrupulously landscaped gardens were scarcely rustling in the breathless breeze, and up towards the mountains he could hear a police helicopter flick-flackering on traffic patrol. He coughed.

  In the cool of the air-conditioned garage, Mrs Benduzzi’s Georgian Silver Eldorado was waiting, still glossy from the last time he had waxed it. The only time Mrs Benduzzi ever drove it anywhere was when she visited her hair stylist on Beverly Boulevard and it had probably covered fewer than a hundred miles from new. He wasn’t covetous though. He preferred the automobiles of the 1950s, vast extravaganzas of fins and lights and gas-guzzling power. His own 1959 Chrysler Imperial Crown was awkwardly parked in the Benduzzis’ love-knot-shaped driveway. He opened the double garage doors and drove the Eldorado out under the shade of the palms.

  *

  It was 11:02. If John had walked to the front gates of Mrs Benduzzi’s house right then, he would have been just in time to see the silver Grand Prix slowly driving past on its way west. The tall man in the black cords and the grey utility shirt was driving casually, his fingers dangling on top of the wheel, and he was smoking a cigarette. He was thinking about a young blonde hooker he had picked up outside of the English Fish-and-Chip Shop on Hollywood Boulevard last night, and how she had sat wide-eyed in his room while he showed her his Colt automatic. He had taken it apart for her in forty-five seconds flat, and then put it together again and loaded it; and then, in the sweaty crumples of his divan bed, he had humped her, and while he was humping her he had forced the greasy steel muzzle up her backside, until she was penetrated by both man and gun, and the mad danger of it had excited them both so much that they gasped and shook with sheer erotic terror.

  Three

  John took off his checkered shirt and hung it on the garden standpipe.

  He hosed the car down in rainbows of water and reflected light, then dried it with a soft doth. It was kind of soothing, cleaning cars. It gave you a half-hour to yourself, to think whatever you wanted to. It was certainly an improvement on walking dogs. Cars didn’t get themselves all lathered up when another car passed by, or try to sniff up each other’s exhaust pipes. He polished the windshield. It was pleasantly cool underneath the trees, and the crimson leaves of Mrs Benduzzi’s poinsettia danced ecstatically all around him.

  After a half hour of strenuous buffing, he looked up and saw Yolande coming towards him with a cold beer on a tray. He stood straight, stretched his back, and refolded his polishing cloth.

  ‘Mrs Benduzzi thought you might be dry,’ said Yolande, with a hint of amusement in her voice.

  John glanced over the black girl’s shoulder towards the house. He saw Mrs Benduzzi at the window, fatly imprisoned in her air-conditioned palazzo, and he waved to her. Pleased, embarrassed, Mrs Benduzzi waved back.

  ‘Play your cards right, honkie, and you could do well for yourself with her,’ Yolande said.

  John took a freezing mouthful of Coors. ‘Me and Mrs Benduzzi?’ he choked.

  ‘Why not? She’s wealthy. She likes you. She just spent the whole morning standing by the window, ogling your ass through her opera-glasses.’

  ‘What does she expect it to do, sing I Puritani?’

  Yolande smiled. ‘I’m just telling you. The lady likes you, and she’s rich.’

  ‘Listen,’ protested John, ‘I like my marshmallow chopped up into cubes and toasted, not on the hoof.’

  The black maid shrugged. ‘It doesn’t look like you’re going to have the opportunity anyway. Here comes trouble.’

  The late morning air was cut by the high buzzsaw pitch of a motorcycle. Around the curves of the driveway, sitting well back on the saddle of a tiny Puch, rode a tall girl in a scarlet-metallic crash helmet, a white T-shirt, and tight white shorts.

  ‘I’d better get myself back to the house,’ said Yolande, with a wry smile. ‘When Mrs Benduzzi sees her, there’s going to be sulks and tantrums for the rest of the day.’

  ‘I’ll catch you later,’ said John. ‘And thanks for the beer.’

  ‘I only brought it,’ said Yolande, walking away with a sassy swing of her hips.

  John folded his sunglasses and tucked them back in his pocket. The motorcyclist pulled up beside him, under the shade of the trees, and dismounted. She unfastened her helmet, shook loose her long brunette hair, and came across to where he was standing. They kissed.

  ‘You look like Bill Holden in Picnic,’ she told him.

  ‘I never saw it,’ he replied, kissing her again.

  She was a striking, dark-complexioned girl with extraordinary squarish bone structure, and dramatic sky-blue eyes. She had a pouting mouth that always reminded him of Brigitte Bardot when she was young, or hitch-hiking jailbait on the dirt tracks of Alabama. She wasn’t particularly pretty, but she was brown and sensual, and she had once appeared in a small pictorial in Playboy. She was very big-breasted, with wide dark nipples that showed through her T-shirt, and a pert, provocative butt which he knew from tiresome experience was an open invitation to any passing American male to slap.

  ‘I thought you were finishing those Indian beads for Mrs Tadema,’ he said.

  ‘Well, sure,’ she told him. ‘I would have been.’

  ‘Except what?’

  ‘Except I had a telephone call.’

  He bent over the Eldorado’s hood and continued polishing, but he watched her distorted reflection in the glossy silver enamel.

  ‘Anyone I know?’ he asked her guardedly. They’d been fighting a lot lately, arguing about which records to play, what TV channel to watch, what food to eat, and he was beginning to wonder if she was trying to bring herself around to leaving him. She was an impulsive, emotional girl. One minute she could believe that she loved him to distraction; and the nex
t he couldn’t work out why she even bothered to stick around.

  She pressed herself against the side of the car. He polished away a triangular area of dull wax, and saw a reflection of white shorts that were impossibly and revealingly tight.

  ‘Someone you know,’ she told him. He detected an effervescence in her voice, and he stood up straight again.

  ‘Someone I know? And it’s so urgent you have to drop Mrs Tadema’s beads and come straight down?’ She came around the car, put her arms around his waist, and kissed his sweaty cheek. ‘It’s your father. He’s arriving this afternoon, four o’clock, LAX. Surprise visit. Isn’t that fantastic?’

  John could hardly believe it. He had always loved his father, always considered him special. He was a dotty, left-wing, absent-minded school principal from Trenton, New Jersey, and during all the years that John had struggled to be a politically creative architect, his father had stood beside him, cajoling him, counselling him, helping him to understand the frustrations and disappointments of being a committed liberal in a less-than-liberal society.

  ‘What time did he call? Did he sound okay?’

  ‘He said he was fine. He called just after you left, but I didn’t come down straight away because I figured you’d be walking the pooch.’

  John couldn’t help himself from grinning. ‘That’s beautiful. That’s really made my day. Hey – supposing we have lunch, and then drive out to the airport. I can stow your cyke in the trunk.’

  He energetically finished polishing the already-glittering Eldorado, while Vicki looked around the garden and picked sprigs of poinsettia to wind in her hair.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, giving the mirrors a last breath, and shining them up. ‘That’s it. Give me a couple of minutes to get my money from Mrs Benduzzi, and then we’re away.’

  He backed the Cadillac into the garage, closed the doors, and then went into the house. Yolande gave him a raised-eyebrows look as he walked through the kitchen. That meant Mrs Benduzzi was slightly less than delighted.

  He opened the ‘dinner-is-served’ doors, and there was Mrs Benduzzi, sitting alone on the pink settee, her head thrown back in a pose that could only mean ‘you’ve thrown me aside like a used pair of shoes, but I don’t care.’

  ‘Mrs Benduzzi,’ he said.

  A reproduction Italianate gilt clock began, laboriously, to chime the hour of twelve, and for almost a minute conversation was impossible while angels with trumpets came in and out of little doors, and bells struck, and mechanisms whirred.

  Then Mrs Benduzzi said, ‘Your money is on the table. You needn’t come tomorrow. Ricardo has told me that he feels like a change of walker.’

  ‘Mrs Benduzzi—’

  She glanced up at him. She looked fat, and pathetic. She gave him a small smile, a barely-noticed ripple on a plate of cream of wheat, and said, ‘It’s all right. Give me a week or two, and then I’m sure we’ll be back to normal.’

  John said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m not,’ she told him quietly. ‘Now, there’s your money. Do take it, I have a lot to do.’

  He walked across to the side table. Under an onyx-and-gold paperweight was a fifty dollar bill. He looked at her.

  ‘That’s correct,’ she said, without changing her expression.

  ‘Okay,’ he nodded, and tucked the bill in his shirt pocket. ‘I’ll see you soon, huh?’

  She smiled at him, that terrible lonesome smile of those who know how little they’re loved, and have grown to accept it. He paused for a moment, and then he walked across to the settee, leaned down, and kissed her on the forehead.

  ‘You’re very special, Mrs Benduzzi. Don’t forget it.’ Then he turned around and went back to join Vicki for lunch.

  *

  At two o’clock, the silver Grand Prix was parked on the corner of Sepulveda Boulevard and Pigott Drive, under the shadow of the San Diego Freeway. The tall black-haired man was sitting in the driver’s seat, smoking a cigarette and listening to the Modern Lovers on his FM radio. Beside him on the seat were the crumpled-up wrappings of a Jack-in-the-Box cheeseburger, which had been his lunch. He waited with a frigid patience that showed he was used to waiting. Waiting, as he was well aware, is a specialized talent.

  Sometimes the man looked as if he were asleep, but his eyes, though slitted, were never completely closed. He was keeping a constant watch on the corner of Sepulveda just ahead of him, and also in his mirrors. Once or twice, his fingers drummed briefly on the steering wheel, as if he were exercising them.

  ‘Massachusetts when it’s cold outside…’ sang the radio. ‘With the radio on…’

  Down by the side of his seat, tucked against the centre console, was his Colt .38 automatic, the same gun he had used on the hooker, in a greasy chamois-leather holster. Although it could penetrate through nine one-inch pine boards at a range of 3,000 feet, and had a muzzle velocity of 1,050 feet per second, the man was planning on hitting a target that, when the moment came, would not be much more than fifteen feet away.

  He glanced up. In his mirror, he saw a black-and-white police car turning the corner of Pigott Drive behind him, and cruising slowly his way. His eyes flickered, but he didn’t move. His mirror sunglasses lay on top of the console.

  The police car drew alongside him, paused for a moment, and then turned left on Sepulveda and disappeared. The man’s fingers drummed briefly on the wheel. The digital clock on his simulated-walnut instrument panel read 2:04.

  Four

  They ate tuna salads at Butterfield’s, sitting outside by the fountain. It was cool in the shade of the trees, although the November sun played jigsaw shadows across their faces, and sparkled in the frosted carafe of white wine that stood between them. At the next table, a woman with a tight silk headscarf and a face as tanned as Shane’s second-best saddle was insisting to her balding escort that Nippon Chiobotsu was the most uplifting sci-fi movie ever made.

  Vicki raised her wine, and said: ‘Here’s to Daddy. I’m dying to see what he’s like.’

  John smiled, and clinked glasses with her. ‘Pretty much like me, only a few centuries older. I’m surprised you’re so enthusiastic about him coming. I didn’t think you believed in relatives.’

  ‘I don’t believe in my own,’ she said archly, as she nibbled around the fringes of her curly lettuce. ‘Why do you think I left Minnesota? When your mother’s a Sweet Adeline, and your father’s big in the Cannon Falls Elks, then I don’t really think there’s much hope of meaningful parent-child communication, do you?’

  ‘It depends,’ he grinned. ‘Didn’t you ever want to sing with the Sweet Adelines?’

  ‘Oh, schmooey,’ she said.

  He watched her affectionately. He hadn’t seen her in such a pepped-up mood for weeks. He finished up his tuna salad, sipped some more wine, and asked the waitress for coffee. He could have hocked his left leg for a cigarette, especially when the woman in the tight headscarf lit up one right next to him, and the smoke began to drift his way; but he put on a cheerless smirk and resisted it.

  ‘Are you suffering?’ Vicki asked him.

  ‘A little. Does it show?’

  ‘Only when you lean forward to vacuum up the passing smoke with your nostrils.’

  He picked up a match folder and began to twist the matches around. ‘I can tell you one thing, I’ll never say a harsh word against dope addicts again.’

  She said, in a noticeably different tone of voice, ‘And I’ll never say a harsh word against you again.’

  He stopped fiddling with the matches and looked up. ‘What does that mean?’

  Vicki lowered her long eyelashes. ‘It means that we’ve been pretty cat-and-dog lately, haven’t we? But I hope we’ve come through it.’

  ‘You sound like you have something to tell me.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I guess I have.’

  ‘You’ve decided you love me after all? And I can play my Rod Stewart albums whenever I like?’

  ‘I love you,’ she said, looking up with un
expected softness in her sky-blue eyes. ‘I’m not sure about the albums.’

  He picked at the matches again. There was a stray shred of tuna between his teeth, and he had to send his tongue to worry it out.

  ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’ he asked her.

  ‘I don’t know. Will you be jealous?’

  ‘Is it as bad as that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, with a faint shrug. ‘I guess it could have been worse.’

  He sat back, crossed his legs, then uncrossed them again and leaned forward. ‘Well, don’t keep me in suspense. What could have been worse? Don’t tell me you’ve been dating Warren Beatty.’

  She didn’t look at him when she spoke. Her dark red fingernails brushed along the edge of the table, and then back again, as if she was reading a rosary, or braille.

  ‘It was about three weeks ago, that day you were out with Philip at Encino. I had a call from an old boyfriend of mine from Minnesota. He said he was coming to L.A. to live, and he wanted to see me again. I guess he’d gotten the number from my mother.’

  John said dryly: ‘Go on.’

  She let out a breath. ‘His name was Ed Tucker. I guess you could say that he was my childhood heart-throb. All the girls at school used to swoon whenever he went past, and send him love notes and stuff. He was real tall and good-looking, and he was always the best at everything. Athletics, football, you name it. He didn’t notice me at first, he was too busy dating some Italian girl named Annette Marino.’ But when I was fourteen my boobs started to grow, and they grew and grew and made every other girl in school look like Olive Oyl, including the wonderful Annette Marino, and that’s when he suddenly realised that I was around. Annette was jilted, and Ed and I went steady for almost five years. He was the second person I slept with.’

  ‘The second? Who was the first?’

  ‘What does that matter? I’m telling you about Ed.’ At that moment, John felt more like a cigarette than he had all week, if only to smoke his jealousy out.