The Eye of the Beholder by Marc Behm

Author:Marc Behm
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Courier Publishing
Published: 2018-01-22T16:00:00+00:00

10

He drove to Los Gratos and San Jose. To Palo Alto, to Redwood City, to San Mateo. He drove everywhere, showing blow-ups of the Minolta photos to desk clerks, chambermaids, bartenders, waitresses, gas station mechanics, bus drivers, taxi drivers, hairdressers, railroad porters, newsboys.

Back in Beverly Hills the house on Oak Drive was still empty, a For Rent sign on the lawn. He telephoned Ted Forbes, pretending to be one of Charlotte Vincent’s old school chums from New Jersey and asking him if he had her address.

‘No, I haven’t,’ Ted answered. ‘Charlotte left Los Angeles months ago. In March. We haven’t seen her since.’

‘How can I get in touch with her?’

‘I haven’t got the faintest idea. Sorry.’

The Eye hadn’t the faintest idea, either. He drove past the bookstore on Hope Street. It was now a barbershop.

He spent two months in Alameda, turning in endless circles, roaming the countryside, visiting Livermore, Tracy, Stockton, Sonora, Angel’s Camp, Lodi, Rittsburg, Richmond, Berkeley, Oakland. He spent another month in San Francisco, checking thousands of hotels.

But he really had no reason to believe she was still in California. He just couldn’t think of anywhere else to look for her, couldn’t think of anything else to do. He’d get out of bed at six in the morning, thinking it was twilight, and drowse around in a doze until noon, waiting for the sun to set, then go back to bed and wake again at four or five, thinking it was dawn. One afternoon he found himself on Half Moon Beach and had no idea how he got there, one evening he fell asleep in his car in a parking lot in San Lorenzo, only to wake up five hours later on the other side of the bay in a bus terminal waiting room in Belmont. He looked in the mirror one morning and was astonished to see that he had a mustache.

He would lie on the floor for hours in his hotel room, surrounded by her photos, trying to evoke some living shape of the real Joanna from the myriad of artificial faces and wigs, trying to abstract some substance from her, something he could absorb for its nourishment of hope. His radar probes ranged in every direction, through hundreds of villages and cities, but she resisted him resolutely.

For three months, he didn’t do a single crossword puzzle.

In August he read in the paper that three convicts had been killed in a cell block riot in a prison in San Jose. One of them was Dan ‘Ken Tuck’ Kenny. He’d been serving a ten-year sentence on a narcotics rap.

In early September he finally faced the fact that he had failed. He either had to give it up or flip. So he shaved off his mustache and called Baker.

‘No shit! I don’t believe it!’

‘I lost Paul Hugo, Mr. Baker.’

‘I’ve got two guys in Rome looking for both of you!’

‘I’m not in Rome, I’m in Frisco.’

‘Frisco?!?’

‘He flew to Cairo in May, then went to Hong Kong via Bombay and Singapore.

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