California Gold (97 page)

Carla groped her way down the stairs, one glove never leaving the banister. Her husband’s eyes darted over the foyer crowd, then back to her.
Deathly afraid she’ll make a gaffe.

She almost did when her silver pump slipped off a riser, she would have fallen, but for Fairbanks’s sudden lunge. They exchanged words. Carla was flushed and shook her head vehemently, then flung off Fairbanks’s hand and descended the last several steps by herself.

“Walter—Carla—good evening. I heard you were living in the hotel.”

Fairbanks brushed at his little mustache. “When we’re not in Burlingame.” He shot looks over Mack’s shoulder. Taut as a wire, Mack thought. It pleased him in a perverse way.

Carla swam in perfume. She started to speak but a matron with a battleship bosom grabbed her. “Carla dearest, do come here and meet Cloudsley Ballantyne, the painter.” Carla lurched away to be presented to a young man with a fey face and center-parted brown hair combed down into horns on his temples. He’d pinned a golden California poppy to his lapel with a pearl pin.

“I’m surprised to see you, Walter,” Mack said affably. “I thought you might be out of town, turning up the heat under your county political bureaus. The election’s not far off.”

Sliding a silver case from an inside pocket, Fairbanks took out a cigarette and tapped it on the case longer than necessary. A pallor had replaced his usual ruddy color.

“Everybody deserves a night off. We’ll have no trouble beating your crowd.”

There it was again, the old smug condescension. God, how Mack despised him. He gave in to the impulse to hit back. “Don’t get overconfident. Remember how the polo match came out. And the race.”

Fairbanks snapped the wooden match he was lifting to his cigarette and the burning head fell to the carpet. He stamped on it, then lowered his voice. “You arrogant bastard. Haven’t changed, have you? You’re trash. That first day, by the creek, Hellman should have put a bullet in you.”

Mack smiled too, a broad smile, but hard. “What the hell do you want from me, Walter? No fight at all? No competition—so you never have to risk losing? Well, I’m afraid not. Especially not this time. This is the big one. And you’re going to lose. Again.”

Livid, Fairbanks struck another match. Deep in his eyes something new lurked, or so Mack thought—fear that Mack might be right.

What an ass you are to goad him. Only makes him hate you more.

Carla flung herself between them. “Such an elegant young man. So talented. Well.” She blinked and touched Mack’s sleeve. “This is charming. My present husband and my former one. Hello, former.”

She made a little lunge at Mack, enveloping him in flesh and the overwhelming scent of her perfume. Had she bathed in it?

Fairbanks bit out a complaint, but she was already draped on Mack and twining her arms around his neck. She found his mouth and opened hers. He smelled and tasted whiskey, strong whiskey.

He tried to step away and Fairbanks dragged Carla off by seizing her wrist. “For God’s sake, don’t make a fool of yourself.”

“Darling, I was only greeting my ex—”

He showed what he thought of that by forcing her to take his arm. Then he pivoted her toward the ballroom. The little scene had played to one side of the foyer, but Mack saw a number of couples shooting sly glances at Mr. and Mrs. Fairbanks. The damage was done, and Fairbanks knew it. He yanked her against his side and marched her toward the high gilt doors.

She turned once, quickly. What Mack saw in that blurred glance surprised and saddened him. He saw longing, the same longing he’d seen the night Swampy lay dying.

He drifted among the tables ranged around the dance floor, stopping first by a large table hosted by Adolph Spreckels and his wife, Alma. Rudy’s older brother was still too proper and starchy for Mack’s taste, but Mack genuinely liked Alma, a handsome, breezy, full-figured woman twenty-four years younger than her husband. Until she married Adolph in 1907, when he was fifty, she had been plain Alma de Bretteville, an artist’s model of uncertain background (she claimed her ancestors were French and Danish nobility). She said openly that she’d been deflowered at a tender age by a Klondike miner, but had taken the son of a bitch to court for a settlement of $10,000. Everyone said she was the model for the Winged Victory atop the monument in Union Square, and she didn’t deny it.

Marriage to Adolph Spreckels had raised her overnight to social eminence. She was the City’s youngest
grande dame
, lunching at the St. Francis every Tuesday with her own chosen circle. She involved herself in cultural affairs, notably the planning of another art museum, in direct competition with Mike de Young. The rivalry was a sharp one; the Spreckels table was as far as possible from that of the de Youngs tonight.

Mack had known Alma casually before her marriage, and in some ways, respectability had changed her not at all. She still had a foghorn voice, a salty vocabulary, and few pretenses or inhibitions. “For Christ’s sake, Mack, aren’t you going to ask me to dance?” she said as he stood by the table.

He grinned. “I’d better, or you’re liable to cuss me out.” The guests laughed politely, but Alma brayed. Adolph pursed his lips, his version of hilarity.

Mack extended his hand. “Thank you, darling,” Alma said loudly as he led her to the floor to waltz. “Some of those friends of Ade’s are fucking cadavers.” Heads turned; she was unperturbed. She fitted nicely into his arms; she had the kind of ample figure men called Junoesque. “Tell me, darling, why didn’t you bring a companion this evening?”

“I wanted to ask Margaret, but she’s filming another Broncho Billy picture.”

“I’m sure there are any number of ladies present who’d happily share their dance programs and their tarnished virtue. I certainly would if I weren’t married and loyal to dear Ade.”

There was a stifled cry and then commotion. The music scraped and squeaked to silence. Alma stretched on tiptoe. “Oh my God, Carla Fairbanks fell down.”

Mack saw her floundering on her side, callously revealed by couples who had quickly stepped away. Her long skirt was hiked over her knees, and garters and a white satin petticoat were exposed. Her partner, Cloudsley Ballantyne, fluttered his hands and dithered.

“Help her, for heaven’s sake,” a portly man growled at the painter.

Carla gripped Ballantyne’s pasty fingers and pulled herself halfway up, then lost control and sat down on her round bottom with a thump. Mack wanted to hide. Such an ordinary thing, sitting down like that. But you didn’t do it in the middle of this crowd.

“Oh my God, how embarrassing,” Alma said in her brassy voice. “Drunk again.”

Fairbanks stormed through the hotel suite, snapping on electric lights in a pair of bordeaux lamps with cut-glass grapes decorating the globes. Carla limped from the foyer and threw her fur carelessly. A claw-foot gold clock on the mantel showed ten past three.

Fairbanks tore off his coat, then his white tie. Unfastening his waistcoat, he broke button thread, and two buttons spun through the light and bounced on the Oriental rug. Carla wandered past him, opened the bedroom door, and turned on the light.

Fairbanks’s hands shook as he tried to open the silver cigarette case. Hearing a cabinet door, then glass rattling, he hurled the case down, spilling cigarettes, and ran into the bedroom.

Pushing Carla, he banged the cabinet shut with his knee. “You’ve had absolutely your last drink of the night.”

“Get out of my way.”

“Carla, you’ve had enough.”

“Enough of you.”

She feinted left, but he wasn’t fooled, and, blocking the cabinet with his body, seized her wrists. Her lipstick was smeared again; a hook of red decorated her cheek. She’d repaired her makeup twice during the evening—twice that he knew about.

“Sit down,” he said, shoving her.

Off balance, she backed into the double bed and went down with a little gasp. Fairbanks stood over her like a wrathful father. “I have had my fill of this kind of behavior. You spent the whole damned evening fawning over that flaming queer who couldn’t even keep you upright on the dance floor.”

Carla leaned back on both hands. “He’s more of a man than you.”

“Speaking from firsthand experience, are you?”

“You have a spiteful rotten temper, darling. Go fuck yourself. You bore me.”

She rolled sideways off the bed and lurched back to the parlor. Fairbanks noticed stain rings on the peach satin. What had she spilled all over herself? And in front of whom? He ran after her. Hearing him behind her, she snatched off one silver pump and tried to clout him with the heel. He grabbed the shoe and threw it, breaking the pane of a window overlooking Market Street. The velvet portiere ropes swung to and fro. His head was buzzing.

“Pay attention, Carla. No, damn it, don’t sneer and turn your back. I am not going to be fobbed off one more time with your spoiled arrogance. You made a spectacle of yourself downstairs. You started with Chance, but he was only the first. There were important people at the ball, people who must be influenced in this election. It’s the last time you’re going to embarrass me. For the duration of the campaign, it is—the—last—time.”

“My. Oh my.” She giggled. “I’ve seldom seen you so passionate. Certainly never in bed.”

He pushed her again, dropping her on a sofa of Turkish leather. To his amazement, she laughed, turned her smeared face upward and
laughed.
The buzzing in his head grew louder.

“Carla, I mean this warning. You’d better not do anything to embarrass me from now until November or you’ll pay for it.”

“Oh, is he scared? I believe he is. Dear little Walter, the uncrowned prince of California, is scared—”

“My future rides on this campaign,” he shouted. “Not only my job, but my reputation.”

She laughed and knifed him again. “Why are you so scared, sweetheart? Because you’re pitted against Mack Chance?”

A sudden, awful, total silence. An auto honked down on Market. Distantly, in the Bay, a ferry bell rang. Fairbanks admonished her with a shake of his finger, but it was feeble, without heart.

“You’d just better heed what I said. If you don’t, you’ll regret it.”

“If I’m still here.” She flounced over and picked up her ermine.

“Where are you going? Back to him?”

“Maybe. Why not? He’s a better man than you’ll ever be. He’s beaten you at every turn. He even raised your son.”

“My—?”

His mouth hung open, and his sleek hair, shiny as his dancing pumps, straggled over his forehead. At that moment he resembled nothing so much as a child lost in a dark wood.

Carla leaned against the brightly papered wall, hands behind the small of her back. Her round breasts moved up and down, the only sign of her excitement. She placed the next knife gently, almost tenderly.

“Yes, I said
son.
Mack isn’t Jim’s father. It was you. That New Year’s in Pasadena. I worked out the dates. I’m positive about it.” Venom flowed into her smile. “But you see, I wanted Mack to raise him. I knew he’d be a better father.”

“Better? Mack’s boy ran off, for God’s sake. The whole town knows it.”

“Well, yes—things went wrong. Doesn’t change anything. I was his mother, and I had a choice to make. I made it. Just one more little contest that you lost to the best man, Walter.”

“You slut.” He shook her by the shoulders. “You dirty vindictive slut.” He bounced her against the wall and she fell, crying out.

Seeing Fairbanks curl his hands into fists, Carla groped for a hold on the drop front of a writing desk. It pivoted down and her weight pulled the desk over. Ink gushed from the well; steel-nib pens flew; creamy Palace letterheads and envelopes sailed like seabirds.

“I’d kill you, but you’re not worth it,” Fairbanks said in a breaking voice. He gathered a homburg and overcoat, and a moment later the door slammed. Carla bent her back and shut her eyes and laid her cheek on the overturned writing desk.

At half past four the next afternoon, Gaspar Ludlow knocked softly on the door of the sanctum.

Ludlow was assistant chief clerk of the legal department. A smarmy young man, always smiling to please, he’d graduated from the business course at U.C. Berkeley and been employed by the SP for three years. The previous Thanksgiving, he’d created a vacancy by planting a Lincoln Steffens book on the desk of his immediate superior. The man was fired and he was promoted.

“Come.”

Fairbanks was at work in shirtsleeves, writing on a ruled sheet of yellow legal paper. The clerk wasn’t accustomed to seeing the general counsel without his coat, or doing anything so mundane as using a lead pencil. Fairbanks hadn’t come in until half past nine. Ludlow was on another floor at the time. When he got back to the department, others whispered about it. Walter Fairbanks III was a punctual man; it was part of his perfectionism.

Several clerks told Ludlow his chief looked ill, and he did. His face pale as a bowl of cold oats and haggard, he handed Ludlow the yellow sheet.

“That is a description of a runaway boy—all of the description I can provide, anyhow. I don’t know what name the boy may be using, but he bears a strong resemblance to Mrs. Fairbanks. His left foot is crippled, and he limps. He would be about twelve years old now. It’s presumed that he ran away from San Francisco just prior to the earthquake. He may be dead. He may have left the state. If neither is true, I must locate him—for personal reasons. Transmit the description to every California sheriff and police department friendly to us.”

Ludlow immediately characterized it as a futile assignment. However, one didn’t get ahead in the SP by disagreeing with superiors. “We’ve paid enough money over the years to make certain there are plenty of those, sir. I’m sure we’ll have some good results promptly.”

Fairbanks stared at him with a sick expression, as if he were sure of nothing any longer.

I
T WAS A THURSDAY
in the last week of September, a stiflingly hot day. Elihu Flintman drove over from Covina in his buggy—not for him these newfangled autos, or any other creation of a dubious modernism. Despite the heat, he wore his heaviest suit, single-breasted and black, together with a black bow tie and fedora. He looked more like a preacher than most preachers.