City by starlight, he goes down to the coffee shop to have dinner. He
is six feet tall, weighs a hundred and eighty pounds, but eats as
heartily as a much larger man. A bowl of vegetable soup with garlic
toast. Two cheeseburgers, french fries. A slice of apple pie with
vanilla ice cream. Half a dozen cups of coffee.
He always has a big appetite. Often he is ravenous, at times his hunger
seems almost insatiable.
While he eats, the waitress stops by twice to ask if the food is
prepared well and if he needs anything else. She is not merely
attentive but flirting with him.
Although he is reasonably attractive, his looks don’t rival those of any
movie star. Yet women flirt with him more frequently than with other
men who are handsomer and better dressed than he. Consisting of
Rockport walking shoes, khaki slacks, a dark-green crew-neck sweater, no
jewelry, and an inexpensive wristwatch, his wardrobe is unremarkable,
unmemorable. Which is the idea. The waitress has no reason to mistake
him for a man of means. Yet here she is again, smiling coquettishly.
Once, in a Miami cocktail lounge where he had picked her up, a blonde
with whiskey-colored eyes had assured him that an intriguing aura
surrounded him. A compelling magnetism arose, she said, from his
preference for silence and from the stony expression that usually
occupied his face. “You are,” she’d insisted playfully, “the epitome of
the strong silent type. Hell, if you were in a movie with Clint
Eastwood and Stallone, there wouldn’t be any dialogue at all. Later he
had beaten her to death.
He had not been angered by anything she’d said or done. In fact, sex
with her had been satisfying.
But he had been in Florida to blow the brains out of a man named Parker
Abbotson, and he’d been concerned that the woman might somehow later
connect him with the assassination. He hadn’t wanted her to be able to
give the police a description of him.
After wasting her, he had gone to see the latest Spielberg picture, and
then a Steve Martin flick.
He likes movies. Aside from his work, movies are the only life he has.
Sometimes it seems his real home is a succession of movie theaters in
different cities yet so alike in their shopping-center multiplexity that
they might as well be the same dark auditorium.
Now he pretends to be unaware that the coffee-shop waitress is
interested in him. She is pretty enough, but he wouldn’t dare kill an
employee of the restaurant in the very motel where he’s staying. He
needs to find a woman in a place to which he has no connections.
He tips precisely fifteen percent because either stinginess or
extravagance is a sure way to be remembered.
After returning briefly to his room for a wool-lined leather jacket
suitable to the late-November night, he gets in the rental Ford and
drives in steadily widening circles through the surrounding commercial
district. He is searching for the kind of establishment in which he
will have a chance to find the right woman.
Daddy wasn’t Daddy.
He had Daddy’s blue eyes, Daddy’s dark brown hair, Daddy’s too-big ears,
Daddy’s freckled nose, he was a dead-ringer for the Martin Stillwater
pictured on the dustjackets of his books. He sounded just like Daddy
when Charlotte and Emily and their mother came home and found him in the
kitchen, drinking coffee, because he said, “There’s no use pretending
you went shopping at the mall after the movie. I had you followed by a
private detective. I know you were at a poker parlor in Gardena,
gambling and smoking cigars.” He stood, sat, and moved like Daddy.
Later, when they went out to Islands for dinner, he even drove like
Daddy. Which was too fast, according to Mom. Or simply “the confident,
skillful technique of a master motorman” if you saw things Daddy’s way.
But Charlotte knew something was wrong, and she fretted.
Oh, he hadn’t been taken over by an alien who crawled out of a big seed
pod from outer space or anything so extreme. He wasn’t that different
from the Daddy she knew and loved.