“You mentioned you were on a leave of absence from work,”
“I had no choice. Someone has to be here twenty-four hours a day. We can’t afford professional care, so I’m ‘it.’ “
“Rough.”
“I shouldn’t complain. I’m sure there are people out there who have it worse.”
I shifted the subject. “You have any theories about who killed the Timberlake girl?”
Ann shook her head. “I wish I did. She was a student at the high school, as well as Bailey’s girl.”
“She spent a lot of time here?”
“A fair amount. Less while Bailey was off in jail.”
“And you’re convinced he had nothing to do with her death?”
“I don’t know what to believe,” she said flatly. “I don’t want to think he did it. On the other hand, I’ve never liked the idea that the killer could still be around someplace.”
“He won’t like it either, now that Bailey’s back in custody. Somebody must have felt pretty smug all these years. Once the investigation’s opened up, who knows where it’ll go?”
“You’re right. I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes.” She rubbed her arms as if she were cold and then laughed at herself uneasily. “Well. I better get back downstairs and see how Mother’s doing. She was napping when I left, but she tends to sleep in short bursts. The minute her eyes open, she wants me Johnny-on-the-spot.”
“Give me time to wash my face and I’ll be right down.” I walked her to the door. As I passed my handbag, I caught sight of the envelope Clemson had given me. “Oh. This is for your father. Jack Clemson asked me to drop it off.” I plucked it out and handed it to her.
She glanced at it idly and then smiled at me. “Thanks for the drink. I hope I haven’t bored you with the family history.”
“Not at all,” I said. “By the way, what’s the story on Jean Timberlake’s mother? Will she be hard to find?”
“Who, Shana? Try the pool hall. She’s there most nights. Tap Granger, too.”
After supper, I snagged a jacket from my room and headed down the back stairs.
The night was cold and the breeze coming off the Pacific was briny and damp. I shrugged into my jacket and walked the two blocks to Pearl’s Pool Hall as if through broad daylight. Floral Beach, by night, is bathed in the flat orange glow of the sodium vapor lights that line Ocean Street. The moon wasn’t up yet, and the ocean was as black as pitch. The surf tumbled onto the beach in an uneven fringe of gold, picking up illumination from the last reaches of the street lamps. A fog was rolling in and the air had the dense, tawny look of smog.
Closer to the pool hall, the quiet was broken by a raucous blast of country music. The door to Pearl’s stood open and I could smell cigarette smoke from two doors away. I counted five Harley-Davidsons at the curb, all chrome and black leather seats, with convoluted tailpipes. The boys in my junior high school went through a siege of drawing machines like that: hot rods and racing cars, tanks, torture devices, guns, knives, and bloodlettings of all kinds. I should really check one day and find out how those guys turned out.
The pool hall itself was two pool tables long, with enough space between to allow folk to angle for a tricky shot. Both tables were occupied by bikers: heavyset men in their forties with Fu Manchu beards and long hair pulled back in pony tails. There were five of them, a family of road pirates on the move. The bar ran the entire length of wall to the left, the barstools filled with the bikers’ girlfriends and assorted town folk. Walls and ceiling were covered with a collage of beer signs, tobacco ads, bumper stickers, cartoons, snapshots, and bar witticisms. One sign proclaimed Happy Hour from six to seven, but the hand-drawn clock under it had a 5 at every hour. A knee-slapper, that. Bowling trophies, beer mugs, and racks of potato chips lined the shelf behind the bar. There was also a display of Pearl’s Pool Hall T-shirts on sale for $6.99. A leather biker’s glove hung inexplicably from the ceiling, and a Miller Lite mirror on the wall was festooned with a pair of lady’s underpants. The noise level was such that a hearing test might be in order later.
There was one empty stool at the bar, which I took. The bartender was a woman in her mid-sixties, perhaps the very Pearl for whom the place was named. She was short, thick through the middle, with graying, permanent-curled hair chopped straight across the nape of her neck. She was wearing plaid polyester slacks and a sleeveless top, showing arms well muscled from hefting beer cases. Maybe, at intervals, she hefted some biker out the door by the seat of his pants.
I asked for a draft beer, which she pulled and served up in a Mason jar. Since the din made conversation impossible, I had plenty of time to survey the place in peace. I turned on the stool until my back was up against the bar, watching the pool players, casting an occasional eye at the patrons on either side of me. I wasn’t really sure how I wanted to present myself. I thought for the time being I’d keep hush about my occupation and the reasons for my presence in Floral Beach. The local papers had carried front-page news about Bailey’s arrest, and I thought I could probably conjure up talk on the subject without appearing too inquisitive.
Down to my left, near the jukebox, two women began to dance. The bikers’ girlfriends made some rude observations, but no one seemed to pay much attention aside from that. Two stools over, a woman in her fifties looked on with a sloppy smile. I pegged her as Shana Timberlake, in part because no other woman in the bar looked old enough to have had a teenage daughter seventeen years before.
At ten, the bikers cleared out, motorcycles rocketing off down the street with diminishing thunder. The jukebox was between selections, and for a moment a miraculous silence fell across the bar. Someone said, “Whew, Lord!” and everybody laughed. There were maybe ten of us left in the place, and the tension level dropped to some more familial feel. This was Tuesday night, the local hangout, the equivalent of the basement recreation room at a church, except that beer was served. There was no hard liquor in evidence and my guess was that any wine on the premises was going to come from a jug the size of an oil drum, with about that much finesse.
The man on the stool next to mine on the right appeared to be in his sixties. He was big, with a beer belly that protruded like a twenty-five-pound bag of rice. His face was broad, connected to his neck by a series of double chins. There was even a roll of fat at the back of his neck where graying hair curled over his shirt collar. I’d seen him flick a curious look in my direction. The others in the bar seemed known to one another, judging from the banter, which had largely to do with local politics, old sporting grievances, and how drunk someone named Ace had been the night before. The sheepish Ace, tall, thin, jeans, denim jacket, and baseball cap, took a lot of ribbing about some behavior of his with old Betty, whom he’d apparently taken home with him. Ace seemed to revel in the accusations of misconduct, and since Betty wasn’t present to correct the impression, everyone assumed that he’d gotten laid.
“Betty’s his ex-wife,” the man next to me said, in one of those casual asides meant to include me in the merriment. “She kicked him out four times, but she always takes him back. Yo, Daisy. How about some peanuts down here?”
“I thought that was Pearl,” I remarked, to keep the conversation alive.
“I’m Curtis Pearl,” he said. “Pearl to my friends.”
Daisy scooped what looked like a dog dish full of peanuts from a garbage pail under the bar. The nuts were still in the shell, and the litter on the floor suggested what we were meant to do. Pearl surprised me by chomping down a peanut, shell and all. “We’re talkin’ fiber here,” he said. “It’s good for you. I got a doctor believes in cellulose. Fills you up, he says. Gets the old system powerin’ through.”
I shrugged and tried it myself. No doubt about it, the shell had a lot of crunch and a sharp infusion of salt mingled nicely with the bland taste of the nut inside. Did this count as grain, or was it the same as eating the panel from a cardboard box?
The jukebox sparked to life again, this time a mellow vocalist who sounded like a cross between Frank Sinatra and Delia Reese. The two women at the end of the bar began to dance again. Both were dark-haired, both slim. One taller. Pearl turned to look at them and then back at me. “That bother you?”