Chapter 11

I caught up on sleep Sunday, and by the time I opened my eyes it was time to go back to bed again, because the sun had set and the house was ghostly and still. I took a shower, I gave Dr. Franklin a ring at his home and thanked him in a less hectic way for what he'd done about Dad, and I also told him to send me a final bill so that I'd get it quick. I was going to add a little donation to his clinic-he spent a couple of hours every day, apart from a very heavy practice, old as he was-giving his time free to the poor and needy.

While we were on the phone, he pulled my leg a little about Madge Fryburg. I told him I thought I had slipped her the convincer about postponing her vacation a little while longer, and he said in the chipper way he had, "Good, good! I rather thought you might. You know, that young woman is really a remarkable person, and she needs plenty of affection. She had a fiance a couple of years ago, from a very good family here in Fresno, and they were very much in love. The trouble was, he was too ambitious for his own good. He wanted to make money quickly, and all he was doing was working in a store for about seventy bucks a week, with a promise of maybe being assistant manager in another couple of years for another ten or twenty in his pay envelope. So someone got to him and asked if he'd mind doing a little night driving between here and Eureka and Bakersfield, and he grabbed it, and the next thing he knew he was pulled in by the narcotics boys for smuggling marijuana and a little cocaine. He's doing about twelve years at Folsom. It broke Madge up pretty badly, and she was obliged to turn to nursing. I guess she felt that worrying about other people's troubles might help her forget her own."

I silently determined to up that check to Dr. Franklin another couple of hundred bucks on my own, because it explained a couple of things about that sultry auburn-haired baggage whose bottom I had spanked so unceremoniously. She ought to have been married and had a couple of kids by now by her guy, but the dreariness of this town and the way they frown on anybody who's young and enthusiastic and ambitious had got to her boyfriend. Of course, he had probably had a little weakness in his character to start with, or he wouldn't have blindly accepted a deal where everything looked like money with no risks. There just ain't no such animal these days.

I began to have an idea in mind, and I went to the Hotel Californian for some chow and a little wine, and then I walked around the mall and then I got into my Thunderbird which I'd parked at the mall and I drove out to the highway, towards the Hacienda Motel. I don't know what I was looking for, but Sunday evening to me is the most lonely time of the entire week. Tomorrow would be busy enough, walking into that bottling plant and that fancy office and meeting all the people who had worked for Dad and having a heart to heart talk with Tulio Verduga, and finding out what the hell he thought he was doing at four in the morning by laying a switch on the back of a girl. If he had actually tried to rape her, the way Jane Wilson had told me he had, I wasn't sure I was going to keep him on the payroll. But already at the back of my mind there was a sort of vague feeling that there was something rotten in the state of Denmark and much more presently, right here in Fresno.

I went into the Hacienda, went to the bar, listened to the juke box, and then went into a pay phone and checked the alphabetical directory. I was looking for Sally Jeffries. I didn't find even her mother, Lena, listed. Then it dawned on me that her mother, after having made a pass at me and probably professionally too, had said something about her marrying Don Foster, a big shot on KJZ-TV, which had all the viewer-ship in Fresno and the adjacent suburban area. Sure enough, Don Foster was listed over in the Fig Garden area. It figured. It was about the swankiest residential part of the town. On an impulse, I dropped a dime into the slot and dialed the number.

There's an old saving, "when a man answers, hang up." But this time a man did answer and I didn't hang up. "Don Foster?" I asked.

"This is he," came back at me in a nice snotty, rather high-pitched voice.

"Is this the Don Foster of Station KJZ-TV?" I pursued.

"Of course it is! To whom am I speaking?" His bass sounded impatient. I could hear faint music in the background and I could also hear something else I couldn't quite identify, like sniffling. Well, in Fresno the hayfever season was just about there, and there was a lot of pollen from the ragweed and all the other foliage which is so plentiful in this climate.

"If you're the Don Foster who married Sally Jeffries, then I'd like to drop over and visit you," I said. "My name's Carl Venturi."

There was a click at the other end of the line and I knew that I had been disconnected. Well, that figured. With a voice like that, Don Foster had acted true to type. But something kept nagging at the back of my mind, and so I got into the Thunderbird and drove out to the address I had found in the phone book. When I got there, I had to whistle low and long. It was really a terrific house, with plenty of rolling acres, hedges, lawns, gardens, and a magnificent driveway with a garage that had room for at least four big cars. Sally Jeffries, if she had married this guy, ought to have done well enough to have taken Lena off the hooking line.

I parked the car in the driveway and rang the bell. A butler received me, looking very supercilious and frosty, as butlers traditionally are supposed to do. This one had evidently been imported, because he had a perfect London accent.

"Whom shall I say is calling, sir?" was his line.

"I'd like to see Mrs. Foster," I gave it right back to him. "Tell her that an old friend from San Francisco was just passing by. It's urgent"

"If you'll wait here, sir," he gestured to a little antechamber right off the huge living-room. There was an archway and drapes which were just slightly parted enough to allow me to see into that living-room and get a gander at the costly bric-a-brac which was cluttering up the room, including a thick Oriental rug which must itself cost a fortune. The antechamber had a tiny little table, two stiff-looking chairs, and a mirror on the wall framed in goldleaf. I sat there and looked at my image, and noticed some dark circles under my eyes. That figured too. I had postponed Madge Fryburg's vacation in a very valiant and taxing way. But somehow, I found myself glad that I had given way to that fit of temper and grabbed her and put her across my lap. I might not have ever got to bed with her any other way if I had tried the usual gentlemanly courting route. Some women react best to an atavistic line, the caveman approach, because they have the seed of masochism in their pussies and it just needs a little encouragement to sprout.

In about five minutes, the butler came back and he was accompanied by Sally. I stood up and my eyes goggled at her. She was more beautiful now than when I had first met her and wanted to get between those olive-sheened thighs of hers. Now it all came back to me, those gorgeous almond-shaped green eyes, that full passionate red mouth with the riper underlip which sometimes she used to catch and hold between her teeth and look ever so wistful, as if she was just dying to fuck but just didn't dare; the black hair which tumbled in thick ringlets to her shoulders, the proud pear-shaped titties spaced so beautifully apart, which thrust now so beautifully against the tight shimmering cling of a tight, silver-sequined evening gown; the lissome waist which curved into those luscious hips and those ripely endowed thighs which held everything a man could want out of fucking between them.

This was Sally Jeffries five years later. There was a smell of perfume to her and of expensiveness. She hadn't had that before; there had been a kind of hungry look to her in the old days, when she and I were both groping for what we didn't know. Maybe she had found what she wanted; I wasn't sure that I had yet.

"Carl!" she gasped as she took a step towards me. "I never thought you'd come back here-and why did you come here now?"

It wasn't exactly the reply I had expected after five years of separation, even if she had got married. We'd been pretty good friends, and I think she'd sensed that I was going to pop the question.

"I came back because my father died yesterday," I told her. "I came back because once you were my girl, and my father didn't agree with my selection, and we had a quarrel and I went to San Francisco because of you. Now he's gone and I'm back and you're married to Don Foster. But I wanted to talk to you if I could and find out what happened. And what about your mother?"

"I think, Mr. Venturi," that high-pitched, snotty voice interposed again as Don Foster hoved into view, pushing the butler aside with an impatient thrust of his hand, "that you certainly aren't going to get any answers from my wife. This is my home, Mr. Venturi, and you're not welcome here. Is it your custom to visit decent citizens late at night, especially on a Sunday, without first calling for an appointment and even if you're not welcome?"

There you had in a crystalline sentence all the Fresno philosophy of life-the philosophy of the haves, that is. The have-nots had their own ideas, but they never got to first base. And I could see that even though my dad had lived a good life and contributed a little something to the enjoyment of others by putting out a damn good wine with his name on the label, Don Foster and his kind couldn't have cared less, and they were probably glad that my father was now just a memory and ashes because they wouldn't have to bother with his kind again.

"I wasn't aware that I had to make a phone call to see an old friend," I told him. "I don't intend to see her again, if that's what you're worried about. Although I've heard it's very popular sport in Fresno to go around wife-swapping or have affairs on the side. I just wanted to talk to Sally because we were friends for a while and because she used to mean a lot to me, just about all that Fresno did mean."

"How very touching!" he sneered. He was just about as tall as I was, and maybe two years older at most, but he had a paunch, the start of a double chin, an ineffective little moustache on his upper lip which looked more as if he hadn't shaved or bathed recently, and a sneer on his face which didn't make him any handsomer at all. I knew his type, and it isn't limited to Fresno. I'd run into plenty of his kind in San Francisco as well, and I suppose there are that kind of snobs in every city in the United States if you go looking for them. Sometimes you don't have to look, they're all around you.

I said to him, "I'm sorry if I disturbed you. I didn't want to see you, though, just Sally."

"Throw this man out, Edwards," Don Foster said to the butler. I got the hint.

I said to Sally, "If you feel like it, call me at the office. Dad's office. I'm going to take over the vineyard and stay in Fresno and find out why I'm not welcome around here any more," and then I went out. But no sooner had the door slammed behind me than I heard a most characteristic sound ... the sound of a slap, followed by a little cry.

Then I heard Don Foster's voice, and it was shrill and angry, and Sally was crying, and I debated within myself whether I should break down the door and slug the bastard, and then I decided against it. I'd probably only cause poor Sally more trouble, and I'd already done enough already. I don't know what it was, but an impulse made me creep around the side of the house to see what I could see. The way he had talked to her and treated her, I had a feeling that she was in for a stiff lecture if nothing less. And she didn't deserve that on my account, no matter what she had thought of me. I came to a huge row of hedges, and there was a kind of half-open balcony window and I could see the outline of a beautifully brocaded bedcover and a very low, wide bed. And then suddenly the door was flung open and Don Foster appeared in the doorway pushing Sally inside. I crouched down behind the hedge, used my hands to pry the branches apart so I could make a sort of peephole for myself. I could also hear perfectly.

"So this is what you do when my back is turned, you little bitch? You're just like your mother, aren't you? The only difference is, you don't do it for money because you've married money."

It was Don Foster starting his lecture, and then I heard Sally sob, "Don, how can you be so hateful? Didn't he tell you himself he'd been away in San Francisco all these years until his father died yesterday. Do you suspect me of having an affair with every man alive?"

"If you want to know something, yes, you bitch. Look at yourself in that slinky dress, and that nice warm skin of yours and those bold breasts," he sneered. "Your mother taught you how to be a successful whore, and that's the only difference. She had to take what she could get and she had to charge the going rate. You held out for me because you knew I was coming into a fortune when my father died and left me the station. You don't love me and you never did."

"You don't give me any reason to, the way you treat me," she flashed back. That cost her another slap, and I saw her stumble to her knees and put her hand to her reddening cheek. I saw Don Foster go to a drawer, take out a little riding crop with an ivory handle, and he was licking his lips, and his eyes were narrow, and there was a light in them I didn't like at all. Then suddenly he raised the crop and slashed it down on her naked back, because the silver-sequined gown was cut very low, almost to the chinkbone at the back. There was an angry red welt on that olive skin, and Sally screamed. And then there was another cut and another, until finally, as she tried to huddle in a ball to protect herself, he thrashed at her buttocks with two vicious slashes. She screamed and rolled over on her side, sobbing as if her heart would break.

He stood there panting, his face flushed, his chest heaving. The ivory-handled riding crop was still in his right hand, and he could have posed perfectly for an illustration in a sadistic novel. He had played that scene as if he enjoyed doing it. I was beginning to think Sally Jeffries had had five years of living hell while I was having myself a good time in San Francisco. What he then said convinced me I was right:

"That's just a sample of what you're going to get one of these nights, dear. I'm going to take you downstairs into the closet room. You know what that is, you've been there before. I'm going to strip you naked and blindfold you, you bitch, and I'm going to leave you there with the clock ticking away, so you'll wonder when I'm coming back. Of course, you'll know that when I do come back, you're going to get a real thrashing. It always makes you sexy when you've felt the whip. Look at yourself now, with those big eyes full of tears and those big breasts of yours panting away. And I'll bet you're getting wet between the legs and you wish that bastard Carl Venturi were here. I don't ever want to hear his name in this house again, do you hear me? I thought we could get rid of people like the Venturis, but I see that bastard son of the old man is back to stay now. Well, my dear, you're going to know what hell on earth is like, for all your bitchiness to me!"

"What makes you think I don't already, Don?" was her choked, sobbing answer.

He drew back his right foot and kicked her behind, and then he strode out and slammed the door behind him.

I left my hiding place behind the hedge and found my way back to the Thunderbird and went home. Even my lonely shadow-haunted house of death was far more cheerful than the house I had just quitted.