LITMIR.BIZ

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to private property, myself. The Kleiner Mansion is a wonderful meeting place, but we could get another clubhouse where we could run our own affairs. But the board of directors voted to stay, so we have to deal with these bureaucrats and their pettifogging. Oh!”

      He raised his eyebrows and grinned, got to his feet. Mrs. van Arndt had returned, her martini glass filled again with sparkling clear fluid, an olive floating in it like a red-irised, green eyeball harpooned on a sliver of pine. Van Arndt took his wife’s free hand and raised it to his lips. “So good to see you again, m’dear.”

      “I couldn’t stay away,” Mrs. van Arndt said. “Have you boys been entertaining yourselves? Haven’t you offered Mr. Lincoln a drink, Ollie? Where are your manners?”

      “Lindsey,” Lindsey said.

      “Mr. Lindsey, please forgive me. Would you care…?”

      “No, thank you. What about Dr. Bernstein?”

      “Yes.”

      Mrs. van Arndt made a sour face.

      “You don’t like her either?” Lindsey asked.

      “Don’t like her looks, don’t like her manners, don’t like her clothes, don’t like her attitude.”

      “I can see you don’t like her. But—could you be more specific than that? Did she do or say something in particular?”

      “I don’t think she loves 1929.”

      Lindsey felt his eyes go out of focus. Wasn’t anyone willing to cope with the present? He had enough trouble, constantly dragging his mother back from 1953, her favorite year, or from whatever other era she happened to wander into.

      In Mother’s case there was a reason if not an excuse. She’d been a pregnant young wife, little more than a teenaged bride, when Lindsey’s father was killed aboard ship in the Korean war. Mother had never got over the shock. She was forever expecting her husband to come home, forever waiting to resume her life. Her doctors had urged Lindsey to institutionalize her, but he’d never been able to bring himself to do it.

      But now this—what kind of craziness was this about 1929?

      “She lives now,” Mrs. van Arndt amplified.

      “Don’t we all?”

      “I mean,” she paused and sipped at her glass, swaying slightly and rubbing her cheek against her husband’s tuxedo shoulder. “I mean, we all formed our club because we all love Art Deco and the era it symbolizes. That’s what the New California Smart Set is all about. We all know that things used to be better than they are now. Some of our older members actually recall the old days. They were here, they lived through the Crash of ’29.”

      “We almost called it the HarCooHoo Club,” van Arndt interrupted. “In honor of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. Those were the days, Mr. Lindsey.”

      Mrs. van Arndt said, “After the Crash, everything went to hell in a handbasket, Mr. Lindsey.”

      He noted that she got his name right that time. “But not Dr. Bernstein?”

      “Tweedy mannish woman.” Her eyes flashed, not so tipsily. “She studies us. Studies us, can you imagine that? Like specimens under her microscope.”

      The van Arndts had sat down facing Lindsey. Van Arndt took his wife’s free hand between his two and massaged it. To Lindsey he said, “She gets agitated now and then. But it has become a sordid, ugly world, Lindsey. You wouldn’t live in a slum if you could move to a decent neighborhood, would you? As far as I’m concerned, the whole world has turned into a giant slum.”

      Lindsey said, “What do you mean, studies you, Mrs. van Arndt?”

      She had lifted her martini glass to her lips and looked at Lindsey, apparently baffled by the challenge of trying to sip and speak simultaneously.

      Her husband answered for her. “Dr. Bernstein wants to publish a paper about us. Publish or perish, she’s said a thousand times. She comes to meetings and sits and watches and writes.”

      Lindsey looked at his own hands, holding golden pencil and pocket organizer.

      “That’s all right, old man,” van Arndt said generously. “You’re here on business. Dr. Bernstein even told me the name of the paper she’s planning. Anachronistic Mimesis and Temporal Alienation: Violent and Nonviolent Acting-Out Strategies of Compensation. What do you think of that?”

      “I don’t know what it means.”

      “Me neither, me buck-o, me neither.”

      Lindsey scratched his head with the top of his International Surety pencil. “I’m afraid I’m losing the thread here. You told me this fellow Joseph Roberts actually saw the Duesenberg stolen.”

      “Caught a glimpse of it, I’d say.”

      “Came running back into the mansion shouting and then passed out.”

      “Precisely.”

      “But he was able to give a statement to Officer Gutiérrez?”

      “I think so.”

      “And then Dr. Bernstein did—what?”

      “She loaded him into her Land Rover and took him home.”

      “His or hers?”

      “Oh, hers. He was much too drunk to drive. They had to go in her Rover.”

      “Yes, but where did they go home to? His home or hers?”

      “Please, Mr. Lyons,” Wally van Arndt said, “that is not a polite question at all.” She plucked the olive from her glass and used her teeth to pull it from its toothpick. She chewed carefully on the olive, dropping the toothpick onto the polished hardwood floor. “Besides, they didn’t say.”

      CHAPTER TWO

      In the morning Lindsey phoned Oakland Police Headquarters and asked for Officer Gutiérrez. Gutiérrez wasn’t in so Lindsey asked if he could get a copy of the theft report on the Duesenberg. Gutiérrez had said Monday, but it couldn’t hurt to try. The operator said she’d transfer the call, but after a dozen rings Lindsey decided that nobody worked at headquarters on Sunday.

      He didn’t like working on weekends himself, but Harden had really come down on him about this claim, and it looked like another of those make-or-break opportunities. International Surety could stall for a while, hoping that the Duesenberg would be recovered. But eventually, if the car didn’t turn up, they’d have to pay. Unless they could find an out, like proving contributory negligence. Leaving a car like this one out-of-doors and unguarded, especially in a city with a crime rate like that of Oakland.…

      Any Duesenberg, especially a 1928 Phaeton, must be a prize plum for collectors—and consequently for thieves. And if they’d left the keys in the ignition, the company could make a strong case against the owners.

      Whoever had parked the car and left it standing in the driveway.… Lindsey hit himself on the forehead. He realized that he didn’t know who had driven the car last night, who had left it parked in front of the mansion. Ms. Smith had disappeared somewhere in the mansion while he was talking with the van Arndts, and that couple had practically drowned him in their own boozy bonhomie but they hadn’t given him nearly the amount of information he needed.

      He was going to recover that Duesenberg, or give it a hell of a shot, anyway. It wasn’t the first time he’d set out to save International Surety a bundle on a theft claim, and if he could recover the Phaeton, he’d add to his record. But it was more than a matter of saving the company dollars, more than a matter of winning another gold pencil from International Surety.

      It was his chance to be alive again!

      Mother was settled contentedly in front of the TV, and while she remained absorbed in a rerun of The Donna Reed Show, he phoned their neighbor Joanie Schorr and asked her to come over for a few hours.

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