Long Shot by Paul Monette Page B

there ought to have been a flurry of running back and forth. He wandered down the row of windows. Far below, the vertiginous slopes that swept around the canyon had no place to hide. He saw it all. The trail he’d walked was clear as the dotted line on a map. Perhaps the funeral was just a trick. The silence was as total here as it was in Harry Dawes’s apartment, Monday night at nine.
    He stood at the final window, looking out. Now was his chance to search the place for clues. He wouldn’t have thought it possible, but he had it all to himself. And yet, perverse as ever, he suddenly wanted out of here. The silence seemed to sound a warning not to begin a search there could be no end to. For the first time, he saw the clash of Harry Dawes and Jasper Cokes in terms of their alien habitats. The tumbledown apartment at the Cherokee Nile was a world away from the wilds of Steepside. All the transitions had disappeared. From where he stood, the mountains roller-coastered at fearful angles to the desert plain. The desert sheered off at the ocean.
    No wonder it ended in violence.
    He turned abruptly and crossed the canyon room, determined to go deeper. In the high wall opposite the bank of windows, a row of stone arches opened off the nave. He could see through into the European rooms, set out like dioramas. One arch led to a library bound in leather. The next went into a Deco bar, all mirrored like a jewel box. Instinctively, Greg passed them by. Beyond the arcade, the Wright plan continued down a narrow corridor. It was skylit every ten or fifteen feet, but otherwise it seemed cut out of solid rock. He felt like he’d entered the hill. When the tunnel forked, he went right, as if trying to keep to the rim of the canyon.
    But somehow he must have got turned around. He came out into a bedroom that hovered above the Japanese garden and, beyond it, the green of the glen. After the treeless slopes of the canyon, the hill seemed almost wooded. The grass-cloth walls were covered with masks, in rank on rank of straw, mahogany, bone. Haitian, East African, Eskimo. Greg could not have pinned them down, even as to continent. He only took them in at all for the light they threw on Jasper Cokes. And then he saw—beyond the big-limbed, mountain-cabin chairs—a trail of Hermès luggage leading, half unpacked, into a closet racked with women’s clothes. He’d followed his nose to Vivien’s room.
    He slipped the paperback Walden out of his pocket. He went to the bed and placed it dead center on Vivien’s Navajo blanket. He walked around it a moment, then put out a finger and moved it a couple of inches clockwise, so as to make it look carelessly tossed. It wasn’t the same as the book he found in Harry Dawes’s apartment. Edna bought this one late last night, off a paperback shelf at Pickwick. It wasn’t a clue to anything yet, unless Vivien chose to make it one. Edna wanted to write some little squib on the flyleaf— This book left by the friends of Harry Dawes —but Sid and Greg had managed to outvote her. If Walden was part of the plot, it would simply have to do the work of surfacing itself. Chances were, there was no connection at all. Still, they had to start somewhere.
    He stood in his old abstracted pose—arms folded, shoulders hunched—till he heard the murmur of voices trailing towards him down the tunnel. He fairly leapt for the sliding door that led out to Vivien’s balcony. Sliding it shut behind, he sidled left so the building blocked him. An instant later he fell to his knees, when he saw what looked like an army grouped below him in the yard. Down on all fours, he crept across to the waist-high balcony wall. His heart knocked something terribly. But he rose up slowly and peered over, freezing the scene in a flash. Then he dropped to the floor again as if he’d gotten it all on microfilm.
    No wonder the house was empty. Down below, in a ring of ivy, was the