The Missing Person by Doris Grumbach Page A

clothes in this heat?” he asked. She was now walking faster, breathing in small gulps, and sweating profusely. He could smell her warmth mixed with the must of coarse khaki.
    She made no reply, but she walked more slowly. Once she stopped so abruptly that he fell against her. He thought he would not be able to stand up under the furious beating of his heart. Then she turned and he followed her into a dark-brown, curtain-fronted bar. Without seeming to look at anything she headed for a table at the rear.
    Demp sat beside her and ordered two beers. He could read the name of the place, scrolled backward, on the front window: it was Castellano’s. The walls were decorated with faded, unframed pictures of the Bay of Naples and Lake Como, crepe-paper streamers, and religious banners left over, he imagined, from the celebration of some Italian festival.
    The waiter brought the beers, nodded to Franny Fuller without recognition or interest, picked up the coins Demp had put down, and wiped the table around the bases of the two glasses. Then he went away.
    â€œDoes he know you, Miss Fuller?” Demp asked.
    â€œNo. But I come here now and then. I have a lot of places I go to now and then around here. It takes days to go to all of them.”
    â€œWhy? Why do you do it? Go to these places like this, I mean.”
    â€œThey’re dark. And everyone in these places is alone and down. Like me. Here it’s dark and I’m alone and down, so I feel at home here in bad times.”
    â€œBut where do you sleep?”
    â€œIn one place or another. A little bit at a time. I go home when I’m dead, really dead tired, and sleep for three days, almost. Everything is better for a while, until I go down again. Then I come back.”
    â€œAre you ready to go home now?”
    Franny Fuller looked at him, her face streaked with beer, weariness, and despair.
    â€œI’ll walk you home if you’re ready to go,” Demp said. He took her damp hand. She let him lead her out of the bar. She pointed down a street. The walk seemed interminable to him. Twice they sat down to rest on stone walls. The hills grew steeper, the houses farther apart, and then disappeared entirely, invisible behind high hedges.
    â€œWhere are we?”
    â€œBeverly Hills. I live up here.”
    â€œIs it much farther?”
    It was. When they arrived at a stopping place, it was four-thirty in the morning. The first faint signs of a break in the black of the night could be seen behind the roof of her house. The walk in through the gate and toward the house seemed very long to Demp who was now tired. Franny Fuller, her head sunk forward, had to be pushed along.
    No one came to the door when Demp used the heavy knocker. He looked questioningly at Franny Fuller whose exhausted eyes were almost shut. She reached out and turned the knob. The door opened.
    â€œHoly cow. Don’t you lock this place?”
    â€œLost the key,” she whispered.
    They came into an entry hall as large and round as a ballroom, Demp thought. He followed her to its end, then into a huge living room in which every lamp was lit. Franny stared into it as though she had never seen it before, turned and walked on, down a hall lined on both sides with black-framed glossy stills from her pictures. She stopped before a half-opened door, pushed it open and went in. Demp followed her.
    Suddenly he couldn’t see her and, utterly confused, he stepped backward to the entrance of the room to find a light switch. He snapped it on. In the sudden flare of light he saw a bedroom almost as big as the living room. At one end was a broad, fur-covered white bed and white bearskin rugs everywhere. The room seemed to be without windows. Or, if they were there, they were covered by some kind of white silky drapery which hung from ceiling to floor on every inch of the walls.
    â€œWow,” he said. “This is some swanky place.” Franny Fuller had almost disappeared