One woman was working at a desk and another was answering a telephone by a filing cabinet. There was a half-door with the top open leading into a small warehouse where he could hear people talking.
"Can I help you, sir?" the woman asked.
She was about his wife's age, but blonde and fair, not half as pretty as his wife, and she wore makeup like the Mexicali whores who'd kept propositioning him when he was trying to secure the forged documents.
"I would like to see about a gravestone, please," he said, in his slightly accented, singsong cadence.
"Would you like something in imperial black?" She opened some brochures stacked on the desk. "You can have a plaque sixteen by twenty-eight for a little over four hundred dollars. I think you'll find our prices competitive. But if you'd like the best, I'd suggest blue pearl granite. It's from Norway, and it's about one thousand dollars. Two hundred more for a custom job."
He leafed through a few pages and said, "You see, I was talking to a man who buried his mother in the Palm Springs area last year in September. He described her monument to me. It was so very lovely, he said. The monument may have been made here. I must have one just like it."
"We don't make our plaques here. We order them. What was the name of the client?"
"That is the problem. I do not know."
"What was the name of the deceased?"
"I am afraid I do not know that either."
"How can I tell you then?" She was one of those American women who had chewing gum in her mouth when she talked. She didn't chew it, but it was there, and she had to move it from side to side in order to speak. He had never found women in the U. S. to be particularly attractive.
"I know the exact date when he called to arrange for the monument," he said. "It was on day thirteen of September."
"Was the deceased buried at the memorial park in Cathedral City?"
"I do not know. I am sorry. I know very little, except that he ordered a tombstone for an old woman on that date. With orchids carved on it."
"Orchids? It was a custom job then."
"Yes, I believe that is so."
"We can do an orchid or any other flower for you. We can order red stone, or green. Green can be quite lovely."
"No, no, please," he said. "I need a monument precisely the same as the one that was arranged on day thirteen of September of last year."
"Just a minute," she said, and picked up the telephone.
It frightened him, the sudden move to a telephone, but this time he didn't panic. He said to himself: What could she be doing? Only calling her boss, nothing more.
"Sam, come in here a minute, will ya?" she said into the telephone.
He pretended to be perusing the brochures until a man in coveralls entered through the Dutch door and said, "Yeah?"
He was a hard-working man. The fugitive had already learned that it was more comfortable to be around working people here than the other kind. This man had hands like those boys he'd met in the stand of tamarisk trees, those boys who had disobeyed him when he told them not to drive the stolen car. He'd read in the newspaper what had happened to them, but it was not his fault, they should have obeyed him. This man had hands like those hard-working boys.
"Sam," the young woman said, "did you deliver a custom order last September for a . . ." She turned to the fugitive and said, "Was it imperial black or what?"
"I am sorry," he said, with an apologetic shrug.
"Okay, coulda been marble, granite, bronze. Did you take any sort of custom job where the client wanted orchids on the plaque?"
"For an old woman," the fugitive said.
"Lots of roses," the man said.
"Orchids," the fugitive said. "For an old woman."
"What was her name?"
"We already been through that," the young woman sighed. "He doesn't know."
"Orchids? No, we didn't deliver no orchids." Then he said, "A daisy. We delivered a daisy plaque for a little girl's funeral."
The mansion was an elephantine dead-white stack of rectangles-a Frank Lloyd Wright ripoff that didn't work-but it was a short walk to downtown so the location was okay.
"You don't look so good," Nelson said, when he arrived and Lynn answered the door in pajamas.
"I was gonna go home early but I ran into a manicurist I met once before in Breda's office. This time she didn't look at me like I was something that'd go tits-up if you found it in your underwear and covered it with blue ointment."
"Did you do her?" Nelson asked, and the leer looked particularly silly on him.
"I hope not," Lynn said. "Cause anyone that'd ball me'd ball anybody, and that's scary. But I'm prob'ly safe. In Zimbabwe when a chameleon crosses your path you become impotent. I think it's also true of Palm Springs lizards."