in the car and hits the freeway!
I’m still jumping out of my skin, but at least I’m moving. I didn’t own a car, didn’t even drive, until I was twenty-six, when Paul’s parents gave us a Plymouth as a wedding present. We drove the Plymouth on our honeymoon, four days at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, and when we weren’t in bed or at the beach, Paul taught me how to drive on back roads lined with avocado groves. A born teacher, he was able to break down all of the actions an experienced driver does unconsciously. I learned well; I’ve always been a good driver. Sixty years of driving in L.A., and I’ve never had an accident.
But the one thing Paul never succeeded in getting across to me was having a lighter foot on the gas pedal. From the moment I learned to release the clutch without stalling, I loved speed! As I get beyond the perpetual Los Angeles traffic, I push the car—a silver Jaguar sedan, my gift to myself for my eightieth birthday—past seventy-five.
I’ll drive as far as Victorville; it’s just eighty or ninety miles from L.A. I’ll treat myself to a date shake, the way Paul and I used to do when we drove to or from Las Vegas. Then I’ll turn around.
But no matter how fast I go, I can’t get away from what Josh told me earlier this afternoon.
“That card we found last week for the detective, Philip Marlowe,” he said the minute he walked in, so excited that the words spilled out of him. “I did a little research. He was quite a character.”
“He was rather well known back in the thirties and forties.”
“Rather well known? I found newspaper articles about some big cases he helped solve. This one reporter wrote about him a lot. He made your friend Marlowe sound like a tough guy around thugs but a knight in shining armor if he was helping someone small and powerless.” Josh shot me an oddly complicit look. “Turns out the reporter’s papers are in a private collection of L.A. history from the 1940s. I’d heard about the collection, and I’ve been curious about it, so I went and took a look.
“And … voilà!” He reached into his banker’s box and pulled out a nine-by-twelve envelope. “The reporter must have been friends with Marlowe, because he got all of his case files. I copied his file on your sister. At least I figured it was your sister—Barbara Greenstein, the one in the dance programs?”
“Yes, that’s right,” I said curtly. For Josh, following the card to Philip and then Barbara was nothing but a librarian’s treasure hunt—a puzzle, a lark. But it was my life he was prying into, my hope that got kindled and, inevitably, dashed. Well, not this time. I already knew what was going to be in the file. I took the envelope and set it aside, then turned to the material I’d laid out on the table. “I promised you those letters to editors I wrote when I was a teenager.”
But Josh was like a cat bringing in a dead bird and wanting to show off its kill. “Funny you didn’t know Kay Devereaux was the name your sister used in Colorado Springs. When she worked at the hotel.”
Obviously Josh had misread something. Still, I opened the envelope and pulled out the file, a thin sheaf of no more than half a dozen pages. My eyes raced over the top sheet, notes from talking to my family: Barbara’s height, weight, date of birth, when and where we’d seen her last, the names of her friends, and so on. Continuing through the file, I could see how Philip followed those leads, though his actual notes were sketchy, a scatter of names or phrases he’d jotted for his own reference; I could piece them together because I’d already heard it all more than sixty years ago. Only one piece of information was new to me. Apparently it came from his interview with Alan Yardley: under Yardley’s name, he’d written Trocadero and three women’s names—women Barbara had worked with in the chorus?
“Fascinating, huh?” Josh said. “So can I ask you about Philip Marlowe sometime?”
I waved him off and dove into the rest of the file.
Performing in a nightclub is hardly the most stable profession, and it had clearly taken some digging to track down any of the showgirls; there was a page with multiple addresses and phone numbers under each woman’s