“I’ve been looking all over for you,” Nina said. “I thought Sam would work just as well, but Emily said no. She wanted you. I don’t see what the difference is.”
“Sam’s three inches taller,” I said. “Ten years older. Blond. Aside from that our own mothers couldn’t tell us apart.”
“It doesn’t matter what you look like,” Nina said. “What matters is whether or not you know how to drive a car.”
“I know how to drive, ma’am. I started driving when I was eleven years old.”
“Last year, then,” she said.
She couldn’t have been more than a handful of years older than I was. “I’m twenty-five, almost,” I said, then felt like a four-year-old telling a five-year-old that I was four and a half. “Is Max back from town with all the other ladies?”
“No,” she said. “The two of us came back early in a taxi. Max said we could take a cowboy and Emily’s car and clear out until the crisis passes, as long as we’re home in time for dinner.”
“I’m glad to oblige, ma’am, but why do you need me?” I ducked under Dumpling’s neck to come around to her side. “I know Emily doesn’t like to drive much, but can’t you do it?” I confess I was more excited at the prospect of driving the Pierce-Arrow than I ought to have let myself been. They don’t make those cars anymore, and even in those days they didn’t make a lot of them. Only the cream of the elite drove them. Presidents. Princes. John D. Rockefeller. Orville Wright, Babe Ruth. You get the picture.
“I never learned to drive,” Nina said.
“You can fly an airplane, but you don’t know how to drive a car?”
“Any imbecile can drive a car,” she said, and handed me the keys. “Here you go.”
Dumpling twisted his head around to see who I was talking to and Nina suddenly brightened. “Why, it’s Lightning, isn’t it?” she asked.
“That’s right,” I said. “Except now we call him Dumpling.”
“I’ve known this horse since we were both hardly more than babies.” Nina took the gelding’s face between her hands and nuzzled his forehead with her nose. “Hello, old friend,” she said. “How’s my favorite boy and why are these silly cowboys calling you Dumpling?”
“He isn’t as fast on his feet as he used to be,” I said. “Calling him Lightning had started seeming disrespectful.”
Nina stepped back and looked the gelding over. “Well, I guess time is hanging a little heavy on him around the middle. Happens to the best of us. It hurts to think my sweetheart here is an old man already. He’ll always be my favorite.”
“Dumpling still has plenty of good years left in him, knock wood.” I rapped the stable wall with my knuckles. “He’s my favorite, too,” I said as I tucked Emily’s keys into my pocket. “Worth all the others put together, even if he’s getting on in years.”
“How about that,” Nina said, nodding and eyeing me speculatively. “You have good taste. Emily told me you weren’t as stupid as you look.”
“I hope not, ma’am,” I said. “By the way, my name is Ward.” I extended a hand for her to shake. She put the folded note in it. Maybe I was as stupid as I looked, after all. “What’s the big crisis?” I asked as I unfolded it.
“Emily is having second thoughts. Only made it as far as the front door of the lawyer’s building. Couldn’t bear to go inside. Some of those old biddies told her cold feet were a sign she’s still in love with Archer. As if being in love with anybody was ever enough. What a lot of idiotic Hollywood rubbish.”
Of course, I owed my job to idiotic Hollywood rubbish. Margaret had been hot to hire me because I reminded her of that young actor playing the beefcake innocent in her favorite movie, a Mae West comedy called She Done Him Wrong. Cary Grant, yes. The very one. “He has that twinkle, Max,” Margaret had said of me as I put my shirt back on and buttoned it after my interview was finished. “Twinkle’s hard to come by in a boy as muscled-up as this young man is. It’s hard to come by, period.” I think of Margaret every time I pass a pet shop and see a puppy twinkling beseechingly at me through the window, every wiggling inch of dog assuring me that he’s worth the money, that he’ll never let me down if I’ll just give him a chance. When I watch an old gangster movie on the late show—Scarface, Public Enemy, White Heat—I remember Max. “Such beautiful suits,” he always said after seeing one of those films over in Reno at the Majestic. “The artistry in the tailoring, only to be shot full of holes in the end. It makes a person think.” Of what, I never asked.
Do what this woman says, Max’s note read, and nobody will get hurt.
Chapter Four
When we got to the shed where the Pierce-Arrow was stored, the car was still under the tarp and Emily was nowhere to be seen.
“I told her to wait right here,” Nina said. “I should have known she’d chicken out.”
“I didn’t chicken out!” It was Emily’s unmistakable croak, but so muffled it sounded as if it were coming from underneath a pile of blankets. “I’m here!”
When Nina snatched the tarp off the car I realized it had been a mistake not to roll up the windows and close the roof before I’d covered it. I’d been so mesmerized by the beauty of its insides—the dimpled fawn upholstery, the sinuous silver knobs on the burled wood dashboard, the ebonized circle of steering wheel—that I hadn’t thought that business through. Now a tortoiseshell cat was nursing a litter of newborn kittens on its back seat.
Other than the cats, the car was empty.
“Where are you?” Nina called. “For Pete’s sake, Emily. We’re in a hurry.”
The stagecoach door popped open and Emily emerged, a moth-eaten white boa draped over her shoulder. “How could you think I’d chicken out?” she asked. “Not half an hour ago you were telling me what a hero I am.”
Right away I noticed a long scratch on her left cheek I hadn’t seen before. Then I realized the boa was the giant, scruffy tom who’d appointed himself king of our barnyard cats.
“Isn’t it a little hot out to be wearing fur?” Nina asked.
“Please. I’m wearing purr,” Emily replied, strumming the animal’s length, producing a pretty faithful imitation of a locomotive engine going full blast. Emily sniffled and rubbed her eyes. “My friend here was fighting with a gray cat under the coach, so I broke it up and shut this one in here with me. We’ve done a wonderful job of calming each other down but I think I may be allergic to it. The cat, I mean, not calming down.”
“That’s Caterwaul,” I said, relieving her of the beast and shooing him outside. “He’s one for wailing when he’s riled. Or whenever he feels like crying.”
“No wonder we like each other,” Emily said, and sneezed.
I fished out a bandana and handed it to her. “We call him Wally, mostly. He’s the resident ladies’ man. I expect he was trying to romance the cat you caught him fighting with. More than likely he’s responsible for those kittens in the back seat of your car, too.”