4.
 Afterward, I bought a quart of orange juice at a boarded up corner market that looked like Lotto in Beirut. Popping two more pills, washing them down with juice, I headed back to the office. Everyone was gone for the day. I had the place to myself, and listened to quiet jazz. I watched through dirty windows as candy lights moved in the harbor.
From time to time I've shared my life with one or another lady who appreciated a surfer. This wasn't one of those times, so I was free to work night and day if I chose. After midnight, I sat back, rubbed my eyes, took another pill, washed it down with the last of the OJ, and stared at the photo lying in a pool of yellow desk light. My heart was racing, from lack of sleep and too many pills. Someone's girlish bikini-clad figure smiled mysteriously, innocently, on some happier day past. I almost thought she was trying to tell me something.
I sat up. Someone had taken that snapshot, and she was looking at him. I wished someone like her would look at me that way. I cupped the snapshot in both hands and stared. With one hand, I fumbled in the desk drawer and brought out a magnifying glass. I pored over the snapshot, trying to draw an ounce of sense from her smile. I moved slowly down along the tanned shoulders, noted the sparse breasts, the long thin torso, the girlish legs. As I gazed into that lost day, I picked up the phone and dialed. Somewhere a sleepy voice answered.
"Sandy," I said.
She groaned in her pillow. "It had to be you, Lambert."
"Sorry. Hey, can you help me out?"
"Go 'way."
Sandy Jensen was an old friend of mine. A young friend. I'd given her surfing lessons. "Sandy, what's it worth to you? How about dinner at Mr. A's?"
"It's Oh-Dark-Thirty."
"This is special, Sandy, I swear."
"What is it this time, Seth?"
I rubbed my hands together. Sandy was with the California Highway Patrol. "I need a make on a dark tan roadster classic, California License." I read her the number.
"Gimme a few minutes."
I sat tight. What she was going to do was illegal, but then so were lots of things. Like fraud, for example.
She called back in a half hour. "This better be good, Seth."
"Dinner like I promised, plus ten surfing lessons. What the hell happened to you?"
"I started going out with a stock broker."
"That was six months ago."
"I know. I'm sorry. He turned out to be an asshole."
"He was married, huh?"
"How did you guess?"
"Who owns the roadster?"
"A Doyle, John." She gave me the address, and I must confess I was a little surprised. It wasn't the place I'd been today. "Social Security Number?"
"You're pushing, Seth."
"It's important. You'll love it when I tell you the story."
Well, I did tell her the story after I got it all pieced together, when Sandy and I were securely fixed into a seat at Mr. A's in Mission Valley. That was a few days later. The night I got Sandy out of bed, though, I hadn't quite stumbled on the secret of Ocean Bluffs Road yet.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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