The Hollywood Trilogy

by Don Carpenter

  It was so corny. Pregnant. When Eddie learned, would he throw her out into the snow? When Quentin learned, would he suddenly find business out of town, or quickly slip her a few hundred and a telephone number? Or would both of them, with tears of self-sacrifice in their eyes, offer to marry her and give the little bastard a name? Lindy had to laugh at that one; even the movies hesitated to show anything that far from reality. On the other hand, why did she have to tell either of them? Only for the money to see the abortionist, and maybe not even for that, if she could get the money some other way. She knew of an abortionist, the mother of one of the pimps who hung around the Desert Room. Her name was Elaine Benedict, and she was supposed to charge three hundred dollars. She did the local hookers all the time, and was supposed to be really good; fast, clean and efficient. That part would be easy. The tough part was getting the three hundred. She did not worry about what to tell Eddie or Quentin; she would just disappear for a couple of days, and when she came back she would damn them to find out where she had been. She was not so crippled by love that she had lost all her spirit. She could even tell them she had had an abortion and she didn’t know who the father was, and let them sort it out in their own minds.

  But she did none of those things, at least not right away. She didn’t feel sick, and the pregnancy would not show for a long time, and she had at least two and probably three months until she had to get the operation done, so she let things slide, along with night school and the idea of going to college, which had once appealed to her so much, and now seemed such a silly dream. Even Quentin didn’t talk about it anymore. They went through the winter and into the spring meeting two or three times a week, and that was about it. They made love, they talked, they argued, but there were no more plans for the future and no discussions about the hypocrisy of it all.

  TWELVE

  AT THE last minute, Lindy decided she wanted company for her trip to see Mrs. Benedict, and so she called her sister. Jody cut school the next day and they met at the bus stop at Fifth and Stark. It was a rare sunny spring day, and Jody got off the bus wearing Levi’s cut and rolled almost to the knee, a print peasant blouse and her white windbreaker. Lindy was waiting for her. She had gotten the money not by asking anybody for it but by saving ten here, twenty there, from the money that Eddie Dorkin gave her to spend. The sisters walked up to Washington Street to catch the streetcar, and Jody very carefully did not ask where they were going or what the event was. Lindy had meant to tell her but the words came hard, and now, walking, it was impossible. Especially under this sunny sky. Lindy had not expected to be frightened but she was.

  As the streetcar rolled up into the West Hills Lindy found the words. “I have to have a little operation,” she said to Jody, as the houses of the rich people moved slowly by. “I guess you know what that means.”

  “I think so,” Jody said. “How come your boyfriend doesn’t go with you?”

  “Eddie’s out of town. He doesn’t even know I’m pregnant,” Lindy said.

  “I’m glad you called me,” Jody said. “You shouldn’t go alone. Where did you get the money?”

  Mrs. Benedict worked out of a small shingled frame house in the northwest section of Portland, on Johnson Street. Lindy had gotten the address from her son Bob, after sitting on a barstool at the Desert Room for three hours one afternoon waiting for him to come in. The house had a small covered porch, and on the porch were two old rotting wicker chairs. Jody said, “Maybe I should wait out here.”

  “Going chicken?” Lindy said with a grin. Together they went into the house. It was not much like a doctor’s office and Elaine Benedict was not much like a doctor. She was a big woman, at least six feet. She had hard sharp intelligent blue eyes and a thin mouth covered with too much bright red lipstick, but the thing Lindy noticed most was her hands, which were large and beautifully shaped, the fingernails clear and trimmed. Elaine Benedict wore no jewelry, and was dressed in a brown tweed skirt and a pale yellow sweater set. “Do you have the money?” she asked Lindy in the small living room of the house. Lindy got the bills out of her purse and gave them to Mrs. Benedict.

  “Who’s this?” Mrs. Benedict said, without looking at Jody.

  “My sister.”

  “Can she drive?”

  “No. We came by streetcar.”

  “Oh shit. You should have somebody to drive you home. Oh well. I’ll call somebody. Your sister can wait out here.”

  Suddenly, Mrs. Benedict looked into Jody’s eyes, her expression almost fierce. “You can keep a secret, can’t you?”

  “Sure,” Jody said. “That’s why I’m here.” She did not like this woman. She would have preferred a man doctor for Lindy, but Lindy had said that this woman was the best in the Pacific Northwest. The door closed behind her sister and Mrs. Benedict. Jody sat down, filled with the old doctor’s-office dread everybody feels, and picked up a magazine. If she ever had to have an abortion, after she became an actress, she would have the operation done in Switzerland, by a top medical man. None of this sneaking around industrial districts.

  Lindy was led to a bedroom that contained a pair of bunk beds, a dresser and some blue curtains on the window. The beds were covered with matching blue spreads with little sailboats, buoys and sailors, in white. There was a bathrobe laid across the bottom bunk, and Mrs. Benedict said, “Take off all your clothes and put on the bathrobe, and then wait for me.” She handed Lindy a couple of little white pills. “The bathroom’s in there. Take these right away.”

  “What are they?” Lindy asked.

  “Pain killer,” Mrs. Benedict said, and left the room. Lindy shrugged and went into the bathroom. She was used to pain killers.

  After about twenty minutes of sitting on the bottom bunk, leaning forward to keep from bumping her head on the upper, Lindy began to feel high and woozy, and her worries slipped away. She smiled at her earlier fears. What she should have done was to hit Eddie’s supply of codeine before she ever left the house; by now, and with the extra pills, she would have felt pretty great.

  Ten minutes later Mrs. Benedict came back in, now wearing the white coat that Lindy had expected. Lindy stood up and said, “Ready when you are.” Mrs. Benedict smiled and said, “You’ve got pretty good nerve. Come on.”

  Lindy followed her down the hall to another bedroom, this one done up as an examining room, except for the wallpaper, which depicted faded bunches of grapes. Lindy asked, “Do most of them act scared?”

  “One way or another,” Mrs. Benedict said. Lindy had expected to see more people, for some reason, but they were alone. There was a glass cabinet against one wall, and the black leather examining table, complete with knee stirrups, so that Lindy felt she was actually in a doctor’s office. It made her feel even better. All the room lacked was a couple of framed diplomas.

  “Take off the robe and lie down, hook your knees into the stirrups,” Mrs. Benedict said. “You’re lucky. It’s nice and warm in here today.”

  “What’s that smell?” Lindy said from the examining table.

  “Ether,” Mrs. Benedict said. She had a cotton pad in her hand. “Just breathe deeply.”

  “Getting all kinds of high today,” Lindy said with a giggle. She breathed deeply into the cotton and felt her mind shredding. It was a delicious feeling, and the only bad part was a faint nausea in the pit of her stomach, but soon even that faded out, and she was alone inside a kind of cotton wool universe, all pink and glowing. Then there were a lot of people, mostly strangers, and then she was alone again, but in the country somewhere, among a lot of very tall trees. She could see way up in the tops of the trees the sun like a disk of burning gold, and she knew she shouldn’t look at the sun because it would hurt her eyes, and so she went inside one of the trees where it was dark and warm. But out of the darkness somebody grabbed at her, no, some thing, and it had sharp claws, and one of the claws stuck in her and tore at her body. Then it was all right again and she was no place, just floating, and then she was awake again, on the examining
table. The bathrobe was draped over her, and there was a very real throbbing pain deep inside her. She sat up, dizzy. She was wearing a Kotex and belt, and there was some blood. After a couple of minutes, while specks danced in front of her eyes, Mrs. Benedict came back into the room.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “Rocky,” Lindy said. “Is my sister still here?”

  “She’s waiting. I told her you’d have to lie down for a while. My son’s coming to take you home.” Mrs. Benedict smiled, and Lindy felt a warmth of affection for her.

  “Can my sister come in and keep me company?” Lindy asked.

  “You go in and get dressed and lie down.”

  After a while Jody, looking big-eyed, came into the bedroom where Lindy was stretched out on the bottom bunk. Jody stood in the doorway. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “My innards hurt,” Lindy said. “But otherwise okay. Don’t you ever let yourself get into this kind of spot.”

  Jody came over and sat down on the edge of the bed, and they waited for Bob Benedict. It was over an hour before he showed up, and Lindy had had to change her Kotex twice in that time. Once Mrs. Benedict came in, without her white coat, and asked if she was bleeding much. Lindy told her, and she nodded and went out again.

  Bob Benedict’s car was a sleek new black Mercury. Lindy sat next to him and Jody in back, where she concentrated on the boils on the back of Bob’s neck. Bob had thick curly black hair combed into a duck’s ass, a sharp face and a rasping voice. He did not look anything like his mother. They were driving down Burnside when Lindy said, “Oh, Christ, I’m bleeding right through my dress.”

  “Don’t worry about the seat covers,” Bob said.

  “I guess you’re used to it,” Lindy said. “But kind of take it easy on the bumps, huh?”

  Jody automatically helped her sister up the steps to the apartment house, and Lindy said, “People gonna think I’m drunk again.” Jody laughed but she did not feel like laughing. Lindy’s face was getting white.

  Inside the apartment Jody helped her sister undress. Her panties were thoroughly bloody. Jody went into the bathroom and ran the hot water, soaking a washrag and wringing it out while Lindy, naked, crowded in behind her and searched through the medicine cabinet for codeine pills. Finally she found them. “Boy, I’m gonna take about two grains of this stuff,” she said. Back in the bedroom Jody washed the blood from her sister’s body. Lindy strapped on another clean Kotex and went to bed.

  “Shit, I feel terrible,” she said.

  “Maybe we should call a doctor,” Jody said.

  “She said I’d probably bleed for a while,” Lindy said. “I wish I had some morphine.”

  “Let’s call a doctor,” Jody said. “We could call Doctor Shoenbrun.”

  “He wouldn’t come all the way downtown,” Lindy said. “Anyway, I don’t want any goddamn doctor in here prying around. It’s a felony, you dig?”

  “Maybe he knows a doctor down here,” Jody said.

  Lindy patted the bed for Jody to sit beside her. “Honey, don’t be scared. This happens to girls all the time. Just stay with me, and let that codeine get to work. I’ll be okay.” But even the strain of talking seemed to be too much for her, and she settled back into the pillow, her lips blue and her eyes abnormally large.

  “I’m going to call a doctor,” Jody said. She went into the living room and looked for the telephone. It was on a table beside the couch. She could not find a telephone book, so she called information and asked for the telephone number of a doctor. The operator put on her supervisor, and the supervisor asked Jody where she was. Jody told her and the supervisor gave her the number of St. Vincent’s Hospital. After several agonizing minutes, Jody was finally talking to an intern. “I think my sister’s bleeding to death,” she said, and as soon as the words came out of her mouth she realized they were true. The intern asked her questions and she answered them, wondering to herself why she was not crying. In this scene she should be crying. She should be hysterical and running around. The intern on the telephone should be talking briskly and telling her what to do, but all he actually said was that Jody should bring Lindy in for an examination.

  Jody hung up and got information again and asked for the telephone number of a cab company, and then called for a taxi. The dispatcher told her it would be twenty minutes. Jody hung up and went back into the bedroom.

  “I called a doctor,” she said. “Do you have any money?” But even as she spoke she could see that Lindy was already dead. She went out and sat in the living room, waiting for the taxi to come. When the driver came she told him, “My sister’s dead. I don’t know what to do.”

  The driver was a young man with a sprig of daphne tucked into his hat. When he heard Jody’s words he backed out and closed the door. Jody went back in and sat down. She really did not know what to do. She did not want to cry. She felt totally empty of emotion. One smart thing would be to walk out of that place and pretend she had never been there, but that would be deserting Lindy. Finally, she got on the telephone again and called the police.

  They asked her a lot of questions, and finally they took her down to the police station and turned her over to a woman in the Juvenile Division. The woman took her into a small room furnished with only two chairs and a desk.

  The woman said, “Are you going to be all right?”

  Jody said, “Yes. I’m okay.”

  “The officers tell me the girl who passed away is your sister.”

  “That’s right,” Jody said.

  “Do you have any idea what happened to her?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “How did you happen to be there in her apartment? Isn’t this a school day for you?”

  “Yes. I cut school. I do it all the time.”

  “Then, as you told the officers, you simply came down to visit your sister and found her dead.”

  “No. I came and found her sick. She asked me to call for a doctor and I tried to but nobody would come. Then she died, so I called the police.”

  The woman was silent for a few moments, looking at Jody. Jody looked at the floor. Then the woman said, “Jody, listen to me. Your sister was killed. Somebody tried to perform an abortion on her and killed her. If you know anything about this, it’s your duty and obligation to your sister to tell us, so that we can catch these people and keep them from killing other young girls. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes,” Jody said.

  “Do you know anything about who did this to her?”

  “No,” Jody said.

  The woman waited a few moments and then said, “Did you love your sister? Were you girls close?”

  “Yes,” Jody said.

  “Then why won’t you tell me what I want to know?”

  “Because I don’t know anything to tell you,” Jody said.

  After another pause, the woman said, “All right. I’m sorry about all this. But we want to find out who these people are and stop them. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Jody said.

  “I didn’t mean to be harsh or cruel.”

  Jody looked up at the woman. “I know it,” she said.

  The woman stood up. “Someone will take you to your mother,” she said. “I’ll leave you alone now.”

  Jody did not look forward to seeing her mother.

  THIRTEEN

  JODY DID not want to go to the funeral, but she could not think of any way out of it. She could not tell her mother that both she and Lindy believed funerals were a crock, that once you died you were dead and that was that. She did not know how to talk to her mother at all. Eleanor was playing the role that Jody could not: for three days she wept and thrashed and cried out, inconsolable and half insane with grief, watched over day and night by her cousin Annie who was a registered nurse and looked like a shorter version of Elaine Benedict; then on the fourth day Eleanor calmed down, and the day after that they had the funeral at a small funeral parlor on Tacoma Street, not two blocks from where they lived.


  In the private curtained-off room to the right of the casket, Jody sat in her new navy-blue suit, sweating and uncomfortable. She was on a couch with her mother and her mother’s cousin. In an overstuffed chair next to the couch sat poor old Burt McKeegan, looking sixty, his face and neck red and covered with hundreds of little criss-crossing blood vessels. Burt had obviously not had anything to drink that morning, and his whole body would shake from time to time. Jody wondered if part of it wasn’t grief. Burt had always been nice enough to them when he had been around, and Jody felt sorry for him. It must have cost him a great deal to attend this funeral.

  The chair and the couch were angled so that members of the immediate family could sit in scrimmed seclusion and yet still see both the casket surrounded by flowers and the more public seating—what Jody thought of to herself as the audience. There were quite a few people out in the audience, a lot more than Jody had expected. Most of them were a hard-looking crew of young people that Jody guessed were Lindy’s Broadway friends, all of them sitting stiffly, looking forward, as if they were under obligation to attend but not to show any emotion, and Jody immediately felt a kinship with them. Jody looked in vain for Quentin Corby. He had been telephoned right away by a distraught Eleanor, but she was only on the phone with him for a few minutes. He was nowhere in sight now, and hadn’t been for the entire five days.

  Patsy Wambaugh and her mother were also in the audience, although Mrs. Wambaugh had never met Lindy. She was probably there because Patsy had been invited and she wanted to keep her company. Patsy looked very serious, but every once in a while she would covertly look around at the somewhat loudly dressed young people from downtown. Jody wondered if Patsy could see her, and once when Patsy seemed to be looking in her direction Jody made a discreet wave, but got no response.