She shook her head. “Lacy trees. That’s all I can say. Do you have time for me tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow morning?”
“Any time. I’ve got nothing to do but read old magazines and watch TV. Being alone in a big house is a lot more solitude than I’m used to.”
“Ken’s not around much?”
“Hardly at all. We’re planning to spend some time together over the weekend, maybe take a drive somewhere.”
Her hands were busy, fingers rubbing against one another.
“The third man,” she said. “He keeps his back to me the whole time. It’s frustrating. And all I can really see of the other one is the mustache.”
I went and got the copy of Terry Trafficant’s book, opened it to the rear flap, and showed her the author photo.
“No, definitely not. Sorry. His mustache is wimpy. Hairy Lip’s was big and dark and thick.”
She put the book down.
I said, “Could you describe him so someone could draw him?”
Her eyes closed again. Her squint looked painful. “I can see him but I can’t really describe his features—it’s as if I’m … handicapped. As if part of my brain is working, but I can’t translate what I see into words.”
She opened her eyes.
“I think I’d know him if I saw him, but I just can’t tell you anything more about him other than the mustache. I’m sorry—it’s not like actually seeing. More like images making their way into my mind. That sounds flaky, doesn’t it? Maybe I’m totally off base on all of it.”
“We’ll just take it as far as it goes, Lucy.”
“But I want to find out—for Karen’s sake.”
“It’s possible Karen has nothing to do with the dream.”
“She does,” she said quickly. “I feel it. I know that sounds as if I’m letting my imagination get out of control. But I’m not. I didn’t wish this upon myself. Why would I want to be dreaming about him?”
I didn’t answer.
“Okay,” she said. “We’ll just take it as it comes. Is today the day you go up to see him?”
“Today at one.”
She scratched her knee.
“Has that been on your mind?” I said.
“A bit.”
“Any change of heart about my meeting him?”
“No.… I guess I’m a little nervous—though why should I be? You’ll be dealing with it, not me.”
I left the house at twelve-thirty, turned off PCH at the red clapboard buildings of the Malibu Feed Bin, and headed up Topanga Canyon Road, cutting through the palisades.
The drought had stripped the mountains down to the chapparal, but last month’s freak rains had brought back some tender buds and the granite was freckled with weeds and wildflowers. Randomly planted eucalyptus appeared on the west side of the road. To the east was a gorge that deepened and darkened as I gained altitude.
There was little to break up the scenery for the first few miles other than an occasional shack or abandoned car. Then a scattering of small businesses appeared among dry, yellow clearings: a lumberyard, a general store and post office, a lean-to advertising magic crystals at discount.
At the top of the road was a fork that separated Old Topanga Road from the newer highway that led into the Valley. Both routes were empty.
The original Topanga settlers had been Californio homesteaders and New England gold panners, asking for little but beauty and riches and privacy. Their descendants still owned land in the canyon, and individualism remained the Topanga way.
During the sixties and seventies—the time of the Sanctum party—the hippies had invaded in giddy droves, living in caves, scrounging for food, and eliciting outrage the natives hadn’t known they had in them. Gary Hinman had a house in Topanga back then, as did lots of other musicians, and he was recording rock ’n’ roll tracks in his home studio when the Manson family murdered him.
No more hippies now. Most had wandered off, some had died from overdoses of freedom, a few had become transformed to Topanga burghers. But the canyon hadn’t turned into Levittown. Artists and writers and others who didn’t keep regular hours continued to homestake here, and I knew several professors and psychotherapists willing to brave the hour-plus drive to the city in order to return here at night. One of them, a man who studied the biochemistry of rage, once told me he’d come across a mountain lion in his back yard one night, savaging a raccoon and licking its chops.
“Scared the shit out of me, Alex, but it also took me to a higher spiritual level.”
I turned left onto the old road. The next couple of miles were darker and greener and cooler, shaded by sycamores, maples, willows, and alders that arched over the blacktop.
Pretty, lacy trees.
Houses appeared every hundred to two hundred feet, most of them modest and one-storied and set into vine-crusted glades. Those on the left side of the road sat behind a dry wash, accessible by footbridge or through old railroad boxcars turned into tunnels.
Mine was the only car on the road, and though I could smell horse manure, there were no steeds in sight. I pulled over and read the directions the woman had given me.
Look for a private road around three miles from the bridge, and a wooden sign to the east.
I drove a slow mile. There were several dirt paths cutting into the hillside on the east, all unmarked, and I made a couple of false starts before spotting a wooden sign nearly obscured by a heavy bank of scarlet honeysuckle.
S NC M
The road, if you could call it that, was an acutely slanting dirt path lined with elderberry and ferns and sugar bush. I traveled a thousand feet of kidney-jarring, hairpin solitude. The trees, here, were thick-trunked and hypertrophied, the brush beyond them impenetrable. The growth was so thick that branches scraped the roof of the car, and in some places the vegetation sprouted in the center of the road and brushed the Seville’s underbody.
Soon I heard the high-note trickle of a stream. Groundwater. That explained the lushness during the drought. Looking for trees here would be like searching for pedestrians in Times Square.
A couple of turns, then I saw a two-piece gate up ahead. Heavy-duty chicken wire framed by planks of weathered redwood.
Latched, but not locked.
I got out, freed the bolt, and swung both gates open. They were heavy and rusty and left brown grit on my hands.
Another five hundred feet. Another gate, a twin of the first. Beyond it was a big, low-slung, lodge-type building flanked by enormous bristlecone pines and backed by a forest of more pines and firs and coast redwood. The roof was green asphalt shingle, the walls, logs.
I parked in the dirt, between a black Jeep Cherokee and an old white Mercedes convertible. A row of iron hitching posts fronted the lodge. Behind it, wide wooden steps led to a wraparound porch shaded by the eaves of the building and set up with a few bent-willow chairs. The cushions on the chairs were blue floral and mildewed. The windows of the lodge were gray with dust.
Flat, thick silence; then a squirrel scampered across the porch, stopped, and shimmied up a rain gutter.
I climbed the stairs and knocked on the front door. Nothing happened for a while; then it was pulled open and a woman looked out at me.
Thirty-five or so, five-seven, with straight, shoulder-length black hair parted in the middle and painted with copper highlights. Her face was a tan oval, the skin smooth as fresh notepaper, the jawline crisp. She wore second-skin black leggings under a bright green, oversized, sleeveless T-shirt. Her arms were bronze and smooth, her feet bare, her eyes orange-brown.
She had the kind of face that would photograph beautifully: perfectly aligned, slightly oversized features. Both ears were double-pierced.
“Dr. Delaware?” she said in a bored voice. “I’m Nova.”
She waved me into a gigantic main room furnished with sagging tweed couches and thrift-shop tables and chairs. To the right was a clumsy, narrow staircase. The grubby plank flooring was covered haphazardly with colorless
rugs. The ceiling was beamed with more planks and raw logs, and each beige stucco wall bore two large windows. Plenty of furniture and still enough room to dance. Along the rear wall, beyond the stairs, what had once been a reception desk had been turned into a wet bar crammed with bottles. On either side of the bar were doors.
The walls were covered with scores of mounted animal heads: deer, moose, fox, bear, a snarling puma, lacquered trout with their vital statistics engraved on plaques. All the specimens looked moth-eaten and tired, almost goofy. One was particularly grotesque—a gray, lumpy, porcine thing with Quasimodo features and yellow mandibular fangs that hooked over a sneering upper lip.
“Wally Warthog,” said Nova, stopping next to a serape-covered couch.
“Good-looking fellow.”
“Charming.”
“Does Mr. Lowell hunt?”
She gave a staccato laugh. “Not with a gun. These came with the place and he kept them. He planned to add some of his own—critics and reviewers.”
“Never bagged any, huh?”
Her face got hard. “Wait here, I’ll tell him you’ve arrived. If you need to, fix yourself something to drink.”
She walked off toward the left-hand door. I went over to the bar. Empty bottles lined the floor. Premium brands, mostly. On the counter were eight or nine cheap glasses that hadn’t seen water recently. An old refrigerator was filled with mixers. I washed a glass and poured myself some tonic water, then returned to the center of the huge room. As I sat on a needlepoint rocker, dust shot up. In front of me was a coffee table with nothing on it. I waited and drank for ten minutes; then the door opened.
CHAPTER
28
His face appeared two feet lower than I expected. He was sitting in a wheelchair, pushed by Nova.
The famous face, long and hatchet-jawed, with a bulbous nose and deep, dark eyes under shelf brows, now white. His hair was gray-black, worn past his shoulders and held together with a beaded band: the Venerable Chief look. His skin, liver-spotted and creased, was as rough as the ceiling beams.
My eyes dropped to his body. Wasted and spindle-limbed, reduced to almost nothing above the belt-line.
He wore a long-sleeved white shirt and dark pants. Everything bagged and sagged, and though the trouser fabric was heavy wool, I could see his kneecaps shining through. His feet were encased in cloth bedroom slippers. His hands were huge and white and grasping, dangling from the thin wrists like dying sunflowers.
As Nova propelled him forward, he glared at me. The chair was an old-fashioned manual, and it squeaked and wrinkled the rug. She positioned him opposite me.
“Need anything?”
He didn’t answer and she left.
He kept glowering.
I gave him a pleasantly blank look.
“Good-looking piece of veal, aren’t you? If I was a fag, I’d fuck you.”
“That assumes a lot.”
He threw back his head and laughed. His cheeks were flaccid and they shook. He had most of his teeth, but they were dark and discolored.
“You’d let me,” he said. “Without hesitation. You’re a starfucker; that’s why you’re here.”
I said nothing. Despite his crippled body and the size of the room, I began to feel hemmed in.
“What’s in the glass?” he said.
“Tonic water.”
He gave a disgusted look and said, “Put it down and pay attention. I’m in pain, and I don’t have time for any lumpen-yuppie bullshit.”
I placed the glass on a table.
“Okay, Little Dutch Boy, tell me who the hell you are and what qualifies you to be treating my daughter.”
I gave him a brief oral résumé.
“Very impressive, you now qualify for a variable-rate mortgage of your IQ. If you’re so smart, why didn’t you become a real doctor? Cut into the cortex and get to the root of matter.”
“Why didn’t you?”
He pitched forward, winced, and cursed violently. Gripping the armpieces of the chair, he managed to shift slightly to the left. “William Carlos Williams was a doctor and he tried to be a poet. Somerset Maugham was a doctor and he tried to be a writer. Both sour, pretentious fucks. Mix-and-match works only in women’s fashions; something’s got to ebb, something’s got to flow.”
I nodded.
His eyes widened and he grinned. “Go ahead, patronize me, pricklet. I can chew up anything you serve me, digest it for my own benefit, and shit it back at you as high-density compost timbales.”
He licked his lips and tried to spit. Nothing came out of his mouth.
“I’m interested,” he said, “in certain aspects of medicine. Cabala, not calculus.… A fool I knew in college became a surgeon. I met him, years later, at a party teeming with starfuckers, and the pin-brain looked happier than ever. His work; there was no other reason for him to be satisfied. I got him talking about it, and the bloodier he got, the more ecstatic—if words were jism, I’d have been soaked. And do you know what brought the greatest joy to his dysphemistic face? Describing the scummy details of exploratory surgery, while eating a cocktail frank. Cracking open the bones, tying off the veins, swan-diving into the heat and jelly of a stinking, cancerous body cavity.”
He raised his hands to nipple level and turned the palms up. “He said the greatest fun was holding living organs in his hands, feeling their pulse, smelling their steam. He was a yawny idiot, but he had the power to flex a wrist and rip spleens and livers and shit-filled guts out of someone else’s flesh-ark.”
He let his hands fall. He was breathing hard, the remnants of his chest heaving. “That’s what interests me about medicine. Dropping a nuclear bomb on certain individuals interests me, too, but I’d never waste my time studying physics. Man Ray once said perfect art would kill an observer upon first glance. Damned near close to universal truth. Not bad for a photographer, and a kike. Delaware … that’s not a kike name, is it?”
“No. And it’s not wop or nigger or spic, either.”
His mouth ticced and he laughed again, but it seemed obligatory.
“Look what we have here, a wit—at least by half. A fucking yuppie halfwit—you’re the future, aren’t you? Off-the-rack Gentleman’s Farterly suits pretending to be bespoke. Politically correct careerism masquerading as moral duty—do you drive a Beemer? Or a Baby Benz? Either way, Hitler would be proud, though I don’t imagine you’ve ever studied history. Do you know who Hitler was? Are you aware that he didn’t drive a Buick? That Eichmann worked for Mercedes-Benz while hiding out in Argentina—do you know who the fuck Eichmann was?”
Remembering the white convertible out front, I said, “I drive American.”
“How patriotic. Did you get it from Daddy?”
I didn’t answer, thinking suddenly of my father, never able to afford a new car.…
“Daddy’s dead, isn’t he? Was he a would-be doctor, too?”
“A machinist,” I said.
“Tool and die—he tooled, then he died. Tut-tut. So you’re a blue-collar hero. Shaky-kneed arriviste by way of the public school system. First in the family to go to college and all that, a Kiwanis club scholarship, no doubt. Mommy’s so proud in her Formica prison—is she dead, too?”
I stood up and began walking to the door.
“Oh!” he bellowed after me. “Oh, I’ve offended him; five minutes and he’s running off to puke in the bushes, the fortitude of a mayfly!”
I half turned my head and smiled at him. “Not at all, it’s just boring. The shape you’re in, you should know life’s too short for small talk.”
His face incandesced with rage. He waited until I’d opened the door and stepped out onto the porch.
“Fuck you and fuck your charwoman mother on a Formica counter! Walk out, now, and you’ll eat my shit in a soufflé before I give you my insights.”
“Do you really have any?” I said, with my back to him.
“I know why the girl tried to kill herself.”
I heard squeaks, turned
, and saw him wheeling himself forward very slowly. He stopped and spun the chair, finally managing to turn his back on me. His hair hung in greasy strands. Either Nova wasn’t much of a caretaker or he didn’t allow her to groom him.
“Fix me a drink, Cubby, and maybe I’ll share my wisdom with you. None of that single-malt swill you yuppie pricks go for—give me blended. Everything in life is blended; nothing stands on its own.” Spinning again, he faced me. I thought he looked relieved that I was still there.
“What’s yellow and red, yellow and red, yellow and red?” he said.
“What?” I said.
“Jap in a blender, hawf, hawf—and don’t give me that look of outrage, you buttoned-down poot. I fought in the only war that counted and saw what those scrawny-dicked monkey-men are capable of. Did you know they used to peel the faces off the Allied prisoners? Marinate human hearts and kidneys in teriyaki sauce and barbecue them? There’s your sushi bar for you. Truman dry-roasted the buck-toothed capuchins, only good thing that exophthalmic rag-pimp ever did. Stop standing there, gawking like a virgin sailor at wet pussy, and fix me a fine blended drink before I tire of you beyond the point of forgiveness!”
I went to the wet bar and found a bottle of Chivas, almost empty. As I poured, he said, “Know how to read?”
I had no intention of answering. But he didn’t wait for a reply.
“Ever read anything I wrote?”
I named a few titles.
“Did you have to write term papers on them?”
“A few.”
“What grades did you get?”
“I passed.”
“Then fuck you, you didn’t understand a thing.”
I brought him his drink. He drained it and held out his glass. I refilled it. He took longer with the second drink, staring at the whisky, sipping, lifting a leg, and passing gas with satisfaction. I thought of all he’d written about heroism and finally understood the word fiction.
He tossed the glass away. His throw was weak, and the tumbler landed near the wheel of his chair and rolled on the rug.
He said, “The girl tried to end it all because she’s empty. No passion, no pain, no reason to keep going. So anything you do with her will be worthless. You might as well be psychoanalyzing a tadpole in order to prevent its froggy fate. I, on the other hand, have a surplus of passion. Spilling over, as it were.” He made slurping sounds. “The only thing that can save her is getting to know me.”
Four Classic Alex Delaware Thrillers 4-Book Bundle Page 153
