Some shower scene.
Her skin still burned with the rashes raised by the knife ... with the little blisters made when the lights boiled the water on her shoulders. The sores scraped open and leaked as she was wrapped in a torn curtain, packaged like carved meat, suitable for dumping in a swamp.
She was uncomfortable in her clothes. She might never be comfortable in her clothes again.
If she kept driving North (by North-West?), she’d hit San Francisco ... city of ups and downs ... But before then, she’d need to sleep.
Not in a motel. Not after this week’s work.
Her blouse was soaked through. No amount of towelling would ever get her dry.
“Do you swallow, Jayne ... do you?”
The soles of her feet were ridged, painful to stand on.
“I spy ... with my little eye ... something beginning wi-i-i-ith ... P.”
Pigeon? Psychopath? Perkins?
“Pudenda!”
Every time the crotch-skin came off, Hitch sprung another letter on her ... another word for vagina. F. C.T Q. P. M.
M for Mousehole? Whoever said that?
Sometimes Hitch took the knife himself and got in close. He said Perkins wasn’t holding it right, was stabbing like a fairy ...
Perkins’s eyes narrowed at that. They didn’t slide over Jayne’s body like Hitch’s, or any of the other guys on the crew.
... but it was an excuse.
The director just plain liked sticking it to a naked woman.
Any woman? Or just Jayne?
He’d have preferred doing it to Janet, because she was a Star. Really, he’d have wanted to stab Grace Kelly or Ingrid Bergman, who were more than Stars. But he’d make do with Jayne Swallow ... or Jana Wrobel ... or some blonde off the street.
Oh, he never touched her with anything that wasn’t sharp. Never even shook hands.
“How do you shake hands with a naked lady?” he’d asked, when they were introduced - she’d been cast from cheesecake 8 x 10s, without an audition - on set. How indeed? Or was that his way of avoiding physical contact with her? Did he not trust himself?
Others had auditioned, she learned ... but turned him down. They’d found out what he wanted and preferred not to be a part of it. Blondes who did naked pin-ups, strippers, girls who did stag films ... they didn’t want to be cut up in a shower, even with Janet Leigh’s head on top of their bodies.
So, Jayne Swallow.
Scree! Scree! Scree!
Now, she really had what Hitch wanted ... and he’d have to pay more than scale to get it back. But it wasn’t the money. That wasn’t her MacGuffin. She wanted something else. What? Revenge? Retribution? To be treated like a person rather than a broken doll?
It wasn’t just Hitch. She stood in for Janet Leigh. He stood in for everyone who’d cut her.
Since driving off the lot, she’d been seeing him everywhere. In the broken side-mirror, through the misted-over rear window. In every film, there he was, somewhere. If only in a photo on the wall. Unmistakable, of course. That fat, double bass-belly ... that caricature silhouette ... doleful, little-boy eyes like raisins in uncooked dough ... the loose cheeks, like Droopy in the cartoons ... that comb-over wisp.
He was waiting for a bus. He was smoking a cigar. He was getting a shoe-shine. He was wearing a too-big cowboy hat. He was smirking in a billboard ad for an all-you-can-scoff restaurant. He was fussing with dogs. He was the odd short fat boy out in a police line-up of tall, thin, unshaven crooks. He was up on a bell-tower, with a high-powered rifle. He was in a closet, with a bag full of sharp, sharp knives. He was in the back seat with a rope. He wore white editor’s gloves to handle his murder weapons.
She looked at the mirror, and saw no one there.
Nothing beginning with H.
But there was a shape in the road, flapping. She swerved to avoid it.
A huge gull, one wing snapped. The storm had driven it ashore.
It was behind her now. Not road-kill, but a road casualty. Suitable for stuffing and mounting.
Hitch said that about Marion Crane too, in a line he’d wanted in the script but not snuck past the censors. They were Jesuits, used to playing word games with clever naughty schoolboys.
Birds ... Crane, Swallow ... suitable for stuffing and mounting.
Another dark shape came out of the rain and gained on the car. A man on a motorcycle. A wild one? Like Brando. No, a highway cop. He wore a helmet and a rain-slicker. Water poured in runnels off the back of his cape. It looked like a set of folded, see-through wings. His goggles were like big glass eyes.
Her heart-rate raced.
... stop, thief!
Had the studio called the cops yet? Had Hitch denounced her sabotage?
“I’ll take it out of her fine sweet flesh,” Hitch would say. “Every pound of meat, every inch of skin!”
She was a thief. Not like Cary Grant, suave and calculating ... but a purse-snatcher, vindictive and desperate ... taking something not because it was valuable to her but because it was valuable to the person she’d stolen from.
The cop signalled her to pull over.
He had a gun. She didn’t. She was terrified.
Cops weren’t your friends.
She’d found that out the minute she got off the bus in Los Angeles. She’d been young and innocent then, with a hometown photo-studio portfolio and a notion to get into the movies. She learned fast. Cops locked you up when you hadn’t done anything. Cops squeezed the merchandise and extracted fines which didn’t involve money. They let the big crooks walk free and cracked down on the hustlers. They always busted the wrong man. Beat patrolmen, vice dicks, harness bulls, traffic cops. The enemy.
Her brakes weren’t good. It took maybe thirty yards to pull over. With a sound like a scream in the rain.
The wipers still ticked as the motor idled. The screech slowed.
In the rear-view, she saw the cop unstraddle his ride. The rain poured off his helmet, goggles, cape, boots. He strode through the storm towards her. He wasn’t like the city cops she’d met, bellies bulging over their belts, flab-rolls easing around their holstered guns. He was Jimmy Stewart lean, snake-hipped. A cowboy with an armoured skullcap.
If she put on a burst of speed, would she leave him here?
No, he’d catch her. Or she’d go off the cliff into the Pacific.
The knuckle rap came at her window. The cop didn’t bend down. She saw the leather jacket through his transparent slicker. A wild one, after all.
She tried to roll the window down and the handle came off. It did sometimes, but there was a trick to fixing it back. She didn’t bother with the trick. She opened the door, first a crack, then halfway, using it to shield against the rain, and ducked her head out to look up at the cop.
His goggles gave him the eyes of Death.
Two little television sets strapped to his face, playing the opening of that show. Dump-da-dumpity-dump-da-dump ... there Hitch was, in a fright-wig, being funny, holding a noose or a big bottle with POISON stamped on it. A non-speaking woman boiling in a pot or strapped to a saw-horse.
“Good eeev-ning,” he said.
Not Hitch, the cop. And not with a British accent.
She waited for it. The come-on. Tonight’s stawww-ry.
“Going mighty fast?” “Where’s the fire, lady?” “The way you look, the things you do to a man ... that ought to be against the law ...” “See what you’ve done to my night-stick, ma’am ...” “Swallow, huh? Well...?”
“Licence and registration?”
He was unreadable. Not a movie cop.
She didn’t ask what she’d done wrong. She knew enough not to open up that debate. She found her documents, sodden and fragile as used tissue, in the glove compartment.
Whenever she showed her papers, she was irrationally afraid they’d turn out to be false - or the cop would say they were. That blanket of guilt was impossible to shuck, even when she ha
dn’t had things to feel guilty about. She knew these papers were legit, but they weren’t in the name she was using. In the photo on her driver’s licence, Jana wasn’t as blonde as Jayne.
Her papers got wetter as the cop looked them over.
“Wrobel,” he said, pronouncing it properly.
Then he asked her something in Polish. Which she didn’t speak.
She shrugged.
“Not from the Old Country, then?”
It might as well have been Transylvania.
“Santa Rosa, originally,” she admitted.
“Hollywood, now,” he said, clocking her address.
She was too cold to give him a pin-up smile. Usually, cops asked if she was in pictures ... she must be too bedraggled for that now.
“You must be in pictures ... dirty pictures,” was the usual line. Said with a grin, and a hitch of the belt buckle into the gut.
“You must be in pictures ... horror pictures,” was the new take. “You must be in pictures ... Alfred Hitchcock pictures.”
“Watch your driving,” the cop actually said. “This is accident weather. How far have you got to go?”
She had no definite idea, but said, “San Francisco.”
“You won’t make it by nightfall. I’d stop. Check into a motel.”
“That makes sense, sir.”
“No need for ‘sir’. ‘Officer’ will do.”
The cop’s skin, under the rain, was greyish. This weather greyed everything out, like a black-and-white movie. The hillside mud should have been red, like blood ... but it washed over the road like coffee grounds. Dark.
“Makes sense, officer.”
“Good girl,” he said, returning her licence and registration.
A motel. Not likely. When Hitch’s film came out, people wouldn’t check into motels without thinking twice. People wouldn’t take showers. Or climb stairs. Or go into fruit cellars. Or trust young men with twitchy smiles who liked to stuff (and mount) birds.
If the film came out now. She might have scratched that.
The cop turned and walked back to his motorcycle. Rain on his back, pouring down his neck.
Why had he stopped her? Suspicion, of course. But of what?
The theft couldn’t have been reported yet. Might not be until Monday morning. Word couldn’t be out. This cop wasn’t rousting a woman motorist for kicks, like they usually did. Maybe he was just concerned? There had to be some cops like that...
While she had the door open, water rained in. Her shoes were soaked.
She pulled the door shut and tried to start the car. The motor seized up and died. Then choked, then drew out a death scene like Charles Laughton, then caught again ... and she drove on.
Damn, December night fell quick.
Now, she was driving through dark and rain. The road ahead was as murky as a poverty-row back-projection plate. Her right headlight was on the fritz, winking like a lecher at a co-ed.
The cop was right. She had to pull over. If she slept in this leaky car, she’d drown. If she drove on, she’d end up in the sea. The Ford Custom did not come with an optional lifeboat. She wasn’t sure hers even had a usable spare tyre.
Through blobby cascades on the windshield, she saw a flashing light.
VACANCY.
A motel. She remembered her vow. No motels, never again ... she knew, really, there was little chance of being butchered by a homicidal maniac. That was just the movies. Still, there was every chance of running into a travelling salesman or an off-duty cop or an overage wild one, and being cajoled or strong-armed or blackmailed into a room with cheap liquor and “Que Sera Sera” on the radio. The ending to that story would surprise no one.
She’d been photographed in motel rooms. She’d been interviewed in motel rooms. She’d auditioned for movie projects that didn’t really exist. If some dentist wanted to call himself a producer and play casting-couch games, he hooked on to a script about giant leeches or dragstrip dolls just to set up his own private orgy. She’d checked into a motel with a young actor - not Tony Perkins, but someone a few steps behind him - and posed for bedroom candids leaked to the scandal sheets to squelch whispers that the rising stud preferred beach boys to bikini babes. In print, they put a black bar across her eyes.
She’d been abandoned in motels, too ... left with bills for booze and damages. Some guys couldn’t have a party without breaking a lamp or knocking a picture off the wall. Or hurting someone, just to hear the squeal and see blood on their knuckles.
VACANCY.
The light flashed like a cliff-top lantern on a cliff in a three-cornered hat picture, luring storm-tossed ships on to the rocks to be looted.
She was more likely to die on the road than in this place.
So, she pulled off the highway and bumped downhill into a parking lot. There were other cars there. The lights were on in a single-storey building.
HACIENDA HAYSLIP.
Like every other place in California, this motel impersonated an Old Spanish Mission - protruding beams, fake adobe, concrete cactus, a neon sombrero over the name.
Once, the Pacific was the far edge of the world. The Jesuits got here first, even before the bandits. Jayne had been to Catholic school. She was more afraid of priests than outlaws. Priests were worse than cops. Beyond the shadow of a doubt. Cops just played the game by rules which favoured them. Priests took the same liberties, but told you it was God’s will that you got robbed or rousted or raped.
She parked as near the office as possible and made a dash from her car to the lit-up shelter. By now, she couldn’t get much wetter.
Pushing through the front door, she was enveloped by heat. The office was built around an iron stove which radiated oppressive warmth. Windows were steamed up. Viennese waltz music came from an old-fashioned record player.
In a rocking chair by the stove sat a small thin woman, knitting. On a stool behind the front desk perched a fat young man, reading a comic book. They both turned to look at her. She must be a fright. Something the cat would drag in.
“Arthur,” said the woman, “see to the customer ...”
Her voice was like a parrot’s, chirruping words it couldn’t understand. The thin woman had a grating, shrill tone and another British accent... a comedy fishwife or a slum harridan. Cockney. Jayne had heard other Englishmen say Hitch was a cockney. He went tight around the collar if it was said to his loose-jowled face. It was a put-down, she guessed - like “polack” or “hunkie”. David Niven and Peter Lawford weren’t cockneys. Cary Grant for sure wasn’t a cockney. Hitch was, and so was this woman who had somehow fetched up on the far side of the world, in the country of Jesuits and outlaws and Indians and gold-diggers.
“In the fullness of time, Mahmah,” said the fat young man.
He didn’t sound cockney. He had a James Mason or George Sanders voice. A suave secret agent, a bit of a rogue ... but coming out of a bloated, cherubic face, that accent was all wrong. Jayne wondered if Arthur was another fairy. Was that why mother and son - “Mahmah” must mean “Mother” - had said goodbye Piccadilly and farewell Leicester Square?
She stood there, dripping and steaming.
Arthur finished reading to the end of the page, lips moving as he mouthed the balloons. Then he neatly folded over the top corner and shut the comic. Journey Into Mystery. He tidied it away with a stack of similar publications, shuffling so the edges were straight as if he had just finished an exam and wanted his desk neat.
“What might the Hacienda Hayslip do for you, madam?”
“A room, for the night.”
“Nocturnal refuge? Most fortuitous. We do indeed rent rooms, nightly. Have you a reservation?”
Before she could answer, his mother piped up ... “A reservation! What does she look like, a squaw? Who ever has a reservation, Arthur?”
“Formalities must be observed, Mahmah. Did you, madam, have the foresight to contact us by telephone or telegram ... or is this more in
the manner of an impromptu stopover?”
“The second thing,” she said.
“Spur of the moment? Fortunate for you, then, that one or two of our luxury cabins are unoccupied at present and can therefore be put at your disposal... are you of a superstitious or numero-logical bent?”
She shook her head.
“Don’t give her Thirteen,” said the old woman.
Arthur sucked his cupid’s bow lips between his teeth, making his mouth into a puckered slit. He was thoughtful or annoyed.
Psychomania: Killer Stories Page 57
