It was very cool, almost cold, going down. The stairs were oddly proportioned, narrow and awkwardly deep, with a curve to the left. The walls were unpainted plaster, slightly damp to the touch. When I rounded the curve, I saw a small door that might have been taken from a submarine. It was rounded and seemed to be made of iron, and it had a tiny window in it. A sliding metal bar, sufficient to lock it from outside, was pushed to one side.
From some rarely visited corner of my memory an image floated up. Something from first grade, something that brought back a sense of pressure on my knees and something hard over my head, a memory that was full of fear and also a kind of excitement. I reached for the iron door and pulled it open, and as it creaked on its hinges I remembered that the thing under my knees was the floor and the thing above my head was a school desk, and the memory was the vestige of a “drop” drill. What I was entering was a bomb shelter.
You still find them here and there in California, underground temples to the nuclear paranoia of the fifties. Absolutely secure, absolutely soundproof. And even before I found the light switch and looked at the blank white walls, I knew where I was. I was in obedience school.
The room was little, as it would have to have been: its whitewashed walls were concrete, at least four feet thick, and it had been built inside what had originally been a not-very-large basement. The floor was a cold concrete slab. The temperature couldn't have been more than fifty. It was colder than the morgue.
Woofers let out a questioning whine above me. “Come on,” I said, suddenly wanting company. After a moment I heard her nails on the stairs.
The room was close to empty. There was a long cheap Formica table against one wall, entirely bare. Each of its four metal legs stood in the center of one-half of a pair of handcuffs. The cuffs circling the table legs were snapped shut but the other cuff in each pair was open. The table was certainly the podium on which Birdie held his graduation ceremonies. Near the opposite wall stood a Polaroid Spectra System camera on an expensive tripod. Aside from the table there was no furniture.
Set into the wall next to the door were three sets of recessed shelves, probably originally intended to hold canned goods and bottled water but now stacked with cardboard cartons full of odds and ends. One of them held Christmas decorations, little lights to make Birdie's house twinkle, and wrapping paper and ribbons. There were also old athletic shoes, garden supplies, extra detergent, and other homely junk that Birdie had stowed down here now that most people acknowledged that the threat of atomic attack was less pressing than the need to wrap presents, wash dishes, and prune roses.
There were also two doors.
The first led to a closet, no more than four feet by four feet. There were no shelves in it; it was just a tiny room. The door had the same kind of metal bar across its outside, and a small grate had been positioned just above the floor, probably to let in air. A perfect place to lock people in the dark. The children had usually been naked, Marco had said. Naked and freezing in a lightless, comfortless concrete room.
The second door opened into a small bathroom with the kind of awkward plastic toilet they put on boats, and a tiled shower. This was where Aimee had hit high C for the tape recorder while scalding water flowed over her body.
I reclosed the bathroom door and the door to the closet and took a long last look at the room, trying to remember whether I'd moved or changed anything else. Woofers, who had been trembling slightly and keeping very close to me, sat on my right foot. She looked up at me anxiously, ready to go back upstairs.
As I leaned down to pick her up, she got off my foot and stood on her hind legs, doing an eager little dance. She was absurdly light. I wrapped an arm around her and she licked my chin as I headed toward the door.
On impulse, I reached out as I passed the Polaroid and pushed the shutter button. A flash bounced off the white walls and as I strained to get my iris open again the camera went nnnnzzzet and a picture slid out of it. A negative image of my retina slid across the picture's surface as I waited for it to develop, and Woofers squirmed in my arms. Thirty seconds later I was looking at an absolutely white Polaroid except for a hard brown edge running along the bottom of the photo: the white was the wall, and the brown edge was the top of the Formica table.
I stopped worrying about Birdie coming home. The boxes on the shelves beckoned to me, and I put the dog down and rifled through them. Christmas lights, Christmas wrappings, Christmas paper; an old set of silver-backed hairbrushes, odds and ends, decorator trinkets that had outlived their appeal on the tabletops upstairs, a wooden box about eight inches square, with an inlaid lid. Inside the wooden box, cigars. The bows on Woofers' ears came loose with a single tug on each and dangled forlornly on either side of her face. I found a bright preglued red wrapping bow that clashed nicely with the ribbons on her ears, peeled off the backing, and pressed the square of adhesive onto her nose. It held. The transformation was amazing. In a few seconds she'd gone from being Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink to Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? She had the grace to look embarrassed.
When I mussed up her hair, she seemed to enjoy it. She took a couple of passes at the bow on her nose with her front paws, but stopped when I said, “No, Woofers.” By then I was looking at the Polaroid camera. It had everything I wanted, which is to say two more pictures and a time-release button.
I put Woofers on the table, told her to stay, and positioned the lever on the time release. Then I took a cigar out of Birdie's box, pushed the shutter, and went to the table. I patted Woofers on the head as the time release whirred away, lifted her front paws, turned my head away, and pushed the unlit cigar into the middle of her belly. “Coochy-coo,” I said. She was wagging her tail, enjoying the game, when the flash went off.
It hadn't been necessary to turn my head because I was cut off at the shoulders. The image was perfect, a bedraggled, drunk-looking little dog with a big cigar pointed squarely at her lower intestine. I put everything back the way it was, tucked Woofers into my jacket, and left.
Bertram Skinker was going to sweat.
23 - The Neutron Bomb
“S he's so cute,” Jessica trilled. “Where did you get her?” Morris stood in the doorway behind her, slightly spectral in the daylight. I'd never seen him before without a green glow on his face. He seemed to have brought some of it with him. Jessica or someone had gotten him to wear a shirt with only one pocket for a change, but the one pocket bristled with esoteric writing implements. He held a big white book tucked under his sharp elbow. From where I sat, on the floor playing with Woofers, it looked like an upscale Yellow Pages—the one-hundred-percent-white pages, perhaps, designed for neighborhoods where no one who was yellow—or brown or black, for that matter—lived.
’Tm taking care of her for a friend,” I lied. Woofers pranced from me to Jessica and back, groomed and immac-late in the morning light, the perfect dog for the perfect neighborhood where everything could be found in the white pages, and happy to be the center of attention. I found myself hoping that Birdie missed her more than she missed him.
“Jessica,” I said, “I don't mean to be rude, but I don't actually recall asking you to come over. And do Annie and Wyatt know where you are?”
“Oh, don't be a grump. Of course they do. And wait until you see why we've come. When you write the story of your life, I want credit. Jesus, Morris, come in, won't you? You can't spend your whole life hovering. And close the door.”
Morris did what he was told, muttering something when he turned his back to pull the door shut.
“Say what?” Jessica said. “And tuck in your shirt.”
“I said I get some credit too,” Morris said, blushing horribly and fiddling behind his back. At least the blush filled in his zits.
“Fine, fine,” Jessica said dismissively. “But me first. What's her name?”
“Woofers.”
She wrinkled her nose. “That's terrible. Can't we give her a different name?”
“You can call
her Gladys for all I care. What's everybody claiming credit for?”
Jessica looked slyly at Morris and then back at me. “This,” she said, pulling a creased and slightly damp piece of paper out of her belt. She opened it and smoothed it on the floor in front of me, and Woofers, sensing my attention the way a cat can, sat on it. I picked her up and dropped her to one side, eliciting a compassionate squeal from Jessica.
I'd seen the printout before, but not quite in this form. It now looked like this:
Record 1. (April 88-October 88)
1. 3088 Compton Blvd., Bellflower, CA 90266 (213) 555-1296
2. 4 yrs
3. Turkey (code name?)
4. CURRENT
5. ORDERS
a. Fingers, 1200 orders, last order 1000 (September 13)
b. Parts, 2800 orders, last order 2300 (September 13)
c. Paper, 4000 orders, last order 3300 (September 13)
d. Drinks, “A” category (no change) (September 11)
6. SPECIAL ORDERS
a. Page 188, upper right, January 88 (April 22-April 27) JX6
b. Page 217, center right, June 87 (May 17-May 22) CP1
c. Page 217, center right, January 88 (May 23-May 29) UI
d. Page 202, upper left, June 87 (unavailable) BX
e. Page 226, upper right, January 88 (July Í-July 11) BX
f. Page 226, upper right, January 88 (July 12-July 18) UI
g. Page 217, center left, January 88 (October 1-October 10) BX
“Page numbers?” I asked. “Says who?”
“It's a book,” Jessica said triumphantly. “They're all in a book. It comes out every six months.” Morris took a tentative step forward, eager to put in an introvert's one cent's worth.
“What book?” I asked.
The phone rang.
I waved them into silence and picked it up. “Hello?”
“Mr. Grist?” It was Jane Sorrell. She was trying to push beyond a whisper, but without much success.
“Mrs. Sorrell. What's happening?”
“She's not back,” Jane Sorrell said in a rigid monotone. “She's not back and no one has phoned. She was supposed to ... she was supposed to be back last . . .” A ring clacked against the mouthpiece, and she made a sound like a retch. “No one has ... has . . .”
“Please, Mrs. Sorrell. Hang on to yourself. It isn't over yet.”
“Oh, yes,” she said, “yes, it is. They've got her, they've killed her, I'll never see—”
“I don't think they've killed her,” I said. She made crumpled, wispy little sounds into the other end of the line. “She's too valuable to them. They're not going to kill her unless they have to.”
Jessica and Morris exchanged wide-eyed stares. Even Woofers was watching me, her brown eyes alert and sympathetic.
“Valuable?” said a new voice, a tougher voice. “What do you mean, valuable?”
“Aurora, is that you?”
“Who else would it be, Donder and Blitzen?”
“Aurora, take care of your mother. I think I know where Aimee is.” I didn't, but I knew how to find out.
“You do?” she said skeptically. “I'll believe it when you bring her home. So what's so valuable?”
“Listen,” I said, gesturing toward Jessica to give me the pad and pencil next to the computer, “give me the address where you sent the money.”
“Mom?” Aurora said. Jessica grabbed the pad and handed it to me, yanking a pen out of the bouquet in the pocket of Morris’ shirt. He had about eight left.
“I don't know,” Jane Sorrell said. She sounded wet.
“Of course you do,” Aurora said authoritatively. “You wrote it down.”
“Where is she?” her mother asked me.
“Here. Here in L. A. Have you got the address?” I clicked Morris’ pen a few times. Different-colored tips kept coming out.
“We know she's in L.A.,” Aurora said. “Haven't you got anything new?”
“That'll have to wait,” I said. “What's the address?”
“I don't know why we shouldn't just call the cops,” Aurora said.
My hands were perspiring, and I tucked the phone between neck and shoulder and wiped my palms on my pants. “Don't. Believe me, don't.”
“Why not?” Aurora's voice was challenging.
I tossed a mental coin. Like most mental coins, it landed on its edge. “Because some of them may be in on it,” I said.
There was a long, tense silence.
“How do we know that?” Aurora finally asked.
“You don't. You can't. Hang up,” I said. “Hang up and call them. But if you do, don't ever call me again. And whatever you do, don't give them my name.”
“You could be manufacturing business,” Aurora said. “We call the cops, we don't need you.”
“Aurora. You don't really believe that.”
She exhaled noisily into the phone. She could have been blowing her nose. I remembered that she was just a little girl. “Mom,” she said after drawing a deep sigh, “give him the address.”
“I've got it,” Jane Sorrell said shakily. “Do you have a pencil?”
“Go.” I'd decided on the red point.
“Eleven-six-eighty-six Altham Street. Los Angeles.”
“Zip?” The red point wrote blue.
”Nine-oh-three-five-two. ’ ’
“Airport,” I said.
“What?” I couldn't tell which one it was.
“That's near the airport. I'll call you.”
“When?” Aurora said.
“When I've got something worth telling you. Good-bye.” I hung up. Airport. That was a long way from Hollywood.
Morris was regarding me as though I were some newly ambitious life form that had just crawled ashore. Anything with the word “killed” in it was outside his frame of reference, as it should have been. Jessica was trying to look nonchalant. “People are dying,” I said. “What's the book?”
Jessica looked at Morris. “Remember in Mrs. Brussels' office?” she began.
“You already won the laurel wreath,” I said. “Spare me the play-by-play. Wait,” I said, suddenly recalling the agent's agitation. In my excitement I snapped Morris’ pen in half and four ball-point-pen barrels scattered to the points of the compass like a literary multiple-warhead missile. “The Actors' Directory.”
“U.r.,” said Jessica, beckoning to Morris, “means upper right.” He handed her the book and she pried it open. “Recognize him?”
She put the book on the floor and pointed to a photo in the upper right. It was her tennis player, the one she'd described as “Cute.”
“Yeah,” I said. “So?”
“Mr. Kale, right?”
“Right,” I said, suppressing an urge to strangle her.
“So he's middle left, in the center of the left-hand page. Look upper right.”
A little girl beamed up at me. Kimberly Winter, it said under the photo, Age: 11. “Oh, Jesus,” I said. “Sure. I should have thought of it.”
“She's her agent,” Jessica said. “Mrs. Brussels. I was the one who figured it out, but Morris had the book. His father is in TV.”
“And the others?”
“This is the January 1988 book,” Morris said. “All the ones that say one-eighty-eight are here, right where they should be, and she's the agent for all of them. Check it out. We've already folded down the pages.”
I went down the printout. If u.r. and c.r. meant upper right and center right, they'd figured it out. All the kids whose pictures were printed in those positions, both boys and girls, listed Brussels' Sprouts as their agency. One of them was the curly-haired little girl I'd seen the first time I went to the morgue. Her name was Lizabeth Worthy.
“Have you got the earlier books?”
“Only one,” Morris said. “It's from 1987. It's got the entry that was marked ‘unavailable.’ ”
“From June?” I asked, checking the printout.
“Yeah. I didn't bring it, but I brought a copy of the page
they asked for.” He put it down in front of me and I stared at it. It had been digitized and scanned, and it was pretty high-contrast, but the bright, star-struck face in the photo was definitely Junko's. She wasn't hard to recognize, even minus a hard year and a lot of drugs and misuse. She stared up at me, wearing a lopsided baseball cap and grinning a hopeful smile that I'd never seen while she was alive.
I had to wait a moment while my blood pressure subsided. I also had to blink a couple of times to clear my eyes. Then I said, “Good.” My voice was forced and my face felt like a brass funeral mask from ancient Greece. “I'll need that other book,” I said.
“There's more,” Jessica said.
“More?” I looked down at Junko's lost, open face, trying to imagine what more there could be. Woofers, feeling neglected, lifted a leg to wash an intimate portion of her anatomy.
“The next issue,” Jessica said proudly. “It isn't out yet.”
“What about it?”
“Morris called the publishers, acting like his father, to find out which of Mrs. Brussels' clients would be listed in the June issue,” she said. Then all of it hit her, the reality of it, and her excitement faded. She looked away from me and out the window at the changeless mountains. “Page 281,” she said, “lower left. It's a girl named Dorothy Gale.”
The eleven thousand block of Altham Street was the Southern California equivalent of a ghost town. Directly beneath the approach of westbound jets from Chicago and points east, the block was battered twenty times each hour by the roar of Boeing and Lockheed engines being throttled back for a landing.
The noise from LAX had killed everything. The lawns were parched and brown, even in April, and the windows of most of the houses were covered with thick rectangles of plywood nailed directly into the external walls. No one was home, and no one was coming home. But the mailboxes were functional, and the mailboxes were all I cared about.
Everything but the Squeal Page 24
