“This lock any harder to pick than the old one?”
He eyeballed the back of the dead bolt and selected a Phillips-head screwdriver from the box. “Good locks aren’t easy to pick, and the lock on your door now isn’t a bad one. Good enough to stop an amateur with a hairpin, at least.”
“Somebody picked it, though.”
The muscles below his checked shirtsleeve bunched as he worked the screw from the face plate. When the threads loosened and the stem wobbled under the tip of the Phillips head, he twisted the screw free with his fingertips and dropped it into his shirt pocket. Age was slowly withering him but he was still strong and skilled, and the slack skin on his arms tautened with the work. “Lock picking isn’t a widely held skill. Less than one percent know how to do it. Less than one percent of one percent. In my experience, it’s easier to use a key.”
“Easier still if I leave the door wide open, hang a sign above the door says Open House.’”
He drew out the second screw and pried the tip of a flathead screwdriver under the face plate until it popped free, exposing anchor screws within. “Previous tenants could’ve kept a key, given a copy to one of the neighbors,” he said. “Who do you know could have a key to the place, other than the landlord?”
I shook my head. Nobody.
“Never had a boyfriend?”
“Just one. A husband. But he didn’t have a key.”
“He could’ve made a copy without you knowing it. Maybe he dropped by, wanted a picture for old-time’s sake.”
“He’s dead.”
The anchor screws were long and thin and when Ben twisted them out the lock split on opposite sides of the door. He fit the halves together again and dropped the lock into the paper bag. “I’m sorry to hear. You’re too young to be a widow.”
I didn’t know about that. No age requirement for bad luck and trouble. The new lock was a Yale seven-tumbler dead bolt, the best you could buy from a hardware store. We talked about the lock and how long it would take to pick if a professional wanted to break it down. About ninety seconds, I said. I’d once watched an acquaintance from California Institute for Women break down a lock just as good in that time. Then Ben said, “You think the shooter came here, then?”
“Just guessing.”
“What would he want with your pictures, you think?”
“He stripped the film from my camera but either he didn’t have the time or he didn’t think to search my bag. Why should he? I was as good as dead, out cold in the path of the fire. A couple days later, he reads I survived. That had to bother him, maybe scare him enough to act. Who’s to say I didn’t shoot more than one roll of film?”
Ben’s mobile phone chirped. He wore it clipped to his belt, like a detective’s badge. The conversation was short, his sentences clipped and to the point. He told the caller he’d be there within the hour and went back to installing the new lock. While he worked I told him I’d talked to Doubleday’s gardener, maids, and chauffeur. Nothing I said impressed him much. He grunted when I mentioned the dead cypress trees and the gardener’s report of finding quicklime in the soil but neither questioned nor commented on my account. He finished out the lock in silence, tested the throw of the dead bolt into the doorframe’s base plate, and satisfied it was properly installed, packed his toolbox. I counted out $42.26 for the lock and started to thank him for his help but he didn’t let me get past the first sentence.
“That was Arlanda,” he said. “She got a call from the coroner’s office. They matched Angela’s dental records with the remains from the house.”
I said I was sorry and he said it was all right, he’d been pretty sure she was gone since the day of the fire. He picked up his toolbox and walked to the front landing before turning to say, “I’m going to pick up Arlanda at the motel and take her over to my place. She wants you to meet us there. Bring the dog if you can. I’m in a mobile-home park above PCH, Tropical Terrace. You know it?”
I said I’d be there and watched him climb down the stairs, one hand on the railing for support. When he reached the bottom I called out, “You want me there, too?”
“Sure,” he answered.
I don’t think he meant it.
Just west of Temescal Canyon the road to Tropical Terrace Trailer Park peeled away from the Pacific Coast Highway to climb a hillside landscaped in bougainvillea, hibiscus, palm trees, and orange-beaked birds-of-paradise. Signs along the side of the road stated the property was private, and at the top of the hill the road curved around a clubhouse compound more appropriate in a country club than a trailer park. A wrought iron fence extended from the corner of the clubhouse to the management office, and through the bars a swimming pool sparkled green below the fading red band of the fallen sun. The first mobile home beyond the clubhouse flew the American flag from the rim of its peaked roof and parked a vintage Oldsmobile Cutlass in the carport. The trailer’s foundation lay concealed behind a facing of grape stake, and the stairs and front porch had been carpentered in matching redwood. The corrugated aluminum siding above the grape stake glistened with a fresh coat of maroon paint. Slanting brass script spelled the family name to the side of the door. It was the best-looking trailer I’d ever seen, until I coasted past its neighbor, a newer model painted sun yellow. The residents strolling and jogging by the side of the road wore the gleaming tennis shoes, crisp sport shirts, and shorts typical of prosperous Californians on the declining side of middle age. Some mobile homes were older and smaller than the others but all looked meticulously maintained, each owner hiding foundations and building patios, porches, and carports to root the trailer in the land.
Ben’s trailer was one of the oldest and smallest and lay at the blunt end of the street, just before the land plunged down a steep hillside to Temescal Canyon Road. A bulldozer parked its blade into the earth across the lane, the work of cutting a new lot suspended by nightfall. I parked behind Ben’s Chevy Blazer. The Rott jumped the doorframe and patrolled the bushes, his nose low and leg high. The trailer had been installed on the lot like a railroad car, narrow end facing the street. A gated cedar fence extended from the trailer’s street-side corner. The fence and lack of a visible front door must have discouraged unexpected visitors. Beyond the gate, stairs mounted to a redwood patio, where a picnic table stood beneath the boughs of a eucalyptus tree. I knocked on the screen door at the head of the stairs and heard Arlanda’s cracked voice call for me to come in. The Rott’s ears perked. When I opened the screen door he squeezed through the gap between my leg and the doorframe.
Arlanda and Ben sat on a tweed couch to the left of the door, their plans for the evening evident in the half dozen bottles of hard alcohol and mixers scattered on the coffee table. The trailer was long enough for a bedroom to the right, a kitchen directly off the front door, and a living room to the left, but so narrow that if you stood in the center and fell sideways in either direction your head would hit the wall. The room would have seemed claustrophobic if not for the sliding-glass door at the far end, which opened to the last flare of twilight over the Pacific. It may have been a thirty-thousand-dollar trailer but Ben had a million-dollar view. Arlanda and I kissed over the Rott’s back. Ben gave me his hand to shake. We should go outside, he said. The night was still warm and the air fresh. It wasn’t that he didn’t want me in his house, I don’t think, but with three people and a dog in that cramped space none of us could have leaned forward without bumping the head of the other.
Ben had a fifth of Canadian Club among the bottles he carried to the patio table, and I started off with that, watered down because it looked to be a long night. Ben and Arlanda talked about whether or not we should eat something and decided we’d be able to drink more with something in their stomachs. Ben knew a place that delivered pizza and called in the order. I complimented him on what he’d done with the mobile home, on his skills as a carpenter, and on the beauty of the location. It wasn’t much of a place, he said, but he didn’t need much room and preferred living in the area he patro
lled as a deputy to buying a condo across the hill in the San Fernando Valley. He liked the idea of staying near Angela too, even if they hadn’t seen each other in nearly ten years. He’d always hoped she’d call him, was disappointed that she never had.
Arlanda said, “Don’t take it so personally. She didn’t call me either. She didn’t call anybody.”
“You called her, though.”
“On her birthday, and every Christmas, of course.”
“She took your calls. She didn’t take mine.”
They drank and reminisced, alcohol the key to memory as well as to forgetting. I mostly listened and drank slowly, nothing in the conversation prompting me to remember or to forget. Ben’s pronunciation lost its crispness by the time the pizza arrived, consonants and vowels sliding into each other without respecting where one word ended and the next began. Still, he maintained a determined drinking pace, revitalized by the food. The Rott sat at Arlanda’s end of the table. He knew a soft touch when he smelled one. She fed him half her pizza, bite by bite.
“I’ll have to make the arrangements tomorrow,” she said. “Not enough left to bury. Suppose we should go ahead and cremate her.”
“Where will you have the ceremony?”
“In Douglas.”
“Crap.” Ben tilted the bottom of his glass to the stars.
“Has to be there. She had a family crypt built about eight years ago, when my oldest was born. Only crypt in Calvary Cemetery, rises above the other graves like a skyscraper. Moved the entire damn family there, including my mom.”
“Don’t suppose you’ll need me at the funeral, then.”
“Of course I need you there. If you’re too much of a coward to go back, just say so.”
Ben tossed the old ice over the railing and started his next drink with fresh cubes. “No need to insult me. I’ll go.”
I said, “Little town like Douglas, I imagine the funeral will be a pretty big deal.”
Arlanda stroked the Rott’s neck, said, “Everybody loves her there.”
“That’s because nobody has seen her for thirty years,” Ben countered.
Mourning the death of a difficult woman is a complex thing, mingling respect and a distant kind of love with resentment and regret. They needed to laugh, not to keep from crying but to stave off anger. They’d missed so much from her when she’d been alive that they weren’t sure how to miss her now that she was gone.
“Aunt Angela is about the only claim to fame Douglas has,” Arlanda said. “It’s a small border town. Drug smugglers and illegal immigrants run the desert outside town and every other vehicle on the road belongs to the Border Patrol.”
“Only the ranchers stay from generation to generation,” Ben said. “Most everybody else I know left after graduating high school. Sure, a few stayed behind to pump gas or wait tables, particularly if the business was family owned. A couple of the kids I went to school with joined the Border Patrol. But everybody else vanished into the cities. That was the reason Angela was such a big deal. Everybody could point at her, say at least one made it big.”
“What happened between you and her?” Arlanda minded her own business when sober but said what was on her heart after a few drinks. Alcohol brings out the intimacy in some people and she was one of them. “I mean, I know what happened because the same thing happened to me, too. She shut herself off. But I never understood why she broke so completely with you. You were always so close.”
“I loved her like my own daughter.” It was an admission of great emotion but Ben didn’t speak with any sentiment in his voice. “She always hid from me, in a way. Here’s one for example. I never even knew she was dancing topless in Vegas.”
“Oh hell, Ben,” Arlanda said, “she was part of the stage show at the Sands, not working in a titty bar.”
“She wasn’t wearing anything from the waist up, was she?”
“Sure she was. The Eiffel Tower.”
“That was on her head, not her chest.”
“Don’t be such a prude.”
“I’m not now; but then, I might’ve tanned her hide. By the time I heard about it she’d already been cast in that film. Maybe it wasn’t much of a part, but it was one of the most famous films of its time and she said it proved she knew better than I did how the world worked.”
“She was stubborn.” Arlanda said. “Mom told me they got into a fight once when they were kids, and Angela didn’t talk to her for three months. Not a word. Just cut her dead. Poor mom. A wallflower with a celebrity sister. She always felt like the forgotten one.”
Arlanda caught me staring at her, trying to figure out what happened to her mother. “Drank herself to death.” She rattled the ice and drained the last of her rum and cola, winking over the raised glass. “It’s a family weakness.”
“Hard to be a movie star making a million dollars a picture and take a thirty-thousand-a-year patrol cop seriously.” Ben iced Arlanda’s glass and eyeballed a jigger of rum over the cubes. His hand moved with deliberate caution, as if completing the task without fumbling or spilling would prove he wasn’t yet drunk.
“Of course she took you seriously. She trusted you.”
“Not for the last ten years, she didn’t.”
“What was it about that night outside Spago? I understand it must have been traumatic as hell, I mean, the poor little creep died right on top of her, but why didn’t she ever recover? What was it that changed things so much?”
“Hard to say. I think in the end she wasn’t happy with her life but couldn’t change. Too famous. Too successful. Hard to go back to working at the corner drugstore after they make you a star.”
“I don’t know if she ever felt like a star, not really,” Arlanda said. “Once, when my mom was having trouble coping with things, she put me on a Greyhound bus to California. Aunt Angela was living in Beverly Hills then, a mansion up one of the canyons. Her maid took care of me most of the time, but every night we’d watch a different film in her home theater. I thought that was so cool, to have a little theater in your house. Most of the films were classics, you know, old ones in black and white. Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, she liked them a lot, but nobody compared to Garbo. That’s a real star, she’d say. The rest of us are just bright planets.” Arlanda’s voice changed when she spoke in the voice of her aunt, and the impersonation was close enough to still Ben.
“She said that?”
“I couldn’t make that up, could I? Don’t have the imagination.”
“She was a remarkable woman. If she was just a bright planet, what does that make us? Asteroids?”
We thought that was pretty funny, our sense of humor fueled by alcohol, but then nobody could think of a clever way to extend the joke and we lapsed into silence.
“Maybe the stalker was just an excuse,” Arlanda said.
“Excuse for what?”
“To disappear from public view. To pull a Garbo.”
“Bullshit.” Ben elbowed his drink and the glass slung ice and vodka as it tumbled off the edge of the table. My hand flared out to snatch it midway between table and floor. Ben glared as though I tried to show him up. Then he blushed.
“’Scuse the language ladies. What was I sayin’?”
I set the glass on the table, thinking he’d had enough but knowing he wouldn’t stop. If he stopped he’d begin the slow descent to sleep and he wanted to go higher still, until not even more vodka could propel him further and he fell fast and hard to a thoughtless stupor. He breathed deeply and reached for the ice.
“We were talking about the stalker.” Arlanda said.
“Davis. Andy Davis. Unemployed carpenter from Florida. A poor, pathetic son of a bitch. I think the whole experience of getting stalked flipped a switch in Angela’s head. We don’t know what it’s like, having somebody obsess on you like that, hanging around your house, sending you notes every day. You know he splashed his own blood on some of ’em? Scared the holy shit out of her. Changed her basic psychology. Like evasion therapy, you know, w
here you show somebody a picture of something they want and then give ’em a shock of electricity. Pretty soon the thing they want makes ’em cringe. After craving fame for so long, she turned to fearing it so much she shut herself in that big house of hers and didn’t let anybody in, not even family.”
Ben pushed back from the patio table and when he stood the bench tipped over behind him. The impact startled a bark from the Rott. Ben cursed his own clumsiness and carried his drink to the patio railing. I watched him carefully, afraid he might tumble over to the hillside below. He may have been drunk, but he was still aware that Arlanda and I watched him and straightened his spine, too proud to stoop. The move shifted his center of gravity to his chest, and he swayed noticeably, despite his steadying hand on the rail.
“When something bad happens,” he said, “you know how your mind goes back to it, looking at every little event that led up to the moment, trying to find some sign of what was going to happen, thinking, If I’d only seen this or thought about that or been standing another two feet to the left, it wouldn’t have played out the way it did? Looking for some way to control the situation, if only in hindsight. Trying not to feel so damn powerless. Fooling yourself into believing that if something similar ever goes down again, you’ll be ready, you’ll know where to look, how to move, you won’t let the same thing happen twice.” Ben stared at the branches of the eucalyptus overhead. “How was I supposed to know the fool had a doll in his hand? He wrote that he wanted to die with her, wanted to bond himself so damn tight whenever anybody mentioned her name they’d think of him, too. I read his letters. I knew what he said he’d do. I thought he was going to kill her.”
Burning Garbo Page 9
