by Ed Kurtz
* * *
One of the blue shirts chauffeured me back to the hotel. It was just past one o’clock but I felt like I’d been awake for days, so I crawled under the sheets and tried to catch a nap. No dice. Not after what I’d seen, which was in fact the first and to date only dead body to ever cross my path. Though I’d never laid eyes on the woman, I had spoken with her and I couldn’t help but feel a great deal more involved in her death than I liked. And every time I tried closing my eyes, all I could see was her.
So I got up, withdrew another ten-dollar brew from the mini-fridge, and flipped through channels until I came to Robert Mitchum tearing up the backcountry byways in Thunder Road. I watched it to the end and stayed tuned for the follow-up, The Sundowners. I didn’t make it all the way through that one; somewhere around halfway through I crashed, hard. When I woke again, the sun was setting behind Hollywood and there was something with Irene Dunne playing on the television. I switched her off, stepped into my trousers, and dragged myself down to the street for a smoke.
Along the way, I got to philosophizing. It occurred to me that, though I agreed with Barbara about the film’s importance, there was something to Shea’s incredulity, too. Just how important was an old silent movie, anyway? Everyone involved in its production, from the star down to the kid who delivered sandwiches to the set, was long dead by now. More than that, even the most essential contributions to our culture didn’t seem that important in the long run, at least not while I leaned against the hotel’s façade with a cigarette dangling from my mouth and my eyes on the weirdos and tourists shambling up Hollywood Boulevard like zombies. The whole damn world was going to come to an end someday and when that happened, who would be left to give a damn about Shakespeare, or Dostoyevsky, or Van Gogh? Never mind Angel of the Abyss. I doubted more than a thousand people alive even knew it ever existed. Only cinema geeks like me and the late Leslie Wheeler could possibly be bothered. Us, and whoever found it necessary to murder her to get their hands on one-eleventh of the film. There were more pointless reasons to die, but I couldn’t think of many.
Dark thoughts like this consumed me and I started to lose focus on the whole nasty situation that enveloped me. I decided I needed a drink, so I stamped out my smoke and went back in to find the hotel bar. Despite the years I’d had to get used to it, I still hated the idea of a bar I couldn’t smoke in, but I swallowed it down and ordered a Dewar’s on ice. Almost as soon as the bartender set to getting it for me, I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“There you are,” Jake said. “I’ve been looking for you, pal.”
For Christ’s sake, I thought. I said, “Man of your word.”
“Mama taught me not to lie,” he said, pulling up a stool beside me. The bartender came back round and set my drink in front of me. Jake said, “One of those for me, too.”
With a sharp nod, the bartender got to it. Jake slapped his hand on the bar, startling me a little, and grinned ear to ear.
“Back in Cali, man!” he boomed. I winced. I absolutely hated it when people said Cali. The only thing worse was La-La Land.
“Probably not for long,” I said. He cocked his head to the side as I sipped my scotch.
“Job fall through?”
“You could say that.”
“Well, dish. What’s the story, Graham?”
“Went to meet with the lady who hired me this morning,” I began.
“Yeah?”
“Only she was dead when I got there.”
“Jesus,” Jake said. “Are you serious?”
“Serious as an Eisenstein picture, bud.”
“What, she was old or something? Heart attack, something like that?”
“Not so old. Cops think she was murdered.” They think. It was pretty damned cut and dry, actually.
I killed my drink and signaled for another.
“Holy shit. That’s terrible, Graham. That must have been a hell of a shock.”
I chuckled morosely. “You’ve got that right. My old man dropped dead in the living room when I was in high school, but I never saw the body. Fact is, this is my first, and it wasn’t at a funeral or anything nice like that. She was just crumpled up in a chair, dead as disco. Place was trashed, too.”
I didn’t know why I was being so candid with Jake of all people, but my mouth just ran away with me. Probably I just needed somebody to talk to after everything that happened and he was handy. Nonetheless, I was starting to feel a bit queasy thinking about it and decided to change the subject.
“What about you? You flew out here?”
“Borrowed some cash, got a decent deal on the ticket.”
Figured.
“How’d you find me here?” I asked.
“Made sense you’d stay in Hollywood, so I started calling around. Got this dump on the fourth try.”
“Regular Hardy boy.”
“Sure,” he said. “Maybe I’ll open my own agency. Take pictures of cheating husbands and shit.”
That would probably be the most work he would have ever done in his life, but I kept that to myself.
“Where are you staying?” I asked him.
“Not far. Little motel with questionable morals. I don’t have a sugar mama funding my vacation.” The words had barely passed his thin lips before his face pinched and he dropped his eyes to his lap. “Ah, crap. Sorry, Graham.”
I waved it off. The waving hand was a little uncoordinated. The scotch was doing its job.
“Forget it. Listen, maybe I’ll stay on another day or two. I’ll ask how far ahead my room is covered and cash the check I got. Tomorrow we’ll do something, you know, Los Angelesy. Make the best of it.”
“Hey, that’s the spirit,” Jake beamed.
“Damn,” I drawled, simultaneously tapping the rim of my glass at the barman. “Why let a little murder ruin a perfectly good trip? We’ll go to Disneyland. Get a goddamn star map. Maybe we’ll run into Brad Pitt and get a fucking autograph.”
Jake pursed his mouth and absently stirred his scotch with the little black straw the barman put in it. I laughed and grabbed his shoulder as the guy brought me number three, which I grabbed and clinked against Jake’s glass. After a deep slug from my hooch, I sighed with gratification and said, “Forget it, Jake—it’s Chinatown.”
An old joke we’d once shared, the line from the Polanski film, and enough to break the ice I’d formed by being a morbid ass. Jake grinned, and I slapped him on the back before excusing myself for a smoke outside. It was damned curious how much more I liked the guy when I was in my cups.
Outside the city was brighter in the night than it was in the daytime, lit blindingly with street lamps and glaring neon signs. Traffic had picked up, transporting sightseers and partygoers, though all the characters in cartoon costumes seemed to have gone home for the night. They had been replaced by the same transvestite street walkers I remembered from my time there in the nineties. It was great knowing how things didn’t change.
I fired up a cigarette, dragged deeply on it, and suddenly remembered what the cop had said about getting in contact with Helen. The thought sent me crashing to half-sobriety and I started to worry that I’d end up in a room with her in some grimy police station, my past never quite willing to give me up to the future.
Such were my unhappy thoughts as I worked my way down a smoldering Pall Mall and the brick wall burst in a cloud of dust about six inches from my ear. Without giving it much thought, I dropped to a crouch and another shot cracked the night, this time hitting the wall where my head had been seconds earlier. Pathetically, I was still clutching my cigarette between two fingers.
A set of tires squealed, peeling out, and I looked up in time to see a late-model Saab speeding down Hollywood in a cloud of exhaust and burned rubber. I couldn’t see who was in the car, but I knew damn well that whoever it was, they’d just tried to shoot me dead. I collapsed on my ass and sat there on the sidewalk, half-drunk and dumbfounded, trying to convince myself it was just another one of L.A.’s notor
ious, mythic, random drive-bys.
But as I finished my cigarette and people came bursting out of the hotel lobby and from both sides of the street, I knew perfectly well that wasn’t the case.
Angel of the Abyss was catching up to me.
6
Hollywood, 1926
Though there was a tremendous panic about it at first, Jack’s failure to arrive on set was eventually chalked up to a severe hangover—the man was simply sleeping it off at home. Upon this pronouncement, several members of the crew and some extras got to shuffling in either direction, whereupon Saul Veritek took up the director’s bullhorn and bellowed at everyone to remain where they were.
“This is no recess, you ingrates,” he hollered. “Time is money, for Christ’s sake. We have five pages need shooting and by God we’ll shoot them.”
Grace, barefoot in her ethereal, postmortem silk gown, floated beside him and whispered, “Saul, surely we shouldn’t go under Jack’s nose.”
The producer lowered the bullhorn slowly and turned to flash a dry grin at her.
“Dearheart,” he cooed, “when I want to hear you speak, they will be words I have written. Do you understand?”
She stiffened. Her lip trembled.
“Of course,” she said, softly. She added: “Mr. Veritek.”
With that, Grace Baron swept up the length of the cloudy gown and padded across the cold stage floor to the lot outside, where she lighted a cigarette and groaned with frustration.
“Trouble in paradise?”
She started, coughing on the smoke and moving her arms up to cover her bosom, and spun on her heel to find a lean youth leaning against the façade of the stage, a metal flask in his hand. He was in his shirtsleeves, rolled up to the elbows, with suspenders keeping up his sagging brown trousers and a rumpled cap on his head. The handsome youth assisting Horace with the lighting. Grace comported herself, stepping back and sucking deeply from her smoke.
“Drinking on the job?”
“Whatever gets you through the day.”
“Can’t think but Mr. Veritek wouldn’t like it much.”
“That old rummy? You’re kidding.”
“Most fellows can’t carry it like he can.”
“I do all right.”
He smiled, took a pull. Grace raised an eyebrow.
“Lighting man?”
“Apprentice electrician. I’m working under Horace.”
“Hope he’s making me look good.”
“Shouldn’t be hard,” he said.
Her cheeks, high on her otherwise pale face, pinked.
“I’m Grace,” she said, offering her hand.
He accepted it, said, “You don’t say.”
“Now don’t be smart.”
“Who, me? I didn’t even finish high school.”
“What’d they call you when you quit?”
“Dummy. These days I call myself Frank. Frank Faehnrich.”
“Used to know a Frank,” she reminisced. “Back home.”
“Where’s home?”
“Idaho, if you can believe it.”
“Sure, I believe it.”
“Does it show?”
“Not so’s you’d notice.”
She finished her smoke, dropped it on the ground. “Where’s headquarters for you, Mr. Electrician?”
“Uh-uh. First tell me who’s Frank.”
“Which Frank?”
“Idaho Frank.”
“A nobody. Probably still making ice-cream sodas at the drugstore on Chance Street.”
“It’s a job.”
“Spill, mister.”
“Not far from here. A little town called San Domingo. What’s so bad about a soda jerk?”
“I’ve known loads of jerks,” she said. “A jerk’s a jerk.”
“And a man’s a man, and a woman’s a woman. What’s it amount to? Ain’t here but enough time to get confused about it all, anyhow. Hell, maybe all jerks ain’t created equal, when you think about it.”
“What sort of jerk are you, Frank?”
“Only the best kind,” he teased.
“That a fact? And what kind is that?”
“Grace! Set!” Saul boomed from inside the set. “Now!”
“Maybe you’ll find out,” Frank said. “Best hurry along now. I’ve got to help shed some light on that pretty face of yours.”
“A charmer,” she pouted, fluffing her hair. “I’ve known loads of them, too.”
She offered a sardonic wink and rushed back inside. Saul stood dead center, his fists planted on his broad hips and sweating profusely. His shaggy brown eyebrows were squashed together and the cigar in his mouth wasn’t lit.
“Only in Hollywood,” he groused. “Anyplace else and you’d be on the goddamn street.”
“Don’t strangle yourself,” she chided him. “Only having a cigarette.”
She bounced past him, back to the cemetery at the northwest corner of the sprawling stage, where a day player in a grave-digger’s getup leaned on a shovel, half-asleep. Taking her position, Grace glanced over her shoulder at the lighting rig beside Jack’s—now Saul’s—chair. Horace was sweating worse than the boss beneath the white-hot lamp, cranking it up and playing with the shades. Behind him Frank stood with his hands behind his back, his eyes on Grace and the rest of his square face a cipher.
* * *
Vacant and crawling with mist, the cemetery lies dormant, the once imperious stones now cracked and covered with lichen. Only a bright shaft of moonlight slices through the pitch, illumining the tomb upon which, some years earlier, a maiden’s heart was pierced by the ritual blade. The heavy lid trembles, disrupting the blanket of mist, and then edges away, catty-corner to open a broad black triangle leading down into the cold finality within. From the grave, a lone hand slowly rises, its ashen, feminine fingers curling around the edge of the stone. She is risen.
* * *
Grace emitted a stunted yelp upon pulling the chain on the lamp. The dim bulb threw a yellow haze across the bungalow that caused Jack Parson to sit up, cough, and smile wanly at her from the edge of her bed.
“Christ have mercy, Jack,” she wheezed.
“I’m sorry,” he said, standing and smoothing out his sport coat with his hands.
Grace laid her bag on the chair and shut the door. She then fumbled for a cigarette from the box on the dresser, lighted it, and frowned at Jack through a blue haze.
“Are you drunk?”
“I wish I were.”
“Don’t you dare touch my liquor.”
He went over to where she stood, inspiring her to take a few steps back. Without asking, he took a smoke for himself and lighted it with her crystal lighter.
“Did you shoot today?”
“We shot.”
“Brought you back to life, did he? Saul, I mean.” He spoke the man’s name like a foul oath.
“That’s what it says in the script. Those are the pages for Tuesday, which is today, by the by.”
“The son of a bitch is turning it into some sort of…horror picture.”
“Hard to influence the course of events when you don’t show up at the studio, Jack.”
She puffed with exasperation, kicked off her shoes. Jack moved the bag to the floor and sat down in her chair.
“Why don’t you go somewhere else for your next one?” Grace asked, the cigarette dangling from her lips as she struggled her way out of her dress. Jack fixed his eyes on the floor. “Or do like Bill Hart’s doing—he’s making a picture all on his own.”
“Hart’s washed up. A joke.”
“Well, you’re still a young man. Just make Saul’s picture and put a lid on the sad-sack routine. You’re only making enemies, boyo.”
“In this town, it’s easy.”
“Easier still when you do all the work.”
Standing in her brassiere and bloomers, she crooked one foot behind her and pushed out a sigh at his boyish embarrassment.
“You’ve seen me stark, for Pete’s
sake.”
“Talk to your boss—that was his scene, you know.”
“It’s art, remember? With a capital A.”
“God, you’re a lively one tonight,” Jack said. He leaned forward to stamp out his pilfered smoke.
“Certainly I am,” she answered, shrugging into a shiny robe. “I’m freshly resurrected, or didn’t you hear?”
“Didn’t you ever read Mary Shelley? Even the resurrected can get put on ice.”
“I thought you had a beef with the ghoulish stuff.”
“I just wanted to make a great picture, Gracie. That’s all. Something to really lift the form.”
“How much lifting does it need? You never saw a Griffith picture? I don’t guess you’ve got anything up your sleeve to make Intolerance look rotten, or do you?”
“Don’t be cruel to me.”
“You’re cruel to yourself,” she spat. “Like I said, you’re young yet. Everything won’t go your way, not for a while, maybe not ever. You’ve got a lot handed to you on a gold platter and you act like you’re dying in a trench.”
“My brother-in-law died in a trench,” he said low.
“And you didn’t, brother—you’re here right now in Hollywood in the picture business, surrounded by enough glut to make old Babylon drool with envy. Get out of here, Jack. I want to go to bed.”
“I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to go anywhere.”
Grace grimaced, dropped her smoldering end in the ashtray.
“You’re a fool, and much too sober. Go find a tavern and drink them out of house and home. You’ll want to crawl in a hole come morning, but I bet you’ll thank me for it.”
“I can’t work like that.”
She laughed. “Who’s working? My director was a bald, fat man chomping on a cigar. Maybe you’ve heard of him.”
Jack lurched forward, arched his right arm around her waist. Grace squirmed and planted her hand roughly on the center of his chest.
