Angel of the Abyss

by Ed Kurtz

  After a slow moment of quiet, I said, “Do you really think Helen’s gone?”

  The truth was I hadn’t given the question anywhere near as much consideration as I should have. I pinned it on my injury, on the trauma of my experience. I didn’t need to think about it, so I didn’t. But that didn’t push it out of my mind. For all the anger and near-hatred I felt for my ex-wife, the thought that she might really be dead tore me up inside. Nothing could take away the years we spent together, for better or for worse, despite it being mostly for the worst. Even if I didn’t know exactly how I was supposed to feel about something like that, what I felt was deep sorrow.

  “I don’t know,” Jake said, staring at the floor. “Coming from that old psycho, who can tell?”

  “Jack Parson’s daughter-in-law,” I said, thinking aloud.

  “At least something finally ties it all together. This shitshow and that goddamn movie, I mean.”

  I tried to relax, despite the pain in my head and the pit in my stomach. It didn’t take. I made a fist with my left hand and squeezed it tight. My right just twitched.

  I said, “I need to get out of here.”

  “You got shot, Graham.”

  “This isn’t over.”

  “For you it is. You’re safe here. There’s a cop right outside the door. It’s a miracle you’re even alive, not to mention not drooling all over the place and crapping your pants. You’re the luckiest son of a bitch ever got shot in the head, and now you’re acting like you’re sorry you didn’t get killed.”

  “Maybe I am,” I moped.

  Jake’s face darkened and his jaw twitched.

  “Fuck you,” he said. “Fuck you, Graham. I saw a girl die because of this. You saw Mrs. Sommer get her throat cut. A shitload of people are already fucking dead but you—you made it. I made it, too. Neither of us should ever have come out here in the first place and by all rights we should both be dead but we aren’t. So fuck you. I’m going home, and as soon as they let you leave—let you leave, you selfish prick—so are you.”

  He was breathing hard after that and staring me down. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. I might have apologized, told him he was right, but he left after that. The sentry in the hall wished him a good afternoon. Jake just grunted and then he was gone.

  * * *

  The most excruciatingly long days of my life dragged by in Jake’s wake. I didn’t hear a word from him, but I took him at his word and assumed he went back east. Shea dropped around once, but only to tell me there was nothing new to tell me. Helen was still classified as a missing person. I couldn’t help but make the connection to Grace Baron—another missing person, and one who was never found. The connection made my stomach churn.

  As for Cora Parson, she too was missing, in a way. Which is to say David’s botched triple murder had likely driven her into hiding.

  “The woman is seventy-seven years old,” Shea told me. “One doesn’t imagine she’s gone very far.”

  “Olivia de Havilland is almost a hundred and still makes appearances,” I said.

  Shea just raised one eyebrow. I didn’t bother explaining.

  “Look,” he said, “in a couple of weeks you’ll be out of this bed and into physical therapy, hopefully in Boston. Where you belong. By then we should have caught up with this woman and I’ll personally phone you to tell you all about it. Until then, if something happens, you’ll be among the first to know. So just get your rest, eat your lousy hospital food, and continue sitting this one out, Ms. Marple.”

  That last bit he said with a smile. He was not an unkind man, for all his bluster and subterfuge. I smiled back, though mostly on the left side.

  “10-4, chief,” I said.

  * * *

  I snuck out of the place the next night.

  It was nowhere near the great escape I initially imagined, however. I waited for my police protection to waddle off for a cup of coffee and simply walked out of the room, down the hall, and into the first open room I found. Inside it, a man I judged to be about my size was snoring loudly in his bed with the wall-mounted television on. I rooted through a drawer across from the bed while Richard Boone swaggered on an episode of Have Gun, Will Travel. One blue T-shirt, a pair of shorts, and a couple of flip-flops later, I waltzed right back into the hall and took the elevator down to the lobby. Anywhere else the bandages cocooning my head might have drawn stares, but here I looked more or less in place. There was a different cop hanging around the front desk. He nodded to me on my way out. I gave him a weak salute.

  At the end of the circular drive in front of the sliding glass doors, I sat down on a green metal bench and took stock. I’d been limping, my right side functional but drowsy, uncoordinated. Whether this was a permanent condition, I didn’t know. But it didn’t seem as though it was going to get any worse. I decided I could live with that, chiefly because I was probably going to have to.

  I took my wallet out of the stolen shorts and counted my available funds, which turned out to be enough to catch a taxi back to Hollywood. The driver wasn’t the chatty type, and that suited me fine. I was too busy thinking about what a reckless imbecile I was being, and how nothing was going to change my mind.

  30

  Hollywood, 1926

  A spotlight illumined the broad stage beneath the screen, into which walked a grinning man in a tuxedo and enormous cowboy hat. The audience erupted with applause, and Grace followed suit. This, she knew, was Hoot Gibson, the star of the night’s premiere, The Man in the Saddle. Hoot’s cowboy pictures had been playing for years, but unlike William Hart they continued to bring them in. Hoot was doing just fine, as his goofy ear-to-ear smile attested.

  Beside her Saul Veritek clapped and smiled, too. He leaned close to her and whispered, “I can’t stand these dismal oaters.”

  “Oh, it was all right.”

  “Dismal,” he repeated, still clapping.

  When the applause died down, Hoot waved both hands at the assembled colleagues and started in on a drawling message of thanks. Grace tuned him out. She had not been able to stop thinking about her late-night visitor, the lights and noise, who it was and what they wanted. Frank Faehnrich was her best guess, but her mind turned blank when she tried to suss out the reason Frank would have to harass and frighten her in that way.

  Was he angry that she didn’t get into the car with him that day? Did he consider her a traitor now? Would he burn down her bungalow like he burned that set, with her asleep inside?

  Grace shuddered.

  Saul said, “Bit chilly in here.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  * * *

  In front of the theater, well-dressed men and women shook hands and congratulated one another and themselves for their successes and conquests. The preponderance of the attention was focused on Hoot Gibson—it was his night after all—but Grace couldn’t help but gawk at the bevy of recognizable faces surrounding her: Tom Mix, Blanche Sweet, Billy Bletcher, Antonio Moreno. Phantoms of Hollywood she had never seen so small, so real. She managed to keep her mouth closed but stared all the same.

  “Don’t look like such a star-struck bumpkin,” came a voice beside her. Grace shook it off and turned to find Jack Parson at her side. “These are your peers, or soon shall be.”

  “It’s so odd seeing them in the flesh,” Grace said. “Smaller in real life.”

  “In full color and sound, too. They’re not just people, though. They’re stars. It’s another level altogether.”

  “Aren’t they artists?” she asked, her voice tinged with sarcasm.

  “Some, yes. Not most. Art requires suffering. I think so, yes. Nobody suffers in Hollywood. This country is riding much too high, all this post-war giddiness. We’ve forgotten about the dead, about the lean times.”

  “Isn’t that what we’re here for? To help people forget?”

  “Hmn,” Jack grunted. “It’ll be worse when sound comes. Cinema should trump vaudeville, the Follies and all that nonsense. But that�
��s all it will be. All singing, all dancing. The pictures won’t be pictures anymore. This will all degenerate into just another low entertainment. Watch.”

  “You’re the biggest cynic I ever knew, Jack. There will be enough room for everything under the sun. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater yet. You’ll be able to say a lot more with talking pictures, won’t you?”

  Jack lighted a cigarette and narrowed his eyes at the bright marquee.

  “I may just say everything I need with Angel of the Abyss,” he said. A faint smile played at his mouth.

  Grace studied him for a moment, failing to decipher his meaning, when Saul came out of the milling throng to shake Jack’s hand and bring him back to earth.

  “I hear you haven’t ruined our picture yet,” Saul said.

  “The ship’s still sailing, captain,” Jack told him.

  “Never doubted it for a moment, my boy. Never for a moment. I didn’t bring you on for your good looks.”

  Jack’s face was inscrutable. A near poker face with a Mona Lisa smile. Saul continued talking, gesticulating as though the heart attack never happened at all, but all the while Jack’s eyes remained on Grace.

  “There’s a party starting up at the Brown Derby,” Saul said to Grace, touching her on the arm. “Why don’t you two come along? Only the best and brightest there—well, and me.”

  He chuckled again and Jack assumed a stern frown.

  To Grace, he said, “That new place on Wilshire, shaped like a hat.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Parson,” Saul groused, though he still grinned. “Let some air out once in a while, would you?”

  He jammed a fresh cigar between his teeth, slapped Grace on the behind, and sauntered back off into the throng.

  “Listen, Grace?” Jack said, rocking on his heels and sniffing the warm evening air. She snapped her attention back to him—she’d been staring at Richard Dix. “Let’s skip the revelry for once, shall we? I’m not much in the mood for it. And besides, I’d like to talk to you.”

  She raised one eyebrow and found a cigarette in her handbag, which she slid between her lips.

  “About the picture?”

  Jack lighted the smoke and said, “What else is there?”

  Grace sucked deeply at the cigarette and rolled her eyes over the crowd one last time.

  “FitzGerald’s?” she asked when they refocused on her director.

  “No, the studio. There’s something I’d like you see.”

  31

  L.A., 2013

  It was weird how much I missed sitting in my swivel chair and feeding old film stock through a computer. All I ever wanted to do since I was seven years old was make movies myself, my own stories on my own terms, but one sour experience made me slam the door on that old dream forever. Still, in spite of everything, there was nothing in the world I loved and desired more than cinema. Even during those turbulent years with Helen—and this was something I never admitted to myself until she was gone—my wife was always going to come in second to my one true love.

  These were my thoughts when I limped up to the front desk of the Wilson Arms and introduced myself to the startled attendant, to whom I probably looked like a refugee from a B horror picture. Half-Igor and half-Invisible Man, with a liberal sprinkling of Frankenstein’s monster to enhance the whole deal. I told her I’d had a room there, paid for by the Silent Film Appreciation Society, and I wanted to know if I could reclaim it.

  No dice.

  And the place was well beyond the realm of my price range, so I had her wheel out my luggage and line up another taxi for me, and I rode downtown until I found a place wretched-looking enough for me to afford. The roof sagged in front of its tiny office and there was an aging prostitute just standing out front, smoking and picking a scab on her lip, like it didn’t make any difference, which it pretty much didn’t. I checked in on my own credit card, got the key, and when I came out again, the working girl was still there. I bummed one of her smokes and she made a sad joke about how she doesn’t usually give anything away for free. I guessed she felt sorry for me, the way I looked, and that made it a little sadder still.

  I went to my room and lay down on the musty bedspread, where I finished the smoke despite the state’s strict laws on that sort of thing. I didn’t figure anyone would give a damn. I put it out in the sink.

  Then I checked my old-school horror show appearance in the mirror, heaved a sigh, and went for the telephone. It was bolted down like everything else in the room. Nothing was attached in my old room. That place was plush enough they could afford a few stolen items. I picked up the phone and dialed information, asked for the number for Cora Parson. Unlisted, but I counted on it. It was a long shot.

  The old lady was probably still riding pretty high on her family fortune, and in some quarters the name still meant something. She wasn’t going to be like the rest of us plebs and keep a public listing. Nevertheless, I wanted to find out where she lived and fast. She might have skipped out somewhere to hide, but she was also an elderly woman and couldn’t have gone terribly far. I was betting she was still in L.A., or at least very close by. Her residence would be my first point of contact to get anything more to go on, if I could find it.

  I leaned against the wall and listened to the people going at it in the next room, longing for another cigarette and thinking about what Shea had told Jake—no more Junior Detective bullshit.

  But hell: he hadn’t said it to me.

  * * *

  When I was in Hollywood in the 90s, there was a place near the old Tower Records where actors and filmmakers and, more than they, dreamy wannabes could go to file their résumés and head shots. It was a small office in an ugly seventies-era office building and the way it ended up working was producers low on cash or just plain sleazy would track down crew and bit players desperate for work so they didn’t have to pay them. For about two months I was bouncing around this notion about making a short film with this Jordanian guy I’d met; it fell apart before it went anyplace but he was the one who sent me to this office to get some names of people who might work on the cheap. I remembered how surprised I was to see more than few familiar names and faces among the dozens of three-ring binders I went through that day. The joint was like an archive for everybody working in the movie business below the superstar level.

  There was no telling if the place would still be around all these years later—there’s nothing like turnaround in Los Angeles—but for once my luck held and I found the office still going strong, though now most of the shelves full of notebooks were gone and there was a bank of five computer monitors crowded around a small plastic table.

  A smarmy-looking kid with retro glasses and an ironic, too-tight sweater vest asked me if I needed some help. I wondered if I was ever going to get used to the pity/disgust stare, and wondered about toning down the whole giant-bandage-on-my-head look before my next step. Whatever that was.

  “I’m looking for information on a producer,” I said, leaning against the doorjamb to give my right side a chance to rest. “Used to work with the guy and I’m getting a small production together.”

  “This isn’t really an information bureau,” he snarled, rudely. “If you’re looking for talent, that’s where we can help. But if you’re looking for someone to bankroll your little movie…”

  I wanted to slap him, but I knew if I did, I’d probably end up on my ass. So instead I cut him off and said, “Actually, my little movie is funded. I only wanted to bring somebody in on it since he’d done me a favor before. We’ve got some major talent attached and I think he’ll be very excited to hear about it.”

  My words were beginning to slur again and I worried the kid was going to assume I was some drunk or junkie off the street, which would have been a pretty safe bet from his perspective. That I was a miraculous survivor of a gunshot wound to the head would probably not even be his second guess. At least I’d been able to change into my own clothes.

  “What might be this gent
leman’s name?” the snotty bastard asked.

  “Parson. John Parson.” I remembered it from the bio I read on the plane.

  Of course, I knew the younger Parson was as dead as his father. I just hoped this kid didn’t.

  “All right, let’s take a look, then.”

  He went to the nearest monitor and sat down in front of it. After hunt-and-pecking his way through the username and password, he brought up an ancient interface that looked like it could have run on DOS. Still, there was a row of tabs at the top labeled with professions, and among them was producer. He clicked the tab and scrolled down the list, some of which appeared in red for some reason.

  “P, P, P,” he mumbled until he reached that letter. “No, sir. No John Parson. I’m sorry we couldn’t have been more help.”

  I’m sure you are, I thought, again fantasizing about whacking him across the jaw. My daydream was interrupted by another young person, a girl with Lucy-red hair, who leaned back in her chair two monitors over and said, “Did you try the old notebooks, Shawn?”

  I raised my left eyebrow at him and said, “Did you try that, Shawn?”

  Shawn groaned.

  The girl rose from her chair and walked over to one of the remaining shelves, sagging from the weight of its contents. I followed her over and she selected a particularly thick white one, flipped to the back and ran her finger down the columns until she found what she was looking for. What I was looking for.