He starts the car.
10
Eugene finds himself in a small room, with no idea how he got there. He walks to a window and looks out. Sees gray sky, lightning flashing in the distance. Thunder follows, shaking the glass. He puts his fingers to the glass and feels cold from outside. Below him, a dense layer of clouds he can’t see past; they block his view of the ground below, but the mere fact of the clouds lets him know he’s very high up in a very tall building. His reflection tells him he’s wearing a gray suit. He isn’t sure he owns a gray suit. He turns around to face the room. On the wall opposite, an oak desk with a telephone and a typewriter on it. He walks to the telephone, picks it up, puts it to his ear. Hears first a shallow silence, then a pounding sound coming from far away.
Thud, thud, thud.
The entire room shakes.
Eugene sits up in bed. There’s someone beside him, but he doesn’t know who. Then he remembers. He can feel her skin smooth and warm against his skin.
Thud, thud, thud.
Suddenly he knows what the pounding is. He crawls out of bed, walks to his closet, grabs a.38 Smith amp; Wesson revolver from the top shelf. It’s been months since he last touched it, perhaps years, and he’s surprised by its weight, but also comforted by it. He checks the cylinder that it’s loaded.
Then, with it gripped in his fist, thumb on the hammer spur, he walks to the front door and yanks it open. No one there, but he hears feet pounding down the stairs. He follows, taking the steps two at a time, the wood cool against the soles of his bare feet. Then out into the chill night where he sees a figure heading toward a car with the engine running, smoke wafting up from its tailpipe. The figure pulls open the driver’s-side door, jumps inside, slams the door shut. The taillights glow red. The car pulls away.
Eugene stands in the wet grass, feet cold, body covered in gooseflesh.
He turns around, heads back up the stairs. His door stands open.
There’s an envelope nailed to it, yet another paper moth. He tears the envelope from the door, leaving the nail in place, and walks into the apartment. He closes the door behind him. He sets the gun down on the dining table beside his typewriter.
He stares at the envelope.
‘What is it?’
He jumps, startled, and looks up.
Evelyn stands in the hallway with a sheet wrapped loosely around her otherwise nude body, revealing a hint of breast he would under normal circumstances find very sexy, but right now he’s too disoriented, too distracted, to find anything sexy. Moments ago he was pulled from dream sleep and now holds in his hands an answer he isn’t sure he wants. This morning he read that newspaper clipping and knew it implied a threat, I will tell unless, and knows he now holds the rest of that sentence in his hands. Unless what? Just look inside.
‘What is it?’ Evelyn says again.
‘I don’t know.’
He tears the envelope open.
STUPID HEART
EIGHTEEN
1
Eugene, wearing only a pair of wrinkled slacks, walks Evelyn to the front door. She looks at him with her large eyes, purse clutched in her hands. Once more she is wearing the dress she wore last night, though it seems strange in the early morning, out of place, and it’s wrinkled from having spent the night on the floor. Most of her makeup has been rubbed away and her pin-curled hair is a frizzy mess. Her chin is pink and raw from kissing him, from rubbing against his sandpaper-rough five o’clock shadow.
She looks beautiful.
He touches her arm as he pulls open the door.
‘Sorry about this,’ he says.
She smiles. ‘It’s probably better this way. I can sneak into my room without anybody seeing at this hour.’
‘I’m glad you’re not upset.’
‘Will you call me?’
‘When I get this resolved.’
‘What are you gonna do?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Call me.’
‘Are you sure you don’t want a cab?’
‘It’s only a few blocks.’
She turns and walks down the stairs. He watches her go. When she’s out of the building he closes the apartment door and sets the deadbolt. He puts his forehead against the wood and stays there a moment before turning to face the room. He walks to the dining table and picks up the note, unfolds it and looks at the gray lettering on the white page. It was typed on a typewriter in need of ribbon replacement. The ‘t’ is cocked to the right, making it look a bit like a malformed ‘x’. The ‘h’ sits higher than the other letters. The note says:
$1000
1:30 p.m.
535 South Grand Ave.
645
He unless was. Unless you give me money. It almost always comes down to money, doesn’t it? Money or love. But there was never any chance this would be about love. What he can’t figure out is, why the paper moths? Why the coyness? Why not simply brace him? Is it someone he knows? He thinks it must be. It must be someone he knows. He worked with a lot of people when he was doing comics, writers and artists, and it could be any one of them. That could be the reason for the paper moths. The man behind this maybe doesn’t want to reveal his identity. Maybe if he did reveal his identity the threat would vanish on the air, like a lover’s promise.
And he still finds it difficult to believe the district attorney will actually come after him for negligent homicide. He might try to pin something like that on James Manning, but Manning runs the whole publishing enterprise. Eugene’s a nobody. He isn’t worth going after. Except for this — he wrote and drew the story in question. If his name came out he could very well end up a codefendant, couldn’t he? Of course he could.
Of course he could.
These are strange times. Living in the shadow of the atomic bomb. Politicians pointing in every direction and shouting communist. Baseball desegregating despite Baton Rouge and other southern cities banning Negro players from their fields; fights over race down at Wrigley Field when the Los Angeles Angels play the Hollywood Stars. Church groups all over the country burning comic books and blaming them for juvenile delinquency. Psychologists claiming they incite violence. Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine still only a hope while kids continue to die. Flying saucers being spotted in the sky across the country while the military denies any responsibility. The world is as frightening as it’s ever been and only getting worse.
And when people are scared, anything might happen.
So Eugene has no answers to his dozens of questions and having no answers he knows not what to do. There are too many unknowns.
You don’t stand on a ledge and leap into darkness. You shine a light into the shadows to see what’s below you.
Could he simply ignore the note? Crumple it up and throw it into the trash and pretend he never received it?
And then what? Wait for something to happen? Wait for the police to come pounding on his door with their guns drawn?
Or maybe he’ll throw the note away and simply go on with his life. Maybe a month from now he’ll stop expecting something terrible to happen; he’ll stop waiting for gray clouds to blow in. Thoughts of the threat will fade into the background, like a radio heard from three blocks away, and he’ll eventually be deaf to them. Five years from now he’ll have forgotten about it altogether.
He doesn’t know what to do.
He looks at the clock. He has to leave for work in twenty minutes.
He tosses the note onto the table.
He tells himself he needs to get dressed and out the door, but for a long time he can’t do anything but stand there and look at that piece of paper.
Then he finds he can move. He turns and heads down the hallway.
2
Evelyn walks down the third-floor corridor. It’s lined with freshly polished shoes, a pair outside nearly every room. She feels a great urge to scuff them all, to walk by and drag her heel across their shining leather tops. That would kink a few mornings. The thought put
s a sour smile on her face, but she doesn’t do it. Instead she walks to Lou’s room and knocks.
Cursing, the creak of a bed, a grunt that means what or who is it.
She tells Lou, open the door.
She’s glad she woke him. She hopes he just got to sleep after nailing that envelope to Eugene’s front door. Hopes he was having a good dream and she pulled him out of it. She feels awful about what she’s doing to Eugene. She’s done worse to other men, but she liked none of them the way she likes him. She knew she shouldn’t get attached to the man — he was a mark, nothing more, and from the beginning he was going down — but maybe you can’t help who you get attached to. It doesn’t matter. It won’t stop her from doing her job. Just makes it unpleasant, that’s all.
Lou pulls open the door. She pushes into the room past him.
‘It smells like asshole in here, Lou.’
‘Why are you here?’
‘To get this over with,’ Evelyn says. Then she unzips her purse. With a white napkin she removes a revolver and sets it on a table. Then she removes a folded-up sheet of paper with writing on.
‘His fingerprints should be all over both of them.’
‘What’s the paper?’
‘You know how to read.’
‘And the knife?’
She shakes her head. ‘I fell asleep last night and this morning had to do what I could. I got you the gun.’
‘Will he notice it missing?’
‘He has work, then his appointment. I doubt he’ll have time to notice it missing. I’m going to bed.’
She turns and walks back out to the corridor. She walks to her room and keys it open and steps inside. She’s surprised by how much she hates herself for what she’s doing. She tells herself to be hard. She tells herself to get her head right. This is business. If there’s no room for God in this business, there’s no room for love.
Love? There’s sex and there’s marriage; she doesn’t even know what love is.
She unzips her dress and lets it fall to her feet and kicks it away. She crawls into bed. She can still smell the man she spent the night with on her skin, she can taste him in her mouth. She covers herself in blankets and closes her eyes, hoping she might be able to catch a few more hours’ sleep. But she can sense the morning’s swift approach. Soon it will be daylight and her mind knows it.
This is the reason there’s no chance of sleep. This is the reason her mind will not go silent. There’s no other possible explanation.
This is business.
3
Eugene’s experience of his day is like a dream remembered. There are faces and colors and places, but they don’t combine to create an experience. He goes to the warehouse and picks up the day’s work; he drives his route and delivers his milk; he collects payment when payment is due; when he sees someone he knows he says hello, yeah, it does look like a storm might be brewing, hope I get done with the job before it starts pouring — but none of his conscious mind is present, and when the day’s over and he’s parking his truck in front of a hotel at 535 South Grand Avenue, he remembers very little of it.
He lights a cigarette and inhales deeply and pulls it from his mouth. He holds it between his fingers and looks at the orange glow of the cherry. He glances over at the Shenefield Hotel, a fourteen-storey block building made filthy by smog. Inside it, someone awaits his arrival. He wonders if he’s making a mistake coming here without the money. There’s a chance he is, a chance he’s making a serious mistake coming here at all, but there was no alternative. He doesn’t have the money. He doesn’t know a way of getting it. He tells himself, too, that even if he could get the money he wouldn’t. He tells himself there’s no way he’d bring a thousand dollars down here without knowing what he was walking into, without knowing who was doing this to him. He tells himself that, but he doesn’t believe it. If he had the money he’d pay. The district attorney might not care about such a nobody as him. The grand-jury investigation could end with the district attorney being told there’s no case. The grand jury could decide there is a case, but the trial result in a not-guilty verdict. Any number of things might happen. But mights and coulds don’t make for restful nights. Even certain doom is somehow better than not knowing. You can wrap yourself in the dark blanket of doom and get some comfort from it. It’s warmer, anyway, than the frigid air of uncertainty.
He steps from the milk truck, tossing his hat onto the seat. He runs his fingers through his oily hair, takes a final drag from his cigarette, flicks it away. Walks under an American flag snapping in the breeze and, doorman pulling the door open for him, thank you, into the hotel lobby.
After taking a few steps inside he stops and stands and does nothing else. He exhales in a sigh and tells himself God hates a coward. Maybe it’s even true.
He walks to the elevator and hits the call button.
A minute later he’s stepping off the elevator and onto the sixth floor.
The corridor is wide and carpeted with red carpet. The walls are white. A man is walking toward him. He was stepping out of one of the rooms as Eugene was stepping off the elevator. Eugene didn’t see which room. He wonders if it’s his man come to greet him. He’s a thin man with a pale, skeletal face, his black hair slicked back with pomade. Eugene continues to walk as if everything were normal, but he watches as the man approaches him. Watches him with great caution. The man wears a black pinstriped suit. He also wears black leather gloves, despite it being spring in Los Angeles.
They pass one another. The man nods, makes brief eye contact, and is gone. It wasn’t his man. Of course it wasn’t. His man’s in room 645.
Eugene wishes he’d thought to bring his gun. Instead it lies useless on his dining table back home. It’d be a good thing to have. Or maybe it would be yanked out of his hand and he’d be shot with it.
He stops at the hotel room. The door’s unlatched, the doorframe cracked, the wood split. He glances back toward the man who walked by him, the thin man with the gloved hands. He stepped out of a room — was it this room? Eugene doesn’t know.
And the corridor is now empty.
He steps forward and something squishes beneath his foot. He looks down. A puddle of liquid on the carpet, darkening it. He reaches down to touch the puddle. His fingers come away wet with red liquid, with blood, and the blood’s still warm, near body temperature.
He closes his eyes, exhales, opens his eyes.
Then opens the door.
NINETEEN
1
Vivian pulls a black dress from her closet and holds it up at arm’s length to give it a once-over. She picks a few pieces of lint from it. It’s a nice dress and aside from being perhaps too brief quite funereal in its simplicity. She believes it’ll do. She will, after all, only be sitting in a pew beside Can-dice while a man of the cloth speaks of death and the departed and how the soul may move on but our memories remain, God bless us all, amen. She wonders how Candice is feeling. She seems to be holding up fairly well, as well as could be expected under these circumstances, but people put up facades. It’s hard to tell what’s going on inside another person’s mind.
Sometimes it is. But she’s fairly certain Leland knew exactly what she was thinking when he walked out the front door fifteen minutes ago, when he left to meet with Seymour Markley. He stood in the entry sulking, saying don’t be like that, darlin, like he thought he could just do whatever he wanted, ignoring her protests, and she had to be okay with it. She isn’t okay with it. She might be a whore, as Markley said, and she might be a blackmailer, but she’s not a liar. She wasn’t until Leland made her one.
And aside from any ethical qualms she has with what Leland is doing — and despite who and what she is, she does have those: how she makes her money might not be legal, but it’s honest — there’s another reason she’s upset with him. She lives by a rule that Leland’s breaking. You do not put your hand twice into the same till. Not unless you want your fingers cut off when the drawer slams shut. Leland knows this, they’ve
been through this before, but once more he’s being stupid about it.
It infuriates her.
It doesn’t even matter if it works out. It has before. That isn’t the point. Every time it works out, it only encourages Leland to try something like this again, and next time it won’t work out. Or the time after that. You have to do things the right way. You have to be honest. You’re dealing with important people who aren’t used to being made vulnerable. You’re embarrassing them. You’re making demands. You have to be straight with them if you expect to come out of that unscathed.
It’s simple self-preservation.
She walks to the bathroom and hangs the dress from the door. She turns on the water in the tub, plugs the drain, watches the tub slowly fill up.
After a few minutes she slips out of her nightgown and steps into the water. She has about thirty minutes to soak before she needs to get ready for the funeral.
2
Barry parks a block from the house. He’s never before done what he’s about to do, but knows better than to park directly in front of the place he intends to burgle. Every neighborhood has at least one bored retiree more than happy to scribble down a license-plate number and call the police about this bald fellow seems to be snooping around and I don’t recognize him, and Barry would rather not get caught. It would almost certainly be the end of his career. He steps from his car and locks the door. He walks along the sidewalk toward the house. The sky is overcast today, gunmetal gray, and the air, while still warm, is beginning to cool. He expects rain is on the way, blowing in from somewhere, but it’s not here just yet. As he walks he listens to the hollow echo of his shoes against the pavement. It reminds him of his days in the army. The synchronized thudding of combat boots on hard-packed soil, the smell of well-oiled rifles, the sound of flags snapping in the wind.
The men didn’t respect him. Commissioned officers are often disliked by soldiers under their command, but this went beyond that. The men didn’t respect or like him personally. They wouldn’t willingly drink with him when the uniforms came off. He thinks now there was some reason for that. He was young and stupid and arrogant, an unpleasant combination. His father expected him to be a career military man as he had been, but instead he left after two years. He’d always loved the piano, had been getting lessons since he was ten, and thought he might have a career as a pianist, but in truth he wasn’t good enough. He could sit in a barroom and impress with clunky renditions of Chopin, but he simply didn’t have the skill to command a stage. Somehow life was missing from the music he clinked out. His fingers lacked grace. Fortunately, the Los Angeles district attorney’s office looked favorably upon his university education and his military record or he might be banging the ivories yet in some western bar with filthy spittoons on the floor. Or maybe not so fortunately. Right at this moment that life doesn’t sound so bad to him. Almost sounds romantic.
The Last Tomorrow Page 14
