He turns his attention back to Evelyn.
‘Where were we?’
2
Evelyn sits on the bed, looking across the hotel room to the man who only a couple nights ago was inside her. The flesh on her chin is still a bit raw from his beard stubble scratching her as they kissed, and she’s still a bit sore. She should have trusted her first instinct. She could see from the beginning, from the night she met him in the bar, that he was not a man to run from trouble but rather to grab onto it and try to bring it to its knees. Not that there was time for her to do anything; she only found out he slipped away from the police thirty minutes ago, and even now, while he’s here in the room with her, while he’s threatening her with a gun, part of her is glad he did. If he’d not had this sort of thing in him she wouldn’t have been attracted to him in the first place.
‘I’m sorry, Gene,’ she says, ‘but there just isn’t-’
Then something occurs to her, something both terrible and great. She thinks there might be a way to do what he wants. It’ll take planning and forethought, and he’ll have to trust her when trusting her is likely the last thing he wants to do, but it might be possible to clear his name. If it’s something she really wants to do.
After a moment’s consideration she knows that it is. She even lets herself believe that once Eugene’s name is cleared they might be able to pick up their relationship where it left off. They might be able to have something together.
‘What?’ Eugene says.
‘I think there might be a way.’
Hope flickers in his eyes, but the shadow of suspicion quickly clouds over it.
‘Do you?’
‘I do,’ she says, ‘but you’re gonna have to trust me.’
‘After what you did?’
Evelyn knows convincing him will be difficult, but she has to try. She closes her eyes a moment to think. She opens them again and looks at Eugene. Looks at him and allows herself to feel what she feels. She prepares herself to speak, and when she does the words that leave her mouth are honest ones.
‘I like you, Gene. We have something. I did what I did because it’s what I came here to do. It was my job. But when I came here I hadn’t met you. I’ve felt crummy ever since I last walked out of your apartment, and that isn’t like me. You have to understand, I’m not a soft woman. I’ve done worse to men than I did to you and lost no sleep. I know that doesn’t speak well of me, but there it is. Whatever Daddy has in him that makes him who he is, I have it in me too. But it was different with you. I’ve felt rotten. I haven’t slept. When I read that you’d escaped the police, part of me was glad, despite the fact that I knew you might come after me. That’s the truth. Now I’m telling you another truth. I think I know a way to get you your life back. All I’m asking you to do is listen to what I have to say, listen to my proposal. If it sounds like something you’re willing to do, if it sounds like something you’re capable of, I want to help you. I want to help you because I still think we might have something between us, and I’ve never felt like this about anyone before.’
As difficult as it was to allow herself to be vulnerable, it felt good too. It feels good. She looks at Eugene, searching his face for something other than suspicion, for something other than complete mistrust.
Finally, she thinks she sees it.
‘Okay,’ he says after a while. ‘What do you have in mind?’
3
Eugene steps out into the rain. The sky overhead is dark with clouds, only diffused gray light seeping through the cover. He walks toward the street wondering if Evelyn’s plan could possibly work. He believes it could. He believes that, like a hammer, it’s so simple it almost has to work. But there’s no reason to believe she has any intention of following through on it, no reason to believe she’d be willing to bring heat down on her father to save him, some guy she met less than a week ago. No reason to believe it beyond her saying so. And there’s plenty of reason to doubt what she says. He wants to believe her, more than anything he wants to believe her, but he’d be a goddamned fool if he let himself take her at her word.
She betrayed him, planned to betray him before they even met, walked into that bar on the evening he first saw her with a sensuous smile on her lips and fluttering eyelids, with the knowledge that she was going to do things that all but guaranteed he’d end up sitting in a chair wired for death.
Yet standing in her hotel room only minutes ago pointing a gun at her, looking at her as she looked back, he wanted to believe every word she said, and some innocent part of his heart did believe, and wanted to embrace her, and feel close to her again.
But his mind is not so stupid as his heart.
After three attempts he manages to kick-start the motorcycle, then straddles the leather seat and gives it some gas.
No, his mind is not nearly as stupid as his heart. Maybe Evelyn’s being straight with him, anything’s possible, but he can neither believe it nor act as if that’s the case. Until he knows better, he’ll have to operate under the assumption that every word she spoke to him was a lie. He’ll use her if he can, and it seems to him he may be able to, but he’ll not trust her.
Only a fool would do that, and in this situation he refuses to play the fool. It happened once. It won’t happen again.
THE ROYAL
THIRTY-ONE
1
Eugene wakes in darkness. He wakes from a dream. In the dream he was trapped in an office building, a skyscraper. Because the elevator was broken, he walked down the stairwell, trying the reach the bottom. He walked for days and days but the stairs never ended. There was nothing to eat. He lost weight. At first he believed he was alone, believed the building was empty but for him. But soon enough he began to hear voices. They were distant, always a floor below. Sometimes there was laughter, and the laughter wasn’t the laughter of the sane. He checked the corridors, the offices, but they were always empty. So he’d continue down the stairs. Then one time an office wasn’t empty. He walked into the room and found four men in tattered clothes, covered in filth and blood, with long beards and long hair, sitting in a semi-circle. In the middle of the semi-circle was another person, a young boy. He was lying on his back. He was dead. His eyes were open. They had a white film over them, like the eyes of a rotten fish. The mouth was open, swollen tongue protruding. Eugene felt like he should recognize the boy, and in some shadowed corner of his mind he did, but his conscious mind couldn’t pull it from the darkness. Some mental barrier prevented it. One of the four men reached out with a knife and cut a piece of meat from the boy’s arm. He put it into his mouth and chewed. Then grinned at Eugene through filthy teeth. He cut off another piece. He held it out to Eugene. Blood dripped from the meat, ran down the man’s grimy hand.
‘No,’ Eugene said, ‘thank you.’
‘You might as well. It’ll spoil soon, anyway.’ Then the man laughed the mad laughter Eugene had heard so many times before. Spittle flew from his mouth, clung to his tangled beard.
Eugene turned and ran, ran down the corridor to the stairwell, pulled open the door, stepped through, and the door slammed shut behind him.
When the door slammed he woke.
And now he lies here in bed, staring at the ceiling, his heart thudding wildly in his chest. He wonders what time it is. He feels lost. He feels like he felt the first time he slept away from home as a child — a week at his grandfather’s — and woke up in unfamiliar surroundings, recognizing nothing.
He reaches to the night table and grabs his watch. He blinks at it in the darkness, holding it close to his face, as he isn’t wearing his glasses. His hope is that it’s nearly four o’clock. He knows it won’t be later, he’s up by four every morning, but he hopes four o’clock is near. After a few moments his eyes adjust and he can see the time. It’s just past midnight, two minutes past, and he knows his sleep is over despite the fact he tossed and turned till at least eleven.
After he talked with Evelyn yesterday there was nothing for him to do. He was fill
ed with adrenalin from the confrontation, but there’d been nothing in it to expend the energy. They had a conversation, came to a tenuous agreement, and he left. He came back here. He listened to the radio. He listened to the radio and he thought. He thought about Evelyn’s plan. It was simplicity itself. It was a hammer. Frame for murder the man who committed the murder. It shouldn’t be difficult.
But they need to get into his room and find out what evidence is still in his possession, perhaps plant further evidence, and that means getting a key. Evelyn has promised to do so. He’ll call her hotel room at eight to see if she got it, but eight is almost eight hours away, and already he feels as though he’s waited too long. He remembers thinking recently that he didn’t understand boredom. He still isn’t sure he does, people who get bored must think themselves very poor company, but he understands something that lives right next door to it. The emptiness of waiting for something to happen. The nagging at the back of the mind from which nothing can distract you. Could be something as simple as a letter in the mailbox or as catastrophic as the bomb, the point is the wait. The empty hours in which distraction is an impossibility. The time between each tick of the clock carries in its short span an entire day — a day filled with the sound of the sea, like your ear to a shell — and nothing in it but nothing.
He looks at his watch again. It’s still two minutes past twelve. He throws the watch across the room. It hits the wall and falls to the floor. He will lie here and go back to sleep and he will not think of the time. He won’t think of time at all. He won’t get up and find the watch. He won’t obsessively check it. He’ll lie here and close his eyes, like this, darkness on top of darkness, the cover of eyelids over the cover of night, and he’ll picture sheep jumping over a brick wall, a red brick wall, two feet high — one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. . twelve-oh-two. Maybe it’s twelve-oh-three by now. It almost has to be. He should find out.
He gets to his feet and walks through the darkness to the place he heard the watch land. He sits on his haunches and feels for it blind, his fingertips moving across the coarse surface of the carpet, occasionally brushing over a strange and suspect crumb. Eventually he finds it. He gets to his feet. He looks at the watch.
Twelve-oh-two.
It doesn’t seem possible. A single fucking minute hasn’t passed? He’s almost able to convince himself it’s broken, but the second hand is moving, tick, tick, tick, around the face of the watch.
He stares at it. And stares at it.
Twelve. . oh. . three.
2
The next eight hours are a shiftless nightmare. He tries to sleep on his back. He tries to sleep on his stomach. He sits on the edge of the bed and stares at the wall. He sits on the opposite edge of the bed and stares out the window, waiting for the blanket of night to be pulled away. But it doesn’t happen. The black remains black. He counts down from a thousand. He wishes he had a bottle of booze. If he drank a pint of something hard he might manage to get a little more sleep in. He does as many push-ups as he can, seventeen, and as many sit-ups as he can, thirty-two, and tries again to sleep. He fails again. There’s grime on his back from lying on the filthy carpet to do sit-ups. He gets to his feet and brushes crumbs from his back. He lies down again. He puts the pillow over his head. It smells like sweat and pomade. He rolls to the other side of the bed, where the mattress is cool. This helps not at all. He feels sweaty and sick.
This night will clearly never end. It will never fucking end.
3
At seven thirty Eugene steps into the shower. He washes himself. He dries off with a coarse white towel that smells of bleach. He gets dressed in a pair of dry khaki pants and a white T-shirt and a short-sleeve button-up shirt and a cardigan sweater. He combs his hair. He brought only the shoes on his feet when he left his apartment, so he slips into them despite their being wet. They make a squishing sound and water leaks through the seams and runs down over the lip of the sole to the beige carpet.
With his shoes on and his laces tied he gets to his feet.
He’s tired and disoriented when he steps into the daylight at seven fourty-five. His eyes sting and feel grainy, as if he’d spent hours at the beach on a windy day. But he’s glad daylight’s arrived and he smiles as he squints at the blue, blue sky.
He heads to a diner on Hollywood Boulevard, finds a payphone in the back, and drops a dime into it. It falls into the empty change receptacle, sending out a hollow clink as it hits, then settles. He dials the Fairmont Hotel. A woman at the switchboard picks up and, after a brief exchange, patches him through to Evelyn’s room.
‘Hello?’
‘Did you get it?’
‘Eugene?’
‘Did you?’
‘I had to bribe one of the hotel girls.’
‘What if she talks?’
‘She won’t.’
‘How can you know that?’
‘The one thing hotel workers know how to do better than anything else is keep their mouths shut, Gene. Silence is a commodity they can sell, and they do.’
‘Okay, what’s next?’
‘Next we find out what we have to work with. I’ll meet you at noon to give you the key. By then I should have some idea how I’m gonna get Lou out of his room. Where are you staying?’
‘We’ll meet somewhere else.’
‘You don’t trust me?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Fair enough. Where do you want to meet?’
‘Schwab’s.’
‘I’ll see you at noon.’
The line goes dead.
Eugene pulls the telephone away from his ear. He looks down at it. It was nice to hear her voice, and he wants to trust her, but he doesn’t.
He hangs up the telephone, drops it into its cradle.
He doesn’t trust her, but she got the key, so their plan moves forward.
His plan moves forward, anyway. Too bad he doesn’t yet know what his plan is. Too bad he doesn’t have the slightest clue. Well, he has another four-hour wait on his hands. He can think about it then. He can think about it over breakfast and a few cups of coffee. He’s starving. Thinks he’ll have some eggs over easy, a fat steak, and some well-done hash browns.
He walks to a booth and sits down.
Maybe with a full stomach he’ll be able to think.
THIRTY-TWO
1
Sandy watches the deputy at the counter scrawl his signature across a form in order to take custody of him. Then the two of them, he and the deputy, walk side by side down a white corridor, through a metal door, and into the crisp morning air. Though the rain has stopped, it stopped last night while Sandy slept, small pools of glistening water still dot the ground, marking its low points, leveling the earth. The puddles reflect blue sky and wispy white clouds and bursts of glistening sunlight like jewels.
The deputy, who will be driving him to his meeting with the district attorney, has a reddish-blond mustache, graying sideburns, and light-blue smiling eyes. He folds a stick of Wrigley’s chewing gum onto his tongue.
‘Trying to quit smoking. Wife hates the smell. Car’s over there.’
He nods toward the vehicle. It’s splattered with mud, which is drying in the morning light, forming a dull crust on the fenders.
Sandy and the deputy walk toward the car.
Today is the day he finds out just what lies he’s to tell when he testifies before the grand jury. He doesn’t even know what a grand jury is. Probably something like a grandmother: a jury of really old people. Maybe they’re wiser than a normal jury. It doesn’t matter; he doesn’t want to do it. Just thinking about talking in front of a group of adults makes his stomach ache. He isn’t sure he can lie the way he’s supposed to lie. In the past when he’s lied it was to get out of immediate trouble. It was thoughtless lying. Like a tapped knee kicking out, a reflex lie shot out of his mouth before he could think to be honest. This will be a story given to him by someone else, a story he’s supposed to speak a
s if it were truth remembered. He’s afraid he’ll forget what he’s supposed to say, or say it wrong.
He can’t do that. This is a lie to get him out of trouble too, more trouble than he’s ever been in before, and he doesn’t even have to concoct a story, only remember one. He can do that. He’ll be nervous and sick to his stomach the whole time, but he can do it. They probably won’t even think there’s anything strange about him being nervous. Anybody would be. Even someone telling the truth.
He can do it. He can do it because he has to.
He reaches for the back-door handle.
‘You can sit in front with me if you want.’
‘Okay.’
He slides into the front passenger’s seat and pulls the door closed behind him.
The deputy slips in behind the wheel, his weight rocking the car.
‘I got a boy about your age,’ he says. ‘Good kid. Great shortstop. You any good at baseball?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Bet you would be with a little practice.’
Sandy doesn’t know what to say to that, so he says nothing. He simply looks at the deputy for a moment, wondering what it might have been like to have a father like him, a father with smiling eyes and easy conversation, then, realizing he’s been staring too long, he looks away embarrassed. He looks out through the water-spotted windshield to the dirt driveway curving out to the street. He’s glad to be leaving this place. He knows it’s only temporary, but he’s glad all the same.
The deputy starts the car. The engine rumbles to life. The deputy puts the car into gear, and they roll down the driveway.
Sandy looks back over his shoulder and watches the buildings shrink. He wishes they would get so small they’d disappear.
Then he wouldn’t have to come back.
2
Fred sits in his Mack truck. The truck is parked on the side of the road, half on the shoulder and half on the gray asphalt. He sits with a porcelain mug of coffee resting on his fat stomach. The collar of his T-shirt has mostly torn away from the rest of the shirt, sitting apart like a cotton necklace. He sips his coffee and fishes through his ashtray for a butt worth smoking. He should have bought a packet of cigarettes this morning. Usually when he fills up his tank with gas he paces the area and finds several good lengths of cigarette on the asphalt — he especially likes the ones with lipstick on the end; it feels sexy to smoke them, like he’s kissing the women whose lips last touched them — but after yesterday’s rain there’s nothing but smears of paper and loose tobacco.
The Last Tomorrow Page 22
