It’s been a long time since she’s shared a morning with someone new, and she hadn’t planned on such a thing happening today. Despite the fact she told him on the phone there could be nothing between them, she knew she had feelings for him; she told him there could be nothing between them because she did have feelings for him, and she didn’t think she was ready to step into something new, and she didn’t want to sabotage whatever this was — if it was anything at all — by hurrying into an affair so soon after she lost her husband. She feels raw. Despite the fact that she’s holding herself together, she feels perpetually close to a breakdown. But she doesn’t regret that it happened. It felt right in the moment and good, and she needed something that felt good after all the bad she’s suffered. Even if this morning turns out to be awkward she won’t regret last night. Even last night had its awkward moments, but despite them, or because of them, it felt wonderfully human. Last night she felt like herself for the first time since Neil was murdered. It made her wonder where she’d been.
This morning she must again deal with this mess her life has become. She must drive down to the district attorney’s office to sit with Sandy while he’s coached on his testimony. She must discuss the terms of Sandy’s deal with Markley and her lawyer, with whom she’s only spoken once before. If everything’s in order, then paperwork can be signed, making the arrangement official.
But last night let her know that this isn’t all she can have. There’s something beyond this, even if she isn’t yet there. Last night was a glimpse of it. She hopes, though her hope is a cautious one, that Carl might take her hand and help lead her there. Maybe she can help him too.
She gets to her feet, finds a pink nightgown hanging over her door, and slides it over her head. The material is night-chilled and as it slips over her body it brings out gooseflesh on her arms.
She walks to the living room.
‘Carl?’
No response.
She wanders through the living room and the dining room to the kitchen, but the kitchen too is empty. A brief but intense sadness overwhelms her, like a wave crashing on the shore and then quickly retreating. He left without saying goodbye. Maybe he left a note for her somewhere. Or maybe he simply stepped out to get some fresh morning air. There’s almost nothing finer than a spring morning after it’s rained.
She walks to the living-room window and looks out. She doesn’t see him, but she does see his car, which means he hasn’t left after all. Simply seeing his car parked out there on the street causes a smile to touch her lips.
She turns from the window and makes her way to the bathroom. She has to use the toilet. She hopes it doesn’t burn when she pees. The first time she urinates after sex is sometimes less than pleasant. She might have a urinary-tract infection. It’d been so long that she’d forgotten she often gets them after first making love with a new partner. She supposes she’ll know soon enough.
The bathroom door is closed. She gives it a tap with her knuckles, says Carl’s name, and when he doesn’t respond pushes the door open.
As the door swings wide she sees flesh, sees Carl sitting on the toilet, smells the stink of shit, and starts to pull the door closed with sorry on her lips. But before the door can latch she stops. There was something strange about what she saw. Carl didn’t look up at her with surprise in his eyes, didn’t look up at her at all. He just sat there, slumped. There’s something very wrong about that.
Slowly she pushes the door open again.
‘Carl?’
Still he doesn’t move. His legs are sprawled out in front of him, feet jutting from wrinkled slacks, pale and gnarled. The toenails are yellow. His head is tilted down, chin resting on his chest. His eyes are closed. Drool hangs from his open mouth. Spittle clings to the patch of hair between his pectorals. It runs down his pear-shaped stomach.
A needle hangs from his left arm, a glass syringe.
She looks from that to his face and understands.
She thinks of her first husband, Lyle, always drunk; controlled by the bottle. Often he’d barely manage to stumble home before passing out on the lawn in his own sick. He couldn’t hold a job. He was married more to his addiction than to her, and of course he finally chose it over her. You need to quit or leave, Lyle, that’s your choice.
Then goodbye.
No. She will not be anybody’s mistress. She will not be second in anybody’s life. She’s been through too much. She’s worth too much.
She walks into the bathroom, stands over Carl. She says his name, and when he doesn’t respond she says it again.
He picks up his head and looks at her. He smiles.
‘Candice,’ he says. ‘G’mornin.’
‘You need to get out.’
‘What happened?’
‘You need to get dressed and you need to leave.’
‘What?’
‘Now,’ she says.
‘What did I do?’
‘What did you-’
She stops. She leans down and pulls the syringe from his arm and holds it up in front of his face.
‘This is what you did. I’m not having that in my life. I’m not. I won’t.’ She throws the syringe down and it shatters on the tile floor. She feels the sting of tears in her eyes, and blinks repeatedly, wanting to hold them off, wanting to get control of her emotions. She exhales.
‘You need to go,’ she says again. This time she says it calmly.
3
Carl looks down at the shattered syringe on the bathroom floor. He can see through the shards to the black and white tiles on which they lie. He looks up at Candice. She glares down at him angry, her brow furrowed, her mouth a narrow line. She shouldn’t be so angry. She should smile instead. He should tell her that.
‘You. . you should-’
‘Get out of my house.’
She wants him to leave. He supposes it’s best if he does. They can talk about this later. He’ll call her later and they can talk about it then. He’ll make her understand that it’s not how it looks. He isn’t an addict. He would never let himself become an addict. He needs to explain that to her. He’ll do it later, though. Right now she’s too angry to listen to him. Right now she’s too angry to listen to reason.
‘Okay,’ he says, and gets to his feet.
The syringe box, his bindle, his lighter, and his spoon all fall to the floor.
‘Oh.’
He leans down and picks up his belongings. He puts them into his pockets. He looks at Candice again. She stands with her arms crossed in front of her chest. When he tries to make eye contact she looks away.
‘Okay,’ he says again.
He walks to the bathroom door. He can hear glass cracking beneath his feet. He supposes he can feel it too, though it doesn’t feel like much. It doesn’t really feel like he can feel it, but he guesses he must.
‘You’re cutting your feet.’
He looks behind him, sees a trail of blood.
‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I’ll clean it up. I’ll go get something to clean it up.’
‘Just go,’ Candice says.
‘Okay. We’ll talk later.’
‘I don’t want to talk later. I don’t want to see you again.’
He doesn’t respond to that. There is no response. He turns and walks to the bedroom. He sits on the edge of the bed and brushes glass from his feet, picking shards from his flesh when he needs to and setting them on the night table. Then he puts on his socks and his shoes, his shirt and his tie. At first he cannot find his coat. After a few minutes he remembers he took it to the bathroom. He doesn’t want to go back there. Candice is angry. He’ll leave it.
He walks to the living room. His fedora hangs by the door, the lone fruit on the hat tree. He plucks it from where it hangs.
‘Shit in it and pull it down over your ears,’ he says to himself before setting it on his head. He looks over his shoulder. Candice stands in the hallway entrance, arms still folded over her chest.
Blood fills his shoes.
> He takes a step toward her, thinking maybe he can hug her goodbye. If he hugs her, if she can feel how much he cares for her, she’ll forgive him. She’ll soften in his arms and forgive him and everything will be fine.
But before he can take a second step she’s shaking her head.
He turns around without responding and unlatches the deadbolt. He grabs the doorknob. It’s cool to the touch.
He pulls.
4
Candice watches him walk out the door. As soon as he’s gone she slides to the floor and puts her face in her hands. That was hard to do. He showed her kindness, he made her feel understood, he made her feel there might be something good on the other side of all this shit she’s been wading through, but she will not be second to an addiction. She’s been that woman before and she’ll not be her again. She simply won’t.
After a few minutes she forces herself to stop feeling sorry for herself. She wipes at her nose with the back of her wrist. She gets to her feet. She walks to the bathroom and looks at the mess on the floor. She needs to clean it up, then she needs to get showered and dressed.
She still has to meet with the district attorney and her lawyer.
At least she gets to see Sandy today. That will be the single bright spot on what she thinks is bound to be an otherwise black square on her calendar.
5
Carl sits in his car and stares through the windshield at nothing, blank as a blackboard during summer vacation. After five minute he blinks and thoughts once more begin passing through his mind. He starts his car. He looks down at his feet. Blood is leaking from his shoes. He probably shouldn’t have stepped on that glass. He didn’t mean to. He didn’t think about it.
Candice shouldn’t have thrown it on the floor.
He puts the car into gear and pulls out into the street.
He considers heading straight to work. He doesn’t want to be late. But he knows he can’t do that. He knows he has to be careful. If he isn’t careful other people will find out something’s wrong. He needs to clean up, bandage his feet. He thinks he can fix things with Candice. He just needs to make her understand that he isn’t a junkie.
He isn’t.
But nobody else can find out what he’s doing.
He drives toward the boarding house. He’s going to be late for work, but that’s better than showing up looking like he does right now.
THIRTY-FOUR
1
Leland Jones stands in the bathroom, looking at himself in the mirror. He wears no shirt, only a pair of dark pants. He isn’t muscular, but his torso is tree-trunk solid and tanned from mowing the lawn shirtless every Saturday. His hair is wet and finger-combed back. His nose is swollen and purple. His eyes are black.
2
Two days ago, on Saturday, he was bashed twice on the head with a shower rod. He fell face-first to the wood floor and broke his nose. He was knocked out. When he came to, the house was empty. He woke and called out to Vivian but received no response. He got to his feet. Blood ran from a gash on the back of his head. It ran down his neck, staining the collar of his shirt. More blood ran from his face. He felt wobbly and unbalanced. He walked to the couch and sat down. He stared at the ceiling and held his nose so blood wouldn’t run from it. Instead it ran down the back of his throat. He had no idea what had happened. He walked through the door saying that everything went smooth as a baby’s backside and next thing he knew he was on the floor. He called to Vivian again while sitting on the couch, his voice sounding strange with his nostrils pinched shut, but knew she wasn’t home. She’d had a funeral to attend.
He couldn’t believe she’d leave him lying on the floor bleeding. It didn’t make any sense. It wasn’t like her. It didn’t make any sense at all.
Then it did make sense.
She was mad at him. She’d told him you don’t put your hand in the same till twice if you don’t want to lose your fingers when the drawer slams shut. She’d told him that, but he’d ignored her, and now he was sitting on the couch with a broken nose and a gash in the back of his head.
The son-of-a-bitch district attorney had sent someone to do this to him as punishment for the blackmail. That’s what had happened. That’s what he thought had happened. But two hours later, when Vivian returned, he learned he was wrong. The district attorney hadn’t sent someone here to beat him up. The district attorney had sent someone here to get any pictures Leland might not have handed over, and that someone had left with all the pictures, his retirement.
His first thought was to go after Markley, but Vivian talked him out of it. They’d pushed him and he pushed back — it was the way of the world, downright Newtonian even — and Leland shouldn’t have expected any different. If he pushed again, Markley would push back again, and that wouldn’t be good for anyone. Anyway, they could take more pictures. She still had a pussy, after all, and he still had a camera.
He agreed to let it go. He was angry and he wanted to do something but in the part of his mind where emotions didn’t rule he knew she was right.
And he knows it still.
3
He blinks at his reflection and wonders briefly if he might be able to use Vivian’s makeup to cover the bruises on his face. He has a meeting with a producer at Monocle Pictures about a speaking part in a Western movie. His character would have a duel with the film’s hero and get shot down. The guy’s given him background work before. Leland had pictures that ensured at least twelve weeks of work every year, that’s the agreement they came to, but a speaking role is a different matter.
He walks to the bedroom and looks at Vivian in bed with her eyes closed.
‘You asleep?’
She opens her eyes to slits. ‘Not anymore.’
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘What?’
‘Think I should try to use some of your makeup to cover up these bruises?’
‘What for?’
‘I got a meeting with a producer.’
‘What kind of part?’
‘I have a duel with the hero and get shot down.’
‘No, keep the bruises. They make you look like a ruffian, which is probably what they want. Now shut up and let me sleep.’
‘You don’t think-’
‘Shut up and let me sleep. I worked last night, in case you forgot.’
He puts on a pearl-button shirt and a bolo tie. He slips into socks and black alligator-skin boots. He perches a Stetson on his head, grimacing as it slides over a bruise. When all that’s done he walks back to the bathroom and looks at his reflection once more. He decides Vivian’s right. The bruises make him took tough. He scowls at himself, squinting and looking mean, then the scowl breaks into a toothy grin.
He grabs his keys and walks toward the front door.
4
Leland parks his powder-blue Ford pickup truck on the south side of Sunset Boulevard, glances into the side-view mirror, sees the street’s clear, and swings open the door. He steps out into the morning air, boots thudding on asphalt, inhales the lingering scent of yesterday’s rain, and slams the truck’s door shut. He heads inside, feeling good.
He slaps his hand on the counter and smiles at the pretty little secretary sitting behind it. She was painting her fingernails fire-engine red as he approached but now she looks up and smiles back at him coolly, no trace of the smile in her eyes. She screws the top back onto her bottle of nail polish.
‘Good morning, sir.’
‘It’s Leland Jones, darlin, and good mornin to you.’
‘How can I help you?’
‘You can pick up that phone and let Woodrow Selby know that Leland Jones has arrived and is ready to speak with him about a part. I’m an actor.’ He gives her his most winning smile.
‘You and everyone else in this town.’
She picks up the phone, says a few words, and hangs up again.
‘You can have a seat,’ she says. ‘Mr Selby will call down when he’s ready.’
‘Is it gonna be long?’
‘Don’t know, I never met him.’
‘He’ll call when he’s ready.’
Leland’s first instinct is to snap at the woman, but he knows that’ll get him nowhere. They’ll have an argument, he’ll get angry, and his day will be ruined. He doesn’t want that. He wants today to be a good one. He needs it to be.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he says, touching the edge of his hat.
He walks to a couch against the wall opposite and falls into it. He leans back, settling in. Tilts his hat down over his eyes. Pictures himself in a dusty one-saloon town, standing in the middle of a dirt road, facing some dogooding sheriff in a white hat. They stand twenty paces apart, elbows bent, hands at the ready mere inches from the butts of their weapons, fingers twitching. Leland’s got a smoldering cigarillo in his teeth. He gnaws on it, squinting at the man standing across from him as the man squints at him. Leland’s got the advantage. The sun’s behind him. A wind kicks up. Something rattles to the left, a pie tin rolling along the boardwalk. White-hat’s eyes shift that direction. Leland takes the chance, draws. Not fast enough. His barrel hasn’t even cleared his holster when he feels something like a sledgehammer thudding against his chest. He stumbles back two steps, looking down at his blue shirt blossoming red. It’s all over now. It’s-
The telephone rings.
Leland pushes his hat up, away from his eyes, and looks across the room to the secretary. She picks up the telephone, says yes sir, okay, and hangs up.
‘He’ll see you now.’
Leland gets to his feet.
5
He steps into daylight. He’s been ruined. That son-of-a-bitch district attorney has ruined him. Forget speaking roles in movies. He’ll be lucky if they let him shovel the horseshit from the dusty streets after a day of shooting. It’s over, he’s over. The district attorney didn’t stop when he had someone bash Leland in the skull, and he didn’t stop when he got the pictures. He only stopped when he made sure Leland was ruined. The son of a bitch is giving the photographs back to the men pictured in them. Leland has had these men scared for years, made them feel like nails with a hammer about to fall, and now they will see there is no hammer, no danger, and they’ll resent the threat.
The Last Tomorrow Page 24
