Horn suppressed the desire to laugh. Although he wasn’t rid of his resentment, it was hard to dislike Scotty for long. Still, there remained one thing, buried deep, that he needed to unearth. “For a while there, I was wondering,” he said. “When I didn’t hear from you, and then when Iris said she was divorcing me. . . . ”
“You thought I was romancing your wife?” Scotty looked astonished.
Horn shrugged. “Sounded reasonable to me at the time.”
“Well, it’s crazy. She’s a great gal, and I always liked her. But hell, John Ray, I fixed you up with her. She’d never get serious about me. I was only good for laughs. Besides, she’s married again.”
“You know anything about the guy?” Horn asked casually.
“A little. You know how I never turn down an invitation? Well, I just might have been at the party where they met each other. At least that’s the way I recall it through the haze of alcohol. Also, I think they both showed up at the old man’s funeral the other day, although there was such a crowd. . . . I haven’t talked to her for a long time. He’s some kind of business type. A few months ago there was a picture of the two of them in the society page, some event. He’s a decent-looking guy.” He glanced quickly at Horn. “Apparently she’s well fixed.”
“Well, good for her,” Horn said, trying to mean it. “Like they say, third time’s the charm.” The subject was making him uncomfortable, and he wondered what he was doing sitting in a dead man’s office. “Is this what you wanted to show me?” he asked, gesturing around the room.
Something passed over Scotty’s face. “No,” he said. “There’s more. When the old man died, my mother and I went through everything of his, all his papers. He was organized, like you’d expect. We opened his lock boxes, found a lot of things related to the business. Even a pile of her old letters to him, which made her happy that he’d bothered to keep them. Some people said he didn’t have a conscience. When it came to business, he could be ruthless. But my mother said they just didn’t know the real Arthur, the man who’d keep old letters from his wife.”
Scotty paused, and Horn simply nodded, waiting. “We knew he’d written a will,” Scotty went on, “but it didn’t turn up in the lock boxes, so we came here to look in his desk. He kept the drawers locked, but we had all the keys from his key ring. Sure enough, we turned up the will down in the bottom drawer.”
Scotty finished off his scotch in one gulp. “There was one other thing in the drawer—this,” he said, reaching downward. He turned a key in a lock, opened the drawer, and extracted an ordinary manila envelope, which he laid on the desk. “I looked inside and told my mother it was just business details, not anything she needed to worry about.” His eyes evading Horn’s, he said quietly, “Now I want you to look at it.”
The envelope was about 9 by 12, bearing the logotype of Bullard Development and no other markings. Horn picked it up, opened the clasp, and let the contents slide onto the desk. It was a packet of photos secured by a rubber band. He slid off the band and spread them around the desktop. Fifteen pictures, warped and dog-eared by Arthur Bullard’s handling. Horn instantly knew the photos. Not because he had seen them before, but because he had seen many like them. The first had been at a county fair, when a cousin had taken him behind a stall and showed him a sepia-toned snapshot he had bought on the street in St. Louis, a picture of a woman lounging on a couch, naked, with her thighs apart.
Horn picked up his glass. “I’ve seen dirty pictures,” he said. “A guy in my platoon over in Italy had a bunch of them. Said they were all of his girlfriend, and if he didn’t make it back to New Jersey, he wanted us to bury ‘em with him.”
“I don’t think they were like these,” Scotty said.
“Hmm?” Horn looked over them again. The photos, like all those he’d seen, gave off a whiff of sinister energy: They were furtive, blatant, and forbidden all at once. Men and women, doing things few cameras ever recorded. The women were all naked, the men were covered in some way, wearing bulky robes, open in front. Their faces were hooded. His eyes swept over the inescapable details, the erect male organs, grasping hands, awkwardly sprawled legs, open mouths, joined bodies. Then he leaned forward, blinking. He’d had too much to drink, and something wasn’t right. He fanned the remaining photos out on the desk and stared.
There were no women in the pictures. Only girls. Children. The oldest, he guessed, were in their mid-teens. They appeared in the tableaus featuring men and sex. The youngest were usually posed alone, naked and in a semblance of seductiveness, their small fingers sometimes touching themselves in ways they couldn’t yet understand. These girls were young, so young he didn’t want to guess their ages.
Horn pushed his chair back and got up. “Don’t know why you went to all this trouble just to show me your old man’s photo album. You want my opinion, he had a sick hobby. Maybe he should have asked the family to bury these with him in Forest Lawn.”
“Wait,” Scotty said. “Give me another minute. Just keep looking.”
Horn stared at him, sighed, then leaned over the desk, bracing himself with his hands. “I see a few guys who belong in jail, who don’t want their faces to show,” he said, sounding bored. “I see a bunch of little girls who are going to be messed up for a long. . . .”
He reached for one photo, held it up close to the desk light. Then he sat down slowly. A small girl, no more than four or five years old, stood in a doorway, smiling at the camera. Her weight was on one leg, her hip cocked and the other leg slightly bent. Her right hand cupped a nonexistent breast, her thumb toying with her tiny nipple. The girl’s face was rouged and lipsticked, but underneath the grotesque mask, her smile was full and eager, as if she wanted to please whoever operated the camera.
It was the face that had stopped him. Even in this childish form, it bore features he recognized. He knew the full upper lip, the well-defined jaw, the pale, wide-set eyes. I didn’t know her then, he thought distractedly, I knew her later.
He looked up to find Scotty staring at him. “I was right,” Scotty said. “It’s her, isn’t it?”
Horn nodded slowly, not wanting to say the name. “It’s Clea.”
CHAPTER THREE
They sat there for a while, listening to the distant sounds of traffic. Horn’s face was set into an expression that was hard and yet unfocused, as if he wanted to lash out at someone but couldn’t yet make out his adversary.
A cleaning woman opened the door and started in, her water pail trailing behind her. She saw the two men and stopped. “This is Mr. Bullard’s office,” she said hesitantly in a thick accent.
“I’m the other Mr. Bullard, the junior one,” Scotty said to her, not unkindly. “Come back later, would you?”
She closed the door behind her. “Fifteen years at this fucking company,” Scotty said quietly, “and some of the help still don’t know me. Guess that’s what I get for only working half days, huh?”
Horn just stared at the photo of the little girl who had once been his stepdaughter. Finally he said, “You know where he got this stuff?”
Scotty shook his head. “There must be dozens of photographers in L.A., and it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of them sell this sort of thing. My father had a lot of money, and I’m sure he had people who could get this for him. This town’s got something for everybody.” He looked around, as if searching for something. “But I did find this.” Reaching in the top center drawer of the desk, he brought out a small card and slid it across to Horn.
It was a business card. It read Geiger’s Rare Books, with a phone number and an address in Hollywood.
“This place is one of several bookstores along that stretch of Hollywood Boulevard,” Scotty said. “I’ve been in most of them. Geiger’s is a little different. They sell first editions, but they’ve also got dirty books under the counter—expensive ones, leather bindings and all that—if y
ou’ve got the money to spend and know what to ask for.”
“You know about this sort of thing, do you?”
“I know about a lot of things, John Ray. Don’t go getting holy on me. You asked me, and I told you what I know.”
“All right,” Horn said. “But your father probably had a lot of business cards.”
“Hundreds of them,” Scott said. “All arranged very neatly and alphabetically in that box.” He pointed to a long and narrow teakwood box resting by Arthur Bullard’s telephone.
“So why—”
“But this card wasn’t in the box,” Scotty interrupted. “It was underneath the desk blotter. The only thing I found there.”
Horn thought about that for a moment, then put the card in his pocket.
“Here’s a laugh,” Scotty went on. “I’ve finally got the goods on the old man. But if he were sitting here right now, I wouldn’t have the nerve to ask him what he was doing with these pictures.”
“I know one thing,” Horn said, looking again at the photo of the little girl. “He held this one in his hands and looked at it. He was a sick son of a bitch.” He sat back, his face drawn, and rubbed his eyes. “How the hell could Clea—”
“Get her picture taken like this? That’s what’s been bothering me. Who took it? Where was she? Where was her mother when this happened? Tell me how old she looks here.”
“Maybe four or five. She was five when I married Iris, and she looks a little younger here. She—” He stopped for a second, swallowing hard. “She was growing real fast right about then. This was either while Iris was still married to Clea’s dad or after she divorced him.”
“Any chance Iris could have known about this?”
Horn had had the same thought, and his face twisted with something close to pain. “How am I supposed to answer that? Look, she’s not one of my favorite people right now, and I’m sure it’s mutual. But one thing I know—she loves this girl.”
Scotty nodded. “I would have said the same thing.”
Horn raised his gaze to him, and the look was not friendly. “Why did you show me all this?”
Scotty shoved his chair back until it rested against a bookshelf behind him. Horn had never seen him look so tired. “Maybe I want to get even with my old man,” he said, his words a little slurred. “For not letting a day go by without dropping a hint about what a disappointment I was to him. Maybe I just want somebody to know he wasn’t the high and mighty Arthur, the guy in those pictures up there on the wall. I don’t want his name in the papers or anything like that. My mother is pretty strong, but I’m not sure if she could handle this. I don’t want to tell the police. These pictures are old, and who are they going to arrest after all this time? I just want somebody to know, and I guess you’re the one I want to know.” He stopped, breathing deeply, and Horn heard the clatter of the cleaning woman’s mop against her pail far down the hall.
“All right, now I know,” Horn said. “But what do you want me to do?”
“Somebody needs to tell Iris about this.”
“You tell her.”
“Come on. I’m just a friend, and I haven’t talked to her in years. Clea was your daughter for a while.”
“Right. Stepdaughter, anyway. And Iris was my wife, until she resigned. I’m not exactly part of the family any more.” Horn was beginning to feel that Scotty was pushing him somewhere he didn’t want to be. “What good would it do to tell her, anyway? It would just make her sick. I’ll say what you just said: This picture’s more than ten years old. We don’t know where your old man got it, and we’ll probably never know. Clea’s a big girl by now. Let’s leave it alone.” Horn got up. “I’m tired.”
“What do you think I should do with these?” Scotty asked, sweeping his hand over the photos.
Horn glanced once again at the painted little face, younger than he had ever seen it, then tossed it back onto the pile. “Burn ‘em,” he said, turning to leave.
As he closed the door, he heard Scotty say quietly, “I hope she’s doing all right.”
* * *
An insistent knocking at the cabin’s front door awoke him when the morning light was still gray. He opened the door to find a little man with a thinning head of hair and an improbably bushy mustache. It was Harry Flye.
“I want to show the property this afternoon,” Flye said without preamble, the volume of his voice turned louder than necessary, as always. “I talked to you about the weeds. The place looks awful. You said you’d take care of it. Get up there today, all right? This morning.”
“All right,” Horn said.
“The place looks awful,” Flye said again, as if it had just occurred to him. “I can’t sell it the way it looks. You’re supposed to keep it up.”
“I will, Mr. Flye,” Horn said with what he hoped sounded like proper respect. You used to be an actor, he told himself. So pretend he’s not a weasel, and act friendly. “Today.”
“This morning,” the other man said as he stomped down the stairs to his car. “The swimming pool can wait a while, but the weeds can’t. You don’t take care of the place, lots of others be glad to get the job, I bet.”
“Nice to see you again,” Horn said as he closed the door.
After breakfast, he put on dungarees and an undershirt, fetched the long-handled scythe, and started up the path that led around his cabin and up the steep hillside through the trees.
The cabin sat on a densely wooded hillside near the head of Culebra Canyon, which wound like the snake after which it was named for a few miles until it dead-ended in the Santa Monica Mountains. The little building was made of rough, old-wood siding, but it had a solid foundation and a fireplace, both made of stone, and a brick chimney that leaned only a few degrees. Inside was one medium-size room with a couch where he slept. Behind a door was the bathroom, and behind a curtain was a tiny kitchen.
Harry Flye, the only other person who held a key to the gate, was his landlord. Flye had used the war to build an impressive little empire of new money—buying low and selling high, turning over property at precisely the right moment to make a buck, reading the market like a Gypsy fortuneteller reads a mark’s palm. At present, he was the owner of the old Ricardo Aguilar place here in Culebra Canyon, a relic of the silent-movie days when Hollywood royalty built estates to match their screen images. The property was mostly in ruins, but the caretaker’s cabin still stood, and Horn was allowed to live there rent-free in exchange for keeping up the grounds. Flye knew about his prison record and didn’t seem to care. What he cared about was cheap labor.
Within five minutes Horn stood on a large plateau, rimmed with eucalyptus trees, from where he could see the Pacific, far off to the southwest. Twenty-five years earlier, Aguilar had built his estate here, a Greek-revival palace where Valentino and Swanson, Fairbanks and Pickford, the gods of the silent screen, had gathered for their revels. When the movies found their voice in the late 1920s, Aguilar’s reedy tenor drew only laughter from audiences. He retired to his hilltop, and years later a fire swept the property and took his life. Horn had heard the stories that the fire was set by Aguilar himself in an attempt at one final dramatic moment. Now the Villa Aguilar was a scorched ruin, with the fire-blackened remnants of the mansion and outbuildings standing here and there like decayed and broken teeth.
Waist-deep weeds were everywhere. Horn picked a spot near the old swimming pool and went to work, swinging the scythe in long arcs. It felt awkward at first, but then he settled into a rhythm, taking pleasure in the easy motion, the snick of blade against weeds, the pause at the top of the arc before letting the weight of the scythe decide the timing of its return. After an hour, he had worked his way around the tennis court and foundations of some of the outbuildings and could look back and see more clearly the shape of the estate. Not a bad life you lived up here, Ricardo.
Before t
ackling the grounds around the site of the main house, he pulled some tobacco and papers from his pocket, sat on a chunk of concrete that once had been part of the foundation of the house, and rolled a smoke. His mind wandered, and for a second he saw Clea’s face in last night’s photo. But he forced the image away, and its place was taken by the thin, pinched face of the boy from the rooming house. Horn remembered the way one untamed lock of hair had fallen over the kid’s eyebrow, again heard him ask: Are you Sierra Lane?
He had met a lot of kids like that, at rodeos and horse shows and public appearances on small-town streets in front of the only theater in town. He signed autographs for them, shook their fathers’ hands. He liked the way they looked at Sierra Lane, the gol-dangedest cowpoke who ever pretended to bust up a saloon. No one had looked at him like that in quite a while. Even that kid yesterday—Horn thought he had seen something different in that look, something full of disappointment, even contempt.
Why’d you push my dad?
He attacked the weeds with new energy, the sweat flying off his face. “I could whup Sunset Carson any day of the week,” he panted aloud, “and twice on Sundays.”
* * *
He worked until mid-afternoon, then had a cool bath in the rusty, claw-footed tub and took a nap. For dinner, he grilled two pork chops, sliced up a tomato, opened a High Life, and carried it all out to the rocker on his front porch, where he sat and ate and listened to the early-evening noises of the canyon. Since the nearest house was a half-mile away and there was almost no traffic down on the road at this end of the canyon, most of the sounds were natural ones—a slow breeze in the eucalyptus and oak trees, an occasional bird sound. At night, he often could hear the call of a coyote way up the slope behind him.
The ringing of the phone startled him. Until settling up his overdue bill with the phone company a few days earlier, he’d been without a telephone for weeks and wasn’t used to its sound. He went in and picked it up.
Clea's Moon Page 3
