“Cowboy.” Mad Crow’s voice was a relaxed rumble from deep in the chest, and Horn imagined him sunken in the hefty chair in his living room with something tall and cold in his fist.
“Yeah.”
“How you doing?”
“Not bad.” The Indian was not given to idle conversation, so Horn waited to see what he wanted.
“Got to thinking. Guess I shouldn’t have sent you after Buddy—”
“You said that already.”
“I know what I said, dammit. How come I can’t say something twice if I want to?” The Indian’s voice lowered a notch. “Look, I don’t want you to get sour on the work. I need you around. We’re good for each other.”
Horn said nothing. He could hear the clink of ice cubes as Mad Crow sipped at whatever was in his glass.
“What you need, you need to stay busy,” the Indian went on. “Got a job for you. It’s over by MacArthur Park. A dentist. Thinks he’s God’s gift to poker. Into me for a couple of hundred. He’s a pillar of society, so he’ll pay up quick and—”
“No,” Horn cut in. “I can’t do it right now.”
“Come on.”
“Something’s come up. I’ll tell you about it later, okay? But get somebody else.” That was a lie. Nothing else was competing for his time. But yesterday’s job had soured him on the work, just as the Indian had guessed. And his talk with Scotty the night before had left him with a sense of unease that he didn’t know how to deal with.
Mad Crow sighed. “Okay, amigo. But remember, I got a business to run, and this is work you can do. You scratch mine, I scratch yours. Not a lot of jobs waiting for you out there.”
The Indian sounded impatient, and Horn felt a rising anger. Their friendship stretched back years, but it had been uneven. In the beginning, Horn had been the successful one, the name on the marquee, and Mad Crow had been his companion, both in their movies and away from the camera. Now the earth had shifted, and Horn found himself the hanger-on, the one who had to earn his pay. Would we still be friends, he wondered now, if I didn’t work for him?
He was tempted to tell Mad Crow to go to hell, as he had back at the casino. But that had been in jest, and he doubted he could keep the edge out of his voice this time. So he simply said, “Talk to you later,” and hung up.
As the sun dropped behind the cabin and the light turned pale green in the trees, he rolled a smoke, lit it, and looked through a day-old copy of the Mirror. He was restless—had been restless, in fact, since seeing Scotty—and turned to the movie ads.
There was a double bill at the Hitching Post on Hollywood Boulevard, a new Gene Autry paired with a revival of The Lost Mine, one of Horn’s movies from a few years ago. Although he never admitted it, he had once enjoyed seeing himself on the screen. But possibly as a joke on the part of the guard who selected the weekly entertainment, one of Horn’s films had made its way up to the California State Prison at Cold Creek. Sitting there in the dark, watching himself ride Raincloud in pursuit of justice while listening to the catcalls of his fellow inmates, he knew that the heroic image would never fit him again.
The phone rang again. Damn, I’m popular tonight.
“Hi. Not bothering you, I hope.” It was Scotty.
“Not at all. I was just having my town car brought around. Thought I’d pick up Linda Darnell and hit the Trocadero.”
“Capital idea. She got a friend?”
“I’ll ask.”
“You’re a prince. A prince among cowpokes.” Once again, Scotty sounded tired. Horn wondered when he’d hear the real Scott Bullard again, the playboy hell-raiser who could lift anyone out of a bad mood. “I’ve had a long day. Been driving all over the place. Thought I’d see if you’d like to go up to the lodge with me tomorrow.”
“Maybe,” Horn said. “What have you got in mind?”
“Oh, I just thought it might be fun. Get out of the heat, breathe some good air. Maybe go for a long walk, bag a few squirrels, I don’t know. I’ll pack some beer in the ice chest. We can leave early and be back by night. Sound okay?”
“Sure. Want me to bring some food?”
“I’ll take care of it.” Scotty was quiet for a moment.
“Anything else?” Horn asked.
“I’ve been thinking about those goddamned pictures.”
Horn made an impatient sound. “You didn’t get rid of them, did you?”
“Not yet. Plenty of time for that. I, uh. . . I think there’s more to them than we thought. Want to see if you agree.”
“I don’t understand a word you’re saying, but I disagree anyway.”
“Not so fast, cowboy. Give me by the end of the day. You tell me you want to burn the whole pile of them, we’ll build a little campfire up in the wilderness and do just that.”
“Fair enough.”
“We might even have time for those war stories you never got around to telling me.”
“I already told you, Scotty—”
“At least how you got the Purple Heart.”
“No war stories from me. Not ever.”
“All right, don’t get mad.” Horn heard what sounded like a yawn. “Look, I’m really worn out,” Scotty said. “Just meet me at my place by eight tomorrow. I’m still at the Moose. We’ll have a good time.”
“Bet you could use one.”
“I could definitely use one. Funerals do that to you. Want to hear something strange? I stopped in at the office for a couple of hours this morning, and Dad’s secretary told me someone went through all his desk drawers sometime last night after we left. Even the locked ones, apparently. Might have been one of the cleaning people, looking for souvenirs now that the old man’s gone.” He didn’t sound convinced.
“Did they find the pictures?”
“No. I took them with me after you left. Didn’t want to haul them around with me all day, though, so I stashed them away, where the cleaning brigade’ll never find ‘em.” Scotty yawned again. “You probably could, though. So could she.”
“So could who? You’re not making much sense, Bullard.”
“Too tired to make any sense,” Scotty said. “Don’t be late.” He mumbled a goodbye and hung up.
Horn sat up for a long time. It was that time of evening when, if he wasn’t careful, his mind went for a walk, sometimes opening old doors and entering rooms where it didn’t belong. He wondered how Iris was with her new husband, and Clea with her new father. When he’d been her father, he’d found that nothing came naturally. His own father had given him little to go on. So he made mistakes. Most obvious was the drinking, and the way it affected his relationship with both mother and daughter. Iris drank too, and once in a while the two of them would wind up in a shouting match that sent the girl into some far corner of the house. Afterward, they would coax her out and try to soothe her, but her eyes darted between them like those of a small animal cornered by two predators.
Neither one of them ever struck Clea. He wished he could say they had never struck each other, but some of their worst fights had ended in blows. The memory still sickened him.
His last memory of Clea was of the night before he was to surrender himself for the trip upstate, when she had locked herself in her room and screamed over and over that he was leaving her. He could still hear the screams, the absolute despair in her thirteen-year-old voice.
CHAPTER FOUR
Horn left early, to make sure he had time to get to Scotty’s apartment. The drive along Pacific Coast Highway went smoothly, and he was able to enjoy the way the growing sunlight picked out the humped back of Santa Catalina Island, far off to the south. He had always liked driving in the early morning, windows open and the fresh ocean air rushing noisily past his ears. As he took Sunset up from the coast road, the light was pearly-gray, no sun in sight yet, but the cool air felt thi
n, as if the coming heat could break through it like tissue paper whenever it wanted.
It was only about half-past seven when he pulled into the parking lot behind the apartment building. Scotty lived in the Blue Moor, an eight-story, U-shaped building with a landscaped courtyard in front and decorated in ornate plaster Spanish-Moorish trim. The higher-up apartments, which included Scotty’s, had a grand view of the Hollywood Hills, including the old sign reading Hollywoodland, a tattered relic of a 1920s real estate development, the H sagging and near collapse. True to its name, the Moor was painted an almost garish shade of blue that made first-time visitors gape. Scotty liked to refer to the place as the Blue Moose. The apartments were peopled by an assortment of dowagers, well-heeled bachelors, and sometimes a name or two from the movies.
Horn spotted Scotty’s car in the lot, a new Lincoln Continental convertible he had first seen the night before last, when they left Cole’s. The top was down, ready to travel, and sitting on the back seat were a jacket, some heavy-duty pants, a pair of hunting boots, and an ice chest. On the dashboard was a grease-stained paper bag bearing the name of a bakery Horn recognized. Whenever the two had gone on an excursion in the old days, Scotty’s main responsibility was procuring doughnuts.
Horn entered the building through the back door and walked down a corridor that gave onto the lobby, a high-ceilinged room of tile and potted ferns. The doorman, he noticed as he rang for the elevator, was not at his usual place behind the desk. Through the big glass-fronted doors he could see traffic moving along the street almost at a crawl. Too slowly for this time of day. Across the street, a small group of neighbors, some in bathrobes, stood motionless, apparently staring at the front of the building.
Maybe a traffic accident. Horn hesitated a second in front of the elevator, then turned and strode across the lobby, pushing through the doors. On the street directly in front of the building stood a police car and an ambulance. Behind the ambulance a mix of police and white-uniformed men stood not far from a stretcher covered with a sheet. He cut across the lawn toward the ambulance, passing a brick walkway that fronted the building. The walkway was stained with a large pool of crimson, still glistening as it seeped into the crevices.
Horn approached the stretcher. “Who is it?” he asked an ambulance attendant standing nearby.
The man was young and black-haired, with bad skin and eyes that had seen a lot. “Some guy who lived up there,” he said, indicating the blue building. “Looks like he fell.”
“I want to see him.”
“That’s not a good idea,” the young man said. “The cops just got an ID on him, and they don’t like. . . . Hey.” He reached out to stop him, but Horn had a hand on the corner of the bloodied sheet, and something in his face made the other man drop his hand.
Horn pulled back a corner of the bloodied sheet far enough to reveal Scotty’s face. The left temple was crushed, and his hair was matted with drying blood. His eyes were open but just barely, the eyelids slitted, as if the world had suddenly grown too bright to look at. The twisted mouth, half open with blood pooled inside, was not Scotty’s any more.
“You know him?” A cop was speaking to him, in a voice that said keep your hands off.
“No,” Horn said.
“Then why don’t you turn loose of the sheet and step back?” The cop was taking in Horn’s appearance, his scuffed shoes. “You live here?”
“No.” Horn replaced the sheet. “Just waiting for somebody.”
The cop’s face didn’t change expression, but Horn could see the man had him tagged as someone he could push. The cop moved toward him until they stood almost chest to chest. “Back on the sidewalk.”
“Sure.” Horn faked a smile, as easily as if the camera had been rolling. “Sorry.” He stepped away, looking at the ground, knowing he didn’t want to risk an arrest, even a frivolous one.
He went over to the front steps of the building and sat down, then pulled out a toothpick and began chewing on it. He was there for a long time, slowly spitting out the pieces, his eyes focused on the bricks at his feet, as the morning warmed and the ambulance left with Scotty’s body and most of the gawkers dispersed. Finally most of the police were gone too, including the man who had spoken to him, and only one squad car was left.
Without knowing exactly why, Horn wanted to see Scotty’s apartment. He avoided the elevator and took the stairs. When he reached the seventh floor, he took off his cotton jacket and sport shirt, folded them, and left them on the landing. Then, dressed in khaki pants, an undershirt, and the same heavy, high-topped work shoes he had worn while weeding the day before, he walked down the corridor to Scotty’s apartment. The door was open, and he went in. A different policeman sat on the sofa in the living room, filling out some kind of report.
“They need a broken window fixed in here?” Horn asked him.
“I don’t think so,” the man said, going back to his report.
“Mind if I look? I don’t want to get in trouble with the manager. They don’t call him Il Duce for nothing.”
The cop laughed without looking up. “Sure.”
Horn went into the bedroom. One of the two windows was wide open. Far up in the hills, the Hollywoodland sign was hard to pick out in the morning haze. He leaned out and saw, seven stories down and precisely below the window, the stained bricks on the walkway. Nothing else on the street seemed abnormal. A woman walked a small dog, and not far away, two kids played catch in a driveway.
He looked around the bedroom, saw nothing unusual. The bed was casually made. He went back to the window, leaning in close to the sill, and saw three faint parallel scratches on the painted surface near the corner. They were not very noticeable and could have been made by almost anything. Fingernails could have made them, Horn thought, if a man was trying to save himself from falling out the window. Or being thrown out.
He noticed that the cop had gone, leaving the apartment door open. Horn decided not to close it, reasoning that he would look less suspicious that way. But he was running out of time, especially if the manager or a neighbor should walk in on him. His mind darted back to Scotty’s comment about someone going through his father’s desk. The same impulse, barely thought out, that had sent him up to this apartment now told him to hunt for the envelope and the photos. He began looking quickly around the apartment, starting in the bedroom, where he searched under the bed and the mattress and opened all the bedroom drawers, then checked the closet. Then on to the bathroom and kitchen. Breakfast dishes were in the kitchen sink, but nothing seemed out of place.
He went out to the living room and glanced around, recalling the last time he’d been there. It was years ago, after he had come back from the war. He and Iris had gone out to dinner with Scotty and his current flame, a young woman who worked behind the cosmetics counter at one of the big department stores on Wilshire Boulevard. Afterward they came here. Scotty had entertained them for a while with jokes about the stuffed shirts at his father’s club, and Horn told a story about the owner of Medallion Studios trying to turn his girlfriend into a movie star, with disastrous results. Then Scotty put on some Glenn Miller records and mixed a pitcher of martinis, and they all seemed content to sit there, eyes closed, and hum along. Horn sat on the sofa with his arm around Iris. It had been a nice evening.
He looked under cushions and furniture and between the records, then moved to the big, glass-fronted bookcase. The thin film of dust that lay on the edge of the shelves and in the occasional gaps between books had been disturbed. In a couple of places, gaps were totally free of dust, as if books had sat there until recently. The shelves looked as if someone had removed handfuls of books, looked behind them, and then replaced them—but not always precisely where they had been.
He heard voices in the hall, gave one last look around, and left, almost bumping into two women, obviously neighbors, who looked at him curiously. Retrieving his
shirt and jacket, he left by the back door. In the lot, he stopped again by his friend’s convertible. The trunk lock, he discovered, had been forced. Inside he found only the spare and the jack. Did they find what they were looking for?
He looked in the glove compartment and behind the sun visors, felt under the seats. Nothing. The clothing, the ice chest—containing only beer and ice, barely melting—and even the bag of doughnuts were as before, telling him that the trunk had been forced open before he arrived. He berated himself for not noticing.
He sat in his car. The sun was higher now, and in the glare on the windshield he again saw Scotty’s face. He had seen too many others like it in Italy. On the way up from Salerno he had marched past Germans stacked up in a ditch, waiting for someone to cart them off. Most of them had that same look—the slitted eyelids framing an awful stare, one that focused on something farther away than living men could see.
It had not occurred to him to tell the cop that he knew Scotty. To Horn’s thinking, a policeman was not someone you trusted with a confidence. Or the truth. Two years at Cold Creek had taught him the value of not giving anything away.
He was not as reflective as some people. He either met problems head-on or ignored them in the hope that they would go away. Sometimes they did. During one of the bad times toward the end, Iris had told him that he was oblivious to others, that he didn’t give enough thought to consequences. By the time he got around to asking himself whether she was right, it was too late.
He shook his head, trying to decide what to do next. Scotty had wanted Horn to go with him up to the lodge, a place the two of them hadn’t visited together in years. What was it Scotty had said to him on the phone? Been driving all over the place. Could Scotty have been up there earlier in the day? If so, why? And why go back?
Horn visited the Lincoln once more, then returned and placed the grease-stained bag and the ice chest on his front seat. He got in and started the engine. An hour later he was passing through Glendale, heading for the foothills of the San Gabriels. He turned in at a gas station and told the pump jockey to fill ‘er up. Even though the war was long over, Horn still reveled in the absence of the hated gas rationing stamps and the luxury of a guilt-free full tank. After all, he reminded himself, he had spent two of those years in a cell where everything was rationed—time most of all.
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