Walkers

by Gary Brandner

  "You are a dear."

  Peter busied himself clearing away the zodiacal chart and smoothing out the velvet tablecloth.

  "Before I go," said Mrs. Griesbeck, "how about a cup of that terrific herb tea? Nobody can make it as good as you do."

  Peter put on a sorrowful face. "I wish I could brew you one, Leonora, but my herb dealer is out of town this week. Visiting relatives in Singapore. Just my luck that yesterday I ran out of a couple of the most hard-to-get ingredients."

  Peter's herb dealer was actually the Ralph's Market at Sunset and La Brea, and the hard-to-get ingredient that Mrs. Griesbeck enjoyed so much was the hefty slug of vodka he always dropped into her cup.

  "What a pity," she said. "That cup of tea always sets off my day just right."

  "I'm sure I'll have a new supply of herbs by next week," he said.

  Under normal circumstance Peter would have been happy to sit around another ten minutes or so with Mrs. Griesbeck while she knocked back a cup of vodka-laced tea. For the price she paid for these weekly sessions of bogus astrology, he could afford to indulge her. And a little tea-spiking was a good deal easier on him than some of the special services his other clients required. But Peter performed whatever was expected of him and never complained. What the hell, it kept him in Corvettes and Guccis.

  Today, however, the circumstances were not quite normal. He was anxious to speed Mrs. Griesbeck on her way back to the eighteen-room house in Beverly Hills, on the right side of Sunset, where she lived with her gynecologist husband and a Yorkshire terrier named Bitsy Face. Peter wanted to be all relaxed and ready when Joana Raitt arrived.

  Joana's call this afternoon had caught him by surprise. Young, attractive, vigorous women like her were not the ones who usually sought out his services. He must have said the right thing to her this morning. He did get lucky sometimes, as with his guess that Joana had undergone a strange experience last night. The expression on her face told him he had hit home. Sometimes Peter wondered in an abstract way whether he might actually have some kind of extrasensory talent. He was, however, too sensible to entertain the thought for long.

  He walked Mrs. Griesbeck to the door and stood on the porch smiling and waving as she negotiated the zigzag wooden steps leading down to the twisty canyon street where he lived. Her gray Mcrcedes waited at the foot of the steps. As Mrs. Griesbeck approached, her young driver sprang out to hold the back door for her. He looked up at Peter with hooded eyes. In a sense, they were in the same line of work.

  The doors chunked solidly closed and the car rolled down the hill to Laurel Canyon Boulevard and headed back toward Hollywood.

  Peter stood for a moment breathing in the afternoon air. The little house was perfect for his purposes. It was near enough to the action, yet isolated from the commercial hullabaloo of the boulevards. The outside was California rustic, with a suggestion of a Walt Disney witch's cottage—a kind of nonthreatening occult look. Peter had selected the furnishings with care. The colors and textures were sensual without being blatant about it. There were just enough touches of mystery—a crystal ball shrouded by a dark-blue cloth, a zodiac clock, a Haitian voodoo mask—to suggest the supernatural without frightening off the clients.

  He walked back inside. There was a quarter of an hour to kill before Joana was due. He snuffed the incense and turned on the exhaust fan over the big front window. Joana did not strike him as the incense type. Next he cut off the Far Eastern sitar music and replaced it with a tape of Laurindo Almeida playing some gentle guitar jazz. He listened for a moment and nodded his approval. Intimate, but not pushy.

  He decided against setting out anything to drink. After all, she called him, let her establish the mood. He would play it by ear. Satisfied, Peter sank into his acrylic-fur Stratolounger and cranked it back to the full recline position. He closed his eyes and smiled. Life was good.

  Some five years earlier, Peter Landau had not had it nearly so good. He was then one of several thousand good-looking young actors in Hollywood scrambling for the bare handful of parts that came up every season in television or the movies. He had been a great favorite in Kansas City community theaters, and was shocked to discover that doors did not spring open for him in Hollywood.

  He was sharing a room then on Melrose Avenue near the Desilu Studios with two other young hopefuls. One was a would-be novelist whose work-in-progress always sounded like whoever he was reading at the time. By the time he had two-hundred pages of manuscript, the style ranged from Ross MacDonald to John Gregory Dunne, and included passages reminiscent of Philip Roth and Mark Twain. The other roommate was an aspiring stand-up comic. He felt he was being held back because he was a WASP, so to establish a more Jewish image he grew a beard and changed his name from Connor to Kravitz.

  With acting jobs exceedingly scarce in those days, Peter spent much of his time scheming ways to eat cheap. One method he hit upon was to arrange to be invited to as many parties as possible, and there fill up on hors d'oeuvres. As an attractive, popular young man, he had no shortage of invitations, and this seemed to be as painless a way of eating free as was available. To be sure, a diet of Pringles, clam dip, salted almonds, Triscuits, caraway cheese, tortilla chips, marinated mushrooms, smoked oysters, and such was not high in nutrition, but Peter was strong and healthy, and it was better than nothing. It was also, he decided early on, better than dropping his pants for some of the town's important homosexuals, which was one popular route for aspiring young actors to take.

  As a perpetual party guest, one who depended on repeat invitations, Peter found it expedient to develop a specialty. A shtik, his friend Kravitz would have called it in his bogus East Side accent. Peter's shtik was palm reading. He read a paperback book on the subject and decided that since it was all bullshit anyway, it would be no problem for him.

  He was at his best with women in the forty-and-up bracket who enjoyed having their hands held by a handsome young man, no matter what kind of nonsense he gave them about life lines. Peter developed a smooth patter along the lines of "I see you've had a fascinating life, and you've overcome some really rough obstacles all on your own." Who was going to deny a piece of flattery like that? Sometimes he would take a flyer like "Within the next two weeks you should receive a large sum of money that you don't expect," or sympathetically, "I see in your hand the signs of a very recent tragedy." He managed to hit on these often enough so people began to seek him out especially for readings of their hands. To Peter's surprise, they pressed money on him for the service.

  One of his early patrons, the wife of a hair-transplant tycoon, encouraged Peter to turn professional and to branch out from palmistry to other occult fields, capitalizing fully on his "gift." It was she who set him up in the house off Laurel Canyon. As for Peter's part of the bargain, he had merely to provide a weekly Ouija-board contact with the lady's late first husband and provide some bedtime activities that the current husband was unable or unwilling to manage.

  Peter's clientele came to him entirely through referrals. The tasteful business cards were the closest he came to advertising, and he had only had those printed because in Hollywood you had no identity unless you had a business card.

  While his psychic-counseling business kept him hopping, Peter did not lack for social life. There was in Southern California an endless supply of nubile ladies like the blonde at the Marina Village, who were eager to jump into the sack with him. Their firm young bodies helped restore him for the sessions with his sagging clients, but sometimes he wished one of them might come up with something like an original thought.

  Joana Raitt, now, she was something else. Peter had spotted her intelligence across the recreation deck almost at the same instant he spotted her tight white jeans. He had made his standard approach, and was not really surprised when she turned him down. Girls like Joana were not usually susceptible to his mellowed-out charm, but it was always worth a try. He had felt a genuine sense of loss when it appeared she had drowned in the pool, and had been glad to see her
looking alive and alert in the parking lot this morning.

  He concentrated, trying to remember exactly what Joana had said while they carried her from the pool to the apartment. Everyone else was shouting instructions and not paying any attention, but Peter, trotting alongside, had heard her clearly. It sounded crazy to him at the time, but when he mentioned it to her this morning it must have been important enough to get her over here.

  It was something about her not belonging somewhere, wanting to get away. It still didn't make any sense to Peter, but it was enough to open up a dialogue. And if he handled it right, there was no telling where it might lead.

  Chapter 7

  Joana drove up Laurel Canyon Boulevard to the twisting little street where Peter Landau lived, and turned off. She found his address painted on the curb about half a block up the street. She parked the Datsun and sat for a moment still holding the steering wheel. She had the sudden what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here feeling that came over her sometimes as she was about to board an airplane, or when she was walking into a strange party. At the airport she could always take a deep breath and remind herself where she was going and why, and at a party someone she knew usually would come out to greet her, but up here in the green canyon above Hollywood she could not shake the feeling of anxiety.

  Yesterday—was it really less than twenty-four hours ago?—when she had met the self-absorbed Peter Landau, she would no more have imagined herself driving to his house the next day than she would have imagined, well, drowning in the swimming pool. Even this morning she had had no intention of ever seeing him again. However, after the unsatisfactory talk with Dr. Hovde and the near-miss with the wild driver in Westwood, she felt she absolutely had to tell her story to somebody, and Peter seemed to be the only one who might be willing to listen.

  She got out of the car and looked up at the rustic cottage surrounded by a heavy growth of chaparral. She smiled at the rickety-looking flight of painted wooden stairs leading up to the porch. She disliked the word, but funky seemed the only way to describe the place. She started up the steps.

  Peter Landau, smiling and sure of himself, answered her knock at the door. He wore a pair of black leather jeans and a safari shirt open, of course, to the belt buckle. On a gold neck chain hung a little gold lion. A Leo, thought Joana; I might have known.

  "Welcome, welcome," he said, giving her a big white smile. "Come on in."

  The room she entered was small and warm, filled with cushions and low, seductive furniture. A thick shag rug covered the floor. The lighting was indirect and subtle. Soft guitar music flowed from concealed speakers. Joana wondered whether coming here was a big mistake.

  "Have any trouble finding the place?"

  "No."

  "Can I get you anything?"

  Joana was about to decline, then thought what the hell. "What I'd really like is a martini."

  "Hey, I'm sorry, but I don't have a drop of hard stuff in the place. How about a glass of wine?"

  "That'll do."

  Peter went out through a beaded curtain into another room. Joana wandered around looking at the books and pictures. The books were mostly occult or psychological, of the self-help variety. The pictures

  suggested the psychic, but with taste. Joana had the feeling they had been picked out by a woman.

  The beaded curtain rattled and Peter reappeared carrying two glasses of pale wine, with a tall green bottle tucked under his arm. Joana took one of the glasses from him and tasted the wine. It was nicely chilled and had a clean, dry flavor. She nodded her approval and Peter beamed.

  "I hope I'm not taking you away from your business," she said.

  "Nope. I'm all yours"—he checked his wristwatch—"until four o'clock."

  "This sounds silly," she said, "but I'm not sure I know why I'm here."

  "You want to talk about what happened to you last night," he suggested.

  "Well, yes. That's part of it, anyway."

  "Get comfortable, then, and let's hear about it."

  He motioned her into a cozy love seat. Joana sat down carefully and was a little surprised when Peter took a chair facing her instead of sitting next to her. She was thankful, being in no mood to fend off a pass right now.

  Pale-green draperies were drawn across the windows, allowing only a diffused afternoon light to come into the room. Combined with the gentle music, the purr of a fan somewhere, and Peter's soft, reassuring voice, it had a hypnotic effect. Joana had to remind herself not to get too relaxed.

  "What I had last night," she said, plunging right in, "was the experience of being dead."

  She watched Peter for a reaction, but he only nodded encouragingly.

  "I mean, as far as I'm concerned, there was a period of time there when I was actually dead."

  "I heard you," Peter said quietly. "Go on."

  So, for the third time that day, she told the story. Once again she relived the emotions that had buffeted her when she left her body, when she was in the tunnel, and when she was trying to get out. When she finished, Joana felt physically exhausted.

  Peter reached across the low table and refilled her wine glass. "What made you decide to call me this afternoon?"

  "I guess it was the accident. Or almost-accident. I was nearly run down in a crosswalk in Westwood by some woman in a station wagon."

  "Do you think it had anything to do with the business last night?"

  "I don't know, probably not. It seems the woman had a heart attack or something. She dropped dead right after she got out of the car."

  "Scary," he said.

  "'Yes, it was. And after that I just had to talk to somebody."

  "Well, I'm glad you came. Now tell me, what can I do for you?"

  "Do you mean in the way of psychic counseling?"

  "Or any other way you have in mind." He caught her frown and grew serious. "Psychic counseling is What I do."

  "l don't know what I wanted from you, Peter, I really don't. Just a sympathetic ear, I guess. I don't see that there's anything you or anybody else can do for me."

  "Don't be too sure." He looked around the room speculatively. "Let me see, I don't think this is a job for the crystal. Ouija board?" He looked at her quickly, then shook his head. "No, we' re not ready for the Ouija board. We don't have time to make a proper astrological chart for you." He rubbed his chin. "What would you say to a Tarot reading?"

  "You mean fortune-telling cards? Like Gypsies?"

  He held up his hands, palms outward. "No no no, not fortune-telling. Don't even say fortune-telling out loud. Fortune-telling is against the law. So are Gypsies, as far as I know. I am no Gypsy fortune-teller, I am a psychic counselor." He smiled at her. "For this no laws have yet been written."

  "I don't think so," Joana said. "I wouldn't be a very good subject. I really don't believe in all that stuff."

  "Until last night, did you believe you could be dead and come back?"

  "You've got a point there."

  "Anyway, it doesn't really matter if you believe or not. It won't affect the reading. Why not give it a try? What have you got to lose?"

  "Well...what the hell, why not?" Joana took out a cigarette and Peter reached across instantly to snap a flame for her from his lighter. "As you say, what have I got to lose?"

  "That's the spirit." Peter stood up and walked over to a compact writing desk. From a drawer he took an oblong package wrapped in silk. He carefully unwrapped the silk kerchief and laid it aside. Joana saw the package was a thick pack of cards.

  "You take good care of them," she said.

  "Silk keeps out the discordant vibrations."

  Joana searched his face for any sign that he was kidding, but found none. He came back and sat down beside her, spreading the cards out face up on the table in front of them.

  Joana gazed down at the colorful picture cards. There were figures of humans, animals, and mythological creatures engaged in a variety of activities in different detailed settings. A few of them, kings and queens, vaguely resembled r
egular playing cards.

  "First time you've seen a Tarot deck?" Peter asked.

  "Yes, it is. Does each of these cards have a meaning of its own?"

  "In a sense they do," Peter said smoothly, "but the symbolism is the important thing. That's the key to the Tarot. The meanings of the individual cards are different according to where they come up in the layout, whether they're upright or reversed, which cards come up around them, and most important, the vibes given off by the querent."

  "Querent?" Joana repeated.

  "That's you. I am the reader."

  "If you say so." Joana picked out a card at random. It showed a tall, square-sided structure on the top of a mountain being struck by a bolt of lightning. Flames licked from the windows, and a man and woman, their faces contorted, plunged apparently to their deaths. "What does this one mean? It looks ominous.

  Peter took the card from her hand. "This is The Tower," he said. "And you're right, this is usually bad news. Conflict, catastrophe, violent change, oppression. It all depends, though, on the total reading. With the right kind of vibes it could mean a new freedom of mind or body, though gained at great cost."

  "What you're saying is it means just about what you want it to mean."

  He smiled, not at all offended. "Not really, but there is always room for interpretation. That's what I'm here for."

  "All right," she said, "let's do it if we're going to."

  "Right." Peter moved the cards about on the table. "First we have to find one that will represent you." He picked out a card showing a handsome crowned woman sitting on a throne, holding in her hands an elaborate jeweled chalice. "How would you like to be the Queen of Cups?"

  "Why not."

  He placed the Queen of Cups face up in the center of the table. Then he scooped up the rest of the deck, squared it, and handed it to Joana. "Now you shuffle the cards."

  She took the deck from him. "How much do I shuffle?"

  "Just until you feel comfortable about it. And while you shuffle, think about some question that you'd like the cards to answer."