"I've never been able to understand that bonding that large families claim," Grant said. "Maybe it's something you can never know unless you share the group's common blood." He had done this disclaimer before, generally using the same words to accentuate his solo nature. "There was just me and mysterious Father, at opposite polarities. Until recently." He pulled out a MetroBank Visa to cover the check, which had conspicuously been delivered in midsentence. MetroBank was owned by Calex.
"Be generous with the tip," Jennifer said. "We've run the poor dear threadbare. Twenty percent; you can afford it."
Grant wrote CASH in block letters across the tip blank on the charge flimsy, then unwalleted currency to leave on the tray. "Better for the waiters," he said. "Less paperwork; less corporate time wasting."
They stood and he moved to knead her shoulders from behind, grateful for the renewed contact after spending the entire meal a table apart. "Would you like to see the property?" He asked this abruptly, feeling that he might not have asked her a day earlier, but now it was fair to offer her some involvement, if she consented. "I have to pop in to see Father's doctor. The lot where the house stood is on the way. Yes?"
"You would have to ask today:" she said as Grant reached to tear carbons. "I've got a shoot with Toby Wolff at three, and yes, I did mention this last night, before we got insensate. Today he does folio shots for me; tomorrow I do nudes, for him. Barter is always the best form of negotiation - each side of the deal thinks they made out best. Once he made the offer, I figured I could get you to tag along so I could get some professional skin shots without any excess laying on of hands by jolly old Toby. He is a pro, but I've heard stories. I think it's backlash against the fact that most of the other LA photographers - the good ones - are terminally gay, and Toby fears for his macho rep."
"Yes tomorrow, if no today is okay. Okay?"
"Deal."
"You sure?" He disliked the thought of abandoning her to the greedy eyes of Toby, but Montgomery Mantel's physician was a difficult guy to get an appointment to see.
"No problem."
"Can you meet me this evening, my apartment? Whenever you finish up?"
"I thought he'd never ask." She spoke toward the sky, grinning wickedly. "But how am I supposed to do that if I don't know what time you'll be done?"
He suspected she knew the answer already but dipped into his coat pocket with a flourish regardless. Between his fingers was a shining-bronze, newly machined key. "For you?'
Her expression went just slack enough to please him; it only lasted a second. Very seriously, she said, "Does this mean that you and I have become an 'item’ sir?" And took the key to his apartment, wrapping it tightly up in her fist.
"God, that's the first time I've ever done anything like that," he said in a slightly stunned voice. But inside, he felt roughly the way good old Max must have after wolfing down his burger.
It was impossible for Grant to miss spotting the old woman as he swung his Pinto into the wide, curving promenade of Avalon Circle, just south of Pico and inside the buffer zone of Century City. She was standing in the center of the empty lot at Number 307, where the demolition had occurred, on the brink of the pit that had formerly delineated Montgomery Mantell's basement. Her arms were akimbo against a billowing paisley dress that went neck to ankles. Grant slowed to stop at the curb as she turned like a cat caught in a garbage can. She had wire spectacles, a granny bun, broad, rounded shoulders, and massive breasts. Grant wondered what sort of ancient foundation garment held such a boldly maternal chest in check.
When she saw him stop, she crossed herself furtively and hustled off the lot with surprising speed for her bulk, bee-lining for a cottage that had been spared the hyperthyroidal development of most of the court's adjoining houses. It looked to be a curt, stringently maintained one- or two-bedroom place, in the midst of castles with octopoid wings that nearly spilled into Avalon Circle from their own lots - a commuter-crunch of mansions.
Bam. Only after her front door pointedly slammed did it occur to Grant that this was Mrs. Saks, the nosy widow. He stayed in the pilot bucket of the Pinto for a few moments, trying to sort his thoughts amidst the heat shimmer and the stink of mown summer grass. He was glad Jenny had not rode shotgun; to have her around all the time meant no room for judging whether the episodes of his life he had begun baring to her in blurts were credible, or prudent. They were still relatively new to each other, recently unwrapped, and had within the last hour agreed to advance their relationship to a more tricky, unstable stage.
Now his palms were finally damp.
He kicked out of the Pinto, stretching, causing his spine to crackle, and crossed onto the lot he now owned, heels sinking briefly into the humid, yielding turf. The sign was conspicuously new, and proclaimed in loud red characters ANOTHER ONE FOR SALE BY MCCOY AND TANNER, with three exclamation points and three phone numbers for inquiry. Grant figured McCoy and Tanner must be pretty loud red characters themselves.
By contrast, the destruction had been scrupulously neat. It was as though a UFO had swooped down to zap the Mantell house, leaving a cleancut template of lawn whose brick sidewalks wound up to a floor plan-shaped rectangle of turned earth. No debris was scattered through the grass, which was still lush and green with the phony cinematic intensity seemingly endemic to the pampered lawns of the West Coast. McCoy and Tanner's banner was planted at the head of the lot, and looked like a lonesome sentry.
When Calex did not have his father globe-trotting, this was the place, Grant thought. The place where dear old Dad spent an abnormal percentage of his valuable executive time alone, with the curtains drawn against inquisitive neighbors. For a woman, perhaps? Several? Grant had known of no cohabitants, concubines, or compatriots - at least none who could claim any legally significant amount of time served.
Upon circumnavigation of the house-shaped plot he saw the basement and foundations were now depressions of fill dirt. In the cottage across the way he saw a pasty white face duck behind an embroidered drape.
He stopped to stand with one hand on McCoy and Tanner's sign, like a hunter posing with a kill, hoping for some sympathetic vibration from the earth. None came. He realized that after today he would probably never return to this place. Calls had already come his way regarding the disposition of the property. Calls from the hemorrhoidally polite minions of Calex middle management; calls Grant did not bother to return. The house, he did not miss. It had never been a home. The few moments he spent here alone were the true eulogy for his father. It felt correct. Montgomery Mantell would call for a moment of respectful silence ... then get on with the business of living.
For Grant, there was literally nothing here anymore. But he idled, walking the lip of the excavation one more time. A glint of metal in the topsoil arrested his notice, near what had once been the basement's east wall. He bent and collected a strand of rosary beads in his fingers - that is, what he suspected to be a rosary, having seen one twice in his life. In movies. He blew dirt crumbs through the gaps of the worked medallion that twirled from one end. He took it to be a Star of David. Closer scrutiny proved him wrong.
Three four-pointed stars were staggered to form a kind of cog or sunburst design. Within the ring, a smaller ring composed the core. It was burnished blunt, obviously old, and appeared to have been worked from pewter. It gave gently beneath the pressure of his fingers. He examined it more closely, still blowing motes of dirt away. He saw the engraving on the flip side of the half-dollar-sized disc.
Lines and circles were hammered precisely into the thin circlet. Boxed circles; others three-quarter boxed, all outwardly random, yet purposefully intricate. They lent texture to one side while the obverse was polished and knickless. Grant thought of photo negatives: the emulsion side versus the shiny side. It all depended on which side you had up.
The designs were very much like those graven in minute detail into the brass frame of the bed and mirror he had just trucked into his apartment. He looked toward Mrs. Saks' house and sa
w her face dip out of sight again.
That decided him.
When it became clear that he would not vacate her porch, nor stop ringing her buzzer, Mrs. Saks cracked open the door instead of calling the law. Grant soon found out why.
"I think you dropped this out there, ma'am," he said, feeling absurd, as though he were playing Huckleberry Finn, putting on manners. He held out the rosary and medallion.
She peeped out, said nothing, allowed the door a few more cautious inches. Her glasses distorted her eyes, making them look to Grant like the view through the wrong end of a thick glass loup. She canted them back on her reddened nose to squint at him. The door opened a few more inches. He could now see one broad foot, torturing a frayed house slipper just beneath the hem of the paisley dress. Her tight bun of hair, including all the flyaways, was the iron-blue tint of a gun barrel.
"Uh - you must be Mrs. Saks," he got out, teeth locked together. The silence was suffocating inside, she shifted her bulk, and Grant saw the foot in the doorway expand under the pressure, the slipper growing taut. My god, there was a good eighteen or nineteen stone inside that flimsy dress. Of that, there was at least twenty pounds of bosom. Thirty.
"You're of his blood," she said, in a voice that came from the very back of the throat and dried on the way out. Her eyes behind their half-inch density of glass checked him out again, head to shoes, and sent the input to her brain for processing. "His blood is yours. I can smell it." Her face was puffy, as if slightly inflated, and florid. Grant imagined her heart laboring to flush the arteries in her massive corpus with blood, to keep the crimson high in her face. "But you have my String?" Fat hands with short, stubby fingers drifted up to cover her mouth in slight confusion. Her eyes seemed to swim into focus, suddenly, and her tone humanized from that of a mummified harridan to a simple but concerned matron. "You have it in your hands. How can that he, boy? Tell me."
"You dropped it on my property" he said, resisting the urge to sarcasm. "In your haste to leave."
"I was afeared. But you're not who I thought you to be; I kenned a new one, a fresh one, a renewal of the evil." She watched the words have the effect she calculated on Grant's expression and stabbed an open palm toward him before he had time to react. "Give me it." she insisted.
"No." To hesitate just now would be to stumble. "It was on my property. If you can explain to me what you're scared of, I might give it to you as a gift."
Her eyes narrowed, were almost swallowed by sun-wrinkles. For a beat he tried to appear rational but unmovable, then he conceded to the instinct that told him threats might just as easily make the old woman clam up or, worse, become more cryptic. He had blundered onto touchy, arcane ground, and needed to know more - information he could not specify, like the unknown crossword-puzzle key that will unlock eight more hidden words. If the medallion was used as some sort of talisman against a real or imagined evil connected to his father, then in her eyes he was probably the agent for some black ruse. A concession became a good gamble.
"No," he said, extending the medallion so it revolved, shining, on the end of the unwinding rosary. "I'm no good at blackmail, Mrs. Saks. Take it - it's yours. But tell me why you think my father's house was evil. Obviously you wouldn't be so scared of losing this if it wasn't?"
She snatched it, stepping one thunderous step forward to capture it in both pawlike hands. Her gaze never left him, still suspicious, and he did not budge.
Finally she said, "Tis not a trick, then."
"I'm afraid that's a little too sophisticated for me." She relaxed another notch, taking her eyes off him for the first time and moving across the porch to stare toward the vacated lot, hands steady on the painted wood of the porch balustrade. "Air's a mess:' she observed. "Stinks. Stings the eyes and parches the gullet some?"
"Smog's bad because of the heat." He half-expected her to trot out lemonade to seal their truce.
"Tis the carbons. Poisons in the very air; some you can't see." A short, disinterested silence ensued, then she turned on him like a carousel on slow revolve. "I've been rude to you with no cause. Not even thanking you for returning my string." She moved back toward the door in vast, arthritic strides, her weight creaking the porch planks.
"Wait. My father's house -"
"You're not touched by the sin, thank the Lord?' she said, shaking her head in judgment. "Best for you to leave it lie. The place be taken now; it can't do no more harm neither." Confidentially, proudly, she added, "I throwed salt over the tilled ground meself, through the new dawn. Two containers of Morton's?'
"The house isn't all gone," he said. "Not yet."
"Then you'd best destroy whatever's left:" she said with grandmotherly certainty. Grant felt scolded. "Fire cleanses."
"No." I'd need a smelter, for god's sake. "It would take a long time. You can help me today."
"I know protection. They wanted to touch me; oh, how they wanted to silence me, trying temptation when the yellow failed. But I knew protection then, and learned more since." She cocked a plump thumb toward the threshold of the front door and the hex sign evenly painted above. It was a larger clone of the medallion design. "That prevents entry. This" - she patted the medallion, now stowed in a flapping-sail pocket of the dress - "prevents personal harm. I laughed in the faces of the demons, and I walk the Earth yet. Godliness can still triumph?'
"Demons... "It was not a question. It was dull repetition. His mind swam.
"They worshiped the Goat. Consorted with demons —fornicators, blasphemers. The Horned One took them all, all but your father. He forestalled somehow, made some pact of blood, gained some engine of protection. But he was taken all the same. Just took longer, was all. No offense:"
Mrs. Saks was as crazy as a gnat in a turbine.
"Who? What others?"
"Maybe the Spilsbury Murders was before your time," she said, squinting at him keenly.
It was one of Hollywood's meatier scandals, back in the days before Vietnam made television so bloodthirsty, when such things were confined to the enquiring poop tabloids Mrs. Saks no doubt took stone-cold seriously. "I've heard of it. Movie people slaughtered by cultists, like the Manson thing, but earlier. Late 50s, early 6os..."
"Nineteen and fifty-nine it was."
He stopped his smile by contorting his neck muscles. "You mean the Horned One hung fire for twenty-three years just waiting to bump off my dad?"
"Time is nothing to the Dark Lords."
"Why my father? This doesn't track at all -"
"To succumb to temptation is nothing new. Look to history, boy. You'll recognize evil if you keep a clear eye?"
I read that once in a fortune cookie, Grant thought. Dark Lords, my little brown eyeball. His impulse was to attack the old woman's derangements from all vantages at once; he opted to simply fly away. There really was nothing left here for him.
"Hang back," she ordered, anticipating his leave-taking. "You'll go now from here and scoff at the visions of a foolish old woman. Your eye is clouded already. Hang back a second." She waddled back into the cool dimness of her lair. Grant clocked off time for the slowness imposed by her own girth, impatient now to be shut of this lunacy, but obligated to finish up what he had begun by ringing the bell. Stupid.
She returned, presenting him with a lump, inside of brown shopping-bag paper fuzzy with handling. It was about the size and weight of a full soup can.
"Your father died with this in his hand."
He tore open the paper quickly, too eagerly. It was a fat candle, black, greasy to the touch. The wick was charred.
"I nicked it. The ambulance boys didn't mind none. You take it. You'll see." Magnanimously she announced, "I think your father renounced the lefthanded path. He only did so too late. There are greater sins, in God's eye."
Debate would not do, so Grant merely backed off the porch with the candle, feeling foolishly like a yokel with a wet-ink deed to Brooklyn's most infamous bridge. He tossed back a cursory thanks and would not have steered around a litter-grub
ber on Hollywood Boulevard any less. His escape was in hand.
"I wish you well, boy. I hope what you learn doesn't lay heavy on your soul. Soon enough, you'll see. I'll do a fetish for your good luck, if my feet don't need a sitz bath tonight." She crossed herself again.
The old woman mumbled to herself, worrying the string, as he left. He beelined straight for the Pinto and did not glance back at her.
His opening line was "A bottle of Mondavi says my day was weirder than yours."
"Fool's bet." Jennifer was on the pillow back sofa, wound thickly up in Grant's blue terrycloth bathrobe. She dropped the subscription copy of American Film into a slack little tent shape on the coffee table. Meryl Streep stared up, eyes puffy, nose as red as usual, face sharp enough to chip flint. "Bottle's already by the fridge. So, tell. You have to go first."
"I am profoundly glad you are not a woman who paints her toenails. Don't ask; it's probably very male and illogical." Her bare feet, still warm and pink from the shower, were braced against the table, and from the distance the robe surrendered, he assumed her clothing was still piled in the bathroom. He brushed her neck with a kiss. She smelled fragrant and clean, and that reminded him of his own stickiness and stiff neck. He paused in passing to savor the bouquet of her hair; the masses and handfuls of glossy black exuded their own intoxicating aroma.
In the kitchenette he uncorked the dry; musky red and swished out two bowl-shaped goblets under scalding water. Through their first glass, he told her most of the saga of Mrs. Saks.
"Sounds like venerable ancient curse on ye olde bed and mirror." She waggled her eyebrows. "Case closed." Pause. "That old lady had been spying on your father for ... what? Twenty-five years? Thirty? Jesus."
"She was unbalanced, sure. But what conviction. And she had a definite interest in salvaging my soul from the big bad demons, or ghosts, or whatever?'
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