by Tim Baker
Dad was trying to explain to me what had happened, his eyes going backwards and forwards, from mine to the television, and it was while he was staring at the screen that he suddenly stopped speaking, his mouth opening in a well of disbelief as he rose from his chair and slowly pointed at the TV. ‘Jesus Christ, it can’t be . . . ’
‘Dad . . . ?’
‘Oh my God, Jesus Christ, it’s him.’
I was frightened. ‘Dad?’
‘There.’ He stabbed the screen with a finger. I stared at the impossibly small faces moving in the black-and-white world. ‘Did you see him, plain as day in goddamn Dallas?’
I don’t know why, but I started crying. I tried to speak but couldn’t. He turned to me, tears in his own eyes. And it was that sight, the first time I ever saw my father cry, after everything that had happened; before everything that was going to happen—the heartbreak and disappointments, the illness and betrayals, the foreclosures and the firings—the only time, now that I come to think of it, that I ever saw my father cry. And it was that astonishment that gave me the courage to clear my voice and speak. ‘Who, Dad?’
He took a step away from the television, as though it were a loaded weapon pointing straight at him. ‘That son of a bitch . . . Hastings.’
* * *
I awake to a hand touching my shoulder. ‘Lewis . . . ?’
I leap to my feet, confused and a little embarrassed to have fallen asleep in the armchair. Evelyn stares at me with concern. ‘Are you all right?’
I look around the room. ‘I was with Eva, when . . . ’ When I fell asleep. The problem is, I have no recollection of having been tired, let alone drowsy. I glance out the window. Almost dusk. Jesus, my last day in Dallas and I still haven’t been to the Book Depository Museum. I had been planning to visit it after lunch. I hadn’t counted on being kidnapped.
‘Eva didn’t want to wake you, but when they told her the news, she said it would be best for everyone to leave . . . ’
‘What news?’
‘Annette Martinez . . . She was found early this afternoon. She was murdered. A karate chop to the neck.’
I had been shocked when I’d read about Tex’s murder earlier in the day, but it wasn’t entirely unexpected. Not for someone like Tex, who had belonged to the murky milieu of mercenaries, paramilitary rebels and death squads. But Annette Martinez? She was a gentle yet determined investigator searching for the truth from the supposed safety of her home cinema, armed with nothing but a remote control. This type of sudden and horrific ending was never supposed to happen to someone as normal as her. Besides, I liked her. She was just about the sanest of all my witnesses, Evelyn included.
The door opens, unable to frame all of Dwayne Wayne’s enormous body, even if he didn’t have a suitcase in either hand. ‘It’s time.’ He disappears.
‘Hurry . . . ’ Evelyn takes my hand and tugs me into the reception area. Granston’s beagle lies in a corner, panting with asthmatic patience.
’Wait a minute, what the hell is going on?’
‘You have to leave, we all have to go.’
‘Go where?’
‘As far from Dallas as we can.’
‘But . . . ’ I stare into her luminous brown eyes. They’ve changed somehow. And then I realise, it’s not her eyes that have changed, it’s the way I’m looking at them. The pleasure of last night has been replaced by doubt. ‘You can’t think Annette’s death involves us?’
‘It involves you.’ Granston says, coming out of a door, an attaché case in one hand, a walking stick in the other. ‘Goddamn it. Nothing good ever comes from digging up the past. Sonny used to say all it did was turn up corpses. And in a city like Dallas, there are more of those than oil.’ He points the cane at me. If it had a trigger, he’d pull it. ‘This is all your fault, Alston. Prying into things that don’t concern you. Just like your goddamn father.’
‘You know, that’s not entirely correct . . . ’
‘Shut up.’ Granston barks at Dwayne. ‘You’re as bad as him.’
I’ve had enough. ‘I’m getting out of this madhouse.’
Granston shouts after me. ‘Good. Go, and never come back, hear me? Never come back to Dallas.’
Evelyn takes my arm but I shake her hand off. ‘Don’t be angry, he’s just . . . ’
‘Don’t be angry? After being kidnapped and menaced. And you haven’t even told me why you did it?’ Evelyn tries to answer, but I talk over her. I’m in no mood for civilized conversation. ‘All you had to do was ask me, and I would have come here gladly. You didn’t have to get them to abduct me.’
‘Lewis, believe me. I called them because I was worried . . . ’
‘Why?’
‘Because of the cards . . . Don’t look at me like that.’ How the hell am I supposed to look at her after what she’s just said? ‘Then, when they told me about Tex Jeetton, I panicked.’ She holds my face between her hands. ‘Death is all around us.’ The incongruity of her soft touch and her harsh words would make me laugh if it didn’t alarm me so much. ‘It was for your own protection, Lewis, you know that.’
‘Why didn’t you just tell me?’ A whooshing noise startles me and I spin around, something arcing fast behind me. But it’s just an automatic sprinkler system coming on. I turn back to her, embarrassed by the shock it gave me. ‘ . . . And why didn’t you come with me?’
‘I couldn’t.’
‘Why couldn’t you? What are you hiding?’
‘Oh, Lewis, what I mean is . . . I can’t.’ She takes a step away from me. ‘Be with you. Ever again.’
‘You’re just like the others. You think I’m the cause of all this.’
‘I know you’re not. But I also know our destinies are not aligned.’
‘Aligned? We’re not bookshelves.’
‘We’re planets . . . ’
She opens the door of the limo in the driveway. Eva Marlowe is sitting in the back. She offers me something she’s holding in her hand. ‘Lewis, it was such a pleasure to meet you. This is for you.’
I stare at her for a long moment, then slowly take the folded onionskin writing paper and open it. Above a drawing of the mansion with the name Caddo in copperplate, Eva Marlowe has written another address: 966 avenue Jean Cocteau, St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat 06230 . . . The sprinklers hum all around me, emphasising the silence. ‘This is your address in France?’
‘This is the address of Betty Bannister. She’s expecting you . . . ’
Dwayne closes the door, separating us with smoked glass. ‘Get in the front. I’ll drop you off at your hotel. There’s a flight at 9:20 tonight, change at Heathrow for Nice. There are still seats available.’
He slams the door behind him as he gets in. I shout through the window. ‘Thanks for the itinerary but I’m flying back to Sydney tomorrow.’ The window glides down to half-mast. He gives a sad shrug. ‘Don’t say we didn’t warn you.’ The engine starts up, making me jump, the limo reversing too fast down the driveway, gravel snapping out of the way.
‘I’ll drive you into town.’
I turn back to Evelyn. ‘What in God’s name makes them think I’d actually go to France? Because they told me to? I’d have to be as crazy as . . . ’
‘Lewis, you were never going back to Sydney. Not before going to France. You have no choice. You’ve never had a choice. Don’t you understand? Your cards were marked even before you were born.’
CHAPTER 47
Los Angeles 1960
South Street. Betty Bannister glides to a halt. ‘Wait here, please . . . ’ She gets out of the car, walking towards the Fox Theatre, its spectral spire a lonely lighthouse in a sky without stars. A smothering ocean fog has come in fast with the midnight tide, salting the city with the metallic embrace of the Pacific. The sea is everywhere, the clash of waves murmuring on the wind; the air heavy with moisture and mist, my own clothes sti
ll saturated from the unplanned dip in the Bannisters’ pool. A clammy shiver passes through me. Someone’s walking over my grave. I get out of the car, watching Mrs. Bannister striding away. I have an intuition—that someone might just be Betty Bannister. Am I being set up? Why did she tell me to wait here? I feel like a dopey hack whose fare is about to do a bunk with the meter still running. Instinct kicks in. I start to follow, sticking close to the shadows along the walls, the click of her heels echoing in the lonely street as she runs across Weyburn Avenue. Goddamn it, what is she up to now? My battered brain, loosened from its moorings by the bruised accumulation of a day of hard blows and sharp cracks, lurches backwards and forwards as I trot after her, playing painful pat-a-cake as it sloshes around the interior of my skull.
She disappears near the movie house . . .
The exterior box office is closed but one of the doors to the cinema is still ajar, a faint light washing out. Lucky break or sucker punch?
The lobby is lit only with the pattern of tiny spotlights shining on framed movie posters: They Drive by Night, Clash by Night, The Night of the Hunter . . . It was enough to give me a terminal case of insomnia. The cheery parade continues down the other side of the lobby with a serenade to homicidal romance: Killer’s Kiss, Kiss Me Deadly, Murder, My Sweet . . . I pause in front of a poster of The Lady in the Lake and think of Deckard, drowning in a sheen of oil-slicked water, and then my own lucky escape in the pool. The cinematic Calvary is nearly over. The last poster seems to be talking straight to me: On Dangerous Ground.
A soft humming leads me across the lobby. A generator, from the projection room. I try the door. Locked. Where could she have disappeared to? One of the auditorium doors is wedged open by a door pump. A red velour curtain blocks the entrance. Like the curtain in Old Man Bannister’s pentagram chamber. Instinctively I reach for my gun before I remember—it’s still at the bottom of the swimming pool. If there’s somebody waiting for me, they better be unarmed, or else a lousy shot.
I pull back the curtain and enter.
Wooden panelled balconies stare down at me in the acute silence. There’s nothing lonelier than an empty cinema. Without the amplified voices proclaiming love and threatening death as giant faces flicker across the weave of silk and silver, the movie palace becomes a public burial chamber, each seat a leather-padded tombstone waiting in vain for a ghostly audience, like a tragic dog sitting patiently beside the grave of its master.
Dead end.
No one.
False lead.
I’m heading back up the aisle when I hear it—so faint it’s almost out of reach.
A child, crying.
Instinctively I look up at the screen, that locus of false miracles and deceit. But it hangs blank and unanimated. It’s no illusion. The sound is coming from a door leading off the orchestra pit. I take the stairs down, careful not to trip.
Under the stage, it’s another world entirely. Luxury cedes to utility, plush carpet to cracked tiles. Barely visible in the nervous flicker of a dying fluorescent lamp, the room is a terrain of obstacles designed to entangle the trespasser. Levers and pulleys, chains and ropes—I try to watch my step. The sound of the child grows stronger before giving way to something else: a murmur and then laughter. It’s coming from a spiral staircase that leads to a crummy flop for a super or night watchman. We’re a long way from High Sierra. There is a squeal of delight coming from the room next door.
I freeze. It is a moment I had stopped believing in. The boy is alive and I am about to become the man who found the Bannister kid. But finding is not keeping. I look around for a weapon.
‘Freeze . . . ’
I recognize the voice instantly. Raising my hands slowly, I turn. ‘Well, what do you know?’ It’s him all right. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you and now you just turn up, uninvited.’
Hastings tosses me a pack of Luckies with his free hand, holding a nickel-plated Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special in the other. ‘Funny, you don’t look like a guy who’s just hit the jackpot.’
I grab a smoke, toss the pack back, deliberately throwing them low and short. He stretches instinctively for the catch. Mistake. The aim of the .38 snub-nosed shifts away from me for a second, and in that moment, I nail the son of a bitch with a short, sharp kick to the chin, snatching the gun from his hand, pointing it at him as he sits up, rubbing his jaw and staring at me with a grin.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘You’re better than I gave you credit for.’
‘Much obliged. Now get up nice and slow.’
There is the metallic whisper of a gun being cocked behind me. Then her voice, husked with the proximity of death held in slender hands. ‘Please, Mr. Alston, I don’t want you to get hurt.’
‘Ever since we first met, all I’ve done is get hurt.’ I inch away from her until I can see them both, my back against the wall. ‘And to tell you the truth, Mrs. Bannister, it’s becoming a very annoying habit.’ I keep the gun on Hastings, watching her out of the corner of my eyes. I don’t like the look of that Colt Single Action Army shaking in her hands. ‘I’m here for the boy.’
‘The trouble is, Mr. Alston—’
‘The trouble is, Mrs. Bannister, that trouble is my business, especially when you’re involved . . . Don’t!’ Hastings slowly raises his hands back up above his head again. ‘I’m taking the boy.’
They exchange looks. ‘You have no idea what will happen to Ronnie if you return him to my husband.’
‘You mean Landis?’ She lets out a cry of surprise and in that moment of disorientation, I snatch the gun from her hands. ‘Easy!’ Hastings almost beat me to it. He takes a step sideways, towards Betty Bannister. I gently ease the hammer back. I’ve never trusted the Colt .45. Heavy and highly temperamental. Liable to go off when you least expect it, which is nearly always. ‘I give you my word: I won’t let that Nazi son of a bitch touch the kid. Or his mother for that matter.’
She stares at me. Not so much surprised as stunned. ‘But didn’t you know, Mr. Alston? My sister was lobotomized right after she gave birth to Ronnie.’
So the Old Man knew from the very beginning who the father was. Knowing the Old Man, he could even have set JFK up. A honey trap with his teenage bride as bait and presidential influence as payoff. But that didn’t explain the medical chart I saw at Linda Vista. It said procedures. More than one . . .
The echo of Sal Mineo’s voice mimicking and mocking me: ‘But the nurse said . . . ’
The nurse had looked in the admissions book. She had said Elizabeth not Elaine. But if Elaine had already suffered Herr Doktor’s operation, that meant the Old Man was lining up her twin sister for a repeat performance. Enforced discretion delivered eagerly by the Laureate of the Lobotomy. After all, the kid wasn’t the Old Man’s son, he was just a huge chunk of equity in an ambitious shakedown; an across-the-board bet in the Biggest Derby of them all: the White House Stakes. All this time, I’d been wrong; I had been looking at Ronnie with the sentimental eyes of a father. But the Old Man never saw the kid as anything but a human bargaining chip, to be played when the spoils of election victory came up for grabs in November. And the Old Man needed to keep his ace in the hole hush-hush. What use is blackmail if everyone knows the secret? Silence must rule. First the mother, then the boy and finally the only other relative who knew the whole story. One by one, their brains had to be muted by ice picks.
The Bannister Way.
So where did that leave me?
I didn’t need a compass needle to see the direction I was heading in: following the footsteps of Hidalgo and Deckard. Of Elaine Bannister and . . . ‘Greta Simmons. She was in on it, wasn’t she?’
They gaze at me, saying nothing . . . Which says it all.
‘Greta used to be a friend . . . ’ Hastings says. ‘She got me the job at High Sierra.’
‘That’s where we met.’ She says it as
though we were a couple of guests getting acquainted at a mutual friend’s wedding banquet.
‘But then, after Elaine fell pregnant . . . ’ His voice drops away. He appears overcome with emotion. It’s genuine, but I don’t get it. Where exactly does Greta Simmons fit in? ‘It was Hidalgo who warned me.’
‘About Greta?’
He looks at me like I’m a moron. ‘About the Fed.’
‘You mean Rico?’
He’s amazed I know the name. ‘Rico was in charge of the snatch . . . ’
Of course. A heist controlled by Boston. Joe Kennedy needed to get rid of the evidence as much as the Old Man needed to hold onto it. And with Rico on board, no wonder they blew the snatch. I didn’t have all the details yet, but it was looking more and more as though Betty Bannister and Hastings had pulled a fast one over two of the richest men in the country. ‘What were you planning to do with the kid?’
