He glanced over his shoulder at Holly. “What does this mean to you?”
“This is how he gets in,” she said.
“Who?”
“Art. How many psychotics do you think I know?”
He stifled a grin as he realized that he didn’t have an answer for that question. For all he knew, she was a living magnet for pathological nut cases. “Did you rip up the carpeting, or was it already loose?” He indicated the row of carpet tacks sticking out of the bottom of the fabric where it lay peeled back from the hatch.
“I had to pull it up,” Holly admitted.
“Why did you do that?”
“Because, goddammit, he was in there half the night and then disappeared. I told you, when I opened the door he was gone. What do you think we’ve got here, fucking Houdini?” She almost shrieked this last, on the cusp between anger and hysteria.
“Let’s go sit down and talk about this calmly, can we?” He didn’t wait for an answer; he took Holly’s hand and led her to the living room. She followed docilely and sat on the sofa. There was a flashlight on the coffee table.
She seemed subdued for the moment. He went to the kitchen and brought back two glasses of soda. “Look,” he said, sitting down next to Holly, “you’ve got to admit that this is pretty far-fetched. I mean, even if there’s a way into the crawlspace from outside, it’s not very likely that anyone, even Jack Stanley, would be—” he groped for words “—stalking you, for Christ’s sake.”
“Listen to this.” Holly turned and knocked on the living room wall behind her. It produced a hollow sound. “What do you suppose is on the other side?”
“I have no idea,” he said. He pictured the configuration of the building; half of the wall behind the sofa was also the right-hand wall of the hall closet. She had knocked beyond the end of the closet. Holly’s kitchen extended from the far end of the living room, and the two bedrooms were beyond the opposite living room wall. “Maybe it’s part of your neighbor’s apartment.”
“No,” Holly said. “I’ve been over there. When they knock on the wall facing this direction, you can’t hear it from here. There’s something in between. It’s where he stays and listens to me.”
“Really!” Christ, she was over the edge. He remembered looking out his apartment window once at five in the morning, all the lights turned off, staring into the parking lot across the street at what he was convinced were two people having sex on the ground. When the sun came up all that was there were two parallel concrete tire stops, painted white. In the dark he had been convinced of what they were, that they were moving, writhing, passionate and insane in their indifference to their exposure. “Excuse me,” he said, and he got up to go to the bathroom.
He looked into the mirror for a moment and then rubbed the heels of his hands against his eyes and the bridge of his nose. What was going on here? This girl had flipped—what did she want from him? Looking again at his reflection, he combed his hair back with his fingers. His glance fell to the counter.
An array of small orange plastic containers lined the tile where it met the wall. He picked up the nearest one and read the label. Tegretol. There were only a few tablets left. The next vial was half full and read, “Lunesta. Take one tablet at bedtime.” He checked the other two bottles. One contained Xanax. Hard to get, but better than Valium. The last vial was marked “Adderall” and was nearly full. Something he had read about but never tried. It was meant to calm down hyperactive children, but was supposed to have an opposite, stimulant effect on non-afflicted adults. He wondered how many Holly had taken. Depending on when she had started, it could definitely account for her behavior now.
He replaced the bottles and returned to the living room. Holly was still sitting on the sofa, staring out across the room, alert, as though listening for a sound she was expecting to hear repeated.
“Holly—” She turned and focused on him, surprised. “How long since the last time you slept?”
“I don’t know. Sunday night, I slept at Ron’s house.”
“That was Saturday. Three nights ago.”
“I know. I slept here Sunday night. Then Monday morning . . .” She hesitated, then continued. “You know, I told you, I had a seizure. I woke up from that in the middle of the afternoon.”
“Yesterday?”
“Yeah, yesterday. Why?”
“You’re taking drugs.” He watched her face, feeling sorry for her, the way the chemicals were affecting her.
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“It could have a lot to do with the way you’re seeing things.”
“You think I’m seeing things?” She said this defiantly, almost amused, as if she had some proof to show him that would validate her whole paranoid theory.
“I didn’t mean that,” he said, exasperated. “I’m talking about the way you’re seeing . . . Oh, the hell with it. Look, why are you taking all that stuff?”
Holly looked down at her hands in her lap. Her nails, he noticed, were bitten short. She took a deep breath, which turned into a yawn, then placed her hand over her eyes for a moment. When she looked at him again, she seemed suddenly exhausted.
“The Tegretol keeps me from having seizures. I stopped taking it when I met Art. That’s one of the reasons I kept listening to him; I didn’t have any seizures during the time I knew him.”
“What about the other stuff?”
“The anti-convulsant acts as a depressant. It makes me so lethargic, I can’t do anything. So one doctor prescribed the Adderall—it’s a stimulant mixed. It worked pretty well but sometimes it would last too long and I couldn’t get to sleep.”
“So you got the Lunesta.” He could understand the logic of it perfectly. Juggling chemicals, just trying to feel normal.
“Right. They would knock me out. Then I told another doctor what I was doing. He was shocked, and told me to throw away the uppers and downers. He prescribed the Xanax for anxiety.”
“So which of these have you been taking?” he asked.
“All of them.” He could see the desperation in her eyes. “I couldn’t just go to sleep. I tried, but God! He was listening to me. Watching me, for all I know.” She stood, picking up the flashlight from the table. “Come with me. I‘ve got something else to show you.”
He followed her down the hallway and out the front door. They turned right and walked through the outside hall, past the neighbor’s apartment and the one beyond that, then down a few stairs.
The stairs led out to the carport. Holly turned right and walked the width of one of the parking slots and then led him through an open door. They were in a laundry room; he could tell by the smell and the boxlike outlines of the machines. Holly turned on the light and guided him diagonally across the room to the far corner where two large dryers were stacked.
“Look.” She pointed at the cinderblock wall behind the dryers. The machines were set so that their backs were close to the wall, but were offset by several feet from the corner.
Holly pointed the beam from the flashlight into the recess and played it across a large rectangle of particleboard set against the wall, extending from the corner to somewhere behind the lower dryer. “Move that aside.”
He slid the particleboard to the right and looked down at a hole in the wall where six cinderblocks were missing. At his feet, the dirt floor of the crawlspace met the concrete floor of the laundry room. In the circle of the flashlight beam, a footprint, and beyond, the same impressions as in Holly’s closet.
“I know how crazy it sounds,” Holly said from behind him. “But how does it look?”
“It’s pretty spooky, I’ll give you that.” Still, the crawl space, and the access, had been there since the place was built—probably fifty years ago—and the marks could have been left by anyone. An exterminator looking for termites, maybe. Yeah, right, he thought.
“Wh
ere are you going?” Holly asked, following him around to the driveway and out toward the street.
“I want to get something from my car.”
At the curb, he opened the Audi and groped in the glove compartment. He felt the familiar handle of a Buck knife, pulled it out, and locked the car.
Back in the apartment, he stepped into the closet and down into the crawl space. The floor was now level with his thighs. Turning to his right, he pulled out the Buck knife and stabbed it into the wall. The hard steel point bit deeply into the soft material.
“What in God’s name are you doing?” Holly asked.
“Well—” he yanked down on the knife handle and then sawed briefly. “Now you’ve got me curious about what’s behind your living room. Don’t you want to know?”
She didn’t say anything. He stabbed the knife into the wall again, this time about two inches to the left of the first cut, and again sawed downward. Finally, connecting the tops and bottoms of the incisions, he gouged out a square of the drywall.
“Pass me the flashlight, would you?” Holly handed it down to him. He pointed the beam into the opening, but could see nothing. Putting the flashlight down, he made another hole about four inches below the first one.
Now he put the flashlight flush to the wall against the lower hole and his eye to the upper one. About seven feet away he saw two-by-four framing outlining large areas of unfinished particleboard; it was the back of the living room wall Holly had knocked on earlier. He pointed the flashlight to the left. About ten feet away he could see another wall.
“What do you see? There’s a space behind the wall, isn’t there?” Holly knelt on the floor next to the hatch.
“You’re right. There’s a whole goddamn room there. It’s wasted space under the stairway and the upper landing.” He pointed the flashlight downward. The wooden framework extended down into the ground, while the particleboard ended flush with the flooring. Below it, the dirt surface extended far beyond the flashlight’s reach.
He handed Holly the flashlight and said, “Shine this down through the hatch in the direction I’m facing.”
Looking downward through the lower hole, he saw the beam cross the space and disappear into the gloom. “Point it downward,” he said, his forehead to the wall.
“Stop! Back up a little.” He couldn’t believe what he saw. “Now sweep slowly to my left.”
Dazed, he stared at the dirt. Beer bottles littered the ground. A larger bottle stood upright, still partially full.
“What is it? What do you see?” The beam wavered as Holly’s hand shook.
“Give me back the flashlight.” He took it and ducked down under the floor, crawled through a narrow space between two-by-fours, and stood up in the room that Holly had predicted, that he had so confidently denied. There was still a chance, he thought, to disprove the whole fantasy, to find a reasonable explanation—that the bottles were left over from contractors doing structural repair, something that made sense.
He bent down and aimed the light at one of the beer bottles, unsurprised to read the familiar Moosehead label. With resignation, he swung the beam around to illuminate the distinctive square body and gold label of the Bushmills bottle.
CHAPTER 55
⍫
The place was on fire.
Tony looked out into the audience, grinning, his Fender Precision bass hanging low over his belt, hands in the air as the crowd cheered and whistled. People were screaming, “More!” but the manager had told them to cut it at one o’clock and their second encore had already taken them ten minutes past that.
Thursday night at the Roxy, midnight show, and a crowd that knew how to party: rock critics that knew the night was young, record company guys that liked to burn it until dawn, dealers and dealmakers and other musicians, checking out what’s hot. No lames like at the early shows, the ones where the wannabees and the hasbeens cranked out their over-rehearsed noise.
Tonight it was Tony that was hot. Tony and his band had just ripped through the best set of their lives and now, staring into the spotlights, he was searching for the payoff.
It was the women that made the evening interesting. Especially the women at the Roxy on a late Thursday night. The models, the party girls, the coke whores, the waitresses from the restaurants, the hot ones that the house let in free.
Later, after packing their gear into the truck and getting their share of the draw from the club manager, the band went next door to the Rainbow for pizza and whiskey and beer and whatever else presented itself. They scored a booth in the far corner of the back room, where it was dark and private but not so dark and private that they couldn’t be noticed.
By the time their pizza arrived, at least a dozen people had stopped by the table to tell him and the band how good the show had been. Three of them, party girls from the Valley, he figured, were now wedged into the booth, picking at the pizza and ordering drinks as though they were intimates of the band members. He wasn’t interested; there was too much possibility in the air.
It was on the way up the narrow stairs to the restroom that he saw what he wanted to see. A wild tangle of dark hair, high, sharp cheekbones under brown eyes that laughed all by themselves, the almost boyish body with the round little ass that he had watched from the Roxy stage. She hadn’t cared about anything or anybody. Just the dancing, the music—his music. She had danced in the aisles, danced on her chair, danced on a table and clapped her hands to the beat high above her head, tossing her crazy hair out of her face, completely on fire.
Now she was coming down the stairs, swiping the back of her hand across one nostril and then the other.
“Hey!” she said, and she put her hand on his wrist. “You were fucking great.” And then just looked at him, her mouth curved with a sly humor. Standing two steps above him, she was eye to eye with him. That’s fine, he thought. He liked them small.
A vial materialized in her hand; she tapped it twice on his wrist and motioned with her head toward the top landing. There was something aggressive, almost pugnacious, in the set of her jaw. Her nose was slightly off, perhaps broken and never set properly.
In the men’s room, he set his back to the door so they could be alone, and opened the vial. He poked into it with the key to his van and put the white powder to his lips, inhaling gently through his mouth. A subtle medicinal aroma filled his mouth as the powder dissolved instantly. He knew that flavor. In a city of rip-offs and ridiculously diluted street drugs, this girl had the best coke he had seen in years. She smiled up at him with perfect white teeth. Using the key again, he helped himself to a couple of healthy snorts, then capped the vial and held it out to the girl.
“I’m Lilah.” She took the vial and then let her hand fall to the buckle of his belt, which she hooked with her index finger. She gave a couple of little tugs and, with the coke just freezing the back of his head, he thought, Yeah, cool, I’ll go for some right here. But instead, she said, “Let’s go,” and tugged his belt again, this time pulling him away from the door, which opened behind him. He realized he had heard knocking without even registering it.
⍫
They stopped at the market for some Wild Turkey and ice cream. The place was so bright he put on his sunglasses, but Lilah careened around the place like a child at a playground. She wore skintight pants in a leopard-skin print and a halter top and pointy silver flats.
When they met at the check stand, he put his bottle of Wild Turkey on the counter and watched as Lilah removed items from the basket she had filled. Espresso ice cream, lemon sherbet, two six-packs of cherry soda, a pack of scouring pads, a can of butane cigarette-lighter refill, baking soda, and a bottle of Courvoisier.
Starting up the van, he said, “What’s all that stuff about?”
“Oh, it’s stuff for Richard, so he doesn’t run out.”
“Who’s Richard?” The whole way from Hollywood, there hadn�
��t been any mention of a Richard, or anyone else for that matter, that might turn up at her place.
“Oh, Richard’s great. You’ll like him.” She waved her hand in the air, vague and dismissive. She tipped some powder from the vial onto her hand and it placed it under his nose. “This came from Richard.”
He decided that Richard’s presence might not be such a bad thing after all. He inhaled sharply and turned out of the market parking lot and up Montana to where Lilah said she lived.
He stood in the hallway as Lilah unlocked the door to her apartment. She opened it and then, holding the bag of groceries, she turned and pushed the door hard with her ass. It had a large crack emanating from an indentation at about hip level—right where a foot would go if you were pissed off enough, he thought. There were cracks in the doorjamb as well, and the door popped open on Lilah’s third try.
From the hallway, he saw a perfectly normal, orderly living room. A sofa, a couple of chairs, a television set in a console. Windows at the far end looking out at trees and a neighboring apartment building. To his right in the small kitchen stood a man in boxer shorts and an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt, frozen in place with his mouth and eyes seemingly stuck open. In his hand was a long glass vial full of liquid.
“Richard, darling, we didn’t mean to startle you.” Lilah put the groceries on the counter and gently took the vial from Richard. Tony watched as she removed the cap and poured off most of the liquid, leaving only an inch at the bottom and something that looked like a congealing blob of oil. She pulled a bottle of Perrier from the refrigerator, popped the plastic cap from it, and poured the cold mineral water into the vial. The mass in the vial seemed to harden and lose its translucent quality, suddenly becoming a pale white rock almost an inch in diameter, which Lilah removed and placed on a coffee filter. Richard, having come out of his paralysis, picked up a hair dryer that was lined up among an arsenal of accessories between the sink and the stove and commenced to blow hot air at the rock in the filter.
Trust Me Page 24
