Manifesto for the Dead
Domenic Stansberry
New York
ONE
This was the end. The final trap. The last flimflam. And for Jim Thompson, this ending—this long plunge into the sweet nothing—was set in motion on the day he first met Billy Miracle, at the Musso & Frank Grill, down on Hollywood Boulevard.
It was 1971, and Thompson came to Musso’s almost every afternoon. He was a crime writer, a novelist and scriptwriter who’d first seen Hollywood almost thirty years before. Now he was sixty-four years old, with flame white hair and dark, hooded eyes. He leaned among the other regulars at the bar, hearing little whispers of infinity. The whispering rose from the bottom of his glass, or seemed to, but the voice was his own.
You’re at bottom of the pit, Jimmy. No call’s coming and even your wife won’t fuck you. I can smell you decomposing.
Thompson glanced around Musso’s. It was a fashionable gutter joint, with dark walls and red booths and boozy air that smelled of cigarettes and chicken-fried steak. The place had a mixed clientele. Hollywood people fresh off the studio lots. Neighborhood regulars. Also writers and actors who came to hustle something and kept coming, night after night. Sooner or later, they all ended up at the bar.
Behind that bar a mirror reflected your image back to you, so everyone seemed to linger in two worlds at once: the dark, murky world of the present; and that other world just beyond, shimmering in the illusive clarity of the mirror. It was to that other world everyone was trying to go, with their highballs and their straight shots and their hustles and their schemes.
Thompson was looking into that mirror when Billy Miracle appeared, sidling up from out of the crowd. “I’m a fan,” Miracle said. “I’ve read every one of your goddamn books.”
Miracle was in his late forties, sliding towards fifty. He wore a white sport coat, a black shirt beneath it. He was dark-skinned and not bad-looking, with short, dark hair and watery brown eyes that had a bit of a glint to them. He had a hawkish nose and a quick smile. He was the kind of guy you wanted to like when you talked to him, but later, you wondered what price you might have to pay.
“Come on,” Miracle said. His voice was soft like linen, his breath smelled of garlic. “Let me buy you a drink.”
Thompson hesitated, but not long enough. “All right,” he said. “That would be swell.”
Miracle’s real name was Abe Syncowitz. Rumor said he was hooked up with the Jewish mob, and somehow he’d used that muscle to get himself into the picture business. He’d made a half-dozen shoot ’em ups, drive-in stuff mostly, with titles like Bullet in the Brain and The End of Time. The stories involved small-time hoods who suddenly found themselves stumbling among the rich and glamorous, and the movies always ended in a wash of blood.
Though the films had made money, Miracle had a bad reputation. His head was full of snow. He schemed crazy schemes. Worse, Miracle was in debt big time to the Vegas mobster who’d bankrolled his last film. And that debt was coming due.
How much of this was true, Thompson had no idea. Until now, he’d only seen the man from a distance. All he knew for certain was Miracle’s studio had pulled the plug, and the producer had been in and out of Musso’s these last few weeks, trying to work a new angle.
It seemed Miracle had hooked himself up with a fading star named Michele Haze. Haze was Jack Lombard’s old girl, and Lombard—as everybody knew—was the green light man for half the pictures in town. Lombard and Haze had been an item for years, but they were finished now. So Billy Miracle had stepped in. He was shopping some kind of screenplay that featured her in the main role.
“A love triangle. Set right here in Los Angeles.”
“A love triangle?”
“That’s right. And you know how that type of thing ends, don’t you?”
“How?”
They regarded themselves in the looking glass, the haggard old writer and the producer on the make. Meanwhile, behind them in the shadows—in the red booths under the dim light—others moved and mingled, speaking in voices that were voluptuous, full of intention.
“Everyone gets fucked, that’s how. Anyway, I’ve got a proposal for you.”
“What’s that?”
“The screenplay—I think it might be easier to sell if it was part of a package.”
“I’m not sure.”
“A book. What I need, is somebody to write a novel based on the screenplay. Then, I’m thinking, if we have book interest, we can get movie interest too.”
It was a screwball scheme, but time was running out. Alberta, Thompson’s wife, had gone this afternoon to look at a place more in their budget, a rummy little joint on the hill behind Graumann’s Chinese. She didn’t want to move, though, and neither did he.
“I’d be interested.”
Miracle seemed not to hear. Thompson guessed what the other man was doing. Laying out the bait. Tugging the string through the water. Waiting for the fish to lunge hard at the hook. Thompson raised his glass to his lips. He swirled the whiskey in his mouth, as if anesthetizing his upper lip. Then he went ahead and bit.
“The book. I could do that.”
They regarded one another once again in the mirror. Miracle’s eyes had grown fierce. “I don’t want the book and the movie to tell the same story. You see the main action of the movie involves this love triangle, here in Los Angeles. But the killer’s from Texas, and the movie tells his story too. Back and forth. A story in Texas, a story here. When the two come together.…” Miracle turned from the mirror now and faced Thompson directly. He looked him in the eyes. “I want your book to tell the story of the killer. The guy in Texas. He’s your job.”
“Do you have any money? An advance?”
“You have to be a son of a bitch in this business. Look at the streets and you see. Pimps. Whores. Robbers and thieves. You forget the basics, you’re on the asphalt. That’s the way life is.”
Thompson had heard this kind of talk before. It was the sort of rant producers went into when you brought up the subject of money. In the face of it, he fell quiet. He swilled the whiskey around the bottom of his glass, knocked it down, stared at the ice.
Miracle went on. “They’re ruthless out there. They’ll cut your throat. Take your wallet. Fuck your mother.”
Miracle slapped his glass onto the countertop, motioned to the bartender for another round.
“Look at Lombard. How do you think he got where he is? He screwed you to the wall too, didn’t he?”
Thompson said nothing. He didn’t want to talk about Lombard.
“Well, you’re not the only one who’s been shut out. Ever since he’s hooked up with that new girl of his, The Young Lovely, no one can get through to him anymore. She has her fingers on everything. You know how it goes. The Young Lovely—she’s got his balls wrapped up in her skirt.”
“Can I see the screenplay? If the book’s based on the movie—then, it might help.”
“Just start writing. Give me a few pages. “Miracle reached over and gave him a pat on the back. “Don’t worry, Jimbo. You and me, we’re simpatico. Peas from a pod.”
Thompson didn’t like the sound of this deal, but he didn’t know what else to do. It was the same old business, the hangman’s trap, damned either way you dangle. Then the bartender slid them each a new drink. The whiskey put a pleasant haze over the mirror. Everyone seemed to be moving in a kind of warm, amber fluid.
“What do you think Lombard would do if the positions were reversed?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, if that starlet—The Young Lovely—if she was in his way. So that he couldn’t get to the people he needed.”
Thompson thought about it, but the truth was he
could not imagine Lombard in such a position.
“So what do you think he’d do?”
“Bury her,” Thompson said at last.
“That’s right. He’d just lay her right into the ground.” Miracle laughed. It was an unpleasant laugh, of a kind he’d also heard before. In the old days, back when he’d worked as a writer at the Police Gazette. On the set of The Getaway, when he’d been writing dialogue for Steve McQueen. In the editorial offices at Lion Books and at Random House. Men laughing over corpses, imaginary or otherwise. From the way they laughed, you would think they were murderers themselves. Most of them weren’t (or if they were, they kept it under wraps). They were family men. They had wives at home. Yards with a picket fence. A daughter who threw her arms around daddy’s neck when he walked through the door.
Thompson took another swallow and pretty soon Miracle slipped away, folding back into the crowd, working other angles, shaking other hands. Thompson regarded his own image in the mirror, and for a second there was a clarity about it, sitting there among all those others, and he wondered if maybe this time things would be different. If maybe there was another world on the other side of that mirror, and he would somehow slip through at last. Then he slugged down the rest of his drink and walked out onto the streets.
Outside it was the same dirty business as always. If you believed the stories, Hollywood Boulevard had been quite the stroll once upon a while. The Great White Way. Flooded with light. The people all but shimmering as they promenaded down the avenue. Maybe so, but now there was not much open but the bars and the skin joints. He walked past the flesh hustlers, turned the corner at Whitely, up the hill toward the Ardmore. He went through the lobby with its globes of yellow light and into the elevator. He stepped into his apartment, looking for Alberta to tell her about his new job.
He found her in the bedroom, by the closet, with her blouse undone. She stood in her skirt and her bra, regarding her aging self in the vanity. She was closing in on sixty, but she looked pretty good. His wife still had her shape. When she looked at him the way she did just now, with those eyes of hers, all green ice and blazing light, he felt her glance like a blow in the chest.
“You asked him how much, honey? You did that, didn’t you?”
“Sure.”
“Well, how much?”
“We’re still negotiating.”
“In other words, you’re going to get screwed again.” Then she turned away from him, buttoning up her blouse, and he felt his heart—which had risen a moment, fluttering like a canary—plummet into his bowels.
TWO
The Thompsons’ penthouse apartment was on the top floor of the Hollywood Ardmore, only a few blocks from the strip, but it was a world away. The walls were white, the carpets plush. There were wall-to-wall windows in the living room, and sliding doors that opened onto the balcony. In the evenings you could stand out on that balcony, twelve stories up, and look towards Santa Monica and the ocean and all the hazy lights in-between.
It should have been a pleasant enough place to work but he could not get anything done.
The reason was Alberta. She stood in front of him now in her green shift and matching pumps. She was a fierce woman, with her silver hair and her hands on her waist and her body that still smelled to him like the honey-suckle vines curling over his mother’s porch.
“No matter how much that producer offers, we have to be out of here by the end of the month. Our lease is up.”
“We can renew it.”
“It’s too late. I made the arrangements for the place on Hillcrest. The one I told you about.”
“It’s never too late,” he said, though he knew better than to believe such nonsense. He strolled over and tried to give her a kiss. She raised a finger between his lips and her own.
“You’ve been drinking.”
“Just a little.”
“Last night. The night before. And now this afternoon. You remember what the doctor said.”
Thompson remembered well enough. If he didn’t take better care of himself, then soon, well, he wouldn’t have to worry about anything at all. He could just forget everything. No worries, no cares. Hang around in a pine box, dressed in his good suit. Take it easy for so long as he liked.
Alberta went on talking. Thompson glanced out the window at the flatlands of the Los Angeles Basin. He felt himself descending. Down there once again into the land of hard light and black shadows.
“Why?” said Alberta.
He had not been listening, but he’d heard the anger in her voice, and saw her expression, and recognized in it the old dilemma, the old devil’s mix, suspicion and desire, hate and love, all that stuff—soft flesh, hard bone, cock and cunt. It had been there ever since he’d first put his hand up her skirt, a million years ago, maybe two million, and looked into her simmering eyes.
“Goddamn it, Jim. Why don’t you pull your head out of the casket and smell the roses.” She wheeled away, off into the bedroom.
If he wanted to get any work done, he would have to check himself a room somewhere. In a transient hotel, a roadside inn, anything he could afford. He’d done the same in the past, when they were younger and lived in two-bit squalor, and he would do so again now.
Trouble was, he needed money even for that.
He went to the kitchen and picked up the phone. Quietly, hoping Alberta would not hear, he dialed his sister in La Jolla. He told her his problem.
“All right, Jim,” Franny said.
The sound of his sister’s voice reminded him of his mother. Of all the little fly-by-nowhere joints they’d lived in as kids. It was the sound of the wind leaking through the wooden boards of a shack at the edge of some town no one wanted to live in anymore. Of Anadarko, Oklahoma, where he was born.
“You and Alberta fighting again?”
“No.”
“Whatever you say. Bill and I are leaving tomorrow.”
“Where to?”
“Lincoln.”
They were always going to Nebraska, Franny and Bill. They had relatives there, friends from the old days. People with thin faces and checkered shirts who’d made their money in hogs and corn.
“How long you be gone?”
“Couple weeks. I’ll put a check in the mail to you before I go, Jim. If that’ll help.”
“Thanks, Sis.”
“You’re welcome to stay here, at our place.”
“No.” He was tempted, though. His sister’s place was just a few blocks from the ocean.
“While we’re in Lincoln, you want me to look up Lucille?”
“Lucille?”
Thompson played it dumb, but he knew damn well who she meant. Lussie Jones. Lucille, really, though no one called her that except other women, sometimes, or those who did not know her well. They’d lain together on the side of a hill once, fingers touching. Back in some other century, it seemed. The night had been grubby with humidity, the sky black, full of stars.
His sister waited on the other end. She knew the story. He had told her once, sloshed to the gills.
“Well, no, I don’t think so,” he said.
Later, as if in a dream—standing over an open grave in the Hollywood Hills—Thompson would think back on this moment and wonder if there was anything he could have done to change what was to happen. If he had not called his sister, for instance. If he had stayed with Alberta in the Ardmore. Or turned down Billy Miracle.
Or if instead, everything that had happened was part of the fabric of things, the warp and the woof, no matter his actions, and there was nothing he could do.
Either way, Thompson got off the phone. When he turned, there stood Alberta, arms akimbo, with that green blaze in her eyes. If she had heard him mention the other woman’s name, he didn’t know, and he wasn’t about to ask.
THREE
His sister sent the money. Thompson checked himself a room in the Aztec Hotel, just off Sunset, in a neighborhood of small hotels and whitewashed bungalows. The Aztec itself was three stories
high. A red brick affair, with a sunbeaten awning hanging over the main entry. On the other side of that entry, a clerk worked the lobby desk.
Thompson paid the clerk—a snide, snarly, drugged-up kid in a red jacket. Then he clomped upstairs to his room.
He hadn’t brought much with him. A change of clothes. A bottle of Jack. His Hermes portable. Also, an old six-shooter that had belonged to his father: an 1886 Retriever. The Retriever was an antique of sorts—a 45 caliper Army issue renowned for its faulty firing mechanism. Thompson brought it along for luck.
He thought of the young clerk who had checked him in.Ugly kid.Back when he was an ugly kid himself, Thompson had worked in an hotel too. His father had dragged the family down south to Fort Worth on a wild-catting scheme, but the scheme had gone sour.
He’d been writing back then as well, hiding his pages under the hotel blotter. He was plagued by erections, steaming up out of nowhere (a problem that had never left him, not completely, not even as an old man, lost in a muddle of words and drink). As a bell clerk, in those days, it had been his job to provide certain services. That meant knocking on brothel doors, bringing back a girl, some bootleg, maybe, or loco weed from the barrios of Dallas.
On occasion the hotel guests invited him to the party. Usually he ended up alone. Roaming the corridors impulsively. It was a trait with him, that impulsiveness, especially when drinking. He entered doors without knocking.
Sorry, he’d whisper. Just delivering towels. Hotel business.
He was no longer that green kid, but in some ways not much had changed. He was still scribbling. Except now he had a different angle; that of an old man sitting at a hotel window, a cigarette in his hand, a half-empty bottle on the table, an incessant cough, blood in his spittle. A man who in the mirror looked a decade older than he was. Raccoon eyes. Skin like the bark on some tree gone to rot.
Oh, well. Miracle, at least, had given him a title.
MANIFESTO FOR THE DEAD
I was standing on the edge of one of those nowhere little Texas towns where the whole world looks like it’s been painted black and white. On the road ahead, prairie and more prairie, and it was the same thing back the other direction. It had been almost an hour since the last car went by.
Manifesto for the Dead Page 1
