There’s a lesson in this, boy.
It was the voice again. Pops. He’d been with me since I could remember. Hardly a good word to say.
If only you’d listen, maybe you’d learn a thing or two.
I was about ready to snap, I guess, between dealing with Pops in my head and standing out there in all that Texas nothing. Then a car appeared on the horizon. It approached slow, coming up out of the heat and the haze. I put my thumb out, and its wheels churned dust all over hell.
A woman motioned me in. She had wide, baby doll eyes, and lips painted the color of a barn door. She smiled and fixed her eyes on mine. I felt something twist inside.
You’re a sap, boy, said Pops. Nothing but a goddamn sap.
FOUR
In the morning, Alberta called. Her voice was pleasant and bright, as if there were nothing wrong between them. He could picture her twelve stories up in the Ardmore, sitting there cross-legged on the couch in her Bermuda shorts and sleeveless blouse.
“I need you at the Hillcrest Arms this afternoon,” she said. “The old tenant has cleared out—and a man from the gas company will be along to adjust the pilot.”
“Aren’t we jumping the gun?”
“And oh. That producer called. Mr. Billy Miracle.”
“What did he want?”
“To meet with you. I told him you were going to be at the Hillcrest apartment. I gave him the address.”
“No.” Thompson didn’t like Miracle knowing his business.
“Don’t worry. Mr. Miracle said it would be better if you courier over some pages in advance. Then meet him down at Musso’s.”
Thompson had more to say, but Alberta did not give him a chance. Her voice was so cheerful, he dared not argue. Any objections and misgivings, odd forebodings rising up out of his gut, any of this, he left unsaid.
That afternoon Thompson headed for the apartment on Hillcrest, working his way though the back streets of Hollywood. The Hillcrest Arms was an apartment building in the Moroccan style, brooding over a sloping little park with a banyan tree. The surrounding neighborhood was strewn with old wrecks. A cop car rolled by, a cruiser on patrol, and Thompson caught a glimpse of the two dicks inside. They were the usual buzzards, grim, bored, squinting through the windshield in their blue suits.
Thompson pushed through the doors and walked down the darkened hall until he reached the apartment Alberta had reserved for them. The place was as bad as he feared: a narrow one bedroom, gray walls, green carpet. For no reason at all, he thought of Lussie Jones. Maybe it was because his sister had mentioned her just a few days ago. Or because places like this, even in their emptiness, were musty with the smell of desire.
He looked down at his crotch. It had come undone, and the sight of himself—undone like that—aroused him. As he reached down to do up the buttons, the door buzzer went off.
Thompson stepped out into the hall. At the end of the corridor, on the other side of the glass entry, stood a young man. It took the young man another instant to realize the door was unlocked, then he pulled the handle. Thompson watched him come. A thin man, lean and gawky. He knifed through the shadows with a nervous, stuttering gait.
“Mr. Wicks?”
Thompson pinned it right away. The Okie accent. Not too different from his own. Nasal and slow and a little hesitant, the sound of a motor sputtering through the corn.
“You with the utility company?”
“I’m looking for a man named Wicks. Sydney Wicks.”
“Then you got the wrong place.”
“This is number 22, ain’t it? I can see right here. Come on, don’t pull my trousers.”
“Maybe you got your orders mixed?”
“Huh?”
“We got a pilot light needs firing.”
Thompson stepped into the apartment, and the young man followed. They regarded one another in the light. The Okie was about thirty. He had blonde hair, cut short, and piercing blue eyes that were so innocent as to be menacing, and a stance that was like that of an adolescent boy just come into manhood. He clutched and unclutched his hand, stared at Thompson fiercely, then looked around the room in a confused manner. The expression on his face said there was something askew—as if Thompson were not the person he’d expected him to be.
The Okie held a piece of paper in one hand, his keys in the other. He wore a gray, uniform-style shirt, but there was no name on it. His face was oily and haggard.
Outside, an old Cadillac stood parked under the banyan tree. It hadn’t been there a few minutes before.
“You’re with the utility company, that right?”
The man ran a hand through his yellow hair. “Come on, Wicks. Let’s see the money.”
“I told you, my name’s not Wicks.”
Thompson heard the fear in his own voice, and felt the situation about to go wrong. The stranger’s eyes widened. He slapped his keys on the mantle and thrust the paper at Thompson.
“This is where I was told to come, with the delivery.”
Thompson examined the paper. On one side, written in a tall, looping hand, was the Hillcrest address. On the other side, though, was a different address all together.
“Look.” Thompson tried to show him the other address.
The Okie was sweating, his eyes wide and nervous. He ran his fingers once again through all that blonde bristle. “Fuck,” he said. Then he glanced toward the window. “Jesus fuck.”
Thompson saw what the Okie had seen. The cop car glimmering in the heat, returning from the other direction. In an instant, the Okie was out in the hallway, headed for the rear of the building. Thompson followed. The back door banged shut, and the Okie was gone. Thompson turned. Through the glass doors at the front entry, he caught the cruiser pause at the stop sign, then take the corner. The dicks looked in no particular hurry. Everything was routine.
Thompson went back to the apartment. His hands shook. He took a drink from the little flask he carried in his pocket. As he stood there, toying with the addresses on the paper, he spotted a dull glint on the mantle.
The son of a bitch had forgotten his keys.
Outside, Thompson circled the block, but there was no one. The Okie had vanished. He looked for a utility van, or a service truck, but there was nothing like that on the streets. Only the Cadillac, over there, under the banyan tree.
Despite himself, he thumbed through the keys on the Okie’s ring. One of them, he thought, might be a fit.
Overhead, the palms rustled in the hot wind. They looked like tall women with idiot hairdos, swaying in the heat. Thompson could hear the traffic on Franklin, the persistent hum of Los Angeles that seemed to hold within itself the silence of the desert.
He told himself to stay away, but he went over to the banyan tree. Underneath it, the Cadillac stood covered with dust, as if it had just been driven on a long journey. He walked around to the back of the car, the key still in his hands.
What he did next, he had a hard time explaining to himself. Maybe I guessed, he told himself later. Maybe I already knew, deep down, what was inside that trunk. The Okie’s slouch told me, the smell of his skin, the nervousness in his eyes. Or maybe it was just the old nosiness. I just wanted to see if the key would turn the lock.
The key turned. A young woman lay before him. Her eyes were milky, and she was bruised about the throat.
In that moment, it seemed, Thomson could hear all the voices in the desert that was the great city of Los Angeles. He could hear them in the whispering of God’s littlest creatures, the tiniest flies, invisible maggots, as they set busily to their work.
FIVE
Thompson closed the trunk, but the girl’s image stayed with him. A brunette, with an oval face, all black and blue. Someone had draped a sheet over her body, but haphazardly, so she resembled a fitful sleeper who’d thrown off her covers. Only there was something wrong about her neck, and about her legs, too, the way they angled and twisted into the wheel well.
She’d been beaten badly, and strang
led about the neck.
Behind her, in the back of the car’s huge trunk, there’d been a brand new shovel. Someone had meant to bury her, maybe. The girl had not been dead long. There was still color in her cheeks, and her body had not yet begun to stink.
Thompson stood with his palms flat against the trunk. The time to go was now, but he didn’t. The street was empty. The nearby porches, the gray windows and overhanging balconies—they were all flooded with white light. He raised his hand to brush away the heat, then he heard a car rushing down Hillcrest Avenue from the hills above the Hollywood Bowl. He could have behaved differently—he could have flagged the car down, maybe, called the police—but standing there, the key in his hand, he was overcome with an inexplicable guilt, as if he were the one responsible for the girl’s death. It was the guilt one feels in a dream, moving down corridors to escape punishment for some half-remembered crime. The car was closer now, approaching the corner, and he did not have time to make it into the building without being seen. So he climbed into the Cadillac. (It was the alcohol, he would think later, or the sun in his eyes, the old jumpiness, a perpetual flaw, that made him leap the way he did.) He sat behind the wheel and turned his face as the car went by.
Go to the cops, he told himself. But that would mean explaining everything. Not just the Okie, but how he himself had taken the man’s keys, popped the trunk.
My fingerprints are all over the car, he thought. The cops will hold me on suspicion.
They could detain him forty-eight hours without cause, he knew—and without liquor. The thought made him twitch. He had been through withdrawal before. The idea of going through the terrors while under interrogation, in a cell, in a dark room …
His mind searched around for an alternative … what could be done … with the girl … the car …
He took the flask from his pocket, felt the whiskey burn in his gut. A feeling of strength, the old rush, the sidewalk shimmering. Then the tremor came again, a hard shiver—a sanitarium shiver almost, as if the fabric of the world were tearing apart, the light disintegrating into dark—and he had to take another drink. Then he heard another car rolling down Hillcrest, and the panic moved him to action. He had to get out of here. He turned the key. The ignition fired.
He pulled onto Franklin, then urged the Cadillac slowly across Highland Avenue, not far from the Ardmore.
What now?
He was implicating himself, he knew, worse with every action. He had to get rid of the Cadillac. Out in the desert, far away. But then how would he get back? And how would he explain where he’d been?
He braked at a stop sign. A car came up from behind. He took a hard left, away from the car, into the Hollywood Hills, and he realized suddenly what he was going to do.
He drove past the old Iago Hotel, climbing up a short, steep grade to the east side of Whitely Terrace, following it until the houses ran out and the asphalt became gravel. Then he killed the engine, easing the Caddy up close to a cyclone fence that ran along the ridge.
The Hollywood Freeway was at the bottom of that ridge, rushing through the canyon below. This spot was not exactly isolated, but it was out of sight, a patch of stone and dirt hidden from the plate glass windows above and the freeway below by a stand of eucalyptus grown out of control. It might be a few days before anyone noticed the car. Then he reached into the back and grabbed a red sweater that lay on the seat. A fine, soft material. Cashmere, he guessed, property of the deceased.
The sweater carried the smell of perfume and the odor of sweat, musky and faint, and that odor seemed to fill the car as he clutched the fabric between his hands. He used the sweater as a rag, wiping his prints from anything he had touched. He worked hurriedly, nervously, and when he finished, he left the keys in the ignition. Maybe someone would steal the goddamn car, he thought, and take the whole nightmare off my hands.
He bundled the sweater into a paper bag and headed down the hill. His prints might be on the fabric, and he needed to get rid of it someplace else, away from the scene.
Not far ahead, there was a break in the cyclone fence. A ragged little path ran into the brush nearby. Further down he could see a dirt road of some sort, on the slope above the freeway. The city had been doing some trench work there, but the job seemed to have been abandoned. It was the way things were these days, half finished jobs everywhere. The murderer had intended to bury the girl, but it wasn’t going to happen now. Not unless I do it myself, and his heart fluttered horribly. I could finish the job tonight, roll her into the trench, be done with it. He reached for his flask and pushed the thought away. He’d gotten himself too involved with this already. Besides, he was an old man and didn’t have the strength for wrestling with a dead woman in the Hollywood Hills.
SIX
Back on the Boulevard, Thompson went into Musso’s and had himself the pork chop special and a pair of drinks. He waited for Billy Miracle. All the while, the sweater sat inside the bag on the seat beside him. It gave off a sweet, womanly smell. He’d been unable to get rid of it, out there in the broad daylight.
Thompson finished his set-up, then ordered another.
Finally, Miracle showed. The producer didn’t come directly to Thompson, though. He leaned his head into a booth, talking to a woman there.
If Thompson were not still shaking from what had happened on the hill, he might have recognized the woman a beat sooner. Then he knew. It was the movie star, Michele Haze, Lombard’s old flame. An arresting woman in her early forties, Haze was a platinum blonde with pale features and dark eyes. At the moment, she sat in a sultry, slump-shouldered way, enshrouded in blue smoke.
Miracle held a hand on her shoulder, then he let loose and came toward Thompson, carrying with him the opening pages Thompson had sent by courier.
“Meetings, meetings. I been in meetings all day.”
“Any luck?”
“Luck? The world wasn’t created by luck, Jimbo. By some lucky fuck waving his hands. There were plenty of meetings first. There were things to talk over, you bet. Hierarchies to set straight. Camera angles. Production budgets.”
Miracle laughed, and Thompson saw a glint in the man’s eyes, a tiny crack of light shimmering in the snowy depths.
“No, it was a long process. A lot of details. Adam and Eve, and that goddamn snake. That’s what it took to create the world. Not a concept, but a plan. Divine inspiration.” The light in Miracle’s eyes opened wider and Thompson remembered the story about the gangster to whom Billy owed money, and how that gangster was not going to wait forever. He felt Miracle’s nervousness and smelled his sweat. “Michele and I, we have someone coming down to talk to us. A money man.”
“Here?”
“Yeah. So I can’t talk as long as I might like.” Miracle set Thompson’s pages on the bar. “How much you need to finish this?”
Thompson stammered. He hadn’t expected Miracle to jump into the money end so quick. “Eight,” he said at last. “Half up front, half on close.”
Miracle let out a whistle. “This is coming out of my pocket, you know.”
“I can do it for six.” Thompson’s voice broke.
“Two. That’s the best I can offer. I would do better if I could, but my financials are pretty fragile. Also, you need to guarantee me a publisher.”
“How do I do that?”
“Tell ’em you got everything all lined up. Tell ’em its going to be blockbuster movie. I’ll pay one-half up front, okay. Maybe the publisher will kick in more.”
“If I’m going to do this right, I need to see your screenplay. I need to know the story.”
Miracle waved him off. “Don’t worry about all that. I’ve got everything you need, right here.”
He took out a newspaper clipping and slid it to Thompson. It wasn’t long, just a few inches of blotter copy about a man wanted in Texas for double murder. The fugitive had tied a man and woman back-to-back, cinching the knots so the ropes tightened as the couple struggled to get free. In the end, the couple had strangle
d in their chairs.
Thompson was puzzled. Then he realized: Miracle wanted him to use the newsclip as the basis for the story.
“There’s your killer. He kills this couple in Texas, then he hightails it to Los Angeles.”
“Why here?”
“He needs money, and there’s this old man from his past, you see, an ex-con, a kind of father figure, who lives out this way. This old con, he sets our boy up with a murder contract in Hollywood.”
Billy Miracle made a sweeping motion with his hands, slapping them together. “Kabam. That’s it. How the stories come together. The killer. The love triangle. Behind the contract is a jealous woman. She wants her rival dead. And our boy from Texas—he’s the instrument of her passion.”
Miracle made it sound like a neat bit of business, but Thompson wasn’t so sure.
“That’s the truth about killers,” said Miracle. “We act like they come out of the blue. Out of the deep dark nowhere. Fact is, we create them. All of us. That’s what the Manifesto’s about. That’s what I want the audience to understand.”
“All right,” Thompson said. “One thing, though—money. I’m a little short.”
“Find a publisher, and I’ll have my people draw you a contract. Meantime, I’ve got to get back to Michele. Like I told you, we’ve got money on the line. Mr. Big, he’s on his way.”
Miracle went back to Michele Haze. She sat smoldering under the blue light. In the movies, she had played dozens of roles—a country girl, a city sophisticate, a tramp—but it was always the same part. A woman yearning for the good life, tormented by some inner darkness.
She and Jack Lombard had had a very public affair, off and on, never marrying, but it had gone on for years. Then recently things had begun to sour, not just with Lombard but on the screen too. Lines had begun to show on her face, and it took too much gel to hide them from the camera. Lombard had put her aside for The Young Lovely. So now she sat with Billy Miracle, lighting a cigarette, glancing toward her reflection in the darkening mirror.
Manifesto for the Dead Page 2
