Manifesto for the Dead

by Domenic Stansberry

  Now I wanted things simple. Pure. With Gloria, it could be what way, I thought.

  But Belle, she’d found out about my past somehow. She was on to me. “You be nice,” she said. “You do as I say.” And she let me know that my plans, whatever they might be, were going to take a back seat to hers. Or else.

  Then one afternoon, she sent me down to the druggist to pick up a prescription for her father. I should have known. I’d seen her and the druggist together. I should have guessed—but I didn’t. I delivered the medicine.

  A few hours later I knocked on Daddy Lanier’s office door.

  No one answered.

  “Sir,” I said

  I pushed it open.

  Inside, Daddy Lanier sat slumped over his desk, head down, cheek pressed to the wood. In his hand, he clutched the prescription bottle.

  He was dead.

  And me—I wasn’t wise enough yet to see who’d get the blame.

  Late that evening, a car drove by. It rolled past slowly, and the light from its head lamps wheeled across the kitchen walls.

  The driver cut the motor, and Thompson listened for the car door. When the sound didn’t come, he peered out the window. The car stood in the blue fog halfway down the block.

  Who could it be?

  Lussie. Or perhaps Lieutenant Mann had had him followed.

  Thompson dropped the curtain. A shadow had moved inside the car, he thought, but he could not be sure. He slopped two fingers worth into one of his sister’s jelly glasses, and listened for the sound of footsteps on the walk. They didn’t come. Then the phone rang.

  “Jim Thompson?” a woman asked—but it wasn’t the voice he expected. Rather, it belonged to Michele Haze.

  She had remembered Alberta mentioning La Jolla, she explained, and his sister’s name. With that much, she had dialed information.

  “I need to meet with you.”

  “Tonight?”

  “There’s a place on the highway down there. The Pacific Café. It’s open late.”

  Thompson knew the place. On the bluff, above the ocean. The owner had decorated the walls with publicity shots. Glossies everywhere, every star there had ever been. Thompson picked up the curtain and took another glimmer out. The car sat as before.

  It was late, he told himself. If Lussie meant to come, she’d be here by now.

  “Will you meet me?” Michele asked

  He closed his eyes and let the dice roll in his head.

  “All right.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Thompson scuttled down the alley behind his sister’s house. He moved faster than he thought he could, like an old crab startled out of its shell. The alley opened onto a side street—empty and dark except for a traffic signal at the corner. On the other side of the highway, the Pacific Café slumped out over the bluff. As he crossed the road, he heard the neon hissing in its blue sign. The fog had lifted along the coast, and the black sea glistened like oil on the beach below.

  Inside, the owner had kept up the old decor. The walls were plastered with the photos, and there was a shot of Michele Haze, taken a couple of decades before, in her starlet years, young and vampish. Her eyes had the sleepy sheen that had made her famous, and she held her lips in the same cashmere pout. She had built her career around that glance, and the soft, almost drunken lisp with which she spoke.

  A white limo pulled into the lot, and Thompson watched the chauffeur saunter up the walk.

  “Michele will talk to you. Inside the car.”

  Thompson found Michele in the limousine, waiting for him, just like the chauffeur said. She wore straight slacks and a cotton shirt and a scarf over her platinum hair. No make-up, her clothes rumpled and mussed. She gave him a shrug—and her eyes were for an instant the same eyes as those of the picture inside, no difference in the world.

  “To what do I owe this privilege?”

  “I felt you should know some things. There’s not going to be any movie.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Jack never signed. There’s no deal.”

  The news did not surprise him. He had suspected the deal was falling apart.

  Her eyes grew misty.

  “The girl. Jack didn’t have her out of his system. She disappeared on him, and I thought maybe he was done with her. Soon as I saw him, that last time in Musso’s, I knew I was wrong. He was going back to her. He was going to kill the picture, and leave me behind.”

  Michele shrugged again, fatalistic. After all, she knew how these things went. She’d been a Young Lovely once herself.

  “He told Billy to drop dead. That he would never work with him in a million years.”

  Thompson remembered that evening at Musso’s, a few days before, when it all happened, how Lombard had left, and Miracle had gone barrelling after him.

  “I waited for them to come back. Somehow, part of me, I thought maybe Jack, that he would change his mind again. That he might still come back to Musso’s that night.”

  “How long did you wait?”

  “An hour, maybe. An hour-and-a-half. But Jack didn’t come back. Only Billy, alone.”

  “Did Billy catch up with Jack? Did they talk?”

  She didn’t respond, but he knew the answer. Or what she wanted him to think. It was there, unspoken, in the blue neon that flickered and fell over the white limousine and its tinted windows to make indecipherable shadows on her face. Miracle had followed Lombard up to his house. Up there, alone, he had gone berserk and when he was done, he’d washed his hands and his face and wiped the blood off his shoes and driven on down to Musso’s. Then he’d decided to frame up old Jim Thompson. Put a little dope in the old man’s drink and drag him back to the scene of the crime.

  “You helped him.”

  “No, I loved Jack.”

  “You doped me. You dragged me up there, the two of you.”

  “I didn’t have any choice.”

  She closed her eyes. The dope—Miracle had gotten it out of her purse he figured, fumbling around on the seat. It was the source of her sleepy eyes, that languor in front of the camera. There had been a time before all that he guessed—when she’d been just some kid in somebody’s hometown, the girl next door who just had to get out. Leaving behind a mom and a pop and a boy in a pick up truck.

  “Did you hire the Okie?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You were jealous of the girl, and now she’s dead. The Okie killed her, didn’t he?”

  She didn’t answer but instead glanced toward the café and he imagined she was thinking about the girl in the picture on the wall inside.

  “That’s what Miracle holds over you. That’s why you have to go along with him.”

  “No, Billy arranged it. He had her killed.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “He was convinced, if The Young Lovely was gone, he could persuade Jack to do the picture.”

  “He told you this?”

  “Before it happened, I thought he was joking. I didn’t think he’d actually go ahead … If you help me, I’ll go to the police. I’ll tell them what happened that night at Lombard’s house. I’ll tell them who the real murderer was. I just need you to do something first. Contact somebody for me.”

  Thompson said nothing. She paused, trying to read his face. For his part, he wondered how much to believe. “Billy had someone else arrange it, the girl’s death,” she said. “And that man, he hired the Okie to do the job. Only Billy didn’t pay up—and now the Okie is after me.”

  “Why you?”

  “When Billy set up her murder, he gave them my name. So now I have to pay off to get rid of them. Once I’m free of them, I can talk to the cops. I’ll tell them you didn’t have anything to do with this.”

  “I don’t know. This type of thing. A guy like me, my age. Chasing someone down.”

  “The contact man—the one who arranged the murder. If you could set up a meeting with him. Tell him I’ll pay.”

  She gave Thompson a hopeless loo
k. He thought again of that starlet in the picture inside the cafe, and he realized he’d been wrong before. There was a difference. Back then, she’d just been posing. She’d been somebody else, pretending to be this woman in the picture, desperate, glamorous. Now the pretense was gone—but it wasn’t just that. Michele brushed a hand against his leg, and in the flickering neon her face had the look of a translucent doll.

  Fear, he decided, that was it. The different thing in her eyes.

  “What’s the man’s name? The contact?”

  “Wicks. Sydney Wicks.”

  Thompson felt his skin bristle.

  “In East Hollywood,” she pleaded. “A place called the Satellite Bar.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  That night I went over to the Lanier place, but Gloria was out, making arrangement for her Daddy’s funeral. I let myself in, and all but stumbled across Belle in the darkened parlor. I held back, though, and saw her take a man’s face between her hands. They kissed, the pharmacist and Belle. They talked it up big. About how it was going to be when the will was cashed out and Belle had gotten her father’s money.

  I listened to them for awhile, and at last I realized. They’d poisoned the old man and planned to pin the whole business on me. As if I’d tampered with the medicine.

  I switched on the light and Belle’s eyes went wide. She tried to explain her way out of it, but I already had Daddy Lanier’s pistol in my hand. I knew, soon as they autopsied the old man, the sheriff would be coming for me. Given who I was, no one would believe my story, I knew that too. My only chance was to get out of town. I had to buy time. So I took two chairs from the dinner table and strung them together.

  “Please,” pleaded Belle. “My neck.”

  I gave the cord an extra pull and stuffed a rag in her mouth. I did the same for the druggist.

  Something inside told me I should do this differently. With Gloria’s help, maybe, and a good lawyer, I could get out clean. After all I hadn’t killed anybody. They were the ones. Even so, there was another, older voice inside me.

  You dope, boy, you goddamn fool.

  I headed toward that voice now. There was an old man, an ex-con out in California, who’d told me if I ever got myself in a fix, come see him. I drove. Somewhere in the desert, the next day, the news came over the radio. A man and a woman had been found dead in a central Texas living room. The pair had tried to free themselves, twisting and squirming, but each movement had only brought the cord tighter about their necks.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Thompson couldn’t sleep. Instead he kept writing. He pictured the drifter coming down the Barstow grade into California, the desert streaming past in the black of night, then the slow bloom of suburban lights. The air whispered through the windwings of the Cadillac, and Thompson could see the drifter’s lips moving as he thought about Belle and the druggist, the rope tight around their necks. Thompson’s lips moved too. Soon the man was over the hills and into the Los Angeles basin.

  Thompson tore the sheet from his typewriter.

  He did not like what was happening. He’d written The Manifesto based on what Miracle had given him. Now, the character he’d created was in Los Angeles.

  That first night in Musso’s, Miracle had laid out the story. The drifter in Texas. The love triangle in Los Angeles. The dead girl.

  Now that story was coming true. Haze, Lombard, The Young Lovely—they were the triangle. The Okie was the drifter.

  “Why me?” Thompson asked himself. “Why did Miracle get me involved?”

  I’m the fall guy. The stumblebum. Someone to blame when things go wrong.

  Also, Miracle had needed a writer.

  There was something flawed in the plan: the notion you could arrange a murder, then make a movie about it, place the blame elsewhere. Producers, though, guys like Miracle, they thought they ran the world. Or liked to think so. Put a spoon to their nose, well, things could get pretty skewed.

  Even so, things were not converging the way Miracle had planned. The Okie had lost the corpse. So Miracle had improvised. And now Lombard was dead too.

  Thompson almost sympathized. He’d been up against that wall himself, clutching all those ragged ends, stories within stories that almost webbed together, the various pieces fraying and disappearing into a darkness that swallowed all calculation. Meanwhile, the killer you had created roamed the city. Your careful plan—out of control.

  It was dawn. The sedan out front had not moved. A green sedan, Thompson saw now, in the first light of morning. It had a familiar look, and no longer seemed frightening. If someone had meant to harm him, they’d had all night.

  Thompson stepped outside.

  A figure slumped on the driver’s side, head against the window. He edged closer. A woman. She stretched her arms, waking up—and he saw who it was, and he was surprised, though perhaps he shouldn’t have been. She had tracked him down, just as she had tracked him down at Musso’s night before last. The sedan, he recognized it now. It belonged to their neighbor, Mrs. Myers.

  “Alberta?”

  She blushed. “I decided to come pay you a visit.”

  “When?”

  “This morning, of course. I just got here.”

  She was lying, of course. She had borrowed the car yesterday, he guessed, and been parked out there all night, though she would never admit it.

  “You want to come in for some breakfast?”

  “Thank you.”

  It was Sunday morning, and he remembered the sound of the kids rumbling about in the front room long ago, roughhousing, and he remembered Alberta watching from the table, still young, smelling of sleep and a midnight tumble.

  “Do you remember when we first met?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Some college party. You were drinking a beer—and I liked the way you held the bottle to your lips.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Yes—but I didn’t know you were going to be holding it there for the next forty years.”

  The night they’d met, he’d seen her leaning against the wall in her red blouse and black slacks. She’d been watching him. The other young men there, they’d smelled of the farm. Young Jim Thompson, though, he’d been around. Debonair, sauntering, reckless, his shirt collar unbuttoned and his tie loose. He’d had experiences. The only loose plank in a room of stiff boards. Their first date, they went to a gangster movie. He had gotten his hands under her blouse, unbuttoning her skirt band. Her features one moment had the look of innocence, and the next seemed as sharp and wicked as a fence post dipped in tetanus.

  “How are our kids?” he asked.

  “Fine.”

  It was an odd question, a sore point. His daughters had married and moved away, but their son, well, he took after the old man. He liked the bar room.

  Thompson cracked the eggs into the pan now, flipped the sunny sides over without breaking them.

  “They’re coming up perfect.”

  “You could always cook an egg.”

  He got the breakfast onto the table, and they sat together reading the paper. They slipped into the old routine, and he saw the age in her face. She had on her white blouse, rumpled from the long night in the car, her skirt that flared at the bottom, white hose, black pumps, a string of pearls. Her nails were painted red. She had been spying on him, out there. She’d come prepared to drag him from the arms of another woman, if need be, but at the same time she meant to look good doing it.

  “Why don’t you give it up?”

  “What?”

  His eyes followed hers, and he saw the bottle that stood on the coffee table. It wasn’t just the booze, she would say. He knew the argument. It’s the whole thing, Jim, the whole business. You pretend it’s for me, but the penthouse—you’re the one who wanted it, honey, Jim. All I’ve ever wanted was something simple and clean. A little place with a flower box in the window where the light shines through. And if it all isn’t quite what I imagine, I’m willing to pretend. So long as my husband doesn�
�t keep plummeting down that long staircase into the dark.

  That was her argument. Thompson knew it, without her saying a word, just like she knew his response. You wanted that penthouse, Birdie. And hell, when it comes to that staircase, you’re the one taking me by the hand, pushing me down.

  “You’ve done things the way you wanted. You’ve written your books.”

  “I know.”

  “That new place, it isn’t so awful.”

  “Yeah it is.”

  “Go back to your work.”

  She stood up. She was gorgeous, his wife. He didn’t want her to leave. She was all but finished with him, though, ready to give him the push over, the way a person got after spending all night in the car.

  “I have to go.”

  “I’ll be back Friday. To help with the move.”

  She turned away, and he saw the arch of the young girl’s back, the housewife’s tits, the tired legs of an old woman whose skirt ended at the dimple in her knees. She was all these women at once. They were all masks, the dust amusing itself.

  “Good-bye.”

  It was the Oklahoma voice again. The voice of his mother, his sisters. Of the front porch swing creaking in the back of their throats. In it, he could hear the cicadas, and the katydids and the hollering moan of some old yellow dog. Then his wife was gone out the door, and Thompson felt a pang in his heart. He gathered up all his papers and hurried after.

  “Take me back to the city.”

  They rode together. Past the orange groves and the oil derricks and the Long Beach shipyards. Up the winding coast and over the flats into Anaheim. Then over the Santa Monica cloverleaf where you glimpsed it all at once—or thought you did—all those streets, Wilshire, and Pico and Lincoln, running parallel to each other and away, coming back and crossing. Spiraling towards the center but still always on the rim. Bunker Hill, Hollywood, Chinatown, Burbank. One long town with one long street. Stucco houses under a white sun that spun around other suns in a galaxy inside a universe black as black could be.