He turned back into the living room. Margot was standing on the opposite side of the room with her back turned. Nevile was sitting next to Lynn, holding both of her hands.
‘What do I do now?’ Frank asked.
Nine
‘Danny will forgive you, you know, given time,’ said Nevile.
Frank finished writing his check on the roof of Nevile’s Mercedes, signed it, and handed it over. ‘I can’t say you didn’t earn it.’
‘I don’t know, Frank. I still have the feeling that something wasn’t quite right. Of course I’ve had visual manifestations before, but this is the first time that anybody else has been able to see them.’
‘Well, maybe we ought to try it again, when Danny’s been laid to rest. You know, maybe he might have learned to accept it.’
‘When’s the funeral?’
‘Wednesday morning, at Oak Lawn. You’re welcome to come if you want to.’
‘Maybe I will. Thanks. And thanks for the . . . um . . .’ He held up the still-drying check.
He drove off, and Frank watched him go. As he turned back to the house, he saw Margot and Lynn coming out. Lynn had her handkerchief pressed to her mouth, and Margot gave Frank a look that meant, don’t even come near us, OK?
‘I’m taking Lynn home,’ she said, ‘and then I’m going to see my parents.’
‘All right. What time do you think you’ll be back?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe I’ll stay overnight. There’s some leftover pasta in the fridge if you’re hungry.’
‘Margot . . .’
‘There’s nothing to say, Frank. I can hardly believe what happened today, but it did, and I need some time to think about it.’
‘You heard what Nevile said. Danny’s traumatized. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.’
‘He’s dead, Frank, and he still doesn’t forgive you. Doesn’t that tell you something?’
Frank didn’t know what to say to that. He stood on the porch while Margot backed her car down the driveway, turned in the street with a protesting squeal of tires, and drove off toward Hollywood Way without looking back at him once.
He was about to go back into the house when a gray Ford Taurus appeared around the corner and parked right outside. Lieutenant Chessman climbed out, followed by Detective Booker.
‘Mr Bell! Glad I caught you at home!’
‘Hi, there, Lieutenant. What can I do for you today?’
Lieutenant Chessman came up the driveway and took his notebook out of his coat pocket. ‘I hope I’m not interrupting anything, but I still have one or two loose ends to tie up, and I was hoping that maybe I could jog your memory a little more.’
‘Lieutenant, I told you everything I saw.’
‘You did, yes. But I’m still having difficulty locating this woman you say you met immediately after the explosion. I’ve identified and talked to every other eye witness, and pinpointed their exact whereabouts immediately prior to the explosion, and also immediately after. But this one woman remains a mystery – Ms X. I don’t know who she is, or what she was doing there, or what she might have seen.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Frank. ‘I don’t see how I can help you. I asked her if she was OK, and she asked me if I was OK, and that was about all we said to each other. I gave my address to one of the officers at the scene, and when I turned around she was gone.’
‘Was there anything memorable about her? Anything at all?’
‘She was about five-four, mid-twenties I guess. Short hair.’
‘What was she wearing?’
‘Just a plain, ordinary dress. Yellow, or cream, as I recall.’
‘And one shoe? Did you notice what kind of shoe?’
‘A sandal, I think. One of those strappy things. Brown.’
‘OK. And that’s all you remember? She wasn’t wearing any distinctive jewelry? She didn’t say anything that struck you as odd?’
‘No, sorry.’
Lieutenant Chessman laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘Very well, Mr Bell. Thank you for your time. If possible, I’d like you to try to think back to that morning, and visualize that young woman, and if anything at all comes to mind – and I really mean anything – please give me a call.’
‘She’s not a suspect, is she?’
‘Oh, no. This is just for the sake of completeness. In investigations like this, we’re very great sticklers for completeness.’
When Lieutenant Chessman had left, Frank went back into the house. He stepped out on to the patio and looked around, but of course there was no trace at all that Danny had been here. Danny, or his psychic imprint, or his ghost, or whatever it had been. The skies over the mountains were beginning to clear, and suddenly the sun appeared, but Frank shivered.
He had the nagging suspicion that something was happening in his life that he didn’t fully understand. He felt almost like a cheated husband who comes home early and finds an unfamiliar set of car keys on the table in the hall, or answers the telephone only to have the caller hang up. Everybody seemed to know more than he did. Why was Lieutenant Chessman so intent on finding Astrid? What was it that Nevile thought ‘wasn’t quite right?’ Why wouldn’t Astrid tell him who she really was?
He could have told Lieutenant Chessman that he was seeing Astrid. Should have told him. But Astrid’s identity was the only thing that he knew that nobody else appeared to know, and although he didn’t know why, he wanted to keep it to himself, for the time being at least.
The phone rang. It was Mo.
‘How’s it going, old buddy?’
‘About as crappy as it gets.’
‘Did you hear the news? Those Dar Tariki lunatics have demanded that all TV shows with any kind of immoral content have to be taken off the air, otherwise they’re going to stage the biggest act of terrorism since September 11.’
‘They’ve demanded what? This is insane. What the hell do they mean by “immoral content”? Just about every TV show has some kind of immoral content. Soaps, cop shows, everything. How can you show good defeating evil if you can’t show evil?’
‘Nevertheless, old buddy, that’s the ultimatum.’
‘So how has the network taken it?’
‘Think “headless chicken.”’
Frank drove to Sherman Oaks to see his sister Carol, who lived with her husband, Smitty, and their three children in a large, scruffy house on the corner of Stone Canyon Avenue. The front lawn was always strewn with scooters and Action Man toys and Smitty’s lime-green ’68 Plymouth Barracuda was always jacked up in the driveway, in varying degrees of dismemberment.
He walked in to find Carol in her saucepan-cluttered kitchen, trying to make estofado. She was a hopeless cook, which was one of the reasons why Frank didn’t visit very often. The last time he had come round to dinner she had cooked chicken breasts in chili cream and he had spent the next day crouched on the toilet with his teeth chattering, praying for death. How Smitty and the kids had survived for so long he couldn’t imagine.
‘You look like shit,’ Carol told him, slicing up green and red capsicums. She was a big woman, three years older than him, with the same brown eyes, but a very much rounder face, and a pudgier nose, and wild brown curls that looked as if she chopped them into shape herself.
‘I think this has finished us off,’ he said. ‘Margot and me. I think it’s kaput sville.’
‘Hey – you’re still in shock, both of you.’
‘All of us.’
‘All of you?’
‘Me and Margot and Danny, too. We held a séance today. You’ve heard of this British guy, Nevile Strange, the psychic detective? The one who’s been helping out with the investigation into these bombings?’
‘You held a séance? For Christ’s sake, Frank. I didn’t think you believed in any of that crap.’
‘I don’t. I didn’t. Not until today. I saw Danny, sis. I actually saw him, and I heard his voice, too.’
Smitty came into the kitchen. He was about two inches shorter than Carol, with thi
nning blond hair that stuck vertically up in the air, bright blue eyes and a permanently surprised face. He was wearing a T-shirt that read PROFANITY IS THE LAST RESORT OF THE INARTICULATE. He hijacked a slice of red pepper from the chopping board and crunched it between his highly irregular teeth.
‘Did I hear séance?’
Frank said, ‘That’s right. I met this guy Nevile Strange when he was looking around The Cedars. He said he could get in touch with people who had passed over, so I asked him if we could talk to Danny. I guess I wanted to hear Danny forgive me. Well, that isn’t strictly true. I wanted Margot to hear Danny forgive me’
‘What’s to forgive?’ Smitty protested. ‘A bomb went off, for chrissakes. Besides, these séances, what a phony!’
‘I don’t think this one was phony.’
‘Oh yeah? My old lady went to a séance after my old man kicked the bucket. This medium told her that my old man was waiting for her in heaven so that they could dance the night away just like they always did. Total baloney, of course, because my old man lost both his feet at Inch’on. Stupid palooka stood too close to a tank.’
Carol flapped her hand at Smitty in irritable dismissal. ‘You really saw Danny?’ she asked Frank.
‘Standing in the back yard. As clear as I can see you now. We all saw him.’
‘You’re serious?’ asked Smitty, crunching another slice of pepper.
‘He said it was all my fault that he was dead and that he wanted to see me in hell.’
Smitty emphatically shook his head. ‘Nah, you don’t want to take any notice of that. You didn’t see nothing. That was a . . . what . . . an optical delusion. That’s what these mediums do. They delude you. Optically. And financially. You didn’t pay this guy, did you?’
They sat in the swing in the back yard in the last warm light of the day, drinking beer and eating pretzels. Carol’s three boys were rolling around on the crabgrass, playing space ninjas.
Carol said, ‘You won’t lose Margot, believe me. But she’s always been kind of private, hasn’t she? She needs some time to work things out inside of her head.’
‘I guess you’re right. But I feel like something’s gone out of our marriage. Something we can never get back.’
‘That’s life, Frank. We’re always losing things we can never get back.’
He looked at Carol and he knew what she was saying. When she was nineteen she had married her high-school sweetheart, Nick Vereno, and she had been so happy that she had blossomed like her family had never seen her before. For seven months, she had almost looked pretty. But then Nick didn’t come home one night, and a week later he told her he had met somebody else. A twenty-eight-year-old exotic dancer with surgically enhanced breasts and a two-year-old kid in tow. Carol’s happiness had been switched off like the lights in an empty house, when you leave it for the very last time.
Smitty swigged Coors and said, ‘You know what you ought to do, Frank? You ought to insist that this Strange guy does it again. Just to prove that what you saw was genuine. I’ll bet you a lobster dinner that he can’t.’
‘Talking of dinner,’ said Frank, ‘can I smell something burning?’
‘God damn it,’ said Carol. ‘I forgot you’re supposed to keep on adding stock.’
She hurried inside. Smitty, unperturbed, carried on swinging on the swing and drinking his beer. ‘Maybe you and Margot could use a break,’ he suggested.
‘A break?’
‘Well, if your relationship had been in really good shape, it seems to me that she wouldn’t have blamed you for what happened to Danny. Maybe you both need to step back and take a look at what’s wrong. There’s marriage, you know, and then there’s something else. Carol was married to Nick and I know that she still carries this eternal flame for him because he was handsome and charming and everything she thought she ever wanted. But what we have together, Carol and me, is such a closeness that you can’t say where one of us ends and the other begins.’
He finished his can and crumpled it up, and tossed it into the trashcan. ‘No disrespect to Margot, but she’s always been kind of serious, you know, whereas you’re always the guy who can’t keep a straight face for more than five minutes.’ He sniffed. ‘Take my advice, Frank. Don’t force it. Give yourself some space. She’s trying to glue herself back together again and you should do the same, with whatever adhesive you can lay your hands on.’
Frank and Smitty drank so many cans of Coors between them that Frank spent the night on the couch. At two thirty-three A.M. one of the family’s golden retrievers came up to him and licked his face, and he woke up shouting ‘eeaurrghh!’ in disgust. The dog wagged his tail and kept running to the door and back again to tell him that he wanted to go for a walk.
He shuffled to the kitchen door and let the dog out into the yard. The moon was so bright that it could have been daylight. He stood there and thought about all the words of advice that had been given to him since Danny died. It was almost as if everybody else in the world had been discussing what he should do next, behind his back. The old man with the long-billed baseball cap; Nevile Strange; Lieutenant Chessman, and Smitty.
Give yourself some space. Cross the road and never come back.
Carol came up behind him and linked arms with him. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’
The next morning, after a breakfast of charred bacon and fried eggs with broken yolks, he kissed Carol and shook hands with Smitty and gave five dollars to each of the boys and then he drove home. Margot’s Jeep was already parked in the driveway. He let himself into the house and found Margot standing in the middle of the living room with her arms folded, like a schoolteacher impatiently waiting for an explanation.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Do I look OK?’
He tried to focus on her through his hangover. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said slowly. ‘You tell me.’
‘Well, no, as a matter of fact, I’m not OK. In fact I’m devastated. I don’t know what you’re trying to do to me, Frank. I always thought you were cynical. I thought that was par for the course for comedy writers. But I never realized that you were cruel.’
He couldn’t understand what she meant. Not until he stepped into living room and she waved her arms at the walls all around her. Her eyes were blurry with tears.
Every one of her Impressions In White had been defaced with red aerosol. One of them had been marked with a swastika, another had the word BITCH scrawled across it. A third had a crude vagina sprayed on to it, and yet another said FORGIVE?? The used aerosol can had been dropped on to the white leather couch, leaving splatters and smears.
‘Christ – who did this?’
Margot stared at him in disbelief. ‘Who did this? You’re asking me who did this?’
‘Hey, you don’t think that it was me?’
‘Who else, Frank? Nobody else has a key, nobody else knows the alarm code. Nobody else knows how much my paintings mean to me. Nobody else despises them like you do, and nobody else thinks that I’m a Nazi and a bitch because I blame you for what happened to Danny.’
Frank opened and closed his mouth and simply couldn’t think what to say to her.
‘I want you out of here, Frank. I don’t care where the hell you go. You can come to the funeral but after that I don’t want to see you. Not until we’ve sorted this out.’
‘Margot, I swear to God I didn’t do this! I wasn’t even here last night. I went to Carol’s.’
She stood still for a moment, with one hand on top of her head, as if she were making one of the most important decisions of her life.
‘Margot . . . can you really see me doing something like this? Sure, I got angry with you the other night, but that was frustration more than anything else. I need you, Margot, and you need me. We have to talk all of this out.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, we don’t. All you want to do is hurt me, because I won’t forget what you did to Danny. I could have forgiven you, yes
. I started to forgive you. But that isn’t enough for you, is it? You want me to pretend that it never happened at all.’
‘Margot . . .’
‘I’m going out, Frank. I’ll be back around three. When I come back, I don’t want to find you here. Please.’
She walked out and left Frank standing in the middle of the living room, with the red-smeared paintings on every side. He felt as if he had woken up this morning in a parallel universe. He had stayed round at Carol and Smitty’s last night, hadn’t he? The dog had licked his face and he had stood in the moonlit yard. Or maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he had driven around here and spray-painted Margot’s Impressions In White.
He approached the painting with the swastika on it, and touched it. The red paint was still slightly tacky, so it couldn’t have been sprayed more than three or four hours ago. He knew for an absolute certainty that he hadn’t done it. He couldn’t have done it.
But if it wasn’t him, who had?
Ten
‘Joe says they’re not going to cancel under any circumstances but one more bomb and I think they’re going to cancel,’ Mo said.
‘This is insane. What are they going to do? Put on endless repeats of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm?’
‘Frank, everybody’s running scared. What’s going to happen if they let off a bomb right in the middle of Wheel of Fortune? What if they blow up the new Mission Impossible movie and kill Tom Cruise? The insurance companies are pulling out of movies and television like Napoleon pulling out of Moscow.’
Lizzie Fries lit another More and blew smoke out of her nostrils. ‘Maybe we could introduce a sympathetic Taliban character and have all our women dress in burkas.’
‘In Iowa?’
‘It was only a suggestion,’ said Lizzie. She was sixty-two and skeletally thin, with a puffball of dyed orange hair and a face with striking bone structure but lizard-like skin. She always wore pant suits and frilly blouses, and enormous dangly earrings. In her twenties she had been a comedienne and a singer, and even Lucille Ball had said she was going to be the next Lucille Ball. But drink and pills and four failed marriages had destroyed her looks, even though they had never diluted her corrosive sense of humor.
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