by Bruce Wagner
Toulouse froze. Was it?—it must be—it was … it was!—him. Him.
He was looking at his father.
Then came a shock from another direction: “Toulouse?”
Boulder fairly tackled him.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, her face frozen in a country-club smile that said: Celebrities Only.
He couldn’t answer; he couldn’t speak.
“Are you rolling? Oh my God, you look like you’re rolling!”
“What?” he managed.
“Like you took E.”
“E?”
“Ecstasy, stupid. Anyway, I’m just kidding …”
“Boulder, I have to—I have to go …”
“Diane’s here, with Dex. Don’t you want to say hello? You have to. We’re having a brunch—we have the same agent now, isn’t it cool? I signed with William Morris!”
As recent events were too much to assimilate alone, Toulouse was forced to throw himself on the mercy of the court of Olde CityWalk, his rationale being that Lucy and Edward had been in on the search for his father from the very beginning and that, to this date anyway, the suppression of family secrets had done the Trotter clan no apparent good. Like in the early days, the musketeers convened in Edward’s apartments—and that, beginning with Trinnie’s boudoir confession, is where he brought them up to speed.
“Oh my God!” cried Lucy. “Why didn’t you tell us!”
Toulouse instantly regretted having opened his mouth. “I’m telling you now. I just found out! Grandpa would kill—”
“I cannot believe you saw him and didn’t say anything! Weren’t you dying to go up to him?”
“And say what? Hey, how ya doin’? It’s me, your son! You know—the one Mom had after you flipped out.”
“But how could you at least not—”
“Lucille Rose,” said her brother. “Please chill.”
The wise guy had spoken. The eyes of Oracle Ed blinked languidly above the veil. “None of this comes as a great surprise,” he continued with studied nonchalance. “I believe I came into that ‘piece of intelligence’—as Grandpa Lou would say—some days ago.”
“Don’t tell me you knew all along,” said Toulouse, prepared to be at once astonished and betrayed.
“Edward!” she rebuked. “You knew and didn’t tell us?”
“I had all the ingredients but didn’t have a recipe—until now. See, for the last week or so, Dad’s been acting very strange. At first I thought it was fallout from the Alzheimer’s. That he was getting ’emotional.’ But then I happened to learn from Eulogio (you know how close we’ve become) that he’s been shepherding dear old Pops to—guess where? The Hotel Bel-Air.”
“But Grandpa said no one knew—”
“I assumed he was having a dalliance. I thought, Good for him—because he sure doesn’t get enough at home!”
“Edward,” said his sister. “That is so mean.”
“When I implied as much out loud, Eulogio said he didn’t think a woman was involved. So then I thought: it’s a man!”
“Ed-ward!”
He squealed with delight. “Now why, pray tell, asked I of Eulogio, why would you think a woman was not involved? Getting information from that fellow is like pulling dumpster-baby teeth. (Well, maybe harder.) Because each time he drove him there, Eulogio responded, each time he drove Señor Dodd, he would later see him strolling about the pond with a heavyset man whose features were much as you described.”
“Fuck!” spat Toulouse. “The whole world knows!”
“The immediate family—and I’m certain Grandpa Lou has taken pains to keep it immediate—is hardly the whole world, Toulouse. So chill.”
“We have to go there,” said Lucy, fiendishly agog at the plotty new developments. Tonight her Smythson would get a workout.
“I glossed it,” said the cousin, kicking himself. “I thought it was just one of Dodd’s pasty Seattle friends holed up in Tinseltown incognito to do a little bullshit consulting on the middle-school project—you know, Billionaire-Boys’-Club stuff. But then it came back to me … one night at dinner last week—remember, Lucy?—Father received a phone call. He stepped away from the table, which was rare; had to be Grandpa Lou. He listened for a second, then shot two words back to the phone.” Edward paused dramatically. “ ‘John Burnham.’ ”
“Yes!” said Lucy knowingly, though just then she wasn’t sure what she knew.
“John Burnham?” Toulouse was lost.
“Then Grandpa said something else, because Father’s forehead wrinkled up and he asked: ‘When?’ ”
“ ‘When?’ ” echoed Toulouse.
“Yes!” cried Lucy. “He said, ‘When?’!”
“—and at this point, Joyce was listening very carefully. Her ear was moving toward the receiver like it was going to fucking dock with it. Then Father says, ‘Did they speak?’ ”
“Into the phone?”
“Into the phone.”
“ ‘Did they speak?’ ”
“Yes!” corroborated Lucy, with great excitation. “And then Dad said, [she lowered her voice in imitation] ‘I’ll take care of it.’ ”
“ ‘I’ll take care of it’?” said Toulouse, sounding—and feeling—like a simpleton.
“Exactly. ‘I’ll take care of it.’ ”
“What is this, The Sopranos?”
“Who is John Burnham?” begged Lucy of her brother.
Edward shoved a cappuccino truffle under the veil and crunched. “I didn’t put it together until Boulder called to gossip about Tull snubbing her at the Bel-Air. After she got it out of her system, she went on and on about how she and Diane Keaton had the same agent—John Burnham! That night, I innocently mentioned Mr. Burnham to Mother during a bath. There was a long pause—I mean long. Then she said, ‘He was best man at their wedding.’ Just like that.”
Toulouse sagely nodded.
“What does it mean?” said Lucy, beside herself. “What does it mean?”
Toulouse filled in the blanks. “Mr. Burnham must have run into my father at the hotel—must have recognized him. They probably spoke, and that’s what the phone call was about. Sling Blade—or some other ‘handler’—probably saw it and reported back.”
“Bingo,” said Edward.
“I guess the cat really is out of the bag,” said Toulouse.
“Not if Grandpa Lou can help it,” said the cousin. “And, believe me—he can help it.”
The gentleman Louis Trotter had received in his living room was the inimitable Mr. Burnham, a higher-up at the William Morris Agency at that time, invited to Saint-Cloud to give express assurance that he would not give away the unexpected return of a fragile old friend—and that if he had already discussed it with, say, a colleague, then would he be so kind to cover his tracks by declaring himself to have been mistaken. Marcus Weiner was by no means the center of Mr. Burnham’s world; thus far, he had only mentioned the brief encounter to Ms. Keaton, his client and confidante. (The actress had of course already told him about her summer holiday with the kids—and of her affection for the profligately talented Katrina; Mr. Burnham had said hello to the latter not so long ago at Ivy at the Shore and found her alluring. Recently divorced, he was on the lookout, but his halfhearted entreaties to Ms. Keaton to play matchmaker had been ignored.) He felt the Trotters were a shade on the paranoid side, but appreciated their sensitivities. A thing like this could attract unwanted press.
This is what led to their summit: after being informed by his father of the swan-side run-in, uneventful of itself yet fraught with potentially hazardous repercussions if not quickly contained, Dodd cold-called the agent, who was also by chance an alumnus of Beverly Vista, albeit some years ahead of him. Mr. Burnham was tickled; having the eccentric billionaire on one’s phone sheet was somewhat of a coup. Dodd quickly gave him the lowdown—while the jailing and other convolutions were withheld, the saga of an ongoing recovery from debilitating mental illness was not. Mr. Burnham was more than happy to com
ply with the request to, as they say, put a sock in it. He was somewhat taken aback when Dodd, in a transparent and superfluous effort to solidify the agent’s trust, brought up the sketchy idea of a future creative alliance between Quincunx and the Morris agency—something in the digital realm or perhaps an interactive project that might tie in with his plans to rejuvenate old BV. (Until now, Mr. Burnham had been unaware that they had that place in common.) Dodd ended by saying his father was eager to meet him face-to-face. An interview at Saint-Cloud was arranged. As reported earlier, that conference was amicable, leaving Trotter the Elder much at ease. Again Mr. Burnham felt it odd, for he had already given his word; but he had always wanted to meet the legendary digger nonetheless, and seized the opportunity, which did not disappoint.
There was no longer any sense, not that there had been in the first place, in keeping Marcus at the Bel-Air. Mr. Trotter hadn’t properly thought it through—the hotel was still a watering hole of the industry his son-in-law had once taken for his own. Though Marcus’s appearance had radically transformed since his show business days, the digger of course had recognized him at once, at his most ragged and obese; it only stood to reason that others, all the Burnham types, would follow suit as he shrank closer to his former dimensions.
A house in Montecito was secured. Marcus decamped with ear-piece’d retinue, and the Bel-Air lodgings were no more.
The old man now obediently turned his attention to a flurry of medical procedures thus far avoided. He was strapped to a chair while a needle poked about the small mass in his neck (for it had lazily returned) in an unpleasant and futile attempt to extract cells. After forty-five minutes, Mr. Trotter thought he might faint and said as much; the doctor stepped away with a flourish while of a sudden the chair went upside down with a great metallic whir so the blood could rush to his head. (He hadn’t been quite ready for that little trick.) All told, the frustrated man spent more than an hour trying to get what he needed—and what he needled—but, failing miserably, could do nothing but schedule an MRI. Mr. Trotter smiled on his way out in such a way that the medic felt he had undergone a nasty procedure himself.
Midweek and mid-December now, and all is weirdly well at the house on Saint-Cloud. For Trinnie, the swelling, so to speak, has gone down. She busies herself with the wandering garden, which has become a kind of obsession. The old woman has not yet taken to its winding path, but her daughter prepares for her arrival through daily diligence and micromanagement of fountain and flora, belying the fact that she herself has utterly lost her way. (It is the Trotters’ special gift to grow or build the family metaphors.) As for Bluey, she has calmed somewhat, Winter’s presence being no small reason. But the Icelander is adrift, shell-shocked by the change of venue. Mr. Trotter finally confirmed that the mystery condo was real; when he began to elaborate, she stopped him, as it would have been vulgar to evince curiosity. Still, his wife’s generous bequeathment made the days lighter and filled her with gratitude.
Drawing on “intelligences” gleaned from his kind patron, Marcus Weiner embarks on a sacred mission.
Around nine o’clock one chilly Wednesday morning, he leaves the 1930s Lutah Maria Riggs–designed Montecito aerie and sets out by chauffeured car for Boyle Heights, a rough, historic neighborhood not far east of the bridge that had once sheltered him. He does not look like the same man who left the Hotel Bel-Air as mysteriously as he arrived; he carries forty pounds less, and there’s a spring to both step and mind that is decidedly un-Victorian. A kind of contemporary reason has returned, along with memories of life before Gypsydom. The therapist has kept a watchful eye out for relapse. Ready to triage, she is lying in wait to cushion his fall when the classic epiphany comes: when the patient realizes the scope of all that has been robbed him and can never be recovered—time, tide and loved ones—but with Marcus, such frissons seem to come and go like trains at a station, leaving him sadder but wiser, morose but not marooned. (Mr. Trotter is unsurprised at his son-in-law’s stamina and resolve.) So today—this dreary, exalted Wednesday morning—our bighearted pilgrim is on a numinous journey, preapproved by all those concerned. His shrink would like him to corral that elusive nineties’ warhorse called closure; but he wishes simply to say good-bye.
And the boy? He has decided that if he cannot see his father, he will at least see Amaryllis. He called the detective to ask where she was; Toulouse had become seriously “proactive.” Samson stonewalled—any information about the girl or her whereabouts, he said, was confidential. Besides, he added, you kids caused enough trouble. He went on to say how cruel it was to expose a girl like that to so many luxuries; how it was his opinion the children had been selfish and condescending “from day one”; how the boy’s demands to see her—“your very tone in this conversation”—showed him to be selfish, impetuous and “entitled” still. In other words, the detective gave Toulouse a piece of his mind. Our hero did not feel at all well after their conversation and to make himself better, wrote the diatribe off as Samson’s spleen at being spurned.
The very same children the detective maligned now gather at Olde CityWalk for yet another in a series of pre-holiday feasts. As Christmas approaches, Stradella House is busy with charity lunches and dinners and the attendant tours, so it is not unusual for the cousins to look out the gingerbread window above the Boar’s Head Inn and see groups of strangers nosing about or passing by in special trams. (The Majestyk has screened It’s a Wonderful Life more than once to benefit Joyce’s Candlelighters.) Lucy is the only one who appears to relish the intrusions of the outside world, though Pullman never seems to mind the endless gaggle of awed spectators, who fuss over him as if he were a unicorn. On wintry nights, cobblestone backstreets fill with carolers and caterers’ torches and carriages pulled by draft horses; the scene is set for Lucille Rose to imagine it really is the London of H. G. Wells and his time machine, a London soon to be expanded upon by an irresistible series of mystery books to be known the world over simply as Blue Maze.
At Toulouse’s request, his braided cousin, who had tirelessly transcribed the orphan’s outpourings for future novelistic use, took to the Smythsonian archives and in no time at all located Amaryllis’s AWOL reference—the marble-hearted institution from which she had escaped. The infamous Mac (Lucy’s footnote: “short for MacLaren Children’s Center. In common usage”) was in a distant town called El Monte.
Toulouse suggested they call the place forthwith. Edward, shrouded in white linen and suffering nobly through a holiday pestilence of acne, barked that it was useless to ring the place up—they should board the MSV instead and hope for a sighting. They could lie in wait just as Amaryllis had outside Four Winds; with gull wings extended, the rescue party should be easy enough for the prisoner to spot (Edward as yet being unaware of the height of MacLaren’s walls). Better yet, they’d come bearing Yuletide gifts and offertories for the fucked-up little foundlings—a veritable Trojan Mauck.
“You know,” said Edward to his cousin, “we haven’t talked about this …” He waited until he had their full attention. “It’s actually pretty intense.”
Toulouse was thinking he was finally going to announce the date of his facial surgery.
“I haven’t told you either, Lucy.”
“Then tell us!” said the girl, with customary exasperation. “Just tell us, Edward.”
“Well … think back. To the day of our wonderful interrogation by the good detective Dowling. Now, if you recall, the detective was wondering … if the girl—Amaryllis—had ever been seen in the company of a certain bearded gentleman—” He swiveled his head toward his sister. “You’re supposed to be the author. You’re supposed to listen. Have Inspector Javert’s comments been forgotten?”
“Bearded?” said Toulouse. “I don’t remember him saying anything about a bearded—”
Lucy frantically flipped through her BIRD NOTES. “He’s right, he’s right! The detective asked if she was with someone—that first time we met … remember, Toulouse? He wanted to know if
she was with someone when she came to Boulder’s movie set—here!” She reached a pertinent passage in the Smythsonian transcript: “ ‘A large-built bearded man …’ ”
“Very good!” shouted Edward.
“What are you saying?” asked Toulouse.
“What I am saying is … that your father—and this is going to come as a bit of a shock—your father befriended Amaryllis on skid row. He took care of her: you know, brought her food, looked after her and so forth.”
“That is bullshit!”
“But here’s the shocker. Maybe you’d better sit down …”
“Tell me!” said the apoplectic boy. “You better fucking tell me now!”
“Edward, tell us—”
“And you better not be bullshitting!”
“Well … you see, it was Amaryllis’s mother who Marcus was accused of murdering. That’s why he was in jail.”
Lucy gasped and was so overcome that she lay on the floor to steady herself. Toulouse fought the impulse to knock down his cousin, and was glad he didn’t, for the consequences would have been dire.
“But who—who told you this?” snapped Toulouse, like a lawyer on the losing side. He’d gone white as Edward’s veil.
“I wish I could say I deduced it myself, but I can’t. It was Mother who spilled the beans, during a bath—that’s when her guard’s down. She tells me everything during a bath.”
Toulouse began to gibber. “I can’t—I can’t believe—murdering her mother … my father!—fed her? looked after? you mean to say she was actually friends with—” He went on like that, much as a sensitive piece of equipment that had been dropped on its head.
“It’s karma,” said Edward, sounding like his aunt. (The whole world sounded more like Trinnie every day.) “What goes around comes around.”
What came around just then was Sling Blade, preceded by a rap at the door. Due to complicated dynastic interweavings, the caretaker had a knack for popping up when family members least expected; yet precisely because of such ubiquity, his presence was never puzzled over. Sling Blade informed that he had come to borrow the MSV as per their grandfather’s hasty request. Edward was outraged, or pretended as much—before a sixth sense that “intrigue” was afoot won out.