Catalina Eddy

by Daniel Pyne

Purple and cyan neon pulse against the windowpane.

  A siren keens.

  January 2. Movie ticket stub for the Egyptian, eight-o’clock showing of How to Marry a Millionaire. A receipt from The Broadway for a pair of felt gloves.

  Her hands were always cold.

  He reads the scrawls and scraps and symbols and recalls his wife; hears the scrape of her voice across his heart. Memory fragments: perfume and baby powder and trusting looks, a rare smile. The hurt that came to live behind her eyes.

  January 3. Her job is stressful, she “worries about the girls,” but trusts that “a man of God” must have pure intentions, right? January 6 offers a single black-and-white photograph, soft focus, oddly framed, of Isla, dress lifted, ankle deep in the foaming surf at Will Rogers Beach. On January 14, Marilyn married Joltin’ Joe, and Isla has the UPI photograph clipped, and a lot to say about it, in her tiny, cramped chickenscratch.

  It’s well past midnight when Lovely puts the diary down, rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands, and gazes blankly into the middle distance, remembering all of a sudden, in the darkness, the flyer from Isla’s kitchen, under the carbon paper, the handbill advertising the outdoor church.

  5

  “WE ARE SPAWN of the unknowable.”

  A blazing midmorning murk bakes the hard-pack clay of a new drive-in movie theater south of Jefferson, where the West Side commuter town of Culver City is quickly spreading. The lot is half filled with cars parked angled up on rolling berms. Lovely’s Morris curls around the back row of the congregation and drives to a clapboard concession stand where worshippers have lined up to buy coffee and Cherry Cokes and Chili-Egg Fries. Out of his car, Lovely squints across the lot at the Hon. Rev. A. R. Drummond, Church of the Cosmic Evolution, who, dwarfed by the shimmering white movie screen, stands on a dais behind a simple mahogany lectern inlaid with a bleached maple cross comprised of a scaled-down vertical Viking rocket and a horizontal banana-neon lightning bolt, delivering his sermon:

  “Under the sun and under the sky. Embraced by the eternal, at the mercy of the laws of the Universe. No more, no less.”

  His voice reedy and nasal and bleating, Dopplered, jittery, wafer-thin from speakers hanging on car windows, Drummond looks just like his picture on the flyer: tweed jacket with patches, bow tie, a trim beard. A rumpled professor. Male pattern baldness, his threadbare combover razzed by the breeze.

  “Einstein says the religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. Transcending any personal God. And avoiding dogma and theology . . .”

  Fresh-scrubbed young girls, virgin in spirit if not in fact, weave bicycles through the cars, taking up the collection, pastel sundresses rippling across slender tanned legs. Lovely’s dad was an usher who served Communion at the Grace Presbyterian in Fruita. Sunday funeral-black suit, shoes gleaming. Grape juice and unsalted crackers. Bicycle girls would have been a real plus.

  “. . . based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Einstein. Who can argue with him? Amen. Truly, amen.”

  From many of the cars come honks of approval: Praise the Sky God, whoever or whatever she might be. Quavering music from a theremin worples from the tiny portable speakers as the congregation unhooks them from half-rolled windows to return them to their posts. Engines starting up. Drummond steps off the dais, his nubile ushers fall in line behind him like baby ducks in saddle shoes, and they parade toward a silver Airstream trailer tucked behind the screen, where Lovely is waiting for him.

  “A. R. Drummond?”

  A dismissive gesture of irritation. “If this is about poor Isla, I’ve already given my statement to the police.”

  “I’m not a cop. Or a newsman.”

  Lovely offers him a card and matches pace as Drummond begrudgingly glances at it. “Leong’s Fresh Fruit and Produce?”

  “It’s where I get my messages.”

  Drummond gives the card back and keeps walking.

  “Communist?” Lovely asks.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Or left-leaning. I heard she was a little pink.”

  “Isla?”

  “You agree, then.”

  Drummond stops. Creased brow. “Who are you?”

  “I’m nobody,” Lovely says. “Just a guy asking questions.”

  Drummond studies him. The acolytes study him, chests out, hair back, chins high, hands knotted behind their backs or lost in the front pleats of their breezy frocks. “No, you’re not,” Drummond decides. “Okay, listen, Mr. Nobody. Isla typed for me, answered correspondence, kept my files in order. That’s it. We didn’t socialize. I didn’t really know her that well. I can’t tell you who would want to hurt her. I’m sorry that she—that what happened happened and—” He takes a breath. “Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

  “I’ve got a few more. Questions.”

  Drummond says, “I do not know who killed her.” Two steps up and he disappears into the trailer and bangs the door shut.

  “That was one of them,” Lovely says to the door. “Good guess.”

  If Isla was pregnant, she had a collaborator: long-term, onetime, accidental—Lovely seriously doubts this space-age preacher is the man, but every trip has its starting point. He tries to take the emotion out of this, because emotions are just cloud cover, they gather and swirl and obscure. He sidesteps to a window, rises on his toes, and sees Drummond inside, talking on a telephone, agitated. Their eyes meet and Drummond snaps shut the louvered blinds. Lovely steps back, turns: the bicycle girls are still staring at him, suspicious, mistrusting.

  “I liked his sermon,” Lovely tells them. “‘Spawn of the unknowable.’ Pretty much sums up my current condition.”

  The joke either lands flat or eludes comprehension; the girls drift off, a school of fish. Lovely gazes out thoughtfully at the drive-in lot, now almost empty of cars. Then takes his time, saunters slowly back toward the concession stand, kicking up dust, and eventually gets into his Morris.

  The Airstream rocks on soft, shot springs as Drummond moves around in it. Someone in a smock and paper cap comes out of the concession shack and empties a huge bin of caramel corn into a galvanized trash can. Lovely starts his car. The Airstream blinds shuffle and part. In his rearview Lovely can see Drummond’s dark eye peer out between slats from the trailer’s shadow and hold vigil as Lovely’s Morris joins the end of the queue of cars crawling out the gate.

  Then they disappear.

  In a few moments, like a jailbreak, Lovely expects Drummond will exit the Airstream, probably through the rear awning window just to be extra-careful, and he’ll hightail it for his ragtop Ford. He won’t drive to the exit, though, he’ll steer back toward the drive-in’s entrance instead, avoid the line of cars, and wave for the keeper to lift the wooden barrier gate just in time for Drummond’s car to barrel through.

  Just outside the drive-in Church of the Cosmic Evolution, a dusty black Morris will be waiting, idling on a side street. And after Drummond signals and merges into traffic, Lovely eases after him, laying back a few cars, but easily keeping the convertible in his sights.

  He’s spent the past decade learning that as long as he’s in forward motion, whatever’s past is held at bay.

  —

  FORTY-SEVEN MINUTES LATER, Lovely is parked high on a fire road that skirts the rim of the Arroyo Seco, peering down through a security fence on a fat old wooden barn that has been recently converted into what looks like a rocket fuel test facility lab. Drummond’s car is parked outside, and the man himself is arguing angrily with a roguishly fine-looking, broad-shouldered man in an open lab coat.

  Lovely recognizes him: it’s the guy from the Hudson Commodore, who was camped like a vulture outside Isla’s Diablo Bonita apartment courtyard the previous day.

  Drummond is apoplectic. Shouting. Lab Coat Man is cool and indifferent. The arroyo air
currents carry to Lovely only fragments of their dispute:

  “. . . what did you tell them?!”

  Lab Coat says something dismissive, muffled, inaudible. Drummond lunges at him, and they begin to wrestle awkwardly, graceless, like, well, a scientist and a holy man, Lovely muses—Drummond climbing on the handsome man’s back, they stumble and collapse in the dirt.

  Blur of their limbs is punctuated by Drummond’s yelps. Lovely considers the fence. Undoubtedly electric. He shrugs off his coat and throws it across the barbed wire, then goes up and over like somebody who knows what he’s doing.

  The Arroyo Seco is a seasonal floodwater gash through the rock and scrub of the Angeles Crest Forest east and north of Los Angeles proper, stretching from Red Box Saddle near Mount Wilson down through the quaint towns of Altadena and La Cañada Flintridge, to the Devil’s Gate Dam, under Pasadena’s Colorado Street Bridge, where it skirts the Rose Bowl and bisects Brookside, trickles lazy through the already aging bungalow barrios of Highland, Montecito, and Cypress Parks before dying just shy of Echo Park, in the dead concrete channel some still call the Los Angeles River.

  The bridge is popular with suicides and Mickey Cohen enforcers. Paez says Forest Lawn should open a branch office underneath it and offer package deals.

  But above Flintridge, where the land opens up and the new housing developments peter out, a razor-wire-topped chain-link fence and skinny gatehouse mark a vast restricted property belonging to Aerojet Laboratories, part of Ike’s military-industrial complex that has grown like fungus in the moist shadows of the Cold War. Lots of warning signs and some military guards who nevertheless had waved the Reverend Drummond right through when they recognized him. Lovely, who doubted he would get the same friendly reception, had slowed his Morris at a gentle, weedy curve to wait, concealed, and once he saw the Ford disappear through the gate, made a three-point turn and hurried back to find the fire road up above, from which he presently slip-slides down into the argument through the parched hillside brush, ruining his slacks.

  Drummond has a pistol. Something random: not a .38. Possibly a military sidearm the good reverend didn’t turn in after the war. He’s up on his feet, stumbling backward and aiming it at the man in the lab coat like somebody who just figured out which end was the one to hold.

  “You’re not going to shoot me, Atlee,” Lab Coat says, willing it to be true. But he’s sweating, scared.

  “No? No?” Drummond’s hand shakes. “You don’t think so?”

  “No. Put it down.”

  “Fuck you, Lamoureux.”

  Lamoureux. Lovely arrives at the flats, finds his balance, and starts to calculate how much distance he can cross in the time it will take Drummond to find and pull the trigger.

  “That’s hostile.”

  “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.” There’s no fire in Drummond’s threats, though. Just fear of defeat.

  “Put it down, huh?”

  And just like that, Drummond lets the gun drop, limp, to his side.

  Hidden in high weeds on the edge of the barn clearing, Lovely watches the scientist named Lamoureux take the gun, pocket it, and lead Drummond inside his lab. His arm goes over Drummond’s shoulders, as if fondly, murmuring, low.

  Lovely reassesses the two adversaries, if that’s what they are. It’s more complicated than it first looked. Nothing is ever simple.

  As soon as the lab man and ersatz minister are inside the building, Lovely darts out of the brush, moves past the big parked Hudson, and presses his back to the barn wall under an open window.

  The lab is an impressive clutter of expensive equipment: analytical instruments, armatures holding beakers and flasks and distillation stations, ventilated hoods over lab tables, portable blackboards filled with equations, huge combustion chambers, and racks and racks of chemicals. Lamoureux holds court at a workbench, lecturing Drummond, still low, still inaudible. Almost seductive. A treatise; a theorem.

  Drummond has slumped on a stool, staring at the floor, like a scolded schoolboy. Nodding dully. Nodding. Nodding. And eventually, the disquisition done, he’s up, out the door, without another word, licked. The rocket scientist just watches him go. Expressionless.

  In a crouch, Lovely glides low and tight to the building, under the windows and along the barn, to witness Drummond’s Ford fishtail away in a rising retreat of dust and exhaust.

  Inside, Lamoureux stands at a jittering ventilator hood, wearing safety goggles and protective gloves, mixing solutions. He tenses, turns suddenly, looks right out the window where Lovely has come back to watch; Lovely times perfectly his step away from it, out of view, but right into a puddle under a leaking spigot with a noisy sploosh.

  In the time it takes the scientist to cross the lab and peer out the window, Lovely is back behind the Hudson, safely concealed.

  He waits until Lamoureux resumes his work. Then Lovely crawls around the car. He’s got a handful of mud from the spigot bleed, and he packs it over one of the taillights before disappearing back into the high brush to scramble up the slope.

  —

  DUSK WHEN THE ROCKET SCIENTIST locks up the big barn and gets in his car.

  Twilight when deep shadows blue the Aerojet gatehouse guards waving the Hudson through.

  Like squat steel dancers, the Hudson and its stubbornly tailing English coupe snake away from the watershed, headlights sweeping synchronized through copses of live oak and eucalyptus, past winking houselights that ghost the narrow roads of Flintridge, and darkness drops like a scrim.

  The Colorado Street Bridge spans the arroyo from the quiet neighborhoods of Pasadena, streetlight globes stretched like pearls through a stagnant mist. Lovely lets his Morris lag farther back into the gloaming just to be safe, the telltale mud-smudged Hudson taillight making his job easy. He’s still telling himself he’s not trying to solve Isla’s murder, just following the threads of its unraveling in the hope of understanding why she’s gone.

  Down through South Pasadena, the grid streets, tumbledown Victorians and squat Craftsman houses lining them, and downtown Los Angeles glowing brightly to the southwest, a promise that the Hudson can’t keep because it turns off finally into the driveway of a low-slung motel, the King’s Kort, idling untended under the office awning as its driver registers at the desk inside.

  From the curb across the street, Lovely watches the man called Lamoureux park and disappear inside unit 19, on the end. Then Lovely puts his car in gear and drives into an empty dry cleaner’s lot for a better, head-on vantage point.

  He doesn’t have to wait long for the next act.

  A light flicks on behind the curtained window of unit 19. The man’s shadow passes back and forth, settles. The faint cast of a television blues the edges of the curtains.

  Traffic passes, flows, a runnel of lights.

  A taxi pulls into the parking lot and glides to the end.

  Lovely takes his opera glasses from the dashboard of the Morris.

  A young girl dressed to look legal gets out of the cab, pays the driver. Fire-red party dress and matching high-heeled shoes. She seems familiar, but in Los Angeles every pretty young girl is more or less like the next, an endless casting session, as if they were coming off an assembly line somewhere in Middle America, eager, willing, built to specs.

  The man called Lamoureux opens the door. Stripped down to a sleeveless T-shirt and pants, no shoes. Stanley from Streetcar, but Brando only in his dreams. Cigarette holder. Some fragment flutter of Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows blues every reflective surface behind him. The chatter of Philco audio. He takes the girl into his arms and kisses her, hard.

  Lovely lowers his opera glasses and chooses not to watch the assignation disappear inside unit 19.

  —

  FEBRUARY 11. She writes, “Love is something other people are gifted. Me, I got cursed with it, infected, twice laid low.” There is anothe
r blurry photograph of Isla’s torso in MacArthur Park, near the rippling water. A matchbook from the Magic Castle. A fortune cookie fortune, “The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.” A handwritten invitation to a Pasadena dinner party in March, to benefit Hon. Rev. A. R. Drummond and the Church of the Cosmic Evolution.

  —

  HOURS PASS, the motel window is dark. Only half of the neon KING’S KORT sign is working, and the VACANCY sign has a shattered panel. He’s made his way through Isla’s diary once and didn’t understand much of it, it passed in a sad blur; the sound of her voice in his head dulled him, it was all he could hear, her voice, her words, her scattered thoughts reflected in the sundry archived bits and scraps and requiring translation. So much depending on a context he just did not know. So he goes through it again, in the pale cast of a streetlamp, looking for clues, he imagines, or answers, or intent:

  Feb 15. I am the sum of my decisions. I make no apology for them. I have no regrets.

  He doesn’t believe it. But maybe she did. Or wanted to. He finds himself arguing with her, again, even in the cryptic guise of her journal. They had never talked about children when they were married, but normal people didn’t, did they? It went without saying. Couples might talk about not having children, Lovely thinks; that made perfect sense to him. He hears a car door slam and looks up.

  The Hudson’s taillight glows red. The headlights switch on and the car comes tearing hell-bent out of the King’s Kort parking lot, tires complaining, gears chattering, chassis throwing sparks when it bottoms out on a dip.

  Lovely ducks down as bright lights cut across his windshield. The Hudson hurries west. Lovely turns his ignition key and the four-banger rattles to life.

  Glendale.

  Frogtown.

  Silver Lake.

  Los Feliz.

  Skirting Griffith Park to Beachwood, and the black glassy Hollywood reservoir, across Cahuenga Pass, up onto Mulholland Highway, finally, and along the serpentine ridge road that splits the city proper from the San Fernando Valley. Los Angeles rolls out south, civilization almost as far as you can see; valley lights skitter north, gaped, haphazard, just thrown out there to choke out the old orange groves and be swallowed finally by a spooky darkness where it seems the world just ends.