Before I ring the bell, I put on a glamour. Something blandly handsome, like a local TV weatherman. Thivierge is in her late eighties. There’s no way she’s going to let a stranger with my face into her secret tree fort. When I’m satisfied with my utterly forgettable face I ring the doorbell.
After a few seconds, an intercom crackles at me.
“Hello? What do you want?”
The voice is young and strong. Definitely not Thivierge’s.
“Ms. Lawton doesn’t know me, but I’d like to speak to her.”
“I’m Ms. Lawton’s personal assistant. If you don’t have an appointment, you need to go away before I call the police.”
That escalated fast. But two can play that game.
“I’ll go away, but tell Ms. Lawton I know her real name is Lisa Thivierge.”
There’s a long pause this time, like maybe the voice is conferring with someone.
The intercom crackles again.
“Ms. Lawton isn’t interested in talking to you. Now, you need to go away.”
“I have a feeling I got Ms. Thivierge’s attention and that she’s listening right now. Isn’t that right, Ms. Thivierge?”
There’s another pause before the voice says, “I’m calling the police.”
With nothing to lose I say, “Forever yours, forever mine.”
A second later, the front door opens.
The assistant is young and blond. At first glance I think she’s heavyset, but I’m wrong. She’s wearing an insulated bodysuit. An arctic breeze drifts out of Thivierge’s front door into the sunny California sky.
The assistant looks me over.
“Are you with TV or the papers?”
“You think I’m a reporter? Is that what this is about?”
“It’s about maintaining Ms. Lawton’s privacy.”
“First, stop with the ‘Ms. Lawton’ stuff. If she really was Lawton, you wouldn’t have opened the door and LAPD would be taking me away in cuffs.”
“If you’re not a reporter, what do you want?”
“I already told you. Forever yours, forever mine. I want to talk to Ms. Thivierge about it.”
“She doesn’t want to talk to you.”
“I don’t want to talk to anybody, but I have a job to do.”
A phone to the left of the door rings. The assistant has to take off a glove to pick it up.
“Yes. I see. All right then.”
She hangs up and steps away from the door.
“Come in,” she says. “Ms. Lawton will see you after all.”
I was right about the air conditioner, at least. The moment I set a foot inside Thivierge’s Halloween castle, I’m freezing.
“I’m Maggie, Ms. Lawton’s personal assistant.”
The look she gives me isn’t quite a sneer. It’s more like she opened a garbage can and found a dead skunk inside. She holds up a hooded parka.
“Put this on.”
I button up my coat against the chill.
“I’m fine.”
Maggie puts the parka back on a wall peg and offers me a heavy scarf. I shake my head. Until I know exactly what’s going on here, I don’t want anything that might be charmed or get in my way in a fight.
“Suit yourself,” Maggie says like I just refused a poison antidote.
“If we’re done with the fashion show, can I see Thivierge now?”
“Ms. Lawton is in the back room by the garden. Follow me.”
The rooms I walk through remind me of Danny Gentry’s place, only a lot richer and a lot classier. Movie posters on the walls. Awards on the bookshelves. Lots of photos with lots of important people. What’s funny, though, is that there’s a light coat of dust on everything, like no one’s set foot in these rooms in a long time.
By the time we get to the back, where Thivierge is waiting, I’m beginning to regret not taking the parka. My hands are going numb and I can see my breath.
Finally, Maggie stops by a room sealed like something you’d see on a space station. The wall around the door is covered floor to ceiling in heavy, silver-backed insulation. The door itself is sealed with a kind of airlock, so that nothing that’s going on out here is going to contaminate what’s going on in the next room.
I touch my cheek and realize I can’t feel my face anymore.
Maggie smiles at that and says, “Please don’t upset her. She’s fragile.”
“I’ll be like cotton-candy kisses.”
Maggie gives me a look and opens the door. An even deeper winter blast smacks me and I can’t help but shudder.
The crap I do to make a living.
I wait by the door and listen as Maggie seals it up behind me.
Across the room is an old woman in a wheelchair who looks like she was carved out of a glacier. A living ice sculpture for some billionaire’s New Year’s party. We stare at each other for over a minute.
Finally, I say, “Thanks for seeing me, Ms. Thivierge.”
“All of a sudden you’re polite. Did your mother teach you to be nice to old ladies?”
“No, ma’am. She taught me how to make her martinis.”
That gets me a brittle laugh. She points to a sofa that’s covered in puffy insulated material. I sink six inches when I sit down.
“So, you found me out and tracked me here,” Thivierge says. “Big deal. If it’s money you want, I don’t have any. Every cent is sunk into this house and the electric bills.”
“I had a feeling they’re pretty hefty.”
“It’d make your balls shrivel up if you saw it.”
“My balls are pretty shriveled anyway.”
Another brittle laugh, followed by a hacking cough. I get up to help her, but she waves me back onto the sofa.
She says, “I can’t stand being touched. Feeling another person’s body heat is agony.”
I’m tired of beating around the bush.
“Tell me, Ms. Thivierge, who cursed you?”
She sits back and eyes me for a minute, so I go on.
“I couldn’t help noticing all the protections you had on your place. Are you afraid of someone? The person who did this to you?”
This time when she laughs it isn’t brittle. It comes from deep in her throat. It’s the most human sound she’s made so far.
She says, “You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you? You’re part of the Hollywood magic set, aren’t you? Well, kiddo, I’ll tell you exactly who cursed me: me.”
It all makes a kind of sense. All of those Hollywood parties with stoned garbage wizards like Kenny; something was bound to go wrong.
“You used to do your own hoodoo at parties? What kind? I’ve heard about play Satanists and that scene. Was that what you were into?”
She gives me a sly smile.
“Don’t make me laugh. That was those West Hollywood hippies into that nonsense. I only did one type of magic.”
“What kind was that?”
She opens her eyes wide.
“Sex magic. I wasn’t looking to go to the next plane of existence or any of that line. I was all about the here and now. Flesh, boy. That’s the only kind of magic I wanted. And I was good at it.”
“What went wrong?”
Thivierge frowns.
“I don’t know. I was running the scene. It was a new ritual, so it was my fault. But for all these years, I’ve had the feeling that someone had it in for me. That they screwed with my tools and potions so I ended up like this.”
She holds her bony arms out wide.
“The White Witch of California.”
“How bad is it?”
“My condition? Anything much above thirty degrees and I’m panting like a dog. Forty is heatstroke. At fifty, I cook like a luau pig.”
“Who would have wanted to do this to you?”
“I don’t know and I’m not sure I want to. You’re the first person who’s tracked me down in all these years. How did you do it?”
“Magic, of course.”
She leans forward in her
chair and speaks conspiratorially.
“Well, if you’ve come here for lessons, you can walk right out the front door.”
“I don’t want lessons. You know why I’m here. Forever yours, forever mine.”
She laces her fingers together nervously before looking at me.
“How do you know about that? Forever Yours, Forever Mine has been buried for decades.”
“To tell you the truth, I don’t know anything about it. That’s why I’m here. And as for how I know about it, I learned about it from Chris Stein’s police file.”
She looks down at the floor, frowning.
“Chris,” she says. “That colossal fuckup.”
“That’s what I hear from people.”
“What are you, a detective?”
“Something like that.”
“Good luck. Half of Hollywood hated him by the end. Including me.”
“Why’s that?”
“The little prick tanked my career. Thirty years I worked in this business and Chris ruined me overnight. Other people too. Like that little girl who was supposed to play his kid sister.”
I lean forward on the sofa.
“Wait. Forever Yours, Forever Mine was a movie?”
“Of course. What kind of detective are you?” She practically shouts it at me.
“It was Stein’s last movie?”
“And mine, as it turned out.”
“What happened?”
Thivierge sighs and steam flows from her frigid lips like there’s a dying dragon down inside her someplace.
“It was a big-budget project. One of my biggest, and sure as shit Chris’s biggest. It was the movie that was finally going to put him up there with Dean and Brando. Then, in a weekend, it went to hell.”
“What happened? Was somebody out to get him?”
She makes a face.
“No one ruined Chris but Chris. He was doing a lot of drugs by then. More than ever. Still going to the play parties in the hills. When the studio got wind of it, they figured that they could paper over it all with money and stories about what a young stud Chris was.”
“Why didn’t it work?”
“You have to remember this all happened a long time ago. Less enlightened times. When it finally got back to the studio that Chris was as interested in other men as the women, well, the executives blew their tops. I managed to talk them down and get the movie back on track. But Chris had plenty of other problems, including some woman. She was no good for him.”
“How do you know?”
“She had her claws into him. The jealous type. Chris couldn’t make a move without clearing it with her. An out-of-town publicity event? He had to clear it with Mommy. A late-night photo shoot? Same thing. It was revolting. They used to send each other notes and call each other at all hours of the night. You can guess how each call ended.”
“Forever yours. Forever mine.”
“Bingo. It got so I was sick of hearing it.”
“But the movie was still going forward?”
“Sure. But then something happened between Chris and Mommy. All he’d say is she wanted something he couldn’t give her. That was the end. He disappeared for days. Went on a real bender. When he resurfaced he promised to be good, but it didn’t last long. That’s when the thing with the girl happened. The one who was supposed to play his kid sister. Did you find that in your files, Mr. Detective?”
“This is the first I’m hearing anything about it.”
She shakes her head. I don’t know if it’s at me or Stein. Both probably.
“The fool gave her cocaine. Fifteen years old and he was letting the kid dip into his stash. She ended up at the Cedars-Sinai ER.”
“And that’s when the studio killed the movie?”
Thivierge shakes her head.
“Killed everything,” Thivierge shouts. “Killed the movie. Killed Stein’s career. The little girl’s career. And mine.”
“No offense, but I know a little bit about Hollywood history. How is it Forever Yours, Forever Mine isn’t up there with the Fatty Arbuckle scandal or Bob Crane’s murder?”
“Because the studio buried it. The script, actors, crew. They used the whole movie budget. Everyone involved was paid off. The papers and TV people. I’m still living on the last of the payout they gave me. When it’s gone, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
I think about it for a minute.
“With all due respect, Ms. Thivierge, even paying off people, you can’t keep something like Forever Yours, Forever Mine a secret. There had to be something more to it.”
She coughs and says, “If you know so much about Hollywood, you tell me.”
I remember some of what I saw a couple of years ago when Samael was still Lucifer and he was in town dabbling in the movie business.
“Studio magicians. They had their own hoodoo team on staff.”
She points a finger at me.
“Finally, you’ve said something smart. They wiped the whole thing out of existence. Like none of it ever happened. But it did, and I knew that if the studio could do that to the story, they could do it to me.”
“So, you ran.”
“Fast too. Then I got cocky and did this to myself.”
Thivierge frowns again, hard enough that I think her pale face might crack.
She says, “What I don’t understand is, with all the studio did to bury the story, how it ended up in a police report.”
“It didn’t. In the report, Forever Yours, Forever Mine wasn’t a movie. It was in a love note. It looked like a woman’s handwriting.”
“It’s always something, isn’t it? All that money. All that magic and they miss a lousy note.”
“Love is a funny magic all its own. Maybe the last piece of the affair didn’t want to disappear.”
She gives me an appraising look.
“I didn’t peg you for a romantic.”
“Mom watched a lot of soap operas while she drank her martinis.”
Thivierge half-smiles at that.
“Samantha,” says Thivierge suddenly. “That was her name. Mommy, I mean.”
“Can you tell me anything more about her?”
Thivierge leans back and looks up, thinking.
“Who remembers these things? She was Samantha something-or-other. A pretty little thing. Probably came from money. She always had it but never seemed to do anything for it.”
“If they were together back then, it would put her somewhere in her sixties now?”
“That sounds about right.”
“Did anything change between them before he died?”
She raises her eyebrows.
“Lordy, did it. The Chris I knew was always into sex, drugs, and parties, but before the end, he added God and the Devil to the list. At first, I thought he’d turned into some kind of Jesus freak. But it was even stranger than that. It was almost a William Blake sort of thing. He saw something, heard something, or snorted something that changed him. I suppose he became a kind of visionary, in his own cheap way.”
Zadkiel. Her again. Now she’s connected to both Chris and Samantha. Was it some kind of love triangle? She wanted him to give up Samantha and when he wouldn’t she killed him?
I rub my hands together and blow on them, trying to get some circulation going. Thivierge looks amused at my discomfort.
I say, “Once Chris came down from on high, was he still hustling?”
“The hustling thing seemed to just fade away. Partly because he wasn’t working hard at it anymore and he’d stopped coming to parties. But mainly it was that his screwy visions scared people. You have to understand, this was around the same time as Jim Jones and other charlatans were hurting people. A lot of us became wary of anyone spewing screwy religious nonsense.” When she smiles, bits of frost crack at the edges of her mouth. “What I’m saying is that he was a lot more fun back when it was just parties and sex magic. Way back when, some of us would get in disguises and go with him and Samantha to that big porn the
ater on Hollywood Boulevard.”
“The Pussycat Theatre?”
“That’s the place. I only went a couple of times, but he and Samantha loved it and would get into all sorts of trouble. That was another reason we knew that Samantha came from money. Whatever trouble they got into, she could always get them out of it. It was only when Chris tried to break things off with her that things went haywire.”
“He lost his meal ticket.”
“That was part of it. The stealing got completely out of hand. The little rat could get in anywhere and would leave with anything he could carry. The wretch made off with some of my jewelry. Say, if you find any emerald earrings during your investigation, let me know. I’ll make it worth your while.”
I think, Who cares?, but I say, “Sure, but let’s get back to Samantha. She didn’t live in Little Cairo, did she?”
“Yes. I think she might have. Chris was always giving her stupid little cat carvings.”
“Bast?”
“You’ll have to ask Chris that.”
“Do you remember what Samantha looked like?”
“Oh hell. Let me think. Pretty. Brunette. A tiny thing. Always smiling, like she was in on a joke that only she knew. What else . . . ?”
Thivierge seems lost in thought for a moment, then throws up her hands.
“This is silly. I have photos from back then. There was always someone taking shots at the parties. Polaroids mostly. No one wanted to take negatives to the corner drugstore, if you know what I mean. I’m sure I have shots of Chris and Samantha.”
“Can you show them to me?”
She gives me a funny look.
“Now you just sound like an old pervert. Are you sure you’re a detective?”
“I’m trying to solve a murder the cops forgot about forty years ago. Isn’t that good enough?”
“All right. Come down off the cross. I tell you what. You keep an eye out for my earrings and I’ll find some photos for you.”
“It’s a deal.”
Thivierge slumps back in her seat.
“I think it’s about time for you to go. I’m getting tired.”
“Just one more thing. Have you ever heard of the Zero Lodge?”
She puts a hand over her face and shakes her head.
“Those cretins. Yes. Chris ran with that crowd. Samantha too. You know, for all of Chris’s excesses, she was the real wild one.”
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