Liminal States

by Zack Parsons

“To hell with it.”

  “That’s the spirit,” he said, and we toasted our cans together. “I got some reefer in my bag. You want to smoke it with me?

  I said yes, although I never really indulged in the drug. It felt good and eased my pain. We laughed at nothing, or maybe at just the right things, and passed the marijuana back and forth.

  “What are you doing half-dead on a beach?” asked Max.

  “It’s a long story.”

  “They just keep getting longer for us. And more complicated all the time.”

  I stared at the surf, and we sat in silence for a while. The warmth of the day was accelerating, burning up that gauzy chill, dissipating the aimless pleasure of the reefer. The beer in my hand was warm.

  “I’ve been seeing things,” I said. “The grasshopper, some weird white creature, and Annabelle.”

  “I see two out of three of those,” said Max. “Used to have nightmares about that damn grasshopper all the time. Never came knocking on my door, so I figured it was all in my head. Same with Annabelle. She never came knocking, so I just told myself I dreamed her.”

  “She came knocking, and I answered the door too late,” I said, and I finished the last bitter swallow of beer.

  “Opportunity lost is the worst, man. What you need is to talk to Ian. He lives up in Malibu. Them Hollywood rich folks try to run him off, but he’s grandfathered in. You should see his place. It’s incredible. He has this room he did up like that cave that collapsed. The one with all the crosses on the ceiling.”

  “With the grasshopper idol,” I said.

  “Yeah, exactly,” said Max. “He gets you real high on this herbal stuff the Indians use, and you go on this wild trip through your memory. Beats any movie you’ll see. And he cooked me dinner afterward.”

  “He’s a Warren?”

  “Yeah, Ian Bendwool. You got a pen and paper?”

  I reached for my black book and was reminded Elias had robbed me of it. I took a dry cleaning tag from my pocket instead. Max dictated the address to me. When he was done, I struggled to push myself up. My pants were ruined, and I was missing both shoes and one sock.

  “Thanks for your help,” I said.

  “No problem,” said Max, only when I looked it wasn’t Max at all, just some gray-haired bum smeared with dirt. He wasn’t even sitting on a cooler, just carrying a few warm beers. I limped off the beach, sure I’d wake up again, but I didn’t.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Not a lot scares me, but I was afraid to go home. I had a change of clothes at my office, so I took the bus and shuffled down the sidewalk barefoot, feeling like a bum. People were staring at me, and I couldn’t blame them once I caught sight of myself in a window. My collar was sticking up, jacket torn, bloody bandages wrapped around my head, and one eye swollen halfway shut. I was fortunate Elias had left me my wallet. At least I could prove I wasn’t a bum when a beat cop stopped me outside my building.

  “It’s been a rough couple of days,” I explained.

  The cop was unmoved to pity. “Just get off my street,” he said.

  I stumbled to the lot behind my building and was overjoyed to find my car parked there. I guess the brunos working for Bishop weren’t complete monsters. I peeked in the windows and could see that the glove box and the smuggler’s hold were both open and empty. Didn’t look like the villains had left me my heater.

  I took the back entrance into my building to avoid the doorman’s judgmental gaze. It was dark and quiet down on the lower floor. There was a faint smell of perfume. The pounding in my head receded a little just being out of the sun. I started to put my key in the door, only to discover I’d evidently left the office unlocked. Great. The last time I did that, some kids took my radio. Forced me to bring the old set from home.

  I made do by the rectangle of light coming through the semi-basement window. The office was gloomy, its shadows deep, but that suited my mood just fine. I sighed and sat down in my creaky office chair. There was a bottle of whiskey in my desk drawer. An extra pack of Bravos. There was a forgotten tumbler on my filing cabinet. I blew the dust off, turned it over on my desk, and glugged a measure of amber liquid into it. I drank it in one go and refilled the glass.

  I switched on my desk lamp, instantly surprised to see I was not alone.

  “Hello,” said Holly Webber.

  Trouble never looked as good in red as Holly Webber’s imposter sitting across from me. Her crimson shift dress stuck to her in all the right places. Her skin was smooth and pale, and there was a lot of it showing, but my gaze kept wandering back to her face. It was surrounded by thick locks of red hair that fell to her shoulders and kept up with the dress. She had blushing apple cheeks and the sort of full red lips I dreamed about kissing right before my alarm clock went off.

  Her shoes were off, and her legs were folded neatly beneath her as if she’d been sitting in my one good chair for a long time. She drew a filtered Wildcat from her handbag and hung it from her pursed lips. I leaned across the desk and gave her a light. I could faintly smell the sweetness of her perfume before the smoke got into my nose.

  “My name is Holly Webber,” she said.

  There was the rub. Her name wasn’t Holly Webber. Couldn’t be. And yet here she was. The same big blue eyes that I’d last seen all glassy and staring up at the sky on a cold Dairy Valley morning.

  “I need your help,” she said. “You’re the detective, right?”

  I blinked a few times, still expecting her to disappear like so many other impossible things I’d seen in the last few days.

  “Can you help me or not?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry.” I reached a hand across the desk to her. “Casper Cord.”

  Her hand was warm. Her grip was firm. Real and not a dream at all. She was barely wearing any makeup but was as beautiful as a Hollywood starlet. I held her hand overlong, and she pulled it away with a jerk.

  “I may be able to help you,” I said, my words tangled up by excitement. “I just might. But I need to know more. The case. Sit down, please.”

  She was already sitting.

  “What is the case?” I asked.

  “I have been kidnapped against my will,” she said. “I mean, obviously not at the moment, but I have been kidnapped, and I’m afraid for my life.”

  “That’s a good place to start. Who kidnapped you?”

  “I don’t know who. They broke into my apartment a few days ago.”

  “Where do you work?”

  She took a long drag on her cigarette before answering. “A hamburger restaurant in El Segundo. Mister Swiftee.”

  “Uh-huh. And how did you escape from your captivity?”

  “He was asleep,” she said. “I could hear him snoring in the other room, so I pried the nail out of the window and climbed out.”

  “Where were you?”

  “South somewhere. It was a nice neighborhood.”

  “Sunset Beach?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. How did you figure it out so fast?”

  “I think I know who kidnapped you. Be glad you never saw his face. He might have been working for someone else. I’m still confused about something, though.” I stood up from behind my desk, came around to her side, and leaned against the desktop. “Who are you?”

  “Holly Webber,” she said.

  “Holly Webber is dead. I saw her body lying by the side of the road in Cranford.”

  “No!” she exclaimed, and she covered her mouth with her hand. She couldn’t meet my gaze. “No, no, no. I thought ... I didn’t know what ...”

  “Calm down,” I said, and I reached for her arm to comfort her. She pushed my hand away. Her big blue eyes were damp with tears.

  “You’re lying to me,” she said. “I would have known if Holly died. Someone ... I would have gotten a phone call and ...”

  “I’m not lying to you.” I went on to explain everything about Holly Webber’s death down in Cranford. Maybe in a little too much detail. The girl looked like I’d taken all the
pluck out of her by the time I was finished.

  She sagged in her chair. The taut sexuality of her was deflated. She was struggling to keep from crying.

  “My name is Veronica Lambert,” she finally admitted. “I am Holly’s friend. Her best friend. We were roommates.”

  “I’ve been investigating Holly’s death as a murder. Your name has come up. I ... your resemblance to Holly is uncanny.”

  “Her mom always called us the twins.” She wiped the welling tears away with her thumb. “We’re not related. She lived most of the time with her dad. That’s where I grew up, in Riverside. Funny thing is, Holly was the bottle red. I was the natural, like her mom. Do you have a drink?”

  I cleaned the dust from another tumbler and poured her two fingers of my cheap whiskey.

  “Why are you all dressed up?” I asked.

  “He brought all my stuff with me when he kidnapped me,” she said. “Just a bag and some clothes at first, but the next day he pushed in boxes and boxes of things. Picture albums, old stuffed animals—he must have cleared out our apartment.”

  “He did,” I tipped the bottle at the edge of her glass and refilled it. “I checked it.”

  “Who is this guy?”

  I held up my hand wrapped in bloody, pus-soaked bandages. She recoiled from the sight of it.

  “He did that to me,” I said. “He’s a piece of work. Psychopath who can bend lead pipes.”

  “You know, you look real familiar to me,” she said. “Did you know Holly’s dad? You from Riverside?”

  “No.” I put down my whiskey. “But that brings me to another question. How did you know to come to me? And, more important, why did Holly have my name and telephone number the night she died?”

  “She’s had it since we lived together. Since her mom passed. If anything really bad happened, she was supposed to telephone you, because you could help.”

  “I couldn’t help Holly,” I said. “I can help you.”

  As much as my past dictated I be smitten with the latest in an apparently long line of Annie Groves look-alikes, I still wasn’t convinced Veronica Lambert was on the level with me. I didn’t have an answer as to why Holly had my number, and something wasn’t adding up about how she died. If it was the giant with the melted face, what was he doing kidnapping Veronica and keeping her safe in his Sunset Beach bungalow?

  I told Veronica not to worry, that I’d deal with the guy who’d kidnapped her, but instead I put on a change of clothes, cleaned myself up until the only hurt showing was a little tape on my face, and followed her. Easy to do when a girl is taking the bus everywhere.

  Her first stop was to pick up some dry cleaning from a little Chinese shop. Woo’s. She was in and out in a hurry, which was good, because she’d apparently convinced the bus driver to wait around for her. I could see the passengers shifting impatiently, probably hollering at the driver to get going. Veronica marched out of the cleaner’s with a bagged dress over her shoulder and climbed the stairs back onto the bus.

  The bus delivered Veronica straight to the driveway of a little yellow two-story in Montebello, not far from Jap Town. A poor, earnest neighborhood where the houses were pretty but uncomfortably close together. There were white flowers growing in the planter out in front of the house. A tricycle in the yard. I watched her walk up the cement path to the door. Even when she was alone, she poured herself up the steps and deployed every weapon in her arsenal.

  She rang the bell. The inner door opened, and she had a brief conversation through the dark mesh of a screen door. Someone, a woman, opened it, and two little kids—a boy and a girl—shot out of the darkened house and launched themselves at Veronica. She scooped them up in her arms and showered them with kisses. She disappeared into the house.

  The name on the mailbox was Delroy. I searched the streets for any sign of a tail. Twice in one week was more than enough, so I’d packed Ishii’s trophy Jap gun from my desk into my smuggler’s hold and was ready to pop lead at anyone who came my way. Assuming the war souvenir still worked.

  The trees divided the sun and laid swaying leaf patterns over the parked cars. There were kids playing cowboys and Indians in a front yard down the street. The cowboys were winning, as usual.

  Veronica emerged from the house with an alligator valise in one hand and a white coat draped over her arm. She said a cheery good-bye to someone I couldn’t quite make out in the darkness of the doorway.

  She was a different person. Her hair was combed back and pulled into a ponytail. Her hip-hugging crimson dress was replaced by a bright tangerine day dress with a cinched waist and vivid botanical print. No more cleavage and not much leg. The dress ended below her knee, and she wore open-toed shoes with kitten heels.

  Half her face reclined behind her cat’s-eye sunglasses. She waved a last time at the screen door, and, with her dry cleaning still in hand, she got behind the wheel of the Buick Woody in the driveway. It was rusty and dented, and Veronica looked tiny peering out of the window. She struggled to maneuver it out onto the road. She spent so long at it, I was afraid she would see me.

  She had lunch with a man I didn’t recognize, had a second lunch with another man, an Italian with several goons, and spent the afternoon by herself in a plush hotel in Beverly Hills. When she emerged, it was evening, and it took me a moment to spot her. I caught a glimpse of her hair and the red dress before she disappeared into a waiting taxi cab.

  Her reason for taking a cab instead of her borrowed Buick was soon made apparent. She was headed to the Sugarside boardwalk. Parking was a nightmare because people either took the train or a boat into the marina. I didn’t need to tail her all the way. I remembered what Caroline, Holly’s coworker from the Swiftee Burger, had told me about Veronica. She worked as a dancing girl. And there was only one spot in Sugarside that still had taxi dancers.

  The marina at night reminded me of those romantic visions of Venice you get in films and picture books. Yachts and cigarette boats and bobbing launches mingled in the dark and placid water, merry lights strung from masts. Men and women gathered on the decks and laughed and drank and enjoyed the summer night and the fruits of their wealth. Bonfires on the beaches. Barefoot youths danced around them like cargo cultists, their flesh crimson and wheat in the firelight, bodies lithe and exposed in their polyester swimming suits.

  It was a Friday, and the crowds were out on the boardwalk. Young couples strolled, enjoying sweet ice and caramel corn and fair weather. The game barkers called to men to prove themselves worthy of the girl on their arm. Shoot a Jap! Test your strength against the Iron Anvil! Land a ring and win a dolly for your gal! Fortune tellers and tattoo artists beckoned from closet-sized stalls lit by the garish neon of their signs.

  Illicit vices could be had at the joints in between or under the boardwalk. I’d followed more than my share of cads and hopheads down there with a camera. The coloreds and Chicanos sold bags of grass and little balls of Mexican junk. They worked alongside their best customers, the three-dollar girls and boys with gaunt bodies and dark, desperate eyes. If you strayed too far from the coppers, the beggars would be on you. Black-eyed, lingering, little hungry raccoons of boys and girls.

  The Cabirian Palace was the mountain looming behind the boardwalk. Its domed roof and Deco cornices were the worse for wear. A painted mural of dancers above the entrance was nearly white with sun; its gold and silver embellishments were jewelry hung on ghosts. The noise from the band and the tidal din of the dancers spilled out the doors and along the colonnaded entryway.

  Sailors from the USS Fresno lounged against the plaster pillars, languid with sweat, kerchiefs untied. They reminded me of the Filipino merchant sailors and the fishermen in Saipan, laughing and sleeping in the streets after two weeks on the sea. They were kids, drunk on cuba libres and perfumed necks, hair pomaded into greased ducktails, long nights and laughter prematurely dwindling into puddles of sour booze.

  They wore their dress whites like boys heading to church. To their eyes I was a fossi
l come to life and escaped from the museum. A few of the sailors called out jeers, but I wasn’t afraid. Sticks and stones already broke my bones; a few names weren’t going to kill me.

  Tropical heat inside the Cabirian. Lobby thick with smoke and sweat and the smells of intimate intervals spent in the coatroom. I pushed past the comers and goers. A dark-eyed cigarette girl sold me a pack of Bravos, and I lit one up just to feel at home. There was a long line for the taxi dancers. I was third- or fourth-rate. Worse than the Hollywood princes and the sailors and the desk workers weekending by the beach. I was one of the old, lonely men in their cheap suits, couldn’t keep a girl’s eye, came here because I couldn’t get a date.

  Most of the dance girls were out on the floor, but some few were taking a break, reclining on sofas and chairs—the plain girls with no curves, Latin girls and coloreds, who probably did their best business on the off nights when the club went mixed. There were also a few earners too tired for the current set.

  I watched their feet. Unstrapping and restrapping, wiggling pinched toes, glimpses of long legs and half-heard exchanges of weary commiseration. They didn’t smile. They were working, and this was their break area. The bouncers kept the men away, shoving drunks with beers spilling down their shirts and warning off the hopeless crushes waving their cards and calling out to girls with names that probably didn’t belong to anyone.

  It was Woody Herman and his Third Herd on stage, Woody’s clarinet blaring out over the heaving sea of the dancers. Only the top row of the bandstand was visible at all. The beating drums of three hundred feet shook the floor like an earthquake, and the air moved with them, pulling all attention and all urges toward the incredible din of that packed ballroom.

  There were a lot of beautiful girls at the Cabirian, but Veronica was easy to spot. She was a million-dollar doll in a hundred-dollar joint, her crimped copper-red hair flapping as she was swung around by her dance partner. She was buttoned into the crimson petticoat of a Dior Corolle, bell skirt ending above her knees, breasts nearly spilling out of the corseted top, one scarlet heel kicked up high as her partner dipped her so her hair touched the floor. She was straight out of my dreams, but I’d bet every man in the joint could say the same thing.