Merle now had cranked a small gasoline motor-generator into action, brought two carbons together at right angles, and eased them apart again with a blinding arc sizzling between them. He made some lens adjustments. On the wall appeared an enlarged photo of downtown L.A., monochromatic and still. Merle rocked the carbons, turned some knobs, took from a wall safe a brilliant red crystal, brought it over to a platinoid housing and carefully slid it into place. “Lorandite—brought out of Macedonia before the Balkan Wars, pure thallium arsenosulfide, purer quality than you can find anymore.” High-vacuum tubes glowed eerily purple. Humming came from two or three sources, not what you’d call in harmony. “ . . . Now watch.” So smoothly Chick missed the moment, the photo came to life. A horse lifted a hoof. A streetcar emerged from inertia. The clothing of city strollers began to flutter in the breeze.
“Ain’t it just the damndest thing you ever saw?” cried “Dick” Counterfly, whose growing familiarity with this rig had only increased his astonishment. One by one over the next half-hour Merle projected other transparencies onto the walls, which pretty soon were covered with scenes from American lives, unquestionably in motion. The combined effect was of a busy population the size of a small city. Inside each frame they were dancing, saloon-fighting, drinking, playing pool, working day jobs, loitering, fucking, strolling, eating in lunchwagons, getting on and off streetcars, dealing pinochle hands, some in black and white, some in color.
In the years since they’d come up with the process, Merle confided, he had begun to understand that he was on a mission to set free the images not just in the photographs he was taking, but in all that came his way, like the prince who with his kiss releases that Sleeping Beauty into wakefulness. One by one, across the land, responsive to his desire, photos trembled, stirred, began to move, at first slowly then accelerating, pedestrians walked away out of the frame, carriages drove along, the horses pulling them shit in the street, by-standers who had their backs turned revealed their faces, streets darkened and gas lamps came on, nights lengthened, stars wheeled, passed, were dissolved in dawn, family gatherings at festive tables were scattered into drunkenness and debris, dignitaries posing for portraits blinked, belched, blew their noses, got up and left the photographer’s studio, eventually along with all the other subjects liberated from these photos resumed their lives, though clearly they had moved beyond the range of the lens, as if all the information needed to depict an indefinite future had been there in the initial “snap,” at some molecular or atomic fineness of scale whose limit, if any, hadn’t yet been reached— “Though you’d think because of the grain-size situation,” Roswell pointed out, “that sooner or later we’d’ve run out of resolution.”
“It might be something wrapped in the nature of Time itself,” Chick speculated.
“Way beyond me,” smiled Roswell, “nothin but old gaffers around here.”
“There’s a fellow on board my ship, Miles Blundell, who often sees into these matters deeper than most. I’d like to tell him about your invention, if you don’t mind.”
“Long as he ain’t connected with the picture business,” said Roswell.
“You’ll be sure and look up Detective Basnight now,” said “Dick” as they were leaving. “Sometimes all he needs is to make a phone call.”
“Shootin somebody’d be better,” suggested Roswell with a chirp in his voice.
Walking out through the fog to the Packard, Chick said to his father, “Good thing I never had a snap of you—those fellows could’ve shown me everything you’ve been up to all these years.”
“Same to you I’m sure, sprout.” As they were about to climb in the auto, “Dick,” as if it had just occurred to him, said, “Maybe you’d like to drive some?”
“It’s embarrassing, but I don’t know how.”
“Gonna be in L.A. for long, guess you’d better learn.” He started the engine. “Teach you if you like. Wouldn’t take too long.”
Back at the airfield, they found Inconvenience in a glare of unaccustomed electrical light frequencies just blossoming into the fragrant desert night. Smells of cooking came from the galley. “Dick” rested his forehead on the steering wheel for a moment. “Guess I should be gettin back to old Treacle.”
“Would you like to come on board and have supper, Dad? It’s red beans, shrimps and rice tonight, bayou style. You could meet Viridian—that’s if she’s talking to me again—and later we could take the ship up, go for a little spin over the Basin . . .”
Surprisingly after their years apart his father’s face was not as unreadable as Chick might have expected. “Well. Thought you’re never gonna ask.”
Lew’s offices in L.A. were in one of those swank new buildings going up along Broadway, with elevators and electricity throughout, looking into a vast interior court below a domed skylight which admitted blues and golds somehow more intense than the desert-bleached ones you usually saw around town. The outer suite was verdant with dwarf palms and Dieffenbachia, and there were three layers of security to be got past, each featuring a deceptively sylphlike receptionist. These girls also worked at the movie studios up in Hollywood as “stunt” performers whenever a scene, in the wisdom of those insuring the picture, might endanger a star actress obliged, say, to dangle from a skyscraper ledge or drive a roadster back and forth across a railroad track in front of a speeding locomotive. Thetis, Shalimar, and Mezzanine, whose stylish flapper-stenographer turnouts concealed bodies designed for the pleasure of intimates as well as the discomfort of strangers, were all crackerjack drivers, licensed gun owners, and surefooted as burros at the Grand Canyon, knowing how to descend a stairway high-heeled into a hotel ballroom without tripping, though sometimes for fun the madcap Mezzanine liked to do just that, staging shrieking thirty-foot descents just to draw the crowd reaction.
Right down the street was the Pacific Electric Building and its new Coles P.E. Buffet, where Lew liked to grab breakfast, when breakfast happened to be in the cards. When it wasn’t, it was usually after a prolonged and hectic night, Lew having taken up what he recognized as serious drinking at an advanced age, around the onset of Prohibition.
Lew had stayed in London as long as he could, but by the time the War was over, Britain, Europe—it seemed all a dream. He could smell those steaks clear across the Atlantic and down that Erie Line, and was dismayed at how long it had taken him to remember that Chicago was home. All that running around. He returned to find that White City Investigations had been bought out by some trust back east and now mostly provided “industrial security,” a term for breaking the heads of those either on strike or maybe just thinking about going out, with the ops now all wearing two-tone brown uniforms and packing Colt Automatics. Nate Privett was retired and living in Lincolnwood. Anybody who wanted to see him had to call up his personal secretary and schedule an appointment.
Not that Lew was doing that bad. There was a lot of money from someplace overseas, some said from gambling interests, others insisted it was gun-running, or some extortion racket—the story always came down to how the storyteller felt about Lew.
But all it took was a couple of years in L.A. to turn him into one more old goat of the region with a deep suntan, who’d seen things, taken part in activities, in the toilets of the wealthy, on the back slopes of the dunes of the beach towns, in the shack cities, in high-desert washes, up Hollywood alleyways full of leafy exotics, that made Chicago seem innocent as a playground. He still had faith in his own rough clairvoyance, his aim and speed with a pistol. He drove down to a range near the beach and practiced a lot. Occasionally, ladies here and there around the L.A. Basin, former movie actresses, real-estate agents, badgirls encountered out on various cases, might, out of policy, not mind spending a half hour with him in bed or more commonly upright in some dimly-lit swimming pool, but no, what his alienist Dr. Ghloix called, long-term relationships.
He knew that other lawfolk of his day, those who worked both sides till they’d forgot which they were on, who’d come to rank,
some of them, among the baddest of the bad, now, their gray mustaches long shaved away, at peace on this western shore, were getting rich off of real-estate deals only slightly more legit than the train robberies they used to depend on for revenue . . . desperados more modest but once lethal as they come were settled in in little chalet-style houses down in the flats around Pico with their cheery, pie-baking brides, hiring on up the hill as script consultants for the shadow-factories relentlessly turning those wild ancient days into harmless packages of flickering entertainment. Lew had never thought he’d see the day, but out here he found himself saying that every day.
“IT SEEMS TO BE some sort of Negro,” announced Thetis. “Again.”
“That disapproval, Miss Pomidor?”
She shrugged. “I don’t mind when it’s bootleggers. They know how to act like gentlemen. But these jazz musicians.”
“If it isn’t in that Erno Rapée movie-theme book, she doesn’t want to know,” Shalimar commented. “Mezzanine, now, she’s always out on dates with these fellows.”
“Once you’ve done black,” Mezzanine crooned to a sort of blues melody, “never go back.”
“Mezzanine Perkins!” the girls practicing shocked gasps.
Chester LeStreet had on a luminous gray worsted suit, shirt and display handkerchief in the same vivid shade of fuchsia, ice-cream-colored Homburg hat, hand-painted necktie. Lew, who had had holes in his socks since the weekend, looked around for his sandals and slipped them on.
Chester beamed at him over dark sunglasses with tortoise-shell frames. “Here’s what it is. I play drums in the house band down at the Vertex Club on South Central, maybe you know it?”
“Sure, Tony Tsangarakis’s joint—the Syncopated Strangler case, couple-three years ago. How’s the Greek?”
“Still ain’t back to normal. So much as tap on a temple block, his teeth starts to chattering along.”
“I heard they finally closed the case.”
“Tight as the gates of San Quentin, but now here’s the thing. Miss Jardine Maraca, who was the canary with the band back then?”
“Roommate of one of the victims, as I recall, left town allegedly in fear of her life.”
Chester nodded. “Never heard from since—up till last night anyway. She calls the club long-distance from some motor court up in Santa Barbara with a crazy story about how that other girl, Encarnación, is still alive, she seen her, knows enough not to go yoo-hooing in public, but now somebody’s after her. Tony remembers you from the go-round before, and wonders if you’d like to look into this.”
“Any personal interest here, Mr. LeStreet, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Just running an errand for the boss.”
“You have a picture of Miss Maraca?”
“Tony gave me this.” The jazz-man reached into a briefcase and handed Lew what seemed to be a publicity shot, with creases and thumbtack holes in it, one of those eight-by-ten glossies you see in lobby displays outside small nightclubs, surrounded by glued-on glitter. Technically she was smiling, but it had that Hollywood rigidity to it that Lew had learned to recognize as fear of somebody else’s power.
“Quite a presentable young woman, Mr. LeStreet.”
The musician took off his sunglasses and pretended to study the picture for a minute. “Guess so. Before my time, of course.”
“Some of your colleagues around there may still remember her. I’ll drop by one of these evenings. First I guess I’ll motor up to Santa Barbara. She say where she was staying?”
“Royal Jacaranda Courts, just off the Coast Highway.”
“Oh yeah, the ol’ R.J. . . . well, thanks, and tell the Greek not to worry.”
IT WAS IN THE DAYS just before the earthquake, and Santa Barbara still reflected a lot less light than it was about to under the stucco-and-beam philosophy of the rebuilding to follow. The place for the moment lay dreaming in a darkness of overwatered vegetation, ivy-shrouded suburban ascents into rat-infested pockets of old California money, a relentlessly unacknowledged past. Because of the right-angled piece of local coastline known as the Rincón, the ocean lay to the south of town instead of west, so you had to rotate ninety degrees from everybody else in Southern California to catch the sunset. This angle, according to Scylla, an astrologer of Lew’s acquaintance, was the worst of all possible aspects, and doomed the town to reenact endlessly the same cycles of greed and betrayal as in the days of the earliest Barbareños.
The Royal Jacaranda was even more of a wreck than Lew remembered it, and under different management, natch.
A kid who must have been on summer vacation sat painstakingly waxing a ten-foot surfboard which took up most of the space in the office.
“Jardine Maraca. You know when she checked out?”
He looked at the register. “It must’ve been before I came on.”
“Have a gander in the room, if you don’t mind.”
“For sure.” Back to his board. Nice piece of redwood.
At the far end of the courtyard was a Mexican with a hose, chatting with one of the housekeepers. Jardine’s room hadn’t been made up yet. The bed had been slept on, but not in. Lew made his way through the place, hoping, and not hoping, for surprises. The small chifferobe held only a couple of hairpins and a price tag from the hat department at Capwell’s. The shelf over the sink in the bathroom had an empty face-cream jar on it. Lew could see nothing out of the ordinary in either the bowl or the tank of the toilet. But he got an idea. He went down to the office again, flipped a bright new fifty-cent piece to the kid, and asked to use the phone. There was a Filipino hop dealer he knew down on lower State who could gaze into the depths of a toilet bowl the way other scryers might a crystal ball or teacup, and learn the damnedest things, most of them useless, but now and then so illuminative of secrets a subject might think he or she had kept perfectly hidden that there was no way this side of the supernatural to explain it. Cops here and in L.A. respected Emilio’s gift enough to allow him discounts on the payoffs required to pursue his career in agricultural goods unmolested.
Emilio picked up on the first ring, but Lew could hardly make him out over the uproar in the background. Lew knew it was probably the missus, but it sounded like an angry mob. Today she and Emilio had been going round and round since about sunrise, and at this point he was more than happy to get out of the house for a while. He showed up at the Royal Jacaranda on an old bicycle, trailed by a nimbus of reefer smoke.
“Thought I’d never have to see this place again.”
“Oh? Let me guess, some dope delivery went sour. . . .”
“No, this is where we stayed on our honeymoon. Cursed, as far as I’m concerned.”
The minute he entered the room, Emilio went all peculiar. “Do me a favor, Lew, take that bedspread and cover up the mirror, O.K.?” He found a towel in the bathroom and did the same with the little mirror over the sink. “They’re like fleas sometimes,” he muttered, getting down on one knee and carefully lifting the lid of the toilet, “like to jump around. This way it stays focused in one place. . . .”
Lew knew better than to hover. He went outside, leaned against the sunlit stucco, and smoked a Fatima and watched the housekeepers work their way down the line of rooms toward him. Sort of keeping an ear out for Emilio, who had looked—hard to say, nervous or something.
He was at Lew’s elbow. “See one of your civilian cigarettes there?”
They stood and smoked and listened to the morning losing its early promise. “Here,” Emilio handing over an L.A. address he’d scribbled in some agitation on a picture postcard of the Royal Jacaranda. “That’s all that kept showing.”
“You’re sure.”
“Overwhelming, caballero. Don’t ask me to go back in and confirm it. And better think twice yourself, Lew.”
“Bad, huh?”
“Bad, big . . . many bodies.” He threw the cigarette butt into a puddle of hose water the sun hadn’t got to yet. “Makes a man appreciate arguing with his old lady, I tell
you that.”
“Thanks, Emilio. Bill me.”
“Tu mamá. I’ll take cash, right now—I want to start forgetting this soon as I can.”
BACK AT THE OFFICE, Lew found Thetis in a dither. “You’ve been getting calls from a crazy person, total panic in his voice, every ten minutes, like he’s using an egg timer. Fact, he’s due to call again,” looking dramatically at her wristwatch, “Just . . . about . . .”
The phone rang. Lew, avuncularly patting Thetis on the shoulder, picked up the receiver.
The panicked voice belonged to Merle Rideout, who lived out at the beach and described himself as an inventor. “Like to come in to your office, but I’m being followed, so any meeting will have to look accidental. You know Sycamore Grove, out on North Figueroa?”
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