The girls left him behind, even the thought of him, as they took their place in the front pew next to three of Morecambe’s male cousins. Each resembled a raggedy, tanned version of the jeweler. They were his only living family, and they’d come all the way from California. They stood to inherit millions, but by the dazzled expressions on their faces, it was possible they weren’t aware of that yet. Clothilde and Lorelei made a point of embracing each cousin and kissing him on the cheek, as if it were Christmas morning, in full view of all the other mourners. It would be a scandal by the end of the week.
Dellaire believed they were going to fire him just as soon as he made it possible. And it was his job to make it possible. It was his job to finish this business with The Juliet. The lawyer melted into the shadows at the back of the cathedral to grieve and contemplate nature, particularly his own.
* * *
Morecambe’s Jewelry was locked up tight with a large black wreath on the door. The wreath was frosted with snow. Dellaire should have thought of that; of course the store was closed. He rubbed away a bit of frost on the window and peered in, not seeing much. He had no idea why he was there except that he wanted to see The Juliet again. While the world had regarded Morecambe’s creation as some larger, critical statement about art and modernity, Dellaire always assumed the old jeweler’s intentions were more personal than that. The man spoke through his creation, but to whom? Dellaire had an inkling.
He was surprised to see a shadow of movement from the back of the store, and then he saw the guard. And not just any guard, either. It was Lucien Jilka, the man that Dellaire had hired to protect The Juliet. Jilka came forward and started to unlock the shop doors.
“Well I’ll be damned,” said Dellaire.
Jilka grinned humbly. “Still here sir. For a while anyway.” He welcomed the lawyer into the store and offered to take his coat.
Dellaire waived him off. “No, this is an impulsive visit, I shouldn’t stay.”
“I had hoped to attend the services myself.”
“Oh, the crowds were too thick, you wouldn’t have gotten in.”
Jilka nodded. “You’ll want to see her then.”
“Yes, please.”
“The letter is in the case.” Jilka sorted through his keys as he approached The Juliet.
Dellaire followed. “Letter?”
“Mr. Morecambe said you were coming.” Jilka unlocked the back of the case.
Dellaire had no idea what Jilka could mean, but he was upon The Juliet now, and even without illumination it was gruesome and glorious. Impossible to wear, too. When did Morecambe make that decision—at The Hunt? When Sailor perished? Or when he was in his shop, finally alone with the two gleaming halves of The Juliet? Perhaps she spoke to him.
“Jilka, you’ve been sitting with this old girl for a long time. Do you think she’s cursed?”
“Oh sir, we all are.”
“Right. I forgot you’re a Catholic.”
Jilka removed the velvet display tray and set it atop the glass. He then extracted an envelope that had been tucked under it.
Dellaire picked it up. A “D” was written on the front. “What’s this about?” The paper was old and dry.
Jilka said, “Mr. Morecambe put that in the case a couple of years ago. That’s all I know.”
Clearly that wasn’t all the guard knew, but Dellaire wasn’t going to press it. Jilka said, “I’ll give you a bit of privacy then.” The guard retreated to the back rooms.
“I won’t be long,” promised Dellaire, but there was no response from Jilka. Dellaire detected a wisp of winter flowing through the shop as if a window was cracked, and he assumed it was the effect of the snow he’d tracked through. The store was cold enough.
Dellaire opened the letter:
Dear Martin,
Did you know that every piece of jewelry is an apology, and that every apology is really a boast? Just as The Juliet apologizes for the past, a ring will apologize for the future, and both glorify sin itself. We, the girls and I, have often discussed whether you had a hand in their father’s death, and while we believe you did not, we are undecided as to whether that means you are a better man, one way or the other. It is important that you know we have talked about you in this manner.
Take The Juliet, and take her curse as well. The girls never expect to see you again.
Love,
Gregory M.
The lawyer called out for Jilka, and when there was no answer, he placed the brooch inside the envelope along with the letter from Morecambe, and tucked it into the inner breast pocket of his coat.
And that was how The Juliet was lost.
* * *
The lawyer Dellaire was on a train back to Philly before the old jeweler was in the ground. He cleared out his safe in the Bottler’s House and vanished into the margins of history.
This left Lorelei and Clothilde free to become modern women, even if that meant the end of their celebrity. Dellaire doubted they would ever acknowledge the disappearance of the brooch. They would graduate from Smith, get married, have children, and be forgotten in their own lifetimes. However, The Great Question would persist from generation to generation, because gossip is life to art’s death: Where is The Juliet?
ROCK AND ROLL
Chapter 4
March 19, 2005: Death Valley, CA
Nene Glatter was disappointed and tired, barely able to make eye contact with her husband, Baron. They’d come all this way for nothing. They pulled the old blue Subaru into the Alkali so they could grab an early lunch and rethink their options only to have Missy, their four-year-old lab, go bonkers over the pigs. There was no way she was going to stay quiet in the car, and these days, leaving a pet in a vehicle was one moral notch above pedophilia. The truth was, the Glatters loved Missy to a fault. They couldn’t bear to leave her, so they drove all the way to Death Valley from Missouri with her in the back of the car.
They sat at an outside table under an awning, just around the corner from the potbelly pigs. The smell was sharp, even on such a gusty afternoon, so Missy was kept on her leash with one end wrapped around Baron’s sand-chapped ankle.
Strands of Nene’s steel-colored hair worked their way out of the black band at the back of her neck. She kept her hair unfashionably long for a grande dame from St. Louis, but the further west they drove, the more common her style became. She’d seen a lot of tough old bitches like herself out in the desert, every one of them carrying a garden trowel as if they were on a mission to restore Eden to its original state.
The napkins and menus were weighted down with tableware, and Nene and Baron hunched around their food to protect it from dust. The wind also made it permissible not to speak until someone had something to say. Like this:
“This whole damned trip.”
“Don’t.”
By the end of the meal Baron was a mess even though he’d given at least half of his burger to Missy. He was a soft man and a soft touch, and despite being so much younger than Nene, it was his health they had to watch. Men were like pets that way, Nene thought; you were lucky to keep one alive for as long as you needed him. Nene, on the other hand, was a rail. An iron rail with steel hair. No one had to worry about her. She could eat, drink, and smoke what she liked.
Baron removed the leash from his leg and handed it to her. “I’m going to clean up.” While he was inside using the facilities, Nene started feeding her own sandwich to the dog. Missy ended up with a full meal while the Glatters went a little hungry, unsatisfied.
Nene had been to the Valley before, but that was years ago in a different lifetime, and she and Baron tried not to talk about that. Back then she was tall, striking, and glib. Now she was rangy, defeminized, and her sense of humor was limited to cutting remarks at Baron’s expense. As a couple, their natural state was domestic and dreamless, that is until Nene broke her silence about her past and started talking about The Juliet. The facts and the rumors. The clues, like in a kid’s book.
She watched a tiny lizard run across Baron’s judiciously abandoned fries.
“Missy, look!”
Missy didn’t care about the lizard. She wanted those piggies. Eventually Nene left the table and allowed the dog to pull her towards the pen. Jesus, did they reek. Missy strained and whined. Nene looked around to make sure they weren’t being observed, and then she and Missy inched towards the pigs.
So the government burned down The Mystery House. That was too bad for Baron. He was beginning to act as if his life had finally begun. Too bad for Nene, too. Long gone were the boys, the drugs, and the parties, but The Juliet was supposed to endure, like Nene herself.
Now what?
The pigs came right up to the edge of the pen to check out Missy. The desert was weird, and the people who tried to make it normal and hospitable, like the proprietor of the Alkali with his burgers and beer, ended up weird too. With pet pigs. It was the same with people who went to live in Alaska. The rough conditions bred an eccentricity tinged with nobility. The biggest assholes in the world were ex-pats living the cushy life in the Caribbean.
Nene brought Missy close enough to get a couple of licks in. “Come on, girl.” When Missy had cleaned Daphne’s and Velma’s snouts, Nene decided that was enough, and she hauled her back to the table.
Baron wasn’t back yet. Nene was going to say to him, Did you fall in? And then he’d be irritated by her crudeness, and that might give her a chuckle. Or maybe not.
Finally, Baron hustled out of the lobby of the Alkali, breathless and scuffing his sneakers through the gravel. Excited, he formed two trembling fists like a baby.
“That was the house,” he said.
“What?”
“We were there this morning. The Mystery House. Folks inside the restaurant, they were talking about it.”
“That prick,” Nene muttered.
“Go pay our check, Nene. Now. That prick just gave away the deed and drove off into the goddamned sunset.”
“Gave away the deed?”
Baron’s eyes grew wild. “The House, Neens. It’s empty. For now, anyway.”
* * *
Rigg hoped that Willie gal was properly impressed. Giving away a house—that was big. An actor acts, and a great actor improvises fearlessly. He’d almost forgotten that. But what a trio he’d left behind at the Alkali: Willie, who’d spent her life waiting for fate to drop a house on her; Tony, who seemed pretty sure fate didn’t exist; and Rhys Nash, with those sad eyes blinking on either side of that bony nose, like shy stars behind a barren planet. Nash was a thinker and a worrier. As an athlete, he was someone to admire, but what if running was a just a really clever way of doing nothing at all: you go out, you come back, and everything was how you left it. It’s always better to run away than run for nothing.
Hamlet was a thinker and a worrier, too. Hamlet would perish in the desert.
Rigg wished Nash well in his pursuit of Willie. Maybe The Mystery House would keep Willie around just a little bit longer. At the end of the day, the love story was the story, and everything else was a subplot. Regrets were for deathbed scenes.
He jumped back into his Jeep and visualized an imaginary film he titled The Beatty Encounter:
Focus in on a single light on in Carter’s Supply where a sweaty creep (Carter himself) with about eight long hairs combed across his scalp toils over books that can’t be juggled to hide his incompetence. Outside, the Jeep pulls into the lot and Dexon’s tooled leather boot comes down on the gravel, fills the frame. Carter looks up, sees The Cowboy. Carter knows what he’s in for, goes for the baseball bat under the counter…
Rigg headed east, stopping first to gas up before he left the park boundaries. He swiped his card and inserted the nozzle into the tank, gripping the pump handle as if it was his fierce will that brought the fuel up from underground. Rigg always posed, no matter how mundane the task. The world expected it of him. He placed his palm above the driver’s side door and leaned into his task, letting his hat tip down almost to the bridge of his nose.
He’d been looked at all his adult life, except for the past few months. Maybe it was easier to be seen than not. This particular Sunoco was a busy stop, sometimes the first place to rest if you were driving in from Las Vegas and the idea of pausing in Pahrump made the hairs rise up on your neck. He could already hear the whispers. Used to be he’d hear the stormy whir and click of cameras around him, but nowadays fans could take silent snaps with their mobile phones. Best policy was to assume someone was always taking his photograph, like a part of nature.
A woman and her sister approached, asked to pose with him. No problem. Then three teenagers, same thing. My pleasure. He started signing scraps of paper, all kinds of paper. A lot of receipts from the snack shop. Someone tried to get him to sign a dollar, but he wouldn’t do that. Signed a ball cap instead, like he was a major leaguer. Sometimes he thought the question he asked most often in his lifetime was, “How do you spell that?”
A beast of a man as tall as he was wide made his way over to Rigg and asked, “You here to play?” Rigg assumed he meant golf. There was a little golfing man stitched onto the fellow’s polo pocket, and the course at Furnace Creek was famous for its low elevation and high level of difficulty.
“No sir,” said Rigg. He couldn’t help but imagine the man frying in his own fat by the fourth hole.
“You here to make a movie?”
“I’m retired,” Rigg chuckled, but he knew that wasn’t going to be enough. He dropped his voice slightly and said to the golfing man, “I came out here ‘cause I fell in love, but then I got my heart broke. Now I gotta leave. You know…”
He waited for the man to say the line.
“Like you ain’t coming back?”
“That’s it.” Rigg fished around in one of the pockets of his jean jacket and withdrew an old, battered Zippo lighter, silver in color, scratched up. A cheap mess waiting to happen even when it was new. He held it out in his palm as if weighing it. “There’s no fluid in this. I don’t smoke anymore, but back when I did, I took it off Sylvia Krystel’s dresser and forgot to give it back. It’d be worth something if there was any provenance, but there ain’t. Just memories, you know?”
Rigg handed it to him. “Feels good in the pocket. I guess that’s enough.”
The man was tremendously moved by the gift, and the five people who had witnessed the exchange began murmuring excitedly. Everything was theater.
The numbers on the pump escalated. Rigg had changed his life again. He could always go back, tell Willie he was drunk when he signed over the house. She’d understand. Or, he could go to Beatty and punch the lights out of a guy he didn’t know. The choice was obvious, and Rigg was satisfied that he had self-cured his depression. By the time the tank was full he’d spent a fortune, but that was to be expected.
An actor acts.
The characters he played made decisions on the spot, right or wrong, and they kept the plot going. He knew it was always best to go on instinct. That’s how he made it here, after all. That’s how he made his money and got all the things a man needed, at least for a little while. Houses, cars, exotic pets, fine wine. And young wives, too—a fresh one every decade or so.
Rigg hopped back into the Jeep, but just as he turned the key he spotted a punky girl trotting out of the station. She had pink streaks in her hair and was wearing a white apron smeared with candy colors, and sure enough when she got to him she smelled like fudge and cigarettes. She waved a postcard at him.
“What have you got there, babe?”
“Can I get an autograph? I have a pen.” She handed him a purple marker along with the card. On the front of it was an old sepia portrait of a trick rider from a Wild West show.
The picture made Rigg grin. “You know who that is, don’cha? Gabe Grease. He was the guy they’d bring in to do the tricks the right way when Wild Bill or Texas Dick were too drunk to do much more than wave at the kiddos. Nice choic
e.” He uncapped the pen and hovered over the white space on the back of the card, waiting.
“Dawn,” said the girl. “Dawn Turner.”
“Dawn Turner,” he repeated. He wrote more slowly than he had with the other fans. “Turner,” he said again, almost tasting the name. “As in Tony Turner.”
She nodded once. Not proud but not embarrassed either. Tony Turner was Tony Jackpot’s real name. Not many people knew that, or cared to for that matter.
Rigg tapped the side of his nose and returned the signed postcard to the girl. “You hold onto this now. I gotta feeling it’s a lucky card.”
Dawn Turner stepped away with her prize. She read what he’d written and gave him a look that would have been coquettish if it weren’t for all the punk rock sass. She wagged a silver-ringed finger at him. For shame, sir.
He was done here. Even going to the toilet could be an event for Rigg Dexon. As he pulled out onto 95, he passed the golfing man one last time. The guy just stood there, swollen like a proud soldier suppressing a salute so as not to betray a comrade in disguise. Rigg Dexon was a real life hero.
Jackpot’s girl waved in his rearview mirror. A perfect exit, the second one of the day, and the only thing that threw it off was the damned flowers. It’s hard to look hard driving off into fields of posies.
* * *
Carter’s Auto Repair & Supply was as Rigg had imagined, even if Carter himself was not. His duality was clear: from the waist up he was tie-dyed and ponytailed, and from the waist down he was all camo shorts and boots. The half hippie–half commando stood out on the grease-stained lot, legs apart with a rabbit gun over his shoulder. Someone had tipped him off.
Rigg parked alongside the stout, battered building. Carter’s business was cruddy at the seams with piles of parts and tires everywhere. Rigg exited the Jeep slowly to show a modicum of respect for the proprietor and his vermin killer. Sure, he wanted to beat the living crap out of the man, but that didn’t mean spilling blood. Or rather, bloodshed was best when it was a merely a side effect and not the intent.
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