Sad thing is, that is a costume. Sorry. I wasn’t part of the group that faked it. I wasn’t even alive in ’67, no matter what a couple of my more outlandish IDs might say. But I’ve met a few of the hoaxers and I’ve worn the suit, which really is a marvel of engineering. I mean, it was hot in there and smelled like a mile of wet dog ass, but I sort of felt like Bigfoot, even though I was looking through concealed eyeholes in his nipples. No, sorry, the Patterson-Gimlin film does not show Bigfoot.
Oddly enough, it was filmed by Bigfoot. So you see the confusion.
Anyway, I was panicked enough that it took me a moment to realize it wasn’t Vassily following me. In my defense, they have some similarities. Like a lot of severely overweight guys, Vassily smells like a combination of baby powder, cologne, deodorant, and flatulence. And because it’s Vassily, I swear the guy has a touch of a pretty distinctive fish smell to him. I like to think of it as krill.
Bigfoot has a wilder scent. He smells a little like a homeless man’s dreadlocks.
Bigfoot and Vassily are of comparable size. The living fossil is taller, but the Russian is wider.
“Hey, Bob,” Bigfoot said. The voice came from the darkness. I could only see a large shadow moving through the trees with impressive speed and grace.
“Hey,” I said back. “You don’t have a giant Russian with you, by any chance?”
“Nope. Saw one a ways back.”
“Let’s leave him where he is.”
I never stopped. Bigfoot was skittish, even with people he knew fairly well. He hated being looked at and would only talk to me as long as we kept moving. He huffed a few times, and even though I knew him, it was hard not to get nervous at animal breathing that deep and loud.
“I thought you were retired,” he said.
“I am. Or was. I don’t really know. Someone framed Mina for murder, so I’m down here clearing that up.” I paused, picking my way over a dangerous section of ground. “It’s not going well.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Bigfoot said. He always liked Mina, ever since I’d introduced them last May. “Is that what that was all about?” I heard the gesture in his voice, catching only some movement in his big silhouette out of the corner of my eye.
“Kind of. Side effect of being back in town.”
“That was Vassily Zhukovsky, wasn’t it?”
“Sure was.”
“Heard he was in prison.”
“He was.”
“Oh.” Bigfoot considered that tidbit while I tried to figure out if the Russian Mob had any deals concerning sasquatch. “You don’t think he framed Mina, do you?”
“He was the most logical suspect. He hates the both of us and he has the kind of resources to get it done, but he didn’t seem to know Mina was in jail. I think he wants us both dead and decided to take the opportunity.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Bob.”
“Me too.”
“I hope Mina’s all right,” Bigfoot said. “Give her my love, okay?”
“I’ll do that.”
“Keep going the way you’re going. You should get to a game trail in a little while, and you can follow that down to PCH.”
“Thanks, big guy.”
“Good luck, Bob.” And just like that, he Batmanned me. You know, when Commissioner Gordon is mid-sentence, and he turns around and Batman is gone? Same thing. Only instead of a guy basically dressed like night, this was eight feet of stinking shag carpeting. It’s one of the more impressive abilities I’ve seen in the Information Underground, and I’ve seen shit, to quote Winston Zeddemore, that would turn you white.
The tree cover broke, and down below I could see the strip of gray illuminated by the yellow lights of streetlamps and cars winding along the surface. I shivered in the wind coming off the Pacific. I was in short sleeves and it hadn’t been day for a while now. The sky had begun to lighten, turning from the purple of the Los Angeles night into a softer blue. I started to see the ground in front of my feet and followed the game path Bigfoot had mentioned. Rabbits, deer, coyote, and maybe even the occasional mountain lion had built me a nice and relatively safe groove to make my way to flat ground.
I made it to PCH right as the sun was rising over my back on Wednesday. Almost a full day and no real progress made, except for eliminating Vassily as a suspect. Maybe. I didn’t like cutting him right out of hand. The Whale had to be involved in this somehow; the timing of his escape was much too convenient. I sat down by the side of the road and took off my dusty shoes, shaking out the yellow rocks and dirt that had accumulated in them.
I listened to the waves crashing against the rocks below as I pulled out my phone and called a cab. Normally I would have taken the metrorail back to my car, but that didn’t exist on the west side. I’d like to blame the Rosicrucians or the Freemasons for that, but it was actually just some rich assholes who didn’t want the riffraff coming into Beverly Hills. Money talks, as they say, so for the time being I was walking.
The cab picked me up twenty minutes later and I dozed in the backseat on the expensive ride back to my car. It wasn’t restful, but it was a damn sight better than being in a trunk. Once I had been returned to the docks, I paid the nice man who smelled like exotic tobacco and got out of his cab.
I stood by my car for a long moment, trying to blink away my fatigue into the steadily brightening day. I was thinking I didn’t have much in the way of leads when my attention turned back to the Barbary Coast. Things were picking up, the huge cargo cranes unloading long, drab boxes filled with poisonous junk from China. Vinnie Cha said Regina del Monaco wanted to see me. Chances were he already told her I had been at Vassily’s club, and might have mentioned the brouhaha with the Whale. If I was on her radar, I should probably find out what was going on.
Hell, it might even relate.
On the stereo: “Missing the Moon” by the Field Mice.
Normal love song, right? Wrong. Look at the title. Now look at the lyrics. When we landed on the moon, the Little Green Men were there waiting for us. They hovered over the Sea of Tranquility in UFOs the size of towns. Just ask Neil Armstrong. It was a warning. That’s why we have yet to go back. So the song was a taunting message from the Little Green Men to us. Thanks, guys. We needed that.
The Rosicrusophists were based out of a mansion in Westwood. Sometimes I wondered why they weren’t closer to their powerbase, which was Hollywood, considering how many starlets and It Boys were seen with the rose pins on their lapels. Wearing one of those said this person was a spiritual being who was being separated from their money through a combination of brainwashing and guile. It also said that talking to this person was likely to get you a forceful handshake and some lingering eye contact. It was a useful visual shorthand.
The cult had come out of the electric typewriter of one Ubiquitous Lothar Fitz-Chang. He becomes more recognizable by his Writer’s Guild-approved penname of Frank Wood. He wrote a chunk of the third season of Bonanza and created that weird show about anorexic cops, The Extremely Thin Blue Line, after an ill-timed flirtation with the Guardian Servitors of the Anorectic Praxis. Unfortunately for Lothar, the failure of his show and the spate of lawsuits that followed effectively bankrupted him and ensured he’d never work in Hollywood again. It marked the first time in history anyone had ever lost a job by making actresses too thin.
With the bills piling up and his first and third wives (there was some bigamy happening) threatening to divorce him and take him for everything he owned (which at the time was an electric typewriter, a fifth of Wild Turkey, a rathole apartment on the east end of Hollywood, and six bottles of trucker uppers), Wood knew he had to do something. His solution was to down the whiskey and chew through the drugs in an ironic parallel to how his actresses had claimed to lose the weight during the filming of The Extremely Thin Blue Line, and write a tract. It was a self-help book called Meet Your Face, which made about as much sense as the title.
It was a massive hit.
With the money, Wood could fina
lly afford some real drugs, and subsequent writings both expanded the scope of the original book, cleaned up a few of the odder ramblings (including an extended rant against drinking orange juice in the mornings, which, like a lot of his teachings, had something to do with the bowels), and added some more esoteric stuff.
It was around this time that one of the many Rosicrucian splinter groups got their claws into the guy, and his writing started adding elements of their mysticism into it. Before long, they supplanted him and had created the cult that we all know and love, lest their fleet of lawyers sue us back into the Stone Age.
I worked for the Rosicrusophists in many different capacities. They knew me as Jim Dawson, former agent. That’s agent in the actorly sense and not the double sense, which was sort of ironic since, due to my possession of a conscience, I was much closer to the latter. To make certain they’d want me, I included a lot of self-sabotage in the bio. I made sure it looked like I was a guy who was not living up to his potential. Toss in some close calls with success, a couple of later stars who had only succeeded after firing Jim Dawson, and a problem with alcohol, and I was all set. And do you know what? The teachings of Frank Wood were just the thing to put me on the right path. That’s some luck, right?
I had to take some of their classes to prove my bona fides. They were mostly harmless, but I could see how they might grab someone who wasn’t quite so bored. It’s not that I have a lot of willpower; I just have a keen bullshit detector and a lack of desire to improve myself. It’s a potent combination. The real irony was that they did teach me something, just not what they’d wanted to: watching their techniques helped me identify the weak points in the brain, which helped me deceive people on a regular basis.
I pulled up at the gate at the mansion. “Jim Dawson here to see Regina.”
The speaker barely crackled. They had tons of money, the Rosicrusophists, and weren’t shy about spending it.
After a moment, the carefully emotionless voice on the other end of the intercom said, “Miss del Monaco invites you to join her on the veranda.”
The gate opened with nary a creak and I drove up the semicircular flagstone driveway in front of the mansion. It was self-consciously English, with ivy climbing brick walls and cozy rooms stuffed with antiques and pretension.
I left my car out front and headed inside. The house was beautiful, with a few careful modern touches here and there. A flatscreen TV in a living room played the news to an audience of no one. A closed laptop sat on a desk looking out over an impossibly green garden. I could hear people lurking in the house, probably servants, but I didn’t see a single person.
I went through a set of large French doors leading out onto a stone patio. There I saw Regina del Monaco at her wire-framed breakfast table, eating like a bird. Initially, I mostly saw the huge hat and sunglasses she used to keep out of the sun. I swear, it was shit like that that made half the Information Underground think vampires were real.
She smiled when she saw me come outside, but it was a brittle, artificial thing. I didn’t take that personally. Rosicrusophists always came off a little phony. It was the fault of their obsessive need to control social situations: they lost the ability to be spontaneous.
Regina was an attractive woman, and had paid a great deal of other people’s money to stay that way. She employed several personal trainers, a cook, a dietitian, and an army of surgeons. Thirty years ago, she had been legitimately gorgeous, a freckly fresh-faced beauty with the perfect black Irish complexion. Now her skin was a uniform shade of ivory, stretched tight and crepe-thin. Her body had not a single bit of softness, and with her muscles, I was pretty certain she could kick my ass without really trying. Her hair was dyed an unnatural black, lacking the subtle auburn highlights of her youth. Her green eyes, behind the shades, were in delicate pits. Her lips were the only plump things on her.
I stopped at the edge of her table. She was eating egg whites and spinach, with a little melon and blueberry on the side. She was drinking something thick and green. Swamp Thing’s snot, from the smell of it.
She looked me over. “What on earth happened to you?”
I looked pretty bad. Other than my obviously broken nose, I was coated in yellow dust from the Santa Monicas, and abrasions covered my forearms and the heels of my hands. I had a few cuts on my face from brambles and some developing blisters from digging my own grave.
“Things got a little out of hand at the Bieber concert.”
She clucked her tongue. “Mr. Dawson, how do you expect to ever rise in degrees if you persist in lying?”
“Nepotism and intrigue.”
Regina didn’t bother to dignify that. “Would you like some breakfast?”
“Actually, yeah. I’m starving.”
“Finally, the truth.”
No idea where the guy came from. Maybe Regina employed breakfast ninjas, trained to slink from the bougainvillea and provide eggs to hungry people in the mornings.
“Get Mr. Dawson a plate, please.” When she spoke, she always met the other person’s eyes. Though hers were practically invisible through her owl-glasses, I could feel them whenever they settled on me. She had the kind of palpable attention usually reserved for grade-school teachers and creepy uncles.
The man, dressed rather nattily in a stylized Salvation Army uniform—the Rosicrusophists had a thing about the Salvation Army—nodded and left. Regina gestured at the chair, which looked like it was made out of metal vines, across from her. “Please, sit.”
I obeyed, settling down on the cold metal.
“Where have you been, James?” she asked.
“Here and there. You know, working on my spirit self. That kind of thing.”
“You disappear for a full year, and that is what you have to say for yourself?”
“I’m here now.”
“Indeed you are. I heard you were in the city last night. I also heard you had a rather... unfortunate encounter with a rough element.” She was filling every word with distaste, trying to make it sound like anyone in the organization would be sullying their path toward enlightenment by frequenting such a place. But the fact was, she heard from a high-level operator who lived in places like that. And the Rosicrusophists didn’t have a single leg to stand on when it came to worshiping the Almighty Dollar.
“Yeah. Little misunderstanding. He thought I was dating his sister, and I reminded him he doesn’t have one.”
“Your lies should be a little more convincing if you want me to believe them.”
“Small debt. It’s worked out now.”
“Much better.” She speared a blueberry. “I don’t need to remind you that I still hold your contract.”
No, you hold the contract for Jim Dawson, who is a figment of my imagination and still has a Blockbuster card because he has trouble letting go of the past. And you’ll hold that contract for another trillion years, since the terms outlast my existence in corporeal form.
“You do.”
A plate slid in front of me. It was—I hesitate to call it an omelet, but that appeared to be the intent—an egg white omelet shot through with slimy strands of spinach and smaller objects I later determined to be capers. Artfully arranged slices of fruit gave me a splash of color contrasting with the lump of bran muffin on the side.
“Make certain you eat the muffin, James. Your bowels could use the assistance.”
“Good to know.” I wanted to turn my nose up at the whole thing, but the fact was I hadn’t eaten since Dan’s office. I horked down the contents of my plate while Regina pretended not to notice.
“As I said, you disappeared quite suddenly and with no explanation, leaving me holding the proverbial bag.”
I had the feeling she was trying to make me feel guilty. I played along. “I’m really sorry about that, and believe me, it will not happen again.” After this next time, as soon as Mina’s out of jail and I never have to look at the creepy way your skin bunches up under your jaw when you chew.
She smiled, beginni
ng to resemble a really well-preserved iguana. “Fortunately, you have a way to make it up to me.”
“I do?” I tried to sound more hopeful than I felt. Which shouldn’t have been hard, considering that how little hope I was presently feeling could be found only with the assistance of very advanced electron microscopes. Regina was a powerful woman, and turning her down was a bad idea. She needed to be handled, and quickly, so I could get back to my real job without her looking over my shoulder.
Regina raised a bare arm that looked like it was made from white chocolate jerky. I heard the French doors opening and turned my head.
I recognized the woman striding through them, but I couldn’t remember from where. I started running through secret societies in my head. She was in her late twenties and very pretty in a way that only the very deluded would call “Girl Next Door.” Her coloring was all California: golden tan, sunbleached blonde hair tumbling over her shoulders, and big brown eyes I could see from across the room. She was dressed casually but stylishly—I’d hung around with Mina long enough to recognize expensive style when I saw it. It was killing me that I couldn’t place her, and I realized I was staring. Instantly, I turned back to my food, not wanting the woman to mistake my brainfart for romantic interest.
“James, this is Heather Marie Tooms, 16th Degree. Heather, this is James Anthony Dawson, 3rd Degree.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Heather said with a sunny smile that showed off a mouthful of flawless, gleaming white teeth.
And just like that I knew where I knew her from. “Uh, hi! Nice to meet you. I’m a big fan.”
Heather Marie Tooms, written in Papyrus across a dark screen while this same woman, five years younger and playing five years younger than that, was fighting demons with the rest of her all-girl band. Yeah, I knew her, but it was as Summer Frye, the lead singer of the Demon Eyez. Surfer girl cruelly turned into a vampire, she had used her powers to fight all the creatures of darkness. The girl who played the punky drummer had been nominated for an Oscar last year for playing George Clooney’s age-inappropriate love interest, and the Asian keyboardist had her own TV show where she was a computer programmer who solved crimes with the internet or something. I don’t remember Heather Tooms being in anything after the CW cancelled Demon Eyez.
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