A big white car parked at the curb with the rear doors open. Cops crawling all over the place. A gurney standing behind the car, covered by a white cloth with a strap around its center. The body beneath the cloth was no more than five feet long. It could have been a child.
So the hit had been on the cards whether she got the doohickey or not. They shot her, it had seemed to me, the moment she’d closed the car door, before they even pulled away from the house, knowing that another car was waiting for them a couple of miles up Pico. Pull over, park legally, leave the stolen car with the dead female burglar in the backseat, and drive off into the night. She’d probably sat there, alone in the backseat, until someone on the sidewalk slowed to look at her.
Pretty fucking cold.
Swearing furiously at the gawking rubberneckers and also at myself, I worked my way up to the first right and headed back to Horton House, pulled back by Stinky’s warning that his client would come after me if I didn’t find whatever the hell it was.
As far as I could tell, the house hadn’t been ransacked, discreetly tossed, or burned down. None of the three would have surprised me. It loomed like a right-angled glimpse of infinite dark matter sliced into the night sky, paled by the city’s neon glow bouncing off the low clouds. More than ever, Horton House seemed like a place where the dead slept badly. This time I’d brought a real flashlight and this time I knew for certain that I was looking for something tiny. I also knew I only had about an hour before the night’s cover of darkness was diluted by the daily warmup to sunrise. The first paling in the sky would be deferred for fifteen minutes or so by the clouds, but the sun itself was scheduled to shoulder its way into the new day around 6:40 and it would already be too light for comfort by then. Burglars usually can tell you what time sunrise is, give or take ten minutes.
So I hauled ass.
First, I ripped to pieces the sagging, stinking bed where Miss Daisy had breathed her last. The blankets, when I tore them off, released an eye-stinging cloud of baby powder. Nothing there, nothing under the mattress, nothing in the toilet tank, nothing in any of the jars and bottles of makeup, most of them decades old: brands like Zell, Max Factor, Tangee, Coty. I even poured into the sink two full shakers of the loathsome baby powder and forced myself to plunge my fingers into it. Zero. In a moment of stupidity I tried to get even with the powder by running water into it, but all that did was turn it into a vile-smelling cement in the basin. The water refused to drain.
Nothing in the light fixtures, nothing behind the wall outlets (which popped right off, the screws embedded in clots of rotting plaster), nothing in the pockets of the clothes or the cushions of the room’s only easy chair. Nothing inside the books on the shelves. Nothing in similar places in any of the other upstairs rooms. Nothing in the cradle. Nothing in any of the dolls on the shelf in the sitting room, which slowed me down for about fifteen minutes as I checked them individually. I hurried downstairs to the basement door, crossed myself with a certain amount of embarrassment, and followed the stairs down into the damp, which was almost as hard on my sense of smell as the baby powder. In one damp, filthy, cobwebbed corner I found a bunch of tools that included a wrench, and I took that back up to the second floor and removed the old U-shaped trap beneath the sink in the master bathroom, cursing myself for doing things in the wrong order as the powder poured through and gave me a sneezing fit. Nothing in the trap. Nothing in any of the traps on the second floor.
This was not looking good, and I only had about thirty minutes of real darkness left.
I was certain that whatever it was would have been on the second floor, if only because that’s where Miss Daisy had been confined, but I went into the kitchen anyway and ransacked the cupboards and drawers. In one drawer I found a yellowing booklet that said Names and Numbers in that faux-handwritten Betty Crocker font so popular in the 1950s. Around and between the grease spots and food smears on its pages, I saw entries in both pen and pencil and in several people’s handwriting, and I tucked it in between my belt and my stomach to keep my hands free. Out of sheer desperation I ransacked the servant’s bedroom for three or four depressing and unproductive minutes and then went into the living room.
It was a broad room, much wider than it was deep. The floor was bare and gritty underfoot with all the dirt that sifts through carpets like the one that had been in this room for decades until it was peeled back for sale. From the state of the floor it was apparent that the carpet had stretched almost from wall to wall, leaving a margin of six inches or so on all sides. It had obviously been custom-cut by its installers to make space for the marble hearth, once white, that claimed the space in front of the fireplace in the center of the long wall. It seemed to me the room had an awkward shape for a place in which so much family life is supposed to be transacted and, ideally, shared. The room’s shape would have dictated two or three separate groupings of furniture, one in front of the fireplace and one at some distance on either side. Maybe they had exhausted their family-gathering spirit around the dining room table. Maybe this family wasn’t all that eager for face-to-face time. When I tried to imagine them gathered here, in this forbidding room, what I came up with was something like cocktails at the House of Atreus.
Before checking out the bookshelves, I put the light on the wispy-looking photos on either side of the fireplace, and they were so appropriate to this awful place that I popped a full set of goose bumps.
Years ago, I had a short dalliance, a bit hair-raising and thin on laughs, with a young female plausible who called herself Angela Havilland and specialized in delivering messages from the Beyond, at a hefty mark-up. She had enormous, melting eyes that looked like they could see through walls, a voice softer than a spring breeze, a soothing, empathetic manner, and a heart like a carbon-steel fist. At first I’d thought, or perhaps hoped, that she did no harm, just applied a kind of warm towel to the wounds of severance. While I was kidding myself, she dazzled the fact-collector in me with her encyclopedic knowledge of centuries of attempts, both heartfelt and fraudulent, to bridge the void between life and death. And here were two prime examples of her favorite curiosity, hanging on the walls of Horton House.
They were “spirit photographs,” a particularly nasty phenomenon from the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first two or three decades of the twentieth. Essentially, they were double exposures made for an audience who had no understanding of how photography worked and who ached for evidence that their dead were still at hand. The most common hoax was a photo of a living person and, in the background, hovering weightlessly, a transparent image of some dearly departed. In none of the spirit photographs did the spirits look alarmed or even vaguely surprised at being dead, which was, of course, because they’d been alive when they’d had a camera pointed at them. The scam started in America, where the most notorious spirit image was a picture of Mary Todd Lincoln, careworn and baffled in her widow’s weeds. Behind her floated a spectral, barely recognizable Abe, his hand resting protectively, if immaterially, on her left shoulder. It would be kitsch if it weren’t so callous, if it weren’t for the hopelessly lost expression on the widow’s face.
Spirit photography was practically made for England, where every third stately home boasts at least one resident spook and where photos of the recently deceased, often children—hard to look at today without profound uneasiness—were hung on walls as framed memento mori. It seems ghoulish until we remember how high the child mortality figures were at the time.
So imagine, in a society that made space in their family gathering rooms for photos of the physical remains of the departed, the hunger there must have been for images of their enduring spirit. Perhaps the most famous of the British spirit photos was hanging to the left of the Horton fireplace: the “Brown Lady” of Raynham Hall, caught descending an empty staircase, taken at the height of the Spiritualist movement, in 1936. People who were on hand when the picture was taken saw nothing out of the ordinary,
although the photographer’s assistant supposedly sensed something and told the photographer to make an exposure, which revealed a woman no more solid than a cloud taking the stairs in the conventional manner, although she certainly seemed insubstantial enough to float. The photo, published in a popular magazine, Country Life, caused a sensation. The image on Horton’s wall seemed to be a direct copy from the original negative, which would make it a genuine rarity; as closely as I looked I couldn’t find the dot pattern that betrays the magazine printing of the day.
The other photograph, equally famous, had been taken almost forty years earlier, in 1895. The sister of the second Viscount Lord Combermere, an enthusiastic amateur photographer, created a panoramic image of his extensive library by setting her camera for a one-hour exposure while Lord Combermere was fully occupied several miles away, being buried. When she developed the film, she found that the Viscount’s customary chair was occupied by an extremely transparent individual who could conceivably have been her brother, although to my eyes, it might have been anyone, including a large terrier.
And here it was, hanging to the right of the fireplace, so Horton had the one-two punch of British spirit photography displayed in his living room. Obviously, I thought, he’d brought them back from England otherwise he’d have had American photographs, of which there are thousands—but why have them at all? From what I’d learned about Horton, he didn’t seem to be someone who was afflicted with the spiritual vapors.
The house did its creaking act again. I thought I’d become immune to it, but at that moment, it was enough to make me turn and look behind me. Just for a second, I wondered whether he could have built this wretched house just to house those eminently spooky pictures.
I didn’t really want to handle them, but to be thorough I took them both down: nothing glued to their backs, no hidey-holes in the wall behind them. With a certain easing of tension, I re-hung them and turned my attention to the books. Maybe some carved-out . . .
My, my.
Tired as I was, for a few minutes there, I actually lost track of time.
An absolute mob of first editions: George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins, George Gissing, and other cream-of-the-crop late Victorian and Edwardian writers, although no Dickens. Eliot’s Middlemarch was definitely the real deal, four octavo volumes instead of the standard three-decker, a concession to the book’s length. It was originally serialized in eight smaller volumes while Eliot was still struggling to finish it—talk about pressure—but the first complete and corrected edition was the one staring at me from the shelf. A couple of other Eliots were probably firsts, but Middlemarch was the most valuable.
While I couldn’t see anyone who would own these things having the insensitivity to deface them, I opened ten or twelve volumes at random; no secret hiding places carved through the hearts of the pages.
I exhaled in relief and stood back to get a broader perspective. This was a serious collection. Some of these old pieces of paper were more valuable, probably, than most of the things that had been taken, but as I said, nobody steals books.
Except me. I went into the kitchen and opened the cupboard with the paper shopping bags packed into it and pawed through them until I found one that seemed less brittle than the others. I grabbed a second to be on the safe side and hustled back into the living room.
All the Eliots went into one bag, accompanied by a couple of beautiful Trollope firsts, not the rarest and most expensive of his books, but two I loved, The Way We Live Now and The Eustace Diamonds. Gissing’s Grub Street went into the second bag, and then I hesitated over the Sherlock Holmes books. Conan Doyle, like many nineteenth-century British writers, was published first in magazines. If demand for an author’s stories justified the expense, the tales were collected and re-released as books. Holmes caused a sensation, and the first two collections, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, each contained twelve stories. First editions of those collections have pretty good value, and here they were. I considered them for a moment—I’ve never been a big Holmes fan—but then, I thought, the first guy ever to equip a detective with a magnifying glass deserved the tribute of being stolen.
I happened to know one of the telltales of the first book, The Adventures, not because I’m an expert but because it’s famous among book collectors, if only because it’s so memorable. On page 317, the character named “Miss Violet” is referred to as “Miss Violent.” So I pulled that volume down, approving in passing the very Victorian peacock blue cover, and flipped it open, and there, waiting for me, was Miss Violent.
I was putting it into the second shopping bag when I registered what I’d seen somewhere in the book’s first few pages. I reopened it to the title page, and there I found, in surprisingly dark blue ink, “To Henry Wallace Horton with thanks for the divine spark, Arthur.” Beneath “Arthur,” as though added in some embarrassment at how personal it was to sign a first name only, was the rest of it: “Conan Doyle.” Really. My claim-jumping, jewel-stealing, assault-and-battering American millionaire was on a first-name basis with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? Henry Wallace Horton’s sojourn in merry old England had been more interesting than I’d imagined.
The second Holmes books also went into the second bag.
I also snapped up good editions of a couple of Galsworthy novels, a beautiful first of Collins’s The Moonstone, and four or five others. I stepped back, regarded the shelves for one more covetous moment, and then, lugging the bags, I went out, wincing, into the first tenuous light of the brand new day.
PART TWO
DAY FOR NIGHT
What hath night
to do with sleep?
– John Milton, Paradise Lost
9
Apartment 302
People had their headlights on, which made it relatively easy for me to play loop-the-loop on the narrow neighborhood streets as I kept one eye on the mirror. I didn’t seem to be dragging anyone behind me, but just to be on the safe side I took a long way around—east toward downtown, then north all the way up to Sunset before heading west again and, finally, south on Western to get home. The sun barged its way into the sky behind me and poked its big nose through the clouds as I turned west, and I squinted like a cave fish caught outdoors at high noon.
I was wearier than I’d thought. I’d been up for twenty-four hours, and a lot of them had been high-adrenaline hours, but that was no excuse not to keep an eye out for anything interesting going on a few cars back.
The woman with the orange hair had said she’d “researched” me, but that could have been an empty threat. I wasn’t that easy to research. The only spot on the map I’d visited that I was certain she knew about, other than Mickey D’s, was Horton House, so if she were going to pick up my trail, that’s where she would do it. Of course, if she’d tried, she would have done it the night before last, when I was supposed to be there. And after she and her bushy-haired friend had picked up and shot Lumia (if I was right about who had been in the car), she’d have had no reason to return. That gun had gone off only moments after the car door closed; Lumia couldn’t have had time to say I was in there. Nor, I thought—and the thought struck like a punch in the gut—would she have. Lumia never would have told them about me. She’d even shared her hiding place with me.
I was going to need to process how I felt about what had been done to Lumia, how I had felt about Lumia, what I could do about Lumia.
Back to worrying about myself. I supposed that Orange Hair could have come back, although I hadn’t spotted her either time when I left the house on foot. It was probably within the realm of possibility that there was a whole platoon behind me, expertly changing places to blend in. But if you believe that, then, first, you’re usually overestimating your interest value, and second, if they’re any good, there’s really no way to detect it. I turned left into the maze of streets east of Western Avenue—once, as the na
me suggests, the westernmost edge of built-up downtown LA and even now a border between urban cramping and the big, sprawling lots that surround some of the town’s most beautiful houses. And then a thought, one I’d been pushing away, shouldered its way in. Perhaps the reason she wasn’t following me was that she already knew where I lived. The prudent thing to do would be to get Ronnie out of there.
Not that the place would catch the eye of Orange Hair as she drove by. My address was inside one of three energetically run-down apartment houses that sit at the corner of two streets I’m not about to name, the kind of urban ruins whose good bones hint at an interesting, perhaps even glamorous, past but that look today like all it would take is one good shove to push the whole thing over, dominoes-style. It’s hard even to read their names from the fractional neon tubing that remains in their signs; a recently broken W has transformed The Wedgwood, where I live, into The edgwood. Similar damage had turned The Lenox into the toxic-sounding The nox and The Royal Doulton into The Royal Doult. All three apartment houses had been named after the premier manufacturers of formal china in the 1920s, which is why, in their rather considerable heyday, they were collectively, if informally, referred to as the China apartments.
And there’d been a lot of hey in their heyday. The area just a mile or three south of Griffith Park had been the first great neighborhood for movie money, the earliest Beverly Hills, so to speak. The houses and apartments in the area were home to well-paid but name-beneath-the-title talent: screenwriters, art directors, actors and actresses on the way up and down, mistresses, multiple mistresses, tag teams of mistresses, the occasional mister, and so forth. So, for example, studio royalty—the Cecil B. DeMilles of the world—lived in castles in Griffith Park, while Cedric Gibbons, who designed both the Oscar statuette and MGM’s lushest movies, bunked luxuriously in the Lenox before building one of Los Angeles’s most extraordinary houses in the wilds of Santa Monica.
Nighttown Page 8