She had her eyes closed, and I went slowly down the stairs and took the guns she’d put there. I said to Phil, “You going to be able to walk?”
He swore at me, the words fairly vile but with no inflection at all. He had his eyes closed. I said, “Good to hear it. Listen, what I want to do is kill you both, but—and I don’t expect you to understand this—there’s a kind of chain of mercy here, and I don’t think I want to break it. Also it would be nice if one of the last things that happens in this fucking awful house is an act of mercy. So instead of killing you, I’m going upstairs for a moment and then I’m coming back down and leaving. One more time, Phil. Do you think you can get over the fence?”
Phil said, “Fuck you.”
“That’s what I thought,” I said. I went upstairs and grabbed the two rag dolls. Then I crossed the hall to Miss Collins’s room and took the photograph from her box of letters. I suppose I hoped her ghost would follow the picture so it wouldn’t be adrift when the house was no more. I tucked into my cargo pants everything but my gun and the flashlight, and went to the head of the stairs. Neither of them seemed to have moved.
“You need to get out of here,” I said to Paulette. “That shot you fired was loud, and he’s losing blood. I should volunteer to help you with him, but mercy goes only so far.” I navigated around them on the stairs as though they were contaminated. When I was most of the way to the front door, a 20,000-volt spike of spite seized me, and I said, “Paulette?”
“What?”
“Miss Daisy really got you, didn’t she? She played you like a harmonica, from the very beginning, and you behaved like a good little puppet. Something to sleep on, if you can sleep. Oh, and don’t forget your nice piece of glass. You’re going to make Uncle Allan so happy”
It was 2:46 a.m., according to the phone, when it rang, and it was going to take me one more minute of mechanical mindless driving, before I’d pull into the edgewood’s driveway, numb, self-loathing, and exhausted. Even though it said CRIME BOSS, I let it go. After four rings it shut down, but then it started up again, so I said something unpleasant and picked it up. Tuffy said, “Mr. Dressler says you don’t have to worry about Allan F.”
“Allan F?” I said. My mind was empty. “Oh, right, Allan F.”
In the background I heard Dressler saying, “Tell him what I said. It was pretty good.”
“Mr. Dressler says to tell you that Allan F. just won a lottery he didn’t know he’d entered.”
“Good,” I said. I blew out a quart of air, hearing it on the earpiece of the phone. “Tell him I said so. Bye.”
“Wait,” Tuffy said. “He—”
Dressler said, “Gimme that phone.” Then he said, “Hello?”
I said, “I’m driving.”
“So stop driving, schmuck. Have you stopped yet?”
“Sure,” I said, still driving. “Thanks for—”
“You sound kinda down. Are you kinda down? ’Cause, listen, I was right. I got a little something. Doc Fleiss called the people who run the imaging center, what we used to call an X-ray, but with nuclear power or something, and they came in and made it work, and I got a little thing there. Doc says don’t worry, but, you know, it’s not his little thing, but he says there’s miracles with that kinda thing these days.”
I had pulled over. “What specific kind of little—”
“You know what kind. Since I told you about it, I figured I should also tell you the doc said it’ll maybe be okay. Maybe. And if it isn’t, it isn’t. But right now, I’m standing up straight and talking to you in my fancy phone, and Allan F., he’s on the other side of the curtain. Listen, come by sometime when you don’t need a favor. I got some more wine I’d like you to tell me about.”
He hung up. I sat there for a minute or two and then put the car back in gear. Only a minute more, and I’d be home.
33
Twenty Minutes
I threw the deadbolt and put the chain on the door. Then I flipped on the hallway light and looked at the broken glass sparkling on the marble floor of the entry hall, at the scattering of dead flowers, the eviscerated couch cushions, the warm-colored fragments of old Native American pottery given to me by a talented pot thief named Hubie Schuze. The water had dried, leaving a ghosty little outline of where it had been, a miniature dry lake bed.
I have no idea how much later it was, but the living room windows were going pale and I was on my knees with a damp cloth, rubbing at the minerals in the water’s outline when my phone rang.
“Where are you?” Ronnie said. “I got up to pee and you weren’t here. It’s getting light out.”
“I’m home,” I said. “But I’m not fit company for anyone.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I’m not company, I’m the one you dance with.”
“It’s been . . .” I said. “It’s been darker than I want to think about.”
“I’ll be there—” she began, but I cut her off.
“No. Really. Do yourself a favor and give me some time to—”
“I will,” she said. “I’ll give you until I get there. Twenty minutes, I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
And she was. She was there before the sun came up.
Afterword
If ever a belief was born at the right time, it was spiritualism. It emerged from a world in which lives were much shorter than they are today and where infant mortality was high. By the time most people were in their mid-twenties, they had mourned loved ones—parents, children, brothers or sisters, friends, spouses, lovers. Death, it seemed to many of them, was in the last room they had left and would be waiting in the next room they entered.
Smallpox and flu repeatedly swept the world. In the last half of the nineteenth century wars and skirmishes broke out like brushfires in Europe, the New World, and Asia, global stress fractures that made new widows and orphans, killed entire families, wiped out towns.
Where had all those people gone? Were they lost forever to the living?
Spiritualism said no. It said it so often and so pervasively that spiritualist societies were formed, books were written, and mediums proliferated, offering brief chats with the departed, for a price. Spirit photography flourished, reuniting in somewhat vague black and white the mourner and the mournee.
And then 1918 brought the greatest cataclysms of all. World War One killed almost eighteen million people, the Spanish Flu epidemic killed another 50 to 100 million, and suddenly, everyone was bereaved. The ranks of the spiritualists expanded exponentially. Mediums became so prevalent and (from one perspective) so flagrant that Scientific American offered a $5,000 prize to the medium whose tricks it could not detect.
The spiritualists and the anti-spiritualists coalesced behind two warring and very well-known men, once good friends, who would seem to have been on the wrong sides. Opposing spiritualism—even helping to evaluate the mediums who competed for the Scientific American prize—was the magician Harry Houdini, then at the apogee of his fame. Championing the mediums and the world of the spiritualists was the medical doctor Arthur Conan Doyle, better known as the creator of literature’s most supremely rational detective, Sherlock Holmes.
The Conan Doyle in this book is accurate in that he was enamored of the American West as a result of attending Buffalo Bill’s touring show; he was fascinated by the New York detective who was one inspiration for the sleuth of Baker Street; and he was a fervent spiritualist. Had he met Mr. Codwallader, he might well have been sufficiently interested in him to encourage a closer acquaintance and even listen to his stories. Truth really is stranger than fiction.
And on a very different note, RIP Du-par’s. The restaurant in which Junior meets Louie, Glinda, and the scrofulous Walter was recently evicted after serving pretty good food at reasonable prices, twenty-four hours a day, for seventy years. The landlords, who were making tens of thousands a month in rent, demanded an inc
rease the restaurant couldn’t meet, thus supporting Louie the Lost’s contention that “The whole fucking world economy has turned into a giant sponge that the only reason it exists is to squeeze all the money there is up to the One Percent. That’s why these rents are going up. It’s like, whatever river you’re on, the water flows into Lake Fatso and stays there.” From the shores of Lake Fatso, the landlords decided to lease the space to a chain makeup store.
Just what LA needs: more makeup.
Lots of great music went into this book: Lucius, Aimee Mann, Alabama Shakes, Anderson East, Alt-J, Aretha Franklin, Arcade Fire, Arctic Monkeys, Ashley Monroe—and that’s mostly just the As. Also, a lot of Bartok and Eric Satie, plus Mozart’s transcendentally beautiful clarinet quartet, Beethoven’s world-refreshing violin concerto in D, and the gorgeous first violin concerto by Bruch.
As always, if you want to suggest some music or otherwise enrich my life, write me at http://www.timothyhallinan.com/contact.php
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