Mercedes was pure ice. “Really.” Hector heard wolf-whistles behind him.
“Yeah,” Hector said. “Really. Thanks for the evening, Merc. It was swell.”
Hector drifted over to a couch where John Huston was still “chatting-up” Fanny Brice. “You best clear out,” he whispered in the director’s ear. “I scent raid...Confidential Magazine...morals charges and lawsuits. Stir in a little statutory rape.”
John quickly rose and took Hector’s arm, walking him out of the house and onto the front porch. It was raining and drops dripped from the eaves of the porch. “I guess I miscalculated asking you here, Hector,” John said, his sonorous tone now terse. “I guess I misjudged you, Hector.”
“You wouldn’t be the first tonight.”
John wagged a long finger in his face. “Well, Hector, leave if you must. But don’t do something precipitous. These people aren’t to be trifled with, Hector. They’re not to be crossed. And they have friends who are even less to be trifled with.”
“Why, hell, is that a threat, John?”
The director patted Hector’s cheeks with both hands. “Threats are for people you’re willing to act against. That was advice, Hector. Advice is for those you wish to keep around. The world’s more interesting with you in it. Really: don’t go getting your cock up to fuck with these people.”
“You should take your own advice, John. There’s a minor in there about to be corrupted all over the place.”
“Who? Sarah? That girl’s well beyond corrupting.” The director smiled, hesitating. “You should come south of the border with me, Hector. Bogie and me, we’re going to film Treasure of the Sierra Madre in Mexico later this year. Damn near all of it will be shot on location. Isn’t that something? Come down for the party, yes?”
“Tempting,” Hector said. “The novelist who wrote the book, he’s kind of a mystery man, isn’t he? I hear nobody knows who he really is.”
“German, they say. But that could be a lie,” John said. “Others say he’s Polish. Or maybe just from Chicago. He doesn’t put a premium on self-identity. Hell, he could be a woman. They say he has ten or more identities he uses. Some think he’s the bastard offspring of the Kaiser. Isn’t that marvelous? For my money, well, I think ‘Bruno Traven,’ our mystery novelist, was actually posing as his own agent — as the man I had to cut the deal with for the film rights to the novel. That’s marvelous, too. I hope it’s true. We all strike poses...put on masks. But who reinvents themselves like that?”
Hector watched John’s back as the gangly director went weaving back inside. An old man was standing out on the porch, smoking a pipe. He said, “Hear the game is in session...The Exquisite Corpse. I need to get back inside for that. It’s just that it’s so damned crowded.”
Hector said, “Well, a space just opened up. I’m out of here.”
The old man wrinkled his brow. “It’s still early. You’re already leaving?”
“Yes.” Hector couldn’t place it...something familiar about the old man’s eyes and their color...something about the shape of his ears. Hector shook out a Pall Mall. “You’ve been coming to parties like this one for a long time, Pops?”
The old man smiled. “Hell, I used to throw parties like this one.”
Trailing cigarette smoke, Hector trotted through a light rain back to his Chevrolet. He heard someone else running up behind him, overtaking him. Passing him by, squinting into the rain, Vincent Price said to Hector, “So, the only other prudent man at the party. Like you, when the orgy starts, I flee.”
Hector decided right there to be a Vincent Price fan. He called, “Any films coming up?”
“Two thrillers,” Vincent called back, smiling and blinking in the rain. “The Web and The Long Night.”
Hector gave him a thumbs-up. “I’ll look for ’em.”
Sinatra on the radio: “Everything Happens to Me.” Hector began the long, zigzagging drive down from the Marshall house, following Vincent Price’s coupe from a respectable and safe distance.
Hector was still toying with finding a pay phone and dropping a dime on the surrealists, despite John’s warnings.
Or, he could simply go home and make it an early night. Maybe get some of the sleep Orson was sacrificing.
Hector was enjoying the cleaner life...enjoying a quiet, steady routine with no drama.
He didn’t need to go kicking cabals of flaky painters in the balls.
Or so he told himself.
Hector was halfway to his rented bungalow when he realized whom the old man’s eyes and ears reminded him of. His epiphany almost sent Hector into a skid and back to Laurel Canyon.
The old man’s eyes and ears were just like those of Rachel Harper, and of her sister, Alva Taurino.
“The approval of the public must be avoided above all. The public must be forbidden to enter if confusion is to be avoided.”— André Breton
THE COLLECTOR
30
Hector rolled up alongside his rented bungalow and idled into the carport. He locked up his Chevy and trotted through the harder rain up to his front door and groped in the dark with the keys. Safely inside, Hector shrugged off his trench coat and turned on some lights and fiddled with the radio...dialing past various dramas and comedies and quiz shows until he found some music: Jo Stafford and “Haunted Heart.”
He looked at his typewriter, standing at the ready, half-a-page of the opening of the last chapter of his next novel already there, the last paragraph ending in mid-sentence, as was his custom.
Hector figured he should probably just knuckle down and finish it now. But he was tired and his mind was weighed down — besieged really. He was swarmed by all the memories of Rachel and Alva and the surrealist murders in Key West and Spain that the party and seeing Alva’s paintings — and, perhaps, actually seeing Rachel and Alva’s hated father — had triggered.
He thought he had put it all away...put it behind him. It had been ten years after all, just as Mercedes Marshall, his fetching, slutty host had said. But it was like that poem, The Hound of Heaven: a sense of still being dogged by all of that, ten, no, really twelve years on.
If Rachel was still alive, she’d be perhaps 35...still young enough...ripe. By now she would have found her true voice as a writer or painter. And if they’d gone the distance, Rachel might have saved Hector from some go-nowhere marriages.
And kid sister, Alva? She’d be 33, Hector reckoned — a resonant age for poets, writers, artists and martyrs.
Screw it. He needed to get his head into something else. Hector turned up Jo and “Haunted Heart” a little louder. He sat down at his typewriter and lit a Pall Mall. He pulled out the page of manuscript there and rolled in a fresh sheet of paper. He started banging away at the keys, thinking of the Keys — Key West in the middle 1930s. He was thinking of Rachel, too. He typed:
You know how it is in August on Bone Key when the night doesn’t take off the heat and the wind from the Gulf just pushes around the heavy stale air without cooling anything down.
I was stretched out there naked on top of the sheets until two, unable to sleep, just watching the sheers billow inward with the dead warm rushes of air, my skin beaded with sweat. I could hear the wind chimes hung out back of the widow Jackson’s house, and from far away, I could hear the horns of the ships out on the Gulf. The ships’ horns and the wind chimes were the last sounds I remembered before awakening, squinting in the orange light through the window, torn from sleep by the caws of Nigger Peru’s fighting cocks.
Now there was a woman on the bed next to me, naked and sleeping.
I stroked her cool back. I shook her once.
She wasn’t sleeping.
Christ. He hated it. Hector tore out the sheet of typing paper, crumpled it and threw it at the empty waste paper basket sitting alongside the desk. He rolled back into the typewriter the chapter-in-progress of his current novel. He tried to line the unfinished sentence up with the keys to continue on.
A knock at his door.
“Hey, Cowboy.”
It was against his better instincts, but Hector was suddenly tired of his better instincts. He closed the door enough to slip loose the chain and then swung it wide for Mercedes Marshall.
“You left your own party,” he said.
“That party.”
“Not exciting enough?”
She shrugged. “Not different enough. I think we’re in a rut.”
Hector shook his head. “Jesus. If that kind of thing becomes rote or routine, what’s left you?”
She smiled. “Maybe tall attractive Texans who have their own creative streaks and who know surrealist art,” she said. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we should ask Mr. Marshall, first.”
“Mr. Marshall is otherwise engaged. He’s back at the party, playing host with his good friend, Randolph Scott.”
“Oh.” Hector had heard the rumors for years. The lanky, laconic cowboy hero was light-in-the-loafers. Well, light-in-the-Justin-boots.
Hector said, “Thanks for not bringing your daughter along. I do have some careworn scraps of scruples to which I stubbornly cling.”
“So you say.”
She shrugged off her fox coat. Mercedes was still wearing her slinky black dress. She opened her purse and took out a long cigarette case. Hector fetched his Zippo from the writing table and fired her up. Mercedes looked at the inscription on his lighter as he sat it down on the table. She said, “So it’s true. John said you and Hemingway used to be tight. He said you two fell out when Hem came back from Spain and caught you with his wife. Guess your scruples don’t run in that direction.”
Hector shrugged. “Old John, he’s a motor mouth of the first water, isn’t he? And he’s not got it quite right.”
“Care to elaborate?”
“Ancient history,” Hector said.
“You should make me a drink, Tex.”
“Afraid this place is dry.”
“Good thing I brought provisions then,” Mercedes said. “There’s a bag on the porch step.”
Hector sighed and fetched the bag. He pulled out six bottles of booze: rum, scotch, vodka, Kahlúa, bourbon and tequila. He poured some scotch and a little water into a juice tumbler and handed it to Mercedes. He poured himself a few fingers of tequila. It had been a while. It hit the spot. He said:
“I guess John with the oral dysentery told you how and where to find me.”
“Sure.”
“Bless John again. Here to continue negotiations?”
She smiled. “You amenable?”
“Maybe more than I was earlier this evening.”
“What changed your mind? Maybe us being here alone?”
“Maybe your party. Particularly, a particular guest.”
That got her attention. “Who was that?”
“I hope you’ll tell me.”
“Then let’s talk business,” she said.
Hector sat down on the couch and she sat down next to him, very close. She crossed one leg over the other, and the slit in her dress spread, affording him a generous view of her pale slender thigh.
“I have six Alvas,” Hector said. “Three are early self portraits I won’t ever sell. I selected them for myself from her loft in Spain. The other three, well, they’re a bit more in the direction of your collection. They disturb me sufficiently that I don’t even have them hanging where I can see them. One actually depicts one of those surrealist torture cells you said you heard Alva was executed for having helped to design. I’ll sell you those three paintings, but apart from cash, I want some information.”
“Sounds fair. You really don’t care for Alva’s transgressive paintings, do you?”
“No, I really don’t,” Hector said. “Inaccrochable, like I said. What’s the point? Even you can’t hang them in public — hell, you hide ’em from your sleaze-ball guests.”
“You really are very bourgeois, aren’t you?”
Well that was hurtful. Hector said, “I’m just a lapsed Baptist from Texas — a converted Catholic of convenience and a pulp writer. What do you expect of me?”
She smiled up at him from under long, carefully tended lashes. Her eyes were fogged with drink...her lips full. She had a dimple in her left cheek when she smiled. The daughter hadn’t inherited that trait from her mother. But that seemed to be the only thing that Mercedes hadn’t handed down to daughter Sarah.
Thinking of her daughter, Hector said, “You’re here. Your homo husband is presumably playing Cowboys and Indians with randy Randy Scott. Who’s minding the kid? Don’t you worry for her, even a little, back home in the hands of that misogynistic, woman-exploiting crowd of partying drunks and hopheads?”
The art collector wrinkled her nose...this strange little pout. “That’s the pot calling the kettle black, isn’t it? John said you’re quite the womanizer yourself, Hector. And there’s a misogynistic streak in all womanizers. John said you’re very promiscuous. How’d he put it, in his crude but charming way? Oh, he said, that you ‘get more ass than a toilet seat.’”
“As much talking as John, does, he really needs a new dialogue writer to punch up his repartee,” Hector said.
“Well, anyway, he says you’re a womanizer too, Hector. He says you’re crazy for women. But that’s fine — I like that in a man.”
“But not in a husband.”
“There are the men you marry,” Mercedes said, “and the men you enjoy.”
“And daughter Sarah, too? Alone with those surrealists? Think she’s really enjoying that?”
“At this point, there’s nothing they can teach her.”
“That wasn’t really my question.” Hector shook his head his again. “All right, so forget the plight of Sarah. How much are you willing to pay for my paintings?”
“Two thousand dollars each.”
“No. Three thousand each for the two smaller pieces. If you want the painting of the Spanish torture cell, which is much larger — at least twice the size of the others — that one will be $5,000.”
“Seems too much.”
“It’s a one of a kind. I could make it $6,000, but you’re going to get the dealer’s discount because you’re going to tell me about an old man I met on the porch of your house this evening.”
“Okay. Agreed.” She stuck out a hand.
Hector didn’t accept it. “We’ll shake after you tell me about this guest.”
“What’s your interest in him?”
“I think he might be related to or have known someone I knew.”
“Another alienated friend like Hemingway?”
“More like lost friend.” Hector described the man he’d met on Mercedes’ porch.
Mercedes listened, flirting with her eyes...tracing the outline of his mouth with a long, polished nail as he talked. She said, “That’s Bernard Harper you’ve described.”
Hector tried not to react visibly to that last name. Ironic: Mercedes Marshall’s favorite painter’s father was a friend of hers — at least a social acquaintance — and Mercedes didn’t even seem to know it.
“Bernard’s a surrealist photographer, though middling if you ask me,” Mercedes said. “He’s never really been what you’d call significant. He supports himself as a studio photographer. You know, those publicity shots you see of George Raft in a double breasted suit, posed at some off-kilter angle and smoking...glamour shots of Rita Hayworth. That kind of thing.”
“You have to have his phone number or address to have invited him to your decadent little soiree,” Hector said.
She nodded and picked up her purse. She pulled out a small address book, flipped pages and then said, “Here it is.” She looked around, uncrossed her legs and stood up. She swayed over to his writing desk, selected a sheet of typing paper and a fountain pen. She scribbled down Bernard Harper’s address and phone number. Then sh
e looked at Hector’s typewriter and read what was there. “It’s wonderful. Is this from your next novel?”
“Looks to be,” he said.
Mercedes smiled. A pretty enough smile. He was enticed. “Maybe you’ll make me a character,” she said.
Hector winked and pointed at his own head with his index finger. “Maybe I already have.”
She smiled slyly. “Speaking of movie stars, you’re really like a taller, beefier Bill Holden. God, you’re my type.”
Hector didn’t take that as a compliment.
Still...
She walked back to him, ground out her cigarette, and standing in front of him, slipped off the straps of her slinky black dress. “Let’s work on my character.” Her dress slid to the floor.
Nude, she pulled him up to her.
Hector said, “You think we need to revise your character?”
Mercedes hand strayed between his legs; felt him there. “Maybe not,” she said. “I mean, you don’t feel like I need revising.”
“I have an unfortunate personality.”— Orson Welles
CRAZY HOUSE
31
He punched the car’s horn again: still no response. Hector slipped out of his Chevy, walked around to the passenger side, and opened the door. He took out the cardboard carton with the four coffees resting there on the seat. He locked his car, then banged on the door of the soundstage with his fist.
The door opened following Hector’s third round of pounding. Orson stood squinting in the doorway, one hand held up to shield his bloodshot eyes from the sun. Black rings lay heavy under Orson’s eyes and his wavy dark hair was askew — full of cowlicks, like some overgrown kid.
Toros & Torsos (The Hector Lassiter Series) Page 21