I tried to talk and became aware of a cloth over my mouth. At first I thought it might have been a gag, but realized it was there to sop up the blood that was still streaming from my nose.
“I’ll get some ice,” Hannah said, rising. She left the room, locking the door behind her.
Louie took her place, hovering over me.
“How do you feel?” she whispered.
“I’ve never been hit like that before,” I replied.
“I had to make it look good, and I didn’t much care for that ‘taco meat’ crack, either.”
“Jesus, Louie, I had to make it look good, too, didn’t I? I don’t normally say things like that, okay?”
“I’m sorry, baby.”
Part of love is forgiveness, a voice said in my head, and it was Louie’s. “What do I really look like?” I croaked.
“Ever see a photo of J. P. Morgan when he was old?”
“Great.”
I got up off the floor made my woozy way to the sofa, and sat down, still holding the rag to my mouth.
Louie sat down beside me. “So do we try to overcome her when she comes back?” she whispered in my ear.
I shook my head, and it hurt. “They’ll see it and stop us,” I said through the cloth. “We have to talk to her.”
“You know how to play good cop, bad cop?”
Underneath my bloody cloth I was smiling, and that hurt, too. “Trust me, I learned from the best,” I said.
Hannah then returned with a large metal bowl filled with ice and a stack of towels. “You stand over there where I can see you,” she commanded to Louie, while she took away my reddened cloth and examined my nose. “Wow. I’ll try not to hurt you any worse.”
“You’d make a great doctor,” I said.
“I wanted to be a doctor,” she replied, holding, a cold compress to my face. “But I had a drug problem. Most hospitals don’t hire doctors with drug problems. The Temple helped me get off drugs.”
From across the room, Louie said: “So that’s why you’re indentured to them?”
“Not indentured, indebted,” though the expression on her face did not fully support her words.
“Pay no attention to her,” I said to Hannah. “She doesn’t understand the way the Temple works.”
Glancing up at Louie, I read in her expression that she understood I was about to engage in Act II of this painful drama.
“You must be very grateful to them for helping you,” I went on. “So grateful that you work for them in return.”
“I am…grateful…in a way, but…”
“But what, Hannah?”
“This isn’t like a job, exactly. I’m not getting paid, or anything. My room and board is free, but when I said indebted, I meant I really am. I owe the Temple so much money for classes and adjusting and counseling, that I have to stay here.”
“But it’s worth it, isn’t it?” I pressed. “I mean, you get to act like a doctor, even if you really aren’t one.”
“And probably never will be,” Louie said, sauntering closer to us. “A junkie like you.”
“Oh, shut up,” I said. “She’ll be a doctor, someday.”
“Yeah, right.”
“You’re such a downer!”
“I’m a realist!” Louie countered on cue. “And you’re nothing but a chump who falls for every pretty face with a stethoscope around her neck!”
“Don’t listen to her,” I said to Hannah. “I know you’re happy here. Who wouldn’t be?”
Since I was ad lib phishing for information, I wasn’t sure where this line of questioning was going to go. All I knew is that I wasn’t prepared for her reaction, which was to completely break down in tears and fold into a near-fetal position.
“Who, wouldn’t be?” she wailed. “Anyone! I hate it here! I’m stuck here, like a wild animal in a hunter’s trap!”
“I had no idea,” I lied. “And I’m sure Louie’s sorry for what she said. Aren’t you Louie?”
Louie rushed over and took Hannah in her arms, and cradled her like a mother comforting a sobbing child. “I’m so sorry, baby. I had no idea, either,” she said.
Hanna broke away from Louie and stood up. “I can’t be seen doing this. It’s a sign of weakness. They’ll see. They’re watching. They’re always watching.”
In an instant came the sound of the door being unlocked, and a second later Alberto and Dan came back in.
“Whatever are we to do with you two?” Dan asked.
“Let us go?” I said, and after several seconds’ worth of crickets, added: “It was just a thought.”
“Until we have all of the information gleaned by Ms. Sandoval here, you two will continue to enjoy the hospitality of the Temple of Theotologics.”
“What if I told you I really wasn’t able to find anything out?” Louie asked.
Dan smiled. “Frankly, I suspect that is the case, but the only way to know for certain is to locate and review your reporters’ notes. What was it the man once said? Trust, but verify. Anyway, that is not the issue at present. The issue for you, Mr. Beauchamp, is how we keep Ms. Sandoval from harming you again.”
“Put her in a different room,” I offered, hoping Dan would automatically reject the idea because it had come from someone who was “unadjusted.”
“I actually have a better idea,” Dan said, right on cue. “Hannah, prepare two syringes.”
Uh oh.
“What are you going to do?” Louie demanded.
“Don’t worry, you won’t feel a thing. You didn’t when you were brought here.”
“He’s going to keep us drugged, Louie,” I said, “probably until they find your cousin Tina.”
Turning on Hannah, Dan said: “You were given an order, private. What are you waiting for? Get the syringes.”
“Yeah, make tracks,” Alberto said. “Get it? Tracks?”
Then he laughed while Hannah crossed her arms over her chest, as though trying to hide the evidence of intravenous drug use. The gesture came so automatically that it must have been reflex, and the look of pain on her face spoke volumes.
Hannah glanced up at me with an inscrutable expression, and then dashed out of the room.
“I must say, Beauchamp, that you have taken your sock in the nose with equanimity,” Dan was saying.
“I provoked her,” I responded.
“Still, I would think you’d like to settle the score.”
“I don’t hit women,” I said.
“Turn the other cheek, is that it?” Dan sneered. “Or in your case, the other nose? Admirable.”
He then lashed out and backhanded Louie so forcefully she flew across the room before colliding with a chair and going down.
“Hey!” I shouted, charging him, but Alberto stepped in between us and shoved me back. I nearly went down on my butt, too, but I fought to retain my balance. I stared at Dan. “Big man, huh?” I said. “I’ll bet you’ll jack off tonight to the memory of that.”
“And I’ll bet you’ll shut your mouth unless you want to see me give it to her worse.”
My mouth opened and then closed again. I wasn’t about to risk having Louie hurt again. And I had to assume that was the point. I was being broken down.
“Big men,” I said again, impotently. “Big, big men.”
“I’m okay, Dave,” Louie said, getting up and wiping the blood from her mouth. “Don’t make it worse.”
We were at a four-person stand-off, like the bridge game from hell, when Hannah returned, holding two syringes.
“You might need to hold them,” she said.
“Quite right,” Dan agreed. “Alberto, you take the woman.”
Alberto violently dragged Louie over to the sofa and threw her against it, and then pressed his forearm against her throat, while Dan—who was stronger than he look
ed—did the same for me.
I don’t know how much pressure was being applied to Louie’s windpipe, but mine was near collapsing. Alberto and Dan were standing side by side over us as Hannah approached and took the caps off the needles of the syringes and plunged one each into the butts of both Alberto and Dan.
Clearly shocked, they dropped their chokeholds on us and staggered backwards. Hannah leapt back as the two tried to charge her, but they got only halfway across the room before faltering, weaving, swearing, and ultimately falling down on the floor, making futile attempts to rise like the cows in those “give-now-to-stop-this-barbaric-practice” PSAs.
Finally, the two stopped moving.
“Good god, you didn’t poison them, did you?” Louie asked.
“No, but I made the shot super strong,” Hannah said. “They’ll be out for a long time. Now let’s go.”
We followed her through the door and into the hallway. “There are cameras all over this place,” I said. “They’re probably watching us right now. How far can we get?”
“There’s one place where there are no cameras of any kind,” Hannah replied. “We’ll go there for the time being.”
“Where’s that?”
She didn’t answer but forced us to hurry along the corridor, and then stopped in front of the enormous door of the Master Suite. Pulling out a key card and putting it into a very well disguised slot on the door, she pushed it open and hustled us in, closing the door behind us.
A cynical whistle (if whistles can be so characterized) coursed through my head, followed by Bogie’s voice saying: Get a load of this!
Even in the dimness of the suite it was possible to make out its ornate luxury, like a room in a European palace, not that I’d been in many. Or any. The ceilings were high, at least a storey-and-a-half high, and made of paneled wood, from which hung a crystal chandelier.
The walls were covered with a deep-red wallpaper that reminded me of the décor of an old Southern California restaurant chain called Joanne’s Chili Bordello, which had a place in Long Beach for a while.
The enormous stone hearth and fireplace that was cut into one wall was large enough to stage a Shakespearean production in, though if we were really as far below ground level as had been indicated, I had to wonder how they managed the chimney.
“That’s just for show,” Hannah said, seeming to read my mind. “This place has central heat and air.”
Over the fireplace was a oil painting, lit on all sides by track lights. It was no surprise that the subject of the painting was Palmer Hanley as he must have looked in the mid-1960s, his head tilted up slightly and his eyes gazing into the distance, revealing a masterfully-rendered expression of optimism and wisdom. It was more expression than I had ever seen on the man’s face from any of his film appearances.
“What is this place used for?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” Hannah said.
“Well, is this the VIP suite or something? The honeymoon suite? What?”
The woman looked and me like I was an idiot. “It’s the Master’s suite,” she said.
“I get that, but how does one earn a night in the baroque presence of the worst actor in the history of Hollywood?”
From behind me a somewhat squeaky voice said, “By being a rude jerk, that’s how.”
Turning, I saw a man behind me.
It was clear he had once been fairly tall, though now he was stooped and remained upright only through the aid of a silver-headed cane, which he grasped in his gnarled right hand. His hair was white and thin, but still there, for the most part, and his face had more lines than the Thomas Guide page showing downtown.
Even though his eyes showed a liveliness and intelligence that was never revealed on film, he remained recognizable.
“Who are you anyway?” demanded Palmer Hanley.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“What is all this, Hannah?” the old man asked.
“I’m sorry, sir. I thought you’d be sleeping,” she replied.
“Um, Mr. Hanley,” I began, “I think I owe you an apology.”
“Everybody does, why should you be any different? Who did you say you were?”
“My name is Dave Beauchamp. This is my friend Luisa Sandoval, and obviously you know Hannah.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Well…we’ve been kidnapped.”
“Okay, but what happened to your nose?”
“My nose? Oh, right.”
I had managed to get so used to the throbbing ache in my face from Louie’s punch that I’d forgotten I looked like W.C. Fields at five in the morning.
“Yeah, I got hurt in the struggle.”
“You should be more careful,” Hanley said. “You say you owe me an apology?”
“Yes sir. I’m sorry I cast aspersions on your acting. I’m sure you were doing your best.”
“You said your name was Dave?”
“Yes sir, Dave Beauchamp.”
“Well, Dave Beauchamp, you and everyone else in Los Angeles cast aspersions on my acting. I did fine on the stage, you know. I played Happy in Salesman in New York and nobody got sick. But I never had that magical quality that you need in Hollywood, the one that makes the camera love you. Truth is, the camera hated me. It somehow sapped my energy, like a vampire. My face turned into a mask and my voice became a dial tone. Why that was, I’ve no idea.
He appeared lost in thought for a moment, then continued:
“Now you take Marilyn…I knew Marilyn, you know, poor little mouse…on stage she would have been an ice box, a piece of furniture. But on camera, well, the camera loved her. Loved her, more than Romeo loved Juliet. Me, on the other hand? The camera hated me just as much as it loved her. Ah, that’s old history now.”
He made his way to the expensive sofa and fell back on it, almost in slow motion, like a feather falling from a height.
“But as for you, Dave Beauchamp,” he went on, “you’re about the only person I ever met who had the good manners and class to stand up and look me in the eye and apologize for taking dumping garbage on my head, so your apology is accepted. You’re all right.”
He thrust a birch twig arm out at me and I walked over to the sofa to take his hand, which was surprisingly strong, and shake it enthusiastically. At that moment I decided I liked Palmer Hanley, no matter what he had done in the past, and would do whatever I could to help him.
“I’m ninety-four years old, Dave Beauchamp, did you know that?”
“No sir, I didn’t.”
“Well, now you do. Now that that’s settled, what are two you doing in my rooms?”
“At the moment, we’re hiding,” I said.
The old man gave a wheezy laugh. “Well, you’ve sure as hell come to the right place, then. I’ve been hidden away here for thirty years.”
“This is incredible,” Louie said.
“I’m sorry, dear, what was your name again?”
“Louie.”
“Louie…like Louie Calhern? You sure don’t look like Louie Calhern. Well, call it incredible if you want, but I’ve been tucked away here because they don’t want me shooting my mouth off about how they turned my dumb little money-making idea into a criminal’s paradise.”
“Who, exactly, are they, Mr. Hanley?” Louie asked.
“I’m getting tired. I don’t get visitors often, not since…Christ, I don’t even remember.”
He turned and hobbled to an overstuffed sofa and plopped down in the middle of it.
“Honey, could you bring me something to drink?”
“Of course,” Hannah said, leaving the room.
“Now, what were you asking? Oh, right, them. You sure you want to hear all this, Louie?”
She slid onto the sofa next to him. “Positive.”
“Suit yourself.”
Hannah hustled back in with a glass of ice tea, which Hanley took from her.
“You two want any?”
“We’re fine, thanks,” Louie said.
“Bottoms up.”
He took a healthy chug that half-emptied the glass, and then said: “Do either of you know what a Mason is?”
After ridding my head of the voice of Raymond Burr, I said, “You mean the secret society?”
“Well, it’s about as secret as an earthquake, particularly in Hollywood, but yeah, the society. Back in the day all the studio heads were Masons, and so were most of the big guns in town. Hope, Autry, the Duke, DeMille, even old Roy Rogers, all Masons. And Harold Lloyd was Mason in chief. But you’re probably too young to know who Harold Lloyd was.”
“He was right up there with Chaplin and Keaton,” I said.
Hanley’s face registered surprise.
“A young kid who knows Harold Lloyd. Maybe there’s hope for the world yet.”
“What about the Masons?” Louie prompted, ever the reporter.
“Well, as you probably know my career in Hollywood was totally in the jakes by the late fifties. I already told you why. By then I wasn’t even successful enough to get in trouble with HUAC! I could’ve marched up and down Hollywood Boulevard wearing a union suit with hammers and sickles all over it and nobody would’ve cared. You had to be famous to be blacklisted. At least working.”
He finished his tea and handed the glass back to Hanna before continuing.
“Anyway, the point came where I was so broke I was living in a friend’s guest room. He was a Mason, and was working on me to try and get me to join, or apprentice, or however it was you became a member, saying it might lead to something. I guess the idea was that if you put on a robe and skipped around a Pentagram with Walt Disney, he’d put you in one of his movies.”
While I doubted that was what really went on in the Hollywood Masonic Temple, I didn’t call him on it.
“But laying there in that borrowed bed, in that borrowed room, I thought I had a better idea,” Hanley continued. “I’d start my own club and charge people to be in it. But then I got the brainstorm to not just settle for a club, an organization, or even a secret society. You still have to pay taxes on those. So I decided to start a church. I got a guy I’d done a television show with to write up a half-assed bible for it, based on some baloney we concocted, and put out the word that I was holding spiritual cleansing sessions, and the suckers took the bait.”
Eats to Die For! Page 17