Company Town

by Paul Neuhaus

  Henaghan smiled. “You know what? I’m with him. Hollywood’s Shadow is not a dick-tingler.”

  “You and my former editor can both burn in hell.”

  “Noted. Can you give me the Reader’s Digest on Verbic and the Guild?”

  Annabelle nodded. “Yeah, but first I’m gonna need a belt. You want one?”

  Quinn laughed. “This morning I puked up everything I’ve ever eaten in my life. I’m gonna pass.”

  “Good call.” Grindle took down a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from the top of the fridge and poured a healthy pour into a tall glass. When she returned and sat back down, Quinn could smell the whiskey across the distance separating the two women. “This is just off-the-top-of-my-head stuff. Go get the details from the book.”

  “Fair enough.”

  The older woman took a long drag from her glass and gave a long, satisfied “Aaah!” “You know this town’s back story,” she said. “Used to be nothing but orange groves and shitty desert. Then the guys making silent pictures in New York and New Jersey realized they could get out of paying Edison his royalty fees if they came West. The weather and golden light sweetened the deal. That was the nineteen-teens and Reginald Verbic showed up soon after. No one knew where he came from or what his history was, but he became a high muckety-muck nice and quick. Ties to the underworld, ties to the police, ties to the district attorney’s department. People were, from what I can tell, afraid of the guy. He had a… presence no one quite understood. Like when you meet a top-tier actor and you say to yourself, ‘Ah, I get it. This guy’s got something.’ Anyway, Reginald was a complete mystery. He had his house, he had his money and he had his lieutenants running his big ol’ murky operation. In the early twenties he asks for and gets a meeting with the bosses of the old studios. People you know well, they come to this dinner, and apparently, leave as changed men. That night, Verbic forged an alliance with the film community. With his connections and his… fatherly advice, he helped make movies the country’s number one export. That night, he also founded the Guild.”

  Quinn had been leaning forward, rapt. “I shoulda had that drink. What is the Guild? I’m a little hazy on it. I mean I’ve been researching and writing about Hollywood since I was a kid, but I never heard about it until this week. Is it a social club?”

  Annabelle nodded. “It’s a social club. It’s a trade organization. It’s a cabal of powerful men. It’s a coven.”

  “It’s a coven? Like with robes and Stonehenge and shit?”

  “They don’t have any henges I’m aware of, but yeah. It’s a coven. Of Warlocks.”

  “No witches?”

  “Nary a one. That’s kind of their thing. They’re working the whole He-man Woman Haters Club idea. If the Guild wasn’t super-secret, they’d be in trouble for Civil Rights violations.”

  Henaghan sat back. “So, when you say ‘Warlocks’, you mean with magic spells and shit…”

  Grindle shrugged. “Am I telling you I witnessed a full-on bubble-bubble-toil-and-trouble kinda deal? No, I am not. It’s all hearsay, but then again, I never portrayed it as anything but. The Devil’s Garden is strictly Caveat Emptor. But I stand by my research.” She took another swallow of Jack Daniel’s then continued. “You wanna know what else I found creepy about what you told me?”

  Quinn nodded.

  “The Bettie Dream. The running-away-at-night-taxi-stand thing. That sounds like Bettie Lyman.”

  Henaghan’s red eyes widened. “The Silver Lake Doll? That Bettie Lyman?”

  “How many Bettie Lymans do you know?”

  The younger woman knew the story well, of course. It was lore from Hollywood’s dark underbelly. The first—and most grisly—of a series of murders in 1947 and 1948. All women. All mutilated. Never solved.

  “Bettie had the experience you described from your dream. The abusive boyfriend chasing her through downtown. The friendly taxi-stand guy. Three days before she disappeared and a week before her body turned up in that park in Silver Lake.”

  As soon as Annabelle said it, recollection crashed into Quinn at full speed. She hadn’t connected the old story to her dream, but Grindle was right. The incident downtown was part of Silver Lake Doll lore. “What do you think it means?”

  Annabelle flicked her eyes toward the fridge. “Search me. But I’m gonna give you the rest of that bottle to take home.”

  David Olkin must have thought it odd to see his assistant trudging up the steps to her apartment wearing a hangdog expression and carrying half a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He was standing by her front door, waiting for her. “Christ,” he said. “You like like hell.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What happened to your eyes? Who’s suitcase is this?”

  Until he said it, Quinn hadn’t processed that Noah Keller’s luggage was still on her porch. “Puking. Noah Keller’s. In that order.”

  “Yeesh,” Olkin said. “You’re not seeing Keller again, are you?”

  “Oh, fuck no. You introduced us.”

  “And I’ve apologized for it like a thousand times.”

  Henaghan brushed past him and unlocked the door so they could both go through. Olkin was in his running clothes and sweaty. “You didn’t have to get dressed up on my account,” Quinn said.

  “I was in the neighborhood. I wanted to see how you were doing?”

  The girl indicated he should sit down on the couch and he did. “You want some Jack?”

  “I do not.”

  She put the bottle down next to the couch and sat down with her boss. “What was on the tip of that knife?” she said.

  One of Olkin’s eyebrows went up. “Is that an accusation?”

  Quinn shrugged. “I don’t know what it is. All I know is, I got stabbed, I had hallucinations then I threw up until my eyes turned red. Then I blew up my toilet.”

  “You blew up your toilet?”

  “Yeah. Which reminds me…” She got up and went to her bathroom with David in tow. The workmen Annabelle had mentioned replaced the toilet but the scorch marks were still on the wall and floor. “See? This morning this place was full of water and porcelain pebbles.”

  “Huh,” David said. “Come back in here.” Without waiting, he returned to the living room and sat. Quinn followed. “Sit down.” As she sat, she noticed he looked every bit of his fifty-two years. “Did you hear from Darren Taft?” he said.

  That caught her off guard. “Yeah. This morning. He said he needed to talk to me. How do you know Darren Taft?”

  Olkin ignored the question. “He does need to talk to you. I asked him to. Let’s not get into the whys and wherefores. He’ll break it down much better than I can.”

  Henaghan cocked her head and narrowed her bright red eyes. “What was on the tip of that knife?” she repeated.

  He sighed. “A tincture. An accelerant. Your mother told me what she did… the whole time you were growing up. She didn’t have the resources to do it right. I did. Me and my friends.”

  A sudden rush of vertigo overwhelmed Quinn. “What the fuck’re you talking about?” she said.

  “You have a… latent ability. Or you did have a latent ability. I’m afraid your first act as a… special person was detonating your own crapper.” There wasn’t a trace of humor in his tone. He wasn’t toying with her. He was calm; doing his best to exude patience.

  “The fire…”

  “Yes. Look, I’m sorry, Quinn. I shouldn’t have been so secretive. I’m… just a soldier.”

  “The Nuremberg defense,” Henaghan mumbled.

  “Huh?”

  “‘I was just following orders.’”

  “Yes,” he said, never lowering his eyes—which told Quinn that he regretted the strain this would put on their relationship, but he didn’t regret what he had done.

  Henaghan rubbed her temples and shut her eyes. “You… What does my mother have to do with this?”

  “She wasn’t trying to hurt you. All those years. She didn’t have the tools for the job. What she did was
sloppy—not to mention cruel, but she did it with a purpose.”

  “She… cut me up like a fish, never telling me why, just letting me suffer… A little kid… She did that with a purpose? Are you fucking kidding me?” Quinn stood and paced back and forth behind the couch.

  Olkin, maintaining his calm, sat and watched her. “I know this is hard to hear, but you had a… potential inside you you needed to get in touch with. You’re not like other people. You’re one in a thousand million. A freak of nature. A recessive gene that only shows up once an epoch.”

  Henaghan had a sudden flash of insight… Her animosity toward Mia was rooted in the younger girl avoiding abuse at the hands of their mother. Quinn always thought it was because her parents preferred Mia to her. That wasn’t it. It was because Mia didn’t have the “potential”. She stopped and glared at Olkin. “When did my mother tell you this? About my special gift?”

  David sighed. “I’ve known for years. Your parents and mine… They’re not just friends. They have… similar hobbies.” Olkin was from Atlanta. From Quinn’s same neighborhood.

  “Is that the only reason you gave me the job at American Consolidated?” Henaghan asked.

  “No, not the only reason. But it was certainly a part of it,” he said. “I wanted you out here. My superiors wanted you out here.”

  “Your superiors in the Guild?”

  Olkin didn’t even blink. “Yes.”

  Henaghan stopped her pacing. “I want you to go.”

  David stood. “And I don’t blame you. You’re on an indefinite leave of absence. Full pay and full benefits. All I ask is that you not blow off that talk with Darren Taft. He can make a lot of things clear to you. Also, just know that the last thing I want is for you to come to harm. I promise you that.”

  Quinn glared at him. “Good. Got it. Get out.”

  He nodded. “Talk to Taft. Then we can talk again.” He didn’t wait for an answer before opening the front door and heading out. Before he was gone completely, his head reappeared and he said, “Lock the door, please.”

  He closed the door and, not knowing what else to do, she locked the deadbolt and fastened the chain. She couldn’t even process what had just happened. She considered grabbing the bottle of Jack Daniel’s and draining it, but the last thing she needed was more puking. Instead, she went to the fridge and got a Capris Sun. As she poked the tiny straw into the tiny hole, she realized she’d seen something in passing with her peripheral vision. She went back to the living room, juice pouch in hand. Henaghan’s apartment was on the third floor. The window to the right of her computer desk looked out on the top of a tree. Usually the tree was empty. As the sun set behind it, Quinn saw the tree was full of little blue birds with bright red heads. Dozens of them, flitting and hopping in the foliage. Quinn dropped the Capris Sun. She sat down at the adjacent iMac and opened Safari. An image search produced no birds like the ones she saw outside. The closest was the Redheaded Woodpecker. However, that bird had a black and white body, and a sharper beak than the ones in the tree. It was also not only too large, it was confined generally to the eastern and middle portions of the United States.

  She was being Hitchcocked by an all-new species.

  Reaching over, she pulled down the blind in front of the window, making the room darker.

  Putting the bird-swarm out of her mind, Quinn went to bed. It didn’t matter that it was only six P.M. and it was barely dark outside. She’d had more than enough for one day. As she laid in bed, she realized her old friends the phantasms were not in attendance. Because they’re inside of me?, she wondered. A tingling warmth in her palm felt like an answer.

  She was Bettie Lyman again. Not at the taxi stand but in a hotel lobby. The Biltmore in downtown L.A. Her stockings were intact and she wore shoes. At her left hand was a tall man, his mood as dark as his suit. He had wavy dark hair and an odd-shaped mustache. The part of her that was Quinn recognized the man right away. It was Jeremiah Daggett. Was this, at last, definitive proof that Daggett was Lyman’s killer? Maybe so, but it wouldn’t hold up in court. Jeremiah kept his eyes forward and his jaw locked. His face showed purpose—to get Lyman out of the lobby and onto the street. Bettie went with him, though Quinn could tell Lyman knew. She knew she’d never see the hotel again or the streets of downtown. She knew and yet she went. This is January 9th, 1947, Quinn thought, drawing on her memories of the case. The Silver Lake Doll was discovered in a vacant lot the morning of the 15th. Once they were outside and the cold night air hit them, Quinn snapped backward then forward.

  This isn’t the woman in the fluorescent basement, was Quinn’s first thought. This isn’t even a woman. She was inside a man this time—an unconscious man muddling through a heavy cloud of narcotics. Since he was unconscious, his eyes were shut. Since his eyes were shut, Quinn could tell nothing about her surroundings. Was the man about to O.D.? Was that why Quinn was here? No, his vital signs (as observed from the inside) seemed good. He’d ride it out and wake up logy in the morning. So, why the hell was she here? Henaghan grew frustrated, kicking around inside the strange cranium with nothing to do. Could she leave? Her only thought was to will herself out of the man’s head. She began to move. Backward, toward the rear of the fellow’s skull. With some additional force, she pushed through tissue and bone. She couldn’t believe it was working. Her own body-lessness exhilarated her.

  She was in a hotel room, looking down on a very thin man lying on top of the king-sized bed’s comforter. What little light there was came through nearly opaque curtains in front of the window to her left. She knew she wouldn’t be able to move the curtains but could she go through them and hover between the fabric and the glass? That’d have to wait. First she needed a better look at her former host. She flitted around so that she was on his right side. He was lying on his stomach with his head turned in her direction. Dropping down, she looked into his face. Despite his awkward positioning, she recognized him.

  It was David Bowie.

  A very young David Bowie. A question shot through Quinn’s entire incorporeal being—What the fuck? Bowie was wearing a sleeveless crochet shirt, bikini briefs and leg warmers. Not casual attire but rather his stage clothes from the early 1970s. Backing away from the comatose rock god, Quinn reasoned that, if she’d been able to free herself from Bowie’s skull, she should be able to penetrate the door. She was right. With very little effort, she found herself in the hallway. She was disappointed when she realized that it looked like every other hotel hallway she’d ever seen (albeit with outmoded decor). Fine. If the hallway wouldn’t tell the story, she’d persist. As she drifted away from Bowie’s room, she could feel something pulling at her. It was like an invisible elastic band connecting her and the Brit. She knew she could only venture so far before the band snapped her backward again. Fortunately, she had enough slack to get where she wanted to go. After three flights of stairs and one more garnish hallway, she ended up in the hotel lobby and confirmed her suspicion.

  You couldn’t be a proper Hollywood historian without knowing something about the rock world too. Particularly in the ‘60s and ’70s, there was considerable overlap. Quinn had been in this lobby before. She’d looked through this glass facade—but in the twentieth-first century, not the twentieth. Outside, in the fading sunlight, was Sunset Boulevard circa 1973. She was in the International Hyatt House—AKA “The Riot House”—a favorite of bands from the time because of its proximity to Hollywood staples like the Whiskey, the Roxy and the Rainbow Bar & Grill. Quinn was excited. Here was real history—much more appealing history than the Silver Lake Doll. She rushed to the street, forgetting her connection to the unconscious Bowie two floors above.

  The elastic snapped back, pulling her backward through all the ground she’d just covered. Going back through the hotel room door was quicker and more painful than the first time around, but she was soon back in Bowie’s head. She was only around long enough to see that nothing had changed in her absence.

  Quinn snapped forward into re
al consciousness, prompted by the ringing phone on her nightstand. It was morning. Fortunately, she didn’t have to vomit. In fact, apart from lightheadedness and thirst, she felt good. The first time she spoke, no sound came out so she cleared her throat. “Hello?” she said.

  “Darren Taft,” said the voice on the other end. “How about you meet me at the store in an hour?”

  Quinn’s first instinct was to say no. She didn’t like what was happening to her and wanted it to end. But avoiding the problem wouldn’t solve it. At the very least, she’d have to pull out of Taft the information Olkin was reluctant to share. Throwing her legs over the side of her bed, she said. “Okay. Okay, yeah.”

  “Wear something casual,” Taft said.

  Quinn rolled her eyes. “Damn. I was gonna wear a wedding dress and diamond shoes.”

  “Sounds a little garish, but okay.” He hung up without saying goodbye.

  3

  The Threshold

  Quinn parked her car in one of the all-day lots behind Hollywood Boulevard. Taft’s Books was closed on Saturdays so this was an all-around unusual situation. She walked the cross street up to the Boulevard and hooked a right. Sure enough, the “Closed” sign was in place, and she didn’t see anyone inside. She knocked on the glass door and waited. Nothing. She looked up. The sky was a threatening gray, but there would be no rain. Another knock. Then Darren appeared from out of the back room with an irritated wave. Yeah, yeah. I’m coming, I’m coming.

  Taft poked his head out. “What’s the magic word?” he said.

  “That’s not funny,” Henaghan replied.

  “It’s kinda funny.” Running his fingers through his straw-like hair, Taft closed the door behind her and relocked it. “Come with me,’ he said.

  Quinn followed Darren into the stock room and it was as dusty and unpleasant as she expected.

  “What happened to the wedding dress?” Taft said, moving some cardboard boxes off a giant stack and into another part of the room.