Angel’s Gate

by p. g. sturges

  • • •

  Then we waited. Waiting was a bitch. For the plumber, for the man, for anything. To wait with dead Melvin was agony. Seconds crept by like centuries. Then the phone rang. I picked it up. “Yes?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Come on up,” I whispered, buzzing him in. I hung up and we waited some more. Then we heard a soft knock at the door.

  I went over, looked through the observation lens. It was Nazarian. I opened the door a few inches.

  He stepped in. I shut the door behind him. I’d kept the lights low. He was edgy and suspicious. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “I’m Melvin’s dude. I’m the guy who has your check. And your gun. Come on.” I led him into the living room. “Melvin had to go. He left something real special for you. He said it’d make things alright.”

  But his eyes had already played over the dark-headed girl tied to the chair. “Melvin told me about her,” I sniggered. “This bitch kicked your ass?”

  Nazarian saw Melvin’s blood on the floor, added two and two and made five: the girl’s blood. “I hope you didn’t kill her, because I want to do that.” He strode across the room, alive in hate, drawing back his fist and—

  Then the tied-up girl slipped her bonds and threw an utterly vicious straight right. Nazarian fell to his knees and Devi’s left hook hit him high on the cheekbone and conveyed him sideways to the floor. All tumped over as my Southern friends might say.

  Then Nazarian reaped the whirlwind. Hard, furious, cold, professional punches rained down on him. A deluge. Where Noah, in generous comparison, had experienced heavy mist. Nazarian’s eyebrows split right and left and his nose was hammered flat. His teeth were knocked right out of his head. His jaw was a sack of jelly beans.

  She wasn’t human. I had to stop her before she killed him. Finally I dragged her off. USMC, baby.

  One last thing. I pressed the golden gun into Nazarian’s hand, wrapped it in my coat, put a single bullet up into the ceiling. And the invisible gases passed into the tissues of his hand.

  Then a second last thing. I searched Nazarian, found his phone, dialed a number.

  “Peedner.”

  “Murder,” I croaked, “murder. 1350 North Harper Avenue. Apartment 3C.”

  Then Devi and I got the hell out of there.

  SEVENTY-FIVE

  To Confess and Repent

  “Mr. Hogue will see you now,” said the lady.

  I rose from my seat. I’d been reading the weekly edition of Variety. An obituary and remembrance of Hale Montgomery. America’s favorite granddad had perished by misadventure, falling off a whale-watching boat in San Pedro. He’d lived a long and noteworthy life. He’d married four times, divorced four times. Creative differences. He’d had four children, none of them now in the arts. He’d been a Catholic Big Brother, he’d jogged for breast cancer, danced for AIDS, sung for the United Electrical Workers, swum for undocumented immigrants. He would be sorely, sorely missed. Goodbye and fare thee well, Stash Rockland.

  The lady was holding the door open to Hogue’s office. “Will I need a guide?” I asked her.

  “A guide?”

  “The man’s got a big office. Is he in the forest, on the green, at his desk, or in the media center?” There could’ve been a river, too. With piranha.

  I guess the lady didn’t think I was very funny. She looked in, then back at me. “He’s at his desk.”

  • • •

  His desk was huge. He sat behind it, in front of huge windows looking out onto the English village. “Have a seat, Mr. Henry,” said the mighty Hogue.

  I sat.

  We looked at one another.

  “So,” he finally began, “tell me what you know about the San Pedro Film Company.”

  “I am the San Pedro Film Company.”

  “That’s honest.”

  “Let’s be honest.”

  “Okay.” He leaned forward. “Both Hale Montgomery and Dr. Wolf forwarded their scripts to me. Which, undoubtedly, you expected. How do you expect me to react to hearsay? Because that’s what that script it, hearsay.”

  “I’m not in the blackmail business.”

  “You’re not? What business are you in?”

  “I’m a shortcut man. I get things done. And, had it not been for your insistence, I’d’ve never known who Davis Algren was.”

  “I thought we were being honest.”

  “I am being honest. When you asked me about Mr. Algren, I had no idea who he was.”

  “There’s a picture of you in the doughnut place holding two cups of coffee. You were bringing a cup of coffee to someone you don’t know?”

  “Mixing a cup of high-test with a cup of decaf makes half-caf. It was two in the morning.”

  “Your being at Dunkin’ Donuts was a coincidence.”

  “No. I was at Dunkin’ Donuts for a reason.”

  “What reason?”

  “One of your girls who lived nearby had been knocked around. I was asked to look in.”

  “One of my girls?”

  “I thought we were being honest.”

  “How much do you know about my affairs?”

  “I know one thing. Which has twenty-eight or twenty-nine parts. But that’s none of my business.”

  Hogue sat back. “Do you have any idea what it is to be rich?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Money has gravity. After a certain point it has you, you don’t have it.

  “The Schwarszchild Radius.”

  “The Schwarzschild Radius? You saw it?”

  “It’s a movie?”

  “Worst movie ever made, Mr. Henry.”

  “I didn’t know it was a movie. I know some casual science. The Schwarzschild Radius is the point of no return, gravitationally speaking, for black holes. Pass over it, you can’t escape falling in.”

  “Because to escape you’d need to accelerate faster than the speed of light. Which can’t be done.” Hogue spread his hands.

  “That’s right. I think.”

  The billionaire considered. “Well, money’s like that. It has me. I have so much money I can’t trust a soul. No one’s honest with me. Everybody has an angle. So love, for example, is out.”

  “You could divest.”

  “Give everything away.”

  “Yes. Start again.”

  Hogue shook his head. “I’m not strong enough to do that. I’ve thought about it. Can’t do it.” He studied me. “How’d you like to work for me, Mr. Henry?”

  I shook my head. “You pay too well. I’d never get out.” I paused. “And you kill people. You think you’re above the law.”

  “That’s because I am above the law.”

  “You really think that.”

  “It’s the truth, Mr. Henry.” He leaned back. “I didn’t start out that way. But now, that’s the way it is.”

  “Please explain.”

  “You know how many people depend on me? Directly and indirectly? Thousands. Men and women, their husbands and wives, their children, their charities, their expensive schools, their this, their that. It goes on and on. All the way to the roach coach parked outside the lot. If I fall, for whatever reason, they all go down, too. Like dominoes. So I’m confident I’ll be judged by a higher authority. Who’ll understand me better than you can.”

  “You think you can’t be replaced?”

  “Just like a hole in the ocean. Of course I can be replaced. But that takes time. And how much time do we all have? My empire fails, like the Roman Empire failed, and we have our own Dark Ages. There’s a lot of rich men on this lot. Supposedly rich. But how many of them could stand idle, monetarily, for two or three years? Not many. And all sorts of well-made plans, for good and laudable things, will come crashing down. And I’m part of it, too. Despots don’t retire, there’s no clear line of succession. They die. They’re assassinated. And that’s what will happen to me.”

  “And the sanctity of human life?”

  “Like Betty Ann Fowler?”


  “Exactly like Betty Ann Fowler.”

  The billionaire sighed. “I don’t expect you to believe this but I think about her every day. Why? Because we made a tiny personal connection. She wasn’t afraid of me. She didn’t talk at my money. She talked to me. And I saw her walk upstairs with that ignorant cowhand, and I thought to myself, I’ll talk to her later. But there was no later. She had been utterly ruined, destroyed. And I weighed the entirety of everything and made my decision. That’s what officers and emperors do. They make decisions. And that decision led to the next decision and the next. And now here we are. Me and the Shortcut Man.”

  We looked at one another. In a strange way he made sense. I’d never talked to a king before. I didn’t envy him.

  “Are you sure, Mr. Henry, that I can’t hire you? I need a new head of security.”

  I shook my head. “No, thank you. I’d get stuck.”

  Hogue shrugged. “Fine. So, tell me, Mr. Henry.” He knit his fingers together. “I don’t want the San Pedro script hanging over my head. Even though, in the long run, it’d just be an annoyance. What do I have to do to make you go away?”

  “I’m not here for blackmail. But I would remind you of something.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Though the mills of the gods grind slowly, they grind exceeding fine.” Pretty heavy for the Shortcut Man, I must admit.

  Hogue nodded, brushed off the heaviness. “You know, I’ve heard that. I think cowhand Montgomery said that in one of his epics. One of my epics. What does it mean?”

  I found myself laughing. “It means if you’re liable, you’ll pay sooner or later.”

  “That’d be only fair.” He stood up, turned, looked into his English village. Then he turned back. “Last chance. San Pedro. What do you want?”

  We looked at one another. “San Pedro going once, going twice—

  Then it occurred to me. “There is something I want.”

  “Of course there is.” He smiled. “What is it?”

  “Six hundred and thirty-nine thousand dollars. I want six hundred and thirty-nine thousand dollars.”

  SEVENTY-SIX

  Hope

  I couldn’t get Davis Algren’s wife, Hannah, out of my mind. The pain I had seen in her eyes. And I kept wondering about his safe deposit box key. Why keep a key for a box with nothing in it?

  And though I’d forgotten Glastonbury’s exact possible-solution number, I knew it was somewhere around two hundred thousand possibilities. Four dials, twenty-two letters apiece, each excluding I, Q, X, and Y. Eventually, whatever was in there would revert to the State of California. Hannah would get nothing.

  I examined Algren’s scripts closely. Beside the scripts themselves, adding to two hundred forty-some pages, there were the backsides of those one-sided pages, some of them full with notes and scribblings. I went though every page, every note.

  Like the drunk searching for his keys under the streetlight, when he might have left them anywhere in town, my reasoning was, though Algren could have left the combination anywhere, the only place I might find it was somewhere in or on his screenplays, the only documents remaining from his life.

  In the second hour, when I felt that my eyes had finally crossed, permanently, I found a tiny notation:

  gave comb to Hannah 071705

  It was the second time I’d run across it, having started through a second time, but this time it occurred to me that perhaps comb actually meant combination.

  I caught up with Hannah the next evening at Dunkin’ Donuts. I’d been drinking bad coffee for an hour and it was late and I was ready to go home. But then she came in.

  I bought her a croissant sandwich and coffee, then asked her had anything special occurred on July 17, 2005. A big smile lit up her face and she extended her hand with the silver ring. “July 17, 2005? Of course, I remember that. That was the day we were married,” she said, “the best day of my life.”

  “Did he ever give you a comb?”

  “A comb?” She was mystified. “I didn’t have any hair. I’d been sick.”

  “I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “I miss him. I miss him.”

  “And he didn’t give you a combination, or a number to remember, did he?”

  She shook her head. A long time ago she’d been pretty. “The only thing Dave ever gave me was this.” Again she extended her hand, showed me her plain silver ring. “On our wedding day.”

  Something struck me. “Would you mind if I looked at your ring?”

  With suspicion, and with difficulty, she twisted it off her finger, handed it to me. “I’ve never taken it off. What about it?”

  It was a plain silver ring, battered, dented, scuffed, worth ten bucks. But inside, very faintly, were four letters.

  • • •

  Mr. Glastonbury, though grave, expressed pleasure at my return to the Bank of America. “Do you have the code, sir?”

  “I believe I do.”

  “Right this way.”

  Mr. Glastonbury inserted his key, turned it half a turn clockwise, removed it. “Now I leave the room,” he said. “Put in your code, insert your key, turn it clockwise, it’ll go a quarter turn. Then scramble your code. Then turn your key and open the box.” With that, Mr. Glastonbury disappeared.

  I went over to the box, turned each dial to what I hoped was the combination.

  H O P E

  I could feel my heart beating. I inserted the key. Now or never. The key turned a quarter turn and a rush ran through me. I scrambled the dials. I turned the key the final quarter turn. I opened the box.

  • • •

  The box was wide, shallow, and flat. There was a lot of cash. Why had he chosen to live on the streets? I’d heard of other cases like this, had never been truly able to understand. Penniless grandmother, subsisting on ramen, with $1,000,000 in the mattress. Minimum-wage security guard dies with a $5,000,000 portfolio. Were they crazy or did they foresee a torrential rain?

  In this case, Davis Algren, as evidenced by the writings in the box, was round the bend. Aliens had infiltrated the government at all levels. They were augmenting human DNA in search of an interstellar hybrid to conquer both the future and the past. Meanwhile they were living in vast underwater cities, hives really, on the bottom of the ocean. They possessed astounding capabilities. They could raise the dead if their attentions could be turned to your particular situation. There was a seven-day window of opportunity. So don’t be too quick in disposing of the deceased.

  There was a sheaf of illustrations to accompany the ravings. Kabbalistic diagrams. It must have made sense to him.

  There was also a letter to Hannah. A love letter, a thank-you letter. It started well. But Algren had become distracted. What had started simply and directly had veered into reptile people and their strange diets. Page two gave instructions for recognizing the reptile people. Remember Jim Morrison and the Lizard King? No accident. And if you knew what to look for, there it was. Page three turned to anger at her skepticism. Page four detailed what would be her dire, well-deserved punishment. She couldn’t say she wasn’t warned.

  I counted the money. $27,320. There was no mention of where it might have come from.

  Okay, then. I knew what I had to do. And then I knew how to do it. I smiled. It was fate. I knew the Atwater brothers.

  SEVENTY-SEVEN

  Ellen Arden

  When I think of all the things in this world that go wrong, it’s pretty much a miracle when things go right. But miracles do happen.

  Take Lew Peedner. Screwed to the bone when I punched Elton Reese’s ticket. Officially destined to be a lieutenant the rest of his days. A good man with no future.

  Then, after the arrest of Eli Nazarian, for the murder of Melvin Shea, suddenly the powers-that-be realize this man, Peedner, is a class-A, number-one, nose-to-the-grindstone, workingman’s hero.

  They take him up three grades to inspector, he’s all over TV, white on rice, he’s a Man
of the Future. The subject of a Special White Paper Report by Ted Sargent. What this proves, said the chief, is that even the high and mighty are subject to the rule of law. Everything isn’t OJ and Robert Blake and the rest of them.

  Lew himself, radiating contentment, told me an interesting thing. We were sitting on the patio at Irv’s Burgers in West Hollywood. Lew had found some strange prints. Both at Bambi Benton’s and Rhonda Carling’s. Finally got a match.

  “Who?”

  “A small time actress. She was in The Schwarzschild Radius. One of the worst films ever made,” said Lew, authoritatively.

  Sonia, the pretty proprietor of Irv’s, delivered our burgers with a smile, sliding a paper plate in front of Lew. “For A-number-one police inspector.” Lew smiled.

  He showed me his plate. I looked at Lew’s portrait. It was too accurate to be funny.

  It looked like he hadn’t slept in three weeks.

  “Looks great,” I said. I looked at my own. I guess I hadn’t slept in four weeks.

  Lew looked at my plate, my caricature. “You look like shit, Dick.” He took a bite of his burger, savored it. “Best burger in L.A.”

  “Everybody knows that,” I said. In his current frame of mind, Lew would have praised Oki Dog. Pound for pound, Oki Dog delivered your best value penny for penny. Their double-dog chili pastrami cheese burrito could feed a family of four for a week and a half.

  But back to the subject at hand. “Lew. You were telling me about the prints you found.”

  Lew swallowed, nodded, wiped his face with a paper napkin. “Yeah. Prints at both places. From that actress in Schwarzschild. She was one of the Cluddum.”

  “The Cluddum?”

  “They were a sect of the Dark Farmers. Opposed to the rule of the Pappam.”

  “God damn it, Lew. What was her name?”

  I had to wait till he’d finished the last bite of his burger. He licked his thumb. “Her name was Ellen Arden.”

  “Ellen Arden?”