by Paul Monette
But Edna knew a break when she saw one. She took the stub of the pencil out of her apron pocket. She licked the end and wrote in big round letters across the heart of the picture: “All my love, Cary.” Then handed it back to Greg with a defiant look, her tongue against her upper lip to steady her wobbly teeth. She saw the dawn of a great idea pass across his face. And then she said: “I bet a guy could charge five dollars for a thing like this. Wouldn’t you say?”
In that one stroke, she showed him how to hit the big time. The United Fans of America was launched. Greg stopped selling dime-a-dozen studio shots and went full steam into personalizing. Soon he needed two assistants, just to handle the volume. And the hard-luck pair in the basement flat came into their own at last. Like Greg himself, they’d only lacked the proper vehicle. Now they raked it in. But it wasn’t any wonder, since they gave the world the better mousetrap it was always on the lookout for. They’d hit on a way to package dreams.
“Hold still!” gritted Edna between her teeth.
She sprayed a wide swath of instant disinfectant. Slumped in the chaise where she held him down, Greg choked as the mist caught him full in the face. He held out his chin till she daubed it clean and iodined the scratch. After that his poor left shoulder, where the scrape was deep, bright pink, and oozing freely. Then his knees, his shins, and two stubbed toes. He looked like he’d taken a bad fall off a skateboard.
“It’s your own damn fault,” she scolded him.
He lay there stinging in his jockey shorts and made as if to take a little sun. Grumbling, Edna packed her first-aid kit. She hitched up the tits of her great balloon of a bathing suit. She sank herself down on a rubber mattress just at the base of the sphinx. She wasn’t done with him yet.
“Listen, honey. You clutch like that, you’re gonna get screwed. It’s as simple as that.”
“I didn’t clutch,” he protested wearily, drawing the back of his hand across his forehead. “I got sick of skulking around, that’s all. I thought I could sidle up to the grave and check out all their faces.”
“It’s Vivien’s fault,” said Sid, from behind his Times. He sat at the shady end of the terrace, under an awning propped by bamboo spears. His pants were rolled to his knees, and his feet were cooling in a kid-size pool, about four by six and plastic. A birthday gift from Sid and Edna when Greg turned thirty-two. He let the paper down a minute. “She could have got him out of there. All she had to do was walk him down to the gate and turn him loose. They wouldn’t have called the cops if she hadn’t let them.”
“You can tell Sidney Sheehan to spare us the hindsight,” she said as she put on a coat of lotion. “I was against it, right from the first. Didn’t I tell you you’d end up in jail?”
“Yes, Edna.”
“And I trust you don’t have any weekend plans. We’re four days behind as it is.”
The week’s mail was spread out on the terrace floor, in an arc around her mattress, fanned like some enormous deck of cards. She began to open those that looked as if they might have money inside. Slowly, little piles of checks and money orders grew beside her. Now and then—though all their advertising begged the people not to—she pulled out cash, smiling as if she’d got a prize.
“I’ll tell you what I’d like to do,” said Sid. “When they get the stone on, I’d like to see it.”
“You mean the grave,” she said, “is that it?”
“Well, why not? I’m something of an authority, after all.”
“Gee, Sid,” reflected Edna dryly, “maybe Vivien Cokes would hire you. You could sit up there and tell stories.”
“She’s jealous, Greg,” said Sidney Sheehan. “On account of I’m so creative.”
Reluctantly, as if pushed too far, she heaved herself to her feet. She padded across the terrace floor to talk some sense to him. She stepped in and joined him, ankle-deep in the little pool, while Sid put his paper aside and stood up proudly. They were forced a bit too close for a proper fight. To work up to a pitch of fury, with all the right gesticulations, they needed a fuller range. For the moment, however, they seemed to prefer to cool their feet on a hot spring afternoon.
“Listen, smart-ass,” Edna growled, “when’s the last time you did something right?”
“You know what pisses you off?” he said, unruffled and aloof. “You always got the yo-yos, down at Graumann’s. Now, when I was in the cemeteries, I drew a higher class of people. Why don’t you admit it?”
They let their feathers fly as if it were a cockfight. Each had a finger jabbed at the other’s breastbone. Sid swayed back and forth on his blue-veined legs like a stork. Edna’s dimpled thighs and meaty upper arms began to shake as she got going. Water splashed over the lip of the pool. From a distance, it looked like a native dance.
Greg winked an eye to see how they were making out. Convinced they were over the worst of it, he rolled away to a fetal crouch. The bumps and scrapes were minor enough, but he still had a lot of nursing of his ego to perform. It wasn’t just that he’d never spent the night in jail. He’d never had a parking ticket, either, so assiduous was he not to cross swords with the law. It amazed him, in a way, that he’d survived it. All the same, as he swooned on the chaise in the midday sun, at a stage where things hurt worse before they started getting better, survival was small consolation.
The Steepside, guards had led him down to the very room he’d broken into, there to wait for the L.A. police. When he asked for a lawyer, the bully in charge stomped on his toes. Later, a couple of beer-belly cops took him away in handcuffs. They tripped him hard as he got in the squad car, and he didn’t remember another thing till they slapped him awake to be booked. His ears were ringing by the time they dumped him in a detention cell, but by then he’d begun to detect a pattern.
“You and that cocksucker movie star both,” said the pasty-faced jailer. He sent Greg sprawling down a flight of stairs. “Who you fairies gonna cum in now?” the turnkey snarled as he locked Greg in.
They were all getting back at Jasper Cokes. They’d always thought he stood for something decent. His being a deviant underneath called into question every other tough guy’s act. It meant they had to prove themselves, which they did by kicking ass. Though they hadn’t a shred of evidence that Greg was one of Jasper’s boys, they were partial to guilt by association. Any old fairy would do in a pinch. If they made a mistake and pummeled a man who was perfectly straight, well, that was life. Besides, a real man ought to act butch enough as to leave no doubt at all.
Quickly, word went round the cell that Greg had been at Steepside. He resigned himself to a multiple rape by drunks and vagrants. Sure enough, a mangy pickpocket—breath like the end of the earth—flattened Greg against the bars and ordered him to suck. At which point this doped-up gorilla came reeling up and put himself between them. He knocked the pickpocket over like a bowling pin. Then he gathered Greg in his arms and wept. It turned out that he’d had a thing with Jasper once himself. He fell into broken sobs that rang all over the jailhouse. When at last he went to sleep, he curled with Greg on the hard dank floor beneath the soapstone sink. All night long he whimpered in his dreams.
Greg was in too much pain to sleep. He lay there hugged in a bear hug, glad to be safe from injury, and used the time to puzzle out his evidence. At sunup, Sid and Edna having arrived with cash enough to spring him, he couldn’t wake the gorilla to kiss him goodbye. He had nothing to leave behind as a souvenir. Then he noticed his one-night stand was barefoot. He took off his wingtips, knelt at the other’s crusted feet, and tied them on. They were probably too tight to walk in, but maybe the guy could trade them for something he needed more. A quart of hooch or a couple of cartons of Camels.
The upshot of it all was this: He wanted to stop right here. Nobody really cared if Jasper Cokes had been killed or not. They seemed to prefer it the way it was, as being somehow seamier than pure and simple murder. Sid and Edna didn’t see how indisposed the police would be to putting any effort in. They thought he got licked
in a fight with a cellmate. They still believed the proper scrap of evidence would turn it all around. It didn’t even seem to daunt them that Harry Dawes had left no trace beyond the three of them.
“Hey, Greg!” they chorused from the pool.
“Huh? What?” He rolled from left to right and squinted along the terrace, only to find their fighting posture had undergone a sea change. Sid sat crosslegged in the water. Edna, standing behind him, kept dipping a styrofoam cup and pouring it out across his naked shoulders. His face was all scrunched up, as if he had dunked in an icy mountain stream. He slapped his torso to bring the blood back up.
“Sid thinks we should wait till it all dies down. As soon as the killer believes he’s home free, he’ll make a mistake. He’ll try to tidy something up, and he’ll fall right into our hands. It’s the stupidest piece of reasoning I’ve heard yet.”
“What I said,” corrected Sid imperiously, “was, why should we be the moving target? Let the other guy make the move. Then we go in as a team.”
Oh, Jesus, he thought, it’s Nick and Nora Charles.
He lifted himself from the chaise and hobbled across the gravel of the terrace. They didn’t seem to understand there was nothing more to go on. The detective part was over. He made a clearing motion with his hands, to let them know he needed room. Edna bent over, grabbed Sid around the chest, and stepped back heavily two or three feet. Sid slid along on his bottom. Greg stepped in and straddled the corner seat, careful to keep his bloody shin out in the air, to guard against infection.
But where was he to begin? If they’d only seen the scene of the crime, they’d have understood in a minute. The mood was all wrong. Steepside might be a movie set, but the movie wasn’t murder. No lingering air of blame, attached or unattached, appeared to mist the top of Jasper’s mountain. Beside the chaos of Hollywood Boulevard, just a stone’s throw from the Cherokee Nile, Steepside was completely in the clear.
“Listen, you guys,” he said. “I’ve got a whole new theory.” Elbows on his knees, hands in a steeple, he peered through the clouded water at the grinning figure of Mickey Mouse stenciled on the bottom. From where they watched at the other end, he looked like a kid in a sandbox. “What if Jasper did what they say? What if he killed himself?”
“I don’t give two shits what Jasper did,” said Edna. “The point is, somebody bumped off Harry.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Greg protested. He made it all up as he went along, just trying to keep it simple. “He finished his movie, right? He was on a real downer. He goes out to pick up a trick for an overnight, and he meets this terrific kid—coming out of Thrifty Drugs or something. They look at each other, and bingo, they connect.”
Across the water, Sid and Edna had a hooded sort of look. She gripped Sid’s shoulder, and it wasn’t certain whether she was reassuring him, or holding on so she wouldn’t keel over. Already it was two against one.
“So he takes him back to Steepside.” Greg went on a little faster, hoping to pick up the pace. “They get it on all right, but Harry won’t play it as rough as he likes. So Jasper goes bananas. He hits the kid too hard, and the kid goes into a coma, like. So he panics. He gets the blades, he gets the pills—”
The gathering silence mocked him. At the other end, Sid and Edna had retreated to an awful stillness. Arranged as they were, one above the other, they looked to Greg like South Seas royalty—set on a floating throne in a lagoon.
“Ick,” said Edna, very unconvinced.
“What you need’s a little R and R,” Sid Sheehan observed, though not unkindly. “That’s why I think we ought to wait. Our offense is out of commission.”
They didn’t give his story the time of day, but they didn’t call him a quitter, either. Greg was their legs and their bankroll both. They understood, rather more than he suspected, that the thriller they’d hitched a ride on was at a sudden standstill. Perhaps they’d known all along what a man like Greg was liable to say at the first big impasse: What was the use, since it wouldn’t bring Harry back anyway. As for them, they had no heavy schedule to juggle. They were at an age where they liked to get a thing done before they went on. Loose ends was a young man’s game.
“Put it this way,” Edna said. “We aren’t going to know a goddam thing till we know what the wife is hiding.”
“That’s absurd,” he responded quickly, a bit as if he expected it. “Vivien has nothing to do with it. All she wants is to be alone, and frankly, I don’t blame her.”
“I’m sure she appreciates the vote of confidence,” Edna threw back coldly. “Tell me, have you hooked up with the entourage officially? You think they’ll put you on the payroll?”
At which point the phone rang. If this was a fight they were having, it seemed they had ended round one. Edna stepped out onto dry land. She trotted ten feet to the Bakelite black extension, catching it up on the second ring. The phone was fed through the amber casement window from Greg’s bedroom. She answered briskly, echoing back the last four digits the caller had just dialed. Then a small pause, and then she turned, grinning as if she’d heard a marvelous joke.
“Vivien,” she said triumphantly, and held the receiver out to Greg.
He couldn’t let on how it made him feel, though of course he hardly knew. As he and Edna passed each other—at the canopy’s edge, between bright sun and shadow—he tried to look as if he couldn’t be more surprised. But Edna wouldn’t give an inch. She was bursting to go have a whisper with Sid. By the time he picked the receiver up, Greg was pretty rattled. He thought he’d seen the last of Vivien Cokes when the night came down at Steepside.
“Greg Cannon here,” he said—perhaps a shade too eagerly. Ready-when-you-are-ma’am was clearly not the right approach.
“It’s not a fair match,” she said by way of hello.
“What’s that?”
“You and me. It turns out I know something you don’t think I know.”
“It’s not my police record, is it?”
“Oh, I heard about that,” she said, with evident disapproval. “You know, you’re simply going to have to get yourself some names. I mean, so you can drop them. Why don’t I start you out with a couple of mine? I never use them anyway.”
Did the breeziness mean she agreed with Edna, that the way it turned out was his own damned fault? He wondered again, as he had all night, why he didn’t blame her, like Sid did. It was as if they’d reached a tacit agreement the moment they met: They’d both take care of themselves.
“Where I’ve got the advantage,” she went on cheerily, “is with this Walden business. You’re still on page 106. I’m all the way up to—uh—167.”
“You are?”
He thought perhaps he’d had an episode of memory loss, from being beaten about the head and neck. He had this impulse, every time she spoke, to ask her to repeat herself. He wasn’t getting the point. When had they ever talked of Walden?
“How shall I get it back to you?”
“What?” he asked.
“Your book. Are you stoned or something?”
“Aha,” retorted Greg, catching on at last. He’d left his book there. The lady was making a formal call, with a script a gentleman ought to know. “You could put it in the mail,” he said helpfully.
“I’ve got an idea,” she said, and he knew she had had it before she called. “Why don’t we meet at the studio? I have to go in on Monday, to have a look at Jasper’s picture. You come too. I understand you’ve done some work in the industry.”
“Sort of,” he said vaguely. “Where do I go?”
“Artie will pick you up. Is noon too early?”
“No. That’s fine.”
“Good. See you then.”
He could tell she was going to hang up as abruptly as she said hello. He hated to break the mood, but he called out: “Wait! He doesn’t know where I live.”
“Of course he does,” said Vivien Cokes, severing connections.
He held the receiver to his ear a moment l
onger, to gather his wits before he turned around. Just what did she mean by “work”? In the field of unbought scripts, the grasses had long blown over his name. She couldn’t mean the autographs—or could she? Anything but that. He prefered to be billed as unemployed, he thought as he put down the phone. He walked across the terrace, trying to look nonchalant.
“You won’t believe it,” he threw out lightly.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Edna reassured him. “We’re going to give it everything we’ve got.”
She leaned against the butt end of the sphinx. Sid was still under the canopy, patting his torso dry with a threadbare motel towel. They had all the time in the world.
“She’s got my book,” said Greg. “We have to get together, so she can give it back.” He tried to leave it at that, but they wouldn’t budge. They let the silence build. “At Universal,” he added lamely. “Monday afternoon. She’s sending a car to pick me up.”
“I wonder what she wants,” said Sid.
“I just told you,” Greg replied quite evenly.
But Sid was not one to be threatened. He twitched his hips in a little hula and sauntered away to the terrace doors. “I’ll tell you what you ask her,” he said as he flung them wide. “What the fuck’s she gonna do with all that money? Ask her that, why don’t you?”
Irrelevant as it seemed, the question hung in the air as he disappeared inside. Edna knelt to the papers and started to gather them up. It seemed she too had had her fill of the great outdoors. Well, let them go, he thought. He looked away over the city, where the visibility was a bare two hundred feet. A savage veil of smog, the first of its kind this spring, had sorrowed down in the night, while he was stuck in jail. He wondered which was the real L.A.: the city in winter, clear to the ocean, or this today, the ruined air choked with the coming summer. It occurred to him that Steepside was above it.
“What I’d like to know,” said Edna Temple, bristling slightly, “is, what did she go to Bermuda for?”