by Paul Monette
“Oh, Sid,” she said, “can’t you tell he’s not impressed? He’s been swimming off yachts.”
He’d been gone a whole week, he realized, without once being spoken of in the third person. Or not in this particular way, while he was right there in the room.
“He’ll refuse to go out on the roof with us,” predicted Edna, nudging Sid. “Now that he’s seen the real thing, he’s never gonna be satisfied with Mickey Mouse again”
Perhaps, Greg thought as he chewed his bread and jelly, it wasn’t the packaged brand of junk he needed—scandal sheets and best-seller trash. The normal run of disconnections trailing in Sid and Edna’s wake was more the ticket here.
“Come on,” he said, “we’ll go out and eat. We’ll charge it up to the company.”
“But I’m not dressed,” protested Edna, hugging her peachy wrapper close about her.
“We already ate four times today,” said Sid, as he took a medicinal slurp of his tea.
“She caught up with you, did she?” Edna asked, getting right down to business.
Greg could sense the glimmer of something separate here, as between two women alone. He understood that Vivien Cokes wasn’t his exclusive preserve, nor a secret he need keep. He should have been glad to be off the hook, but he wasn’t. He was too tied up with making sure nobody got the wrong idea.
“She met me at Carbon Mountain,” he said, as though it were under the chapel clock. Perhaps he was being too cautious. These two were surely the last to wonder where it was all going to lead between him and Vivien. They knew the way the wind blew. Yet he felt an edge of caution creeping in. “We did research,” he added lamely.
“Well—who did it?” Sid asked bluntly, cutting through all the red tape.
“It’s got to be one or the other,” Greg replied, as he rooted through a drawer to find an opener. He had a bottle of Dr. Pepper in one hand. He wasn’t remotely thirsty, but it gave him something to do. “It’s either Carl or Artie,” he announced.
“Well, of course it is,” retorted Sid. They didn’t need a mission halfway round the world to tell them what any dope could have figured out. “Which one?”
“Actually, we’re split,” he said, as if it were something admirable, like divvying up the spoils. “I say it’s Artie. She says Carl.”
Sid and Edna gave each other a long significant look. It showed what they thought of amateur gumshoes altogether.
“You plan to flip a coin?” asked Edna mildly.
“For now, we’re just going to talk to them,” he said.
“Gee, maybe you ought to give them a week’s vacation,” Sid remarked facetiously. “Let ’em rest up before it goes to the cops. Or will you turn ’em loose with a reprimand? Maybe you think they’ve suffered enough.”
“Don’t you see,” snapped Greg, “the whole thing’s closed. Nobody cares who did it anymore. It’s not like a TV show, you know. Things aren’t always wrapped at the end.”
“Excuse me,” retorted Edna, waving a hand as if she’d burnt it. “That’s a lot of bull. Somebody did it—somebody’s got to pay.”
He looked from one to the other, as they stood there cold and adamant. Apropos of nothing at all, he thought: There were two ways to die by violence. At the end of a long and twisted cave, the way Jasper did—or like Harry, caught in crossfire.
“What would you do? Shoot him?”
“Sure I’d shoot him,” Edna said defiantly.
“Me too,” Sid piped in. “Let’s shoot ’em both. They both look crooked as hell.”
Greg strode off. He batted the swing door back on its hinges. He entered the dome of the dining room like a big shot taking cover in his office. The two-voice chorus followed close at his heels, but at least it lost the feel of a backstairs plot. Besides, they were used to shouting here. They threw out fifteen half-cooked theories all at once. Nobody lowered his voice for an hour. Long before they ever teamed up, the three of them had learned to keep their contacts temporary, lest they get preempted. Now they were in cahoots, they had to renegotiate their rights from time to time.
They accused him of going astray of the main idea. Swift, they said, was the only kind of justice that could kill the rage that ate you up. When he tried to tell them the story he’d smuggled out of the temple, he kept having to stop and go back, till he lost them.
And one by one—it was almost imperceptible at first—they picked up the thread of their work. Shrilling and ranting, Greg tore through a pile of mail. He split things into first and second, forgetting to set aside gossip to chew over dinner. Edna stood shouting across from him, calling for blood. Not missing a beat, she pulled over a stack of Merle Oberon, fished in her apron pocket for a pen, and started signing. Sid, meanwhile, did a lot of footwork, back and forth to the filing cabinet.
They stayed at it till half past ten. There was no one moment when they could have sworn the argument was over, but after a while the fighting got sporadic. It didn’t die out entirely. Squalls blew up out of nowhere. Accusations flew. “Who broke the stapler?” “Who’s got Marilyn?” All along, they logged a little nine-to-five and got a bit ahead. The last whole hour was more or less business as usual. They processed all their intervening orders, till their tongues hung out like hounds from so much licking envelopes.
Finally, they’d worked up such an appetite they could have eaten brussels sprouts. Greg didn’t even have to ask. They were mad to get out on the town. They dropped by Sid and Edna’s on the way so the two of them could put on street clothes. Then they went gingerly down the steep part of Cherokee—arm in arm, with Greg in the middle. As the incline leveled off, they broke free into three different strides and sallied along the avenue to Hollywood Boulevard.
Though they had their pick of gritty, late-night ethnic fare, in the end they settled on burgers, for reasons of decor. Burger Satori had a big plate window on the street. The counter was built at the windowsill, with eight red swivel stools that faced the traffic. They sat in a row, their burgers wrapped in butcher paper, sharing a bucket of fries. They witnessed a coke sale, a coke bust, and a sudden escape—all in the space of thirty seconds. A pimp and a hooker leaned on a mailbox by the curb, working through a jealous spell. There were teen-age boys in earrings. Girls with green and yellow flashes in their hair.
“I bet she’s never been here,” said Edna, crunching ice from a paper cup of Pepsi.
“Who?” he asked, though of course he knew.
“Vivien Cokes. She’s been everywhere you can think of. Even when she was a kid—she’d been more places then than any of us’ll ever see.”
“So?”
“So nothing,” she said. “It was just a thought.”
At the window, as if he were on a screen, a man in overalls made faces at them. He gobbled a pantomime dinner like a pig, to see if he could crack them up. They glanced at him, mute and chilly, like they thought he was a bug. He hastened on dejectedly.
“Edna honey,” Sid remarked, waving a string potato in the air, “we know what you’re trying to say. With all that money, she’s miserable—right? She never gets a chance to go out and buy a hot dog. Well, I’ll tell you something—I’d still move in tomorrow.”
“Oh, she’s happy enough,” replied Edna archly, following it up with a one-note snort, to think how little he understood. “As far as that goes,” she added with great disdain.
“By the way,” said Greg, “she sent you the bag of stuff you wanted”
“Who did?”
“She did. We stopped at this stand, by the side of the road.”
“You mean the syrup? That was supposed to be your errand.”
Greg didn’t see that it made much difference. But as it seemed to get her fretful, he told her they had done it as a team. He painted it Norman Rockwell for her—filling the air with the cider smell of harvest, sweeping the floor with chips of pine. She perked up right away. She could hardly wait to get home and pore it over. As if to celebrate, she turned to the counterman and ordered up t
hree hunks of custard pie. Sid and Greg protested that they couldn’t eat another thing, but once they’d got it in front of them, they managed after all. They called for a round of Sanka, just to wash it down.
“Tomorrow we go on a diet,” Edna resolved between bites.
“Tomorrow,” Sid swore, “I don’t give a damn what the plans are. I’m getting up at noon.”
Greg didn’t make any promises.
Next morning he rented a car—briefly wondering, as he signed, if the Dodge he left in Hamilton Falls had gone onto the computer yet as being out of bounds. For all he knew, the scanner that Avis put his papers through might trigger a squad of cops to come pouring in and goon him. Once, he thought, was quite enough.
He drove away without incident. He headed out to Steep-side, not really thinking to call ahead. He had some fuzzy notion of arriving, just at lunch, when he figured they’d all be gathered round the glass-top table by the pool. There he would make his formal request, grave as an old inspector, to speak to Artie privately. Then they would walk down the garden, as far as the redwood tub, to have it out. It all had a certain symmetry that appealed to his sense of things in place.
A housemaid sprang the gate and let him in without a hitch. He drove uphill and parked along the shoulder by the garages. The gardener looked him over briefly, shrugged off all the questions put in English, and left him in the living room, staring down the canyon. He couldn’t believe security had grown so lax. Somehow, it made his own ordeal two weeks ago seem pointless. He would have felt more at home being grilled through a hole in the door. Then, at least, he could have presented his impeccable credentials.
He called out all their names and went from room to room. There wasn’t a sign of life—except the great outdoors, which opened out at every view with its old and vast abandon. The door to Artie’s room stopped him cold. He could tell—from the swirl of clothes on the bed, all drab and washed to death, the whole room overlaid with a detritus of magazines and ticket stubs—that a failure was in residence, waiting out the end. But, though he’d tracked the wolf to its lair, he didn’t so much as cross the doorsill. Evidence wasn’t his way—or anyway, not the sort that people hid under the mattress.
He traced his steps through the soundless house and drove home feeling cheated. For an hour and a half before Vivien called, he bossed Sid and Edna around like a brutish foreman—though without any notable success. They quickly slowed their pace to a crawl, to show him where he could put it. When Vivien finally gave him the clue to proceed, he should have been bloody relieved. But he felt a curious thrill of annoyance, having to ask directions to his suspect. He threw her a curve for sheer cussedness’ sake.
“You don’t miss real life at all,” he told her—though who the hell was he to say? He didn’t blame her a bit for hanging up.
Now it was well after dark. He drove the valley floor, reading off numbers five digits long. He probably would have found it faster, just scanning the line of the roofs against the sky, till he saw the name in lights. Yet he didn’t want too much truck with neon, if he could avoid it. Neon signs were too eager to please. All the same, when he got to 44601 Ventura, he couldn’t help but see the lit-up rooster, rising into the night. Perhaps because he’d heard the name as one word only when she spoke it—cocktail, as in liquor—he’d half expected a giant martini in profile. Instead, a ten-foot rooster twitched its ass in a one-two blink of ice-blue light.
What was Artie? The bouncer?
He went round and parked in the lot in back, which was all but empty at this hour. Then he crunched across the gravel to the door. Inside, it was standard issue—the room the size of a boxing ring, he thought, though he’d never been near one. Eight men stood at the bar, dressed down and just alike, working on Coors and cigarettes. The gauzy air was still as a third-stage health alert. A split-rail fence ran around two walls. The juke box had a country bent. In one corner was a makeshift stage, maybe two feet high, that didn’t look too sturdy.
Greg sauntered up to the bar. No one turned to watch him. At this hour, he would have had to swagger.
“You got a Lite?” he asked
The barman, stripped to the waist, turned away without a nod, as if to ignore him. He was muscled like a discus thrower—so his every move played a rhythm across his flesh. He pulled open a heavy old ice-chest door in the wall and reached out a bottle. He swung around and set it on the bar. The other hand came up to grab the neck. Greg saw he carried the opener with him always, ready to flick off a cap in a flash. The Lite cap shot across the room, with a ricochet off the wall.
“I’m looking for Artie,” Greg said, very low and neutral.
They locked eyes briefly and sized each other up. It was such a conventional scene, Greg could have rattled the next part off himself. “Who wants to know?” the barman would ask, to gain time. Or else he’d nod in the right direction, if Artie was at the bar—which he wasn’t. Too much time went by for Greg to believe the name meant nothing.
“He’s down the hall,” the barman said at last. “I’d knock, if I was you.”
The hall was lit by dark-red bulbs, as if it could not help but end in sin. At fifteen paces, it jogged to the right, so that even the music seemed to recede in the final lap. He put out a blood-red hand against the wall to guide him. When he came to the end, he found two doors, one on either side. GUYS on one, LADIES on the other—the stenciling blunt, the spray-paint furred around the letters.
He doubted a woman ever got this far.
He turned the knob on the men’s-room door, slipped in, and saw it was empty. Claustrophobically small. The light on his digital watch was a positive beacon, here in the two-watt dim recesses. The whole place stunk so bad of old urine that he wondered if the plumbing was hooked up at all. Still, the power of suggestion being what it was, he stepped to the butt-clogged urinal, pulled out his pecker, and went.
He heard voices out in the hall—Artie and someone else. They must have come out of the ladies’ room.
“Don’t even think about it,” said the other one. He recognized the voice, but couldn’t place it. “It’ll be years before you see a penny of it.”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Artie. “I don’t want it.”
“Yes, you do. You need a place of your own. You can’t live there forever.”
“As long as I want,” said Artie, full of a strange belligerence. “Viv said so.”
“Please, I just ate,” the other sniffed. “Don’t you know the widow Cokes is crazy? You’d do well to get as far from her as you can.”
One set of footsteps walked away. Greg shook the last few drops with a meditative air, put it back in his pants, and zipped up fast. He stepped out into the red-lit hall—and flashed to the day he walked on the set at Universal. The figure back in the shadows, under the mission clock. It was the only time he’d ever heard Maxim Brearley speak, but he had no doubt it was that same man who’d just retreated into the night. He rapped on the ladies’ door.
“Don’t come in,” said a voice inside. “Not unless you got a J and B and soda.”
Greg was at a loss. He tried to think of a clever riposte, by way of announcing himself. He failed.
“Just kidding,” Artie called. “Come in—I can’t stand suspense.”
What Greg saw first, when he pushed the door and went on in, was a woman’s face in the mirror, staring back at him. Of course it was Artie too. He knew that right away. But it almost worked. No matter that the elements, one by one—the ash-blond fall, the sable lashes, hoops at the ears, the lips hot-pink—were frankly overblown. He knew the effect was meant for whiter lights than these, with a no-man’s-land laid down between the audience and the act. He was too close in to see it right.
“My dear,” said Artie, leaning into the mirror to draw the line along one eye. “You’ll never guess who’s walked in.”
It was like he was speaking to someone just across the table—only here, it was himself.
“You’re busy, huh?” said Greg apol
ogetically.
“Oh, I don’t know about that. The show doesn’t start for twenty minutes yet. You got something in mind takes longer than that?”
The room was about six by twelve, with a makeup table wedged between a toilet and a sink. Not grisly like the room across the hall. Just blank and rather seedy. On the wall were blown-up photographs, of Bernhardt’s Hamlet and the Lunts. Then a cracked and smutty poster that must have weathered a season on Shubert Alley: “Katharine Cornell and Brian Aherne in The Barretts of Wimpole Street,” SOLD OUT THROUGH APRIL plastered across it. The Bakelite phone on the makeup stand was the twin to the one in Greg’s apartment. Artie was in his underpants, with a towel at his shoulders. The bentwood hatrack just behind him was loaded with boas and sequined gowns.
“It’s Jasper,” Greg began.
“It always is,” said Artie dryly.
“What I mean is,” Greg went on—too haltingly, somehow. He came off so slow that his charge got watered down with pauses. “See—I figure it had to be you.”
“What had to be me?”
“Killed him,” Greg replied politely.
“Is that so?” said the other vaguely, lifting up the phone. “Greg dear, you’d like a J and B and soda, wouldn’t you?”
“Sure.”
“You’re a real sport.”
He dialed a single digit and ordered up two from the barman. Then he stood up, turned to the hatrack, and started to sift through his evening clothes. He kept his gestures quiet, as if to make it clear he wasn’t setting up diversionary moves. Greg should go on talking—get it all out on the table, so to speak. This may have been nothing but acting. Now was the time, if it ever was.
“Well, now,” Artie said, as if to get things straight, “you went to Vermont. How was it?”
“Muddy,” said Greg. “The whole place smelled of rotten grass. Lots of rain.”
“Hideous, isn’t it? The people die the day they’re born. You found some relics, did you?”
Greg, who was bundled up in a fleece-lined flight jacket, was getting woozier by the minute. He reached right away for his inside pocket—where a flyer would keep his charts. He brought out a yellowed handbill, smoothed the creases out, and dropped it on the table. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream—Saturdays through October, no admission.” In the role of Puck, the freshman whiz Balducci.