San Diego Lightfoot Sue

by Tom Reamy

  She spotted it behind some shovels, misted over with cobwebs. She pushed the shovels aside, grasped the handle, and lifted the gasoline can. It was heavy. She shook it. There was a satisfying slosh. She smiled grimly and started back to the house, walking more lopsided than ever.

  Then she stopped and gaped when she saw Leo Whittaker’s car parked out of sight behind the house. She hurried on, letting the heavy can bounce against the ground with every other step. She opened the kitchen door and shrieked.

  Mrs. Gilbreath stood in the doorway, smiling pleasantly at her, and holding a butcher knife. Without reasoning, without even thinking, Miss Mahan took the handle of the heavy gasoline can in both hands and swung it as hard as she could.

  The sharp rim around the bottom caught Mrs. Gilbreath across the face, destroying one eye, shearing away her nose, and opening one cheek. Her expression didn’t change. Blood flowed over her pleasant smile as she staggered drunkenly backward.

  Miss Mahan lost her balance completely. The momentum of the gasoline can swung her around and she sat in the snow, flat on her skinny bottom. The can slipped from her fingers and bounced across the ground with a descending scale of clangs. She lurched to her feet and looked in the kitchen door. Mrs. Gilbreath had slammed against the wall and was sitting on the floor, still smiling her gory smile, her right arm twitching like a metronome.

  Miss Mahan scrambled after the gasoline can and hid it in the pantry. She ducked up the kitchen stairs when she heard footsteps.

  Mr. Gilbreath walked through the kitchen, ignoring Mrs. Gilbreath, and went out the back door. Miss Mahan hurried up the stairs. Oh Lord, she thought, I’ll be so sore, I can’t move for a week.

  She entered the upstairs hall from the opposite end. She stepped carefully over the debris from the wall shattered by the djinn. She looked in the bedrooms on the other side. The first one was empty with a layer of dust, but the second… She stared. It looked like a set from a Maria Montez movie. A fire burned in the fireplace and Leo Whittaker lay stark-naked on the fur-covered bed.

  “Leo Whittaker!” she bellowed. “Get up from there and put your clothes on this instant!” But he didn’t move. He was alive; his chest moved gently as he breathed. She went to him, trying to keep from looking at his nakedness. Then she thought, what the dickens? There’s no point in being a prude at this stage. Her eyes widened in admiration. Then she ceded him a few additional points for being able to satisfy Twilla. Why couldn’t she have found a beautiful man like that when she was twenty-three, she wondered. She sighed. It wouldn’t have made any difference, she guessed. It would have all turned out the same.

  She put her hand on his shoulder and shook him. He moaned softly and shifted on the bed. “Leo! Wake up! What’s the matter with you?” She shook him again. He acted drugged or something. She saw a long golden hair on his stomach and plucked it off, throwing it on the floor. She took a deep breath and slapped him in the face. He grunted. His head lifted slightly and then fell back. “Leo!” she shouted and slapped him again. His body jerked and his eyes clicked open but didn’t focus.

  “Leo!” Slap!

  “Owww,” he said and looked at her. “Miss Mahan?”

  “Leo, are you awake?”

  “Miss Mahan? What are you doing here? Is Lana all right?” He sat up in the bed and saw the room. He grunted in bewilderment.

  “Leo. Get up and get dressed. Hurry!” she commanded. She heard the starter of a car grinding. Leo looked at himself, turned red, and tried to move in every direction at once. Miss Mahan grinned and went to the window. She could hear Leo thumping and bumping as he tried to put his clothes on. The car motor caught and steam billowed from the carriage house. “Hurry, Leo!” The black Chrysler began slowly backing out, Mr. Gilbreath at the wheel. Then the motor stalled and died.

  He’s trying to get away, she thought. No, he’s only a puppet. He’s planning to take Twilla away! She turned back to Leo. He was dressed, sitting on the edge of the bed, putting on his shoes. He looked at her shame-faced, like a little boy.

  “Leo,” she said in her sternest, most no-nonsense, unruly child voice. The car motor started again. “Don’t ask any questions. Go down the kitchen stairs, and to your car. Hurry as fast as you can. Don’t let Mr. Gilbreath see you. Bring your car around to the front and to the end of the lane. Block the lane so Mr. Gilbreath can’t get out. Keep yourself locked in your car because he’s dangerous. Do you understand?”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Never mind. Will you do what I said?”

  He nodded.

  “All right, then. Hurry!” They left the bedroom. Leo gave it one last bewildered glance. They ran down the kitchen stairs as fast as they could, Leo keeping her steady. She propelled him out the back door before he could see Mrs. Gilbreath still smiling and twitching. The black Chrysler was just pulling around to the front of the house.

  She ran to the pantry, retrieved the gasoline can, and staggered into the entry hall. She could see Mr. Gilbreath getting out of the car. She locked the door and hobbled into the parlor. Twilla had been moved to the divan and covered with a quilt. He shouldn’t have moved her, Miss Mahan thought, with an injury like, that it could have killed her.

  Twilla saw her enter and began screeching curses at her. Miss Mahan shook her head. She put the gasoline can down by the divan and tried to unscrew the cap on the spout. It wouldn’t budge. It was rusted solid. Miss Mahan growled in frustration. The front door began to rattle and clatter.

  Twilla’s curses stopped suddenly and Miss Mahan looked at her. Twilla was staring at her in round-eyed horror. Miss Mahan went to the fireplace and got the poker. Twilla’s eyes followed her. She drew the poker back and swung it as hard as she could at the gasoline can. It made a very satisfactory hole. She swung the poker several more times and tossed it away. She picked up the can as Twilla began to scream and plead. She rested it on the back of the divan and stripped away the blanket. She tipped it over and pale pink streams of gasoline fell on Twilla.

  Glass shattered in the front door. Miss Mahan left the can resting on the back of the divan, still gurgling out its contents, and went to the fireplace again. She picked up the box of matches as Mr. Gilbreath walked in. His expression didn’t change as he hurried toward her. She took a handful of wooden matches. She struck them all on the side of the box and tossed them on Twilla.

  Twilla’s screams and the flames ballooned upward together. Mr. Gilbreath shifted directions and waded into the flames, reaching for Twilla. Miss Mahan ran out of the house as fast as she could.

  She was past the black Chrysler, its motor still running, when the gasoline can exploded. Leo had parked his car where she told him. Now he jumped out and ran to her. They looked at the old Peacock house.

  It was old and dry as dust. The flames engulfed it completely. The snow was melting in a widening circle around it. They had to back all the way to Leo’s car because of the heat.

  They heard a siren and turned to see Sheriff Walker’s car hurrying down the lane, followed by some of the funeral procession on its way back to Hawley. The ones who hadn’t turned down the road were stopped on the highway, looking.

  “Leo, dear,” she said. “Do you know what you’re doing here?”

  He rubbed his hand across his face, his eyes still a little bleary. “Yes, I think so. It all seems like a dream. Twilla… Miss Mahan,” he said in pain. “I don’t know why I did it.”

  “I do,” she said soothingly and put her arm around him. “And it wasn’t your fault. You have to believe that. Don’t tell Lana or anyone. Forget it ever happened. Do you understand?”

  He nodded as Robin Walker got out of his car and ran toward them. He looks very handsome in his uniform, she thought. My, my, I’ve suddenly become very conscious of good-looking men. Too bad it’s thirty years too late.

  “Miss Mahan? Leo? What’s going on here?” Robin asked in bewilderment. “Is anyone still in there?” He looked at her feet. “Miss Mahan, why are you runn
ing around in the snow with only one shoe on?”

  She followed his gaze. “I’ll declare,” she said in astonishment. “I didn’t know I’d lost it. Leo, Robin, let’s get in your car. I have a lot to tell you both.”

  Miss Mahan sat before the fireplace in her comfortable old house, tearing the pages from her Twilla journal and feeding them one at a time to the fire. Paul Sullivan had doctored her cuts and bruises and she felt wonderful—stiff and sore, to be sure—but wonderful. Tomorrow the news would be all over town that, with brilliant detective work, Robin Walker, aided by Leo Whittaker, had discovered that Twilla Gilbreath’s father was Yvonne’s killer. In an attempt to arrest him, the house had burned and all three had perished.

  She had told Robin and Leo everything that happened—well, almost everything. She had left out her own near encounter with Dazreel and a few other related items. She had also given the impression—

  sort of—that the house had burned by accident. Poor, sweet Robin hadn’t believed a word of it. But, after hearing Leo’s account, taking a look at her demolished car, and seeing the footprints in the snow, he finally, grudgingly, agreed to go along with it. And it did explain all the mysteries of Yvonne’s death.

  She knew the public story was full of holes and loose ends, but she also knew the people in Hawley. They wanted to hear that an outsider had done it, and they wanted to hear that he had been discovered. Their own imaginations would fill in the gaps.

  Lana Whittaker didn’t really believe that Leo was working with Robin all those nights he was away, but they loved each other enough. They’d be all right.

  She fed the last pages to the fire and looked around her parlor. She decided to put up a tree this year. She hadn’t bothered with one in years. And a party. She’d have a party. There hadn’t been more than three people in the house at one time in ages.

  She hobbled creakily up the stairs, humming “Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly,” considerably off key, heading for the attic to search for the box of Christmas tree ornaments.

  Under the Hollywood Sign

  I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I noticed him. I suppose I had been subliminally aware of him for some time, though he was just standing there with the rest of the crowd. Anyway, I had other things on my mind: a Pinto and a Buick were wrapped around each other like lettuce leaves. The paramedics had two of them out, wrapped in plastic sheets waiting for the meat wagon, and were cutting out a third with a torch. He appeared to be in the Buick, but you couldn’t really tell.

  My partner Carnehan and I were holding back the crowd of gawkers. A couple of bike cops in their gestapo uniforms were keeping the traffic moving on Cahuenga, not letting any of them stop and get out. But there were still twenty or twenty-five of them standing there—eyes bright, noses crinkled, mouths disapproving.

  All except him.

  That’s one of the reasons I noticed him in particular. He wasn’t wearing that horrified, fascinated expression they all seem to have. He might have been watching anything—or nothing. His face was smooth and placid. I think that’s the first time I ever saw a face totally without expression. It wasn’t dull or blank or lifeless. No, there was vitality there. It just simply wasn’t doing anything at the moment.

  And he was… Don’t get the wrong idea—my crotch doesn’t get tight at the sight of an attractive young man. But there’s only one word to describe him—beautiful!

  I’ve seen my share of pretty boys—the ones that flutter and the ones that don’t. It seems the prettier they are, the more trouble they get into. But he wasn’t that kind of beautiful.

  Even though the word is used these days to describe practically everything, it was the only one that fitted. I thought at first lie was very young: nineteen, twenty, not more than twenty-one. But then I got the impression he was much older, though I don’t know why, because he still looked twenty. He was about five-ten, a hundred and sixty-seventy pounds—one of those bodies the hero of the book always has but that you never see in real life.

  His hair was red, or it might have just been the light from the flashers. There were no peculiarities of feature; just a neutral perfection. I’ve heard it said that perfect beauty is dull, that it takes an imperfection to make a face interesting. Whoever said it had never seen this kid.

  He was standing with his hands in his pockets, watching the guys with the torch, neither interested nor uninterested. I guess I was staring at him, because his head turned and he looked directly at me.

  I could smell the rusty odor of the antifreeze dribbling from the busted radiators and the sharp ozone of the acetylene and the always remembered smell of blood. A coyote began yipping somewhere in the darkness.

  Then a couple of kids got too close and I had to hustle them out of the way. When I looked back, he was no longer there.

  They finally got the third one out of the Buick. When they pulled him out I could see the wet brown stain all over the seat of his pants where his bowels had relaxed in death. The ambulance picked up all three of them and the wrecker hauled off the two cars still merged as one. Part of the mess was dragging on the street and I could hear the scraping for a long time. The bike cops did a few flashy turns and roared away. The crowd started to wander off, and Carnehan and I began sweeping the broken glass from the pavement.

  But there was only one thing I could think of: I couldn’t remember the color of his eyes.

  Nothing much happened the rest of the night. We cruised the Boulevard a few times, but there wasn’t anything going on. A few hustlers still lounged around the Gold Cup and the Egyptian, never giving up hope. There was no point in hassling them—they’d just say they were waiting for a bus, and we couldn’t prove they weren’t. It was a pretty scruffy-looking bunch this late in the morning. The presentable ones had scored a long time ago. You could probably get most of these with an offer of breakfast.

  Carnehan reached behind the seat and pulled an apple from the paper sack he always kept back there. He took a bite that sounded like a rifle shot and then offered me one. “No, thanks.”

  “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” He grinned and took another bite.

  “You’re keeping the entire AMA at bay.”

  He laughed; partly chewed apple dribbled down his chin. He wiped if off with the back of his hand. I kept my eyes on the street. “Why don’t you eat soft apples? They’re quiet.”

  “I like the hard ones.”

  We stopped a car with only one taillight and gave the guy a warning ticket.

  Then the sun was coming up. It was hitting the tops of the Hollywood Hills and illuminating the Hollywood sign. It looked decent from this far away. You couldn’t tell it was made of rotting timbers and sagging sheet metal clinging in the wind. From here you couldn’t see the obscenities scrawled on it.

  We went back to the station, reported, and then into the locker room. The rest of the graveyard shift were wandering in, showering, and changing out of their uniforms. Cunningham has the locker next to mine. He had been on the Pansy Patrol and was wearing a shirt unbuttoned to the waist, no underwear, and pants so tight you could count every hair on his ass.

  Wharton, one of the police psychiatrists, was leaning against the lockers talking to him. Doc was on his favorite theme again. He was telling Cunningham why he, Cunningham, was so successful on the Pansy Patrol. The fags recognized a kindred spirit; the fags always knew one of their own kind; if Cunningham would only stop fooling himself, just stop deluding himself that he was straight, just know himself, just start living a conscious life, he would be a happier, more fulfilled person.

  I had been on the Pansy Patrol with Cunningham a few times and had seen him operate. I wasn’t completely sure Doc was wrong. Cunningham was peeling off the tight pants and I watched in fascination, although I’d seen it before, as the sizable bulge in his crotch stayed with the pants.

  Poor Cunningham.

  He was standing there naked with a slight smile on his face, putting the pants neatly on a hanger, listenin
g to Doc’s clarinet voice. He looked a lot like the cop on “Adam-12,” whatever his name is, the kid. The boys had even called him “Adam-12” for a while until they got tired of it. I couldn’t keep from comparing him to the guy I had seen at the wreck, but Cunningham didn’t compare at all. He was just a good-looking kid with a slim muscular body, and not much equipment. But it didn’t seem to bother him. He always grinned and said it wasn’t size that counted, it was technique.

  I took off my own pants and looked at myself. I wasn’t as young or as good-looking as Cunningham, but I did all right on the Pansy Patrol. I was bulkier and more heavily muscled and hairier; I guess I appealed to the rough trade crowd. I was never very comfortable without underwear, and thank God I didn’t have to wear padding.

  Wharton finished his catalogue of Cunningham’s emotional failings. Cunningham looked at me and winked. “I don’t really know anything about it, Doc, but maybe the reason I’m not interested in sex with another man is because I’m just not interested in sex with another man.”

  Doc’s lips got a little tight and his face was slightly flushed. I knew Cunningham had been reading Kingsley Amis again and had probably maneuvered Doc into the whole conversation—and Doc was eminently maneuverable. I’d heard most of it before, so I got a towel and started for the showers.

  Cunningham followed me and Wharton followed him.

  “You’re right, Cunningham, you don’t know anything about it!”

  I turned on the water and began soaping. Cunningham got next to me and Doc stood at the door, still talking. Cunningham looked at me and grinned and said loudly, “Sorry, Doc, I can’t hear you with the water running!”

  There were about ten other guys in the shower, grinning at each other. Cunningham leaned toward me. “Hey, Rankin, you notice how Doc always manages to look in the showers?”