EIGHTEEN
ANOTHER BLUE SKY. Another clear, sharp morning, with the smog blown clear to the Pacific’s glinting rim. Every angle of every rooftop and the glinting hubcap of every car were so uncannily sharp it was like some special effect in a big-budget feelie. But none of it felt real. He remembered the lit radio’s hissing, and Wallis Beekins’ voice. For all that his throat was still raw, his elbow throbbed, glass fragments sparkled in the Delahaye’s carpeted footwell and the car still stank of burnt gasoline, whatever had happened yesterday felt like it belonged to some distant age. Those near-last moments on the overlook especially.
Suicide was, he supposed, what men often did, especially in this city. Drive up to some scenic spot and put a hose from the exhaust in through the window. Just let the dark carry you away. Better than a gun; more modern, and far less messy. For women, it was still generally pills, booze, maybe a hot, scented bath and a few deep cuts with a razor. Or you could hook a noose around your neck and jump off a bridge the way Betty Bechmeir had done.
He took Sunset past Barnsdall Park and whatever the builders were putting up in place of the burnt-out lot that had once been Grauman’s Chinese Theater—more shops, probably. Life everywhere. Pretty women. Streetcars, cars, horsedrawn carts and buses and streetsweepers and outdoor cafés all bustled in the sunlight. But, as the land rose and he took the valley road north on this clear smogless day and the whole city began to spread below him, it all looked like some complex checkerboard, and the surrounding mountains were purple-headed Gods, hunched in debate over what game they would next play with all those tiny creatures which scurried beneath.
No other automobiles hovered in his rearview as he drove on toward Stone Canyon, but after what he’d seen last night, he had no intention of driving straight up through Woodsville’s front entrance to Erewhon. He did instead what he should have done the first time around, not to mention the second, and slowed as he got closer to the estate until he saw a wide but unassuming dirt track heading up and off. Places like this always had another way in for tradesmen and garbage collectors. Passing along a tall metal-posted chainlink fence, he pulled off and stopped the Delahaye in scrub. He waited. The sun was already hot. Dust settled and ticked on the car’s panels. Gripping the gun in his pocket, he climbed out, eased the door shut and walked through an open gate into the back of the Woodsville estate.
Nothing more than he’d have expected. Hedges, heaps of grass cuttings and looping power and telephone lines. Then he saw a stooped figure pushing a wheelbarrow down a laurel avenue. Clark barely had to increase his pace to catch up. As he did so, he realized that this was the same guy he’d noticed the first time he’d driven up to Erewhon, pushing what was probably the same wheelbarrow. The way he moved, the whole look of him, was pretty distinctive.
“Hi there.”
The man, little more than a huge boy really, stopped and put down his wheelbarrow and turned. He had the egg-shaped face, loose lower lip, and pudding-bowl haircut of the sort of person Jenny would have described as being blessed by simplicity.
“Was just coming in the back way. Looking for a place called Erewhon.”
“Who are you?” Pudding-bowl didn’t exactly look hostile. But it was hard to tell.
“I, ah, live there. Name’s Daniel Lamotte. Perhaps you know me? Or April Lamotte?”
His bottom lip pushed itself out. “You mean Mrs Lamotte from Erewhon?”
“That’s right. She’s my wife. You know her?”
“Sometimes gets me to do stuff,” he mumbled as he rooted in his ear, then studied his fingertip.
“You, ah, work on keeping all the grounds of Woodsville nice and tidy, right?”
He nodded.
“Sorry—I guess I don’t know your name?”
“Evan.”
“Well, Evan, I’m Mrs Lamotte’s husband. I guess you haven’t seen me much… ?”
Evan just gazed back at him with a look which suggested he really just wanted to get on with pushing his wheelbarrow.
“Tell you what, Evan.” He pointed up between the hedges. “Is Erewhon this way? I’ll just follow you…”
They reached a sort of inner crossroads, where all the back pathways through which this estate was serviced intersected. There were trashcans, lawnmowers, shacks, an old flatbed truck, moldering piles of compost, a lazy drone of flies.
“Don’t happen to have seen my wife around much lately?”
“Like I say. She sometimes gets me to do stuff.”
“You mean in her garden at Erewhon? I guess she gets her own gardeners in usually, though?”
He shrugged.
“Like what kind of thing?”
“Bonfire a couple of days ago. Just help her burn stuff.”
“A… You mean, she was burning things?”
“Just papers.” Another shrug. “She came an’ asked if I’d got some stuff needed burning to help it along. ’Course, I always have…”
“Papers. Right. You, ah, wouldn’t happen to know if she or anyone else is around in Erewhon right now?”
“Don’t think so. Been quiet lately. Saw her car go out, though.”
“You mean—”
“Red Cadillac. Saw it go by out down the road ’bout an hour ago.”
“And she was in it? Alone?”
Evan nodded. He glanced longingly toward the waiting manure heap, and then his wheelbarrow. His eyes were starting to glaze.
“Well, thanks, Evan. You’ve been a big help. Which of these tracks leads to Erewhon by the way? Sorry, but I don’t know this way much…”
“Right up there.” Evan gave Clark a just-must-be-stupid look. “There’s a sign right over the top spells it out.”
Clark was about to turn. Then he stopped. “Say, Evan. Just one last question. You don’t happen to know who does the security around Woodsville—I mean, working here, you must see them about… ?”
“That’d be Mr Hugens.”
“What’s he look like?”
“Mr Hugens? Oh, he’s…” Evan puffed out his cheeks and made a circling movement around his waist with his arms.
“Sure—big old Mr Hugens. Of course. You ain’t seen anybody else around, have you? Guy in a black Mercury sedan with a badge on the side says Gladmont Securities?”
“Only person I seen lately round here ’part from you is the telephone man.”
“Sure, the telephone…” Once more, Clark was about to turn, but, squinting up in the warm sun, he saw that this was also the place where Woodsville’s many phone lines intersected. After bunching against a final, fatter telephone pole, they then traveled down and into a small, concrete-sided shack less agricultural-looking than the others. “So there was some problem or other with the telephones needed fixing?”
Evan nodded. His look had settled to bored.
“He work the wires up on a ladder?”
“… No.”
“He came and worked on the problem right in there, in that little exchange?”
“I guess.”
“What was he like, this telephone guy? Thin? Good looking? Tall?”
Evan just about managed a nod.
Another modern touch in Woodsville’s oh-so-modern world: a new automatic exchange. Pick up a phone, dial out a number and hey presto, you were right through without having to speak to another human being. Clark tried peering in through the window of wired glass. The heavy door had a sign with a Ma Bell logo on it, a warning against trespass, and a bolted hasp with a very thick padlock. He felt a surprising amount of give when he gave it a gentle tug. A harder pull, and the thing simply dropped apart in his hands. Glancing back to see that Evan was busy tipping his wheelbarrow over into a steaming pile of compost, he pulled open the door and slipped inside.
The space was narrow, dimly lit, filled with an electric buzz. A sudden flurry of clicking made him reach into his pocket for his gun. But these were just relays—this was how this place worked. Not that Clark knew about anything electrical unless it ran something
inside a car, but he’d had a salesman come and see him only a few months back, tried to tell him about this new way forward for private investigators: forget about those grubby hotel sheets and dinner receipts and photos, all the modern dick needed was a wire tap. The Feds had been at it for ages—Clark had a dim recollection that it was how they’d done for Al Capone—but now, thanks in no small part to the burgeoning popularity of the feelies, the technology of wire-recording was available to anyone with the need of it, just as long as they weren’t too worried about legalities and could step up a fifteen dollar deposit followed by twelve equal monthly payments of ten.
Another clatter as a call to somewhere went in or out. He could see how the racks of relays were individually labeled with house names. He ran his finger along the dusty housings until he came to the one which, hand-printed on a stuck-on scrap of paper, was labeled EREWHON. He peered more closely at this particular gray-enameled block of clever electrics. Then he checked the ones up and along. There was no doubt. Only the screwheads of Erewhon’s telephone relay showed the clean glint of recently exposed metal.
Re-closing the heavy door, he looked more carefully at the loose padlock before hooking back the latch. In a bright circle, the tumbler for the key had been neatly drilled out.
Erewhon’s glassy rooftops flashed at him from above waving trees as he squeaked open the gate leading to the back lawns. Still keeping close to the perimeter, he worked his way slowly around the grounds. You’d expect some kind of activity at a place like this, even if the lady of the house was out. Pool boys, gardeners, maids, masseurs, florists, handymen—all the legions of the cheaply paid who kept a place like this functioning even in these newly automated days when cars lit your cigarette and phones dialed themselves. But everything about Erewhon felt empty. No obvious movement at the windows—or cars outside the front, either, when he got to the side which faced the drive.
Then he caught an unmistakable smell. Watching out for poison ivy, he pushed through a recently crushed stretch of thicker undergrowth and reached a wide, clear black circle of burnt ground. It looked like one of those flying saucers people had started seeing had landed here. Taking hold of a burnt stick, he picked over the bonfire’s residue. A few crusty leaves of what might have once been sheaves of paper adhered to the earth, but the next rain would get rid of even those. Skirting the edges and about to give up, his eyes caught a flash of blue. Poking through the withered grass, he picked up the corner of a butterfly-clipped sheaf of blue paper. Typed repeatedly on what was left of the end sheets were the beginnings of the words:
Wake Up
He dropped the scrap into his outer pocket. Then he made his way at a quick stoop between the bushes toward Erewhon. The house shone. Every window was closed, and every room he looked into seemed still and dark. Assuming now the easy posture of someone who had every right to be here, he walked around to the graveled front. This time, the sliding doors didn’t move when he climbed the steps, but the bright silver key on his keychain fitted the black marble inset with smooth perfection.
NINETEEN
ABSOLUTE QUIET. Not a breath of movement. That curving staircase which seemed to hang on nothing but shadows. A gloss on the floors so deep that walking over them felt like crossing a lake. He reached down into his suit coat pocket and felt the Colt’s ribbed wooden grip. All the doors along the corridor which had previously been open to the garden were shut. With so much glass, and on a day this warm, the air was overpoweringly hot. There was a sour and musty smell, too; the big flower arrangements which had seemed so impressive before were wilting now as the water in their vases evaporated to sludge.
The wraith wasn’t running this time, either. Just an empty plinth, with wires running out the back and a switch he hadn’t noticed before on the side, although he certainly had no inclination to try to turn the thing on. The big room where April Lamotte had seen him, with its trophy tapestries and decorations, smelled as stale as the corridor, although it wasn’t quite so hot. He’d been expecting—he didn’t know what. But something. Instead, every which way he turned, all he saw was reflections, illusions, shadows.
The place felt almost overpoweringly empty. Yet everything was neat. Everything was just-so. The sort of neat and just-so, it occurred to him, that comes when someone tries hard to scrub away at their life until all that’s left is surface brilliance.
He checked the other downstairs rooms, and down in the kitchens and the quarters for the maids, which were empty as well: the mattresses bare, the wardrobes clear of anything but a few coathangers. He peered inside big refrigerators and freezers; barely anything in them, either. He sniffed at the drains, and at the few drinks left in the drinks cabinet. He looked behind picture frames and inside toilet cisterns. Nothing, zilch, nada …
Then there was a study, a small room far too tidy to be somewhere in which a guy like Daniel Lamotte would ever work. The desk was bare apart from a new black cradle-set bakelite phone, a letter-opener and some geometrically arranged pens. The desk drawers contained nothing but more stationery. He pulled them all the way out and felt around and underneath just to be sure, but found nothing more. The wood double file cabinet beside the desk was unlocked. The two big drawers held too many bills and receipts for him to do more than flick though, although he didn’t doubt that any incriminating stuff would have been incinerated in that bonfire. But what stuff? And where exactly was April Lamotte?
He paid more attention to the bank statements, all of which were recent, and stacked with the kind of figures he wasn’t used to seeing in his own communications from the Cali Fed and Gen. There’d been some big payments in, and then out again, recently. Tens of thousands of dollars since the spring. More evidence of someone getting ready to head off somewhere? He riffled back into the lower cabinet where he thought he’d noticed some legal-looking documents, and found secured loans, mortgages, terms of indenture. He remembered April Lamotte standing in the strange gloom of that room down the corridor. I won’t beat about the bush, Mr Gable. Dan and I need the money … That wasn’t quite the picture he was getting here, but it was certainly the case that she’d used Erewhon’s considerable value to get hold of a lot of fresh capital, and then done something with it all which looked to involve transferring large amounts of cash.
Blackmail? Was that it? Or maybe she was shunting everything to one side before she tried to declare for bankruptcy? Leaving papers like this which told any kind of story might have seemed odd, but Clark reckoned that everything here was either easy for someone else to check up on or was already on public record, and would have raised even more suspicions by its absence. What was missing here was the rest of the story. Whatever that story actually was.
He slid the two drawers back without taking any of the papers. After all, he had a key, and he was getting a feeling by now that April Lamotte wouldn’t be coming back to Erewhon any time soon. Then, on second thoughts, he crouched down and reopened the file cabinets and felt around the inside backs and corners. His fingertips brushed something. He leaned harder and winced at the soreness of his bruised elbow. Then he had it. He lifted it out.
A torn out scrap of newspaper. On one side there was nothing but a bit of newsprint sky. The other showed an advert.
Nero Investigations
Fully State-Licensed
Discreet and Professional
“We Provide Answers Without Any Questions”
Huntingdon 1799
She’d been coy enough about many things, but she’d admitted using some kind of private dick to find him, and Nero Investigations fitted the bill. Thing was, he knew who ran the set-up. Abe Penn might be a few steps up from him in the PI foodchain—with a valid license and an office with a working phone and maybe even a service secretary—but Clark couldn’t believe that Abe would set him up with someone like April Lamotte without warning him. There might be little honor left in his particular trade. But there was some.
He picked up the phone and dialed Abe’s number, picturing th
ose relays down in that little exchange as he heard the clicks and buzzes. The line rang. It rang again. On the tenth ring, he put the handset back down in its cradle.
He looked more closely at the one picture on the wall. It was a glossy image in the full garish color of a realtor’s brochure of a pine cabin surrounded by trees and the glimpsed peaks of mountains. The gold lettering said, Larch Lodge, Bark Rise, Sierra Madre. Not the sort of place which any backwoodsman would ever inhabit, but he remembered how April Lamotte had said something about a place they owned up in the mountains that Dan had gone to in one of his failed attempts to reconnect. He lifted the picture down, worked the photo out from its frame and stuffed it, along with the Nero Securities advert, in an inside pocket.
Upstairs, everything was just as empty, and just as swish. Along with a pool room which looked to have never been used to play pool in and several pristine guest suites, he found a dedicated feelie viewing room. It also functioned as a kind of library, with leather, brass and wooden fittings, although there wasn’t a single book. The tall, dustless shelves along the side walls were stacked instead with boxed reels of filmstock and feelie wire. After all, why would a modern writer actually need to read? He studied the long rows with their title labels stuck beneath them for a few minutes, but they meant little to him—with his interest in the feelies, it was hardly likely they would. But yeah, now here was something just a touch out of place. There were odd gaps. Missing titles that were somehow suddenly as obvious, and as recent, as punched-out teeth. One of the labeled gaps he even recognized. It was The Virgin Queen.
He headed back along the thickly carpeted landing to a final set of double doors which, it turned out, led to the main bedroom suite. Midnight blue velvet curtains hung half-open before the shut doors of a Juliet balcony. White sheepskin rugs and low white divans floated amid their reflections like puffy summer clouds. There was a frieze behind the bed: a marquetry of polished woods suggestive of flames or the wings of birds. At least here, though, there was evidence of recent activity. The ash tray on the glass bedside table next to the phone was an over-brimming heap of pastel stubs, and there were several small indentations on the side of the mattress as if someone had repeatedly sat down and got up again from it, although the bed didn’t look slept in. Still, he peeled back the blankets and carefully inspected the sheets. Freshly laundered. He detected none of the usual stains or scents.
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