Officer Doyle’s hand squeezed Clark’s shoulder. “For the record, do you recognize this person?”
“Yes. It’s April Lamotte.”
The cop’s hand squeezed again. “Maybe you want to be left alone in here with your wife for a moment?”
“No. It’s okay.”
He stepped back. The young cop was about to pull the sheet back up to cover the body, but the whole scene still didn’t seem real. He reached out to touch the translucent flesh of April Lamotte’s shoulder. He was half expecting his fingers to pass right through, but all he felt was cold flesh.
TWENTY THREE
HE WAS SAT DOWN in a fish tank with a silvered glass wall. What looked to be that same picture he’d seen of Herbert Kisberg on the Senserama billboard smiled at him from beneath crossed stars and stripes and Liberty League flags. There was also a poster of a woman wearing a few rags and not much else brandishing a sword labeled Truth and Democracy at an ape with the words World Communism written across its skull. Some handy draftsman had given the ape Negroid features and added a speech bubble. Sorry, Lady, the ape was saying, even us coons caint sometimes get it up.
He smoked his last Lucky Strike. Officer Doyle sat on the far side of a scarred wooden desk. Officer Reynolds sat with a pencil and a notebook in the room’s farthest corner. Both of them were also smoking. If there was a time to come clean about this whole stupid façade, the message trickled through his brain, it was now.
“What I need to do, Mr Lamotte,” Officer Doyle said, leaning a roll of uniform-encased belly fat toward him across the desk, “is to prepare a report which I can then pass on to the Coroner’s Investigator. There’ll need to be an inquest. There’ll also have to be an autopsy, I’m sorry to say. We need to establish cause of death, although the facts look pretty clear-cut.”
Clark heard the muscles of his neck creak and click as he nodded yes. “Basically, a report was radioed in from the Forest Rangers’ office at Arrowhead around noon yesterday morning. Like I said, some hikers had found this car the way I described and with your wife’s body in it. The engine was still running, although it was near out of gas. Working back, we reckon she probably parked there between one to two hours earlier. Say, about ten, or ten thirty. We got the call here in the city because of the deceased’s presumed identity.” The cop cleared his throat. “And Officer Reynolds and me arrived there about the same time as the tow truck and the Coroner’s photographer. It’s an overlook up above Running Springs. Pines and that kind of stuff. It’s a pretty spot. Any idea why your wife might be driving out that particular way… ?”
“I think we’ve got a lodge up there.”
Officer Doyle glanced at his colleague. “Think?”
“No. We have. I’m sorry. I mean—”
“Sure. I know this is difficult. Just take your time. It’s okay. Anyway, we got your wife’s ID and address straight off, but when we turned up at the, ah, Lamotte residence this afternoon, there was no one around but this gardener guy who sees to the grounds of the surrounding estate.”
“Evan.”
“Yeah.” The cop flicked through his notebook. “Mr Evan Brinton. Weird sort of guy, if you don’t mind me saying. He wasn’t much help. And your house was all locked up. No residents or employees. We tried the neighbors—discreetly, I might add—but nothing going. We finally got to Blixden Avenue through your tax records, Mr Lamotte, believe it or not. Oh, yeah—and Mr Evan Briton informed us that you’d been talking to him earlier that same morning. Said you’d come the back way where he works. Does that sound right to you?”
“April and I were out last night. I’m a screenwriter, and we’ve—I’ve—just signed a new contract for a big feelie. We had a meal as a celebration. It was at a place up above Silver Lake called Chateau Bansar.”
“Can you spell that?”
He did. The cop wrote it down.
“Then I dropped her off at Erewhon… .I guess it was around midnight. And I drove back Downtown. I just didn’t imagine…”
“So you didn’t spend last night at home with your wife?”
“No.”
“Any particular reason?”
“I spend a lot of my time at my place Downtown. I find it easier to write there.”
“And sleep?”
“Yeah. That’s how our marriage works.”
“I see.” The old cop nodded. “I mean, Mrs Doyle and I, we share the same house an’ all. But that’s hardly any of my business.”
Clark closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Saw April Lamotte leaving Chateau Bansar. Saw her in his arms and sobbing tears, with the car valet and waiters as witness. “We’d had an argument at the restaurant.”
“About anything in particular?”
He shrugged in a way that he hoped might express the hopelessness of trying to explain any marital argument.
“And then you came back to Erewhon to see her again this morning?”
“Yes.”
“So went into the house at—what?”
“Like Even said, it was around ten this morning. And like I said, we’d had an argument the night before. And there was this big contract. Things that needed sorting out…” The screwed-down chair wouldn’t move when he tried to shift it forward. “I came the back way because kids in downtown had thrown a stone in through the window of my car the night before and I didn’t want her to see the damage. Of course, she wasn’t there.”
“Find anything unusual this morning inside your house?”
“No. Absolutely nothing.”
“So, Mr Lamotte, to be exact, the last time you saw your wife was when you dropped her off last night after that meal?”
“Yeah.” A muscle at the corner of his eye pulsed. “That’s correct.”
“And you didn’t hear from her after that?”
“No—and before you ask, I was at Senserama studios with the production executive who’s bought my feelie script from about noon this morning to the time you saw me arrive at Blixden Avenue. His name’s Timmy Townsend. You can check up with him if you like. Or why don’t you try asking a woman named Barbara something who lives next door to my apartment, if you haven’t already done so? She came by to give me some mail early this morning…” He wiped at his mouth. The shocked indignation was starting to feel genuine. “Look—my wife’s down in the morgue and all you’re doing is asking a whole lot of questions. Where is this leading?”
“I’m sorry, Mr Lamotte.” Officer Doyle’s face glistened like pink marble. “This is just a part of the job we have to do. Someone’s died, and we have to try to find out as much as we can, and as quickly as possible. I ah…” He pulled at his ear, then glanced over to Officer Reynolds, who inclined his head in a slow nod. “This is an even more difficult question. Mr Lamotte—was there any reason for you to think, fear or suspect that your wife might kill herself?”
Images of April Lamotte. Red-haired and beautiful in that green pantsuit as she paced Erewhon, and even redder haired and more beautiful when she drove up in the Delahaye along Sunset to pick him up what felt like half a century ago. Her kissing him. The smell of Chanel Cuir de Russie. The lipstick taste of her mouth. The wet push of her tongue. The determined and well-organized way she’d set out to kill him. “No,” he said finally. “She was… She liked to be in control. She’s not the type who’d ever give up. Not unless…” But unless what? He saw her again at Erewhon. And then outside that swish restaurant. His eyes prickled as if they were filling with dust. A swishing, windy sound rushed though his ears.
“Right.” Once again, as if looking for some signal, the old cop glanced over at the young cop. “Did Mrs Lamotte like hiking, the out of doors?”
“Not especially.”
He nodded. “She was just wearing regular low heels and slacks. Apart from a road map and some handmade cigarettes, the car was pretty much empty. But there was this…”
Officer Reynolds stood up. He walked over and laid a small reporters’ springbound notepad on the ta
ble, turned it around so Clark could see it properly. Then he sat down again. The handwriting on the front sheet was the same neat script he’d seen on some of the documents in Erewhon’s study.
The way everythings happened I cant
Im sorry. I thought I could make it
I am afraid. I am a coward. I am sorry for everything. If I had done this a long time ago. it would have saved a lot of
Here I am in this dead and empty place
TWENTY FOUR
THE TWO COPS LED HIM out of the fish tank and pointed him down the corridor toward the restroom. He felt the swaying bulk of the snubnose Colt as he rooted in his pockets for enough change to get a fresh pack of Lucky Strikes from a row of vending machines, then a tepid cup of cardboard-flavored coffee, which he knocked back in one. He checked his watch, but the hands had stopped; it had been more than a day before, and a long way back in Venice, when he’d last wound it.
The smell of the restroom flung itself at him as he pushed through the door. The place looked like it had seen some very heavy use, and absolutely no cleaning, for at least the last couple of days. Make that weeks. Cubicle doors hung broken. Several of the toilets and the whole length of the urinal trough had overflowed. The floor was awash with translucent heaps of paper, toilet blocks, cigarette butts, newspapers, and yellow lakes of piss set with heaped islands of turds. Even though this was a mens’ restroom, there were even a few sodden and bloodied scraps of what looked like women’s sanitary pads. Pissing up against a wall outside would probably be more hygienic, but he picked his way across the drier spots toward the one toilet cubicle which gave an impression, misleading as it turned out, that it might be properly functioning.
He wondered as he pissed into the near-overflowing bowl about all the people who came through a place like City Hall, and the business of life which got done here. Births and deaths. Taxes and cadavers. Crimes and punishments. Threats and beatings up. No wonder this itchy sense of dread and disappointed waiting had seeped into its walls so soon after it was built. Made with sand from California’s fifty eight counties and water from its twenty one missions—a lot of Angelinos liked to say the next earthquake would show the folly of ever putting it up. Unthinkingly, he pulled the flush, then jumped back. But he needn’t have worried. It didn’t work.
There was a single sink on the way out. With the stains which drooled down its sides and the rusted steel mirror hung sideways above it, it made the one in Daniel Lamotte’s pad in Blixden Apartments look like the height of luxury, but he felt he had to use something to try to get himself to feel clean. Balling a handkerchief in his hands, he worked open the faucet, and was rewarded by a surprising gush of hot water. No soap, of course, but he gratefully rinsed his hands and took off the glasses to splash his face. This water was about the first good experience he’d ever had in City Hall. It cleared his head—almost shook something out—until he remembered April Lamotte’s half-beautiful corpse. Things she’d said came tumbling back to him.
I’m asking you not to leave, Mr Gable. More than asking …
You’re not quite the hard-bitten cynic you like to think you are. You’re worse. You’re just an outright romantic …
I sometimes wonder. I mean, even today … What the hell’s it all for?
People, when they first came here from back east to make movies, they said it was because of the quality of the light. What they didn’t talk about was the quality of the dark…
He could even hear the cadence of her voice. He spluttered and gasped. A sense of dread passed over him as he put the glasses back on and blinked into the lopsided steel mirror, but the face which peered back at him was still mostly his own. And the City Hall noises which he’d heard earlier—the echoing screams, the doors banging, that odd hissing sound—were louder here. Even in midst of death and all that, life went on… Still, it felt weirdly cold, as if a window had been pushed open, although this restroom was entirely enclosed. And that hissing sound… .He tried twisting the faucet off harder to see if that would make it stop. It didn’t.
Dark streamers seemed to be flapping behind him when he glanced again into the mirror. It was as if an invisible wind was blowing, but nothing actually seemed to be physically moving. Apart, that was, from the hairs on the back of his neck, and the skin along his spine. He turned, expecting—he wasn’t sure what… Nothing but filthy cubicles, and one of the striplights in the ceiling flickering on and off. That was what he was hoping for.
The clamor was louder now, bringing the hollow howl of voices, the flap and bang of doors carried through dark spaces. And it wasn’t coming from some other part of City Hall. He was certain of that now. His skin chilled. He felt giddy. Something sour and bad and airless was coating his tongue.
Then he saw it again. At first it was just a substanceless blur—like looking at the shimmer of a dust devil across a summer field. Then, and this was somehow more disturbing still, it actually started to act like a dust devil, and pluck up scraps of the wet mess over which it hovered and draw them up into a loose but increasingly defined swirl. It grew a shape of sorts, legs at first, and then a torso, and a gathering suggestion of arms. It no longer resembled a dust devil. If it looked like anything at all, flapping as it was with a mess of toilet paper, piss and ordure, it was like some schoolboy mixture of the mummy and the invisible man. But it was horrible—and the horror, as a face finally began to grow, had nothing to do with filth of which it was made. What it emanated was a sense of inexpressible pain. He got an impression of broken limbs, destroyed flesh, of mouths, eyes, faces, all differently distorted, but equally agonized.
“What the hell are you?”
He didn’t even realize that he’d spoken, but the shifting thing seemed to take heed of his voice. For a moment, there was a sense that the shapes fighting within it tensed, cowered. Then, in a shriek of light, they dissolved. Not so much vanishing as spreading out, slamming into the walls, leaving nothing but a shocked silence and the bathetic plop of sodden toilet paper to the floor. Sour ripples washed out to him. Whatever it was that he’d just witnessed, it had been real.
TWENTY FIVE
CITY HALL SMELLED ONCE AGAIN of nothing but sweat and old coffee as he walked back along the corridor from the restroom toward the solidly unmistakable figure of Officer Doyle standing at its far end.
“You okay, fella?”
For lack of any better response, he nodded.
“May as well get you home. That place up in the hills?”
Erewhon’s glass walls. Its endless swallowing reflections. That medicine cabinet. April Lamotte’s bed. “I think I’d prefer to go back to Bunker Hill.”
“Not a problem.”
“What happens next?”
“I think that’s about it, Mr Lamotte. This of all times, I can’t thank you enough for being so cooperative. Just so as you know, it’ll probably be a few days before the Coroner’s Department release the body. You’ll need to get in touch with a chapel of rest.”
“A what?”
“Chapel of rest’s what a lot of the undertakers in this city like to call themselves now.”
“Right.”
“’Fraid we’ll have to keep hold of your wife’s car and possessions for a while as well until the Coroner delivers his report. The car’s in the pound. Still works okay as far as I know, but you might need to show it to your insurers. Her other stuff’s all bagged up—her clothes and things. It’s evidence until the case is formally closed, although we can let you have the money and keys and so forth. You want that sorted now?”
He hesitated only fractionally before he said yes.
He could tell the old cop was switching off, the way he was left alone with a mailbag stuffed with April Lamotte’s belongings. But he’d never felt comfortable about the part of his work which involved going through other people’s clothing. Especially if they happened to be dead. But here it all was; the things any woman would probably wear if she went out for a morning drive into the hills, although the lab
els were more than averagely expensive. Bra and panties. Socks and shoes. Slacks with a good press in them. A linen blouse which still felt laundry-crisp. Everything reeked of carfumes far more strongly than her body had, and he had to draw his hand away when he touched a crust of drying vomit. His vision swayed. He looked around the little room—at a broken chair, at a notice board pinned with dates for the Vice Squad Sea Fisherman’s Club which petered out back in ’38—daring anything to come, anything to happen. Nothing did.
He made himself feel in April Lamotte’s pockets. Found only a handkerchief, keys. He checked them against his own keychain. Apart from the ones which belonged to the Cadillac and Blixden Apartments, they were the same. There was a small purse. He unclipped the clasp. A clip of about thirty dollars, a silver lighter, a spare handkerchief, the same sunglasses she’d worn when she picked him up, and a silver holder for a half dozen of those pastel cigarettes. That, and a pencil. The point was still sharp—used for no more than a few lines. Wherever April Lamotte had been planning on going, she’d sure been traveling light. That pine lodge? But why would she choose to stop and write those things and kill herself on the way?
Heavy footsteps along the corridor; Officer Doyle returning. He closed the purse and felt quickly around the bottom of the mailsack. He got an aha! surge when he found what felt like a sheaf of paper, but it turned out to be only a Sunaco fold-out map of Los Angeles and the surrounding district of the sort that gas stations gave out for free if you took a full tank. It looked barely used, but it felt oddly sandy, gritty… For lack of anything else, he stuffed it into his inside suit coat pocket.
Officer Doyle grumbled about life in the manner of all old cops as he drove Clark back through the city.
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