“Time was, we’d spend our days arresting felons. But now there are these Youth Vigilantes the Governor’s got sworn in in those mass rallies. Wander round the streets in those uniforms like they own the place. I mean, if there’s some lowlife needs the crap beaten out of him, I’ll do it myself…”
“I guess.”
“… Spend so much time trying to track down pinkos and fairies and abortionists and every other kind of freak, there’s hardly any left for the real villains. And what’s this three strikes and you’re out crap? I mean, what the fuck has crime got to do with baseball, if you’ll pardon my French. And the Comstock Act! Just don’t get me started. An’ you only have to drive along Vine round about midnight if you really wanna see lewd and lascivious, but the pastors and the League of Concerned Housewives an’ all the rest don’t give a damn about that. Just last week we were supposed to be raiding this socialist bookshop, but when we get there the fire department’s beat us to it.” He chuckled disappointedly. “Some Liberty Leaguers had already burned the place down. I tell you, live and let live, but good old fashioned police work’s gone down to nothing. All that’s left for us to do is hold back the crowds…”
A filthy barefoot woman wearing a ratted fur coat and what looked like some kind of tiara was pulling an old luggage trolley laden with her possessions up past Angles Flight. A sign at a taxi rank said NO LOITERING NO NIGGERS. A Rolls Royce swished heedlessly by, its windows a magic lantern filled with hopelessly beautiful faces. A Champagne bottle struck the blacktop in a shower of green sparks as it took the corner. Clark wondered if this city really was changing, or if it wasn’t becoming more and more of what it always was.
“We’ve got this new project. Chief says they’re gonna put them receiving Bechmeir things—what do you call them?”
“Iconoscopes.”
“That’s it. Put them ico-copes in all the interview cells. The DA’s got shares in one of the companies that makes them, so you can work out the rest yourself… An’ as if we needed some dumb new machine to show us that criminals lie. See, what you really need to do good cop work is brains.” He tapped the top of his cap as they took the turn into Blixden Avenue. “That’s one thing that’s never gonna change.”
Officer Doyle pulled the car in at the far end of the street, and stepped around to let Clark out. “By the way, what you said about those kids damaging your vehicle. I’m guessing those were the same little street rats who were out here this evening. I’m sure I can put in a word with the beat officer, make sure they ain’t so cocky next time.”
“No, no—it’s okay.”
“You sure?” He laid a fat hand on Clark’s shoulder and gave it a momentary squeeze. “But just take it easy, will you? You’re a good guy. If there is a heaven, I’m sure your wife’s up there, smiling down on us poor suckers right now…”
Clark stood and watched the cop’s car backlights fade. Then he noticed that an old gum wrapper had been stuck on the Delahaye’s windshield. He lifted the wiper to take a look.
SoRRie bout you
WIF MisTa Lameout
Fom Roger
Even in the dark, he now knew how to avoid the creak on the first rise of Blixden Apartments’ stairs. It was only when he’d closed the door on room 4A and peeled off his shoes and socks that it occurred to him that he could have driven back home to Venice. Or simply found a cheap hotel. But he was back here now, so deep in over his head that he didn’t know where the surface was, and he’d never felt so tired in his entire life.
Although nothing had been obviously changed or moved, the room looked in an even bigger mess that it had this morning. The empty tins. The bottles. The cheap scraps of furniture. Those windfall heaps of notebooks and papers. Blundering around it all, he laid the snubnose Colt down on the table amid the scattered drafts by the typewriter, then went to the window and rocked it open to let in some air. Looking down at the street, he thought he saw a figure standing at the furthest edge of a pool of streetlight on the opposite sidewalk, outside the collapsed house. It seemed to be looking right up toward him. Then, as if sensing his attention, it dissolved.
He stayed leaning out of his window in room 4A of Blixden Apartments, doing nothing but breathing in the city scents of dust and garbage and eucalyptus, nothing but listening to the everyday night sounds of cats yowling, dogs barking, the soft rise and fall of faraway traffic, then a siren’s brief wail. Finally he racked the window back shut, pulled across the flimsy curtains, and dragged off the rest of his clothes.
Naked, he clicked off the light and lay down on the rucked mattress with no anticipation, tired though he was, of anything resembling sleep. He rolled over, turned back. In dark waves, the room pulsed and closed itself about him. Whispers of voices past, trust betrayed, and opportunities lost, came to him. Then he heard the sea, and bright edges of laughter, and saw all the lost faces of those he had once loved.
TWENTY SIX
MORNING. HALF IN AND OUT OF SLEEP. All the old times, all the old faces. The big cars and the publicity shots and his name in Variety and boozing till dawn at the Marmont. Success not waiting around the corner, but right there in front or him, lying in his hands. Soft as a puppy. Warm and clean and bright as this Californian sunlight. And driving his lovely Pierce-Arrow in midnight blue.
Clark smiled. He turned over. A hot blaze spilled into his face. He grunted. Raised an arm to shield his eyes. Saw light surrounding a silhouette like the glittering aura of a saint.
“Who the hell are you?” A woman’s voice demanded. “And what exactly are you doing here?”
“Me?” His bare back sticking to the wall, he eased himself up. His penis, aroused from all those dreams, chafed sorely against the sheets.
“You remember who I am?” she asked.
He nodded. He was remembering a lot of things now. “You’re Barbara, uh, Usher.”
“Eshel. It’s Barbara Eshel.”
“Right.”
He watched as she leaned back on the chair which she’d drawn from the desk. Watched as she kept the snubnose Colt which he’d left there trained in the middle of his chest.
“And you are?”
“I told you yesterday. My name’s Daniel Lamotte. I thought—”
“You must think I’m really stupid. But I guess the only stupid thing I’m doing is sitting here and asking for explanations when I should just call the police.”
“How did you get in?”
“That catch on your door. Either it won’t budge at all, or you give it a shove and hey presto you’re in. It’s the same with half the locks in Blixden Apartments. But then you’d know that, wouldn’t you? If you actually lived here.”
“Look…” He was still having to shield his eyes from the brightness of the window and his head throbbed from the seemingly near-permanent hangover he’d acquired since April Lamotte had tried to gas him. He was also still conscious that he was in bed naked, for all that his prick was no longer tenting the sheets, and that his Daniel Lamotte glasses were tossed over on the desk. “… if you just stop pointing at me with that gun, then maybe we could talk.”
“I’m very happy with this gun, thanks,” she said.
“Look. Barbara. Miss Eshel. I just have this funny thing about having a lethal weapon aimed at me when I’m sitting in my own bed. Even more so by someone who probably doesn’t know how to use it.”
“It’s not your own bed, though, is it? You’re going to tell me next that the safety catch is on.”
He nodded. “It probably is.” Then, seeing as this wasn’t the time and the place to worry too much about modesty, he began to lean forward. “If you just let me have that thing—”
A bright flare. A loud bang.
“See.” She said through the feathering smoke. “The safety wasn’t on. And I do know how to use a gun, thank you very much. Otherwise Mister whoever you are, we’d be sponging down your fucking brains.”
He sank back. Plaster was flaking from a fresh indentation in the wall above his head. “You can�
�t just… People will…”
“You’ve obviously forgotten that, unlike you, I actually live here. I know the Kitcheners always go out on Friday mornings, and that sweet Mrs Bruch on the other side’s deafer than a post. I’m not some city kid. I shot coyotes and possums back in Fingerpost, Missouri the way folk here in this city stamp termites. So. Now that you know all about me, perhaps you might like to tell me a little about yourself?”
“Why are you suddenly so sure I’m not Daniel Lamotte? Yesterday—” “I was sure you weren’t him yesterday as well, you fathead! But I thought that it was none of my business. At the very least, I decided I’d wait and see. But that was before the cops came around here last evening saying they wanted to speak to Daniel Lamotte because his wife was probably dead. She is, isn’t she? It’s in the news this morning. I went out and got the early paper.” She turned around, lifted a copy of the Los Angeles Examiner from the desk and tossed it to him. At no point did the Colt’s barrel cease to aim at his naked chest. “It’s folded at the right page.”
SCREENWRITER’S WIFE FOUND DEAD IN OWN CADDY
The article was a half column in length. It said pretty much what he’d have expected. “You know what they say,” he muttered as he put it aside. “It has to be true if it’s in the LA press.”
She snorted. “You’ve got a neat line in patter, haven’t you, Mister whoever you are? For someone sitting bareass naked, that is, in someone else’s bed.”
“You’re still convinced I’m not Daniel Lamotte?”
“Aren’t you?”
This was getting ridiculous. He had to shrug.
“Who are you, then?”
“Will you put down that gun, or at least stop firing it at me, if I say?”
“Depends.”
“I didn’t kill April Lamotte, if that’s what you think.”
“Which is exactly what I’d expect you to say if you had killed her.”
He nodded. She had a point. “I’m just this idiot guy. Believe me.”
“Does the idiot guy have a name?”
If this girl was going to kill him, he decided, she’d probably have done so already. That, or she’d just tried to, and the shot had been a lucky miss. Either way, he was sick of pretence. “I’m Clark Gable.”
She twitched her mouth. “Should that mean anything to me?”
“No.”
“So why are you pretending to be someone you aren’t? And what’s happened to the real Daniel Lamotte?”
“That’s too many questions. You’ll have to be patient if you want me to explain…”
He had always liked to think himself a half-decent teller of tales, but this one came out as a confused mess. He muttered in broken sentences about being a private dick, about his lost acting career, and about the specialized kind of marital work he’d thought at first was all April Lamotte wanted. And Erewhon, and being shown the photo of a man scowling at the camera—a tall man who looked a bit like him if you discounted the beard and the glasses, and had gone so far off the rails in writing a feelie about the life of Lars Bechmeir that he’d supposedly been locked away in some fancy private clinic. Then the deal, signing the contract, and the swans on the moat and the meal at Chateau Bansar. And being in that car, the Delahaye which was like some dream turned into a nightmare, and the guy who was or wasn’t some kind of security guard who might or might not have been following him… All of it was strange indeed, but somehow not as strange as the fact that he was sitting here in this flophouse on Blixden Avenue telling his story to a young woman who was still pointing a gun at him, and that April Lamotte was now dead.
Still, Barbara Eshel listened. The only question she asked was to find how much he’d been offered for the job. Toward the end, the Colt’s barrel even drooped a little until it was aimed directly at his crotch.
“You expect me to believe all of that, Mr Gimble?”
“Not really. But it’s all I know. It’s Gable, by the way.”
She hunched forward in the chair. “This Lamotte woman might want to hire someone to impersonate her husband for all sorts of reasons. Other, I mean, than just getting you to sign a contract on the pretence of his being temporarily mad. Hadn’t that occurred to you?”
“It did.”
“But you’re saying you still went ahead?”
He shrugged. He was sitting here, wasn’t he?
She chewed her lip. “Do you think Daniel Lamotte—I mean the real one—is still alive?”
“No idea. She said that she’d visited him a few days ago. Something about some clinic up in the hills. But she didn’t say where… How well did you know him?”
She sighed and puffed at her fringe. “He was quiet, shy, nervous, kept himself to himself. He had that sort of aura about him—and I don’t necessarily mean in the feelie sense—that didn’t invite closeness. That stuff I was saying yesterday about hearing his typewriter going through these walls like a friendly ghost—that was true. But it was more about the typewriter being friendly than him.”
“I think I get the picture.”
“It must be weird. I mean, aren’t I the first person you’ve met apart from his wife who actually knew him?”
“So you believe me?”
“Even someone as seemingly naïve as you could surely come up with something better than that ridiculous gumph if they wanted to lie.”
The gun had drooped again. Now, it was pointing merely at the bed.
“Maybe I could get dressed?”
“Can’t see why not.”
“But you’re not leaving?”
“I can wait.”
“Don’t tell me,” he said, standing up and pulling the sheet with him in a vague attempt at modesty that failed when it snagged on a loose spur of raised floorboard, “You’re a farm girl… You’re used, I mean in Fingerpost, Missouri to seeing… ?”
“All sorts of stuff, yeah. But mainly cattle. A few hogs as well.”
“Right.”
Stupidly naked, he rummaged for clothes as quickly as he could whilst Barbara Eshel remained sitting on the chair with the gun still tracking roughly in his direction. He found a collarless shirt. Braces. He avoided bending in her direction when he opened drawers and pulled on fresh undershorts. In the feelies, he couldn’t help thinking, this whole scene would have been done the other way around.
“Now…” He sat back on the edge of the bed. “… if you say you believe me, will you please put down that gun.”
“Is there anything you haven’t told me?”
“I’m sure there is.” His hair was mussed and he needed a shave.
She studied the gun. “Is this yours?”
“It’s Daniel Lamotte’s. I found it right there in his desk drawer. I hate the things. They’re always nothing but trouble.”
“Doesn’t look like it’s been used much.” She did something fancy, cocking and uncocking the hammer and spinning out the chamber, for all the world the female Jewish cowboy, then laid it down on the desk. “He must have been afraid of something to get it.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Unless he was planning on shooting himself.”
“I’ve thought about that as well.”
“How about you, Clark?”
“What the hell do you mean?”
“What do you plan to do?”
He glanced toward the blackened mirror. Heard again a hissing that could have been telephone wires or the sea. “I don’t know… I’d run if I knew where I was supposed to run to. And what I was running from.”
“And as you don’t?”
He shrugged. Glitters of light from the edge of his dreams seemed to push by him.
“You know what kind of writer I am?”
“I rather assumed—”
“Assumed, yeah, the way everyone does in this city that the only kind of writing worth a rat’s ass is for the feelies. But there are other things you can do with words, you know. Like telling the truth, for a start.”
“That woul
d be something.”
“Would, wouldn’t it? The fascists have tramped all over Europe and now they’re here. Kisberg and his Liberty League cronies are busy turning all California into a white enclave—”
“That’s a bit strong.”
“Is it? Do you know how many Hispanics have been repatriated? Do you know what the penalty is now for what they call deviant activity? ’Cept they don’t even call it a penalty—it’s treatment.” She took out her State identity card from her top blouse pocket. “You know what this is for?”
“Course I do. We’ve all got one. It’s so cops can tell who you are. Or if you want a library ticket, or health treatment through State Aid.”
“Come on—how many times have you been asked to show yours, even doing the sort of work you say you do? Never, I’ll bet.”
He shrugged. “Not that often.” The cops hadn’t even asked to see it before getting him to identify his wife.
“Funnily enough, I get asked to show mine all the time. You ask anyone else who’s brown or yellow or looks Jewish or Hispanic. That is what this country is coming to, and California’s in the lead.”
“I guess I don’t pay much notice to politics.”
“Most people don’t. Not until they can’t live in their street no more, or some guy in uniform tells them they’ve broken some law they haven’t even heard of. But I plan to do something about it.”
“You mean…” He couldn’t keep the incredulity out of his voice. “… by writing?”
She nodded. “We’re printing a newssheet—it’s an antidote to the Hearst conspiracy which controls most of the media here in California.”
“What’s it called?”
“LA Truth. I know that sounds like an oxymoron.”
“Oxy…? Oh, yeah. Don’t think I’ve heard of it.”
“It’s a tough gig getting it out. What with either paying the new State Stamp Tax, or running underground…”
She trailed off. He got the general impression that editions of LA Truth didn’t hit the newsstands that regularly.
“There’s a story in whatever’s happened to Daniel Lamotte and his wife. And I can’t believe it’s just coincidence that he’s written a script about Lars Bechmeir.” She looked around her. “It’s got to be somewhere. Maybe here—or wherever the real Daniel Lamotte is, or up in that fancy house in the canyons. Where do you think we should start?”
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