I forgive you. But he knew it was not true. Her arms had him about the neck, and she would never let him go.
THIRTY-TWO
I ended up on the highway again, where it all started, thumb out. A man picked me up this time, a salesman. Starched white shirt. Yellow tie. Hair slicked back, cowlick sticking straight up.
Insurance, he said, that was his game. He liked to see people well protected. And he liked to talk.
“Name’s Hank. Hank Goodfellow. Where you headed?”
I didn’t answer, but Mr. Goodfellow didn’t seem to care. He just kept talking. Himself, he was headed out to Phoenix, he said, because there were lots of retired folks out that way who appreciated the value of a good annuity.
“Peace of mind, that’s what people want in their Golden Years. Serenity. Except some of these elder types, they’ll pull your tail. Ace the company right out of its dough, you know what I mean.”
We kept driving, and he kept talking, and the meanwhile I wondered if that’s what Pops was doing, living it up on the money I was supposed to have been paid for taking care of that girl.
I hadn’t heard from him, not a word, not even his voice inside my head.
The silence was getting to me.
“The only disadvantage to this traveling life,” said Hank Goodfellow, “is a man gets lonely. He misses his wife and kids.”
Mr. Goodfellow reached down towards his ass and tugged at his wallet.
“What you doin’?”
“Photos,” he grinned, and out they came. The family all dressed up, sitting in front of some photographer’ s backdrop at the local department store.
“Come on. Those ain’t your wife and kids.”
“Yes, they are.”
“No, they ain’t.”
He stuck his lip out, offended. Wondering to himself just why he’d picked up a guy like me.
Myself, I was thinking about that business on the street, before I left L.A. I’d seen the old man before, I thought, back at the apartment, where I’d taken that girl’s corpse, and I was pretty sure he was hooked into the routine. He was hooked up with Pops somehow, or maybe he even was Pops. Then I’d looked into those watery eyes and seen the confusion there, and realized he was nobody, just some old fool. And something else occurred to me. Maybe old Pops was everywhere, little bits and pieces of him, chopped up and living inside each of us. I grabbed the old man, trying to shake the truth out of him, but then the old woman came out of nowhere, worthless hag, and knocked me upside the head with her purse.
So now here I was, on the road again. Goodfellow driving fast, hauling bloody murder through the desert, the hot wind whipping through the windows. I looked him over more carefully. My height, my weight. Except for his clothes, he was a kind of mirror of myself. There was a difference though. He was a real, solid guy, with responsibilities, a job to do, a regular position. Me, I was just some figment, a shadow passing through his life.
The idea infuriated me, and I yanked out my gun.
We turned off into that desert then, and as we moved further from the main highway, I imagined all the creatures crawling across the hot sand, and I thought I could hear the sounds they made, the slithering and hissing. I was like them, I told myself. I needed to survive. Food. Shelter. But it wasn’t just those things.
I needed some kind of explanation. A reason for the way things were.
“Right here.” I directed Goodfellow down a dirt road. About a half mile in, the road started to peter away.
“You ever hear a voice in your head? Tells you what to do, how to live your life? You fight it, you resist, finally hell, one day, you just give in. ‘Okay,’ you say. ‘Stop pestering me. I’ll listen, I’ll do anything you like.’ So you do that, you make the big leap, then the son of a bitch abandons you. You ever have an experience like that?”
He nodded obligingly. There was sweat on his brow.
“You ain’t just saying that, are you?”
He shook his head.
“Good. Because I want to hear that voice again, you and me. Where better to listen, then here, in the middle of all this quiet. Now, pull over. Get out and take off your clothes.”
“Please, no.”
“I like yours better than mine. We’re gonna trade.”
“I got a wife. A child.”
“No you don’t.”
He did what I told him, took off his clothes and stood stark naked under the desert sun. Then we put on each other’s clothes, and traded wallets, too. He had an expectant look in his eyes, as if part of him were waiting for something to happen. Like maybe something would swoop down from the sky and chariot him away. Except no one came, of course, and I let him stand there until I could see in his eyes he was thinking things over more realistically. Maybe the most realistic thoughts he’d ever had in his life.
“Come on,” I said. “Tell me what you hear.”
He whimpered.
“What’s it saying? Come on, now.”
Hank Goodfellow stood there in the heat, his eyes earnest, his face pale. His lips parted, trembling, like maybe he had something he wanted to say. Like maybe he had heard the voice and was ready to tell me what he’d heard. Then he shrugged his shoulders and bolted for the ravine.
I fired. He kept running, but he was staggering, and I fired again. This time he fell down. He got up again, scrambling on all fours, but he was gut shot. He tumbled into the ravine and I found him there at the bottom on his back, grunting. The blood frothed up out of his mouth. He started to choke and gasp, wheeze and strangle, making all kinds of ungodly sounds, but I sat there listening, patiently, until he was quiet and his eyes began to glaze.
I had heard something, I thought, there in the empty spaces, in the silence between each gasp and rattle, and I heard it now too, in the desert air, in the hot sand, where the creatures hissed and vanished.
Then, it was gone. No voice at all, really, just the promise of a voice.
I cursed for a little while, pissed off. I fell to my knees and sobbed, but my sobbing died away, and I felt the hot wind on my cheeks, the faintest whisper, my sobs echoing back, and I knew I couldn’t give up.
I would have to go on looking, listening. There were more streets for me to wander, I knew, doors to unlock, windows to crawl through. On the other sides of those windows and doors, more people, men and women who had the truth inside them, maybe, but didn’t want to admit it, or wouldn’t know it until they heard it from their own lips. So I had to get them to talk. It was a job without end.
Meanwhile, I had my new clothes, my new wallet. A position in the world. I climbed into the car. Then I started up the engine and drove off into all that mindless dust.
The next afternoon, Thompson slid the final pages into the mail slot, his obligation fulfilled. His mind quavered. The killer had been a miserable sort from the opening pages—or maybe the world had conspired against him, one bad break after another—but either way, he had graduated to the next level, so to speak. A man on a mission, loose in the world. Himself, Thompson, he was worn out. His evening on the hill had left him sore and dirty. It had gone as well as such a thing could go, he supposed. Even so, he felt undone. The air tremored with an unnatural clarity, and the light shimmered, as if the walls themselves were on the verge of speaking. He took a drink. The shadows hissed.
Alberta was right. The Manifesto would not save them from the Hillcrest Arms. Still, he had kept up his end. Miracle owed him a grand. If the producer didn’t pay—couldn’t, or wouldn’t, no matter—then the book would be Thompson’s. He could shop it all he pleased.
He dialed Michele Haze.
“Just a minute, Mr. Thompson.”
Her answering service again. The line went quiet. A shadow moved. He heard other voices, on the phone, in the background, maybe, here in the room. He couldn’t tell. The receptionist returned. “Yes, Michele Haze wants very much to meet with you.”
“When?”
“Three-thirty this afternoon. At her business suite
in Santa Monica. The Alameda Building. You know it?”
“Yes.”
“Room 47.”
She rang off. He listened to the room. There’d been no other voices after all, he decided. Just cars whispering down the street, curtains rustling. He had the shakes pretty bad. Maybe it had been his own bones he’d heard, rattling away. He sipped. Careful not to drink too much, just enough. Ease the rattling. Becalm the light. He needed to talk to Michele, explain the situation. You can talk to the cops now, honey, he would tell her; you’re off the hook. Then he could forget it all. Let the demons run. Meantime, he took another sip. To steady himself. To keep the light and the dark separated, the voices quiet.
THIRTY-THREE
The Alameda was an improbable looking building in the style known as California Gothic, squat and wide, with elephantine columns and a red tile roof. A trellis, made of wood and strap leather, slouched morosely over the entry. Thompson recognized the building’s ugliness, but appreciated its stolidity. His shakes had left him, but the light falling through the flowering yuccas was wild and bright.
The Alameda was not Michele’s main residence. That would be in the hills somewhere. This was an apartment suite she kept for doing business.
He stepped under the trellis. The security system was nothing elaborate, just a buzzer and a squawk box.
Thompson rang. The door opened.
Inside, he pigeon-toed his way through the lobby into an open-air courtyard. It was more splendid than he expected: palm trees and staircases spiraling toward iron balconies hung with jasmine and trumpet vine. The layout, though, was confusing, and he could not figure how to proceed. Each suite opened to its own balcony, and each balcony had its own gate, with steps descending to the central staircase, which in turn descended to the courtyard. Trouble was, the gates were not numbered. Thompson had no idea which one belonged to Michele Haze.
He retreated to the lobby, and a creaking elevator. It carried him up to the fourth floor, where the door to Michele’s suite stood ajar.
“Anyone home?”
In the entry were pictures of Michele Haze from earlier in her career. Eyes like the eyes he had seen in the limousine, glancing over her shoulder through the blue neon.
Thompson heard something. Feet shuffling. Shoes on carpet.
A narrow hall led away from the parlor. It opened onto the dining room. When Thompson turned the corner, the first thing he saw was himself—in a mirror that gaped across the opposite wall, floor to ceiling. At the far end of the table, a chair had been overturned, but that was not what drew his attention. Rather it was Michele Haze, lying stiff-legged on the carpet, one hand underneath her stomach. She lay in a pool of red. Her hair was bloody, and her clothes, too, and there was blood seeping into the carpet.
Thompson saw movement in the mirror. A man stepping out of the shadows, into the reflection.
Billy Miracle.
He held a revolver in his hand. “Nice gun,” Miracle said. “Family heirloom, is it?”
Thompson felt an odd calm. The gun Miracle held, it was a Retriever. Alberta had mentioned it at Musso’s. The hotel clerk was the one who’d ransacked his apartment, he had thought, or the Okie—but he’d been wrong. It was Miracle.
“It’s little rusty-looking, this old pistol,” the producer said. “But it works swell.”
Miracle twitched, blinked. His eyes, moist and black, shone with a certain irreality—a preternatural alertness. Thompson followed his gaze as it skittered over the dead woman. Her posture was long and thin. She wore a beige skirt and a blouse the same color, with a hint of pink. Her blonde hair spewed on to the carpet. Her face was turned from Thompson, but he could see it in the mirror—just as he could see Miracle standing behind him. The star’s face bore a look of anguish. Her eyes were still open, her hands clenched, one in a fist beneath her stomach, the other grabbing at the hem of her skirt, as if she’d been twisting it in her fingers as she died. The skirt lay hiked now well above the knee.
Miracle had shot her. She had grabbed the chair for support, maybe, but it had toppled, then she had fallen to the floor. She’d been dead, or dying, Thompson thought, when I rang the door.
My bad luck to stumble into the middle of their argument. An instant’s contemplation, though, told him it had nothing to do with luck. Miracle had used Thompson’s gun, after all. He’d buzzed him in, as if he expected his arrival. So Miracle had planned it, just as he’d planned the other deaths, one scheme after another, begun in simple desperation—his need to make the film, to satisfy his mobster partner—but ending here, in this labyrinth in which Thompson found himself now. Miracle stood between Thompson and the front door. He wondered if there were another way out. He remembered the balconies, the interconnecting staircases.
“You killed her,” said Miracle. The producer dressed as always. White jacket, black shirt. Gold necklace and cream-colored slacks. “You came in here, and you murdered the poor girl.”
“No.”
Behind him, he could feel Miracle’s physical presence—while at the same time the man’s image loomed in the mirror before him. Another mirror hung on the far wall behind them both. Their images repeated inside it, receding in infinite regression.
“So far as I can tell, it started with that killer,” Miracle said. “The one you hired to take care of The Young Lovely. That’s how the police will see it, I’m sure. You and Michele, you arranged it together.”
“That’s not what happened.” Thompson protested. Miracle did not seem to hear. His chest swelled grandly.
“Each of you had your own reasons. Michele—she wanted rid of the girl. She wanted her man back, her position on the throne. You, on the other hand—a desperate writer, at the end of his string. The Young Lovely was blocking your path. And if you got rid of her, well, not only would she be gone, but Michele would be indebted to you too. But you didn’t anticipate what would happen next. That Michele would get back with Jack, then cut you out of the picture altogether. Cancel the deal. So you went into a rage. A bloody, alcoholic rage. You went up to Lombard’s house, and you killed the son of a bitch. And when it was all done, you collapsed in the front yard. You left your wallet behind, your shoes. You made a bloody fucking mess of the business.”
It hadn’t happened that way. Miracle was reversing the roles, making Thompson out to be the guilty party. “You’re trying to frame me,” Thompson’s voice cracked, his hands trembled, but he still felt calm. He observed his shaking hands as if they belonged to someone else. “You’re the one, Billy.”
Miracle ignored him. “Then the police began to close in, and you became more desperate. Your trump card was Michele. Or so you thought. She would defend you. She would provide you with an alibi the night of Lombard’s murder. Because after all, she had helped plan the death of The Young Lovely—and if she turned against you now, well, you’d tell the police. But then, that too went astray. Because it turns out your killer—the klutz, the bumbler, the fool—he killed the wrong woman. Some passerby, a woman no one knows, no one cares about. Even her body has disappeared—and how could you threaten Michele with complicity in a murder that never happened? So you begged her to help. You pleaded, but you began to suspect she was going to let you fall. Then—you killed her. You shot her with your father’s gun.”
Miracle’s version of events had its own inner logic. A flawed logic, sure, but it was the logic that controlled the moment. He could feel its inexorable movement forward. Whether the police would realize this or not, he had no idea, because he knew (and the cops knew) such falterings in logic underlie not just the ravings of lunatics, but the case of the most assiduous prosecutor. There was in every argument a place between the seams, where the clutter lay. No matter how you tried to fill it up with detail, to bridge the abyss, to cover the gap, it was still there.
Himself, he had always been drawn to that place, to that little crack in the fabric of things, the inevitable flaw in the glass.
“You think you know what the dead a
re asking for?” Miracle asked.
Thompson shook his head. Miracle had gone off the edge. His own knees were knocking now, and he felt a trembling in his chest. His calm had dissipated.
“It isn’t justice the dead want. It isn’t some kind of explanation. No—it’s much simpler than that. The dead, they’re tired of being dead. They want to come back.”
Thompson looked at the gun in the man’s hand.
“But the dead can’t come back, so they want the next best thing. They want company, my friend—they want someone to pay them a visit. So they send their emissaries, spokesmen on their behalf. Cancer. Strokes. Epilepsy. The bogey man in the closet with a long knife. We pretend to ourselves we don’t recognize their voices, but we do. The force of all the souls calling out, it’s irresistible. Their numbers get bigger all the time, the chorus deafening. There’s no choice but to join them.
“A guy like you, you understand what I’m saying, don’t you Jimbo.”
Meanwhile, the grimace on Michele’s face seemed to have grown tighter, more grotesque. There was blood clotting in her hair, between her teeth. She had gotten it all over herself, rolling about, dying on the carpet.
“It’s the women who provide our inspiration, don’t they? But in the end, we have to take the trip back ourselves. Make the big plunge.”
“Why don’t you put down the gun?”
“You aren’t going soft on me, are you? Don’t tell me, underneath it all, you’re a sap, too. You want to ride into that beautiful sunset. Talk to God. Get a place in Malibu.”
“I think we should call the police.”
“We will. Or I will. Do you want to know what I’m going to tell them, about today?”
Thompson nodded, just to delay the man. He saw his head move in the mirror, and in the mirror opposite, the images embedded one inside the other, all those images of himself moving in unison, and he wondered what it was he had thought himself aspiring to, really, all those days at Musso’s. He wondered if there was some golden world, just beyond his reach—or if instead it was just the same world, refracting back onto itself over and over, and the deeper into it you wandered, the more entrapped you became, until finally, one day, the corpse you stumbled over was your own, and you found yourself on the floor, staring into your own face, your own eyes, and in those eyes were the retreating feet of Billy Miracle.
Manifesto for the Dead Page 11