Last Call: Expiration Date Part 15

"Cool. That's good then. s.h.i.t, this stuff is like napalm! How's-I meant to ask, how's Sukie?"

Sullivan was glad that he had thought to bring a beer with him. After chugging a series of gulps, he gasped, "Fine. No, she's-well, I think she's dead."

"Jesus. You think?" After a pause, Steve said, "I always liked her. Well! Do something sentimental for me? Have a Kahlua and milk for me, in her memory, will you do that? Promise?"

It had been Sukie's favored breakfast drink. Sullivan nodded dutifully, imagining dumping Kahlua and milk into his stomach on top of the Guinness. He realized that Steve couldn't hear a nod, and said, "Okay, Steve. So what's your address? I don't need directions, I've got a Thomas Brothers guide."

Steve gave him an address on La Grange Avenue, and Sullivan hung up and returned to his table.

The fried mozzarella had cooled off, but the Buffalo wings were still hot, and he dipped them in the marinara sauce as often as in the blue-cheese dressing. When the waitress came by again he ordered two more beers ... and a Kahlua and milk, though he resolved to let the drink stand as a gesture rather than drink it.

He got hungrier as he diminished the fresh beers and ate the snacks, and after gnawing at the chicken bones he began chewing up the rehardened mozzarella. Just as he was considering ordering something else, maybe the Nachos Grande, the waitress walked up and told him he had a call at the bar.

He blinked up at her. "I doubt it," he said. "Who did they ask for?"

"A guy drinking a Kahlua and milk. You haven't touched it, but I figure you're who they want."

That has to be Steve, somehow, Sullivan thought uneasily as he pushed back his chair and weaved his way between the tables to the bar, on which a white telephone sat with the receiver lying next to it. He was reminded of the call he'd got at O'Hara's, back in Roosevelt, the call from Sukie that had started this pointless-no, this cathartic-odyssey, and after he had nervously picked up the receiver and said "h.e.l.lo?" he was relieved to find that the voice on the other end was not Sukie's again. Then he realized that he hadn't listened to what this woman had said.

"What?"

"I said, is this Pete Sullivan," she said angrily.

"Yes. Are you somebody at Steve's house? I-"

"This is Steve's wife, and I'm at a pay phone. He scalded himself dumping that dip on his leg! And in his hair! Intentionally! To have an excuse to give me a shopping list and get out of the house so I could call you from somewhere where those men wouldn't hear! Here's his note for you, his 'shopping list': Pete-Call me back and say you cannot make it over to my house, please, Pete. And don't say on the line where you're going, and get out of there. Whatever it is, they want you alive. I've got a wife and kids. Good luck, but don't call me again ever after this next call. That's his note, okay? This is the third d.a.m.n sports bar on Wilshire that. I've called, and now I've got to go to some store and buy some more frijoles and Jack cheese and stuff, even though I know we're not going to be making more Beans Jaime, thank G.o.d, just so this shopping trip will look genuine to those men! They'll leave when you call and tell them you can't come over, so call. And then just leave us alone!"

"Okay," he said softly, though she had hung up. The waitress was standing nearby, watching him, so he smiled at her and said, "Can I make a local call?" When she shrugged and nodded, he went on, "And could I have another Coors Light."

Again he punched in Steve's number; and again Steve answered it quickly. "Steve," Sullivan said, "this is Pete. I'm calling from a different bar, I'm up on Hollywood Boulevard now. Listen, man, I just won't be able to make it by tonight. And, ah, I'm gonna be leaving town-I'll catch you next trip, okay? Next year some time, probably."

As he carried his fresh beer back toward his table he wondered, without being able to care very much, if Steve's regrets had sounded any more sincere to "those men" than they had to Pete.

He was looking down and carefully watching each of his shoes in turn catch his forward-moving weight, for his spine was as tense as if he were walking along the top of a high wall.

He sat down heavily in his chair at last, and, just in case, hid the gla.s.s of Kahlua and milk under his tented napkin.

Those would be deLarava's men, he thought dully.

And I can drink all night long, or run to the van and drive to Alaska, and it won't change the obvious fact that she is planning, again, to- He inhaled, drained the beer, and then dizzily exhaled.

-She is again planning to consume my father's ghost. For some reason she can't just let him rest in peace.

She went to Venice today because of the fish business, sure, but the fishes must have been acting up because my father's ghost is coming back out of the sea; right there in Venice, where he drowned thirty-three years ago. Right back where it started from, he sang in his head.

deLarava would like to have me-alive-as a lure. Not as part of a mask, the way Sukie and I used to work, but, for this one, as a lure.

With a shudder of revulsion, Sullivan remembered how fat and youthful and happy deLarava always was after sucking in some ghost through one of her sparking clove cigarettes.

Presumably one ghost was as good as another ... so why was she again going after his father's? On that Christmas Eve in 1986, Pete and Sukie had both been uneasy with the fact of being physically present in Venice Beach, especially with deLarava, for it had been in the Venice surf that their father had drowned in 1959, when the twins had been seven-but it wasn't until well after noon, in the instant when Sukie had spilled the contents of the s...o...b..x deLarava had brought along, that he and Sukie had known what ghost was indeed that day's particular quarry. deLarava had probably been hoping to consummate the inhalation without the twins even suspecting, but the exposed wallet and key ring had been, horribly and unmistakably, their father's.

The old man had drowned, and they hadn't been there. And then Loretta deLarava had tried to eat the old man's ghost, and-as Pete Sullivan had realized only after having driven far up the featureless Interstate 5 toward San Francisco, and as Sukie must have realized at some point during her own flight-they had fled without taking away the wallet and the keys.

Sullivan held the cold beer gla.s.s tightly to keep his hands from shaking, and his face was cold and sweaty. In that instant he completely understood, and completely envied, Sukie's suicide.

She'd had to do it. How could you hide forever in a bottle?-unless you became transparent yourself. Dissolved (-like Speedy Alka-Seltzer-) so that you were a waveform propagated all the way out beyond any sc.r.a.ps of physical material, even compa.s.s needles, that might move in response to the fact of you and thus betray your presence.

(He couldn't think about the three cans of Hires Root Beer that had also fallen out of the s...o...b..x, one of which had rolled right up to his foot and sprayed a tiny forlorn jet of ancient brown pop across his shoe, but) he knew in the tightening back of his throat that he and his sister had betrayed their father on that day, that chilly winter of 1986 day, by running mindlessly away and leaving the tokens of their father's ghost in deLarava's hands.

But I'm still alive, he thought, and I'm back in L.A. I've got to save him from her. And I can't possibly face him.

"-the ghosts of dead family members," said a placid male voice from one of the television speakers, "but police investigators speculate that the apparently supernatural effects were caused by some electrical or gas-powered apparatus that may have exploded and caught fire, causing the blaze that gutted the psychiatric clinic and killed three of Dr. Elizalde's patients. Several others still to this day remain hospitalized for psychological trauma sustained during that Halloween tragedy."

Sullivan looked up at the nearest screen, but saw only football players running across a green field. He pushed his chair back and turned around, and on one of the farther sets saw a blond man in a suit standing behind a news-show podium. As Sullivan watched, the studio set was replaced with a still photo of a slim, dark-haired woman standing with raised eyebrows and an open mouth in a doorway. Her eyes were shut.

That looks like a bar-time snapshot, Sullivan thought as a chill p.r.i.c.kled the back of his neck. Whoever this woman is, she seems to have antic.i.p.ated the flash.

"And today," the newsman's voice went on, "nearly two years after that scam-gone-wrong, Dr. Elizalde is reportedly back in Los Angeles. Police say that this morning she went to the Amado Street house of Margarita Gonzalvez, the widow of one of the patients who died in the so-called seance-and drew a handgun and fired four shots! Mrs. Gonzalvez was able to snap this photograph of Elizalde shortly before the discredited psychiatrist allegedly began shooting. Police are investigating reports that Elizalde may subsequently have bought a disguise and stolen a car."

The scene changed back to the newscaster in the studio, who had now been joined by another blond man in a suit. " 'Physician, heal thyself,' " said the newcomer solemnly. "A tragic story of misplaced faith, Tom."

"Certainly is, Ed," agreed the grave newscaster. "Though medical authorities now believe that many of the folk remedies dispensed at these curanderias and hierverias can actually be beneficial. It's the charlatans who prey on credulity, and exaggerate the reasonable claims, who give the whole field a bad name."

The newsmen were apparently segueing into a topical Halloween-related story about the upcoming Day of the Dead celebrations in the local Hispanic communities, and shortly they switched to film clips of stylized papier-mche skulls waving on poles, and dancing people wearing black and white face makeup and wreaths of marigolds. Sullivan turned back to his table, frowning at the spooklike figure of the napkin-draped drink. The dead woman's drink, the suicide's drink. He wasn't going to touch it.

Apparently this psychiatrist's catastrophic "so-called seance" had been big news two years ago. Sullivan never read newspapers, so he hadn't heard about it.

She held a seance at her psychiatric clinic, he thought; on Halloween, a dangerous night even for a seance that might not have been meant to get real supernatural effects. And something sure enough happened-the surviving patients apparently saw "dead family members," and then there were fires and explosions or something, and three of her patients died. (Of course the police would a.s.sume that the disaster was caused by some kind of goofy "apparatus" blowing up.) If she is on bar-time, as that photo implies, it's certainly no wonder-she's now got ghosts guilt-linked to her, like all of us ghost-sensitives.

Sullivan had gathered from the news story that Dr. Elizalde had fled Los Angeles after the fire and the deaths. Why had she come back now, at another Halloween? Not to shoot at that widow, it seemed to him-if there was shooting, it was probably aimed at Elizalde. Elizalde probably came back here in some idiot attempt to ... set things right.

Apologize to all of them, living and dead.

But ...

It sounds to me as though she really can raise ghosts, he thought. Whether she's happy with it or not, it sounds as though she's a genuine, if accidentally ordained, medium.

She could probably raise the ghost of my father, and I could-insulated from him, at a medium distance, speaking through a screen like a shameful penitent in a confessional-warn him.

His heart was beating faster. Elizalde, he thought. Remember the name.

She'll be hiding now, but I'll bet she won't leave L.A. until after Halloween, until after her Quixotic amends are impossible again. She'll be hiding, but I'll bet I can find her.

He smiled bleakly into his empty beer gla.s.s.

After all, she's one of us.

Outside, in the westbound left lane of Wilshire Boulevard, a 1960 Cadillac Fleetwood slowed to a stop at the Westwood intersection.

Behind the wheel, Neal Obstadt could see that all the other drivers had their headlights on, so he reached out carefully and switched on his own. He liked to be the last.

A cellular telephone was wedged under his jaw, and in his right hand he held a Druid Circle oatmeal cookie from Trader Joe's. "You don't need to be fretting about overcosts, Loretta," he said absently into the phone. "Your location accountant's an a.n.a.l-retentive, and the production reports always balance. You've got the insurance and permissions. Worry about something else, if you've got to worry."

Obstadt had had various business dealings with deLarava for years, and he knew that this anxiety was what she called "checking the gates"-a cameraman's term for a last-minute, finicky checking of the lens for dust or hair. Still, he could hear her sniffling-and she'd been crying on the phone this morning, too-and it occurred to him that this agitation was out of proportion for the modest ghosts-on-the-Queen-Mary shoot she had scheduled for Sat.u.r.day.

"You having a bad hair day, Loretta?" he asked. "Your big manhunt suffer a setback?" The light turned green, and he accelerated west, toward the elevated arch of the 405.

"What did you have to do with that?" shrilled her voice out of the phone. "He isn't really leaving the state, is he?"

Obstadt blinked, and smiled as he took a bite of the cookie. "Who, Topper?" he said around the mouthful. "Spooky, I mean-your Nicky Bradshaw. He left the state? I had nothing to do with it, I swear. I never even liked the show."

"Oh, Bradshaw," she said, her quick anger deflating. "My ... manhunts are doing just fine, thank you. I've got one s.n.a.t.c.h working right now that's going to be costing me twenty grand."

"Good for you, kid, the big time at last." Obstadt glanced at the taped-shut Marlboro carton on the seat beside him. Twenty grand for a washed-up old prehistoric fish? he thought. Or did you give up on the fish? I'm spending forty grand to finance a s.n.a.t.c.h, buy the access to somebody else's s.n.a.t.c.h-but forty grand for a thousand primo smokes is the bargain of a lifetime. Jeez, though, cash!-in a cigarette carton that I've got to hand to some guy from the phone exchange, just for rerouting their reward listing of that missing Sockit Hoomie boy! The exchange people are reliable, but who, really, is this Sherman Oaks person? His a.s.s'll be smoke, if he hoses me on this. "So who is it that slipped through your fingers tonight?" Obstadt said into the phone.

"If everybody minded their own business," sniffed deLarava, "the world would go round a deal faster than it does."

Obstadt suspected that her line was a quote from one of the Alice-in-Wonderland books. Loretta liked old smokes that had hung around hotel lobbies for decades; Obstadt preferred them fresh. It was the old ones that quoted Alice all the time. Among the solid old b.u.m-smokes on the street, the Alice stuff seemed almost to be scripture.

He was driving between the broad dark lawns of the Veterans Administration grounds now, with the Federal Building to his left and the cemetery to his right.

"Is it that fish?" he asked, taking another bite of the cookie. "Did you get outbid by the fish-market man at Canter's?" So much for your bid to be the Fisher Queen, he thought-in spite of all your vegetarianism, and your "youth treatments," and your Velcro instead of b.u.t.tons and topologically compromising b.u.t.tonholes.

"What are you eating?" deLarava demanded. "Don't speak while you're chewing, you're getting crumbs in my ear."

"Through the phone? I doubt it, Loretta." Obstadt was laughing, and in fact spraying crumbs onto his lap. "It's probably dead fleas. Don't you wear a flea collar under your hair?"

"Jesus, it's sand! Grains of sand! Has he been whispering to me while I napped? But I'll eat him-"

The line clicked, and then Obstadt heard the dial tone.

He replaced the phone in the console cradle, and his smile unkinked as he drove under the freeway overpa.s.s, the cemetery behind him now. You spend all day at the beach, Loretta, he thought, you shouldn't be surprised to find sand in your ear.

Loretta was crazy, beyond any doubt. But- Something big had happened last night, at around sundown; he had had to excuse himself from dinner at Rusty's Hacienda in Glendale and go stand on the sidewalk and just breathe deeply and stare at the pavement, for all the ghosts he'd snorted up over the years were clamoring so riotously in his mind that he couldn't hear anything else; the Santa Ana wind had strewn the lanes of Western Avenue with palm fronds, and Obstadt had squinted almost fearfully southwest, over the dark hills of Griffith Park, wondering who it was that had so abruptly arrived on the west coast psychscape.

The intensity had faded-but now the street-smokes were all jabbering and eating dirt, and some kind of dinosaur had washed up in Venice, and deLarava couldn't stop crying.

Loretta's a clown, he had said this morning. She wins chips in this low-level game, but never cashes 'em in to move up to a bigger table; still, some big chips do sometimes slide across her table; and she's all excited about one now.

He stomped the gas pedal furiously to the floor, and bared his teeth at the sudden roar of the engine as acceleration weighted him back against the seat.

The fish? he thought; some Jonah inside the fish? The guy that maybe left the state? Nicky Bradshaw?

Who?

CHAPTER 22.

The snoring got more distinct every minute, and sounded more like a tune: at last she could even make out words ...

-Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Gla.s.s AND WAY OUT EAST at the other end of Wilshire, out where multicolored plastic pennants fluttered along nylon lines strung above used-car lots, where old brownstone apartment buildings still stood on the small gra.s.sy hills, their lower walls blazing even in the failing daylight with bright Mexican murals, where neglected laundry flapped on clotheslines in the gra.s.sless courtyards of faded apartment complexes built in the 1960s, Kootie stepped up a curb, limped across the sidewalk away from the red glow of a Miller Beer sign in a corner bar window, and rocked to a halt against the bar's gritty stucco wall.

He was still intermittently talking to himself, and during the walking of these last several blocks he had even begun moving his lips and whispering the dialogue.

"I can't walk anymore," he panted. "I think I've ruined my foot-they're probably gonna have to just cut it off and put a wooden one on."

"Duh," he said thickly then, speaking for the absent ghost of Thomas Alva Edison, which he was certain he had left behind in a mess on the stairs at the Music Center, "well, I got wooden teeth. No, that was George Washington-well, I got a wooden head."

"I saw your head," Kootie whispered, his voice shaky even now as he remembered that shocking period of dislocation. "It was made out of old strips of beef fat." He mouthed the last two words with, it fleetingly occurred to him, as much revulsion as his vegetarian parents would have done. He jumped hastily to the next thought: "I'm gonna go in this bar-no, not to get a c.o.c.ktail, you stupid old fart!-I'm gonna get somebody to call the cops for me."

Kootie was still holding the quarter that the pay telephone had given back to him two hours ago. He had been gripping it between his first two fingers and tapping it against the palm of his hand as he had walked. The rhythm of the tapping had been unconsidered and irregular, but now, probably because he had a purpose for the coin again, the tapping was forcefully repet.i.tive.

"I don' wanna go in the bar," he said in his dopy-old-Edison voice, and in fact Kootie didn't want to step in there. The memory was still too fresh of the lunatic phone call with-with what, exactly? The ghosts of his parents? It had been that, or it had been a hallucination. And his parents had seemed to be in a bar.

But if somebody else made the telephone call ...

(He found himself picturing carbon; black grains in a tiny cell at first, with a soft iron diaphragm that would alternately compress and release the carbon grains, thus changing the conductivity; but the grains tended to pack, so that after a while the conductivity was stuck at one level ...) If somebody else made the call it might go through, and not just be routed again to that bar from h.e.l.l.

That call an hour ago had started to get through-Kootie was sure now that the first voice he had heard had really been the 911 operator, for after he had walked away from the pay phone he had seen a police car drive past slowly in the right-hand eastbound lane of what had proved to be Sixth Street. Kootie had wanted to go flag him down, but had found himself hurrying away across the parking lot instead, and pushing open the gla.s.s door of the ninety-nine cent store, where he had then gone to the back aisle and crouched behind a shelf of candles in tall gla.s.ses with decals of saints stuck on the outsides.

He must have been afraid, still, of facing the police and deciding which sort of crazy story to tell them.

And then the shop manager had yelled at him, demanded to know what the boy was doing there, and in his feverish embarra.s.sment Kootie had bought a bagful of stuff he hadn't wanted, just to placate the man: a box of Miraculous Insecticide Chalk, a blister-pack roll of 35-millimeter film, and a Hershey bar with almonds. They were all things displayed right at the checkout counter. The bag was crumpled up now, jammed inside his lightweight shirt.

When he had finally left the store and resumed limping east, away from the fading light, he had pretended that the imaginary ghost of Edison took the blame for Kootie having hidden from the police car. Duh, sorry, he had had the ghost say, but I can't let the cops catch me-I've got library books that have been overdue since 1931!

Now Kootie forced himself to push away from the wall and walk toward the bar's front door. He was chilly in the smoky evening breeze with just the polo shirt on, and he hoped the bar's interior would be warm.

(A gla.s.s lamp-chimney, blackened with smoke. When the black stuff, which was carbon, was sc.r.a.ped off, it could be pressed into the shape of a little b.u.t.ton, and that b.u.t.ton could be attached to the metal disk. In another room you could bite the instrument it was connected to, and, through your teeth and the bones of your skull, hear the clearer, louder tones.) Kootie pulled open the door with his left hand, for the fingers of his right were still rapidly thumping the quarter into the tight skin of his palm. Tap ... tap ... tap ... tap-tap-tap ... tap ... tap ... tap ...

An outward-bursting pressure of warm air ruffled his curly hair-stale air, scented with beer and cigarette smoke and sweaty shirts, and shaking with recorded mariachi guitar and the click and rattle of pool b.a.l.l.s breaking across bald green felt. Yellow light shone in the linoleum under his Reeboks' soles as he shuffled to the nearest of the two empty barstools. The bartender was squinting impa.s.sively down at him over a bushy mustache.

"Do you have a telephone?" Kootie asked, grateful that his voice was steady. "I'd like to have someone make a call for me."

The man just stared. The men on the barstools around him were probably staring too, but Kootie was afraid to look any of them in the face. They'll recognize me from those billboards, he thought, and turn me in. But isn't that what I want?

"Telefono," he said, and in desperate pantomime he raised his left hand in front of his chin as if holding an empty c.o.ke bottle to blow hoots on, while he held his right hand up beside his head, the fingers extended toward his ear. "Hel-lo?" he said, speaking into the s.p.a.ce above his left hand. "Hel-lo-o?"

His left hand was still twitching with the coin, and belatedly he realized that the rhythm it had been beating against his palm was the Morse code for SOS; and at the same time he noticed that he was miming using one of those old candlestick-and-hook telephones, like in a Laurel and Hardy movie.

SOS? he thought to himself-and then, instinctively and inward, he thought: What is it, what's wrong?