Last Call: Expiration Date Part 17

Now he was wondering if even cold baths would work for much longer. He didn't speak to people face-on anymore, even if he'd just chewed up an Eat-'Em-&-Weep ball, because of the way they would flinch at his breath; and he knew that his ankle, onto which he had squarely dropped that refrigerator two days ago, couldn't possibly ever heal. He had wrapped it up tight with an Ace bandage, but it still hurt, and he wondered if he would be around long enough to get so tired of it that he would just saw the whole foot off.

He was only fifty-two years old ... or would have been, if he had still had any right to birthdays. At least he wasn't a ghost.

Loretta deLarava obviously wanted to finish him off now-as she had smashed him seventeen years ago-after having taken aim at him all the way back in '62, on the set of Haunted House Party.

She had known who he was-Nicky Bradshaw, star of "Ghost of a Chance," G.o.dson to Apie Sullivan-but he had not realized who she was until that summer night when unseasonable rain had actually put rushing water in the L.A. River bed all the way up by the Fourth Street bridge, and the shooting of some zombie scene had had to be postponed.

Everybody had been sitting around in the big, chilly brick warehouse in which the indoor sets had been built, and deLarava had kept looking at her watch. That was natural enough, since by that time she was practically the second a.s.sistant director on the picture, but after a while she had lit up a corncob pipe full of some vanilla-scented tobacco and gone wandering out into the rain. He had heard her whistling old tunes out there, specifically "Stormy Weather," and when she had come back in she had ditched the pipe and had seemed to be stoned. At the time he had a.s.sumed that she'd been hiding the smell of gra.s.s or hash under the vanilla ...

Though in fact she had seemed wired, as if on cocaine or an amphetamine. As soon as she'd got back inside and shaken back her wet hair she had started talking nonstop in her hoa.r.s.e, fake British accent-rambling on about her genius-plus IQ, and telling fragments of anecdotes that clearly had no point except to ill.u.s.trate how competent she was, equal to any challenges and a master of subtle revenge upon anyone who might foolishly dismiss her as unimportant.

The monologue had sat awkwardly with the crew and the youthful actors, all of whom had until then thought pretty highly of her. Bradshaw had been napping in a nest of rags in the costuming room, but the change in the tone of the conversation woke him, and he had wandered sleepily out into the big room.

"I was married once," deLarava was saying airily. "He was a very powerful figure in ... an industry I'm not at liberty to name. He gave me everything I asked for, we had a big estate in Brentwood and a whole fleet of cla.s.sic cars! But he couldn't give me the gift I demand of a man-that I be the most important person in his life. His two children ... occupied that spot." (One of the crew wearily asked her what she had done about that, and deLarava simpered.) "We went on a picnic," she said, "and I fixed potato salad just the way he liked it, with olives and red onions and celery seed, but I used a jar of mayonnaise that had been sitting out opened for a few days. And he had an appointment later that afternoon. Oh yes," she went on as though someone had asked, "the most important appointment of his life. His precious children pigged down a lot of the potato salad too."

("Jesus," someone muttered. "Did they all die?"

(The question brought deLarava back from the spicy pleasures of the memory.) "Hm? Oh no, they didn't ... die. But for a while they definitely had nothing to think about except when Nurse ... Nurse Loretta might find the time to attend to their sickbeds! I can a.s.sure you!" Her British accent had been broadening out to sound more Texan, and was practically a drawl when she added, "That time they really were p.o.o.ped-out puppies."

At that moment Bradshaw realized who she was. Her appearance had changed drastically in the intervening three years, but when she forgot the hoa.r.s.eness and the affected accent he knew the voice even an instant before the p.o.o.ped-out puppies phrase-which he had heard her say a number of times-confirmed it. Then she looked up and saw him, and her eyes widened and then narrowed momentarily as she visibly became aware that she had been recognized.

It's Kelley Keith, he thought in that first moment of surprise; it's my G.o.dfather's widow ... fat and disfigured now ...

Only then did he consider what she had just said. The most important appointment of his life. And he remembered that the autopsy of Arthur Patrick Sullivan had mentioned spoiled potato salad in his stomach as the cause of the cramp that had caused him to drown, out past the surf line on that summer day in Venice in 1959.

Bradshaw had backed away without changing his sleepy expression ... but he'd known that she wasn't fooled. She was aware that he-alone!-had recognized her, and that he alone had understood her oblique and inadvertent admission of murder.

After Haunted House Party was in the can, he had finally stopped trying to chase his earlier success in show business. He had enrolled in the UCLA law school, and two years later pa.s.sed the California bar and moved to Seal Beach to practice real-estate law.

Sometimes during the ensuing decade he had wondered if the advent of Loretta deLarava had scared him away from the movies ... and then he had always recalled the artistic merits of Haunted House Party, and had wryly dismissed the suspicion.

He had stayed away from Hollywood, though, and had gradually stopped seeing his friends in the industry; and even so, he was careful to keep his home address and phone number a secret, and to vary the route he took to his office, and to come and go there on no set schedule. He kept a gun in his office and car and bedside table. Superst.i.tiously, he never ate potato salad.

And in fact it wasn't potato salad that she finally got him with, in 1975. It was a spinach salad with hot bacon dressing, and lots of exotic mushrooms.

When Johanna returned to her magazine, Shadroe, who hadn't called himself Nicholas Bradshaw since his "death" in '75, took one more look at the static television screen and then stumped into the little room where the tub was, and by the glare of the bare overhead lightbulb he stared with distaste down at the dozens of ice cubes floating in the gray water-like broken gla.s.s in a tub of mercury.

The sooner he took his bath and got out, the sooner he could be in his car and driving west on Ocean Boulevard to the marina, where he would climb aboard his boat and spend the long hours of darkness sitting and staring at another TV set switched to CBS with the brightness control turned down just far enough to black out the picture, watching the white line that would certainly be on that screen too, and listening for the burping croaks of his pigs.

Like every other night.

CHAPTER 24.

"That's the effect of living backwards," the Queen said kindly: "it always makes one a little giddy at first-"

"Living backwards!" Alice repeated in great astonishment. "I never heard of such a thing!"

"-but there's one great advantage in it, that one's memory works both ways."

-Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Gla.s.s AT THE NORTHWEST CORNER of MacArthur Park, crouched under a pyrocantha bush in the shadow of the statue of General MacArthur, Kootie watched as his fingers opened his bag of purchases from the ninety-nine-cent store on Sixth Street. The box of insecticide proved to be MIRACULOUS INSECTICIDE CHALK-MADE IN CHINA, and inside it were two sticks of white chalk with Chinese writing stamped into them. An instruction sheet on flimsy paper was all written in Chinese figures, and Kootie leaned out of the shadow of the statue's base as his hands held the paper up close to his eyes in the leaf-filtered radiance of a streetlight.

" 'Directions for use ...' " he heard his own voice say thoughtfully. Kootie started to interrupt, "You read Chinese-?" but Edison took over again and finished, " '... On floor, use enclosed chalk to write "Bugs, kill yourselves forthwith." ' "

Then Edison was laughing an old man's laugh with Kootie's boy's voice, and he flipped the paper over. "Kidding," Edison said. On this side the directions were in English. " 'The chalk is more effective to use at night,' " Edison read, and Kootie could see that he was reading it correctly this time. "Well, that's handy, eh? 'Draw several parallel lines each two to three centimeters apart across the track which the insect used to take ...' I like 'used to,' as if the job's already done. Well," he said, folding up the instructions, "this will do some good, though it's a child's version of a device I set up in the Western Union office in '64 in Cincinnati, and later in Boston-a series of plates hooked up to a battery. That was for night work, too-I told everybody it was for rats or roaches or whatever they'd believe, but it was to get some rest from the d.a.m.n ghosts."

Kootie caught a brief glimpse of memory: a big dark room in what had once been a downtown Cincinnati restaurant, copper wire connections arching and popping all night, the harsh smell of the leaky batteries, and morose, transparent ectoplasmic figures huddled in the corners far away from the stinging metal plates.

Kootie's hands waved. "Get us back out to the sidewalk, will you boy?"

Kootie tucked the bag back into his shirt and then obediently straightened up and walked across the gra.s.s and stepped up to the sidewalk. He started to brush dirt off his pants, but found that he was crouching to draw a circle all the way around himself on the concrete with the stick of chalk. His lips twitched, and then Edison used them to say, "I'd better let you do it; spit in the circle. If I try it you'll do something else at the same moment and we'll wind up with spit all down our chin."

Our chin? thought Kootie-but he did spit on the sidewalk before straightening up.

"Very well, your chin," said Edison. "Now crouch again and let me draw some lines."

Kootie squatted down, and then watched as his hand drew a maze of lines around the circle: parallel lines, spirals, radii from the circle's edge-until this section of sidewalk looked, Kootie thought, like the site of some hopscotch Olympics. Cars hissed past in front of him in the street beyond the curb, but the only close sounds were the click-and-scratch of the chalk and his own eager breath.

The chalk was being worn down to a stump as cartoon eyes were added, and more wheels were drawn, and Crosshatch squares were carefully colored in. The production was a couple of yards wide now.

Kootie shivered. It was cold out here, and he didn't like having his arm stretched out for so long. "Will you be done when that stick of chalk is used up?" he asked hopefully. There had been two sticks of the chalk in the yellow-and-orange box, and he hoped Edison wasn't going to need the other one as well.

He was about to repeat his question when Edison spoke instead: "What? What is it now?"

"How much of that stuff have you got to draw?"

"Stuff ..." Kootie's head was swung this way and that, and he had the impression that Edison was even more bewildered than he was by the convoluted designs he'd drawn on the sidewalk.

"Did I-" Edison began. He took a deep breath. "Yes. There. That'll stop any ghosts or ghost hunters who might pick up my trail."

As Kootie presumed to straighten up, he could feel his recent memories being ransacked. "And," Edison went on, "it might slow down your ... one-armed murderer. Now-how much does a dinner cost around here? Oaffg-Never mind, what I meant was, let's find some place to eat." Kootie's head tilted to look down, and again their gaze swept the lunatic drawing. "After that we can come back here and-see if we've caught something to put in your film canister."

Only now did Kootie realize that his purchases at the ninety-nine cent store might not have been his own idea; and he wondered why Edison apparently wanted to catch a ghost. But the notion of dinner was compelling.

"I've been smelling barbecue for a while," he ventured.

"Good lad, I'm not getting anything ... olfactory, myself. Lead the way, by all means-it's never a good idea to turn your back on your nose."

The thrilling blend of onion and peppers and lemon on the breeze seemed to carry at least the promise of warmth, and Kootie was briskly rubbing his arms above the elbows as he followed the smells across the Park View intersection and around a corner, to a doorway under a red neon sign that read JUMBO'S BURGOO & MOP TROTTER. Even from out on the street Kootie could hear laughter and raised voices from within.

"It's food," Edison a.s.sured him. "Southern stuff."

(Again Kootie got a memory flash-Spanish moss hanging from old live oaks along the banks of the Caloosahatchee as he chugged upriver in an old sloop, the winter house in Fort Myers among the towering bamboo and tropical fruit trees, cornmeal-dipped fried catfish served alongside corn on the cob that had crinkly hairpins stuck in the ends for handles ...) "And without any sense of smell I won't be able to taste any of it," Edison went on in an aggrieved voice as Kootie pulled open the screen door and stepped into the place. "I'd much rather have stayed deaf instead."

Redwood picnic tables were lined up on the flagstone floor, with a counter along one side of the room-ORDER at the near end, PICKUP at the other-and in the kitchen beyond that, Kootie could just see the tops of big shiny steel ovens. Framed hand-painted menus swung in the hot air above the counter, and the other three walls, dark old brickwork, were crowded with black-and-white photos that all seemed to be autographed. The cooks and the countermen and all the men and women and children at the tables were black, but for the first time since losing Raffle and Fred, Kootie didn't feel like an excluded fugitive.

"What can we do for you, little mon?" rumbled a voice above Kootie's head. Looking up, he saw the broad, red-eyed face of a counterman staring down at him.

"I'm going to have-" began Kootie, from habit wondering what sort of pulses and grains and vegetables they might serve here; then he finished defiantly, "meat!"

"Meat you shall have," the man said agreeably, nodding. "Of what subcategory and method of preparation?"

"Barbecue pork ribs," said Edison while Kootie was still trying to read the menu through the dark lenses of his sungla.s.ses, "and the turnip and mustard greens with bacon dumplings-" ("Please," interjected Kootie breathlessly, just to be polite.) "And a big mug of beer-" ("N-n-no," Kootie managed to interrupt, "I'm too young, I'll just have a large c.o.ke!") "And," Edison went on-("Not" said Kootie, who could see what was coming)- "a cigar," finished Edison in defeat, "dammit."

The black man was frowning and nodding. "Yes, sir," he said. "Nothing wrong with you." He was tapping keys on the cash register, which hummed and spat out a receipt. "Seven dollars and a quarter, that comes to."

Kootie gave the man a ten-dollar bill, keeping his mouth and throat firmly closed against Edison's outraged grunting.

The man gave him his change. "It'll be at the far end of the counter there, in just a minute. Do you think you can keep the number twenty-two in mind? Can you remember it even now?"

"Twenty-two," said Kootie. "Sure. Why?"

"Because that's the number that one of us up here will call, when your supper is ready for you to pick up. I can't see why that shouldn't be satisfactory to everybody concerned, can you?"

"No, sir," said Kootie. He limped to a table that was occupied only at one end by a couple of old men playing dominoes, and he wondered if he might ever get used to everyone thinking that he was crazy; then he wondered what schemes Edison might come up with for finding a place to sleep tonight, and to make money tomorrow. Remembering the chalk drawing, he hoped the old man's ghost wasn't going senile.

When his number was called and he went up to get his tray, his gaze was caught by a polished wooden box on the counter. A metal rod, hinged at the bottom, ran up the front of it, and a piece of paper had been taped to the rod, with L.A. CIGAR-TOO TRAGICAL hand-lettered vertically on the paper. On the counter in front of the box was a cardboard bowl of peppermints.

Kootie's gaze was snagged on the lettering. He read it downward, and then upward, and it was the same letters either way. This seemed important, this proof that moving backward could be the same as forward, that the last letter of a sentence could be not only identical to the lead-off capital letter but the very same thing ...

He realized that he had been standing here, holding the tray with the steaming plates on it and staring at the vertical words, for at least several seconds. He made himself look away and breathe deeply. "What," he whispered, "is it?"

"That's a cigar lighter," rumbled his throat as he crossed to his table and sat back down. "Well," he answered, "you didn't get a cigar, so forget about it."

Kootie made both of them focus on the food.

The ribs were drenched in a hot sauce that reeked of tomato and onion and cider vinegar, and he gnawed every shred of meat off the bones and was glad of the napkin dispenser on the table. The greens only got nibbled, because Edison couldn't taste them and Kootie found them strong and rank, but he did eat most of the dumplings.

A mouthful of c.o.ke ran down his chin onto his shirt when Edison opened his mouth to whisper, "My G.o.d, it's fly paper!"

Then Kootie watched his hands untuck his shirt to get at the bag and pull out of it the box of film. The film cartridge itself was dumped out onto the table, and Kootie's fingers s.n.a.t.c.hed up the empty black plastic canister. Kootie was about to point out that the film was in the yellow metal thing, but Edison hissed, "That fella's going to light a cigarette!" Sure enough, one of the old men at the table had taken out of his pocket a pack of Kools and was shaking one out.

Kootie's head snapped forward, and then he couldn't tell if it was intentional or not when he drooled some c.o.ke into the empty plastic film container.

"Get to the cigar lighter before he does," Edison whispered. "Go, or I'll motivate for you, this is too lucky a chance to waste."

His legs already twitching impatiently, Kootie pushed back the bench, got to his feet and wobbled over to the wooden box on the counter. How does it work? he thought.

Edison whispered, "Don't work it-act like you just came over here to get a mint."

Kootie started to say Okay, but had got no farther than the "Oke-" when the ceiling lights dimmed and the air was suddenly cold; and he was distantly grateful when he felt his knees lock, for sudden dizziness had made the field of his vision dwindle like a receding movie screen. He thought he sensed someone big standing behind him, but he couldn't turn around.

" 'Kay," he managed to whisper.

Kootie watched his own hands. His left hand picked up one of the mints, and he could feel its powdery dry surface, like a big aspirin, even though he wasn't controlling the fingers-(It's like the opposite of when your hand's asleep, he thought)-and his right hand brought up the plastic container to catch the mint deftly when his left hand dropped it. Then his right hand slowly sc.r.a.ped the edge of the container up the metal rod at the front of the cigar-lighter box, as if trying to scratch off the taped-on paper.

Then the ceiling lights brightened again and all three of the cash registers began clicking and buzzing. Edison had capped the little container as quickly as if he had caught a bee in it. "Grab a mint," he made Kootie whisper. "Grab a whole handful, like you're just a greedy boy."

Kootie dizzily obeyed, and walked back to his table when his left foot began to slide in that direction. As he sat down, heavily, he heard one of the countermen demanding to know why all the registers were going through their cash-out cycles.

"Let's go before they figure it out," Edison said softly. "Leave a tip?" put in Kootie. "They didn't bring it to the table," Edison pointed out impatiently.

As he rode his scissoring legs out of the restaurant, Kootie managed to wave one shaky hand at the counterman.

The night outside was colder now, and the headlights of the faceless cars seemed to glow more hotly as they swept past. Edison, forgetful of Kootie's hurt ankle, was making him hurry, and the result was a bobbing, prancing gait. He had stuffed the plastic container into his front jeans pocket, but his left hand still clutched the mints.

"Didjjj" began Kootie, but Edison clamped his teeth shut, then said, "Don't speak of it. I lit up the whole area-we've got to get clear of it."

Kootie was hurrying west on Wilshire, away from the spot where Edison had drawn the chalk patterns on the park sidewalk by the statue, and he caught a thought that might or might not have been his own: A stupid use for chalk-that was just stupid-a ghost's idea of a ghost trap. Apparently the "flypaper" on the cigar lighter had been better.

Edison made Kootie glance up at a streetlight as he shuffled past under it, and Kootie understood that the old man was glad to see that the light didn't go out to mark their pa.s.sage.

Ionic. From nowhere the word had come into Kootie's mind, and at first he thought of marble pillars with curled scroll-like tops. (Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. Doric columns had just a flat brick at the top, and Corinthian ones had lots of carved grapes and leaves.) Then the notion of pillars disappeared, and he pictured a clump of little b.a.l.l.s, with much tinier b.a.l.l.s...o...b..ting rapidly around the clump; when the tiny b.a.l.l.s were stripped away, the clump-the nucleus-had a powerful electric charge. If it was moving, it threw electromagnetic waves.

These were not Kootie's thoughts, and they didn't feel like Edison's either. "Ionaco," Kootie said out loud.

And suddenly the gleam of moonlight shining on the fender of a parked car ahead of them was not just a reflection, but an angular white shape, a thing; and Kootie's perception of scale was gone-the white shape seemed to be much farther away than the car.

The shape was rotating, growing against the suddenly flat backdrop of the city night, and it was ... an open Greek E, a white spider lying sideways, a white hand with fragmenting fingers ...

It was moving upward and growing larger, or closer.

It was a side-lit white face, an older man's face-with a white ascot knotted under the chin; and as Kootie stared, gaping and disoriented, the lines of a formal old claw-hammer coat coalesced out of the shadows under the face, and an unregarded background shadow that might have been a building was now a top hat. Cars on the street were just blurs of darkness, moving past as slowly as moon shadows.

Kootie thought the image was some kind of black-and-white still projection-the light on it didn't correspond to the direction of the moon or the nearest streetlight-until the white mouth opened and moved, and Kootie heard the words, "I only have one left." The voice was low, and reverberated as if speaking in a room instead of out here on the street, and the lips didn't move in synch with the sounds.

The figure still seemed to be some kind of black-and-white hologram.

Neither Kootie nor Edison had kept the boy's body moving. Halted, Kootie was aware of sweat on his forehead chilly in the night breeze. "One what?" asked Edison wearily.

"Belt." The ghost, for Kootie was sure that's what this thing was, opened its coat, and Kootie saw that the figure wore, as a sort of bulky c.u.mmerbund, a belt made of bundled wire. A little flashlight bulb glowed over the buckle. "Fifty-eight dollars and fifty cents, even now."

"We don't need a belt," Edison said; but, "What does it do?" asked Kootie. It was heady for the boy to realize that, on this night, he would believe nearly any answer the ghost might give.

"Well," said the ghost in its oddly contained and unsynchronized voice, "it could have cured Bright's disease and intestinal cancer. But it banishes paralysis and restores lost hair color and stops attacks of homicide. It's called the I-ON-A-CO, like the boy said. It's a degaussing device-you can sleep safely, if you're wearing it."

"I don't have fifty-eight dollars," Kootie said. For the first time since hurrying out of Jumbo's whatever-it-had-been, he opened his hand. "I've got mints, though."

The ghost came into clearer focus, and a tinge of color touched its white face. "Out of respect for Thomas Alva Edison," it said, and its words matched its lip movements now, "I'll take the mints in lieu of the money."

"He'd rather have had the mints in any case," said Edison grumpily. "And you never thought that I might want 'em."