Last Call: Expiration Date Part 19

Sullivan turned down Cherokee, parked his van in the lot on the south side of Miceli's and switched off the engine, and for a few minutes he just sat in the van and smoked a cigarette and sipped at a freshly popped can of beer. Thank G.o.d for the propane refrigerator, he thought.

Just because he had parked here didn't mean he had to eat at Miceli's. He remembered a Love's barbecue place on Hollywood Boulevard just a block or two away. He could even restart the van and go eat at Canter's, or Lawry's. What he should do, in fact, was get a to-go sandwich somewhere; he had no business blowing his finite money in sit-down restaurants.

It had been here at Miceli's, on that rainy night in the fall of '86, that he had had his last dinner with Julie Nording; the dinner at which she had been so distant and cold, after which he had gone back to the apartment he'd shared with Sukie, and had got drunk and written his ill-fated sonnet.

You're here to exorcise the ghost, he told himself comfortably as the cold beer uncoiled in his stomach. Prove to yourself that there's no more power to sting in those old memories- And then he winced and took a deep swallow of the beer, for he remembered his real ghosts: Sukie, who for years had been so close a companion that the two of them were almost one person, their love for each other so deeply implicit that it could be unspoken, ignored, and finally forgotten; and his father, whose wallet and key ring (and three Hires Root Beer cans) he and Sukie had intolerably left behind when they had mindlessly fled deLarava's shoot in Venice Beach on Christmas Eve of 1986.

He had spent this morning at City College. He had showered and washed his hair in the cologne-reeking men's gym, setting his clothes and "scapular" and f.a.n.n.y pack on a bench he could see from the broad tile floor where the showerheads were mounted against the tile wall, so that he wouldn't have to rent an authorized padlock for the brief use of a locker, and possibly have to show some ID; and then he had got dressed again and reluctantly walked over to the library.

He'd made his way upstairs to the reference section, a maze of tall shelves full of ranked orange plastic file folders stuffed with newspapers and magazines, and endless sets of leather-bound volumes with t.i.tles like Current Digest of the Soviet Press and Regional Studies, and with some help he managed to find the long metal cabinets of drawers where the microfilm was kept.

He'd pried out the boxed spool of the Los Angeles Times from July to December of 1990 and carried it to a projector in one of the reading booths. Once the film was properly threaded and rolling, he sat for several minutes watching July newspaper pages trundle past on the glowing screen-advertis.e.m.e.nts, comics, and all-until he inadvertently discovered that there was a fast-forward setting on the control k.n.o.b. At last he found the first of November. (President Bush had "had it" with Saddam Hussein; the governor's race between Wilson and Feinstein was still too close to call.) The Elizalde story was at the bottom corner of the front page: THREE DEAD IN CLINIC BLAZE. According to the text, a firebomb had been detonated in Dr. Angelica Anthem Elizalde's psychiatric clinic on Beverly Boulevard at 8:40 P.M. on Halloween night. The resulting three-alarm fire brought fifty firefighters, from Los Angeles, Vernon, and Huntington Park, who put the fire out in forty-five minutes. Dr. Elizalde, 32, had suffered second-degree burns while trying to extinguish one of the patients who had caught fire; altogether, three of her patients had died, though only that one had died of burns; and five more were hospitalized with unspecified traumas. Police and the Fire Department were investigating the incident.

Sullivan had fast-forwarded the microfilm to the November 2 issue. The story was still on the front page-now Dr. Elizalde had been arrested and charged with manslaughter. Several of the survivors of her Wednesday-night group-therapy session had told police that Elizalde had been conducting a seance when the disaster had struck, and that hideous apparitions had materialized in the air; and they claimed that one of the patients, a man named Frank Rocha, had spontaneously burst into flames. Fire investigators noted that Rocha's body had been incinerated. Police theorized that Elizalde had installed machinery to simulate the appearance of ghosts, and that this machinery had exploded during the fraudulent psychic performance ... though they admitted that no traces of any such machinery had been found.

The November 3 issue had moved the story to the front page of the second section, where it eclipsed the "Cotton Club" murder trial, which had apparently been hot news in 1990. Elizalde had raised her $50,000 bail, and then had apparently disappeared.

The descriptions of the Halloween-night seance were fuller now, and more lurid-the surviving patients claimed that ropes of ectoplasm had burst from the bodies of many present, and that spirits of eviscerated babies, and of screaming women and babbling old men, had then formed in the air over their heads; and Frank Rocha had exploded into white-hot flames. It was now revealed that several of the patients who had had to be hospitalized were in fact confined in psychiatric wards with acute psychotic reactions.

In the issue of November 4 it was confirmed that Elizalde had disappeared; police sources commented that until her arraignment they would not issue a bench warrant. Included in the article were quotes from an interview that the LA. Weekly had done with Elizalde two months previous to what was now being referred to as the Da del Muerte Seance. "I find it effective," she was quoted as having said, "to use the trappings of the so-called 'occult' in eliciting responses from credulous patients. It has no more intrinsic value than the psychiatrist's cliche couch or the stained-gla.s.s windows in a church-it's simply conducive." Police were still speculating that she had decided to enhance the effect by somehow staging dangerous, faked supernatural phenomena.

Sullivan had tucked the microfilm spool back into its box and returned it to the drawer, and then located the cited issue of LA. Weekly-an actual paper copy, not microfilm-and turned the pages to the interview.

There had been a photograph of Dr. Elizalde in her consulting room, and, looking at it in the library this morning, Sullivan had winced. She was strikingly good-looking, with long black hair and big dark eyes, but she looked more like a gypsy fortune-teller than a psychiatrist: the photographer had caught her smilingly underlit over a glowing crystal ball the size of a melon, and behind her he could see saint-candles and all kinds of primitive little statues on shelves, and a framed print of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

The interview itself had not been so bad. He had made notes of some of her statements: On ghosts: "Well, of course when a person dies, actually that person is gone; a TV set that was used only to view PBS is no different from one that never showed anything but Sunday morning televangelists, once the two sets have been disa.s.sembled-they're both equal in their total absence now. But all of us who are still around have hooks in the memories of these dead people, unresolved resentments and guilts, and these things don't stop being true, and being motivational, just because the person that caused them is dead, has stopped existing. By having my patients strongly pretend-oh h.e.l.l, briefly believe-that they can communicate with the dead collaborators in their pasts, I let them forgive, or ask for forgiveness-'give the pain to G.o.d'-and achieve peace. My patients don't forget the old wrongs endured or committed, but the memories of them stop being actively, cripplingly poisonous. My methods facilitate this by letting the patients literalize the old ghosts. [ans. to quest.:] No, I don't believe in ghosts at all. I'm a rational materialist atheist. By the charged term 'G.o.d' I mean objectivity. [ans. to quest.:] My patients are free to. I don't preach.

On men in her life: "No, I-(laughter) physician heal thyself!-I think I'm still reacting against the machismo image of my father and my brothers. My father drank-I was thirteen when I figured out that his drinking was worst around February and March, when he'd get his vacation pay and his tax refunds-and he'd beat up my mother; and even on the farm out in Norco he always had to have steak and salad and a baked potato and a couple of gla.s.ses of wine at dinner, and silverware, while the rest of the family got rice and beans. And my brothers and their friends were ... oh, you know, khaki pants, polished black shoes, Pendleton shirts b.u.t.toned only at the top b.u.t.ton with white T-shirts underneath, hairnets with the gather-point in the middle of the forehead like a black spidery caste mark. Tough-all the firstborn boys are Something-Junior, and the fathers always had them out on the front lawn in a boxing ring made with a garden hose, sparring like fighting-c.o.c.ks. And the boys and girls were supposed to get married and have kids as soon as possible. I've reacted against the whole establishment I was raised in, there-I'm not Catholic, I don't drink, and I don't seem to be attracted much to men. Oh-and not to women at all!-let me add. (Laughter.)"

On why the crystal ball (if she's so materialistic): "The stasis of the clarity, the clarity of the stasis-people look deeply for ghosts in pools where the agitation has pa.s.sed. Tide pools seem to be the best, actually, literally, in eliciting the meditation that brings the old spirits to the surface; the sea is the sink of ghosts ... that is, in the superst.i.tious mind, mind you. Seriously, patients seem to find their ghosts more accessible in the shallow depths of actual ocean water. It's been worth field trips. Eventually I'd like to move my clinic to some location on the beach-not to where there's surf, you see, but pools of ordered, quieted seawater."

In the City College library, Sullivan had leaned back in his plastic chair and imagined the statements of a psychiatrist in some bucolic culture about a thousand years from now, when guns had survived as nothing but inert, storied relics: Because of the legends still adhering to the objects known as "Smith and Wessons," I find that valuable shocks can be administered by pressing the "muzzle" of one such object against a patient's temple, and then ritualistically pulling the "trigger." I have here a specimen that has been perfectly preserved through the millennia ... now, watch the patient ...

BOOM.

Boom indeed, he thought now two hours later in the Miceli's parking lot, as he finished his beer and dropped the cigarette b.u.t.t inside the can. Well, she's learned better. One of her patients must have been a ghost-connected person who acted as a primer, the charge being Halloween night and the hollow-point slug being a whole s.h.i.tload of actual, angry, idiot ghosts. And the main target seemed to have been one of her patients who had died but hadn't realized it yet, so that he threw posthumous shock-sh.e.l.ls when his lifeline collapsed, igniting his overdue-for-the-grave body. And then two others died of heart attacks or something, and everybody else just plain went crazy.

That must have been some night, Sullivan thought now as he levered open the van's driver's-side door and stepped down to the pavement in the chilly morning air. Well, maybe she's learned better now; here she is back in town, and, unless I miss my guess, the reason she's come back is to make amends-to a more literal sort of ghost than any she was willing to acknowledge when she gave that interview.

If I can find Dr. Angelica Anthem Elizalde, he thought, maybe she could be talked into doing another seance. She knows how, and I've got Houdini's mask, which has got to be big enough for both of us to hide behind. We could both deal with our ghosts from behind the mask, like Catholics confessing through the anonymizing screen in a confessional.

As he trudged up the sidewalk beside the brick wall of Miceli's, he wondered if Elizalde felt differently about the Catholic Church now. Or about drinking.

Or even about men, he thought as he pushed open the door and stepped inside.

Sullivan was sitting alone at a table down the hall from the entry and just taking a solid sip of Coors when someone tapped him on the shoulder.

He choked and blew beer out through his nose-and he dropped the gla.s.s, for his right hand had slapped his shirt pocket for the bag with the severed thumb in it and his left hand had darted to the loop on the f.a.n.n.y pack that would open the thing with one yank, exposing the grip of the .45 inside.

"Jesus, dude," came a startled, anxious voice, and a man stepped widely around from behind him, smiling and showing his hands self-deprecatingly. "Sorry!"

Sullivan recognized him-it was an old college friend named Buddy Schenk. "I spilled my friend's drink, sorry," Schenk said, looking over Sullivan's shoulder. "Could he have another? Uh-and I'll have one too." Schenk looked down at Sullivan. "Okay if I sit?"

Sullivan was coughing hard, but could inhale only with strangled, whooping gasps. He waved at the chair across from him and nodded.

"Beer in the morning," said Schenk awkwardly as he sat down. "You're getting as bad as your sister. And you're jumpy! You went off like a rattrap! About gave me a heart attack! What are you so jumpy for?" He had unfolded a paper napkin from the table and was mopping up the foamy beer and pushing aside the curls of broken gla.s.s.

Sullivan tried to inhale quietly, and was humiliated to find that he couldn't. His eyes were watering and his nose stung. "Hi-Buddy," he managed to choke.

My G.o.d, I am nervous, he thought. If I'd known I was so scared of deLarava I would have sat with my back to a wall.

He wished he could smell something besides beer, for suddenly he wanted to seine the garlicky air for the scent of clove cigarettes.

The waiter who had earlier taken Sullivan's order for a meatball sandwich walked up then, and swept the soaked napkin and the broken gla.s.s into a towel.

After the man had walked away, Sullivan said, "Buddy, you a.s.shole," mostly to test his voice; and he could speak now. "It's good to see you."

Sullivan discovered that he meant it. This was his third day back in Los Angeles, and until this moment he had felt more locked out of the bloodstream of the place than the most postcard-oriented tourist. It was a new Los Angeles, not his city anymore-the freeways didn't work nowadays, Joe Jost's was gone, Melrose Avenue was ruined, Steve Lauter had moved across the 405 and had guns pointed at his head, and the people Sullivan was most concerned about were dead people.

"Well, it's good to see you too, man," Buddy said. The waiter brought two gla.s.ses and beer bottles to the table, another Coors for Sullivan and of course a Budweiser for Buddy. "How's t.w.a.t?"

Sullivan smiled uncertainly, not sure if he'd misheard his friend or if the question was some vulgar variation on How's business? He looked over his shoulder and took a sip of beer carefully. "Hm?"

"Sorry, Toot. We used to call you two Twit and t.w.a.t sometimes."

Sullivan's momentary cheer was deflating, and he had another gulp of beer. "I never ... heard that," he said.

"Well, you wouldn't have. Hey, it was all a long time ago, right? College days. We were all kids." Buddy laughed reminiscently. "Everybody figured Sukie had an incestuous thing for you, was that true?"

"I'm sure I'd have noticed." Sullivan said it with a blink and a derisive snort, but he found himself gulping some more of the beer. The gla.s.s was nearly empty, and he poured into it the rest of the beer in the bottle.

The old shock was still a cold tingling in his ribs. (He had read that the weight of the Earth's atmosphere on a person was fourteen pounds on every square inch of skin, and he thought he could feel every bit of the weight right now.) Sukie had been like the poor lonely ghosts, hopelessly trying to find that better half.

Old Buddy sure has a winning line of remember-whens, he thought.

"She's dead," Sullivan said abruptly, wanting to put a final cold riposte to Buddy's thoughtless needling before it went any further. "Sukie-Elizabeth-killed herself. Monday night."

Buddy frowned. "Really? Jesus, I'm sorry, man. What the h.e.l.l have you-that's why you're alone. Were you with her? I'm real sorry."

Sullivan sighed and looked around at the Pompeii-style murals on the high walls. Why had he come here? "No I wasn't with her, she was in another state. I'm just in town for ... business and pleasure."

"s.e.x and danger," agreed Buddy cheerfully, apparently having got over his dismay at the news of Sukie's suicide. Sullivan remembered now that for the few months that Buddy had stayed with them in '82, he'd always remarked, upon going out in the evening, Off for another night of s.e.x and danger!-and when he'd drag back in later he'd every time shrug and say, No s.e.x. Lotta danger.

"No s.e.x," Buddy said now, grinning, "lotta danger. Right?"

"That's it, Buddy."

"You're having lunch, right? Lemme join you, it's on me and we'll eat ourselves sick, okay? Whatever you ordered already is just the first course. We'll drink to poor ... Sukie. I'm supposed to be meeting a guy at noon, but I'll call him and put it off till three or so."

Sullivan was already tired of Buddy Schenk. "I can't be staying long-"

"Bulls.h.i.t, you're staying long enough to eat, no?" Buddy was already pushing back his chair. "Order me a small pepperoni-and-onion pizza, and another beer, when you get your refill, okay?" He was calling the last words over his shoulder, striding away to the hallway where the telephone was.

"Okay," said Sullivan, alone in the dining room again.

He was agitated by the conversation about Sukie. And the insult to himself! Twit and t.w.a.t! And he was sure that he and Sukie hadn't picked up the Teet and Toot nicknames until ... the early eighties, at the earliest. So much for the we were all kids disclaimer. It's not just thoughtless-why is he jabbing at me this morning?

Sullivan tried to recall when he'd last seen Buddy. Had Sullivan said or done something rude? Sukie might have. Sukie could probably be counted on to have.

His beer was gone, and he looked around for the waiter. A pepperoni-and-onion pizza, he thought, and another Bud and maybe two more Coorses. It's always been Bud for Buddy.

Even the waiter had known it.

Sullivan's hands were cold and clumsy, and when he accidentally banged his fingers on the edge of the table they seemed to ring, like a tuning fork.

How had the waiter known it?

Oh h.e.l.l, Buddy had probably been in here for a while, and this one hadn't been his first. Or maybe he was a regular, these days. Sullivan breathed deeply and wished he had gone somewhere else for lunch.

Why was Buddy hanging around drinking beer at Miceli's when he had a noon appointment somewhere? Miceli's wasn't the sort of place one ducked into for a quick beer.

Maybe the appointment was for lunch right here at Miceli's, and Buddy had arrived early to drink up some nerve.

Through the high window overlooking Cherokee, a beam of morning sunlight lanced down onto the tabletop and gleamed on a stray sliver of broken gla.s.s.

Sullivan had certainly jumped, when Buddy had tapped him on the shoulder; grabbed not only for the gun but for Houdini's mummified thumb, too. What had he been afraid of? Well-that deLarava had found him.

Maybe deLarava had found him. Who was Buddy calling?

Jesus, he thought, taking a deep breath. Where's that waiter? You need a couple of beers bad, boy. Pa-ra-noia strikes deep. You meet one of your old friends in one of your old hangouts ...

Both of which deLarava would have been aware of, just as she'd been aware of Steve Lauter. Maybe there was no one I knew at Musso and Frank's, day before yesterday, just because that was Sukie's and my personal place. We never went there with anybody else, so deLarava wouldn't have known to plant an "old friend" informer there.

If Buddy's here to betray me, he might very well want to pick a fight, to justify it to himself.

Sullivan stood up, walked around the table and sat down in Buddy's chair, facing the entry.

Are you seriously saying, he asked himself as his fingers tingled and he took quick breaths, that you believe deLarava has planted an old friend at each of your old hangouts? Restaurants, bars, parks, theaters, bookstores? (Do I have that many old friends? Maybe the roster is filled out with strangers who've each got a picture of me in their pockets.) Oh, this really is paranoia, boy-when you start imagining that everybody in the city has nothing in mind but finding you; imagining that you're the most important little man in Los Angeles.

But I might be, to Loretta deLarava. If she really wants to capture and eat my father's ghost. And she has money and power, and the paranoid insect-energy to put them to directed use.

O'Hara's in Roosevelt, Morrie speaking, he thought, remembering his flight out of Arizona on Monday night, after Sukie's call. He had calculated then that it would take less than half an hour for bad guys to get from the nuclear plant to O'Hara's.

He thought: How quickly can they get here, today?

Warning-you are too close to the vehicle.

Sullivan was out of the chair and walking toward the front door and feeling in his pocket for the keys to the van.

"Pete! Hey, where you going, man?"

Sullivan pushed open the door and stepped out into the chilly morning sunlight. Behind him he heard Buddy yell, "G.o.ddammit," and heard Buddy's feet pounding on the wooden floor.

Sullivan was running too.

He had the van key between his thumb and forefinger by the time he slammed into the driver's-side door, and he didn't let himself look behind him until he had piled inside and twisted the key in the ignition.

Buddy had run to a white Toyota parked two slots away; he had the door open and was scrambling in.

Sullivan jerked the gearshift into reverse and goosed the van out of the parking slot, swinging the rear end toward Buddy's Toyota; the Toyota backed out too, so Sullivan bared his teeth and just stomped the gas pedal to the floor.

With a jarring metallic bam the van stopped, and Sullivan could hear gla.s.s tinkling to the pavement as the back of his head bounced off the padded headrest. Luckily the van hadn't stalled. He reached forward and clanked the gearshift all the way over into low and tromped on the gas again.

Metal squeaked and popped, and then he was free of the smashed Toyota. He glanced into the driver's-side mirror as he swung the wheel toward the exit, and he flinched as he saw Buddy step out and throw something; a moment later he heard a crack against his door and saw wet strings and tiny white fragments fly away ahead of him. Then he was rocking down the driveway out onto Cherokee amid screeching rubber and car horns, and wrenching the van around to the left to gun away down the street south, away from Hollywood Boulevard. He slapped the gearshift lever up into Drive.

He caught a green light and turned left again on Selma, and then drove with his left hand while he dug the Bull Durham sack out of his shirt pocket. Feeling like a cowboy rolling a smoke one-handed, he shook the dried thumb into his palm and tossed the sack away, then drove holding the thumb out in front of his face, his knuckles against the windshield. It felt like a segment of a greasy tree branch, but he clung to it gratefully.

Out of the silvery liquid glare of the cold sunlight, a big gold Honda motorcycle was cruising toward him in the oncoming lane; he couldn't see the rider behind the gleaming windshield and fairing, but the pa.s.senger was a railthin old woman sitting up high against the sissy bar, her gray hair streaming behind, unconfined by any sort of helmet ... and she was wearing a blue-and-white bandanna tied right over her eyes.

Her head was swiveling around, tilted back as though she was trying to smell or hear something. Sullivan inched the thumb across the inside of the windshield to keep it blocking the line from her blindfolded face to his own.

Sweat stung his eyes, and he forced himself not to tromp on the accelerator now; the Honda could outmaneuver him anywhere, even if he got out and ran. (The shadows of wheeling, shouting crows flickered over the lanes.) And it was probably only one of a number of vehicles trolling between Highland and Cahuenga right now.

G.o.d, he prayed desperately as a tree and a parking lot trundled past outside his steamy window, let me get clear of this and I swear I'll learn. I won't blunder into predictable patterns again, trust me.

The 101 Freeway was only a couple of big blocks ahead, and he ached for the breezy freedom of its wide gray lanes.

Keening behind his clenched teeth, he pulled over to the Selma Avenue curb and put the engine into Park.

He sprang out of the driver's seat and scrambled into the back, tossing the mattress off the folded-out bed. Buddy would even now be telling them that Sullivan was in a brown Dodge van, but they'd recognize him even sooner if he didn't have the full mask working. They would already have been given his name, his birth date, too much of what was himself. When he and Sukie had worked together they had been a good pair of mirror images, being twins, and so there had been no solid figure for a ghost or a tracker to focus on; but now he was alone, discrete, quantified, discontinuous. Identifiable.

He had to grip the thumb between his teeth to bend over and lift the plaster hands out of the compartment under the bed, and he was gagging as he hopped forward and slid back into the driver's seat. He laid one plaster hand on the dashboard and grotesquely stuck the other upright between his legs as he put the van back into gear and carefully pulled out away from the curb.

The Honda had looped back, and now was pa.s.sing him on the left. The riders hadn't had time to have talked to Buddy, but the old woman swung her head around to blindly face Sullivan, and peripherally he could see the frown creasing her forehead.

She's sensing a psychic blur, he thought; a mix of Houdini's birth and life, and my own. She won't be catching any echoes of Houdini's death, because the old magician was masked for that event, and got away clean even though he died on perilous Halloween. She'll be wondering if I'm a schizophrenic, or on acid-what it is that makes the driver of this vehicle such a psychic sackful of broken mirror. (He even felt a little different-his jacket seemed looser and lighter, though he didn't dare look down at himself right now.) He groped through his mind for any remembered prayer-Our Father ...? Hail Mary ...?-but came up with nothing but a stanza of verse from one of the Alice-in-Wonderland books, a bit Sukie had liked to recite: "The sea was wet as wet could be, The sands were dry as dry.

You could not see a cloud because No cloud was in the sky: No birds were flying overhead- There were no birds to fly."

The motorcycle drifted past outside his window and pulled in ahead of him; through the close gla.s.s of the windshield he could hear the ba.s.s drumbeat of the motorcycle's exhaust pipes, and through the fluttering gray hair he could see the old woman's jaw twisted back toward him; but he kept a steady, moderate pressure on the gas pedal, though his legs felt like electrified bags of water. Was the driver of one of these cars around him seeing some signal from the old woman? Was he about to be cut off? They wanted him alive, but only so that deLarava could use him as lure for his father's ghost.

In a hoa.r.s.e voice he quoted more of the Alice scripture, thinking of Sukie and mentally hearing her remembered recitation of it: "Still she haunts me, phantomwise, Alice moving under skies Never seen by waking eyes."

The brake lights flashed on the transom of the gold motorcycle-but its rider leaned the heavy bike around in a U-turn and then accelerated back toward Cherokee, the diminishing roar of its engine rising and falling as the rider clicked rapidly up through the gears. Sullivan's jacket was heavy and tight again.

He spat the old brown thumb out onto the dashboard and gagged hoa.r.s.ely, squinting to be able to see ahead through tears of nausea.

He turned left on Wilc.o.x, and then right onto the crowded lanes of eastbound Hollywood Boulevard. Don't puke on yourself, he thought as he squinted at the cars glinting in the sunlight ahead of him. It looks like you got away this time. Now stay away. Hide. Buddy will have described the van, and might even have got the license number.