Last Call: Expiration Date Part 20

The thought of Buddy reminded him of the missile his old friend had thrown at the van as Sullivan had committed hit-and-run. Stopped at a red light, Sullivan now rolled down the driver's-side window and craned his neck to look at the outside of the door.

A branching pattern of viscous wetness was splattered from the door handle to the front headlight. It was clear stuff mottled with yellow and dotted with angular bits of white, and half a dozen vertical trickles had already run down the fender from the initial horizontal streaking.

Buddy's missile had been a raw egg.

The schoolboy-prankishness of the gesture was disarming. He egged my van, Sullivan thought; after I smashed the front end of his car! How could he have been colluding with deLarava at one moment and doing something as goofy as this in the next? I must have been wrong-poor Buddy wasn't guilty of anything but beery tactlessness back there in the restaurant, and then he must really have been calling some business a.s.sociate when he went to the phone. I should go back, and apologize, and agree to pay for getting his car fixed. This was pure paranoia. Even the people on the motorcycle had probably just been- No. Sullivan remembered the old woman sitting high up against the sissy bar, blindfolded against visual distractions and sniffing the breeze, and he couldn't make himself believe that the pair on the Honda had been random pa.s.sersby.

He kept driving straight ahead.

East of Vine, the street stopped seeming to be Hollywood Boulevard, and was just another Los Angeles street, with office buildings and CD stores and boarded-up theaters, and red-and-yellow-blooming wild lantana bushes crouched in the squares of curbside dirt; but when he glanced out of his open window he saw, a smoky mile to the north against the green Griffith Park hills, the old white HOLLYWOOD sign-and for just a moment, to his still-watering eyes, it had seemed to read HALLOWEEN.

Not for two days yet, he thought, and he spat again to get rid of the taste of Houdini's thumb. I've got about thirty-six hours.

Just past Van Ness he turned right onto the 101 southbound. The freeway was wide open and cars were moving along rapidly for once, and he gunned down the ramp with the gas pedal to the floor so as to be up to speed when he merged into the right lane.

A. O. f.u.c.king P., he thought as he took his first deep breath in at least five minutes. On the freeways, there you feel free.

He remembered now, now that he was at long last experiencing it again, the always-downstream rush of driving along open fast-moving freeway lanes. Up here above the surface streets, above them even if the freeway was sluicing through a valley, the real world off to the sides was reduced to a two-dimensional projection of sketchy hills and skysc.r.a.per silhouettes, and you dealt with the names of places, spelled out in reflector-studded white on the big green signs that swept past overhead, rather than with the grimy stop-and-go places themselves; even the spidery calligraphy of gang graffiti markers, looping across the signs in defiance of barbed wire and precarious perches and rushing traffic below, were formal symbols of senseless-killing neighborhoods, rather than the neighborhoods themselves.

Other drivers were just glimpsed heads in the gleaming solidity of rushing cars in this world of lanes and connectors; s.p.a.ce and time were abridged, and a moment's inattention could have you blinking at unfamiliar street names in Orange County or Pomona.

Sullivan had to find a place to stay, a place with a garage. After this, he couldn't keep living in the van out on the streets. And he wanted to be close to deLarava, without putting himself in the way of her possibly stumbling across him.

Just short of the towers of downtown he turned south on the Harbor Freeway, toward Long Beach and the Los Angeles Harbor ... and the Queen Mary.

CHAPTER 27.

"If it had grown up," she said to herself, "it would have made a dreadfully ugly child: but it makes rather a handsome pig, I think."

-Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland FRANCIS STRUBE'S BLACK LEATHER electric office chair was acting up. It was made by the McKie Company, which was supposed to manufacture the best race-car seats, and he had punched the b.u.t.ton on the "comfort console" to pump up the lower-back region, but it had inflated out grossly, to the size of a watermelon, and in order to sit back with his shoulders against the top of the chair he had to push out his chest and belly like a pouter pigeon.

Ludicrous. He leaned forward instead, dividing his attention between the flimsy sheets of fax paper in his hand and the man in the seat across the desk. The Goudie Snuff people-after extorting a thousand dollars out of him!-had printed out their mailing list in some kind of minimalist dot-matrix, and Strube was afraid he'd have to get Charlotte to puzzle it out for him.

"But," said the client uncertainly, "would that be best for them?"

Strube looked up at him. What dreary aspect of the man's divorce case had they been discussing? d.a.m.n the chair. He pushed the "deflate" b.u.t.ton several times, but the leather-covered swelling behind his kidneys didn't diminish; if anything, it swelled more. But he put patient concern in his voice as he asked, "Best for whom?"

"Whom we're talking about, Mr. Strube! Heather and Krystle!"

These, Strube recalled, were the man's daughters. He remembered now that custody of the children had been the topic at hand.

"Well, of course it would be best for them," Strube said, indicating by his tone that he was way ahead of the man, and had not lost track of the conversation at all. "Our primary concern is the well-being of Heather and Krystle." Strube had made a bad impression early on, when, having only read the girls' names on the information form, he had p.r.o.nounced the second one to rhyme with gristle rather than Bristol.

"But," went on the father of the girls, waving his hands bewilderedly, "you want me to demand alternating custody of the girls, a week with me and then a week with Debi, and then a week with me again? How would that work? They'd have to pack their clothes and ... and toothbrushes and schoolbooks and ... I don't even know what all. Every weekend! Would Debi be supposed to feed their goldfish, every other week? They wouldn't even know what was in the refrigerator half the time. The girls, I mean."

Rather than the goldfish, thought Strube. I follow you. "It's your right-and it's to their benefit," he said soothingly. "For two weeks out of every month they'd be living with you, in a normal, nurturing environment, away from that woman's influences."

He let his gaze fall back to where the fax sheets lay in a patch of slanting sunlight on the desk. Most of the customers for Goudie snuff were shops, but there were a couple that seemed to be residential addresses. He noticed one on Civic Center Drive in Santa Ana, and drew a checkmark beside it. Santa Ana was just an hour away, down in Orange County-that could easily be where Nicky Bradshaw was hiding out these days. Strube reminded himself that he would have to scout all the likely addresses, and actually see Bradshaw at one of them; he wouldn't get the credit for having found Spooky if he just sent in half a dozen likely addresses.

And here was one in Long Beach. Why did so many people need to have snuff mailed right to their houses?

" 'That woman' is my wife," protested the client.

"For a while," Strube answered absently. Here was another address, in Southgate. How did somebody in Southgate afford a luxury item like Scottish snuff? "You did come in here for a divorce, you'll recall."

"Only because she filed! I didn't want a divorce! The girls staying a week with me, and then a week with her-this is fantastic!"

Strube looked up. "Well, you won't be paying child support for half the time. Besides, the arrangement won't last for very long. Your girls will hate it, and it'll wear Debi down, and then you can press for total custody." To h.e.l.l with your girls, he thought; it'll protract the proceedings, and I'm paid by the hour.

The thought was suddenly depressing, and he remembered yesterday's riddle about the lawyer and the sperm cell. He realized that he was hunched over the desk like some kind of centipede.

He spread his Nautilus-broadened shoulders inside the Armani jacket, and leaned back, lifting his chin.

And from the back of the McKie chair burst a sharp, yiping fart-sound. A wordless cry escaped his astonished client.

Still sitting up straight, though he could feel the sudden heat in his face, Strube said, "That will be all for today."

"But-about the division of property-"

"That will be all for today," Strube repeated. He would press for a Subst.i.tution of Attorney tomorrow.

One chance in two million of becoming a human being. He could work with the studios, handle prestige cases for famous clients. Swimming pools-movie stars. He could start by representing Bradshaw.

The client had stood up. "What time ...?"

"Miss Meredith will schedule an appointment." I knew him in '74 and '75, which was more than ten years after he quit s...o...b..z, Strube thought. I'm likelier to recognize him than any of his old Hollywood crowd is.

He maintained his stiff pose until the man had left the office. Then he let himself slump. He could check the Santa Ana address today.

Maybe even the Long Beach one too.

Loretta deLarava was crying again, and it was taking her forever to eat her ham-and-cheese sandwich. She was in a window-side booth in the Promenade Cafe; out through the gla.s.s, across the blue water of the Pacific Terrace Harbor she could see the low skyline of Long Beach, with the boat-filled Downtown Long Beach Marina spread like a bristly carpet of confetti around the foot of it.

She preferred to eat in the employees' cafeteria on C Deck, four decks down, back by the stern; but she couldn't make herself go there anymore.

When the Queen Mary had been an oceangoing ship, that C Deck auxiliary room had been the men's crew's bar, called the Pig and Whistle, and she liked the airy brightness of the present-day cafeteria, with the young men and ladies in the tour-guide uniforms chatting and carrying trays to the white tables, and the absence of obnoxious tourists. But yesterday, and the day before too, when deLarava had gone there, she had found herself in a low dark hall, with dartboards on the walls and long wooden tables and benches crowded with men, some in ap.r.o.ns and some in black ties and formal jackets. The men at the nearest table had looked up from their pint gla.s.ses of dark beer and stared at her in wonderment. She hadn't been able to hear anything over the throbbing, droning vibration that seemed to come up through the floor, and she'd realized that it was the sound of the ship's propellers three decks directly below her.

It had been the old Pig and Whistle that she'd seen, as it had been in ... the sixties? h.e.l.l, the thirties?

And late last night she had left her stateroom and followed uncarpeted stairs all the way down to D Deck, and stood by the closed-up crew's galley by the bow and looked aft down the long, dim service alley, known to the crew in the old days as the Burma Road, that was said to stretch all the way back to the old bedroom service pantry and the hulking machinery of the lift motors by the stern. From far away in that dimness she had heard a lonely clashing and rattling, and when she had nerved herself up to walk some distance along the red-painted metal floor, between widely separated walls that were green up to belt height and beige above, hurrying from one bare bulb hung among the pipes and valves overhead to the next, she had seen tiny figures moving rapidly in one of the far distant patches of yellow light; children in red uniforms with caps-she had peered at them around the edge of a ma.s.sive steel sliding door, and eventually she had realized that they were the ghosts of bellboys on roller skates, still skating up and down the old Burma Road on long-ago-urgent errands.

She had hurried away, and climbed the stairs back to her stateroom on B Deck, and locked the door and shivered in her bed under the dogged-shut porthole for hours before getting to sleep.

The sandwich was actually very good, with tomato and basil in among the ham and cheese, and she made herself take another bite.

The man sitting across the table from her was holding a pencil poised over the wide white cardboard storyboards. "You okay, Loretta?"

"Sure, Gene," she mumbled around the food in her mouth. She waved her free hand vaguely. "Stress. Listen, we've also got to get a lot of footage of the belowdecks areas-the crew's quarters, the section up by the bow where the service men were bunked during the war-it'd be a good contrast, you know? To all the glamour of the top decks."

"Well," he said, sipping nervously at a Coors Light, "I guess you can edit to a balance in postproduction-but we cleared it with the Disney people for just the engine-room tour and the pool and the staterooms and the salons. There might not be accessible power sources down in the catacombs, and G.o.d knows what their routines are-they might tell us it's too late to set it all up. It'd only be giving them two days' warning, if you want to get everything in the can Sat.u.r.day."

"Well, we can at least do stills down there. A still photographer, and me, and my a.s.sistant carrying a portable stereo-that shouldn't disrupt any employees."

"You don't need music to shoot stills, Loretta. And how are you going to use stills?"

deLarava had looked past him and seen Ayres standing by the cash register. She waved, and said, "I've got to talk to this guy, Gene. Do what you can, okay?"

The man stood up, taking the storyboards with him. "Okay. If the PR guy's in his office I'll talk to him now, on my way out. I'll call you and let you know what he says. Tomorrow I'll be at the studio all day, and I'll be back here Sat.u.r.day, early, to make sure they rope off the areas from the tourists. I still don't see why we had to film on Halloween. A weekday would have been less crowded."

"Will you not be questioning my decisions, Gene? You gentlemen all work for me."

Gene left as Ayres walked up, shrugging as they pa.s.sed each other, and deLarava was crying again; she wanted to scratch her scalp, but didn't dare, because she had stretched three rubber bands over it this morning. She had felt she had to, after the dream that had somehow left her to wake up crouched over the toilet in the stateroom's bathroom, whispering to the water in the bowl.

Ayres sat down and promptly drank off the last inch of the Coors Light. "Your old boy Joey Webb is crazy," he said. "He's out at all hours on the beach with a metal detector and a jar of orange marmalade, singing that 'Ed Sullivan' song from Bye Bye Birdie."

"Ed Sullivan? The moron. He's not supposed to be looking for Ed Sullivan."

"Could I have another of these, please?" said Ayres to a pa.s.sing waitress. To deLarava he said, quietly, "I found out some things about the Parganas couple."

"Okay...?"

"Well, they were crazy too. The old man, named Jiddu K. Parganas, was born in 1929. His parents announced that he was the jagadguru, which is apparently like a messiah, okay? The World Teacher. Theosophical stuff. There was a guy he was named for, named Jiddu Krishnamurti, who was supposed to be it, but he shined the job on in '28. He got tired of the spirit world, he said, seeing ghosts crowding up the beaches all the time. Great stuff, hm? But our Jiddu, the one born a year later, didn't work out too well. When he was twenty he got arrested for having burglarized the old house of Henry Ford, who had died two years earlier. The Ford executors hushed it up, but apparently Jiddu got away with a gla.s.s test tube. The Ford people hooked up another one to replace it, and nowadays the fake is on display in the Ford Museum in Greenfield Village in Michigan."

deLarava's heart was pounding, and tears were again leaking out of her eyes. "Fake of ... what?"

"It's supposed to contain Edison's last breath."

"Edison?" My G.o.d, deLarava thought, no wonder the psychic gain is cranked up so high around here since Monday! No wonder Apie is coming out of the sea, and every ghost in town needs only a sneeze to set it frolicking. I guessed that the Monday-night torture-murder wasn't a coincidence, and that the kid had run away with someone heavy-but Edison!

"Yeah," said Ayres blandly, "the guy that invented the lightbulb. Anyway, Jiddu married a rich Indian woman who was also into this spiritual stuff, and they seem to have formed a sort of splinter cult of their own, just the two of them. They bought the house in Beverly Hills, where they were killed Monday night. The police are aware of the place-they've had to answer a lot of complaints from the Parganases and their neighbors. A lot of drunks and b.u.ms used to come around demanding to talk to somebody named Dante or Don Tay."

"That would have been the mask," said deLarava softly. "They kept it in a hollowed-out copy of The Divine Comedy or something." She waved at Ayres. "Never mind. Go on."

"Some comedy. Their kid, this Koot Hoomie that you're looking for, was born in '81. His teachers say that he was okay, considering that his parents were trying to raise him to be some kind of Hindoo holy man. Have you got any calls?"

"Hundreds," she said. "People have grabbed every stray kid in L.A. except Koot Hoomie Parganas." She thought of the boy out there in the alleys and parking lots somewhere, eating out of Dumpsters and sleeping all alone under hedges ... and last night's dream came back to her, forcefully.

She was crying again. "I've got to get some air," she said, blundering up out of her chair. "Tell Joey Webb to keep looking-and tell him to keep an eye on the ca.n.a.ls.' "

The sea was too full of imagined ghosts, waked up and opposing her, and the carpeted corridors and long splendid galleries' seemed suddenly bristly with hostile ectoplasm acc.u.mulated like nicotine stains over the decades, so she fled to the Windsor Salon on R Deck.

She liked the Windsor Salon because it had hanging chandeliers, not the lights-on-columns that stood everywhere else in the ship, big Art Deco mushrooms with glowing mica-shade caps. The Windsor Salon had been built after the Queen Mary had been permanently moored in Long Beach, had in fact been built in the s.p.a.ce of one of the now-useless funnels, and so it could afford the luxury of ceiling lights that would have swung and broken if the ship had been out at sea.

No parties of tourists were being shown through the room at the moment, so she collapsed into one of the convention-hotel chairs and buried her face in her hands.

She had dreamed of a group of little girls who were camping out on a dark plain. At first they had played games around the small fire they had kindled up-a make-believe tea party, charades, hopscotch on lines toed across the gray dust-but then the noises from the darkness beyond the ring of firelight had made them huddle together. Roars and shouts of subhuman fury had echoed from unseen hills, and the drumbeat of racing hooves and the hard flutter of flags had shaken in the cold wind.

Perhaps the girls had gathered together in this always-dark wasteland because they all had the same name-Kelley. They had formed a ring now, holding hands to contain their campfire and chattering with tearful, nervous, false cheer, until one of the girls noticed that her companions weren't real-they were all just mirrors set up closely together in the dirt, reflecting back to her own pale, dirt-smeared face.

And her sudden terror made the face change-the nose was turned up, and became fleshier, the skin around the eyes became pouched and coa.r.s.e, and the chin receded away, leaving the mouth a long, grinning slit. Kelley had known what this was. She was turning into a pig.

Loretta had driven herself up out of the well of sleep then, and discovered that she was kneeling on the tile floor of the little bathroom, crouching over the toilet and calling down, down, down into the dark so that Kelley might find her way back up out of the deep hole she'd fallen into.

There were no parking lines painted on the weathered checkerboard of cracked concrete and asphalt behind the apartment building, so Sullivan just parked the van in the shade of a big s.h.a.ggy old carob tree. He dug around among the faded papers on the dashboard until he found Houdini's thumb, unpleasantly spitty and dusty now, and then he groped below the pa.s.senger seat and retrieved the Bull Durham sack and pushed the thumb back into it.

With the sack in his shirt pocket and his gun snugged in under his belt, he pushed open the door and stepped down onto the broken pavement. Green carob pods were scattered under the overhanging tree branches, and he could see the little V-shaped cuts in the pods where early-morning wild parrots had bitten out the seeds.

This would be the fourth apartment building he checked out. When he had come down off the freeway at Seventh Street in Long Beach, he had quickly confirmed his suspicion that motels never had garages, and then he'd driven around randomly through the run-down residential streets west of Pacific and south of Fourth, looking for rental signs.

He had stopped and looked at five places already, and, no doubt because of his stated preference for paying in cash, only a couple of the landlords had seemed concerned about his murky, out-of-state, unverifiable references. He thought he would probably take the last one he had looked at, a $700-a-month studio apartment in a shabby complex on Cerritos Avenue, but he had decided to look at a few more before laying out his money.

He was down on Twenty-first Place now, right next to Bluff Park and only half a block from the harbor sh.o.r.e, and he had just decided that any of these beachfront rentals would be too expensive, when he had driven past this rambling old officelike structure. He wouldn't even have thought it was an apartment building if it hadn't had an APT FOR RENT sign propped above the row of black metal mailboxes. It looked promisingly low-rent.

Sullivan walked across the pavement now toward the back side of the building, and soon he was scuffing on plain packed dirt. Along the building's back wall, between two windowless doors, someone had set up a row of bookshelves, on which sat dozens of mismatched pots with dry plants curling out of them, and off to his left plastic chairs sat around a claw-footed iron bathtub that had been made into a table by having a piece of plywood laid over it. He stared at the doors and wondered if he should just knock at one of them.

He jumped; and then, "Who parked all cattywampus?" came a hoa.r.s.e call from behind him.

Sullivan turned around and saw a fat, bald-headed old man in plastic sandals limping across the asphalt from around the street-side corner of the building. The man wore no shirt at all, and his suntanned belly overhung the wide-legged shorts that flapped around his skinny legs.

"Are you talking about my van?" asked Sullivan.

"Well, if that's your van," the old man said weakly; he inhaled and then went on, "then I guess I'm talking about it." Again he rasped air into his lungs. "Ya d.a.m.n bird-brain."

"I'm here to speak to the manager of these apartments," Sullivan said stiffly.

"I'm the manager. My name's Mr. Shadroe."

Sullivan stared at him. "You are?" He was afraid this might be just some b.u.m making fun of him. "Well, I want to rent an apartment."

"I don't need to ... rent an apartment." Shadroe waved at the van. "If that leaks oil, you'll have to ... park it on the street." The old man's face was shiny with sweat, but somehow he smelled spicy, like cinnamon.

"It doesn't leak oil," Sullivan said. "I'm looking for an apartment in this area; how much is the one you've got?"

"You on SDI or some-kinda methadone treatment? I won't take you if you are, and I-don't care if it's legal for me to say so. And I won't have children here."

"None of those things," Sullivan a.s.sured him. "And if I decide I want the place I can pay you right now, first and last month's rent, in cash."

"That's illegal, too. The first and last. Gotta call the last month's rent a deposit nowadays. But I'll take it. Six hundred a month, utilities are included ... 'cause the whole building's on one bill. That's twelve hundred, plus a real deposit of... three hundred dollars. Fifteen. Hundred, altogether. Let's go into my office and I can ... give you a receipt and the key." Talking seemed to be an effort for the man, and Sullivan wondered if he was asthmatic or had emphysema.

Shadroe had already turned away toward one of the two doors, and Sullivan stepped after him. "I'd," he said laughing in spite of himself, "I'd like to see the place first."