Last Call: Expiration Date Part 9

This is the vein, all right, Elizalde thought dourly. All the creepy stuff that I was brought up to believe was orthodox Roman Catholicism.

She remembered her surprise when a fellow student at UCLA had mentioned being a Roman Catholic. Elizalde had asked him how an intelligent person could really believe, for example, that rolling a raw egg over a child would cure fever-and then she'd been humiliated when he'd a.s.sured her that there was nothing like that in Catholic doctrine, and asked her where she had got such an idea.

She had of course chosen to laugh it off as a joke, rather than tell him the truth: that her mother had viewed taking Communion at church, and curing afflictions by rolling eggs over sick people-or by burning cornflowers, or eating papers with incantations scrawled on them-as all part of the same faith.

A plastic lighter and an open pack of Marlboros lay on the gla.s.s counter; and Elizalde, reminded by the cigar-ash book of a trick her grandmother used to perform, impulsively laid a dime on the counter and took one of the cigarettes. The women stopped talking and stared at her, but didn't object when she lit it.

She puffed rapidly, not inhaling, and when she had a half-inch of ash she tapped it off onto the gla.s.s and with a fingertip rapidly smeared it into the shape of a six-pointed Star of David. Then she puffed hard at the cigarette for a full half-minute, while the two women on the other side of the counter watched cautiously. Elizalde wiped her right hand hard down the flank of her jeans.

Finally she tapped the long ash into her dry palm; she squeezed it, rubbed it around with her fingers, and pressed her hand down onto the center of the star.

If this was done correctly, with the heel of the hand imprinting a beardlike semicircle and the curled-under fingernails sc.r.a.ping clean s.p.a.ces that looked like shadowed eye sockets and then jiggling across the ash forehead, the result was a face that was plausibly that of Jesus, identifiable by the beard and a sketchy crown of thorns. Elizalde's grandmother had reduced grown men to tears with the apparently miraculous image.

Elizalde lifted her hand away-it had worked well enough.

One of the women crossed herself, and the other opened her mouth as if to say something-but then the ash pattern on the gla.s.s started to move.

Elizalde had glanced down when the women's eyes had gone wide and they'd stepped back, and at first she'd thought a draft was messing up her crude picture; but the ash image was re-forming itself. The jagged streaks that had been the crown of thorns became straggly lines like unruly bangs, and the broad smear of beard crowded up and became the jowls of a fat face. The ash around the eye gaps arranged itself in a finely striated pattern, representing baggy wrinkles.

Fleetingly it occurred to Elizalde that her palms were too damp now to do the trick again. The blood was singing in her ears, and she gripped the metal edge of the display case because her sense of balance was gone.

She recognized the face. It was Frank Rocha, one of the patients who had died during that last group-therapy session at Elizalde's clinic on Halloween night two years ago.

Then the blur of the picture's mouth coalesced into clarity like solid curds forming in vinegared milk-and the mouth opened, and began moving. It was of course silent, and Elizalde couldn't read lips, but she convulsively slapped her hand across the ash image, nearly hard enough to break the gla.s.s.

Her expression when she looked up at the two women must have been wild, for they backed up against the pay telephone on the back wall.

Elizalde dropped the cigarette onto the linoleum floor and ground it out with the toe of her sneaker. "Yo volvere," she said, "quando usted no est tan ocupado." I'll be back when you're not so busy.

She turned and strode out of the botnica onto the Soto Street sidewalk. The morning air was cold in her open, panting mouth, but she could feel a trickle of sweat run down her left-side ribs.

That really was Frank Rocha's face, she thought. G.o.d!

Her own face was as cold as if she had been caught in some horrifying crime, and she wanted to hide from this street, from this city, from the very sky.

She still had the letter from Frank Rocha in her wallet, in the hip pocket of these very jeans. She wanted to throw it away, throw the whole wallet away, every bit of ID.

One of them was finally for real, she insisted to herself even as she was furiously shaking her head and nearly sprinting away from the incriminating counter in the botnica. That last ... seance, two years ago, actually f.u.c.king worked. It did! Dr. Alden, drunken old a.s.shole, was right to make me resign. I should have listened to him, listened to the d.a.m.ned nurses, even though they were all wrong in their reasons for criticizing me. I killed those three patients who died in that clinic conference room, and I'm responsible for the ones who were injured, and the ones who are probably still in one or another of the state mental hospitals.

Angelica Elizalde vividly remembered the two times she had been called in to Dr. Alden's office.

Come in," he had told her when she had walked down the hall to his ostentatiously book-lined cubicle. "Do please close the door, Dr. Elizalde, and sit down."

Alden had been the chief of the attending staff at the county hospital on Santa Fe in Huntington Park; he was a political appointee with unkempt hair and cigarette-stained fingers, and drunk half the time. Elizalde had been thirty-two years old, a psychiatrist with the t.i.tle of "Director of Medical Education for Psychiatric Training." She had been at the county hospital for two years at that time, and in '90 was making $65,000 a year.

And she had felt that she earned it. After her internship she had stayed on at the county hospital for genuinely altruistic reasons, not just because it was the path of least resistance-the third-world-like situation provided experience that a more gentrified area couldn't give her, and she had wanted to help the sort of people who ordinarily wouldn't have access to psychiatric care.

Alden had reached across his cluttered desk to hand her a folded letter. "The charge nurse charged in here this morning with this," he said, smiling awkwardly. "You'd better read it."

The letter from the charge nurse to Alden had been a denunciation of Elizalde and her techniques; it concluded with, "Nurses and staff have lost confidence in Dr. Elizalde and would not feel comfortable carrying out her orders in the future."

Elizalde had known that every hospital is virtually run by the nurses, and that no chief of staff could afford to displease them; but she had looked up at Alden defiantly. "My patients get better. Ask the nurses themselves how my patients do, compared with those of the other doctors."

Alden's mouth was still kinked in a forced smile, but he was frowning now. "No. I don't need to ask them. You must know as well as I do that your methods have no place in a modern hospital. Voodoo dolls! Ouija boards! And how many of those candles have you got on your shelves in there, the tall ones with ... saints, and, and G.o.d, and the Virgin Mary painted on them? It's not helpful to-a white-bearded G.o.d, Caucasian, a man, leaning out of the clouds and holding a scepter! And Rastafari paraphernalia, Santeria stuff! Your office smells like a church, and looks like some kind of ignorant Mexican fortuneteller's tent!"

Abruptly Elizalde wondered if she should have brought along a witness. In an even voice she said, "These methods are no more-"

"Voodoo dolls, Dr. Elizalde! I can't believe you credit such-"

'I don't credit them, any more than I credit Rorschach blots as really being pictures of monsters!" She had made herself take a deep breath then. "Really. Listen. By having patients do readings with cards and planchettes I get them to be unself-consciously objective-about themselves, their spouses, parents, children. The readings let me see, without the patients having to tell me, the problems that deeply concern them, traumas that they subconsciously know should be exposed. A lot of people can't do the abstraction needed to see things in blots, or-or see motivations in situational sketches that look like old storyboards from 'Leave It to Beaver.' But if they've grown up with these symbols, they-"

"The subject is closed," Alden said tremulously. "I order you to resume the standard psychiatric routines."

Elizalde knew what that meant-see each patient for ten minutes at a visit, during which time she would be expected to do nothing more than look at the patient's chart, ask the patient how he or she was doing, a.s.sess the medications and perhaps tweak the prescription a little; nothing more than maintenance, generally by means of Thorazine.

She had left his office without another word, but she had not obeyed him. While the other psychiatrists' offices had all looked alike-the metal desk, the announcements taped to the walls, the particleboard bookcase, the toys in the corner for patients' children-Elizalde's office had gone on looking like a bruja's den, with the religious veladoro candles on the shelves, pictures of Jesus and Mary and filthy old St. Lazar on the walls, and Ouija boards and crystal b.a.l.l.s holding down the papers on the desk. She had even had, and frequently used to good effect, one of those giant black 8-b.a.l.l.s, in the little window at the base of which messages like Good Luck and True Love would float to the surface when the thing was turned upside down. A simple "What do you think that's referring to, for you?"-with any of these admittedly morbid toys-had often unlocked important fears and resentments.

Some of the other members of the psychiatric team had frequently talked about raising "spiritual awareness" in their patients, and had liked to use the blurry jargon of New Age mysticism, but even they found Elizalde's use of spiritualism vulgar and demeaningly utilitarian-especially since Elizalde insisted that there was not a particle of intrinsic truth behind any sort of spiritualism.

Too, she had not been inclined to come up with the trendy sorts of diagnoses. It had been popular among psychiatrists then to uncover hitherto-unsuspected childhood memories of s.e.xual abuse, just as ten years earlier all the patients had been diagnosed as having "anger" that needed to "be worked through." Elizalde was sure that guilt and shame were the next emotions that patients would be encouraged to rid themselves of.

She herself thought that guilt and shame were often healthy and appropriate responses to one's past behavior.

And so she had again been called in to Alden's office.

This time he had simply asked her to submit her resignation. He a.s.sured her that if she did not resign, she'd be "put on the s.h.i.tlist" with the Peer Review Organization and the National Register of Physicians-suspended from taking any Medicare or Medicaid patients, and thus unhirable at any hospital in the country.

He had given her the rest of the day off to think about it, and she had paced up and down the living room of her Los Feliz house, determined to call "60 Minutes" and the Los Angeles Times; she would expose the county psychiatric system, rout the self-righteous nurses, get Alden's job. But by the next morning she had realized that she would not be able to win this fight-and at last she had driven to the hospital and mutely handed in her resignation.

Then she had gone into private practice. She found a chiropractor who agreed to let her rent his storefront Alvarado Street office on Tuesdays, and she worked as a secretary for a downtown law firm the rest of the week.

Her Tuesday psychiatric business had been slow at first-two or three patients, sometimes a fifty-minute group "seance"-but good results earned referrals for her from local businesses and even from the county, and within six months she had moved into an office of her own, between a credit dentist and a car-insurance office on Beverly. Soon she'd had to hire a receptionist to help out with correspondence and billing the insurance companies.

Finally, on Halloween night in 1990, she had held the last of her seance sessions. And it had been for real.

Elizalde had been walking west on the Whittier Boulevard sidewalk for the last several blocks, having fled Soto Street, and now she stopped.

In 1990, Frank Rocha had been living in a little bungalow-style house just north of MacArthur Park. Elizalde had called on him twice, in the determined, I-make-housecalls spirit she'd had at the time, and she thought she could find the place again.

He had had a wife, and ... two daughters?

Standing on the sidewalk in the morning sun, Elizalde was snapping her fingers with controlled, fearful excitement. She knew that her two years of aimless wandering around the country had been just postponement; or not postponement but preparation, getting her strength back, for ...

For the perilous and almost certainly pointless ordeal of making amends.

Amado Street, it had been. She would be able to find it once she had got to MacArthur Park. She took a deep breath, and then began walking, looking for a bus stop.

CHAPTER 15.

"When the sands are all dry he is gay as a lark, And will talk in contemptuous tones of the Shark: But, when the tide rises and sharks are around, His voice has a timid and tremulous sound."

-Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland SINCE THIS WAS IN effect breakfast, Pete Sullivan had ordered a Coors Light with his menudo. The beer was finished by the time the waiter carried the bowl of tripe stew to his corner table, so he waved the empty gla.s.s at the man.

"Another Coors," noted the waiter, nodding. From the moment Sullivan had sat down, the man had proudly insisted on speaking English. "That was unleaded, right?"

"Right," said Sullivan. "Right," he repeated quietly as the waiter walked back to the counter. Unleaded, he thought. That's the only kind of gasoline they sell now, so people with old vehicles like mine have to dump little jugs of lead subst.i.tute into the tank every time they fill up. Probably the term unleaded for light beer will still be in use long after leaded gasoline is forgotten, and everyone will a.s.sume that it's a corruption of some old beer term. Uhn-ledden, he thought blurrily. The original light beer, brewed since the Middle Ages in the ancient German village of Bad Fahrting.

There were two or three plastic bottles of shampoo now alongside the bottles of lead subst.i.tute in the box under the sink in his van, and he imagined strolling into the men's gym at City College up on Vermont and pouring the wrong stuff onto his head in the shower. He could claim it was a delousing measure. It probably would work as a delousing measure. But what would he tell the gas-station attendant when he poured shampoo into the gas tank?

The shampoo had been only ninety-nine cents a bottle-logically-at the Arab-run ninety-nine-cent store he'd stopped at on Western. The ubiquitous little L.A. strip malls seemed to be all ninety-nine-cent stores now, as they had seemed to be all Mexican-style barbecue chicken places in the eighties.

Tiny Naylor's was gone, and so he had driven on down Sunset past the various coffee shops that he still thought of as the chicken-hawk place, the A.A. and N.A. place, the rock-'n'-roll place, the punk-rock-h.e.l.l place. G.o.d knew what sorts of crowds they attracted now. Ben Frank's was still by the La Cienega intersection, and he remembered that it had been such a hangout for the longhair-and-granny-gla.s.ses types in the sixties that the casting call ad for the Monkees' TV show had said, "Ben Frank's types wanted."

He had turned south on Highland and then east again on Melrose-and discovered that Melrose Avenue, though still animated, had died. He remembered when Flip, the huge used-clothing store, had burned in '83 or '84, and had then had an epic fire sale out on the sidewalk-kimonos and tuxedos and fedoras, all selling cheap in the hot sun and the loud rock music. Now there was a Gap clothing store, just like you'd see in any mall. In the early eighties, savvy j.a.panese had been scouring Melrose for old leather jackets and jukeboxes, and nervous tourists would drive by to look at the punks with green mohawks; now the funny hairstyles looked as if they'd been done at the Beverly Center. Like a government-subsidized avant-garde, Sullivan had thought as he'd tooled his old van down the crowded avenue, affluent disenfranchis.e.m.e.nt is just galvanic twitching in a dead frog's leg.

Once safely past the neighborhood of deLarava's studio, he had turned south on Western and driven down to Wilshire and followed it farther east, past the marooned Art Deco relics of the Wiltern Building and the Bullocks Wilshire, to Hoover Street; east of Hoover, Wilshire slants through MacArthur Park (Sullivan's father had always stubbornly gone on calling it Westlake Park, as it had been called before World War II, but today Sullivan sped through to Alvarado without thinking about the old man), and Sullivan recalled that the boulevard would end a mile or so ahead, just past the Harbor Freeway.

Here in this triangle between the Harbor and Hollywood Freeways were the narrow streets and old houses of the area known as the Temple-Beaudry district. Over on the far side of the freeways, on the hill above downtown L.A., the grand Victorian houses of Bunker Hill had stood until thirty years ago. Anonymous office towers stood there now; and on this side Sullivan saw new cleared lots and construction, and he knew that Temple-Beaudry would soon go the same way.

He had got off Wilshire and driven around through the pepper-tree-shaded streets, and had eventually found this place-a tiny Mexican restaurant called Los Tres Jesuses. Presumably it was owned by three guys who each had the common Hispanic first name Jesus-p.r.o.nounced Hey-soos, and usually, perhaps out of reverence, replaced with the nickname Chui-p.r.o.nounced Chewy. "The Three Chewies" had sounded to him like a good place to get breakfast.

Snap, Crackle, and Pop, he thought now as he took a sip of his second cold beer. Manny, Moe, and Flapjack. Larry, Moe, and Culero. Sukie had called people culero sometimes-it meant, roughly, coward.

He picked up his spoon and dipped it into the hot menudo. Even the steam from it, sharp with garlic and onion and cilantro, was strengthening; in a few minutes he had eaten it all, chewed up every white rectangle of tripe and mopped up the last of the red, beefy broth with tortillas.

He wiped his forehead with the paper napkin and waved the second emptied bottle of beer at the waiter. He put it down and shook a cigarette out of the pack, and as he struck a match he noticed that the tin ashtray on the table had a crude felt-pen drawing of a skull in the dish of it, with, carefully lettered around the rim, the words L.A. CIGAR-TOO TRAGICAL.

It was a palindrome-L.A. cigar both ways, with toot in the middle.

Startled an instant in advance, he dropped the burning match onto the drawn skull, and the ashtray glared for a moment with a silent puff of flame, as if someone had previously poured a film of high-proof brandy into it.

The flame was out instantly, and the faint whiff of ... bacon? ... was gone as soon as Sullivan caught a trace of it.

Suddenly he was nervous-but a moment later all that happened was that a car alarm started up in the lot behind the bar. Beep ... beep ... beep ... He smiled wryly-Que culero, he thought-but his hand was almost twitching with impatience for the third beer.

Then the bartender began clanging a spoon against a gla.s.s between the beats of the car horn: beep-clang-beep-clang-beep ...

For a moment it was the Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore ... and with that the memories of his father had caught him.

You couldn't count on motors, their father had told Sukie and Pete a hundred times, sitting over chili sizes at Ptomaine Tommy's down on Broadway, or in line for the Cyclone Racer roller coaster way out at the Pike in Long Beach, or just driving the new Studebaker up Mulholland Drive along the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains to Topanga Canyon and back. The camera had to be cranked at a steady speed even when you were crouched on a platform bolted to the front of a car spinning out around a turn, or on a boat in the Bering Sea when it was so cold that the oil in the camera was near to freezing solid. Some guys tried to use the second hand of a watch to keep rolling that foot of film per second, but Karl Brown told me the trick of humming the Anvil Chorus in your head-if you got that tune really tromping, they could swing you on a sling in a high wind from the top of a twenty-story building and you'd still have that crank turning sixteen frames a second as steady as a metronome in somebody's parlor.

Their father had been Arthur Patrick Sullivan-known as A.P. or "Apie," apparently because he liked to do feats of strength and had hair growing thickly on the backs of his shoulders-and he had started in the movie business in 1915, working as a cameraman and film technician in Cecil B. DeMille's barn at Vine and Selma in Hollywood. His bosses in those early days had been DeMille, Jesse Lasky, and Samuel Goldfish, who was soon to change his name to Goldwyn-but the infant movie business was chaotic, and Apie Sullivan had eventually become a producer and director at 20th Century Fox. For a cresting decade or so he had made feature films with stars like Tyrone Power and Don Ameche and Alice Faye; but it had been obvious to the twins that he had been happiest in the days before sound stages and artificial set lighting. They'd say "We're losing the light" when the sun would start to set, he had often told the twins, but that was Griffith's magic hour, that hour when the sun was just over the trees, and the buildings and the actors would be lit from the side with that gold glow.

The 1920s had been their father's magic hour.

By the time the twins were born, in 1952, the old man had been on his third marriage, had subsided into doing doc.u.mentaries and freelance editing, and was supplementing his income by buying and selling real estate out in Riverside and Orange County; but he had never moved out of the old Spanish-style house in Brentwood, and he had sometimes hung out at Hillcrest Country Club with Danny Kaye and George Jessel, and had been proud that he could still occasionally get jobs in show business for the children of various old friends.

The waiter brought the third Coors Light, and Pete took a long sip from the neck of the bottle. Drinking in the morning, he thought.

Beth, as Sukie had been known until college, had always claimed to remember their mother, who died a year after the twins' birth. Pete had never believed her.

When the twins were seven, their father had got engaged to be married again. Kelley Keith had been thirty-three years old to their father's sixty-one, but she was a genuine actress, having had a few supporting roles in films like We're Not Married and Vampire Over London, and the twins had been impressed with her contemporary career as they had never been with their father's old movies. And she had been slim and blond with a chipmunk overbite and laugh-crinkled eyes, and Pete had been desperate not to let Beth know that he had fallen in love-he was certain-with their stepmother-to-be.

The four of them had seemed, to the twins at least, to do everything together-wading in the tide pools at Morro Bay to find tiny octopuses and to nervously stick their bare toes into the cl.u.s.tered grasping fingers of sea anemones, hiking through the pine woods around their father's cabin in Lake Arrowhead, having grand lunches at the giant-hat-shaped Brown Derby on Wilshire ... Their father always ordered raw oysters and steak tartare, and kept promising the twins that they'd be getting new brothers and sisters before too long.

The wedding was held in April of 1959, at St. Alban's Church on Hilgard. Sukie-Elizabeth-had been sulking for weeks and refused to be the flower girl, and in the end it had been Shirley Temple's little girl, Lori Black, who carried the bouquet of lilacs. The reception was at Chasen's, and Pete could still remember Andy Devine raucously singing "At the Codfish Ball."

And then, one afternoon that summer, their father and his new bride had driven out to Venice Beach for a picnic. The twins had not been along for this outing. Their white-haired father had reportedly gone swimming, doing his always-self-consciously-athletic "Australian Crawl" way out past the surf line, and he had apparently gotten a stomach cramp. And he had drowned.

Pete tilted the bottle up for another slug of cold beer.

After their father's death, Kelley Keith had just disappeared. She had simply packed up all her belongings and moved, and no one had been able to say where to.

Story of my life, Pete Sullivan thought now with no particular bitterness. Later he'd heard a rumor that she had gone to Mexico with a lot of their father's money. Then he'd heard that she had got in a car crash down there and died.

And so the twins had been put into the first of what was to be a succession of foster homes. And eventually there had been Hollywood High, and City College and no money, and then the jobs with deLarava.

deLarava probably has the license number of my van, Sullivan thought now as he swirled the last inch of beer in the bottle. Could she somehow have the cops looking for it?

He remembered a joke his father had liked to tell: What do you make your shoes out of?

Hide.

Hide? Why should I hide?

No, hide! Hide! The cow's outside!

Well, let her in, I'm not afraid.

I'm afraid, Sullivan thought. Yo soy culero.

He had seen a pay telephone on the back wall by the restroom doors, and now he slid a couple of quarters from the scatter of change on the table and stood up. See if you can't establish a solider home base, he thought as he walked steadily to the phone. Clausewitz's first piano concerto.

Be there, Steve, he thought as he punched in the remembered number. Don't have moved.

He heard only one ring before someone picked it up at the other end. "h.e.l.lo?"

"Hi," Sullivan said cautiously, "is Steve Lauter there please?"

"This is Steve. Hey, this sounds like Pete Sullivan! Is that you, man?"