Long Shot (6 page)

“It's about this loser,” Carl began.

As to how she felt herself, she would have sworn she was going mad if she hadn't been gripped by such a sudden fury. The grief was nothing yet, but all her pent-up terror had loosed its hold when the rage came on. Her moods were usually rhythmed like the tides, by forces off the earth, so she wasn't much given to finding cause. But why this anger? What was wrong? Surely it was more than Jasper dying. She desperately wanted an enemy, and she wasn't sure Carl was good enough. She'd have liked to be all alone just now. But the fact that Carl was here as well insured one thing: He wasn't free to dispose of Jasper back at Steepside, changing around what didn't work like so many cuts in a script.

“So he follows this bandit's getaway route,” said Carl, “from San Francisco all the way to the Mexican border.” Carl liked his stories two lines long, as tight as a joke. “He's trying to find the guy's last hideout. There's supposed to be a fortune buried there. The thing is, it's been lost a hundred years.”

They reached the end of the cedar alley. The BMW turned off the dirt and tripled its speed on the main road. She thought how, in the days ahead, anyone peering in at her window would say she was only gone for a swim. She sat back now so the wind blew on her face. It suited her present air of disconnectedness that an aura of her lingered here. It meant she would return. When all the dying was over at home, she would bring the grief back here. For now, she let the whole thing go—the paradise bit and the island girl together.

Then, without any warning, the wind was full of nothing but the sea. She couldn't smell lilies, no matter how deep she breathed. It was as if they'd driven across a border where all one's finer sentiments withdrew. If she remembered right, the lilies had always grown more and more faint when she drove off long ago. They vanished by degrees. Tonight, the perfumed air stopped cold, and she caught the rougher scent of the world at large—blurred and nameless and raw.

“Well, does he find it?” she asked him finally.

“You mean the loot?” He sounded like he didn't know. “It's hard to say. The ending's kind of a trick.” At that, he seemed to struggle. She wondered if he had his doubts as to whether he ought to tell the trick. He cleared his throat. “You know,” he said, “we still have an awful lot to decide.”

“Later,” she retorted sharply.

It must have killed him to yield to her, but he had no say unless she asked, at least till Jasper was in the ground. By common consent, a widow still ran her own show, whether or not she had a publicist in residence. With Vivien, it was something even more. Her whole life long, she'd had this fear that came on her like a fever, such that she always failed in the maze of death at the first or second turning. Tonight there was none of that. The fury she rode would not be stopped. It made its own road over anything put in its way. Especially the likes of Carl.

“I'll tell you what,” said Vivien brightly. “You just wait till we're over the Rockies. We'll still have a whole half hour to decide.”

“Decide what?”

“Who to put the blame on, you or me.”

“Vivien darling,” Carl replied with a weary sigh, his temper razor thin, “don't you know a thing like this is never someone's fault?”

“Shove it, Carl,” she snapped at him—meaning to tempt him further if she could. “You save that shit for the cover of
Time
.”

They made the run to the airport. Far down the fields on either side, she saw the blue of landing lights. She could scarcely wait to be airborne—all locked up for seven hours, and nothing to do but fight. She looked across at his shallow profile in the dark. If she had it her way, they'd be rolling in the aisle—biting, pulling hair—before they reached the mainland. She burned to make him suffer it more than she. Burned to be, as between the two of them, the one who would survive it.

“You act like you're the only one got left behind,” he said. “You think
I
don't hurt? I feel like I just lost a brother.”

“What you just lost,” she said, “is a job.”

They came in under the wing of the Willis jet. A steward stood on the tarmac, a fat white towel over one arm—as if someone was just coming out of a bath.

“And I don't need you,” said Carl, with a finger triggered as if between her eyes, “so lay it on someone else.”

“What
you
're going to need, Mr. Twenty Percent, is an alibi.”

The pilot opened Vivien's door. The steward opened Carl's. For a moment, no one emerged from the back of the car.

“An alibi for what?”

“Whatever's been done,” she said with a shrug, and gathered her things and left him there.

The night air all around was empty of every island flower. The breeze was soft. The sky full-domed. Vivien hurried across to the waiting jet as if she were in an awful rush.

She didn't know what she meant at all.

chapter 2

DESERT-GREEN, SNAKE-PROWLED, POWDER-DRY
, they rise up here like the last of the West. In fact, as mountains go, the Santa Monicas play the wilderness part to the hilt. They front the coastal plain of the L.A. basin with something like the pride of ranges fully twice their size. And not because they can't be climbed, since that is all some people ever do. But they aren't pristine in the Tibetan way, removed forever from man's estate. One cannot get properly lost in them, or avalanched or height-sick. Still, there are stretches not yet built on that are empty as a dream. Money claims title and trees these slopes wherever it can, from Brentwood east to the steeps of Hollywood. Yet for miles at a stretch the stubborn ground persists, from crest to empty canyon. In a city where most of the people have scarcely a three-foot square to stand on, the scrub-covered ridge of the Santa Monicas is the closest L.A. ever gets to a thing like Central Park.

In the winter of 1919, Abner Willis was able to say that he bought Stone Canyon for a song. Nineteen hundred acres at eight cents a throw, to be precise. At the time it was so much dead-end dust, boxed in by mountains too steep to pitch a tent on, and not a cup of water as far as the eye could see. Though it lay between Bel-Air and Beverly Hills, those heavily gardened districts turned their backs on nature in the raw, as if it were faintly embarrassing. But an old deed-trader like Abner knew a good deal more about land than how to turn it into the south of France. Long after everyone else had subdivided madly, he kept all his bottom land in orange trees and beehives, biding his time for twenty years, and never so much as breaking even on a crop. He put off deciding where to build his house, preferring to ride up all alone and living out of a sleeping sack.

In 1935, he convinced the county water district to use his canyon for the west-side dam and reservoir. He sold it back to the public at better than half a dollar's profit on the acre—a six-hundred-percent return over twenty years. Considering that he had a thousand back for every dollar he sank in Orange County, the canyon deal was next to philanthropic. Besides, if he'd charged the county any less, they would have been suspicious—maybe his canyon leaked, or it sat on a hairline fault. He couldn't have been more accommodating, frankly. All he was after was the view out over the water, with a bowl of hills around it. A wilderness all his own within the L.A. city limits.

He used to say he'd got a little corner of Wyoming. Doubtless no one from Wyoming would have seen it quite that way, but more and more, this was how Steepside came to see itself—wild as the last frontier. Abner Willis stood on his empty hilltop, pointing down the canyon toward the dam, and said to Mr. Wright, his architect: “Pretend this canyon's the middle of nowhere, and build me a house on top of it. Make sure it's open all over, so the Willises never forget it's the West down there.”

Abner knew full well where the Mediterranean lower third of the state was headed. The people were pouring in so fast you couldn't count them. It wasn't going to end till every vacant lot was taken up. In twenty more years, Los Angeles wouldn't remember how far west it used to be. By then, as Abner saw it—turning to point the other way, east along the ridge of the Santa Monicas, high above the endless city—by then, the people here would all be living in the future. And barring some catastrophe—say an earthquake seven-five or better, which Abner knew was an old wives' tale—who was going to protest the future's being here? The rest of the world, as far as Abner Willis could ascertain, preferred to stick to the past.

On Tuesday the fourth, when Vivien Cokes, the last of the Willis line, came back to the hilltop she called home, she had to do the final leg in a company helicopter. She could have sworn the seats were upholstered to match the jet. But she had no choice. A crowd of upwards of a thousand was jammed so tight at the Steepside gate, it would have taken a car a good twenty minutes to inch its way through. If the widow herself had turned out to be in a given car, they probably would have flattened it. Just to get a close-up of her, red-eyed and bereft.

The helicopter whirled up over the dam and into the canyon, crossed close to the water, and then rose up the side of the hill, touching down on the west lawn. Vivien jumped out first. She ignored the half-circle of downcast types who waited to tell her how sorry they were. She threw her arms around Artie and tugged him away to the house. But he wasn't any help at all. He couldn't stop sobbing and asking her why—the very thing she'd counted on him knowing. As to where the blame should fall, he didn't leave an opening big enough for anyone but him. It was all his fault, he told her over and over. The mortal flesh of Jasper Cokes had been given into Artie's care. In the bodyguard line of work, a man made only one mistake.

Meanwhile, four sympathetic suicides—all of them thin young women—were laid to the Jasper Cokes affair in the course of the first day. It wasn't clear whether they died because they agreed the world was awful, or whether the knowledge that their particular star was gay had sent them over the edge. When at last the police came lumbering down the hall to Harry Dawes's apartment, they found it wall to wall with neighbors, all of whom swore the door was broken open when they got there. Nobody really cared. There was nothing to steal.

At Universal, a couple of jumpy executives scrambled around in the editing rooms and scooped up every scrap of
The Broken Trail
. This they locked in a vault, with an armed guard dressed like a chocolate soldier. The film's director, Maxim Brearley, announced to the press (before he went into seclusion) that all of Jasper's tortured final days were there to see in the picture.

Of course, you could hardly find an out-of-work actor who didn't have a story to peddle as to the kinks of Jasper Cokes. But most of the dirt was going to have to wait. In the followup work, they'd prove how his whole life reeked of death and the drift into moral corrosion. At present, the media had all it could do to bury him. Or, as it turned out, to burn him up.

It seemed he'd remarked to Vivien once that he wanted his ashes buried high in the hills at Steepside. Just like Abner Willis, who'd always had a horror of ending up another stone in a graveyard. At the time, Vivien simply laughed it off as one of Jasper's ironies. They were eating a mound of crab in the Cecil Beaton suite at the St. Regis, looking out of a big round window down the length of Fifth. Jasper had always been uncommitted, to place above all else. He didn't seem to require a permanent home. He preferred hotels. So when he spoke that night of a bare and windy grave site, she thought he was saying the opposite. Why would he care about afterwards? He'd had all his candy on this side.

But when they got together to iron out details, they found he'd made the same remark to Carl and Artie, too, years ago in a low-life bar miles from the nearest cemetery. They saw now that he must have meant exactly what he said. Ashes in the hills was the order of the day. It was only then, when Vivien gave the nod to release these plans to the press, that she first began to see herself as one of three around Jasper Cokes. She'd always thought of them before as three against Carl and his bloodless deals, though here it was she who usually stood and fought. Jasper and Artie tended to be amenable. Furthermore, she always supposed that if anyone split the group, it would be she. But now it appeared the mathematics were over her head.

They settled on a sunset service for Thursday the sixth, and decided to keep the mourners down to five, forestalling the overland invasion of the press by inviting the lady dean of the anchormen to film it from a hundred feet away. This was not enough for the swollen crowd at the bottom of the hill. By Wednesday noon, the police had pegged it at forty-five hundred. The boulevard up through Beverly Glen from Sunset to Mulholland Drive was all but impassable. Most had come expecting to file by an open coffin, thus to wail at the frailty of life. At the very least, they expected to watch a fleet of limos pass in and out. An urn let into the earth with only five in attendance seemed to them a lousy piece of theater. As the numbers grew on the boulevard, they put on a show of their own.

The downhill gate was abandoned, except for security traffic and the delivery of goods. In addition, Vivien dismissed the helicopter within hours of her arrival, as being too noisy and disorienting. So whenever she and Carl and Artie left the estate, they were forced to go on horseback. Down the steep and narrow trail on the canyon side, where there wasn't any road, then around the north end of the reservoir. It was about an hour's ride. When they reached Stone Canyon Road, a driver picked them up in the powder-blue Rolls and whisked them away through Bel-Air. The crowd at the gate was never the wiser. Vivien made the trek twice, to get out to dinner on Wednesday the fifth, and Thursday morning to shop for black.

It was just gone midnight Wednesday when she led the way uphill on Jasper's buff-and-spotted horse. Carl and Artie were fifty yards behind her, arguing what would have happened if. An hour ago, she'd sat with them in the Hamburger Hamlet in Beverly Hills. Rough and sweaty in her riding clothes and wearing mirror glasses, she listened while they blamed it all on Harry Dawes. The worst they could summon up to pin on Jasper was keeping Harry secret. Vivien wasn't buying their scenario, though she hadn't said a thing at dinner. If they were going to be strictly accurate, she thought, Jasper was more to blame for the boy than the boy was for Jasper.