Manifesto for the Dead (11 page)

Even so, things were not converging the way Miracle had planned. The Okie had lost the corpse. So Miracle had improvised. And now Lombard was dead too.

Thompson almost sympathized. He'd been up against that wall himself, clutching all those ragged ends, stories within stories that almost webbed together, the various pieces fraying and disappearing into a darkness that swallowed all calculation. Meanwhile, the killer you had created roamed the city. Your careful plan—out of control.

It was dawn. The sedan out front had not moved. A green sedan, Thompson saw now, in the first light of morning. It had a familiar look, and no longer seemed frightening. If someone had meant to harm him, they'd had all night.

Thompson stepped outside.

A figure slumped on the driver's side, head against the window. He edged closer. A woman. She stretched her arms, waking up—and he saw who it was, and he was surprised, though perhaps he shouldn't have been. She had tracked him down, just as she had tracked him down at Musso's night before last. The sedan, he recognized it now. It belonged to their neighbor, Mrs. Myers.

“Alberta?”

She blushed. “I decided to come pay you a visit.”

“When?”

“This morning, of course. I just got here.”

She was lying, of course. She had borrowed the car yesterday, he guessed, and been parked out there all night, though she would never admit it.

“You want to come in for some breakfast?”

“Thank you.”

It was Sunday morning, and he remembered the sound of the kids rumbling about in the front room long ago, roughhousing, and he remembered Alberta watching from the table, still young, smelling of sleep and a midnight tumble.

“Do you remember when we first met?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Some college party. You were drinking a beer—and I liked the way you held the bottle to your lips.”

“That's right.”

“Yes—but I didn't know you were going to be holding it there for the next forty years.”

The night they'd met, he'd seen her leaning against the wall in her red blouse and black slacks. She'd been watching him. The other young men there, they'd smelled of the farm. Young Jim Thompson, though, he'd been around. Debonair, sauntering, reckless, his shirt collar unbuttoned and his tie loose. He'd had experiences. The only loose plank in a room of stiff boards. Their first date, they went to a gangster movie. He had gotten his hands under her blouse, unbuttoning her skirt band. Her features one moment had the look of innocence, and the next seemed as sharp and wicked as a fence post dipped in tetanus.

“How are our kids?” he asked.

“Fine.”

It was an odd question, a sore point. His daughters had married and moved away, but their son, well, he took after the old man. He liked the bar room.

Thompson cracked the eggs into the pan now, flipped the sunny sides over without breaking them.

“They're coming up perfect.”

“You could always cook an egg.”

He got the breakfast onto the table, and they sat together reading the paper. They slipped into the old routine, and he saw the age in her face. She had on her white blouse, rumpled from the long night in the car, her skirt that flared at the bottom, white hose, black pumps, a string of pearls. Her nails were painted red. She had been spying on him, out there. She'd come prepared to drag him from the arms of another woman, if need be, but at the same time she meant to look good doing it.

“Why don't you give it up?”

“What?”

His eyes followed hers, and he saw the bottle that stood on the coffee table. It wasn't just the booze, she would say. He knew the argument. It's the whole thing, Jim, the whole business. You pretend it's for me, but the penthouse—you're the one who wanted it, honey, Jim. All I've ever wanted was something simple and clean. A little place with a flower box in the window where the light shines through. And if it all isn't quite what I imagine, I'm willing to pretend. So long as my husband doesn't keep plummeting down that long staircase into the dark.

That was her argument. Thompson knew it, without her saying a word, just like she knew his response. You wanted that penthouse, Birdie. And hell, when it comes to that staircase, you're the one taking me by the hand, pushing me down.

“You've done things the way you wanted. You've written your books.”

“I know.”

“That new place, it isn't so awful.”

“Yeah it is.”

“Go back to your work.”

She stood up. She was gorgeous, his wife. He didn't want her to leave. She was all but finished with him, though, ready to give him the push over, the way a person got after spending all night in the car.

“I have to go.”

“I'll be back Friday. To help with the move.”

She turned away, and he saw the arch of the young girl's back, the housewife's tits, the tired legs of an old woman whose skirt ended at the dimple in her knees. She was all these women at once. They were all masks, the dust amusing itself.

“Good-bye.”

It was the Oklahoma voice again. The voice of his mother, his sisters. Of the front porch swing creaking in the back of their throats. In it, he could hear the cicadas, and the katydids and the hollering moan of some old yellow dog. Then his wife was gone out the door, and Thompson felt a pang in his heart. He gathered up all his papers and hurried after.

“Take me back to the city.”

They rode together. Past the orange groves and the oil derricks and the Long Beach shipyards. Up the winding coast and over the flats into Anaheim. Then over the Santa Monica cloverleaf where you glimpsed it all at once—or thought you did—all those streets, Wilshire, and Pico and Lincoln, running parallel to each other and away, coming back and crossing. Spiraling towards the center but still always on the rim. Bunker Hill, Hollywood, Chinatown, Burbank. One long town with one long street. Stucco houses under a white sun that spun around other suns in a galaxy inside a universe black as black could be.

Alberta didn't take him with her back to their place at the Ardmore. If he had asked, maybe, but she had her pride.

She pulled over on Hollywood Boulevard, not far from the Aztec. Lussie had not shown up at his sister's place, Michele Haze wanted him to find Sydney Wicks at the Satellite Bar, his book was unfinished. Still, he couldn't care about those things now. He reached over to kiss his wife. She responded, almost. He put his hand on her belt, where the white blouse disappeared into her skirt, and placed his lips on her cheeks. She closed her eyes and let him have the corner of her lips.

He considered giving her the money inside the envelope. Like she said, though, it wasn't enough, and he still had a vision of himself snaking away, leaving this all behind, slipping over the border into some foreign country where volcanoes rumbled up out of nothing and the senoritas danced in the shadows, naked, voluptuous, full of piss, full of life.

TWENTY-SIX

She dropped him at the corner, a block from the hotel. It was a long block, a hard bit of sidewalk. He walked with the manuscript tucked underneath one arm, his suitcase under the other, all the time worrying it would slip from his fingers. The feeling in his arm hadn't come back all the way, not yet.

An old son of a bitch spat on the street in front of him. A whore farted and belched, mocking Thompson as he passed. Across the way two long-haired idiots passed a pipe back and forth, and a young woman clutched at herself, teeth clattering, hands shaking, as if she were about to jump out of her skin.

This is it. Where I belong, he thought. Walking the blind alleys where there's a song of gloom behind every eyelid. In the good old days, I was a hophead with the best of them. Vitamin shots and transfusions and anything else that a gave a jolt to the nervous system. These days he settled for the simple stuff. Bought himself a bottle at the corner and went inside the hotel.

… into a dark room where the shades were drawn and the only light was that which fell in a harsh slant through the blinds. In that light I didn't see him as well as I might have, or it could be his looks had changed. Guys like him, their looks were always changing. Or maybe I just confused one with the next, all my mother's men and those ex-cons and this one in front of me now. In my head, they were all the same man. They were all Pops. When I saw him, the story of what happened came streaming out of me.

I'll help you, son. But you got a lesson to learn.

At his touch, I broke into a grotesque river of tears. I thought he would mock me, but no.

You're part way home, boy. Do as I say, you'll be okay. You'll make the transformation. Disappear into the walls. Into the landscape, the air and dirt. You'll be the high singing of the wires, and whatever you've lost, Christ, you'll find it again. I'll see to it. I have friends. Connections.

He could talk like that, Pops could. He could lull you to sleep with his words. The way those words washed over me, it wasn't like they came out of the darkness, but like they were the darkness, and I was sleeping inside them.

What it got down to was this. There was a young woman, and there was this movie star who wanted her dead.

It was an easy job, Pops said, it paid well, and once it was done, he would help me out of this mess.

I did what he told me. I knocked on her door. I got the wire around her neck and looked into her eyes. She reminded me of all the women I had ever known. Gloria most of all. It was her fault. If she hadn't been so sweet, I would have done it simple. I would have swindled her father and been on my way. Belle never would have discovered my past. None of this would have happened.

But it did happen. So I pulled tight, looking into her eyes. Then I put her corpse in the trunk of car and drove to the address Pops had given me.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Late that afternoon, Thompson made his way down a narrow side street. The Hollywood Freeway ran under an escarpment nearby, and its sound rattled the buildings. In the center of all that noise was the Satellite Bar, an ugly joint, lime green, squatting between two abandoned storefronts. Its paint was peeling, the stucco crumbling, exposing the chicken wire underneath.

Find Wicks for me, Michele Haze had told him, and I will set you free.

Inside, the Satellite Bar was empty except for the man behind the counter and the sound of the freeway. The man was as big a man as Thompson had ever seen.

“What can I do you?”

“A whiskey,” Thompson said. “And a beer back.”

The man stepped into the back room to get Thompson his beer, then splashed some whiskey into a glass. He wasn't exactly polite about it. He pushed the whiskey over, watched Thompson drink like a guard watches a prisoner.

“Who sent you?”

“I'm looking for Sydney Wicks.”

“What's your name?”

Thompson told him.

“Who sent you?”

“She … I don't know if I should get into details. If you …”

The man cut him short. “Who sent you?”

“A client.”

The guy gave him a brutish look.

“My client wants to meet with Mr. Wicks. And clear up an obligation.”

“I'll make the call, but it's going to cost you a hundred bucks. She tell you that part too, this client? I don't do my work for free.”

Thompson went into his envelope and counted out the money. The man stuffed the bills into his pants pocket.

“No guarantees.”

The bartender stepped into a little room behind the bar. Thompson could see him through the door, hunched over the phone in a room so small it seemed barely able to contain him—and Thompson suddenly couldn't help but question the wisdom of being here. He wondered if Michele would keep her promise.

The bartender hung up and shouldered his way back towards Thompson.

“They'll call back. Meantime, you wait here.”

The bartender poured himself a gin, and positioned himself at the other end of the bar, between Thompson and the door. The noise of the freeway grew louder, and a piece of stucco tumbled from an outside wall into the street. The phone rang.

“Yeah?” The bartender breathed heavily into the mouthpiece, listening. Then he hung up.

“You'll have to wait a bit longer.”

“How about another round?”

The bartender splashed him a whiskey.

“And a beer to go with it?”

“I have to go to the back to get it.”

“All right.”

The man went into the back room. Something wasn't right. Thompson decided to leave. He stepped toward the front, but managed only a few paces before the voice boomed out.

“It's not time for you to go.”

“I was just stretching.”

“You can stretch sitting down.”

It was a long time before the phone rang again. An eon. Three eons. The sun collapsed and was born again and every living thing turned to dust. Then it started all over, the creatures creeping up out of the big nothing, tigers with fish gills, birds with snake eyes, the whole ugly business. The jungle roared and squealed. The freeway thundered.

Finally, the call came. The conversation was as brief as before. Briefer.

“You can go now,” said the bartender.

“What do you mean? What about Wicks?”

“There's no such man as Sydney Wicks. Your woman friend, she made a mistake.”

Thompson decided not to argue.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Thompson walked down The Strip, hands in pockets. He had to keep them there, they shook so badly. With everything that had happened, he could not help being spooked. The visit to the Satellite had changed nothing. Demons were loosed on the streets. His own demons, someone else's, it didn't matter, a little sip no longer kept things under control. The abyss was triumphant, one mean son-of-a-bitch. He tried to concentrate on events of recent days, thinking he could find in them the secret that would help him escape. No. He took out his flask. As he raised it, he saw something from the corner of his eyes. He wheeled around. Nothing. He drank. Maybe he had been wrong about everything. Though the liquid ran down his throat, following the rules of gravity, he had the opposite sensation. He felt as if his own self, his essence, were rising into the flask.