Manifesto for the Dead (6 page)

Thompson finished the whiskey. He felt black-headed. Miracle was jumbling things up, as usual, but still, things like that happened in his books. A dumb slob screwed by happenstance, over and over. Maybe the slob wasn't altogether innocent, but the punishment, well, it made you wonder.

Miracle went on. “The fool takes it in the shorts, if I remember right. Gets blamed for the whole business.”

“Where are we going?”

“Tell me, Jim, there's always a place in your stories, things just go haywire. I can't tell what the hell's happening.”

It was true. Events got skewed. Characters stumbled into the abyss.

“What's your point?” asked Thompson.

“Jack Lombard and I, we had things in common. Men of vision. Different visions, maybe—but still, you get the drift. Successful men are like gangsters. In control. Powerful. Ruthless. You, Jimbo, on the other hand, you.”

The blackness was overcoming him. It wasn't his usual blackness, but something more powerful. They were way out Sunset now. Miracle still driving, but his voice close by, somehow, hissing in his ear. “Lombard expressed some concerns, Jim. Said you have no control. Just down and down you go. Then out. You never make it back.”

Thompson tried to shake Miracle's voice from his head.

They stopped at a light. Near Sunset Plaza—a corner joint, tables on the sidewalk. The kind of place tourists went to watch movie stars, and ended up watching the traffic instead. He grabbed at the door handle.

“Hey, where you going? Jim?”

Thompson lurched onto the street. He heard Miracle coming after him. Horns blared.

“Come on, Jim. Let's get back into the car.”

“Fuck you,” Thompson said. “Fuck Lombard!” He bellowed, thrashing among the tables. He slipped, and he threw his arm out to catch his balance. A table tipped. A chair fell over. Thompson leaned against a lamppost and slid.

“What's the matter with him?” someone asked, a bystander.

The noise from the horns was wild now. Footsteps, voices rising among the horns. People gathering to see the problem. Miracle shooing them off.

“No, no. Not to worry. Just too much to drink, huh Jimbo. We'll give this boy a ride home. Come on, Michele. Give me a hand.”

Billy Miracle crouched on one side of him, Michele Haze on the other. They cooed and cajoled and promised to take him home and Thompson did not have the legs to resist. He stood in the center, an arm draped over each of them. They helped him along and for a moment it wasn't so bad. Thompson leaned his head towards the movie star, catching the heavy smell of her perfume, burying his head in her platinum hair. She grunted under his weight, surprisingly strong, then his feet buckled, wobbling, and for a minute it seemed he would pitch forward onto the asphalt. Somehow they maneuvered him back to the car.

“Take me home.”

“Sure, Jim, sure.”

They gave him a push, and Thompson slumped into the back seat. The horns fell quiet. He surrendered to that blackness, and for a minute he was way down in it, then he struggled back up, pressing his head to the window. They were rounding a corner, up into Beverly Hills. He wanted to protest, but he couldn't. It was like there was something stuffed inside his mouth. He heard a voice, small as hell, way down there, somewhere in the dark. Thompson tried answering and heard himself mumbling, and it was the same voice he mumbled as he read over and over the typewritten words on the page, when he was on the cusp of two worlds. Now he was back up above the blackness and he heard Miracle and Haze arguing. Thompson could not make out the words. He listened for them, but it was a like viper language, way down in there, and he was pursing it, plummeting towards that darkness, and then they were helping him walk again, one on either side. He buried his face in Michele's blouse. He looked up and saw in her face the intense beauty of someone carried along by an evil she could not control. Their eyes met. He reached for her. In that instant she let him loose, her and Miracle both, letting him fall hard into the darkness, through it, disappearing, plummeting toward the black earth.

THIRTEEN

Thompson woke at dawn. The sky overhead was a wild pink—and nearby, in a cypress hedge, some starlings were making a fuss, flitting blackly from branch to branch.

The remains of some vast darkness lingered in his head. The darkness was a lake, but it was a lake that had no shore, and there were no sounds and no reflections rippling across its surface. He did not want to return to that lake, but return he did.

He opened his eyes again later. How much later, he could not say. The starlings were gone and the sun more fierce. Though it was still morning, and the ground still cold, the desert sun burned overhead.

He lay in front of a very large house: a mansion in the contemporary style, all windows and aluminum and enameled steel. He worried someone might come to those windows, but no one did. The air was still and quiet and hot. His head hurt. He wondered if he had died and this were some uncharted circle of hell, reserved especially for himself.

A car rolled into the drive. He lay as still as he could, flattening himself into the grass. The car was a late-model sedan, nothing fancy. Out stepped a Mexican woman in a white uniform. She did not glance in his direction but sauntered primly down the pink flagstones to the rear of the house.

The maid, Thompson figured. And he realized he had not died after all. He was in Beverly Hills.

Thompson scrambled towards a gap in the hedge, hobbling. The branches scratched his face, but he pushed through. On the other side, he hobbled some more; he had lost a shoe. He searched the hedge a while, then started down the hill. Maybe his shoe lay back on the grass, but he did not want to be caught loping about on some movie star's lawn.

What happened last night? he wondered.

He had experienced blackouts before, but usually after a long night of drinking. Last night, he had barely begun.

He patted himself down, found the bank envelope in his jacket pocket, money intact—but his wallet gone. It had been empty anyway, no identification, so in that matter, at least, he had lucked out.

The hill bottomed at Sunset, and he crossed to the bus stop. After a little while a cop car drove by, then another, each turning up the way Thompson had just come, back up Beverly Drive. The cops had their sirens off, but they drove with a degree of urgency.

The cops could be investigating anything, he told himself. A tourist in Bob Hope's swimming pool. Doris Day's orgasms. Zsa Zsa's missing poodle.

Finally, the bus arrived. It was a local and took him a little ways past Sunset Plaza. Lately this part of the Strip had been taken over by the hippies. Suburban riffraff, ghetto trash, aspiring actors, they wandered together up and down the street, all roaming about. At first glance it seemed they were mingling, engaged in some common enterprise. Up close, he realized they were each going their separate ways: hustling dope; buying bikinis, black lights, banana-colored slacks. Sitting at the open-air tables, eyes dim and glassy. Tapping the table tops with their fingertips and looking about, waiting for what was happening to happen. Washed up flotsam. Debris. Scum floating on a sea of nothingness. More all the time. They lounged in front of the Whiskey-A-Go-Go all night in their leather, then huddled under the billboards by day, passing their joints back and forth while overhead, painted and peeling, a giant blonde lounged beside a bottle of gin. Meanwhile the cars rolled by spewing exhaust, and Thompson felt himself, watery, dissolute, with an erection growing up suddenly, ridiculously, out of all this nothingness. An old man's erection, nothing to write home about—unless, of course, you were an old man yourself. Down Sunset, the Hollywood bus was nowhere to be seen.

He stepped into a notions shop and bought himself some sneakers and a clean shirt. The shirt was wide-collared, bright and gaudy, but it least it was not soaked through with sweat.

He started to walk, just to be moving. He would catch the bus at the next stop along the line. Further on, he glanced up and saw the Château.

Lussie was staying here.

In the old days the Château had been a glamorous joint, and the tour agents used that glamour now to attract out-of-towners and conventioneers. Thompson decided what the hell. He would cross the street and walk into the lobby. He would ring her room. If what Alberta had told him was true, her husband would not be in town for a few days yet.

The last time he'd seen Lussie had been in a hotel room in New York, maybe fifteen years back. He'd been in town trying to set up a book deal, and she had been on a business trip with her husband. The old man had been out for the day, so Thompson had gone up and knocked on her door.

She had opened up and let him in. Her eyes had flashed with something that surprised him. He wondered if it would be there again.

No, he told himself.

He couldn't go to the Château. Not in this state, disheveled as he was.

Thompson caught the bus back to the Aztec Hotel. He walked though the lobby, past the snoozing clerk, upstairs to his room.

He wanted out. Away from Billy Miracle. All these years writing about murderers and their victims, men trapped by their desires—by swell-looking babes and no account virgins—and now here he was, trapped too. He wasn't so different from the drifter in the book he was writing maybe, working his way toward a fate scrawled in someone else's hand. But he went ahead anyway and sat down at his desk. He was under contract, after all.

FOURTEEN

Belle Lanier could get her old man to dance naked in the street, if that's what she wanted, so getting me the job at her father's place was a pretty straightforward business.

Daddy Lanier treated me like a prince. He paid me fair, and patted me on the back, and didn't seem to want anything in return. Maybe he was a good man like he seemed. Or maybe he was a fool.

Either way, my plan, it was to take these people for a ride. To milk them good and be on my way.

Then one day the younger sister, Gloria, showed up at the office. She wore her hair tied back and a brand new dress: a wide-collared thing that hung down below the knees. She had sincerity written all over her face.

“Hi,” I said, and gave her my brightest grin. “What can I do for you?”

I took her for a stroll, and talked it up big. I told her how much I loved the town, and the people here, how it reminded me of my childhood. It was all lies, but she smiled, sweet as sap, and for a little while I believed my own words.

Finally we went back to the office. I looked through the window, watching her walk. I thought for a minute how I wished everything was good and wholesome as she made it seem. Just then I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Daddy Lanier. He had been watching me study his youngest daughter as she strolled away under the pecan trees.

“You want to come over to dinner?”

He looked at me with the eyes of the father I'd never had. The good father. Who cared for me and wanted to see me do well in the world. Who would never treat me like that lousy voice in my head.

FIFTEEN

The next day, Thompson got a call from Matthew Roach, his agent in New York. They'd known each other for twenty years, back to the days when Thompson wrote for the crime magazines. Thompson liked hearing from him: the cheering lilt in his voice, all camaraderie, like a pat on the back that said:

Give 'em hell, buddy. They 're all bastards, but hey, you, Mr. Million Bucks, you got what it takes.

The truth was, Roach was a swindler like all the rest. They'd fallen out a dozen times over the years, but none of that mattered. Thompson liked him anyway.

“Too bad about Jack Lombard. A damn shame.” Roach's voice sounded odd. He wants something, Thompson thought. But why is he bringing up Lombard?

“Nothing's too bad for him. That son of a bitch.”

“That's a hell of a thing to say.”

“I'm a hell of a guy.”

“The reason I called, Hector Sally talked to me, about your book deal. I think we can make this thing swing.”

Thompson hesitated. He had hoped to do this without Roach, to save himself the commission. “Hector says they'll do the book. Contingent on the film. Any advance you get, though, that has to come from the production house.”

“I was hoping …”

“That's the best I can get you.”

Roach's voice was firm, and Thompson felt his old dislike of the man returning. He enjoyed the feeling. It felt good to hate his agent again. To hate agent and publisher at the same time, in the same moment, this was one of life's true pleasures.

“Now, this is what I want you to do. Send me a copy of the deal you have with Miracle.”

“All right.”

“You haven't signed it yet, have you?”

“No,” Thompson lied.

“Good. Because I want to protect the rights on this. Send me the deal memo now, and the chapters as you write them. I'll forward the chapters to Hector. Meantime, I'll call my movie contacts. That way, if things fall through with Miracle, you'll still have the book, and maybe we can build something on that.”

“All right.”

Despite everything, Thompson enjoyed having Roach on the line. While he had him, he felt connected. He could smell Manhattan: the gray buildings and the grime, the perfumed blouses in elevators that never stopped rising, the presses inked up and ready to roll.

“So the place must be buzzing with it?” Roach sounded again as he had sounded when he first called, his voice heavy with insinuation.

“Buzzing with what?”

“What happened to Jack. Everybody must be talking. A dirty business like that.”

“What dirty business?”

“You don't know?”

“No.”

“Lombard was murdered.”

Thompson felt his heart in his throat. “Murdered?”

“In Beverly Hills. In that big ass house of his. Someone beat him to death with a baseball bat.”