Mirror (24 page)

Martin said, ‘He was only eight years old, what was he doing staying up all night?’

Fido coughed and then noisily cleared his throat. ‘
I
don’t know what the hell he was doing, staying up all night. We used to listen at the door sometimes, but we could never hear nothing. Sometimes music. But they used to have girls in as well. Not exactly hookers but what you might call starlets.’

Martin looked at Ramone, but all Ramone could do was shake his head. ‘Don’t ask me, man, I never heard of anything like this. Either this guy’s shooting us a line, or else his brain’s gone, or else we just came across the biggest Hollywood mystery that ever was.’

‘Listen,’ Martin told Fido, ‘when you were working here, where did they keep the safe-deposit boxes? Can you remember that?’

‘Certainly I can remember,’ said Fido. ‘What’s it worth?’

Reluctantly, Martin handed Fido another ten-dollar bill. He snapped it, the same way he had snapped the first one. Then he sniffed and said, ‘They used to keep the safe-deposit boxes in back of the manager’s office, through the archway behind the desk. But if you’re looking for them, I can save you some trouble, because they ain’t there now. Round about 1951, when the Hollywood Divine really started losing money, there was some kind of plan to refurbish it, you know, and they shifted a whole lot of stuff down to the basement. The only trouble was, the plan fell through, lack of money, zoning problems, something like that, and everything that was shifted down to the basement just stayed there.’

‘So that’s where the safe-deposit boxes are now?’

‘You’ve got it, your honor. Not to mention two thousand square feet of moldy carpet, and enough velvet drapes to make Little Lord Fauntleroy pants for every down-and-out in Greater LA.’

Ramone gave a sharp, unamused laugh. Fido shrugged and gave a goofy grin, baring abscessed gums and brown, tartar-clogged teeth.

‘One more thing …’ put in Martin. ‘Who’s this Redd woman you keep talking about? I thought that Boofuls was looked after by his grandmother.’

Fido said, ‘I never knew too much about her. But she was the one who booked the suite, that’s how we got to know her name. R-E-D-D, Redd, that was it, but it could have been a what’s-its-name, you know, pursue-dough-name.’

‘Do you have any idea what her relationship to Boofuls was?’

Fido shook his head. ‘No idea. She just rushed him in before it began and rushed him out again when it was over.’

‘Did you get to see her face? What she looked like?’

‘Well … briefly. It’s a long time ago now. But she was pale, you know what I mean, the sort of pale that looks like somebody’s been ill, or shut up for a long time without going out in the sunshine. Pretty, in a way, but kind of
sharp
pretty. Sharp nose, sharp chin, sharp eyes. Classy, too. Definitely classy. But sharp.’

‘What did she used to wear?’

‘Always the same, black evening cloak, red dress underneath. Never saw what style it was. She was in and out of here so darned quick.’

Martin was mystified by all this. He had never heard of any other woman escorting Boofuls besides his grandmother; and he had certainly never heard of monthly get-togethers of movie stars at the Hollywood Divine Hotel, with Boofuls apparently presiding.

‘I hope for your sake this is on the level,’ he told Fido.

Fido saluted with a hand that was gray with grease. ‘You never came across a servant so true, your honor.’

For twenty more dollars, the vacant-eyed desk clerk took Martin and Ramone up to what had once been the Leicester Suite. They climbed the wide marble stairs to the mezzanine floor and crossed an echoing landing that smelled of Sterno. The desk clerk led them up to two wide carved doors – some of their panels broken now and nailed up with sheets of ply – and unlocked them with keys from a huge jangling ring.

‘We have to keep this place locked, every junkie in town was using it as a shooting gallery. We used to drag out two or three stiffs every single morning, OD’d on crack.’

Inside, by the light of half a dozen bare bulbs, they cautiously explored a hotel suite that must once have been magnificent. Because it was on the mezzanine floor, its rooms were half as high again as any other rooms in the hotel. Its walls gleamed with gold and silver wallpaper, and there were gilded Renaissance moldings on its murky ceilings and around the doors.

The desk clerk led them through an inner lobby, and then through more double doors to a cavernous room that must have been the lounge. There was a grand gilded fireplace and a gilded chandelier, but all the furniture and the carpets had been taken out. The floor was littered with old yellowed newspapers and rat droppings; and in the far corner there stood, unaccountably, a green and white garden swing-seat.

Their footsteps scuffed and echoed. Ramone, with his hands in his pockets, said, ‘You can’t believe that Clark Gable was ever here, can you?’

‘What was he
doing
here, that’s what I want to know,’ said Martin. ‘What was Boofuls doing here?’

‘Orgies, maybe?’ suggested Ramone. He walked around the swing-seat and then pushed it. It creaked backward and forward, backward and forward,
squueaakkk–squikkkk, squeeeaakk–squikkkk
.

Martin said, ‘A small boy holding orgies? It doesn’t make sense.’

‘Well, don’t ask me, man,’ said Ramone. He sniffed. ‘This place gives me the heebie-jeebies.’

The desk clerk asked, ‘You done now? There’s nothing else to see.’

‘Yes,’ said Martin, ‘I guess we’re done. Can you take us down to the cellars?’

They left the Leicester Suite and the double doors were locked behind them. The desk clerk took them downstairs to the lobby and then along a narrow corridor to the kitchens and the service areas. The kitchens were filthy: strewn with rubbish and deserted. The grease-encrusted oven doors hung open. It was difficult for Martin to believe that the Hollywood Divine’s celebrated
homard orientale
had once been prepared here, as well as the famous fiery pudding of red cherries and Grand Marnier created especially for Gloria Swanson.

The desk clerk unlocked the cellar doors. ‘There’s a light switch down on the left. You can look all you want; I have to get back to the desk. Just tell me when you’re through.’

Together, Martin and Ramone groped their way down the first flight of wide concrete steps. Martin found the light switch and flicked it; a row of fluorescent tubes illuminated a wide vaulted cellar stacked to the ceiling with chairs, tables, folding beds, mattresses, chalkboards, lampshades, statuettes, signs saying Exit and No Smoking, boxes, crates, and rolled-up carpets.

Martin began carefully to climb through this collected detritus of the Hollywood Divine’s history, his arms stretched out to keep his balance. He trod on a cardboard box full of brass lamp sockets, and they showered onto the floor like Aladdin’s treasure.

‘Any sign of those safe-deposit boxes?’ Ramone asked him.

‘I don’t know. There’s a whole lot of stuff covered by sheets, right at the back. I’m going to take a look now.’

Martin clambered across stacks of rollaway beds to reach the far side of the cellar, where it was darker and the air was suffocatingly still. Something tall and angular was concealed by a stained gray sheet; something as tall as a man with one arm outstretched. Martin tugged at the sheet, but it was caught.

‘What’s that?’ called Ramone, clambering after him across the beds. He pushed one foot through the springs of a rollaway bed, and there was a loud
gddoinngg
noise, followed by a sharp exclamation of Goddamn it!’

Martin pulled at the sheet again, and this time it tore wide open. He shouted out in fright, and trod backward, and almost lost his balance. Out of the ripped sheet a shining black face was staring at him, a face with white eyes and reddened lips.

Ramone came forward and tore off the rest of the sheet. ‘Heyy …’ He grinned. ‘Not bad. She shouldn’t’ve scared you.’

It was a 1930s statue of an African dancer, probably made out of plaster. She was wearing ostrich feathers in her hair and a grass skirt and carrying a zebra-skin shield. ‘Very bodacious ta-tas,’ Ramone remarked, peering inside the sheet.

They climbed farther along the length of the wall and, at last, jammed into one of the corners, they came across the safe-deposit boxes. There were four banks of them, lying on their backs on the floor, and almost completely buried under dozens of folding wooden chairs.

‘At least nobody could stroll out with
these
,’ said Ramone.

It took them more than ten minutes simply to move all the chairs off the top of the safe-deposit boxes. Martin rubbed dust and grime from the topmost bank of boxes 1–100. That meant that they would have to lift the entire bank of boxes out of the way in order to get to number 531 somewhere underneath.

They each took hold of one end of the boxes and Tried to lift them up. They were impossibly heavy. ‘We’re going to rupture ourselves, shifting these,’ said Martin. ‘Maybe we’d better slide them instead.’

Grunting, cursing, they managed to slide the top bank of boxes off to one side; then tilt it so that it dropped upright onto the floor.

‘What do you bet the numbers we want are right at the bottom of the stack?’ said Ramone.

He peered at the labels of the next bank of safe-deposit boxes and then rubbed one or two of them with the heel of his hand. ‘Numbers 500 through 600, thank the Lord.’

Martin climbed up onto the boxes and ran his fingers down the labels until he found 531.

‘I’ll give you a thousand to one the key don’t fit,’ said Ramone. ‘Nobody with
your
luck is going to find the right box first time.’

‘Theo said the Hollywood Divine,’ Martin told him. ‘And, believe me, Theo was really psychic. Well, sensitive, that’s what he said.’

‘I guess anybody would be sensitive working for Elmore Sweet,’ Ramone commented.

Martin took out the key that Sister Boniface had given him and fitted it into the lock of the safe-deposit box. As he did so, he was certain that he heard somebody whistling, somewhere upstairs in the derelict hotel. He hesitated, and listened, and then he heard it again. It was an odd little melody from
Sunshine Serenade
. Boofuls sang it at the very end of the movie, when he believed (mistakenly, of course) that he had lost his mother.

Apples are sweeter than lemons

Lemons are sweeter than limes

But there’s nothing so sweet as the mem’ry of you

And the sadness of happier times

The song was unusual because it had been written by George Garratt rather than Boofuls’ regular team of writers; and because – after Garratt had argued with L B Mayer over ‘artistic differences’ – the whole sequence had been cut out of the prints that had been sent out on general release. Martin knew the song because it was still included in the video of
Sunshine Serenade
that this friend Gerry had sent him from the M-G-M archives, but who else would have known it?

Fido, possibly, if he had ever heard Boofuls singing it. Or George Garratt, except that in 1958 George Garratt had washed down two bottles of chloral hydrate pills with a fifth of Polish vodka and been found to be DOA at Laurel Canyon Hospital. Or – if his image in Martin’s mirror had been more than just an image, and if there was any truth at all in what Nurse Newton had said about him – Boofuls himself.

‘
That didn’t seem to make too much difference – him being dead
.’

Ramone said, ‘What’s wrong, man? You look like you seen a ghost.’

Martin strained his ears, but the whistling had died away, faint and echoing, somewhere upstairs in the gloomy corridors of the Hollywood Divine Hotel.

‘Did you hear something?’ he asked Ramone.

Ramone shook his head.

‘I don’t know … I thought I heard somebody whistling.’

Ramone sniffed. ‘Probably the wind,
mi amigo
. Or the plumbing.’

All the same, Martin was sure that he had heard that plaintive, unremembered song. ‘The Sadness of Happier Times’, words and music by George Garratt, vocal rendition by Walter Lemuel Crossley, known all over the world as Boofuls.

Martin tried to turn the key in the lock of the safe-deposit box. It was stiff and rusted, but he gradually managed to budge it. ‘There! It’s the right key, I’m sure of it! It’s just so darn hard to turn it!’

‘Just don’t break it, that’s all,’ Ramone cautioned him, ‘otherwise you’re never going to get this suckah open.’

The levers grated together; and then quite suddenly the key turned all the way around, and Martin was able to lift open the door. The door of the safe-deposit box was quite small – only nine inches by four – but the inside was nearly two feet deep. Now that it was resting on its back, Martin would have to put his hand inside it like a lucky dip. He peered into it cautiously. Ever since that brindled cat Pickle had come flying out at him from the darkness underneath his desk, he had felt cautious about sticking his head in where it wasn’t wanted, and also where it
was
wanted.

Ramone tried to look inside, too, and they bumped heads.