Revenant Rising (37 page)
“Two what?”
“Former parasites. A few days ago I heard that a photojournalist that used to make a living off stalking me was murdered in L.A., and now the Lester bloke.”
“Was he also a paparazzo?”
“No, he was in another line of business, and like the fuckbag in L.A., we never could make anything stick to him for very long. Chances are, though, that my name’s stuck to him and if his death gets much media mention I’ll get honorable mention, same as when the California death was reported.”
“Is this all something I should know about? As regards your biography, of course.”
“Yeh, I’m afraid you’ll have to be told. Only reasonable for you to know. I could tell you myself, actually . . . I could tell you about it tomorrow, couldn’t I? That is if you weren’t so hell-bent on denying me the pleasure of taking you on your rounds.”
This is no Mrs. Floss she’s looking at; he’s not that transparent, and he’s certainly not confused. But he is getting the same message across that she received from the old lady—that by accepting his favor she would be doing him one.
They ride on in silence for the last few blocks to Rockefeller Center and her parking garage, where she doesn’t bother resisting when Colin insists on waiting with her while a valet goes for her car.
“This is it for today, then?” he says when the car arrives and she gives him back his coat.
“I’ll call you later with the directions to my house and the time I’d like to get underway tomorrow.” She pretends she hasn’t just made a huge concession as she gets into the Range Rover and buckles the seatbelt. He squeezes her shoulder, activates the door locks, and shuts her in without so much as a word; his triumphant grin says it all.
The unresolved issues gouging Nate for most of the transcontinental flight are shelved the moment of touchdown in L.A. Further thought about derailing Saul Kingsolver, heading off David Sebastian, and interpreting news of a West Village drug dealer’s violent death will have to wait until his return to New York. Reinforcing what’s known about Cliff Grant’s execution better be the only thing on his mind for the next three days or this trip will be an even bigger fiasco than last Wednesday’s attempt to repackage Colin Elliot.
He clears the terminal and picks up a rental car in record time. Low profile in a thirty-six-hour beard, cheap Ray-Ban knockoffs, torn jeans, and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt, he parks the nondescript car several blocks from his ultimate destination and sets out on foot. Nothing can be accomplished before dark—at least an hour away—so to kill time he detours over to Ocean Front Walk, where he’s just another face in a Venice Beach crowd that’s already peaking in anticipation of a big Saturday night.
The passing freak show holds no interest, nor does grabbing something to eat, although his stomach is telling him it’s still on EDT and dinner’s long overdue. Toward the northern end of the boardwalk, he settles on the Fig Tree Café, where he nurses an iced tea and picks at a chopped salad until sunset is imminent. In the afterglow he retraces the quarter-mile to his starting point, then heads inland for three blocks until he’s aligned with the target, one street over on Venice Way.
The jungle of overgrown vegetation behind Cliff Grant’s bungalow resembles the sumac and pine scrub of far Northern Michigan only inasmuch as it presents a barrier to be broken through. That’s all, nothing more, nothing symbolic here. Similar can be said for holding a penlight in his teeth while he works a window screen loose and jimmies a window lock with the screwdriver he thought to bring. Nothing in this activity compares with wrenching the door off a crumpled pickup truck with little more than his bare hands. Plus, odds are a billion to one that still another headless corpse could be waiting on the other side of this window.
In the hour after dusk, Nate slips through what turns out to be a bedroom window and drops the few feet to the floor, where he pauses to listen for his own echoes. Satisfied that he’s raised no alarm, he adjusts to the sounds he does hear—distant feedback from the boardwalk and intermittent traffic noise from nearby Grand Boulevard—and moves in small increments into the next room, a living room of sorts.
The urge to make comparisons is again felt when the narrow beam of the penlight reveals the setting in a series of small patches, as was the case when uncovering damage done by a road accident nearly two and a half years ago. And again, there’s no real comparison because here there’s no need for that senses-sparing limitation; here, he’s prepared to take everything in all at once if necessary—even the overwhelming odor of putrefaction made no less cloying by the secondary odor of burnt paper.
In the kitchen, the area of bleed-out and blood spatter is extensive. He’s only too glad to proceed within the constraints of his light source to avoid stepping on any of the dried spill. In an extension of the kitchen, in what appears to be a tiled and glassed-in porch with metal miniblinds on all the windows, the penlight beam picks out several sections of five-drawer file cabinets. Many of the emptied drawers are open, some to the extent of undermining the stability of the cabinets themselves. As a precaution he gently pushes these drawers shut with either his foot or the handle of the screwdriver.
He’s about to move on to an area where the floor appears scorched when the penlight illuminates a sizeable curl of paper that was either hidden by or released by one of the file drawers he just closed. He picks it up without worrying about fingerprints. Whatever it is, he’s looking at the blank side. He turns it over and his awkward attempt to smooth it out with one hand releases a crumbling of charred edges. He goes back to holding the penlight in his mouth, shines it on the find at close range and sees that he’s inspecting the remains of a commercial photograph, a glossy. Enough is left of the photograph to reveal the subject matter and identify the subject. Even with her head thrown back in a posture of mock ecstasy, Aurora Elliot is spectacularly recognizable as the nude chick finger-fucking herself.
This he was not prepared for. His initial reaction is to toss the place from one end to the other in case a stash of this shit exists somewhere the crime scene investigators didn’t look. He resists that temptation, but not without recalling the last time he threatened to rip this place apart and Colin countered by blindly refusing to believe the fabled Aurora would ever resort to porn. “Jesus, Jesus,
Jesus
,” Nate mutters at confirmation of the old rumor and slides the remnants of the photograph into a jeans pocket.
Nate leaves the way he came in. On the walk back to the car he becomes more and more convinced that Grant’s archive had to have contained a section devoted to the Elliots; the partially burnt photograph is proof enough of that. But without further evidence, there’s no way of establishing whether the presumed files were deliberately destroyed or randomly chosen as fuel for the fire allegedly set to cover up the crime. He drives off, heading back toward the beach and an undertaking that can only be called Sisyphean.
Hoop’s waking thought is of the one-of-a-kind truck parked next to a lamp-post in the middle of the motel parking lot. He can’t see it from his room, his gummy window looks out on the opposite side of the building, but he can see it in his mind’s eye when he stirs out of bed at the crack of dawn.
This must be what Christmas feels like when you know the thing you wanted most is under the tree. He heads for the bathroom with more enthusiasm than he’s felt in days—in weeks—and hardly notices the ring in the tub and the scratchy nonskid strips when he does a full bath that includes unplaiting and washing his hair.
After he’s finished in the bathroom and dressed in a new set of clothes, it’s time to think about his hair. He needs to ask himself whether the old woman who gave him breakfast yesterday would name plaited hair as his standout feature, or if she’d just call him Cuban and let it go at that. He could also ask himself if a customized El Camino would notch people’s memories, but he already knows the answer there and is willing to take the chance.
He delays a decision that won’t come easy and turns on the television for the first time since moving in. Religion programs are showing on nearly every station. That tells him it’s Sunday and that a calendar might come in handy now that he has a watch to track the hours.
With his new equipment, he makes coffee and prepares a meal of peanut butter and saltines. While he eats he leafs through the car-buying guide like he’s having second thoughts. But it’s his hair he’s having second and third thoughts about.
Once his mind’s made up, things go fast. He brings out the big knife from the new tool case, gathers his loose fresh-washed hair into a thick hank that he lops off with a single whack. By feel he can tell what’s left of it is squared just below ear level, a length he’ll have to live with even if it makes him feel like the Samson character out of the white man’s holy book.
Without looking in a mirror, he finishes dressing in a jeans jacket and a New York Yankees baseball cap pulled low over the rough haircut. He locks the knife away in the tool case he’ll be taking with him and leaves the rest of the gear at the mercy of the slovenly housekeeper.
As he approaches the El Camino in the motel parking lot, pride of ownership wants to swell him out like a courting bullfrog. He admires the slick lines, the unmarked condition of the bodywork, the made-to-measure cover on the load bed that came as a bonus, and the dark brownish-reddish-purplish color and silver trim. He approves everything from what rests under the hood to the depth of the tire treads and then praises himself for honoring the truck tradition he was raised with, although this truck is like nothing his family ever drove. They’d see it as fancified; he sees it as refined.
Today he doesn’t wait for luck or an unseen hand to guide him. This time he’s going to Old Quarry Court of his own accord, and this time he’ll hold out till there’s no doubt left about where the rock star’s new girlfriend lives—where there’s good reason to believe the rock star will show up sooner or later.