Wake Up and Dream (15 page)

O
FFICER REYNOLDS DROVE
the patrol car down from Bunker Hill. Clark sat in the back with Officer Doyle. Reynolds had a Liberty League badge just like Timmy Townsend’s on his uniform lapel, but the fatter, older cop didn’t. They had the regular radio on—NBC, even, although it was a shade too early for Wallis Beekins. It murmured in the background through his haze of thoughts.
Three Little Fishes
by Kay Kyser, and they swam and they swam and fell right over that dam, just the way he was falling. Then a newscast about Marshal Petain making up to the Nazis in France, then how the Republicans at their convention in Philadelphia were talking of choosing some dark-horse-nobody called Wilkie, and the big mystery of who the Liberty Leaguers were going to put up—a mystery to which Clark, with an even deeper falling, realized he had the answer.

Was
this
the real trap which April Lamotte had been setting for him—to implicate him in her own death? But that made no sense. Just as likely, the body they were taking him down to City Hall to identify wouldn’t be hers. No,
that
was it. And somehow, in some way he hadn’t yet figured, she was setting him up for a murder rap… But that didn’t make much sense either. At least these were plain old street cops in uniform and not suits from homicide. They’d gotten hold of this sheet simply because they worked the district which covered Stone Canyon and were after some easy time-and-a-half.

Twilight outside now. The streetcars on Broadway threw sprays of sparks. City Hall loomed, its windows a lit mosaic, the white flecks of a few gulls still floating on the fading thermals above. Janitors and cops drifted in the big marble entrance hall. Many of the specialist departments of the LAPD—drugs, homicide, sedition, vice—worked out of City Hall, and the corridors beyond had the feel of a busy precinct station. The air smelled of Gestetner fluid, Thunderbird wine and vomit. Officers in shirtsleeves and shoulder holsters shepherded whores, smokehounds, political discontents and transvestites into offices and holding cells.

The Coroner’s Department and the city morgue lay down some stairs in the basement. No windows here and half the lights were off, leaving spaces of black along the corridors. A typewriter was clicking somewhere. A phone rang unanswered.

“It’s this way…”

The air had already dropped a few degrees as Officer Doyle held open a final door.

It wasn’t like in the feelies. They didn’t lead you into some tiled auditorium and rack out the body from one of those sliding trays set in a wall. What they did was take you into a small room. Posters on the walls about agricultural credits and the dangers of orange blight and the boll weevil. An aproned mortician pushed a sheeted gurney through a rubber flap door.

“Okay, Mr Lamotte.” He felt the old cop’s hand rest on his shoulder. “You ready?”

He nodded yes.

“I’m just going to pull back the sheet so that you can see the face, right?”

Officer Doyle signaled to his younger colleague, who, looking like he’d much rather be somewhere else, stepped around to the front of the gurney and, using the tips of his fingers, lifted the top of the sheet back and off.

It was April Lamotte. Her lips were blued beneath what was left of that burgundy lipstick and her lively green eyes had been closed and were just starting to sink and her red hair had been flattened and pulled by the way she’d been handled. But it was her. There was a meaty smell which he knew would soon get stronger, and a faint reek of car fumes and vomit which the perfunctory wipe-down which the morticians had given her hadn’t quite removed, but stronger still was the odor of Chanel
Cuir de Russie
. It was April Lamotte, and, for a corpse, she looked surprisingly beautiful. No bloating of rot and gas. Only a mild roadkill stench.

Officer Doyle’s hand squeezed Clark’s shoulder. “For the record, do you recognize this person?”

“Yes. It’s April Lamotte.”

The cop’s hand squeezed again. “Maybe you want to be left alone in here with your wife for a moment?”

“No. It’s okay.”

He stepped back. The young cop was about to pull the sheet back up to cover the body, but the whole scene still didn’t seem real. He reached out to touch the translucent flesh of April Lamotte’s shoulder. He was half expecting his fingers to pass right through, but all he felt was cold flesh.

H
E WAS SAT DOWN
in a fish tank with a silvered glass wall. What looked to be that same picture he’d seen of Herbert Kisberg on the Senserama billboard smiled at him from beneath crossed stars and stripes and Liberty League flags. There was also a poster of a woman wearing a few rags and not much else brandishing a sword labeled
Truth and Democracy
at an ape with the words
World Communism
written across its skull. Some handy draftsman had given the ape Negroid features and added a speech bubble.
Sorry, Lady,
the ape was saying,
even us coons caint sometimes get it up
.

He smoked his last Lucky Strike. Officer Doyle sat on the far side of a scarred wooden desk. Officer Reynolds sat with a pencil and a notebook in the room’s farthest corner. Both of them were also smoking. If there was a time to come clean about this whole stupid façade, the message trickled through his brain, it was now.

“What I need to do, Mr Lamotte,” Officer Doyle said, leaning a roll of uniform-encased belly fat toward him across the desk, “is to prepare a report which I can then pass on to the Coroner’s Investigator. There’ll need to be an inquest. There’ll also have to be an autopsy, I’m sorry to say. We need to establish cause of death, although the facts look pretty clear-cut.”

Clark heard the muscles of his neck creak and click as he nodded yes. “Basically, a report was radioed in from the Forest Rangers’ office at Arrowhead around noon yesterday morning. Like I said, some hikers had found this car the way I described and with your wife’s body in it. The engine was still running, although it was near out of gas. Working back, we reckon she probably parked there between one to two hours earlier. Say, about ten, or ten thirty. We got the call here in the city because of the deceased’s presumed identity.” The cop cleared his throat. “And Officer Reynolds and me arrived there about the same time as the tow truck and the Coroner’s photographer. It’s an overlook up above Running Springs. Pines and that kind of stuff. It’s a pretty spot. Any idea why your wife might be driving out that particular way… ?”

“I think we’ve got a lodge up there.”

Officer Doyle glanced at his colleague. “Think?”

“No. We have. I’m sorry. I mean—”

“Sure. I know this is difficult. Just take your time. It’s okay. Anyway, we got your wife’s ID and address straight off, but when we turned up at the, ah, Lamotte residence this afternoon, there was no one around but this gardener guy who sees to the grounds of the surrounding estate.”

“Evan.”

“Yeah.” The cop flicked through his notebook. “Mr Evan Brinton. Weird sort of guy, if you don’t mind me saying. He wasn’t much help. And your house was all locked up. No residents or employees. We tried the neighbors—discreetly, I might add—but nothing going. We finally got to Blixden Avenue through your tax records, Mr Lamotte, believe it or not. Oh, yeah—and Mr Evan Briton informed us that you’d been talking to him earlier that same morning. Said you’d come the back way where he works. Does that sound right to you?”

“April and I were out last night. I’m a screenwriter, and we’ve—I’ve—just signed a new contract for a big feelie. We had a meal as a celebration. It was at a place up above Silver Lake called Chateau Bansar.”

“Can you spell that?”

He did. The cop wrote it down.

“Then I dropped her off at Erewhon… .I guess it was around midnight. And I drove back Downtown. I just didn’t imagine…”

“So you didn’t spend last night at home with your wife?”

“No.”

“Any particular reason?”

“I spend a lot of my time at my place Downtown. I find it easier to write there.”

“And sleep?”

“Yeah. That’s how our marriage works.”

“I see.” The old cop nodded. “I mean, Mrs Doyle and I, we share the same house an’ all. But that’s hardly any of my business.”

Clark closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Saw April Lamotte leaving Chateau Bansar. Saw her in his arms and sobbing tears, with the car valet and waiters as witness. “We’d had an argument at the restaurant.”

“About anything in particular?”

He shrugged in a way that he hoped might express the hopelessness of trying to explain any marital argument.

“And then you came back to Erewhon to see her again this morning?”

“Yes.”

“So went into the house at—what?”

“Like Even said, it was around ten this morning. And like
I
said, we’d had an argument the night before. And there was this big contract. Things that needed sorting out…” The screwed-down chair wouldn’t move when he tried to shift it forward. “I came the back way because kids in downtown had thrown a stone in through the window of my car the night before and I didn’t want her to see the damage. Of course, she wasn’t there.”

“Find anything unusual this morning inside your house?”

“No. Absolutely nothing.”

“So, Mr Lamotte, to be exact, the last time you saw your wife was when you dropped her off last night after that meal?”

“Yeah.” A muscle at the corner of his eye pulsed. “That’s correct.”

“And you didn’t hear from her after that?”

“No—and before you ask, I was at Senserama studios with the production executive who’s bought my feelie script from about noon this morning to the time you saw me arrive at Blixden Avenue. His name’s Timmy Townsend. You can check up with him if you like. Or why don’t you try asking a woman named Barbara something who lives next door to my apartment, if you haven’t already done so? She came by to give me some mail early this morning…” He wiped at his mouth. The shocked indignation was starting to feel genuine. “Look—my wife’s down in the morgue and all you’re doing is asking a whole lot of questions. Where is this
leading
?”

“I’m sorry, Mr Lamotte.” Officer Doyle’s face glistened like pink marble. “This is just a part of the job we have to do. Someone’s died, and we have to try to find out as much as we can, and as quickly as possible. I ah…” He pulled at his ear, then glanced over to Officer Reynolds, who inclined his head in a slow nod. “This is an even more difficult question. Mr Lamotte—was there any reason for you to think, fear or suspect that your wife might kill herself?”

Images of April Lamotte. Red-haired and beautiful in that green pantsuit as she paced Erewhon, and even redder haired and more beautiful when she drove up in the Delahaye along Sunset to pick him up what felt like half a century ago. Her kissing him. The smell of Chanel
Cuir de Russie
. The lipstick taste of her mouth. The wet push of her tongue. The determined and well-organized way she’d set out to kill him. “No,” he said finally. “She was… She liked to be in control. She’s not the type who’d ever give up. Not unless…” But unless what? He saw her again at Erewhon. And then outside that swish restaurant. His eyes prickled as if they were filling with dust. A swishing, windy sound rushed though his ears.

“Right.” Once again, as if looking for some signal, the old cop glanced over at the young cop. “Did Mrs Lamotte like hiking, the out of doors?”

“Not especially.”

He nodded. “She was just wearing regular low heels and slacks. Apart from a road map and some handmade cigarettes, the car was pretty much empty. But there was this…”

Officer Reynolds stood up. He walked over and laid a small reporters’ springbound notepad on the table, turned it around so Clark could see it properly. Then he sat down again. The handwriting on the front sheet was the same neat script he’d seen on some of the documents in Erewhon’s study.

The way everythings happened I cant

Im sorry. I thought I could make it

I am afraid. I am a coward. I am sorry for everything. If I had done this a long time ago. it would have saved a lot of

Here I am in this dead and empty place

T
HE TWO COPS LED HIM
out of the fish tank and pointed him down the corridor toward the restroom. He felt the swaying bulk of the snubnose Colt as he rooted in his pockets for enough change to get a fresh pack of Lucky Strikes from a row of vending machines, then a tepid cup of cardboard-flavored coffee, which he knocked back in one. He checked his watch, but the hands had stopped; it had been more than a day before, and a long way back in Venice, when he’d last wound it.

The smell of the restroom flung itself at him as he pushed through the door. The place looked like it had seen some very heavy use, and absolutely no cleaning, for at least the last couple of days. Make that weeks. Cubicle doors hung broken. Several of the toilets and the whole length of the urinal trough had overflowed. The floor was awash with translucent heaps of paper, toilet blocks, cigarette butts, newspapers, and yellow lakes of piss set with heaped islands of turds. Even though this was a mens’ restroom, there were even a few sodden and bloodied scraps of what looked like women’s sanitary pads. Pissing up against a wall outside would probably be more hygienic, but he picked his way across the drier spots toward the one toilet cubicle which gave an impression, misleading as it turned out, that it might be properly functioning.

He wondered as he pissed into the near-overflowing bowl about all the people who came through a place like City Hall, and the business of life which got done here. Births and deaths. Taxes and cadavers. Crimes and punishments. Threats and beatings up. No wonder this itchy sense of dread and disappointed waiting had seeped into its walls so soon after it was built. Made with sand from California’s fifty eight counties and water from its twenty one missions—a lot of Angelinos liked to say the next earthquake would show the folly of ever putting it up. Unthinkingly, he pulled the flush, then jumped back. But he needn’t have worried. It didn’t work.