Wake Up and Dream (17 page)

“That catch on your door. Either it won’t budge at all, or you give it a shove and hey presto you’re in. It’s the same with half the locks in Blixden Apartments. But then you’d know that, wouldn’t you? If you actually lived here.”

“Look…” He was still having to shield his eyes from the brightness of the window and his head throbbed from the seemingly near-permanent hangover he’d acquired since April Lamotte had tried to gas him. He was also still conscious that he was in bed naked, for all that his prick was no longer tenting the sheets, and that his Daniel Lamotte glasses were tossed over on the desk. “… if you just stop pointing at me with that gun, then maybe we could talk.”

“I’m very happy with this gun, thanks,” she said.

“Look. Barbara. Miss Eshel. I just have this funny thing about having a lethal weapon aimed at me when I’m sitting in my own bed. Even more so by someone who probably doesn’t know how to use it.”

“It’s not
your
own bed, though, is it? You’re going to tell me next that the safety catch is on.”

He nodded. “It probably is.” Then, seeing as this wasn’t the time and the place to worry too much about modesty, he began to lean forward. “If you just let me have that thing—”

A bright flare. A loud bang.

“See.” She said through the feathering smoke. “The safety wasn’t on. And I
do
know how to use a gun, thank you very much. Otherwise Mister whoever you are, we’d be sponging down your fucking brains.”

He sank back. Plaster was flaking from a fresh indentation in the wall above his head. “You can’t just… People will…”

“You’ve obviously forgotten that, unlike you, I actually live here.
I
know the Kitcheners always go out on Friday mornings, and that sweet Mrs Bruch on the other side’s deafer than a post. I’m not some city kid. I shot coyotes and possums back in Fingerpost, Missouri the way folk here in this city stamp termites. So. Now that you know all about me, perhaps you might like to tell me a little about yourself?”

“Why are you suddenly so sure I’m not Daniel Lamotte? Yesterday—” “I was sure you weren’t him
yesterday
as well, you fathead! But I thought that it was none of my business. At the very least, I decided I’d wait and see. But that was before the cops came around here last evening saying they wanted to speak to Daniel Lamotte because his wife was probably dead. She is, isn’t she? It’s in the news this morning. I went out and got the early paper.” She turned around, lifted a copy of the
Los Angeles Examiner
from the desk and tossed it to him. At no point did the Colt’s barrel cease to aim at his naked chest. “It’s folded at the right page.”

The article was a half column in length. It said pretty much what he’d have expected. “You know what they say,” he muttered as he put it aside. “It has to be true if it’s in the LA press.”

She snorted. “You’ve got a neat line in patter, haven’t you, Mister whoever you are? For someone sitting bareass naked, that is, in someone else’s bed.”

“You’re still convinced I’m not Daniel Lamotte?”

“Aren’t you?”

This was getting ridiculous. He had to shrug.

“Who are you, then?”

“Will you put down that gun, or at least stop firing it at me, if I say?”

“Depends.”

“I didn’t kill April Lamotte, if that’s what you think.”

“Which is exactly what I’d expect you to say if you had killed her.”

He nodded. She had a point. “I’m just this idiot guy. Believe me.”

“Does the idiot guy have a name?”

If this girl was going to kill him, he decided, she’d probably have done so already. That, or she’d just tried to, and the shot had been a lucky miss. Either way, he was sick of pretence. “I’m Clark Gable.”

She twitched her mouth. “Should that mean anything to me?”

“No.”

“So why are you pretending to be someone you aren’t? And what’s happened to the real Daniel Lamotte?”

“That’s too many questions. You’ll have to be patient if you want me to explain…”

He had always liked to think himself a half-decent teller of tales, but this one came out as a confused mess. He muttered in broken sentences about being a private dick, about his lost acting career, and about the specialized kind of marital work he’d thought at first was all April Lamotte wanted. And Erewhon, and being shown the photo of a man scowling at the camera—a tall man who looked a bit like him if you discounted the beard and the glasses, and had gone so far off the rails in writing a feelie about the life of Lars Bechmeir that he’d supposedly been locked away in some fancy private clinic. Then the deal, signing the contract, and the swans on the moat and the meal at Chateau Bansar. And being in that car, the Delahaye which was like some dream turned into a nightmare, and the guy who was or wasn’t some kind of security guard who might or might not have been following him… All of it was strange indeed, but somehow not as strange as the fact that he was sitting here in this flophouse on Blixden Avenue telling his story to a young woman who was still pointing a gun at him, and that April Lamotte was now dead.

Still, Barbara Eshel listened. The only question she asked was to find how much he’d been offered for the job. Toward the end, the Colt’s barrel even drooped a little until it was aimed directly at his crotch.

“You expect me to believe all of that, Mr Gimble?”

“Not really. But it’s all I know. It’s Gable, by the way.”

She hunched forward in the chair. “This Lamotte woman might want to hire someone to impersonate her husband for all sorts of reasons. Other, I mean, than just getting you to sign a contract on the pretence of his being temporarily mad. Hadn’t that occurred to you?”

“It did.”

“But you’re saying you still went ahead?”

He shrugged. He was sitting here, wasn’t he?

She chewed her lip. “Do you think Daniel Lamotte—I mean the real one—is still alive?”

“No idea. She said that she’d visited him a few days ago. Something about some clinic up in the hills. But she didn’t say where… How well did you know him?”

She sighed and puffed at her fringe. “He was quiet, shy, nervous, kept himself to himself. He had that sort of aura about him—and I don’t necessarily mean in the feelie sense—that didn’t invite closeness. That stuff I was saying yesterday about hearing his typewriter going through these walls like a friendly ghost—that was true. But it was more about the typewriter being friendly than him.”

“I think I get the picture.”

“It must be weird. I mean, aren’t I the first person you’ve met apart from his wife who actually knew him?”

“So you believe me?”

“Even someone as seemingly naïve as you could surely come up with something better than that ridiculous gumph if they wanted to lie.”

The gun had drooped again. Now, it was pointing merely at the bed.

“Maybe I could get dressed?”

“Can’t see why not.”

“But you’re not leaving?”

“I can wait.”

“Don’t tell me,” he said, standing up and pulling the sheet with him in a vague attempt at modesty that failed when it snagged on a loose spur of raised floorboard, “You’re a farm girl… You’re used, I mean in Fingerpost, Missouri to seeing… ?”

“All sorts of stuff, yeah. But mainly cattle. A few hogs as well.”

“Right.”

Stupidly naked, he rummaged for clothes as quickly as he could whilst Barbara Eshel remained sitting on the chair with the gun still tracking roughly in his direction. He found a collarless shirt. Braces. He avoided bending in her direction when he opened drawers and pulled on fresh undershorts. In the feelies, he couldn’t help thinking, this whole scene would have been done the other way around.

“Now…” He sat back on the edge of the bed. “… if you say you believe me, will you please put down that gun.”

“Is there anything you haven’t told me?”

“I’m sure there is.” His hair was mussed and he needed a shave.

She studied the gun. “Is this yours?”

“It’s Daniel Lamotte’s. I found it right there in his desk drawer. I hate the things. They’re always nothing but trouble.”

“Doesn’t look like it’s been used much.” She did something fancy, cocking and uncocking the hammer and spinning out the chamber, for all the world the female Jewish cowboy, then laid it down on the desk. “He must have been afraid of something to get it.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Unless he was planning on shooting himself.”

“I’ve thought about that as well.”

“How about you, Clark?”

“What the hell do you mean?”

“What do you plan to do?”

He glanced toward the blackened mirror. Heard again a hissing that could have been telephone wires or the sea. “I don’t know… I’d run if I knew where I was supposed to run to. And what I was running from.”

“And as you don’t?”

He shrugged. Glitters of light from the edge of his dreams seemed to push by him.

“You know what kind of writer I am?”

“I rather assumed—”

“Assumed, yeah, the way everyone does in this city that the only kind of writing worth a rat’s ass is for the feelies. But there are other things you can do with words, you know. Like telling the truth, for a start.”

“That
would
be something.”

“Would, wouldn’t it? The fascists have tramped all over Europe and now they’re here. Kisberg and his Liberty League cronies are busy turning all California into a white enclave—”

“That’s a bit strong.”

“
Is
it? Do you know how many Hispanics have been repatriated? Do you know what the penalty is now for what they call deviant activity? ’Cept they don’t even call it a penalty—it’s
treatment
.” She took out her State identity card from her top blouse pocket. “You know what this is for?”

“Course I do. We’ve all got one. It’s so cops can tell who you are. Or if you want a library ticket, or health treatment through State Aid.”

“Come
on
—how many times have you been asked to show yours, even doing the sort of work you say you do? Never, I’ll bet.”

He shrugged. “Not that often.” The cops hadn’t even asked to see it before getting him to identify his wife.

“Funnily enough, I get asked to show mine all the time. You ask anyone else who’s brown or yellow or looks Jewish or Hispanic.
That
is what this country is coming to, and California’s in the lead.”

“I guess I don’t pay much notice to politics.”

“Most people don’t. Not until they can’t live in their street no more, or some guy in uniform tells them they’ve broken some law they haven’t even heard of. But I plan to do something about it.”

“You mean…” He couldn’t keep the incredulity out of his voice. “… by writing?”

She nodded. “We’re printing a newssheet—it’s an antidote to the Hearst conspiracy which controls most of the media here in California.”

“What’s it called?”

“
LA Truth.
I know that sounds like an oxymoron.”

“Oxy…? Oh, yeah. Don’t think I’ve heard of it.”

“It’s a tough gig getting it out. What with either paying the new State Stamp Tax, or running underground…”

She trailed off. He got the general impression that editions of
LA Truth
didn’t hit the newsstands that regularly.

“There’s a story in whatever’s happened to Daniel Lamotte and his wife. And I can’t believe it’s just coincidence that he’s written a script about Lars Bechmeir.” She looked around her. “It’s got to be
somewhere
. Maybe here—or wherever the real Daniel Lamotte is, or up in that fancy house in the canyons. Where do you think we should start?”

This room was filled with stuff—endless typed-up scripts and treatments and letters, and then even larger amounts of near-undecipherable handwritten notes—Daniel Lamotte wrote like a drunk doctor—all of which might contain potentially useful information. But from what Clark knew of April Lamotte, and from what he’d seen up at Erewhon, it seemed doubtful. Had she been up here and sorted through this mess? After a quick search showed no carbons of that burned blue screenplay, it seemed likely.

Barbara Eshel couldn’t recall seeing or hearing anything untoward in Blixden Apartments, either, although she was often out trying to get the next edition of
LA Truth
to press, and comings, goings and strange noises at unlikely hours were hardly uncommon. Neither could she quite remember the exact last time that she’d heard the typewriter clacking in room 4A before Clark had dicked around with it yesterday. She was sure, though, that it was before last weekend. Maybe early last Friday.

Clients at a first interview would often tell Clark just how good it felt simply to
talk
. Now, he knew exactly what they meant. Barbara Eshel clearly had her own agenda, and might have shoved herself into his life by pointing a gun at him, but just running things through with her felt like some weight was lifting off his chest. As he finished dressing, they agreed that she’d wade through more of these papers, speak to Blixden Apartments’ other residents, check up on places Daniel Lamotte was likely to have visited for research, try to find out a bit more about his and April’s lives from the public records, and then maybe the addresses of some upmarket mental health clinics. All of which would keep her more than busy enough to stay out of his hair whilst he drove up toward the mountains to find the pine cabin—Larch Lodge—that Dan and April Lamotte supposedly owned.

“Let me see. This map looks almost new. You say it was found in her car?”

For all that she smelled nice, he wasn’t so sure that he was happy about the possessive way she was leaning over his shoulder to try to help him work out where he should be heading.

“Have you looked to see if there are any marks? Or, you know, worn bits where people have been prodding at it?”

“Of course I have.” He was doing it as she spoke.

“So the road up around
here
is where she’s supposed to have killed herself. And this… Lookee here. See—Bark Rise! It’s on the way to that lodge of theirs, Clark! It’s
got
to be. Can you remember what she wrote in the suicide note? It doesn’t say in the paper…”