Wake Up and Dream (24 page)

“Not that I know of. It wasn’t something I wanted to get them thinking about doing, either. Once I got the picture, I kinda backed off.”

“But Jesus—here’s someone else who’s disappeared!”

“That’s just the start. Whole reason I went down to Willowbrook was to get a feel for the kind of stuff Dan was researching. To be honest, there’s not that much to see. Just some bundles of press releases and the same old photographs we’ve all already seen in the magazines. That, and a couple of prototype versions of field generators in glass cases, a sensory room not much better than your average feelie theater, and framed versions of the early adverts when the whole industry was trying to promote the Next Big Thing. I’m surprised he went there as much as he did. But I did manage to smuggle out this…”

Looking pleased with herself, and with a theatrical rustle, she produced a sheet of yellowed paper densely typed with faded columns of names.

“It’s dated May 12, 1931, and it’s the guestlist for the premiere of
Broken Looking Glass
, the first ever feelie. Hughes was there.” She pointed. “’Course, it was his movie, I mean feelie, and then there’s the production staff and the actors and some people I recognize as reviewers and the usual hangers-on from the press. Especially for something they thought was going to be a freakshow disaster. But there are quite a few others as well. See—Herbert Kisberg? Well, I guess he was showing an early interest in the technology that would make his fortune. Lars and Betty Bechmeir, of course—they would be there, wouldn’t they? Then there’s Cy Edgerton. He’s ex-mayor, tons of directorships, and he’s also on the Bechmeir Board of Trustees. Then Jerry Lock. He owns half the undeveloped real estate south of the Baldwin Hills. Famous and successful people, right? Or at least they are now. And we all know Peg Entwistle.”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “We all know Peg.”

“It’s like this is a list of the people who’ve made it big in this town since the thirties. But that’s only half the story. Have you heard of William H. Frooney?”

“William H… ?”

“Don’t read the papers much, do you?”

“Never did.”

“Will Frooney ran a construction company. One of the biggest. Still going, far as I know. In fact, Frooneys might even be the firm that’s at work on the site of what’s now left of Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Their signs are still all over the place. But Frooney hanged himself about four years ago. And Carel Srodzinski…I suppose you don’t remember him?”

He shook his head.

“Srodzinski ran an electronics firm. People used to call him The Magician of the Wires, and that was before all the publicity he got from the way he died.
Fried By His Own Electricity
—don’t you remember that? The LA press love an ironic suicide. There are quite a few other suicides on this list. Far more than you might reasonably expect. Of course, we all know about Betty Bechmeir. But there are even worse things happened to some of those people as well. Gabriel Halon, for example. Now, he was doing well out of airplanes and chemicals. Had a fine ranch-house up in Santa Monica. Place called Happenstance.”

“You mean the Happenstance killings? God, that was
terrible
.”

“Press
must
have had a field day if you’ve heard about it, Clark. All six of the family, and then even the dogs. Tortured for days. Like… who the hell knows what it was like? ’Course, the culprit or culprits were never found. And neither were they for the Theobold murders a year or two later. Ring any bells?”

“None that I’m hearing.”

“Then you’re the lucky one, and the Theobolds certainly weren’t. He was a successful doctor—a pioneering brain surgeon. Basically, they were found starved to death in their own home in ’38. Bad enough, right? But all their friends had thought they were in Europe and someone had kept them chained up in there for months. They hadn’t just starved. They’d been forced to eat… Well, the coroner’s report rather implied it was each other.”

“That’s sick.”

“Is, isn’t it? But there’s a pattern.
All
of these people went to the premiere of
Broken Looking Glass
. And now they’re dead successful. Or simply dead. And the ones that are dead either killed themselves, or had something far worse and nastier happen.”

“Why hasn’t anyone else ever seen this going on?”

“Because there
is
nothing going on unless you check against this guestlist. Far as I can tell, these people aren’t particularly associated in any other way. Guys like Frooney and Srodzinski and Halon, they might have known each the way the rich always do, but as far as anyone knows, their deaths were just regular common-or-garden LA murders and suicides, and whoever takes any notice of those? And when it comes to those big showpiece murders, well, they do tend to happen in LA rather more than most places.” She was looking at him with that sideways tilt to her head and an expression which was somehow both knowing and wary. “But there is one other name I want you to see…”

She held the guestlist out to him. It was badly crumpled. It must have been the actual typed sheet which had been used to check people in on the night.

“You see?”

Before he could say whether he saw or not, she was pointing toward the bottom of the list, where the name A. Lamotte (Miss) was just visible.

“This is
big
, Clark. This is
important
. This is a massive opportunity to put
LA Truth
on the publishing map…” Barbara Eshel was pacing the room now, flushed and excited. She’d already wrenched the two invites for Kisberg’s party out of his hands.

“But—”

“We’ve
got
to go. It’s an open secret Kisberg’s going to announce himself as the Liberty League presidential candidate tomorrow, and here’s our chance to get into his house. He’s on the board of the Bechmeir Trust, for godsake, and he was on that guestlist of ten years ago before anyone even knew who the hell he was. Can’t you see what a chance this is, Clark? Can’t you see how it all adds up?”

“Look at us.”

“Obviously, we can’t go as we are—but didn’t you say that Erewhon has walk-in wardrobes stuffed with expensive clothes?”

He put the cup with the remains of his cold coffee down on the table beside his chair. His eyes traveled back to the list. Barbara was right—there were some names he recognized, for all the little attention he paid to the news.

“We’ll be seriously late,” he muttered.

She flapped her arms and laughed. “Don’t you know how
fashionable
that is?”

“T
HIS IS SOME PLACE.”

There were no obvious signs of forced entry at Erewhon, or of LAPD scene of crime notices or further violence or blood. Automatic lights flared on when they entered the hall.

“Just stand over there by the staircase. I want the reader to get a real sense of this place’s scale. And put those glasses back on.” Barbara Eshel screwed a new flashbulb into the Graflex camera which had taken up most of her handbag.

Pop
.
Flash
.

“If you like, we can just say it’s an old picture of Daniel Lamotte before everything went wrong. Depends how the story works out, but we’ll certainly need something, a visual angle—especially if I can get a feature in one of the better magazines.”

“I thought you said you were doing this for a piece in
LA Truth
?”

She lowered the Graflex to twist the winder around. “Yeah, but the more I think about this, and the more we find out—this story’s got breakthrough written right through it like a stick of Long Island rock.”

Flashbulbs hissed and flickered. She wandered off, cursing in surprise at the size and splendor of the rooms.

The same fine furniture, pale carpets and dark curtains swam into view beneath the recessed lights when they went upstairs to find clothes. The phone still sat on the glasstop table beside the bed in the room April and Daniel Lamotte had shared. So did the ashtray, still filled with all those ground-out pastel-colored butts. He could even see the dent on the bed where she’d sat and waited two nights ago for the call saying her husband was dead.

“You know,” Barbara was saying, “this woman’s not so very far from my clothes size. Might even be the same. But who the hell needs all of this stuff? Such a waste of money…” Nevertheless, she was lifting lots of it out; whole shifting, rustling piles of dresses and suits and skirts. “And by the way, Clark—do you really think they’d be able to afford this lifestyle on a feelie writer’s money alone? Okay, he wrote some successful screenplays, but
this
? Thought you said you
knew
this industry?”

The guest suite he went to get changed in wasn’t much of a come-down. Even though the boiler was off and the water was cold, the shower felt sweeter than anything he was used to.
And
not a cockroach in sight.

I could get used to this, part of him was saying as he sat on the edge of the bed and toweled himself. The walnut furnishings. The carpets. The mirrors. That car outside. The cost of a working man’s monthly wages for a bottle of cologne. And that young woman in the room along the corridor—who was probably naked in the shower right now—I could get used to her, as well.

But nothing would settle. Not this weird new life he was living, nor the old one he seemed to have lost. Even now, it took an effort of will to look at himself in the long dressing table mirror, and the face he saw bought no particular relief.

He shook his head. Inspected the fine assortment of another man’s clothes he’d gathered. Shirt collar pinned by solid gold. A suit of that deeper shade of black you never saw in any regular clothes shop, and only rarely in night skies. Shoes snug as a ballerina’s pumps. A silk paisley necktie so beautifully painted it was a work of art. He already knew the look and fit all of it would be perfect.

He went downstairs after he’d gotten dressed and waited for a while in the hall for Barbara Eshel to come down. He smoked a Lucky Strike. He stared at the phone in the alcove. He wandered the long corridor after he’d finished his cigarette. The wraith was still turned off. He stopped and studied it. Then he felt around until he found a toggle switch around the back of the plinth.

Nothing at first but a soft swishing, like silk over flesh. He guessed that that was the looped recording wire passing and re-passing over the recording heads. Then came a humming, and a faintly cattish smell of warm valves and shellac as the amplifiers started to do their work. There was something floating now between the charged plates like a stream of sunlit dust, and the air seemed to have chilled as if a door somewhere had been opened. The plasm shimmer of the Bechmeir field was unmistakable now, a dance of light, and beautiful to behold.

The wraith floated before him, and it seemed that his mind was playing tricks, although he knew that what he was experiencing was, by definition, a trick of the mind. What had April Lamotte said about this feelie recording—that Daniel Lamotte had got some studio to mix in the auras of all his favorite actors, then put it on a loop? He could see what she meant. For wasn’t that Peg Entwistle’s queenly aura he was now feeling, and wasn’t this one that guy with the ragged gait for whom things always went wrong? It really was like the distillation of some endless night at the feelies, and he could understand why Daniel Lamotte had got the thing made, and also why it had come to taunt him. But there was something else as well. An undertow that dragged oddly at the spirit—something bleak and powerful and strange…

He turned the thing off with a shudder, and watched it fade and drain away. Hearing something further down the corridor, he turned and saw that lights were on in the room where he’d talked with April Lamotte. A changed Barbara Eshel was standing beside the long couch.

“What kept you so long, Clark?” she asked.

Every time he thought he’d got some sort of handle on this woman, she went and did something like this. How, for example, could she have got herself dressed and downstairs so much more quickly than he had? And then, manage to look like she did?

“You don’t brush up too bad,” she said as she studied him. “For a failed actor, that is.”

“Neither do you. For a twobit newshound.”

“This…” she gestured—she’d chosen a long, dark dress which shimmered with turquoise blues—“… was about the only thing in April Lamotte’s entire wardrobe that anyone move around in like a normal human being.” It was loose and long from the hips down, low and tight at the bust. She hadn’t done much to her hair, but whatever she’d done had transformed her. Or maybe it was the earrings or the silver choker. “I mean, what
is
the
point
of having some glossy fabric wrapped so tight around your thighs and ass that you can barely walk?”

“I think I can explain that.”

“Don’t bother! I already feel like some ridiculous society whore. And
I’m
someone who used to stand outside Liberty League rallies waving banners until the
LAPD
started beating us up.”

T
HE SKY ROILED AND FLICKERED
as they drove down from the canyons towards Beverly Hills. The Beverly Wiltshire, and the Electric Fountain. Billboards and billboards and billboards.
JUDAS THE FEELIE WHO WANTS TO LOOK OLD WARM WINE ENEMAS DO YOU INHALE HOT DOGS BUY SELL DINE DIE THE LAST THE BEST THE LATEST NEW NEW NEW FRESH NEW YOUNG

The building beyond the raised chromium portcullis of Herbert Kisberg’s gatehouse was so large and yet floated so delicately on floodlit tiers of lawn that it scarcely seemed to be made of stone at all.

“You’re not going to tell people you’re my dead wife, are you?”

“Of course not.”

“But you’re with me, Barbara. The way you look—anyone who heard about what’s happened is going to think it’s a bit quick to start a new romance.”

“First of all, this is Hollywood and they wouldn’t think that at all. Secondly, they’d care even less. But thirdly, Clark, I’ll simply tell people I’m who I really am.”

“You mean—”

“I’ll say,
Hi, I’m a writer
. And they’ll ask if I’ve had anything produced. And when I tell them I’m not
that
kind of writer, they’ll walk away.”