Manifesto for the Dead Page 5

  Thompson woke at dawn. The sky overhead was a wild pink—and nearby, in a cypress hedge, some starlings were making a fuss, flitting blackly from branch to branch.

  The remains of some vast darkness lingered in his head. The darkness was a lake, but it was a lake that had no shore, and there were no sounds and no reflections rippling across its surface. He did not want to return to that lake, but return he did.

  He opened his eyes again later. How much later, he could not say. The starlings were gone and the sun more fierce. Though it was still morning, and the ground still cold, the desert sun burned overhead.

  He lay in front of a very large house: a mansion in the contemporary style, all windows and aluminum and enameled steel. He worried someone might come to those windows, but no one did. The air was still and quiet and hot. His head hurt. He wondered if he had died and this were some uncharted circle of hell, reserved especially for himself.

  A car rolled into the drive. He lay as still as he could, flattening himself into the grass. The car was a late-model sedan, nothing fancy. Out stepped a Mexican woman in a white uniform. She did not glance in his direction but sauntered primly down the pink flagstones to the rear of the house.

  The maid, Thompson figured. And he realized he had not died after all. He was in Beverly Hills.

  Thompson scrambled towards a gap in the hedge, hobbling. The branches scratched his face, but he pushed through. On the other side, he hobbled some more; he had lost a shoe. He searched the hedge a while, then started down the hill. Maybe his shoe lay back on the grass, but he did not want to be caught loping about on some movie star’s lawn.

  What happened last night? he wondered.

  He had experienced blackouts before, but usually after a long night of drinking. Last night, he had barely begun.

  He patted himself down, found the bank envelope in his jacket pocket, money intact—but his wallet gone. It had been empty anyway, no identification, so in that matter, at least, he had lucked out.

  The hill bottomed at Sunset, and he crossed to the bus stop. After a little while a cop car drove by, then another, each turning up the way Thompson had just come, back up Beverly Drive. The cops had their sirens off, but they drove with a degree of urgency.

  The cops could be investigating anything, he told himself. A tourist in Bob Hope’s swimming pool. Doris Day’s orgasms. Zsa Zsa’s missing poodle.

  Finally, the bus arrived. It was a local and took him a little ways past Sunset Plaza. Lately this part of the Strip had been taken over by the hippies. Suburban riffraff, ghetto trash, aspiring actors, they wandered together up and down the street, all roaming about. At first glance it seemed they were mingling, engaged in some common enterprise. Up close, he realized they were each going their separate ways: hustling dope; buying bikinis, black lights, banana-colored slacks. Sitting at the open-air tables, eyes dim and glassy. Tapping the table tops with their fingertips and looking about, waiting for what was happening to happen. Washed up flotsam. Debris. Scum floating on a sea of nothingness. More all the time. They lounged in front of the Whiskey-A-Go-Go all night in their leather, then huddled under the billboards by day, passing their joints back and forth while overhead, painted and peeling, a giant blonde lounged beside a bottle of gin. Meanwhile the cars rolled by spewing exhaust, and Thompson felt himself, watery, dissolute, with an erection growing up suddenly, ridiculously, out of all this nothingness. An old man’s erection, nothing to write home about—unless, of course, you were an old man yourself. Down Sunset, the Hollywood bus was nowhere to be seen.

  He stepped into a notions shop and bought himself some sneakers and a clean shirt. The shirt was wide-collared, bright and gaudy, but it least it was not soaked through with sweat.

  He started to walk, just to be moving. He would catch the bus at the next stop along the line. Further on, he glanced up and saw the Château.

  Lussie was staying here.

  In the old days the Château had been a glamorous joint, and the tour agents used that glamour now to attract out-of-towners and conventioneers. Thompson decided what the hell. He would cross the street and walk into the lobby. He would ring her room. If what Alberta had told him was true, her husband would not be in town for a few days yet.

  The last time he’d seen Lussie had been in a hotel room in New York, maybe fifteen years back. He’d been in town trying to set up a book deal, and she had been on a business trip with her husband. The old man had been out for the day, so Thompson had gone up and knocked on her door.

  She had opened up and let him in. Her eyes had flashed with something that surprised him. He wondered if it would be there again.

  No, he told himself.

  He couldn’t go to the Château. Not in this state, disheveled as he was.

  Thompson caught the bus back to the Aztec Hotel. He walked though the lobby, past the snoozing clerk, upstairs to his room.

  He wanted out. Away from Billy Miracle. All these years writing about murderers and their victims, men trapped by their desires—by swell-looking babes and no account virgins—and now here he was, trapped too. He wasn’t so different from the drifter in the book he was writing maybe, working his way toward a fate scrawled in someone else’s hand. But he went ahead anyway and sat down at his desk. He was under contract, after all.

  FOURTEEN

  Belle Lanier could get her old man to dance naked in the street, if that’s what she wanted, so getting me the job at her father’s place was a pretty straightforward business.

  Daddy Lanier treated me like a prince. He paid me fair, and patted me on the back, and didn’t seem to want anything in return. Maybe he was a good man like he seemed. Or maybe he was a fool.

  Either way, my plan, it was to take these people for a ride. To milk them good and be on my way.

  Then one day the younger sister, Gloria, showed up at the office. She wore her hair tied back and a brand new dress: a wide-collared thing that hung down below the knees. She had sincerity written all over her face.

  “Hi,” I said, and gave her my brightest grin. “What can I do for you?”

  I took her for a stroll, and talked it up big. I told her how much I loved the town, and the people here, how it reminded me of my childhood. It was all lies, but she smiled, sweet as sap, and for a little while I believed my own words.

  Finally we went back to the office. I looked through the window, watching her walk. I thought for a minute how I wished everything was good and wholesome as she made it seem. Just then I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Daddy Lanier. He had been watching me study his youngest daughter as she strolled away under the pecan trees.

  “You want to come over to dinner?”

  He looked at me with the eyes of the father I’d never had. The good father. Who cared for me and wanted to see me do well in the world. Who would never treat me like that lousy voice in my head.

  FIFTEEN

  The next day, Thompson got a call from Matthew Roach, his agent in New York. They’d known each other for twenty years, back to the days when Thompson wrote for the crime magazines. Thompson liked hearing from him: the cheering lilt in his voice, all camaraderie, like a pat on the back that said:

  Give ’em hell, buddy. They ’re all bastards, but hey, you, Mr. Million Bucks, you got what it takes.

  The truth was, Roach was a swindler like all the rest. They’d fallen out a dozen times over the years, but none of that mattered. Thompson liked him anyway.

  “Too bad about Jack Lombard. A damn shame.” Roach’s voice sounded odd. He wants something, Thompson thought. But why is he bringing up Lombard?

  “Nothing’s too bad for him. That son of a bitch.”

  “That’s a hell of a thing to say.”

  “I’m a hell of a guy.”

  “The reason I called, Hector Sally talked to me, about your book deal. I think we can make this thing swing.”

  Thompson hesitated. He had hoped to do this without Roach, to save himself the commission. “Hector says they’ll do th
e book. Contingent on the film. Any advance you get, though, that has to come from the production house.”

  “I was hoping …”

  “That’s the best I can get you.”

  Roach’s voice was firm, and Thompson felt his old dislike of the man returning. He enjoyed the feeling. It felt good to hate his agent again. To hate agent and publisher at the same time, in the same moment, this was one of life’s true pleasures.

  “Now, this is what I want you to do. Send me a copy of the deal you have with Miracle.”

  “All right.”

  “You haven’t signed it yet, have you?”

  “No,” Thompson lied.

  “Good. Because I want to protect the rights on this. Send me the deal memo now, and the chapters as you write them. I’ll forward the chapters to Hector. Meantime, I’ll call my movie contacts. That way, if things fall through with Miracle, you’ll still have the book, and maybe we can build something on that.”

  “All right.”

  Despite everything, Thompson enjoyed having Roach on the line. While he had him, he felt connected. He could smell Manhattan: the gray buildings and the grime, the perfumed blouses in elevators that never stopped rising, the presses inked up and ready to roll.

  “So the place must be buzzing with it?” Roach sounded again as he had sounded when he first called, his voice heavy with insinuation.

  “Buzzing with what?”

  “What happened to Jack. Everybody must be talking. A dirty business like that.”

  “What dirty business?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No.”

  “Lombard was murdered.”

  Thompson felt his heart in his throat. “Murdered?”

  “In Beverly Hills. In that big ass house of his. Someone beat him to death with a baseball bat.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “They found him upstairs. Whoever it was, they made a mess of it. Chased him all over the house.”

  “Jesus.”

  “It wasn’t what you would call a clean kill. The man really suffered.”

  Thompson felt that big blackness inside him again, and he tried to remember what had happened the night before. He saw himself climbing out of Miracle’s car, stumbling about those tables, and then he was inside the car again, heading into the hills.

  After awhile, Roach got off the phone. Thompson sat himself in front of the typewriter, but it was hopeless. He went down to the newsstand and bought himself a copy of the Herald.

  HOLLYWOOD MOGUL MURDERED

  Bloody Crime Shocks Tinseltown

  The body of movie mogul Jack Lombard was found early this morning beaten and bloodied almost beyond recognition in the foyer of his Beverly Hills mansion.

  The body was discovered by Lombard’s maid, Julia Alveraz, about 11:30 yesterday morning, according to Los Angeles police.

  Mrs. Alvarez told police that the back door of Lombard’s downstairs office was ajar, and there were signs a violent struggle had taken place.

  Lombard was known to meet with producers, writers and directors at all hours of the night in his famed downstairs room, where some of the most celebrated movies in Hollywood history were conceived.

  Though details at this time are sketchy, police said it appears the struggle began downstairs. Papers and household fixtures had been knocked on the floor, and a chair overturned.

  After the initial attack, Lombard then fled his attacker, going upstairs into the mansion’s large and spacious living room, which itself resembles a Hollywood stage set, filled as it is with props, costumes, antique cameras, and other memorabilia.

  Here, Lombard apparently put up a fierce struggle for his life. Investigators say the room was in shambles, with much of the memorabilia broken and smashed.

  Lombard’s body was found just a few steps from the front door.

  There were bloody hand prints on the vestibule walls, suggesting he had been on the verge of escape when the assailant cornered him at the entrance.

  His head had been struck repeatedly with a blunt item. A bloody baseball bat was found nearby.

  As there was no evidence of forced entry, investigators suspect the attacker may have been someone known to Lombard.

  Lombard was a controversial figure who made and broke many careers in Hollywood. He was someone about whom people often felt passionately.

  “At this point, we’re following every lead we get,” said Detective Orville Mann of the Los Angeles Police. “No one in Hollywood is beyond suspicion.”

  On an inside page, the newspaper had run a picture of Lombard’s mansion. Thompson recognized the place immediately. He felt the dread rise inside him. All that glass, those steel rafters. He’d woken up there this morning, on the lawn, under those huge and sightless windows.

  SIXTEEN

  Now Thompson studied himself in the reflection of the newsstand window: his wrinkled trousers and his ridiculous shirt and the oversized sneakers. His face was lined like the face of an old bluff that had been soaked by rain and carved up by some bitter wind. He tried to light a cigarette, but his hands shook. He couldn’t get control. He stepped off the street, into a bar. It was a skid row place. Inside, old men like himself were already into it, heads bowed, nodding toward their glasses. Sometimes they mumbled, whether to one another or to the drinks they held in their hands, it was hard to tell. The sounds those lips made were incoherent, but such incoherence was the point. Failed marriages. Childhood beatings. Loved ones killed by accident or in homicidal rage. These things happened. If you were deemed guilty, you might get locked up for a while. You might get lobotomized, or incarcerated alongside a man who longed for nothing more than to fuck your ass three times a week, but sooner or later society forgot about you. There were other matters, other criminals to punish. Anyway, maybe you did the job better yourself. So they let you go, and you wandered free and you needed the potion of forgetfulness.

  “A whiskey,” Thompson said.

  The whiskey helped calm him. I’m innocent, he thought. And for a minute, the whiskey still hot in his belly, he believed it was true. He hadn’t been a lousy husband, a lousy father. (So lousy, in fact, that his two daughters, his son, hell, their faces vanished on him, and all that was left were their eyes, boring up out of the nothing, out of the dark, lingering around like a question someone had forgotten to answer.)

  He thought of his sister’s place in La Jolla. She and her husband were in Lincoln, the house empty. He saw himself there by the ocean, recuperating in the salt air, finishing his book. He would go, he decided. Rest. And think things through.

  As he stood up, he glanced into the mirror over the bar. It was not unlike the mirror at Musso’s, except the glass here had gone bad. The reflection was no good, the image smoky and dark. He could not see himself clearly, and it was as if he had slipped over some boundary. He remembered Billy Miracle—his eyes in the rearview, his hands below the seat fiddling, then coming up with the drink. Miracle had been inside Michele’s purse, Thompson realized. Then it occurred to him:

  I was doped.

  Thompson thought about the ride away from Sunset Plaza. Haze and Miracle dragging him into the darkness. Letting him fall.

  They hired the Okie to kill the girl. They killed Lombard. And now they’re trying to blame the whole business on me.

  It was either that, or believe he’d gone over the edge himself.

  SEVENTEEN

  On the corner, near the old Roosevelt Hotel, a clean-up crew was going at it, young men on their hands and knees, polishing those Hollywood stars embedded in the walkway. It was late morning, and the T-shirt shops and the pizza stands were just opening. A bouncer from one of the sex palaces hosed the walk nearby. The pigeons cooed, and the air was redolent with the smell of burned tomatoes and beer gone flat

  Thompson thought about the girl in the Cadillac, and how her ringlets fell so sweetly over the bruised cheeks. He headed up Grace Avenue toward the Ardmore. His plan was to grab the keys to the Ford, then
be on his way, to the coast.

  He reached Franklin. All he had to do was go around the corner, and he would be home. He glanced up the hill toward Whitley Terrace, wondering if the Cadillac was still there, the girl curled in the trunk.

  A patrol car pulled over the rise. A couple of young blues sat in the front seat. The cops were everywhere, it seemed, watching your every move. The one in the driver’s seat gave him a little wave of the hand, telling him to cross. He went ahead, obliging the cop—going in a direction he had not intended to go. Up the hill, towards the Cadillac. Meanwhile, he felt the cops looking him over. He could guess what kind of sight he made. An old man in sagging pants and a knit shirt. I worked the Texas oil fields, Thompson wanted to tell them. I hung out with the Wobblies, I hopped the rails. It was what men did during the depression. Not just me, but thousands, all looking for work to feed the wife and kids back home. A person my own age, why, he would recognize that. These young cops, these nobodies, why …

  The road climbed steeply. Thompson heard the squad car down below him, idling in the intersection. He worried somebody had seen him coming off Beverly Drive, and reported his description. The cops could be listening to it right now. Two seconds, the big red lights would come on. And here he’d be, cornered by happenstance.

  At the top of the hill, he braved a look back.

  The squad car was gone.

  He stood on Whitely Terrace, alone, on a rise looking down toward the Ardmore and the rest of Hollywood. Just around the corner, the asphalt turned to gravel.

  Maybe the Cadillac was still there. Either way it would be foolish to go see. The cops could be on a stake out, for all he knew.

  He would not be standing here if that young cop had not motioned him to cross the street. Coincidence, inevitability—he wondered if there were a difference—compelled him forward. He stopped. His hands trembled. Maybe the Cadillac had never had been there at all. The incident was a dream, a drunken hallucination. Then why not go forward, under the eucalyptus. Down the gravel road. Dismiss it once and for all. But he wasn’t that far off the beam, not yet. He’d seen the girl. Thinking about her, he all but saw her again. He could see too the empty trench further down the hill, and the shovel in the trunk.