Coldheart Canyon (53 page)

“In case there’s anybody at Maxine’s place.” He went back and forth between studying his face and checking the road.

“You look fine,” Tammy told him.

“I guess it’s not so bad,” he said, assessing his features.

“You just look a little different from the way you used to look.”

“Different enough that people will notice?”

Tammy couldn’t lie to him. “Sure they’ll notice. But maybe they’ll say you look better. I mean, when everything’s properly healed and you’ve had a month’s vacation.”

“You will come in with me, won’t you?”

“To see Maxine? My pleasure.”

“Mind if I smoke?” He didn’t wait for a reply. He just rolled down the window, pulled out a battered pack of cigarettes, and lit up. The rush of nicotine made him whoop. “That’s better! Okay. We’re going to do this.

You and me. We’re going to ask Maxine a lot of very difficult questions, and figure out whether she’s lying to us or not.”

They had reached the Pacific Coast Highway, and the roar of the traffic through the open window made any further talk impractical for a time.

They drove north for perhaps five miles, before coming off the PCH and heading west. The area wouldn’t have been Tammy’s idea of idyllic.

Somehow she’d imagined Malibu being more like a little slice of Hawaii; but in fact it was just a sliver of real estate two or three houses deep, with the incessant din of the Pacific Coast Highway on one side and a narrow strip of beach on the other. They’d scarcely driven more than a quarter of CC[348-676] 9/10/01 2:29 PM Page 396

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a mile when they came to the Colony gates. There was a guard-house, and a single guard, who was sitting with his booted feet up beside a small television. The set went off as soon as they drove up, a broad smile appearing on the man’s face.

“
Hey
, Mister Pickett. Long time, no see.”

“Ron, m’man. How goes it?”

“It goes good, it goes good.”

The guard was clearly delighted that his name had been remembered.

“Are you going to Ms. Frizelle’s party?”

“Oh . . . yeah,” Todd said, throwing a panicked glance at Tammy.

“We’re here for that.”

“That’s great.” He peered past Todd, at the passenger. “And this is?”

“Oh, this is Tammy. Tammy, Ron. Ron, Tammy. Tammy’s my date for the night.”

“Good goin’,” Ron said, to no one and about nothing in particular. Just a general California yea-saying to the world. “Let me just call Ms. Frizelle, and tell her you’re on your way down.”

“Nah,” Todd said, sliding a twenty-dollar bill into Ron’s hand. “We’re going to surprise her.”

“No problem,” Ron said, waving them by. “Good to see you, by the way—”

It took Tammy a moment to realize that Ron was talking to her.

“It’s always good to meet a new friend of Mister Pickett’s.” There didn’t seem to be any irony in this: it was a genuine expression of feeling.

“Well, thank you,” Tammy said, thrown a little off-kilter by this.

“Fuck. She’s having a party,” Todd said to her as they left the guard-house behind them.

“So.”

“So there’ll be lots of people. Looking at me.”

“They’ve got to do it sooner or later.”

Todd stopped the car in the middle of the street.

“I can’t. I’m not ready for this.”

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“Yes you are. The more you put it off the more difficult it’s going to be.”

Todd sat there shaking his head, saying: “No. No. I can’t do it.”

Tammy put her hand over his. “I’m just as nervous as you are,” she said. “Feel how clammy my hand is?”

“Yeah.”

“But we said we’d get answers. And the longer we take to ask her, the more lies she’ll have ready.”

“You do know her, don’t you?” he said.

“She’s my nightmare.”

“Really. Why?”

“Because she stood between me and you.”

“Huh.”

Silence.

“So what are we going to do?” Tammy said finally.

“Shit. I don’t want to do this.”

“So that makes two of us. But—”

“I know, I know, if we don’t do it now . . . All right. You win. But I will beat the living shit out of the first person who says one word about my face.”

They drove on, the houses they were driving past far more modest in scale and design than she’d expected. There was very little here of the kitsch of Beverly Hills: no faux-French châteaux sitting side by side with faux-Tudor mansions. The houses were mostly extremely plain, boxlike in most cases, with very occasional architectural flourishes. They were also very close to one another. “You wouldn’t get much privacy there,”

Tammy commented.

“I guess everybody just pretends not to look at everybody else. Or they just don’t care. That’s more like it. They just don’t care.”

“That’s the connection between you and Katya, isn’t it? You’ve both been looked at so much . . . and the rest of us don’t know what that feels like.”

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“It feels like somebody’s siphoning out your blood, pint by pint.”

“Not good.”

“No. Not good.”

They rounded a corner, bringing their destination into view. The party-house was decorated with thousands of tiny white twinkle lights, as were the two palm trees that stood like sentinels to left and right of the door.

“Christmas came early this year,” Tammy remarked.

“Apparently.”

There were uniformed valets working the street; taking cars from the guests and spiriting them away to be parked somewhere out of sight.

“Are you sure you’re ready for this?” Todd asked Tammy.

“No more than you are.”

“Want to go one more circle around the block?”

“Yes.”

“Uh-oh. Too late.”

Two valets were coming at the car bearing what must have been burdensome smiles. As the doors were opened, Todd caught tight hold of Tammy’s hand. “Don’t leave my side,” he said. “Promise me you won’t.”

“I promise,” she said, and raising her head she put on her best impersonation of someone who was rich, famous and belonged at Todd Pickett’s side. Todd relinquished the keys to the valet.

“May I assume this is your first A-list Hollywood party in the flesh?”

Todd said to Tammy.

“You may.”

“Well then this could be a lot of fun. In a grotesque, ‘there’s a shark in the swimming pool’ sort of way.”

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There came a point, as Jerry’s car was carrying Katya out of Coldheart Canyon for the first time in the better part of three-quarters of a century, when her fears seemed to get the better of her. Jerry heard a voice, as dry as a husk, out of the darkness behind him: “I’m sorry . . . I don’t know that I can do this.”

“Do you want me to turn around?” he asked her. “I will if you want me to.”

There was no reply. Just the soft sound of frightened weeping. “I wish Zeffer was still here. Why was I so cruel to him?” None of this seemed to be for open discussion. It was more like a private confessional. “Why am I such a bitch? Jesus.
Jesus
. Everything I’ve ever loved . . .” She stopped herself, and looked up at Jerry, catching his reflection in the mirror. “Don’t mind me. It’s just a crazy old woman talking to herself.”

“Maybe we should go back and find Mister Zeffer? He could come with you. I realize there was some bad blood between you—”

“Zeffer’s dead, Jerry. I lost my temper with him, and—”

“You killed him?”

“No. I left him in the Devil’s Country. Wounded by one of the hunters.”

“Lord.”

Jerry brought the car to a halt. He stared out of the window, horrified.

“What would you like me to do?” he said after a while. “If you can’t go on without him, I mean.”

“Take no notice of me,” Katya said, after a short period of reflection.

“I’m just feeling sorry for myself. Of
course
I can go on. What other choice do I have?” She took another moment to study the passing world. “It’s just that it’s been a long time since I was out in the real world.”

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“This isn’t the real world, it’s LA.”

She saw the joke in that. They laughed together over the remark, and when their laughter had settled into smiles, he got the car going again, down the hill. At some unidentified point between the place where her faith had almost failed her and Sunset Boulevard, they crossed the bound-ary of Coldheart Canyon.

Their destination was already decided, of course, so there wasn’t much reason to talk as they went. Jerry left Katya to her musings. He knew his Hollywood history well enough to be sure that she would be astonished by what she was seeing. In her time Sunset Boulevard had been little more than a dirt track once it got east of what was now Doheny. There’d been no Century City back then, of course, no four-lane highways clogged with sleek vehicles. Just shacks and orange groves and dirt.

“I’ve been thinking,” Katya said, somewhere around Sepulveda.

“About what?”

“Me and my wickedness.”

“Your what? Your
wickedness
?”

“Yes, my wickedness. I don’t know why it came into my mind, but it did. If I think about the women I’ve played in all my really important pictures, they were all wicked women. Poisonous. Adulterers. One who kills her own child. Really
unforgivable
women.”

“But don’t most actors prefer to play bad characters? Isn’t it more fun?”

“Oh it
is
. And I had a lot to inspire me.”

“Inspire you?”

“As a child, I saw wickedness with my own eyes. It had its hands on me.

Worse, it
possessed
me.” Her voice grew cold and dark. “My mother ran a whorehouse, did I ever tell you that? And when I was ten or so, she just decided one night it was time to make me available to the customers.”

“Jesus.”

“That’s what I said to myself. Every night, I said:
Jesus, please help me.

Jesus, please come and take me away from this wicked woman. Take me to
Heaven
. But he never came. I had to run away. Three times I ran away and my brothers found me and dragged me back. Once she let them have me, as a reward for finding me.”

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“Your own brothers?”

“Five of them.”

“Christ.”

“Anyway, I succeeded in escaping her eventually, and when you’re a thirteen-year-old, and you’re out in the world on your own, you see a lot thirteen-year-olds shouldn’t have to see.”

“I’m sure you did.”

“So I put all that I saw into those women. That’s why people believed in them. I was playing them for real.” She fumbled at the inside of the door. “Is there some way to open this window?”

“Oh yes. It’s right there. A little black button. Push it down.”

She pushed and opened the window a crack. “That’s better,” she said.

“You can have it all the way down.”

“No, this is fine. I’ll take it in stages, I think.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Going back to the pictures, I wonder if you’d do me a favor, when we get back to the house?”

“Of course. What?”

“In my bedroom in the guest-house there are six or seven posters from those early films of mine. I’ve had them up there for so long, all around the bed, I think it’s time I got rid of them. Will you burn them for me?”

“Are you sure you want them burned? They’re worth a fortune.”

“Then take them for yourself. Put them up for auction. And the bed.

You want the bed too?”

“There isn’t room for it in my apartment, but if you want me to get rid of it for you—”

“Yes, please.”

“No problem.”

“If you make some money from it, then spend it. Enjoy it.”

“Thank you.”

“No, it’s me who should be thanking you. You’ve been a great comfort to me.”

“May I ask you why?”

“Why what?”

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“Why are you getting rid of all that stuff now?”

“Because everything’s changed for me. That woman I used to be has gone. So are all the things she stood for.”

“They were just films.”

“They were more than that. They were my memories. And now’s the time to let go of them. I want to start over with Todd.”

Jerry drew a deep breath to reply to this, but then thought better of it and kept his silence. Katya was acutely aware of every nuance in her immediate locality, however; even this.

“Say what’s on your mind,” she said.

“It’s none of my business.”

“Say it anyway. Go on.”

“Well I just hope you’re not relying too much on Todd Pickett. You know he’s not all that reliable. None of them are, these younger guys.

They’re all talk.”

“He’s different.”

“I hope so.”

“We can’t ever know why things happen between two people. But when it feels right, you have to go with your instincts.”

“If he’s so right for you, why did he run out on you?”

“That was my fault, not his. I showed him some things which were more than he was ready to see. I won’t make that mistake again. And then he had some woman with him, Tammy Somebody-or-Other, who was just trying to steal him away. Do you know her?”

“Tammy? No. I don’t know a Tammy. Oh wait. I do. I had a call from the police in Sacramento. She went missing.”

“And they called you? Why?”

“Because I know Todd. Apparently, this Tammy woman runs his fan club.”

Katya started to laugh.

“That’s all she is to him?” she said.

“Apparently.”

“She runs his fan club?”

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“That’s my understanding.”

“So there’s no romance between them?”

“No. I don’t even think they really know one another.”

“Well, that solves that.”

“It does and it doesn’t,” Jerry said cautiously. “She still persuaded him to go with her.”