Cypress Grove (12 page)

Years to come, I’d spend much of my life sitting alongside other people’s pain as I did that night, hearing it break, stammer, circle back on itself, duck, feint and run. I’d remember this moment.

“We’d been married almost four years when she died,” Junie said. “I came home one morning and found her in the tub. She was leaning back, eyes closed. The water was cold. So was she. I’ve had a soft spot for junkies ever since.”

He got up to shove in a new tape. Some early western swing group, Milton Brown maybe, doing “Milk Cow Blues.” For a time Brown had this amazing steel guitar player, Bob Dunn, a natural on the order of Charlie Christian or Johnny Smith, played steel like it was a jazz trombone. His breaks gave you chills.

I got back to the room around three in the morning and, unable to sleep, lay watching lights from the interstate sweep the wall, radio on low beside me, both of them messages from a larger world beyond. Finally dawn’s foot caught in the door. I hauled myself from bed, showered and went out to the diner for breakfast. When I returned, there was a lock over the doorknob of my room. Looked like a big clown’s nose.

A young redhead with half a yard or so too little shirt and half a dozen too many tattoos manned the office. He hooked his head as I came in, swiveled the phone up from his mouth and said he’d be with me in a minute.

“Can’t get in my room,” I said when he finished.

“Two-oh-three, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Need you to pay up.”

“I’ve been paying by the day, almost a week now. It’s not due till noon.”

“We’re talking yesterday, not today.”

“I brought money by around ten.”

“No record of it.”

“Short, fat guy, looked like his hair hadn’t been washed for, I don’t know, maybe ten years?”

“Danny.”

I waited.

“Danny’s gone. Checked out last night.” He didn’t think it was funny either, but hey. “With everything in the till, not to mention the office radio.”

“And my money”

He shrugged. “Don’t guess you have a receipt.”

I did, as it happened. In prison you learn to hoard, you hang on to every single thing that comes your way.

Red studied the receipt, did everything but sniff it, and grunted. I paid him for the day. He grunted again.

“Be a lot easier if you paid by the week.”

I just looked at him, the yard look, and watched his face go smooth. He pushed a receipt across the desk without meeting my eyes again. Then he got a bunch of keys and followed me up the staircase to unboot the door. The keys were hooked onto a giant steel safety pin and rang like tiny wind chimes as we climbed.

Inside, I switched on the TV to the rerun of an old cop show, some five-foot guy with a chip on his shoulder the size of a river barge and a taste in clothes running to big collars, slick fabrics and rips. All his shirts seemed to be missing the top three buttons. A gold medallion nestled in there among chest hair. I found myself wondering what it would be once it hatched.

Paired footsteps moved up the stairs.

Someone knocked at the door.

Cops and cons, you always know. Way they stand, way they walk, something in the eyes. The point man was there almost flush with the door, smiling, relaxed, but ready to push in or take me down if he sensed the need. He was one of the rare individuals whom off-the-rack fit perfectly; his dark JCPenney suit was immaculate, carefully pressed, but slick with wear. His partner (who’d be driving the Crown Vic pulled in at an angle below) stood off by the railing. Seersucker for him, spots baked into the tie.

“Mr. Turner?”

I nodded.

“Mind if we come in?”

I backed off and sat on the bed. Tugging up pantlegs to save the crease, Big Dog took the chair past the nightstand. B-side stayed on his feet just inside the door. He held a hand-carry radio unit. Every few moments it crackled.

“Can’t help but notice you didn’t ask to see badges. Situation like this, most people would.”

“I’m not most people.”

“True enough.” He looked around, as though the limping dresser or precise angle of the bathroom door might divulge something crucial. “Nice place. Been here what? four, five days? Like it?”

“I’ve seen worse.”

He nodded. B-side lifted the curtain to look out. “Hey! Get away from there!” he hollered. “Fuckin’ kids.” He stepped out onto the walkway and continued in the same vein, after a moment came back.

“You know a man named Roy Branning, Turner?”

“I could.”

“Four-oh-four Commerce Parkway? You paid him a visit two nights ago.”

“Carrying a message. Nothing more to it than that.”

“And the message was?”

“Private.”

“Sure it was.” He got up and walked into the bathroom, came back holding my safety razor. “Private’s a word you need to be careful around. You know?” Sitting again, he ran the razor along the edge of the nightstand, digging in. Veneer peeled off, thin shavings curled up behind. “Thing is, day after your visit, Branning turned up dead. We have to wonder what you know about that. Surprise you?”

“Not really. What I hear, he was pretty much the complete asshole.”

“You heard right.” This from B-side by the door.

“So there’s nothing you can tell us? Now, when it could make a difference? Before this all goes any further?”

I shook my head.

He set the razor carefully on edge on the nightstand, stood and ambled towards B-side, who shifted the radio between hands to open the door.

“We’ll be in touch.”

“Be careful out there, Detective.”

“Thank you for your concern. So few care.”

His smile put me in mind of a throat cut ear to ear.

“Two violent deaths since you showed up here,” Lonnie Bates said. “This sort of thing follow you around?”

“Could look that way, I guess.” Did to me sometimes.

We stood over the cadaver with Doc Oldham. I was thinking how the words
cave
and
cad
were in there. I was thinking how frail our lives are, how thin the thread tethering us to this world. Go out for the Sunday paper and on the way back, half a block from home, you get hit by a delivery truck. Random viruses claim squatter’s rights in our bodies and won’t be evicted. Amazing any of us manage to stay alive.

“Lonnie, goddamn it, I got people to take care of. Live people. Not much I can do for this poor son-of-a-bitch, is there?”

“County pays you, Doc.”

“Every village’s gotta have an idiot.” He wore good-quality clothes, Brooks Brothers tan suit, blue oxford-cloth shirt, carefully cinched tie—all so stained and body-sprung that Salvation Army sorters would have thrown them out. Half a mug of coffee disappeared at a single swallow. The mug had a nude woman on it. When you poured in hot liquid, her flesh disappeared and a skeleton emerged. As the contents cooled, flesh came back. Right now, she was about half formed. “Dozen more bodies, I might even be able to make my car payment this month, who knows?”

“What can you tell me?” Bates asked.

“Chickens ate him.”

“Thank God we have you. All those years of study, all that expertise. Without that, where would we be?”

Doc Oldham shrugged. “If I wasn’t here, why the hell would I care in the first place? Hell, I don’t care now. Velma okay?”

“Don Lee’s with her. Niece on the way up from Clarksdale. Only family she has.”

“Igor!”

An elderly black man looking like a 1950s railroad porter appeared to claim stretcher and remains of body and wheel them away. Doc Oldham followed. Much-abused stainless steel doors swung to behind.

We walked out into stiffling heat, early-morning rain dripping from trees and eaves and steaming off the sidewalk.

“What’s your day look like?” Bates asked.

“Assuming you don’t have other plans for me, it looks like a drive into the city.”

I’d spoken to Val and got the name of a guy who wrote about movies and taught film studies at the university. His books sported titles like
Biker Chicks and Fifty-Foot Women,
Short on Clothes, Skateboard Cowboys.
He’d written an entire book, Val said, on the three versions of
Invasion of the
Body Snatchers.
Kind of books Carl Hazelwood might have had out in the garage, from the sound of things. Guy’s a little weird, Val added. What a surprise.

Just over two hours later I found myself on a block-long street a mile or so off campus where restaurants, cafes, coffee shops and bars still tilted their hats towards students. St. Martin’s Lane didn’t exist on any map; I’d had to stop and ask directions three times. Then, when I found the address, there was no house on the lot. Five-fourteen gave way directly to 518, with a spot between like a missing tooth. A structure stood back by the alley fence, though, a guest house or converted garage. I pulled into the ruins of a driveway and headed for that.

What at first glance I took to be a small, hunched man answered my knock. On closer notice I realized he wasn’t small at all, only drawn into himself, so that he gave the appearance of such. He’d been wearing headphones that pulled away when, oblivious, he came to the door and, as it were, the end of his rope. He glanced back at them lying inert on the floor a yard or so behind. Two days’ growth of beard, hair chronically unruly, scuffed loafers, baggy chinos with frayed cuffs, a black T-shirt. Over this, a many-pocketed hunter’s vest.

Two rooms from what I could make out, possibly another beyond? Shutters and curtains drawn. The whole of it seemed to be lit with a single 40-watt bulb.

“You’re Turner? Come on in.”

He showed me his back as he scuttled into, yes, a third room, and came back with a platter from which he peeled off a plastic covering. Carrot sticks curled up like the toenails of old men, cheese cubes awash with sweat. I had the impression my host didn’t entertain often and was into recycling.

Having delivered the goods, he bent to retrieve the headphones and put them on a table beside a rickety recliner.

“I was just having a beer,” he told me, and picked up a can of Ballantine Ale. Tilting it back only to find it was empty, he looked puzzled, as with the headphones. “Maybe that was earlier, come to think of it. Have one with me?”

“Sure.”

Again, back to me like a beetle, he exited. A hairless cat materialized at my feet, throwing itself to the floor in elaborate shoulder rolls. On a TV in one corner a black-and-white movie showed soundlessly. Long, back-projection shots of highway-patrol cars coursing down highways. Arizona? New Mexico?

My unaccustomed host stood in the doorway, beer in each hand. His name was Mel Goldman. He survived off novelizations of B-grade movies and TV series. Half a dozen paperbacks he’d written around a show concerning L.A. teenagers’ crises (things are hell out there in the promised land!) did okay in the States but went gold in Germany. Publishers brought him over, major national magazines interviewed him. I almost shit my pants, he’d said of the experience upon return. Those people had to know I’m a Jew, right?

“Aliens have landed,” Goldman told me. “The sheriff’s kid saw them, but no one believes him. He’s a dreamy sort. First reel’s amazing—just kind of floats. Creates this whole town, this atmosphere of suspicion and dread. Then it all gets thrown away and the whole thing turns into one long, stupid chase. Kind of thing a man would eat his socks not to have to watch.”

I tried hard not to look down at his feet.

He handed me a beer and asked what he could do for me. We sat watching a ’52 Dodge with a green plastic screen like the brim of a card dealer’s hat above the windshield careen off the road as a tall man, strangely stooped, stepped out before it.

“Something about a murder, you said on the phone. I don’t see how I could possibly help you with something like that.”

I gave him the abstract: my case and Carl Hazelwood’s death in fifty words, dry as a science paper. Like notes you make about clients for your files. “I don’t know what I’m looking for,” I said. “But I read Carl’s journal. Lot of it had to do with old films.”

“Science fiction, gangster, prison stories—that sort of thing?”

“How’d you know?’

“What else would it be?” He watched as the tall, stooped man entered a cave hidden among trees.” ’Home. I have no home. Hunted, despised, living like an animal.’”

“Okay”

“Bride of the Monster.”

Onscreen, inside the cave, the tall, stooped man stood over a body laid out on a steel table.

“One of many he’ll inhabit,” Goldman said. “The bodies, recently dead, are imperfect and last but a short time. His supply is running out, his mission remains unfulfilled.”

That
had a ring of familiarity about it.

“Actor’s name is Sammy Cash. No one knows much of anything about him, who he was. He came out of nowhere, starred in this string of movies—for a year or so there, he seemed to be in every cheap movie made—then he was gone.”

“Carl’s sister says films were realer than life to her brother, that he loved the bad ones best of all.”

“Good man. There really is an inverse engine at work here. The cheaper the films are, the more they tell you what the society’s
really
like, as opposed to what it claims for itself. Any particular names come up?”

I pulled out my notebook.

“Herschell Gordon Lewis, Larry Cohen,
Basket Case,
Spider Baby, The Incredibly Strange Creatures.
”

“Mr. Hazelwood had good taste. Or bad. Depending.” He laughed, and beer came out his nose. He wiped it, beer and whatever else, on his sleeve.

“Any idea who or what BR might be? It comes up on almost every page of his journal. An abbreviation, initials—”

“Just the two letters? No periods after?”

I nodded.

“Carl Hazelwood was murdered, you said?”

“You know something?”

“I might. You see the body?”

“Pictures.”

“Like this?” Goldman brought his arms over his head in an acute V, wrists turned outward.

I nodded.

“Certain circles, that’s a famous image. Couple of Web sites even have it as part of their logo. Branches with leaves breaking off. The leaves look like hands.”

“Okay, I’m lost.”

“You’re supposed to be. Know much about cult films?”

“Nothing.” Basic interview skills. Play dumb, admit to nothing. Interviewee’s words rush in to fill the void. “Tell me?”

“I can do better than that. Hold on.”

He stalked off to the corner of the room, rummaged in a stack of videocassettes there, then went to the desk for similar rifling. Came up with a CD. He ejected the resident cassette just as the tall, stooped man passed into a new body.

“This is all I have,” he told me, “all anyone has, as far as I know. Downloaded it from an Austrian Internet site.”

Long shots of suburban homes, tailored green lawns, billboards. Then suddenly, jarringly, the close-up of a man in agony. He stands or is propped against what may be a trellis, wooden lace work through which a white wall shows. His arms are pushed into a tight V above his head. There is a flurry of hands, four, then six, then eight, as they circle his, touch them, loop twine about wrists, tie them to the open weave. Left alone now, his hands droop to the sides. He smiles.

My host ejected the cassette as the screen filled with static.

“Sammy Cash again,” he said, “though most people don’t realize it. He’d been through a lot by then, he’d changed. This clip may be all that’s left—all I’ve ever seen, at any rate. But the film’s a legend. Any serious collector would trade his grandmother for a copy, throw in his firstborn.”

“Why?”

“You mean besides the fact that no one else has one.”

“Right.”

“Because it’s the most elusive movie ever made. There are still a few people around that claim to have seen it, but just as many insist no such film ever existed—that the whole thing’s a legend.”

He replaced the former cassette. A nude young woman looked in the mirror and saw there the tall, stooped man she’d previously been. She reached out to touch the mirror but, unaccustomed to her new body, reached too hard. The mirror broke.

“The Giving.
Interesting enough in itself, from what we know. But infinitely more interesting as the last legendary film of a legendary director. You need another beer?”

I told him I was fine. Sipped from my can to demonstrate.

“The director is almost as elusive. Supposedly started out as a studio salesman, flogging film bookings to small theatres all over the Southwest. In the only interview he ever gave, he said he made the mistake one day of actually watching one of the things he was selling and knew he could do a lot better. He sold his Cadillac, sank the money he got into putting together a movie. Friends and neighbors and his barely covered girlfriend served as actors in that first one. He shot it over a weekend, and when on Monday, driving a borrowed car, he went back out on the road, that was the one he worked hardest to sell.

“Took studio folk a time to cotton to what was going on, even with bookings starting to fall off all through Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. By then he’d put away enough money to make another movie. Four more actually. When studio folk finally caught up with him to fire him, he was coming off the plane from two weeks in Mexico with his girlfriend and actors he’d scrounged from local colleges and had those four new films in the can.

“He was like a lot of natural artists, told the same story over and over. Always a dance between this detective hero and his nemesis. At first the nemesis was nothing more than a cardboard character, a threat, a blank, a cipher. But as time went on, movie to movie, he began to become real. In some of the movies he had extraordinary powers. In others he was seen only as a shadow, or as a presence registered by others. Remember, the director was cranking these out in a week or less. Pouring them directly from his soul onto celluloid, as one critic put it.

“Then, suddenly, they stopped. A year went by. Finally—rumor or legend has it—his swan song:
The Giving.
This great mystery movie. There are half a dozen Web sites devoted to his work.”

“Can’t help but notice you’ve avoided the director’s name.”

“I haven’t. No one knows it. The movies were all brought out as ’A BR Film.’ No separate director’s credit. Just the two letters, no periods after.”

I stood, thanking him for his time.

“You want, I could skate around a bit on those Web sites, get e-mails off to my contacts, see what turns up.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

He tried drinking again from the empty can. “Done, then. I’ll be in touch.”

I almost stepped on the hairless cat who in lieu of giving up, had decided to outwait me and, when I moved, throw itself bodily in my path. As I tried to regain balance my hand went down hard on the couch. A floorboard near one leg cracked, descending like a ramp into darkness. Such was the unworldly ambience of that place, I wouldn’t have been unduly surprised if a line of tiny men with backpacks had come hiking up the tilted floorboard.

“Mr. Turner?”

Yes?

“Sammy Cash, the actor? And whoever it was made the movies? Some think they’re the same person.”