Death Claims (12 page)

His father smiled. "Nanette is in residence in Reno." The smile became a wince. "All expenses paid." 

"Why not be smart?" Dave said. "Save money. Don't marry this one." He took another swallow of his drink, trying to tot up exactly how many stepmothers there'd been in the forty-five years since he'd howled his first protest at life. They shifted in and out of focus—a face, a voice, a name, a scent of soap, the taste of a certain supper, a warm Coke at a dusty country filling station, laughter, a slap. His own mother was less than these, not even a snapshot, merely a name on a marriage license dated 1922, turning brown at the edges. He'd found it at age nine when he'd dropped a heavy carton of stuff from his father's desk during a move and it had blown with other papers across a lawn. He'd worn it inside his shirt for weeks and cried over it when he was alone, imagining he missed her. He'd been sulky and savage to his father and to the bewildered girl who was his lost mother's third replacement, a breasty, wide-eyed blonde child who lived in a pink kimono stitched with a pale-green dragon and in a haze of Turkish cigarette smoke. 1932. He'd grown tired of mourning someone he'd never known and put the paper away. He still had it somewhere. He didn't know why. What was his father saying now? That this girl was different. 

"I'm aware I've made mistakes—nine of them, to be brutally exact. But even I can learn, given a few decades and sufficient humiliation." 

"I hope you're right." Dave gave him a level smile. "You know how much I hope that." 

His father rose. "You could come meet her. You'd see. She's very wonderful. You'd like her." 

"That would make her different," Dave said. 

His father set his glass on the cabinet. Some of the crysanthemums straggled. He frowned and worked at straightening them. "You liked Lisa." He said it without emphasis. Dave stared at him. 

Lisa's name hadn't come up between them in more than twenty years. Yes, he'd liked her. Too much, as it turned out. His father had resented the way young Dave ignored Barbara, Susan, Ruth. But when the boy had taken to Lisa—she was nineteen, Dave only two years younger—he'd resented that no less. For once he'd chosen a girl with more than looks—with brains and background. Her father had been a high-court judge in Germany. Till the Nazis shot him. Dave couldn't recall now what had happened to Lisa's mother. Her two brothers had tried to leave Germany and failed. Only she had escaped. There was mournfulness to her dark beauty. But her smile was radiant. So was her mind. And she'd been someone in his own house at last to whom he could talk about books and music, painting and theatre—things that made a difference to him. 

Thinking back on it now, maybe there'd been some justice to his father's jealousy. Maybe Dave had been half in love with her. He still remembered with good warmth their jaunts to the old museum in Exposition Park, to the sleepy white rooms of the Huntington Library, to organ recitals in the gray towering hollowness of a cold downtown church, to chamber-music concerts in a bare wooden hall in a west-side park where a beaky, balding Igor Stravinsky had sometimes twitched a baton-all of which Carl Brandstetter had made it plain bored him. So that the two youngsters had taken to going alone. And to political meetings that wouldn't have bored his father but would have angered him. 

Then there'd been a little caf
é
 not far from his school where he and Lisa had sometimes met for lunch—strong farmhouse coffee, the good smell of newly baked bread, rain on a steamy windowpane. Had they met that way often? Too often, he guessed. Yet, of course, he'd been no threat to his father. Even if Lisa had been capable of unfaithfulness, and she wasn't, he had no use for girls sexually. But his father didn't know that. If Dave had worked up the nerve to tell him, would the marriage to Lisa have lasted? Possibly. He hadn't found the nerve, though. Not till after the war, when Lisa was gone and forgotten with the rest. 

He said now, "Is she like Lisa?" 

His father's smile was thin. "As like Lisa as your Mr. Sawyer is like Rod.'' 

"Externals." Dave shrugged and finished his drink. "Dangerously deceptive." He got off the desk corner. 

His father paused with his glass lifted, frowning, pretending concern. "Something wrong there?" 

"Some confusion about who's dead and who's alive. But if it can be straightened out, I'll straighten it." 

"You could let it go," his father said. 

"That's your style"—Dave peered into the martini pitcher— "not mine." He tilted the over his father's glass, over his own. It measured out exactly. 

"He working yet?" Carl Brandstetter asked. 

"The offers have all been for overseas posts. Too secret to discuss. But—at least until this morning—he didn't want to go overseas again." 

His father started to ask something and stopped because Miss Taney opened the door. For sixty years Miss Taney had maintained inside a body like an assemblage of bleached sticks the spirit of a nerve-shattered girl of five. Her mouth never stopped trembling. Her eyes were wide with fright. She delivered all messages in a kind of whispered shriek. The more so now, in the awesome presence of Carl Brandstetter, managing director and chairman of the board. 

"Excuse me. Mr. Sam Wald is no longer a member of the Screen Writers' Guild, but they gave me his address, just as you said they would." She held out a memo in a blue-veined hand that shook. 

"Thank you," Dave said. "You can take those forms." 

She took them and fled.

T
HE STREET WAS
a curved cement shelf, walled on one side by white buildings, Mediterranean style, and on the other by high curbs topped with railings of thick iron pipe. The drop off the curbs was twenty feet straight down to the red tile roofs of identical houses, another curved shelf of street, and more red roofs below that, among the sun-crested tops of reaching palms. Up here there wasn't bare earth enough to yield much greenery. Plantings ran to clumps of spiky Spanish bayonet and stunted banana trees in the jogs of long white stairways. 

Sam Wald's front door had sometime been enameled black, but the coating had seamed and scaled off in places. Dave tried a black bell push. It didn't seem to work. There was a stingy black iron knocker. He rapped that. At the end of the red tile landing a fat gray striped cat woke from sleep in a patch of sun, stretched, sat, began to wash. She reminded Dave of Tatiana, his and Rod's old cat. A little window back of iron grillwork in the door opened. A bloodshot eye looked out. 

"David Brandstetter," he told the eye. "Death-claims division, Medallion Life Insurance Company. It's about John Oats, the bookseller. He's dead." 

The voice that answered was raspy and defeated. Like a fan's who's cheered fourteen innings for the team that lost. "I thought death was supposed to be the end." 

"Somebody wanted it to be," Dave said. "I'd like to know who. He was in touch with you. Maybe you can help me." 

"I can't help myself." But a spring lock clicked, a chain rattled, the door opened. The man who opened it was short and pudgy. He wore a brindled gray track suit made for someone no taller but a lot thinner, maybe a Sam Wald of thirty years ago. The shirt pulled up. The pants couldn't meet it. A bulge of lardy belly showed. The suit needed washing. Stained deck shoes matched it. No socks. Crusty ankles. Four days of stubble blacked Wald's jowls. He hadn't combed what was left of his hair. His lips were dry and cracked. He moistened them with a gray tongue and squinted gummy eyes against the slant of afternoon sun. He croaked: 

"All right. What the hell. Come in." He shrugged, flopped his hands, turned away. "Excuse how the place looks. Busy. No time. Can't afford a cleaning woman. Can't afford anything anymore. Can't pay the rent. That's who I thought you were. The landlord. Lived here three years. Son of a bitch won't trust me for a lousy month." 

Dave saw why when he shut the door and stepped down out of the hall. The room had space and a beautiful shape. Parquetry floor. Rococo Louis Quinze chairs and sofas, good copies. No one cared anymore. No one had cared for quite a while. Dirty laundry strewed the Aubusson carpet, the petit-point of footstools. On delicate gilt-and-white tables stood open soup cans, bean cans, contents half eaten, sprouting mold. Cloisonne and Meissen were lost among crumpled potato-chip bags, soggy milk cartons, driedout wedges of pizza, chewed, forgotten. On a white plaster mantel an ormolu clock had stopped, as if frightened by an ambush of empty vodka bottles. The smell was of decay. 

"I had two Oscar nominations." Wald picked his way through the wreckage, heading for a short curve of steps with lacy iron rails. A dirty shirt hung off a finial. He picked it up, looked at it as if he didn't know what it was, dropped it. "But do you think I can sell a script today? Can't even get an agent." 

Dave followed him up the stairs. In the room at the top a handsome period desk held a big electric typewriter. Its motor pulsed softly. Rolled around its platen was a half-typed page. A sheaf of typed pages lay next to the machine. There were also a fifth of supermarket vodka, a punctured can of Treesweet orange juice, a thumb-smudged tumbler holding what was probably a mixture of the two. There were paperback books. Wald picked up one of these, his mouth puckered in disgust. 

"So look what I'm writing now." He held the book out. Dave took it, found his reading glasses. On the book's cover was a color photo of two girls in black lace bras and panties, kneeling on a couch, taking the pants off a sallow young man with a mustache. "Porn. Cheap porn. It's not even a living. But-I'm working my way up. They paid me eight-fifty for the first one. I'm on my fourth. That'll get me an even thousand. Just one trouble. They don't go any higher. They want product. To get it, they've got to keep you hungry. Nobody who wasn't starving would write this shit." 

He took back the book, dropped it on the desk, dropped himself into the carved, gilded chair that faced the Olivetti. "I had years when I made a hundred thousand. A decade when I never made less than fifty." His hand went mechanically to the glass that held more than orange juice. While he sucked up half the mixture, he glowered at the words in the typewriter. He set the glass down, put his stubby fingers on the keys and machine-gunned a sentence. "Sickening," he said. 

"You'd have to do one a week," Dave said. "Can you do one a week?" 

"It's not a question of 'can,' " Wald said, and finished what was in the glass and picked up the bottle with one hand, the tin of orange juice with the other, and poured the glass full again. 

Dave said, "It might be easier without the booze." 

"Without the booze it would be impossible." Wald looked past Dave. "What do you want?" 

A woman who was very thin stood in an archway up two steps. Her soiled lavender wrapper didn't cover her breasts well. They were full, rounded, like fine fruit on a dying tree. Her skin was corpse white, almost luminous. Her eyes were very large and took color from the dye of the wrapper. The only makeup she wore was liner around those eyes. She clutched under her arm a little stringy-haired, taffy-color dog. 

"He wants to go out." Her voice was deep, the diction stagy. It made the speech sound like a quote from
Antigone
. One of the more tragic lines. Dave guessed he'd seen her. In a film. Or maybe more than one. She'd had more weight then, but the bones were what made her beautiful and the bones were even more in evidence now. Her hair was cropped. There would be wigs someplace down the hall behind her. If she wore one for a minute, he'd be able to put a name to her. A moderately famous name, he thought. "I can't take him," the ravaged voice said. "I'm not dressed." 

"Get dressed," Wald said. "I'm busy." 

"Take him out!" she screamed, and threw the little dog at him. It hit the floor skidding with a terrified scrabble of claws. It came against the wall with a yelp and cringed there, shivering, eyes sparks of fear behind a streaky straggle of hair. Dave looked back at the archway. The woman had gone. Back to her amphetamines, no doubt. Wald hadn't moved. He sat staring at the words in the typewriter again. 

"Is there a leash?" Dave went to the little dog, knelt, reached out a slow hand. 

Wald sounded dazed. "What?" The chair legs scraped the floor. He got to his feet with a sour sigh. "Yeah, yeah. There's a leash. But you don't have to take him. Why the hell should you have to take him?" 

"You're busy," Dave said. The dog shrank back into a corner, whimpering. He touched its head, small, delicate as a Sevres teacup. He gently scratched the silky ears. The dog quivered, but it didn't snap. It let him pick it up. "Where do I find the leash?" 

"I live in a God-damn nightmare," Wald said. He went past Dave fast and down the stairs. Dave followed, carrying the dog. He watched Wald paw among unopened bills and letters, magazines still in their mailing wrappers, on a narrow gilt table next to the steps up into the hall. He found a length of braided leather. While the small body wriggled with anxiety, Dave clipped the leash to the collar. He set the dog down and pulled open the door. It tugged him out, claws scrabbling again, with eagerness this time. Dave could understand its wanting out. What he couldn't understand was that after it had relieved itself in the ivy geranium that margined the steps halfway down to the street, it turned and pulled hard on the leather to get back to the house. It pawed the cracked black door frantically to get in. When he let it in, bent and snapped off the leash, it streaked across the littered room and up the short stairs. It was as crazy as the other inhabitants. 

Wald was rattling the Olivetti when Dave got back to him. He'd finished the page. He yanked it out of the machine and laid it on top of the others. He looked at Dave. "Thanks," he said. "I hate going out there looking like this. In daylight." 

It reminded Dave of John Oats swimming at night. "What did Oats want when he telephoned you?" Wald snorted a kind of laugh. "Money. Nobody calls me anymore except for money. Why do people always want what you haven't got?" 

"Obviously he didn't know." Elegant bookcases lined one wall —scroll pediments, pierced fretwork doors, and beyond the fretwork solid shelf after shelf of rich leather bindings that glowed with costliness and care, decades of it. Dave put on the reading glasses and peered. Hallam's
History of England
, two stout deepgreen volumes, hand-tooled, hand-gilded in flawless tracery.
Essays of Elia
in cinnamon-brown pebbled leather with a rose motif in gilt between the cords. Symonds's
Benvenuto Cellini
in glossy black with austere gilt rulings. Dave hunkered down for a took at the lower shelves that were meant to accommodate taller books.