Expiration Date (41 page)

And here was one in Long Beach. Why did so many people need to have snuff mailed right to their houses?

“That woman’ is my wife,” protested the client.

“For a while,” Strube answered absently. Here was another address, in Southgate. How did somebody in Southgate afford a luxury item like Scottish snuff? “You did come in here for a divorce, you’ll recall.”

“Only because she filed!
I
didn’t want a divorce! The girls staying a week with me and then a week with her—this is fantastic!”

Strube looked up. “Well, you won’t be paying child support for half the time. Besides, the arrangement won’t last for very long. Your girls will hate it, and it’ll wear Debi down, and then you can press for total custody.” To hell with your girls, he thought; it’ll protract the proceedings, and I’m paid by the hour.

The thought was suddenly depressing, and he remembered yesterday’s riddle about the lawyer and the sperm cell. He realized that he was hunched over the desk like some kind of centipede.

He spread his Nautilus-broadened shoulders inside the Armani jacket, and leaned back, lifting his chin.

And from the back of the McKie chair burst a sharp, yiping fart-sound. A wordless cry escaped his astonished client.

Still sitting up straight, though he could feel the sudden heat in his face, Strube said, “That will be all for today.”

“But—about the division of property—”

“That will be all for today,” Strube repeated. He would press for a Substitution of Attorney tomorrow.

One chance in two million of becoming a human being. He could work with the studios, handle prestige cases for famous clients.
Swimming pools—movie stars.
He could start by representing Bradshaw.

The client had stood up. “What time…?”

“Miss Meredith will schedule an appointment.” I knew him in ̻74 and ‘75, which was more than ten years after he quit showbiz, Strube thought. I’m likelier to recognize him than any of his old Hollywood crowd is.

He maintained his stiff pose until the man had left the office. Then he let himself slump. He could check the Santa Ana address today.

Maybe even the Long Beach one too.

L
ORETTA DELARAVA
was crying again, and it was taking her forever to eat her ham-and-cheese sandwich. She was in a window-side booth in the Promenade Cafe; out through the glass, across the blue water of the Pacific Terrace Harbor she could see the low skyline of Long Beach, with the boat-filled Downtown Long Beach Marina spread like a bristly carpet of confetti around the foot of it.

She preferred to eat in the employees’ cafeteria on C Deck, four decks down, back by the stern; but she couldn’t make herself go there anymore.

When the
Queen Mary
had been an oceangoing ship, that C Deck auxiliary room had been the men’s crew’s bar, called the Pig and Whistle, and she liked the airy brightness of the present-day cafeteria, with the young men and ladies in the tour-guide uniforms chatting and carrying trays to the white tables, and the absence of obnoxious tourists. But yesterday, and the day before too, when deLarava had gone there, she had found herself in a low dark hall, with dartboards on the walls and long wooden tables and benches crowded with men, some in aprons and some in black ties and formal jackets. The men at the nearest table had looked up from their pint glasses of dark beer and stared at her in wonderment. She hadn’t been able to hear anything over the throbbing, droning vibration that seemed to come up through the floor, and she’d realized that it was the sound of the ship’s propellers three decks directly below her.

It had been the old Pig and Whistle that she’d seen, as it had been in…the sixties? Hell, the thirties?

And late last night she had left her stateroom and followed uncarpeted stairs all the way down to D Deck, and stood by the closed-up crew’s galley by the bow and looked aft down the long, dim service alley, known to the crew in the old days as the Burma Road, that was said to stretch all the way back to the old bedroom service pantry and the hulking machinery of the lift motors by the stern. From far away in that dimness she had heard a lonely clashing and rattling, and when she had nerved herself up to walk some distance along the red-painted metal floor, between widely separated walls that were green up to belt height and beige above, hurrying from one bare bulb hung among the pipes and valves overhead to the next, she had seen tiny figures moving rapidly in one of the far distant patches of yellow light; children in red
uniforms with caps—she had peered at them around the edge of a massive steel sliding door, and eventually she had realized that they were the ghosts of bellboys on roller skates, still skating up and down the old Burma Road on long-ago-urgent errands.

She had hurried away, and climbed the stairs back to her stateroom on B Deck, and locked the door and shivered in her bed under the dogged-shut porthole for hours before getting to sleep.

T
HE SANDWICH
was actually very good, with tomato and basil in among the ham and cheese, and she made herself take another bite.

The man sitting across the table from her was holding a pencil poised over the wide white cardboard storyboards. “You okay, Loretta?”

“Sure, Gene,” she mumbled around the food in her mouth. She waved her free hand vaguely. “Stress. Listen, we’ve also got to get a lot of footage of the belowdecks areas—the crew’s quarters, the section up by the bow where the service men were bunked during the war—it’d be a good contrast, you know? To all the glamour of the top decks.”

“Well,” he said, sipping nervously at a Coors Light, “I guess you can edit to a balance in postproduction—but we cleared it with the Disney people for just the engine-room tour and the pool and the staterooms and the salons. There might not be accessible power sources down in the catacombs, and God knows what their routines are—they might tell us it’s too late to set it all up. It’d only be giving them two days’ warning, if you want to get everything in the can Saturday.”

“Well, we can at least do stills down there. A still photographer, and me, and my assistant carrying a portable stereo—that shouldn’t disrupt any employees.”

“You don’t need music to shoot stills, Loretta. And how are you going to use stills?”

DeLarava had looked past him and seen Ayres standing by the cash register. She waved, and said, “I’ve got to talk to this guy, Gene. Do what you can, okay?”

The man stood up, taking the storyboards with him. “Okay. If the PR guy’s in his office I’ll talk to him now, on my way out. I’ll call you and let you know what he says. Tomorrow I’ll be at the studio all day, and I’ll be back here Saturday, early, to make sure they rope off the areas from the tourists. I still don’t see why we had to
film
on Halloween. A weekday would have been less crowded.”

“Will you not be questioning my
decisions,
Gene? You gentlemen all work for me.”

Gene left as Ayres walked up, shrugging as they passed each other, and deLarava was crying again; she wanted to scratch her scalp, but didn’t dare, because she had stretched
three
rubber bands over it this morning. She had felt she had to, after the dream that had somehow left her to wake up crouched over the toilet in the stateroom’s bathroom, whispering to the water in the bowl.

Ayres sat down and promptly drank off the last inch of the Coors Light. “Your old boy Joey Webb is crazy,” he said. “He’s out at all hours on the beach with a metal detector and a jar of orange marmalade, singing that ‘Ed Sullivan’ song from
Bye Bye Birdie.”

“Ed
Sullivan? The moron. He’s not supposed to be looking for
Ed
Sullivan.”

“Could I have another of these, please?” said Ayres to a passing waitress. To deLarava he said, quietly, “I found out some things about the Parganas couple.”

“Okay…?”

“Well, they were crazy too. The old man, named Jiddu K. Parganas, was born in 1929. His parents announced that he was the
jagadguru,
which is apparently like a messiah, okay? The World Teacher. Theosophical stuff. There was a guy he was named for, named Jiddu Krishnamurti, who was supposed to be it, but he shined the job on in ’28. He got tired of the spirit world, he said, seeing ghosts crowding up the beaches all the time. Great stuff, hm? But
our
Jiddu, the one born a year later, didn’t work out too well. When he was twenty he got arrested for having burglarized the old house of Henry Ford, who had died two years earlier. The Ford executors hushed it up, but apparently Jiddu got away with a glass test tube. The Ford people hoked up another one to replace it, and nowadays the fake is on display in the Ford Museum in Greenfield Village in Michigan.”

DeLarava’s heart was pounding, and tears were again leaking out of her eyes. “Fake of…what?”

“It’s supposed to contain Edison’s last breath.”

“Edison?”
My God, deLarava thought, no wonder the psychic gain is cranked up so high around here since Monday! No wonder Apie is coming out of the sea, and every ghost in town needs only a sneeze to set it frolicking. I
guessed
that the Monday-night torture-murder wasn’t a coincidence, and that the kid had run away with
someone
heavy—but
Edison!

“Yeah,” said Ayres blandly, “the guy that invented the lightbulb. Anyway, Jiddu married a rich Indian woman who was also into this spiritual stuff, and they seem to have formed a sort of splinter cult of their own, just the two of them. They bought the house in Beverly Hills, where they were killed Monday night. The police are aware of the place—they’ve had to answer a lot of complaints from the Parganases and their neighbors. A lot of drunks and bums used to come around demanding to talk to somebody named
Dante
or
Don Tay.
”

“That would have been the mask,” said deLarava softly. “They kept it in a hollowed-out copy of
The Divine Comedy
or something.” She waved at Ayres. “Never mind. Go on.”

“Some comedy. Their kid, this Koot Hoomie that you’re looking for, was born in ’81. His teachers say that he was okay, considering that his parents were trying to raise him to be some kind of Hindoo holy man. Have you got any calls?”

“Hundreds,” she said. “People have grabbed every stray kid in L.A. except Koot Hoomie Parganas.” She thought of the boy out there in the alleys and parking lots
somewhere, eating out of Dumpsters and sleeping all alone under hedges…and last night’s dream came back to her, forcefully.

She was crying again. “I’ve got to get some air,” she said, blundering up out of her chair. “Tell Joey Webb to keep looking—and tell him to keep an eye on the
canals.”

T
HE SEA
was too full of imagined ghosts, waked up and opposing her, and the carpeted corridors and long splendid galleries seemed suddenly bristly with hostile ectoplasm accumulated like nicotine stains over the decades, so she fled to the Windsor Salon on R Deck.

She liked the Windsor Salon because it had
hanging chandeliers,
not the lights-on-columns that stood everywhere else in the ship, big Art Deco mushrooms with glowing mica-shade caps. The Windsor Salon had been built after the
Queen Mary
had been permanently moored in Long Beach, had in fact been built in the space of one of the now-useless funnels, and so it could afford the luxury of ceiling lights that would have swung and broken if the ship had been out at sea.