Fade to Black (12 page)

At the top of the stairs, Eric stared down at his aunt. The sick smile remained on his face, spilling out the last of his eerie laughter. In its place, after a troubled pause, came his own voice, weak and uncertain.

“Twentieth Century Fox presents
Kiss of Death,”
he recited, “starring Victor Mature, Brian Donlevy, Coleen Gray . . .” The laughter came again as he turned slowly to go back inside. When he spoke again, it was in the voice of Tommy Udo “. . . Richard Widmark, Taylor Holmes, Howard Smith, Karl Malden . . .”

He closed the door and slowly walked back through the room, past the suit of armor, past the hung costumes, the collage of posters and cardboard cutouts, the library of film books and catalogued films. A thousand faces stared at him, silent. Some laughing, some grim, all staring outward, watching.

His legs seemed heavy. Each step weighed him down more, weakening him.

Aunt Stella was gone. He’d never known a moment without her there, in person or influence. Gone. No more nagging. No more lectures. No more backrubs.

He stumbled into his bathroom, slumping over and running the cold water, splashing it up into his face.

He looked up. There were two mirrors, the larger a flat surfaced reflection on the medicine cabinet doors, the smaller a round mirror mounted beneath it. One side of the round mirror was flat, but the other was slightly concave, enlarging his features, distorting them slightly around the edges.

No more.

No more Aunt Stella.

No more Eric Binford.

He backed away from the mirror, terrified, overcome with nausea. He crumpled slowly to his knees, gagging violently. He rolled over onto the floor, curling himself up into a fetal position and weeping softly to himself until the sickness passed.

CHAPTER •
14

It rained on and off the day of the funeral. At the cemetery, it came down hard, as if the skies were weeping for Aunt Stella to compensate for the absence of a gathered beloved. Aside from Eric and the priest, there were only a handful of groundskeepers listening to the eulogy, standing serenely beneath extended umbrellas as they waited for the showers to dissipate so they could go back to work.

The Reverend Schick spoke with the clear, commanding voice that had earned him a radio slot Sunday mornings and a generous congregation of listeners, among them the deceased.

“Stella Binford led a life of piety and quiet Christian charity that touched all who knew her. Generous to a fault, both to her friends, loved ones, and to the church, we commit her spirit to the Almighty and pray for her eternal salvation, that her wondrous soul may find peace in Heaven as it did on Earth. Amen.”

Eric listened from the cover of a nearby mausoleum, dressed in a gray suit and a matching wide-brimmed hat, again from a bygone era. A yellow raincoat was draped over his shoulders. His face was paler than usual, etched in grief. He took a final draw on his cigarette, then dropped it on the cement, watching the rain put it out, drop by drop.

By the end of the service, the rain was letting up. Reverend Schick came over to Eric, carrying both a black fabric purse and a gold-plated urn the shape of a trophy cup he’d picked up from the rain-beaded card table before him. He was young, large and handsome, a true quarterback in the Lord’s backfield.

“I’m sorry,” the priest said, “but there was just no room next to Miss Monroe.”

“But that’s where I wanted her.” Eric said, genuinely saddened.

“There are other nice sites,” Reverend Schick offered, holding out his purse.

Eric fed it a folded bill.

“Thank you,” the priest said. “Come, walk with me.” He held his arm out, ready to drape it over Eric’s shoulder. Eric went with him, but kept his distance. They strode across the green, unassuming grounds of Westwood Memorial Park. Situated across the street from Ship’s Westwood, the cemetery was well-hidden by surrounding buildings. The grounds were flat, no larger than a small city park. All gravemarkers were fiat and level with the ground, so that at first glance it seemed that the greenery was no more than a well-shaded picnic area. Along the north wall, running parallel to Wilshire Boulevard and adjacent to the Avco building and the parking lot for Perpetual Savings, were various marble courtyards, each lined with burial vaults. Marilyn was entombed in the northeast wall.

“Now, here are the ashes,” Reverend Schick said, handing the urn to Eric. “Why don’t you take them home, live with them for a couple of days. There’s no hurry. You have plenty of time to decide . . . say until Friday, okay?”

They made their way to an elongated white Lincoln parked alongside the curb. A television aerial sprouted from the trunk like a haloed fin.

“I really have got to go,” the priest explained. “I have to service another funeral, I have a christening, and I have a wedding . . . that’s a double ceremony. But if there’s anything you need, my boy, you call me, okay? Preferably before six.”

Reverend Schick opened the back door to the Lincoln and climbed in. Eric watched him. Just like Spencer Tracy in
Boys Town,
he thought. Hah.

The priest pressed down the electric window and looked back at Eric, saying, “I’ll see you tomorrow now, at your aunt’s memorial service?”

“No,” Eric said with finality. “I don’t believe in God.”

“Well, God still believes in you, Eric,” Reverend Schick assured him, bringing the window up so that Eric found himself staring at his own reflection in the tinted glass, arms cradling the urn with his aunt’s remains.

Before the car pulled away, Eric laughed at his reflection.

It was the snicker of Tommy Udo.

The coast was overcast, but it had stopped raining. Eric stepped off the bus in front of his house and went inside to drop off the urn and his raincoat. He paused in the living room, putting on his sunglasses and staring in the mirror as he adjusted the brim of his fedora. He spoke to his reflection as if it were a gunsel in his private mob. His voice was Cagney’s.

“We’re in this jam on account of a double-crossing dame, see? Nobody gets off crossing Cody Jarrett.”

Outside, Eric climbed down the steps. He looked down at the other end of the house, seeing where the back stairwell led to the sidewalk. He could see the leaves already turning yellow on the limb of a shrub that had been broken by Aunt Stella’s wheelchair days before.

“Top o’ the world, Ma,” he muttered before turning and starting down Riviera.

Three Chicano youths in their early teens were idling at the corner on their bicycles, uniformly dressed in white T-shirts and denim shorts. They all wore butch haircuts and chewed on lollipops with the white sticks poking out of their mouths like cigarettes.

Eric saw them and crossed the street to avoid them.

“Hey, dig the pimp!” one of the youths said.

Eric ignored them, but they rolled over the curb on their bikes and fell in beside him.

“Hey, pimp!” one of them wheedled, “you score us some pussy? We got a dollar.”

Eric stopped and looked at them.

“A dollar? What for? Cat food?”

“Cat food? Sheeet, man. We ain’t talking cat. We talking pussy.”

“Now look here, boys,” Eric said, calling on Cagney to help him out. He pulled open his suit coat, exposing a shoulder holster and the handle of a revolver. Once he was sure they had seen it, he buttoned his coat back up. “I’m working for the Man, see? Now am-scray or I’ll make some trouble for you, hear?”

The youths looked to one another, deciding not to call Eric’s bluff. They silently rode off.

By the time he reached Windward and Pacific, Eric blended in with the crowd more readily. His suit could have passed as stock in the chic shop at the corner, where he went inside to buy a pack of cigarettes and a copy of the
Hollywood Reporter.
The cashier made eyes at him, but he wasn’t interested.

Taking up his position across from the skate shop, Eric skimmed through the slick-sheeted tabloid, stopping to read over an article addressing itself to rumors that Cagney was coming out of retirement after twenty years to play a cameo roll in the film version of
Ragtime.
Eric was both elated and saddened by the news. It was good to see that his favorite star was going back into pictures, but he had hoped that the occasion would have been for the movie Eric had been working on. He’d written a part specifically for Cagney, a role similar to Brando’s in
The Godfather.
Well, Eric consoled himself, if Cagney came back for one picture, he might be willing to try another, especially when it was right up his alley. The perfect part. Tony Alabama’s mentor.

“Well, I think you’re better off without either one of them,” Stacey said, holding the door open while Marilyn came out, then closing up the skate shop for the night.

“I don’t know,” Marilyn said, “There was something about that boy with the scooter . . .”

“Oh, brother,” Stacey moaned as they started walking home along Speedway, an ironically named sidestreet that could barely support two-way traffic.

“Be nice, Stacey,” Marilyn said, “I think I’d like to track him down, although he must hate me for standing him up.”

“Consider yourself lucky. He seemed like the kind who’d sit next to you the whole movie trying to work up the nerve to put his arm around you, and all the time he’d be squirming in his seat so much you wouldn’t be able to concentrate.”

“He’s not like that at all. He knew a lot about the movies. More likely he’d forget I was even there.”

“So where would that leave you?”

“That’s the way I like to watch movies,” Marilyn said. “Up in the front row, with nobody distracting me. I knew this guy once who told me that if you sit up close, you have a better chance of tuning out the other people and just being sucked into what’s happening on the screen.”

“You can have it,” Stacey told her. “I like to hang back with the real people.”

“Don’t I know it? I’ve gone to one too many movies with you,” Marilyn berated her friend, “cracking jokes all through the whole picture. You ruin it, you know?”

“To each his own.”

Eric followed from a block behind them, passing full-scale murals that threw back the image of old street scenes from the sides of buildings, like brick snapshots blown up to serve as a movie backdrop.

To himself, he narrated each step he took, caught up in the role of his screenplay persona. Tony Alabama . . . Cody Jarrett with a name change, a few years shaved off his age. He lit a cigarette for effect, then whispered inaudibly through the smoke like a speech balloon in a comic strip.

“Alabama stalked her down the broken backstreets, his feet like bloodhounds sniffing out the trash along the sidewalk . . . She even walked like Monroe, swaying her hips like a stopwatch in the hands of a hypnotist. I had to look away now and then or I’d fall in a trance . . . Yeah, just like Marilyn in
Niagara
. . . Women like her ought to have it registered, just like a gun . . . I’ve seen a woman’s legs cause more damage than a full round from a forty-four.”

At Miller Street, the girls cut up to Main and slowed their pace to take in the storefronts. Eric crossed the street and busied himself with staring into an antique shop until he saw their reflections walk off again.

He maintained his surveillance from across the street, losing another half a block as he waited for traffic to clear at the next intersection.

He inconspicuously stroked his chest, smiling as he felt the outline of the shoulder holster and the butt of the pistol.

He wished he could hear what they were saying.

Stacey and Marilyn walked silently a few more blocks, coming into their neighborhood. Children scurried about on the sidewalk, raising a ruckus with their games of tag and hopscotch.

“Wait!” Marilyn said to herself, stopping.

“What? What is it?”

“On the back of his scooter,” Marilyn remembered, “there were initials, I think from the place where he worked. What were they? Did you get a look?”

“Look. Marilyn, would you forget about him?”

“But I want to see him again,” Marilyn said. “He’s just so . . . huggable. Do you know what I mean?”

“Oh, Marilyn. Listen, if you want to meet something real huggable, why don’t you come to Chippendale’s with me tonight and take a look at some of those male dancers. They’ll give you all kinds of ideas, then at ten o’clock they open the doors up to men and, boy, it’s like supermarket sweepstakes. Take your pick!”

“Oh, Stacey, that’s disgusting,” Marilyn said, laughing.

They turned into their yard and started up the front walk.

“You’re curious, Marilyn,” Stacey goaded. “Admit it!”

“ ‘I Am Curious Marilyn’.”

“I knew it.”

“Stacey. I was just kidding,” Marilyn said. “I’m staying home tonight. I figure I must be six months behind on my correspondence. If I don’t write back home, I won’t have any friends left when I go back to visit.”

The girls went inside.

Eric watched them from across the street, noting the address.

When he got home, Midnight was asleep, curled in the seat of the broken wheelchair. The cat looked up at Eric a moment, then laid its head back down. Eric took off his fedora and suit coat, then crept up toward the wheelchair, pulling the gun from his shoulder holster.

“It’s curtains for you, kitty,” he whispered menacingly.

Midnight opened its eyes. Eric squeezed the trigger on an empty chamber, but the metallic click was loud enough to send the cat running for safer cover.

Eric laughed fiendishly, sitting down on the floor. By degrees the chortling changed to a tearful sobbing, then a soft whimper. He stared down at the gun in his hand, slowly turning it so that the barrel pointed up into his face. He pulled the trigger again.

Click.

CHAPTER •
15

Disco music played loudly over a portable radio, drowning out the sound of the nearby surf. A special area of the Venice pavilion was fenced off for the exclusive use of those who found self-fulfillment in dancing on eight wheels.

Moriarty stood outside the fence, watching random individuals put on their fluid moves with a projected self-absorption, as if they weren’t out to impress anyone. Moriarty didn’t skate, but Anne did. She weaved her way through the others like the lead in a musical. She was wearing white cotton shorts and had tied the bottom half of her shirt into a knot just beneath her breasts, baring the even tan of her hourglass midriff. Moriarty watched her longingly, with that feeling of knowing one is being led on but not caring as long as the destination is reached. When she finished one final traipse around the fenced-in perimeter, she skated back to the gate and eyed Moriarty with a playful, yet calculated, gaze.