Fade to Black (13 page)

“You like?” she asked, stepping carefully past the gate and skating slowly beside him.

Moriarty nodded.

“If I could dance on my ten-speed we’d make quite a pair.”

It was dusk. A breeze was picking up over the ocean.

“So what do you think of all this?” Anne said, stopping at a bench to take off her skates.

Moriarty stroked his chin as he took in the skaters, bicyclists, and pedestrians roaming the beachfront paths; the diehard sunbathers lying prone in the sand; the filled paddleball courts with the popcorn sound of steady play; the sound effects emanating from the bank of pinball machines and other electronic games inside a tented arcade; the stumbling drunks with loud voices and smoky gazes drifting in for the night; the squealing children on jungle bars; the screeching gulls above the soft swells of the Pacific, the rainbow-colored buildings of Windward.

“It looks like what you’d get if you put St. Mark’s Square, Coney Island, and Peter Max into a blender and turned it on full blast,” Moriarty said with a snicker.

Changed into her tennis shoes, Anne slung her skates over her shoulder as she walked with Moriarty to her car.

“So how do you think Franco is going to turn out?” she said once they were in the car and headed for Moriarty’s. “I understand he’s agreed to go into your program.”

“Well, I set him up with his parole officer, this guy I used to know up in Berkeley. They seemed to hit it off pretty well. Franco’s out job-hunting tomorrow, but I’ll bet you anything he’ll just try to wrangle his way into another band.”

“As long as it pays the bills, right?” Anne said encouragingly. “By the way, didn’t I see some guy from the
Herald-Examiner
coming up from your office this afternoon?”

Moriarty nodded.

“Free publicity. If I can pull some good press and get some early results with Franco and this Dugas character I’m seeing tomorrow, I can set up a buffer to keep Gallagher off my ass.”

“You two are determined not to get along with each other, aren’t you?”

“Opposites don’t always attract, Anne.”

“They do sometimes, though, don’t they?” she said, turning off Lincoln and speeding down the ramp leading to Pacific Coast Highway.

“You really think we’re that different?” Moriarty asked.

“Yeah, I do,” she said. “I think I’m pretty straightforward, but you . . . you like to play the mystery man some of the time, Jerry, you know? Dark moods, staring into space when you think I’m not looking . . .”

Moriarty laughed.

“Two days and you’ve got me down pat,” he said. “Congratulations.”

“Not really, Jerry. There’s a big difference between spotting a mystery and solving it.”

“It’s not in my file?” Moriarty teased, not as savagely as before.

“That’s my whole point, Jerry. Your file doesn’t make sense. If everything they say is true, ten years ago you were like a figment of Jack Kerouac’s imagination, one of the last Berkeley beatniks. Along came the war protests and all of a sudden you gave up music and madness for psychology. Somewhere in there, there’s got to be a missing link, right?”

Moriarty ran a finger along the top of the dashboard, staring up out the window at the cliffs leading up to Palisades Park.

“Gallagher ought to give you a promotion. You’d make a great detective.”

“Jerry, stop evading me. What’s the big secret?”

“No secret,” Jerry said. “I got bored and sold out. Cleaned up my act like a good little boy and set up a safe little practice. Presto chango, and you have Dr. Moriarty.”

Anne followed the coastline to Jerry’s house, then pulled into the driveway, stopping the car.

“You know, Jerry,” Anne said, reaching out to stop him before he got out of the car, “I don’t believe a word of it.”

“Huh?”

“Like you said, I’m a good detective. I know the missing link, I think. I just thought you might want to bring it up on your own.”

“Come on, Anne, what’s with all this missing link stuff? Is this Charles Darwin week or something?”

“It’s what happened to your brother, isn’t it?” Anne said. “That’s what changed everything.”

Moriarty opened his door and climbed out, looking back at Anne. “Listen, thanks a lot for the ride, but I—”

“Jerry—”

“See you at the station.”

“I’m sorry,” Anne said, “I just thought you might want to talk about it.”

“Well, you thought wrong,” Moriarty said, his voice strained. “I’m sorry too, but that’s private.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t keep it bottled up inside you . . .”

“Look, Anne. I’m the shrink in this crowd, remember?” He closed the car door. “Goodnight.”

He started up the walk for his house.

“Goodnight, Jerry,” Anne said softly. She watched him go up to the door and let himself in. He didn’t look back. She backed out of the driveway and drove home.

CHAPTER •
16

A half-smoked cigarette jutting from his lower lip, Eric finished cleaning up the living room. It was warm inside, largely due to the raging flames in the fireplace. The fire had been going all morning, being fed a diet of health food journals and old dance magazines Eric had unearthed from his aunt’s room.

Satisfied that the flames were sufficient to go to work on meatier fuel, Eric started to clear the mantle of thick books on nutrition, reading off the titles to himself with an amused annoyance.
Better Living Through Prunes, Health for the Handicapped, Live a Hundred Years with Herbs.

As the fire took to the books, Eric stepped back and watched the covers blacken. The pages inside curled as they ignited. He took a long draw on his cigarette and smiled contentedly. He looked up at the urn standing over the hearth and blew smoke at it.

“Here’s to your good health,” he toasted, dropping the butt of his cigarette in with her ashes as he added, “Aunt Stella!”

The purge next moved to the kitchen. Eric clipped out a brief newspaper article on his aunt’s death, termed accidental, and stuck it to the door of the refrigerator with a magnetic button reading
NO HEROES.

He opened the door and set an opened shopping bag on the floor in front of it. Slowly and methodically, he took out the fresh fruits and vegetables stocked on the shelves and in the crispers. After he emptied it all out, he planned to go to the store and stock up on the kind of food he liked, the kind Aunt Stella had never knowingly let him have in the house.

He was free.

The front doorbell rang. Twice.

Eric stopped what he was doing. He slowly closed the refrigerator, staring at the news clipping he had just posted.

The police, he thought. They’d found something out. A witness. A report on the wired engine of the wheelchair. A thousand thoughts raced through his head as he stared at the fuzzy silhouette framed in the window of the front door.

He quietly walked toward the door and peered through a slit in the curtains, exhaling with relief when he recognized the mailgirl.

He opened the front door as she was turning to walk back down the steps.

“Oh, Eric,” she said, surprised. She had a handful of rolled magazines in her hands. “You’re still here. I thought maybe you’d moved, because of your aunt’s . . . you know, the name change on the mailbox . . . Listen, I’m really—”

Eric glared at the girl, suddenly incensed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said hotly, “The name is Jarrett! You got it? Cody Jarrett.”

“But—”

Eric slammed the door shut, then reopened it long enough to grab the magazines.

The mailgirl stared at the door a second, confused, then slowly walked down the steps to the sidewalk, past the mailbox with “C. Jarrett” lettered on its side.

Hearing a soft, urgent whine, the mailgirl looked down at the ground and followed the sound to the back base of the staircase, where Midnight scratched at the soiled Johnny Cat spilling out from its crushed pan.

The mailgirl stroked the cat and uprighted its pan, then shook her head pitifully, looking back up toward Eric’s front door. As she passed the corner street sign, she frowned.

Instead of declaring this to be Market, the sign read 99
RIVER STREET.

It took Eric most of the day to finish clearing Aunt Stella’s things out of the house. Whatever he couldn’t burn he tossed into her room until it was as cluttered as his own.

By late afternoon he was hungry and exhausted. He went to the grocery store and bought a cooked chicken, dripping with grease and barbecue sauce in a display rotisserie, along with a bag of nacho cheese chips and bean dip. Coming back home, he plopped down on the sofa and ate, enjoying the freedom of foregoing table manners and not having to eat like this secretively.

He watched the 5:30 movie.
Dr. Cyclops.
Great special effects, Eric thought. If only he could shrink a few people he knew down to the size of clothespins.

After the movie, Eric went back up to his room. He pulled aside the strips holding his shades against the window frame and peered out at the sunset, bleeding its vibrant colors against the horizon, bathing his neighborhood in a shadowy twilight. Higher up in the sky, a slice of the waxing moon hung ready to preside over the night.

Perfect, Eric thought.

He went over to his stereo, putting on a Pablo Casals record. A lone, mournful cello. The music crept softly into the room, somber and melancholy. It was Eric’s favorite album, close to the only record he owned that was not a motion picture soundtrack. And this one was, in a way. He used it as background for some of his old silent films. It was eerie, the effect it could have on different footage. He had found, through constant experimenting and several happy accidents, that by splicing out the written dialogue sequences in the old twenties melodramas and slowing down the speed of his projector to fit the tempo of the music, he could come up with a presentation more haunting and more powerful than the original versions. One day he would show someone his discovery. There would be a job in it, he was certain. He would make a name for himself. It was just another of his many options.

As the music continued to fill the room, Eric took his makeup kit into the bathroom. He washed his face carefully, then pulled down a sheet of plywood from the top of the sheet closet and set it over the sink, creating a table to spread out his kit on. He pulled in a chair from the bedroom and sat down before the table and mirror, ready to begin.

Besides the kit, Eric had a thick textbook on general makeup techniques and an expanding file filled with separate pamphlets providing instructions on how to achieve professional results when attempting to transform one’s countenance into anyone from Richard Nixon to the Phantom of the Opera.

Each Halloween since the first year he had received the kit, Eric had spent hours making himself up to be a different character, usually from a horror film. To go with each character, he had also arranged a fitting backdrop and tape of sound effects, creating in effect his own cramped theatre in the kitchen area near the side door. Over the years, he had become an institution of sorts in the neighborhood, with some kids coming back to trick-or-treat several times the same night just to see Eric’s impromptu performances. It was not hard to understand why Halloween was his favorite holiday.

Halloween was more than two months away, however.

Eric took the expanding file and pulled out the booklet on Dracula. He also had on file publicity stills of various actors who had portrayed the infamous Transylvanian over the years. Conrad Veidt, Max Schreck, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney, John Carradine, Francis Lederer, Christopher Lee, David Peel, Noel Willman, Frank Langella, George Hamilton, Klaus Kinski. Eric sorted through the pictures, holding some of them up against the mirror to compare their features with his own. He finally settled on Lugosi, Veidt, and Lederer, taping their stills up on the wall next to the mirror.

The record played through and rejected itself. Eric went back into the room long enough to flip it over before settling down to don the makeup.

The directions in the pamphlet were given with the premise that the entire face was to be done simultaneously, but Eric concentrated on just one side, splitting his face into separate profiles so that he could study the differences. He improvised on some details, trying to achieve effects similar to those of the faces on the stills.

The results were phenomenal. Looking at himself in the mirror, even he found it difficult to recognize Eric Binford in the Dracula countenance cloaking the left side of his face.

Satisfied, he completed the application and then put the kit away.

In the anteroom closet, Eric sorted through costumes dangling from hangers in protective cleaning bags, pulling one away and taking it over to his bed.

Unzipping the bag, he pulled out the black and white suit that, fifty years before, Bela Lugosi had worn on his way to cinematic immortality in the classic Tod Browning version of
Dracula,

It was the first night of the Annual Horror Film Marathon at the Fox Venice theatre.

A field day for aficionados, the marathon was set to go on for the next three days, clocking up in the process more than thirty hours’ worth of celluloid thrill and chill. The fanatics treated it as a masquerade ball, and the theatre swelled with aliens, ogres, werewolves, and even a walking shark. The
Rocky Horror Picture Show
crowd, usually restricted to weekend midnight gatherings to celebrate the showing of their cult favorite, reveled noisily at the opportunity to flaunt their fetishes during prime time.

Eric stood in line before the concession stand, staring at the posters along the wall, less than enchanted with the festive atmosphere around him.

They don’t understand, he thought. This was a horror festival, not a comedy marathon. The costumes were fine, but the joking was wrong, an improper counterpoint to the somber milieu he thought best suited for the evening.

“Excuse me, Vamp,” someone said, tapping his shoulder.

Irritated, Eric turned around to face Richie’s younger brother, dressed as Buzz Aldrin in a lunar jumpsuit. A long brown cigarillo projected out from his mouth through the raised visor of his helmet.