Fade to Black (8 page)

He turned his attention back to the television, where the anchorman was offering his own example to the topic of discussion. Onto the screen came the picture of a stranded, crumpled automobile on a road shoulder. There was nothing moving, and the shot had the quality of a still photo by Diane Arbus. All gloom and grim portent.

“. . . a couple was shot and killed, causing a two-car collision at the Central off-ramp on the Glendale Freeway,” the voice-over described.

“It just bugs me,” Moriarty said finally. “I’m obsessed with the subject and it freaks me out, because . . . we’re planting these crazy images inside of these children’s heads.”

The news ended with an invitation to stay tuned for the upcoming evening movie, featuring John Wayne in
Stagecoach.

Moriarty looked over by the side of the bed, picking up Anne’s service revolver by the barrel as if it were the tail of a dead rat.

“Do you really use this thing?” he asked.

Anne looked over at him, munching on a handful of crackers. She nodded and took the gun from him.

“Yep,” she said wickedly, setting it down beside him. “It makes a big bang.”

There it was again, he thought. Just when he thought he had her pegged, she changed course on him, moving in the blink of an eye from psychology to slapstick, from compassion to cynicism.

“Why do you do that?” Moriarty asked.

“Do what?” she said innocently, lying back on the bed and raising a finger to his chest, stroking the hairs with a long, painted nail.

“That,” he said, looking down at her hand. “You remind me of this one patient I once had. She was sort of railroaded into therapy against her will, so she made up her mind she was going to try to make a fool of me. You know, put on a different act every session, telling me some bullshit that supposedly had happened to her when I damn well knew she’d just been reading test cases in some schoolbook, thinking she could trip me up. It was like making fun of it all meant she wasn’t, in fact, the worst neurotic I’d ever run across.”

“You sleep with her, too?” Anne asked with a grin.

“Come on, Anne,” Moriarty said. “Quit bullshitting me. Look, if you want to play this strictly for laughs, fine. I mean, I can go that way, too. I’ve never fucked a cop before, and it’ll probably make an interesting footnote on my ‘file’. But let’s not pretend we’re pulling a fast one on each other, okay?”

Anne slowly pulled her hand away.

“Don’t go getting high and mighty with me, Jerry. You were playing cat and mouse with me today, too, you know. And, as for your file, you have to admit it’s all true.”

“Okay, okay,” Moriarty said, waving his hands in the air like a referee. “I tell you what. You give me the file on you and we’ll be even.”

“You mean like a balance of power?” Anne asked.

“A balance of terror would probably be more like it,” Moriarty said.

Anne sighed and pulled a pillow over her chest, hugging it with exasperation.

“Why are we doing this? Moriarty, do you hear what we sound like? We sound like a couple of ten year olds out behind the woodshed. ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.’ Come on.”

Moriarty snickered.

“And talk about throwing up smokescreens,” Anne went on, “Here you are, Mister Ounce-of-Crime-Prevention-Is-Worth-a-Pound-of-Prison, tooting enough cocaine to make a pharmacist drool and putting on Paul Butterfield imitations in the basement like some teenage Walter Mitty. Look, I came onto you because I was looking for a good lay, no strings attached. Now you want to sign me up for a stint on the couch.”

“All right, all right,” Moriarty said. “Game, set, and match to you. My mistake. I’m sorry I brought it up.”

“You and me both,” Anne said, tossing away the pillow and getting up from the bed. “I’m going to take a shower and go. Is that okay with the doctor?”

Moriarty laid back on the bed and laughed at the ceiling.

“What the hell’s so funny?” Anne asked.

“The worm has turned,” Moriarty said.

“I don’t get you,” Anne said, going into the bathroom and starting the shower.

Moriarty followed her and stood in the doorway, watching her wrap her hair up in a towel.

“You see, Anne,” Moriarty explained, “I’ve always been the one who decided when I’d had enough of a woman. I’ve never had it coming the other way. When I came down here, I—”

“So that makes me a real ballbuster then, doesn’t it?” Anne retaliated. “I think your ego can handle something like that, don’t you? I mean, it’s supposed to be your specialty!”

“Why are you being so hostile?”

“I don’t want to get involved,” Anne told him. “I can take it serious up to a point, then that’s it, I want out.”

“Why?”

“Look,” Anne said, looking back at Moriarty once she stepped into the shower. “When I go off duty, the job comes off with the uniform. Why don’t you do the same? Quit trying to analyze me.”

She slid closed the shower door and stepped in under the water.

“I’m sorry,” Moriarty explained.

“I can’t hear you,” Anne called out.

Moriarty remained in the doorway, looking at the shower and trying to figure out why he felt so determined to keep up this relationship. He didn’t come up with an answer, but he thought up a plan.

Stepping into the bathroom, he took a bottle of shampoo off the top of the toilet bowl. Unscrewing the cap, he reached over the top of the shower door and emptied the shampoo into the tub.

“What are you doing?” Anne demanded.

Moriarty slid open the shower door and quickly plugged up the tub. Suds were already beginning to billow in the water around Anne’s feet.

“Bubble bath for two?” Moriarty asked impishly. “No questions asked?”

Anne looked at him, the anger draining slowly from her face. She finally scooped up a handful of suds and tossed them in Moriarty’s face.

“Come on in, you silly ass,” she said, sitting down in the tub of bubbles. “The water’s fine.”

CHAPTER •
10

Eric got out of work at five. Berger had chewed him out again for taking too long on his errands, and both Richie and Bart had razzed him about their bet, trying to bump up the stakes. He had let it all roll off him. He had more important things to think about.

He only had until six-thirty.

He jogged up to Hollywood Boulevard and Larry Edmunds’ shop, his framed picture of Marilyn from
The Prince and the Showgirl
tucked under his arm. Like most of the old book and film stores lining the boulevard, Larry Edmunds’ had the feel of a setting in a forties movie. Cramped racks had grown upward over the years for lack of another available direction, and the air was pungent with the smell common to some antique shops and old libraries.

Eric went to the back counter, where one of the clerks was supervising a client sorting through a file of one-sheets and publicity stills featuring Humphrey Bogart.

“Hello, Eric,” the clerk greeted. She was old, her face a network of kind lines, like a character actress who’d made a life of playing sweet grandmothers.

Spotting the poster from
Passage to Marseilles
that the customer was looking over, Eric cringed. “Terrible movie,” he reviewed. “If they did it today they would have just gone ahead and called it
Casablanca II
instead of trashing it up to make it seem original.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” the customer, a Britisher the clerk’s age, argued. “I rather liked it. I’d prefer Michelle Morgan to Ingrid Bergman any day. More my cup of tea.”

“What do you have there?” the clerk said, noticing the photo under Eric’s arm.

Eric set the picture on the counter.

“I’m in a real hurry,” he explained. “Can I leave this as collateral for that
Let’s Make Love
poster I gave you a downpayment for Saturday?”

“Oh, Eric, I don’t know . . .”

“Please,” Eric pleaded, “it’s important.”

The clerk smiled. “Very well, Eric. Preferred customer that you are . . .”

While she went back to get the poster from the black file, Eric tapped his fingers nervously on the countertop, looking over the other man’s shoulders at the Bogart prints.

“Say,” Eric asked. “Do you know what Bogart’s last name was in
Casablanca?”

“I should think it was still Bogart,” the man said after some thought.

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know, I know, young man. Just a joke. It was Rick . . . Rick . . . I’m afraid you’ve stumped me on that one.”

Eric smiled, gratified.

The clerk returned with the poster, rolled up inside a used mailing tube.

“Here you go, Eric,” she said. “Just try to bring the rest of the money around by the end of the week, okay?”

“Oh, thanks. Thanks a lot.” Eric slid his framed picture across the counter toward her. “Here, aren’t you going to take this?”

“No, Eric, that’s okay,” she said. “But tell me, what is your big hurry—”

“I can’t explain,” Eric said, dashing back down the main aisle toward the front door.

“Wait!” the other man called out after him. “You didn’t give me the answer.”

But Eric was already outside. He ran across the street to the corner of Hollywood and Las Palmas, waiting at the bus stop for the next RTD to roll by on its way to the coast. There was a falafel stand there, and he bought one with some of the change left from turning in the bottles earlier in the day. He wolfed down the falafel, standing over John Payne’s Hollywood star set inside a circle of pink stone on the sidewalk.

Getting on the bus and securing a transfer, Eric went to the back and took a seat by himself. As he slowly made his way westward, he stared down at the portrait of Marilyn Monroe. She looked back at him the way she almost always looked out at the world. Straight in the eye, everything up front.

Christ, did he love her.

Eric got off the bus in Westwood, transferring to the Santa Monica busline leading back to Venice.

Fidgeting with excitement, he picked up the mailing tube and slowly pulled out the poster. Unrolling it like a sacred scroll, he smiled approvingly at her likeness.
Let’s Make Love
had been her last film before
The Misfits.
It could have been her prime. Instead, it had been the beginning of the end for her.

“I would have saved you, Beauty,” he whispered to her.

Eric reached to his pocket for a marking pen. The next time the bus stopped, he stretched the poster out on the seat beside him and hastily wrote along the border, “You’ll always be mine.” He signed it, “A secret admirer,” then rolled the poster back up and slid it into the mailer, crossing out Larry Edmunds’ address and writing in Marilyn O’Connor’s name.

The bus dropped him off at Windward and Riviera. It was a little past six. He walked hastily the few blocks to the roller skate emporium, stopping across the street from it.

He was standing next to an ice cream stand, where a boy of ten was poking through a palmful of coins as he looked over the listing of flavors. Eric went through his pockets and came up with his last quarter.

“How’d you like to earn this?” he asked the boy, showing him the coin.

“I ain’t supposed to talk to strangers,” he said.

“Then don’t talk. Just listen. I’ll give you a quarter if you take this tube and give it to the girl working in the skate shop across the street.”

The boy thought about it a moment.

“Thirty cents,” he said.

“All I have is a quarter,” Eric said impatiently. “Now do you want it or not?”

The boy nodded and took the tube.

“Okay, great,” Eric said. “And tell her it’s a special delivery, but don’t let her know it was me, okay?”

The boy nodded again, taking the tube and the quarter, then checking traffic before crossing the street.

Eric walked over to the bench in front of a taco stand and sat down to watch. The boy went inside the emporium, then ran out seconds later, empty-handed. Eric smiled with satisfaction. That would go over real nice. Better than flowers anytime.

“Hey, can you people let me through? I have to get back to work.”

Eric froze. It was Marilyn’s voice, right behind him. He slowly bent forward, burying his face in his hands as she walked past him on her way across the street.

She hadn’t noticed him. Eric slowly raised his head, watching her go back into her shop.

“We’re out of quarters again,” Stacey greeted Marilyn irritably from behind the cash register.

“I’m sorry,” Marilyn apologized, polishing off her tostada. “There was a long line of freaked-out New Yorkers at the taco stand acting like they never saw a burrito before.”

Stacey laughed, appeased.

“I could have killed them,” Marilyn added as insurance.

This close to closing time, the shop wasn’t that busy. The only person in the shop besides Stacey and Marilyn was Joey Madonna, self-proclaimed photographer extraordinaire, a trend lemming who’d been putting the make on Marilyn for the past week. He leaned forward on the counter, camera dangling from his neck like bait on a hook.

“Hi, Marilyn,” he said smoothly. “How you doing?”

“Okay,” Marilyn answered indifferently, straightening a few pairs of skates on the shelves behind her. “How are you?”

“Good,” Joey said.

“Oh, Marilyn,” Stacey cut in. “There’s a special delivery package for you. I put it under the counter.”

Marilyn purred to herself as she reached for the tube and pulled out the poster. When she unrolled it, she gasped, impressed. “Oh, must be from a wealthy fan.”

Joey sniffed contemptuously. “Oh, yeah, big spender. Those are selling for two bucks on the pier.”

“Look who’s jealous,” Marilyn told him, taking the poster over to the wall and hanging it up. She smiled at it approvingly, then turned back to Joey. “Big cynic. I love it.”

Outside the window, Eric smiled happily from behind his mirrored aviator glasses. He ducked away before he could be seen. Whistling to himself, he ran home, buoyant with expectation.

Back at the shop, Joey stepped back from the counter and toyed with his camera.

“I just got a job,” he told Marilyn casually. “I thought you might be interested.”

“Whatever for?” Marilyn asked.