Manifesto for the Dead (10 page)

The doctor had warned him. You keep it up, the way you're living, you'll hemorrhage, buddy, you'll have yourself a stroke.

He dressed slowly. Just a nosebleed, he told himself. Everything'll be all right, soon as I get out of town. He buttoned his shirt, hoisted up his suitcase with his good arm, then stumbled into the harlot streets.

TWENTY-TWO

Thompson hailed a taxi to the Santa Monica station, then took a Greyhound down the Pacific Coast Highway. Outside, there was that white sun and that white sand and that white sky full of salt and the strangled call of gulls. When you looked at the combers through the bus windows—in their gauze blouses and bright shorts, their Raybans and polo shirts—they all seemed aloof and unknowable, as if they moved in a secret and pure realm that left their heads full of light. When these same people strolled inside the bus, though, it was a different story. You could see the desire in their faces, too, and smell the sweat and the lotion, hear the grunts and see the struggle of the body to make itself comfortable, and notice too the flaws in the features, the jaws that were too sharp, the heads that came to a point, the breasts that sagged and the bellies that drooped. They lost their aura, here in the bus. They became like him, leaning their heads back into the cushion, watching the scenery in the tinted glass.

Finally, he arrived in La Jolla. His sister had a cottage off the main street. He dallied in the kitchen, thinking about Lussie Jones, wondering if she would call. Then he set up his typewriter. It was why he had come. To escape the situation. To finish his assignment and be done.

I was trapped. It was the old two way pull, and I didn't know which way to go.

By day, it was Gloria, tugging sweetly at my hand. By night, it was her sister, twisting between the sheets.

The old two-hearted tug, I knew all about it. My momma, I use to follow her legs with my eyes, right up to where they disappeared into one another, and I knew how those men felt when they looked at her. I wished I didn't know. Because it wasn't how a boy was supposed to feel. And a mom wasn't supposed to laugh at her son, either, the way she laughed at me, seeing that look in my eyes.

Now I wanted things simple. Pure. With Gloria, it could be what way, I thought.

But Belle, she'd found out about my past somehow. She was on to me. “You be nice,” she said. “You do as I say.” And she let me know that my plans, whatever they might be, were going to take a back seat to hers. Or else.

Then one afternoon, she sent me down to the druggist to pick up a prescription for her father. I should have known. I'd seen her and the druggist together. I should have guessed—but I didn't. I delivered the medicine.

A few hours later I knocked on Daddy Lanier's office door.

No one answered.

“Sir,” I said

I pushed it open.

Inside, Daddy Lanier sat slumped over his desk, head down, cheek pressed to the wood. In his hand, he clutched the prescription bottle.

He was dead.

And me—I wasn't wise enough yet to see who'd get the blame.

Late that evening, a car drove by. It rolled past slowly, and the light from its head lamps wheeled across the kitchen walls.

The driver cut the motor, and Thompson listened for the car door. When the sound didn't come, he peered out the window. The car stood in the blue fog halfway down the block.

Who could it be?

Lussie. Or perhaps Lieutenant Mann had had him followed.

Thompson dropped the curtain. A shadow had moved inside the car, he thought, but he could not be sure. He slopped two fingers worth into one of his sister's jelly glasses, and listened for the sound of footsteps on the walk. They didn't come. Then the phone rang.

“Jim Thompson?” a woman asked—but it wasn't the voice he expected. Rather, it belonged to Michele Haze.

She had remembered Alberta mentioning La Jolla, she explained, and his sister's name. With that much, she had dialed information.

“I need to meet with you.”

“Tonight?”

“There's a place on the highway down there. The Pacific Café. It's open late.”

Thompson knew the place. On the bluff, above the ocean. The owner had decorated the walls with publicity shots. Glossies everywhere, every star there had ever been. Thompson picked up the curtain and took another glimmer out. The car sat as before.

It was late, he told himself. If Lussie meant to come, she'd be here by now.

“Will you meet me?” Michele asked

He closed his eyes and let the dice roll in his head.

“All right.”

TWENTY-THREE

Thompson scuttled down the alley behind his sister's house. He moved faster than he thought he could, like an old crab startled out of its shell. The alley opened onto a side street—empty and dark except for a traffic signal at the corner. On the other side of the highway, the Pacific Café slumped out over the bluff. As he crossed the road, he heard the neon hissing in its blue sign. The fog had lifted along the coast, and the black sea glistened like oil on the beach below.

Inside, the owner had kept up the old decor. The walls were plastered with the photos, and there was a shot of Michele Haze, taken a couple of decades before, in her starlet years, young and vampish. Her eyes had the sleepy sheen that had made her famous, and she held her lips in the same cashmere pout. She had built her career around that glance, and the soft, almost drunken lisp with which she spoke.

A white limo pulled into the lot, and Thompson watched the chauffeur saunter up the walk.

“Michele will talk to you. Inside the car.”

Thompson found Michele in the limousine, waiting for him, just like the chauffeur said. She wore straight slacks and a cotton shirt and a scarf over her platinum hair. No make-up, her clothes rumpled and mussed. She gave him a shrug—and her eyes were for an instant the same eyes as those of the picture inside, no difference in the world.

“To what do I owe this privilege?”

“I felt you should know some things. There's not going to be any movie.”

“What do you mean?”

“Jack never signed. There's no deal.”

The news did not surprise him. He had suspected the deal was falling apart.

Her eyes grew misty.

“The girl. Jack didn't have her out of his system. She disappeared on him, and I thought maybe he was done with her. Soon as I saw him, that last time in Musso's, I knew I was wrong. He was going back to her. He was going to kill the picture, and leave me behind.”

Michele shrugged again, fatalistic. After all, she knew how these things went. She'd been a Young Lovely once herself.

“He told Billy to drop dead. That he would never work with him in a million years.”

Thompson remembered that evening at Musso's, a few days before, when it all happened, how Lombard had left, and Miracle had gone barrelling after him.

“I waited for them to come back. Somehow, part of me, I thought maybe Jack, that he would change his mind again. That he might still come back to Musso's that night.”

“How long did you wait?”

“An hour, maybe. An hour-and-a-half. But Jack didn't come back. Only Billy, alone.”

“Did Billy catch up with Jack? Did they talk?”

She didn't respond, but he knew the answer. Or what she wanted him to think. It was there, unspoken, in the blue neon that flickered and fell over the white limousine and its tinted windows to make indecipherable shadows on her face. Miracle had followed Lombard up to his house. Up there, alone, he had gone berserk and when he was done, he'd washed his hands and his face and wiped the blood off his shoes and driven on down to Musso's. Then he'd decided to frame up old Jim Thompson. Put a little dope in the old man's drink and drag him back to the scene of the crime.

“You helped him.”

“No, I loved Jack.”

“You doped me. You dragged me up there, the two of you.”

“I didn't have any choice.”

She closed her eyes. The dope—Miracle had gotten it out of her purse he figured, fumbling around on the seat. It was the source of her sleepy eyes, that languor in front of the camera. There had been a time before all that he guessed—when she'd been just some kid in somebody's hometown, the girl next door who just had to get out. Leaving behind a mom and a pop and a boy in a pick up truck.

“Did you hire the Okie?”

“What do you mean?”

“You were jealous of the girl, and now she's dead. The Okie killed her, didn't he?”

She didn't answer but instead glanced toward the café and he imagined she was thinking about the girl in the picture on the wall inside.

“That's what Miracle holds over you. That's why you have to go along with him.”

“No, Billy arranged it. He had her killed.”

“Why would he do that?”

“He was convinced, if The Young Lovely was gone, he could persuade Jack to do the picture.”

“He told you this?”

“Before it happened, I thought he was joking. I didn't think he'd actually go ahead … If you help me, I'll go to the police. I'll tell them what happened that night at Lombard's house. I'll tell them who the real murderer was. I just need you to do something first. Contact somebody for me.”

Thompson said nothing. She paused, trying to read his face. For his part, he wondered how much to believe. “Billy had someone else arrange it, the girl's death,” she said. “And that man, he hired the Okie to do the job. Only Billy didn't pay up—and now the Okie is after me.”

“Why you?”

“When Billy set up her murder, he gave them my name. So now I have to pay off to get rid of them. Once I'm free of them, I can talk to the cops. I'll tell them you didn't have anything to do with this.”

“I don't know. This type of thing. A guy like me, my age. Chasing someone down.”

“The contact man—the one who arranged the murder. If you could set up a meeting with him. Tell him I'll pay.”

She gave Thompson a hopeless look. He thought again of that starlet in the picture inside the cafe, and he realized he'd been wrong before. There was a difference. Back then, she'd just been posing. She'd been somebody else, pretending to be this woman in the picture, desperate, glamorous. Now the pretense was gone—but it wasn't just that. Michele brushed a hand against his leg, and in the flickering neon her face had the look of a translucent doll.

Fear, he decided, that was it. The different thing in her eyes.

“What's the man's name? The contact?”

“Wicks. Sydney Wicks.”

Thompson felt his skin bristle.

“In East Hollywood,” she pleaded. “A place called the Satellite Bar.”

TWENTY-FOUR

That night I went over to the Lanier place, but Gloria was out, making arrangement for her Daddy's funeral. I let myself in, and all but stumbled across Belle in the darkened parlor. I held back, though, and saw her take a man's face between her hands. They kissed, the pharmacist and Belle. They talked it up big. About how it was going to be when the will was cashed out and Belle had gotten her father's money.

I listened to them for awhile, and at last I realized. They'd poisoned the old man and planned to pin the whole business on me. As if I'd tampered with the medicine.

I switched on the light and Belle's eyes went wide. She tried to explain her way out of it, but I already had Daddy Lanier's pistol in my hand. I knew, soon as they autopsied the old man, the sheriff would be coming for me. Given who I was, no one would believe my story, I knew that too. My only chance was to get out of town. I had to buy time. So I took two chairs from the dinner table and strung them together.

“Please,” pleaded Belle. “My neck.”

I gave the cord an extra pull and stuffed a rag in her mouth. I did the same for the druggist.

Something inside told me I should do this differently. With Gloria's help, maybe, and a good lawyer, I could get out clean. After all I hadn't killed anybody. They were the ones. Even so, there was another, older voice inside me.

You dope, boy, you goddamn fool
.

I headed toward that voice now. There was an old man, an ex-con out in California, who'd told me if I ever got myself in a fix, come see him. I drove. Somewhere in the desert, the next day, the news came over the radio. A man and a woman had been found dead in a central Texas living room. The pair had tried to free themselves, twisting and squirming, but each movement had only brought the cord tighter about their necks.

TWENTY-FIVE

Thompson couldn't sleep. Instead he kept writing. He pictured the drifter coming down the Barstow grade into California, the desert streaming past in the black of night, then the slow bloom of suburban lights. The air whispered through the windwings of the Cadillac, and Thompson could see the drifter's lips moving as he thought about Belle and the druggist, the rope tight around their necks. Thompson's lips moved too. Soon the man was over the hills and into the Los Angeles basin.

Thompson tore the sheet from his typewriter.

He did not like what was happening. He'd written
The Manifesto
based on what Miracle had given him. Now, the character he'd created was in Los Angeles.

That first night in Musso's, Miracle had laid out the story. The drifter in Texas. The love triangle in Los Angeles. The dead girl.

Now that story was coming true. Haze, Lombard, The Young Lovely—they were the triangle. The Okie was the drifter.

“Why me?” Thompson asked himself. “Why did Miracle get me involved?”

I'm the fall guy. The stumblebum. Someone to blame when things go wrong.

Also, Miracle had needed a writer.

There was something flawed in the plan: the notion you could arrange a murder, then make a movie about it, place the blame elsewhere. Producers, though, guys like Miracle, they thought they ran the world. Or liked to think so. Put a spoon to their nose, well, things could get pretty skewed.