Manifesto for the Dead (7 page)

“I didn't know.”

“They found him upstairs. Whoever it was, they made a mess of it. Chased him all over the house.”

“Jesus.”

“It wasn't what you would call a clean kill. The man really suffered.”

Thompson felt that big blackness inside him again, and he tried to remember what had happened the night before. He saw himself climbing out of Miracle's car, stumbling about those tables, and then he was inside the car again, heading into the hills.

After awhile, Roach got off the phone. Thompson sat himself in front of the typewriter, but it was hopeless. He went down to the newsstand and bought himself a copy of the
Herald.

HOLLYWOOD MOGUL MURDERED

Bloody Crime Shocks Tinseltown

The body of movie mogul Jack Lombard was found early this morning beaten and bloodied almost beyond recognition in the foyer of his Beverly Hills mansion.

The body was discovered by Lombard's maid, Julia Alveraz, about 11:30 yesterday morning, according to Los Angeles police.

Mrs. Alvarez told police that the back door of Lombard's downstairs office was ajar, and there were signs a violent struggle had taken place.

Lombard was known to meet with producers, writers and directors at all hours of the night in his famed downstairs room, where some of the most celebrated movies in Hollywood history were conceived.

Though details at this time are sketchy, police said it appears the struggle began downstairs. Papers and household fixtures had been knocked on the floor, and a chair overturned.

After the initial attack, Lombard then fled his attacker, going upstairs into the mansion's large and spacious living room, which itself resembles a Hollywood stage set, filled as it is with props, costumes, antique cameras, and other memorabilia.

Here, Lombard apparently put up a fierce struggle for his life. Investigators say the room was in shambles, with much of the memorabilia broken and smashed.

Lombard's body was found just a few steps from the front door.

There were bloody hand prints on the vestibule walls, suggesting he had been on the verge of escape when the assailant cornered him at the entrance.

His head had been struck repeatedly with a blunt item. A bloody baseball bat was found nearby.

As there was no evidence of forced entry, investigators suspect the attacker may have been someone known to Lombard.

Lombard was a controversial figure who made and broke many careers in Hollywood. He was someone about whom people often felt passionately.

“At this point, we're following every lead we get,” said Detective Orville Mann of the Los Angeles Police. “No one in Hollywood is beyond suspicion.”

On an inside page, the newspaper had run a picture of Lombard's mansion. Thompson recognized the place immediately. He felt the dread rise inside him. All that glass, those steel rafters. He'd woken up there this morning, on the lawn, under those huge and sightless windows.

SIXTEEN

Now Thompson studied himself in the reflection of the newsstand window: his wrinkled trousers and his ridiculous shirt and the oversized sneakers. His face was lined like the face of an old bluff that had been soaked by rain and carved up by some bitter wind. He tried to light a cigarette, but his hands shook. He couldn't get control. He stepped off the street, into a bar. It was a skid row place. Inside, old men like himself were already into it, heads bowed, nodding toward their glasses. Sometimes they mumbled, whether to one another or to the drinks they held in their hands, it was hard to tell. The sounds those lips made were incoherent, but such incoherence was the point. Failed marriages. Childhood beatings. Loved ones killed by accident or in homicidal rage. These things happened. If you were deemed guilty, you might get locked up for a while. You might get lobotomized, or incarcerated alongside a man who longed for nothing more than to fuck your ass three times a week, but sooner or later society forgot about you. There were other matters, other criminals to punish. Anyway, maybe you did the job better yourself. So they let you go, and you wandered free and you needed the potion of forgetfulness.

“A whiskey,” Thompson said.

The whiskey helped calm him. I'm innocent, he thought. And for a minute, the whiskey still hot in his belly, he believed it was true. He hadn't been a lousy husband, a lousy father. (So lousy, in fact, that his two daughters, his son, hell, their faces vanished on him, and all that was left were their eyes, boring up out of the nothing, out of the dark, lingering around like a question someone had forgotten to answer.)

He thought of his sister's place in La Jolla. She and her husband were in Lincoln, the house empty. He saw himself there by the ocean, recuperating in the salt air, finishing his book. He would go, he decided. Rest. And think things through.

As he stood up, he glanced into the mirror over the bar. It was not unlike the mirror at Musso's, except the glass here had gone bad. The reflection was no good, the image smoky and dark. He could not see himself clearly, and it was as if he had slipped over some boundary. He remembered Billy Miracle—his eyes in the rearview, his hands below the seat fiddling, then coming up with the drink. Miracle had been inside Michele's purse, Thompson realized. Then it occurred to him:

I was doped.

Thompson thought about the ride away from Sunset Plaza. Haze and Miracle dragging him into the darkness. Letting him fall.

They hired the Okie to kill the girl. They killed Lombard. And now they're trying to blame the whole business on me.

It was either that, or believe he'd gone over the edge himself.

SEVENTEEN

On the corner, near the old Roosevelt Hotel, a clean-up crew was going at it, young men on their hands and knees, polishing those Hollywood stars embedded in the walkway. It was late morning, and the T-shirt shops and the pizza stands were just opening. A bouncer from one of the sex palaces hosed the walk nearby. The pigeons cooed, and the air was redolent with the smell of burned tomatoes and beer gone flat

Thompson thought about the girl in the Cadillac, and how her ringlets fell so sweetly over the bruised cheeks. He headed up Grace Avenue toward the Ardmore. His plan was to grab the keys to the Ford, then be on his way, to the coast.

He reached Franklin. All he had to do was go around the corner, and he would be home. He glanced up the hill toward Whitley Terrace, wondering if the Cadillac was still there, the girl curled in the trunk.

A patrol car pulled over the rise. A couple of young blues sat in the front seat. The cops were everywhere, it seemed, watching your every move. The one in the driver's seat gave him a little wave of the hand, telling him to cross. He went ahead, obliging the cop—going in a direction he had not intended to go. Up the hill, towards the Cadillac. Meanwhile, he felt the cops looking him over. He could guess what kind of sight he made. An old man in sagging pants and a knit shirt. I worked the Texas oil fields, Thompson wanted to tell them. I hung out with the Wobblies, I hopped the rails. It was what men did during the depression. Not just me, but thousands, all looking for work to feed the wife and kids back home. A person my own age, why, he would recognize that. These young cops, these nobodies, why …

The road climbed steeply. Thompson heard the squad car down below him, idling in the intersection. He worried somebody had seen him coming off Beverly Drive, and reported his description. The cops could be listening to it right now. Two seconds, the big red lights would come on. And here he'd be, cornered by happenstance.

At the top of the hill, he braved a look back.

The squad car was gone.

He stood on Whitely Terrace, alone, on a rise looking down toward the Ardmore and the rest of Hollywood. Just around the corner, the asphalt turned to gravel.

Maybe the Cadillac was still there. Either way it would be foolish to go see. The cops could be on a stake out, for all he knew.

He would not be standing here if that young cop had not motioned him to cross the street. Coincidence, inevitability—he wondered if there were a difference—compelled him forward. He stopped. His hands trembled. Maybe the Cadillac had never had been there at all. The incident was a dream, a drunken hallucination. Then why not go forward, under the eucalyptus. Down the gravel road. Dismiss it once and for all. But he wasn't that far off the beam, not yet. He'd seen the girl. Thinking about her, he all but saw her again. He could see too the empty trench further down the hill, and the shovel in the trunk.

The air tremored with unfinished business.

No!

A shiver ran through his body. The world shimmered and the leaves whispered. Then he pulled himself together and hurried down the hill. He would gather his things and go to the coast. Escape.

Inside the Ardmore penthouse, Thompson rummaged for some clean clothes, and for the key to the Ford. The apartment itself had the look of a world about to be forsaken. There were boxes stacked all about, and Alberta's clothes lay strewn on the bed. He went to his closet and took among other things the white jacket he'd worn years ago to the premier of
The Killing,
a movie he'd written with Stanley Kubrick. The son of a bitch.

Alberta wasn't anywhere around. Out on an errand, he guessed. Himself, he was going to the ocean.

He lugged his suitcase to the elevator. Outside, he found the Ford parked at the rear of the building, gleaming under the thin shade of a giant yucca, but its engine wouldn't turn for him. It made an unhappy noise that grew steadily fainter and died away.

Then he saw Alberta emerge from Mrs. Myers' green sedan. Mrs. Myers emerged too, a neighbor woman with whom Alberta sometimes went shopping—and the pair stood talking. Alberta wore a white blouse and black slacks. She held her hands up on her hips, and her breasts jutted against her white blouse. It was a posture he'd seen hundreds of times, and it always stirred his desire.

The women sauntered on towards the door. At the last minute, Alberta turned on her heels, as if surveying the parking lot.

Thompson was tempted to call out. In the old days, they would fight and afterwards it would be okay. They'd cuddle like teenagers, full of syrup, full of endearments:

Honey pumpkin. Sweet Dick. Lover girl. Joy of my life. Girlie puss.

Now she disappeared into the building. She did not see him, and he did not call out. Maybe, because in the back of his head somewhere he was thinking of Lussie Jones, imagining her in the seat beside him as he made his way down the shore.

He tried the car. The engine wouldn't turn. The motor was silent as the dead.

He struggled the suitcase down the hill, sweating fiercely. Getting out was not so easy. On Hollywood Boulevard, he stepped again over all those stars embedded in the crumbling sidewalk. The clean-up crew was finished. The streets were empty and hot.

EIGHTEEN

Back at the hotel, the desk clerk was stoned. His head lolled, and his eyes were shiny. He wore a jacket of the type worn by organ monkeys, only more frayed. The red fabric was matted by age, its color bleached by the sun, and the gold braid was all but worn from the sleeves. The jacket, too, had its own odor about it. It gave the young man the combined smell of the many men who had worn it before, then left it to hang, unwashed, in the bell clerk's closet.

“Messages?” Thompson asked.

“Huh?”

“Letters. Notes. Stationery scrawled with lipstick. Has anybody been by to see me?”

“Yeah. But nobody with lipstick.”

“Who?”

“A man.”

“Did he leave his name?”

“No.”

“Did you ask for it?”

“Hey, I buzzed your room. When you didn't pick up, I told him to go knock on your door.”

“Tell me, kid. What the hell's in your head?”

“Nothing. He gave me a tip.”

“What happened to him?”

“What do you mean?”

“The man who was here, where did he go?”

“He waited around in the lobby for a while.”

“Then?”

“He said he'd be back later.”

“What did he look like?”

“I don't remember.”

“What do you mean, you don't remember?”

“He gave me a tip, that doesn't mean I memorized his face.” The kid squinted, as if looking up at Thompson from inside a dark hole. “Maybe you should loosen up.”

Thompson had had it. “Go drown, you little rat.” He wanted to smack the kid, but instead he burst into a coughing fit. The fit racked his body with a spasm that started deep in his lungs and seemed for an instant as if it would never stop.

The kid smirked. Thompson wanted to punish him. Instead, he went upstairs. He wondered who had come to see him. If the Okie had searched him out somehow, there was nothing to stop him from coming back in the middle of the night. The door lock was a flimsy piece of business.

He thought of his sister's place, and Lussie Jones. He called Greyhound, but the next bus wasn't till tomorrow morning. He thought about Lussie again. The way things were going, he might not have another chance to see her. He went to his closet and got out some studio stationery. He still had courier privileges from his time working with Colossal. One thing about the studios: If they were slow about giving you something, they could be just as slow about taking it away.

Dear Lussie,

My sister gave me your message. Yes, I would be most glad to see you again, perhaps show you around the City of Angels. I will be at the Musso & Frank Grill tonight, sixish, for drinks and dinner. It's a grand old place, dingy in the manner of the true Hollywood. If you are not otherwise engaged, I would love to have you at my table.

Yours,

J. Thompson.

Six o'clock was less than three hours away. It was not much notice, but maybe she would come. Meanwhile, the heat was stifling; he went to the window to get what he could of the breeze. Outside, the scofflaws had taken to the doorways and alleys, camping in the shadows. The Okie was still out there on the streets, Thompson figured. Sooner or later he would run into him again. There were laws about such things. Rules of nature. An object in motion tended to stay in motion. All lines intersected, all paths converged. Somewhere, past the curve of the ocean, Sepulvada ran into Sunset ran into Santa Monica Boulevard, became one street, divided again, became many.